How Barner launched in Croatia with AI marketing: purchases up 160.6% in a month

The challenge: Launching screen glasses in a market that already had plenty

Barner arrived in Croatia with no history there. Nobody was searching for the name yet, and the eyewear market was already crowded with fashion brands, sunglasses labels and local opticians, many of them advertising every single day.

The product was ready. What the team did not know yet was the market: who else was selling, what they were saying, and which channels would bring the first buyers to a webshop nobody had heard of. And like most launch teams, they had more to do than people to do it, spread across more tools than anyone wanted to open.

Company brain: First, teaching Checkgrow everything about Barner

The launch started in the Knowledge Center, Checkgrow's company brain. Barner's products, audiences, brand voice and offer went in once, in detail. From that point on, everything Checkgrow produced, from the campaign plan to the ad copy to the answers in the AI Assistant, started from Barner's own facts instead of a blank page.

Then came the accounts. Barner connected Google Analytics, Meta and Google Ads, and linked its Instagram profile in Social Media. Each connection is a few clicks, and together they changed what the company brain could do: it no longer only described the business, it could see Barner's traffic, ads and sales as they happened.

Competitor research: Seeing every competitor's ads before spending a euro

With the brain in place, the team turned to the market. In Competitors, Checkgrow's AI research mapped the 20 brands and opticians selling in Barner's space and kept watching them. The first view was eye-opening: 15 of them were advertising, with about 1,000 live ads between them. D.Franklin and Hawkers each ran 100 active Meta ads, Meller 99 and Kaleos 87, while MÓ was putting its effort into LinkedIn.

For the first time, Barner could see all of its competitors' ads in one place, next to their social media: followers, growth and the posts that performed. The view stayed live. When Optika Anda went from 13 active Meta ads to 31 in late September, and General Optica added 7 in a single day, the team saw it that week, not months later in a slide deck. It also showed where Barner already stood out: on LinkedIn, it ranked 4th of the 10 brands tracked, 25.3% above the median.

Creative at scale: More than 400 AI ad creatives, made in Croatian and shipped straight to the campaigns

Knowing the market made the brief easy to write. In Campaigns, Checkgrow planned the launch: Barner Launch - Aug 2026 went live on Instagram and Google Ads on 27 July 2026, and an influencer campaign joined on Meta from 8 September.

Then Creative Studio did what a small team could never do by hand. Working from the brand, products and audiences in the company brain, it generated 423 ad creatives for Barner, written in Croatian and sized for every placement. Lines like "Predugo si pred ekranom? Zaštiti svoj vid" ("Too long in front of a screen? Protect your eyes") spoke directly to the people Barner makes glasses for, and a simple 30% offer with the code ALL30 gave them a reason to try.

395 of those creatives were approved and sent into the campaigns from the same screen, with no exporting, re-uploading or rebuilding ads in another tool. Because every creative stayed linked to its results, the reporting shaped the next round: the AI optimisations showed which ads were converting, and those were the ones the team made more of. Create, launch, learn, improve, all in one loop.

423

AI ad creatives generated for Barner in Creative Studio

395

approved and sent directly to Barner's Meta and Google Ads campaigns

Tracking and KPIs: One funnel, from the first impression to the purchase

Before Checkgrow, the question "is this working?" meant opening three platforms and reconciling numbers that never quite matched. In Insights, Meta, Google Ads and Google Analytics sit in one funnel, so the whole customer journey reads from top to bottom.

At the top, Meta ads made 3.8 million impressions and 33,600 clicks, and Google Ads 605,700 impressions and 7,727 clicks. In the middle, shoppers browsed product lists 86,765 times and opened single products 25,039 times. At the bottom were the purchases, and one click on them showed where they came from.

That click settled the question every launch team argues about. By session, the catalogue sales campaign on paid Instagram brought the most purchases, 39.5%, ahead of direct visits with 13.2% and Google's Performance Max campaign with 11.1%. In total, 151 purchases came from a campaign and 92 without one. Insights even explains why two different numbers can both be right: session attribution tells you which visit converted, first-user attribution tells you which channel first brought the customer in.

AI Assistant: Asking the data instead of digging through it

With everything connected, the team stopped building reports to answer questions. They asked. In early October, someone typed a simple question into the AI Assistant: which ads are converting the best in Meta?

About half a minute later the answer came back, with a table. Over the 30 days from 7 September to 6 October, Brad Offer 34,30 was the strongest Meta ad: 13 conversions from €736.11, the lowest cost per conversion of any ad with real volume at €56.62, and the most revenue, €679.07. Tortoise Offer 34,30 brought the most conversions, 16, but at €68.76 each.

No exports, no spreadsheets and no waiting for the weekly report. The same chat can bring in the competitors, the creatives or the funnel, because the AI Assistant answers from Barner's company brain and connected accounts rather than from the open internet. It turns a performance review into a conversation.

€56.62

lowest cost per conversion with real volume: Brad Offer 34,30, 7 September to 6 October 2026

€679.07

revenue from Brad Offer 34,30 in the same 30 days, the most of any Meta ad

16

conversions from Tortoise Offer 34,30, the most by volume

What Checkgrow found: Instagram brought the crowd, and the webshop converted it

Once Barner's Instagram and Meta accounts were connected, the channel picture became clear within days, and the sessions per channel were one click away in Insights. Instagram was the engine of the launch: 9,545 sessions, 6,966 of them from paid ads, ahead of Google with 4,143 and direct visits with 3,444. Paid Instagram alone brought 32,198 users, and Google paid search 16,186.

Search did its own quiet work. When people in Croatia looked up the new name, the Google ad "Barner je stigao u Hrvatsku" ("Barner has arrived in Croatia") was waiting, and it converted 13 times on an 11.82% click-through rate.

9,545

Instagram sessions, 6,966 of them from paid ads

32,198

users brought by paid Instagram, ahead of Google paid search with 16,186

11.82%

click-through rate on the brand search ad, with 13 conversions

The results: Purchases up 160.6%, new visitors up 119%

A month into the launch, the numbers confirmed what the team had watched build day by day. Between 2 September and 2 October 2026, Barner's webshop recorded 357 purchases, up 160.6% from 137 the month before. New visitors more than doubled, from 4,700 to 10,290, up 119%.

357

purchases, up 160.6% on the previous period

+119%

new visitors: 10,290 first visits against 4,700

69,190

page views, with 86,765 product list views

The busiest day was 29 September, with 14,809 events on the site, and Fridays became the strongest day of the week. The launch campaign alone recorded 316 purchases by 2 October. Smart Reporting summarises all of it automatically, so the team reads the month in a minute instead of building the report.