Screwfix has appointed Incubeta as its PPC agency for the UK and Ireland, following a competitive multi-stage pitch process; Incubeta will take full responsibility for PPC account management, strategic consultancy and the development of an AI-driven performance engine to manage more than 70,000 SKUs across Screwfix's e-commerce estate.

Screwfix is the UK and Ireland's leading trade tools and hardware retailer, part of Kingfisher plc (LSE: KGF), operating more than 900 stores and one of the UK's largest trade e-commerce businesses; Kingfisher's UK and Ireland segment reported revenue of £5.2 billion in FY2025/26.

Incubeta is a London-headquartered global AI outcomes digital marketing agency with annual revenues of approximately $311 million (€285 million) and approximately 800 employees across 22 offices globally, backed by Carlyle Group. Incubeta has previously won PPC mandates from Harrods and counts L'Oréal, Netflix and Hyundai among its clients; it recently acquired RocketSource, an AI marketing consultancy, and has launched proprietary agentic AI tools CPI and OutperformBI.

The CX driver is the expectation gap between a trade professional searching for a specific product and the search result that meets them. A tradesperson looking for a 25mm stainless steel screw in a specific grade does not want to encounter a generic landing page, an out-of-stock product or a sponsored result that does not match their intent. 

At 70,000 SKUs, managing that match through manual bidding and static feed management creates systematic mismatches at scale — bid waste for Screwfix and irrelevant search results for the customer. Incubeta's mandate to deploy dynamic feed management and agentic AI is fundamentally a CX intervention: ensuring the right product appears in the right paid search position at the right moment, at a scale human management cannot sustain.

The demand-led growth approach Screwfix's digital director cited in the selection rationale is commercially and experientially precise: reallocating PPC budget based on live consumer signals rather than fixed forecasts means spend follows actual customer intent, capturing seasonal demand shifts and job-specific product needs at the moment of search rather than the moment of planning.

For the sector, Screwfix's appointment confirms that trade retail CX now extends upstream into the paid search journey, and that getting the discovery experience right at 70,000 SKUs requires AI infrastructure, not manual optimisation.

Source: incubeta.com / retailgazette.co.uk / kingfisher.com / zoominfo.com