Beauty Retailer
This leading U.S. beauty retailer is the premier destination for cosmetics, fragrance, body, skin, and hair care products. They also offer extensive salon services, personalized to fit each customer.
The Challenge
This beauty brand understands that customers need to seamlessly browse, shop, and experience their products both online and in store. During the critical holiday shopping period, Rise was tasked with using digital marketing to expand the client’s reach and boost brick-and-mortar sales after their online shipping cutoff in early December.
The Strategy
To engage the beauty retailer’s primary target audience—beauty enthusiasts aged 18 to 35 across the United States—Rise needed a strategic expansion during the crucial holiday shopping season. This initiative aimed to include last-minute holiday shoppers, broadening the potential customer base and driving increased sales.
The Insight
To encourage more brick-and-mortar sales after the .com shipping cutoff, we needed to strategically test paid media possibilities in preparation for the holiday season. Working closely with our partners at Google, Rise crafted a YouTube testing roadmap that could help us define the best platform playbook for holiday.
We enabled the below YouTube tactics across select product campaigns to determine the optimal approach heading into the busiest time of year. The test campaigns were chosen to ensure they wouldn’t negatively impact online sales by excessively prioritizing in-store traffic.
- OmniChannel Bidding (OCB): Utilizing Google’s data signals, this method targeted and optimized engagement with users likely to visit the beauty retailer’s store, increasing the likelihood of in-store shopping after viewing the YouTube ad.
- Local Offers (LO): By including unique snippets in Product Extensions, this feature targeted users within a 25-mile radius of the beauty retailer’s locations, displaying available in-store products, and promoting immediate accessibility.
After observing a significant increase in store visits and sales the following week, the beauty retailer confidently expanded the use of OmniChannel Bidding and Local Offers as the standard tactic across all Holiday YouTube campaigns.
The Solution
We launched our three-month Holiday campaigns, flighted over six seasonal “themes” in collaboration with various beauty partners participating in the retailer’s Media Network. Each theme featured ad sets with subtle variations in the headers, primarily to highlight the participating brands throughout the duration of each theme. This ensured that when customers were purchasing last-minute Christmas gifts, YouTube displayed real-time in-store inventory and optimized toward store traffic (using YouTube’s algorithm) to encourage brick-and-mortar sales after the .com shipping cutoff. This strategic decision effectively balanced boosting physical store traffic without compromising online sales performance, thus enhancing their overall retail strategy.
The client saw a remarkable increase in Offline ROAS in the first week after enabling OmniChannel Bidding and Local Offers. This lift was sustained through the holiday season, demonstrating the value of leveraging Google’s algorithmic bidding. Among the channels in the omnichannel plan, this YouTube strategy was one of the top performers, consistently maintaining the most efficient CPMs across all flights, which was a secondary KPI.
The Results
Increase in Offline ROAS
More Omnichannel Buyers YOY
Above Omnichannel ROAS Goal for Holiday Campaigns
