L'Oréal used Amazon Marketing Cloud to reach the relevant audiences at the right times
November 24, 2021 | By: Matt Miller, Sr. Copywriter
Many marketers may find themselves at some point asking a familiar question: How many times should an advertisement be seen by audiences? It’s a tricky question, and one that marketers have spent many years trying to figure out. And perhaps the best way to answer that question is to start by better understanding the customers.
In the first half of 2021, L'Oréal used Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to better understand how to reach their customers. What the brand found using Amazon Ads' adtech helped them optimize their marketing strategy and the frequency of their advertising.
Finding the sweet spot of ad frequency with AMC
© Hub Institute
“We tend to think that we invest in media, we work on awareness, we push a lot, we expose our consumers more and more, but thanks to these tools, we can evaluate when we can modify our media investments,” said Chief Marketing Digital Officer of L’Oréal France Elise Ducret during a session at Hub Forum in October. “Using AMC, we realized that after four ad exposures we could reallocate part of the budget that had not been planned for remarketing investment in order to expand our customer base and therefore expand prospecting budgets.”
Through a series of analytics tests on AMC, L’Oréal learned that after customers saw one of their ads four times, the messaging became less effective, the customers were less likely to convert, and L’Oréal was not seeing a strong return on investment.
“We had to stop over-pressuring our consumers,” Ducret said, noting the importance of frequency capping, which limits the number of times a brand’s display or video ads are seen by a user in order “to avoid any advertising waste.”
By shifting their strategy, L’Oréal was able to increase return on ad spend by 53% in the first month and 87% in the second month.1 At the same time, the savings achieved allowed L'Oréal to increase its prospecting budget from 7% to 44%.2
Reaching shoppers on their omni-channel journeys
© Hub Institute
Beyond creating a better strategy for frequency capping, AMC also helped L’Oréal better understand how to reach the relevant audiences at the right time throughout today’s omni-channel shopping journeys. This was important for L’Oréal because for many modern customers, shopping journeys are no longer linear. In 2020, 39.6% of French shoppers used multiple devices (computer, phone, tablet) to make purchases, a growth of 7% compared to 2019, according to a 2021 report from Fevad.
Using AMC, L’Oréal was better able to evaluate how Amazon Ads campaigns were driving engagement and sales wherever they spend time as a part of its omni-channel strategy.
“We really have to take into account the omni-channel experience everyone is talking about and evaluate all the touchpoints in relation to each other, but the difficulty is to measure all of this. So, tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud are absolutely critical for us to truly attribute the entire path and not just stop at the last click to which we attribute the sale,” Ducret said. “This helps us to improve our media mix ... taking into account this omni-channel insight—it will be key.”
Contact an Amazon Ads account executive today to learn more about using AMC to help reach the right customers at the right time.
Sources
1-2 Advertiser provided data, 2021