Beauty brand looks to drive growth with Sponsored Brands video

Milani Cosmetics, which offers shoppers a wide array of affordable beauty products, is best known for a catalogue that suits women of all skin tones and beauty goals. Milani looked to engage shoppers discovering in the Amazon beauty category, choosing to partner with Envision Horizons for full-service account management in August of 2019. The key focus at the onset of the partnership was to drive greater awareness with category level shoppers, reaching a wider audience, while also maintaining efficient advertising cost of sales (ACOS) across the brand’s Amazon Ads efforts.

Testing Sponsored Brands video to drive consideration and sales

Generic or category-level keywords were a big point of focus for Envision Horizons as they set about developing Milani’s Amazon Ads strategy. While normally these types of keywords are viewed as awareness or consideration driving, they wanted to test whether they could also effectively drive conversions. The first step in building out campaigns was selecting the right products to support with advertising. To make these determinations, Envision Horizons used existing conversion metrics, reviews and inventory levels. Profitability can be challenging for products with a lower price point, and Envision Horizons worked with Milani to develop an ACOS target that would serve as the primary key performance indicator (KPI) across sponsored ads campaigns. Specifically, Envision Horizons wanted to test whether Sponsored Brands video offered a creative format that could drive upper-funnel and lower-funnel performance with category level shoppers.

Analyzing the keys to Milani’s Sponsored Brands video success

Sponsored Brands video ads proved be a powerful ad format for Milani as Envision Horizons continued to test different tactics for the brand. Their Sponsored Brands video campaigns proved highly effective at driving both clicks and conversions. Envision Horizons took a closer look at Milani’s top-performing Sponsored Brands video campaigns to learn more about which keyword strategies and creative elements were driving performance and developed the following insights:

Generic and branded keywords can help drive well-rounded performance: Envision Horizons noticed that generic keywords almost always had a higher average number of impressions and clicks than branded keywords. Brand keywords consistently drove stronger ACOS, return on ad spend (ROAS) and click-through rate. Envision Horizons posits that by using both these keyword types within Sponsored Brands video campaigns, you can help deliver across both awareness and conversion KPIs for advertisers.

Keyword length can be a factor: Envision Horizons found that short keywords (two words or less) drove much stronger performance in Milani’s Sponsored Brands video campaigns compared to longer keywords (three words or more). Short keywords ultimately drove 78% more ad-attributed sales for Milani than did longer keywords.¹

Phrase match type can help drive sales attributed to advertising: Envision Horizons found that when comparing match type, phrase match keywords drove 72% more sales than broad and exact keywords combined.²

Envision Horizons feels that Sponsored Brands video can be an amazing tool when looking to drive engagement with category-level shoppers. They also feel that it’s important to have the right type of video creative to suit the product and category in focus. For Milani, the creative focused on product performance instead of their brand story, and it was a strong way to differentiate the brand’s offering from similar products as shoppers discovered.

Especially for categories such as beauty, dynamic creative assets can be game-changing. The high performance of this ad unit is likely attributed to the style of videos which included high-definition, detailed shots of the product and also demonstrated the product in action on a variety of models.
– Account Manager, Envision Horizons

Learn more about skin care advertising.

¹Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2021.
²Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2021.