Agency Amazing helps L'Oréal double sales with Amazon Ads

World-renowned beauty brand L'Oréal was founded in 1909 by the chemist Eugène Schueller. Based in Clichy and headquartered in Paris, France, it’s one of the largest cosmetics companies in the world.

Though L'Oréal started its business with hair dyes, it’s now present in 150 countries, marketing 36 brands and thousands of products in all sectors of the beauty industry, including hair color, perms, hair styling, skin and body care, cleaning products, makeup, and fragrances. Among its consumer brands is L'Oréal Paris Dermo Expertise, its affordable skin care line, which offers products like anti-aging skin cream, makeup remover, toner, under-eye cream, and more.

In December 2018, the team partnered with the agency Amazing—a Madrid-based digital marketing agency that specializes in managing and optimizing product catalogs and advertising campaigns—to help improve its brand presence and help increase the visibility and sales of its L'Oréal Paris Dermo Expertise line online.

To help boost sales for the line and help improve its visibility within the skin care category on Amazon.es, the agency designed a “better together” strategy, launching Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Stores, and Sponsored Display campaigns for a select few products within the line. Key to the strategy was treating each of these products as their own unique business, with differentiated objectives, budget, advertising cost of sales (ACOS), return on ad spend (ROAS), key performance indicators (KPIs), content, and ad campaigns for each.

Here is a breakdown of the tactics the agency Amazing deployed for each product:

• Sponsored Products: When L'Oréal first started advertising on Amazon.es, it focused on branded and generic keywords, but with the help of the agency, it created a keyword structure that worked with each keyword matching option (exact, phrase, and broad). This allowed the brand to reach more shoppers looking for similar products. The agency then fine-tuned the product detail page of each of the campaigns by focusing on:
• Images: Amazing helped cover all spaces available within the product detail page with high-resolution imagery and videos for each product.
• Titles: Amazing ensured the advertised product titles included the top keywords from each campaign.
• Content: Amazing added the top keywords in bullet points for the product descriptions, keeping the length under 200 characters for each. It then used A+ Content, which included a cross-selling table with the best products linked for easy visibility and comparison.
• Stores: Creating a Store exclusive to the Dermo Expertise line of products helped drive brand awareness, helping Amazon shoppers learn the brand story and discover its product portfolio.
• Sponsored Brands: L'Oréal allocated more of its budget to Sponsored Brands campaigns, helping connect shoppers to both the product detail pages and the brand’s Store. An always-on strategy with the products running deals also helped drive visibility of the Dermo Expertise line’s discounted products.
• Sponsored Display: Launching Sponsored Display campaigns helped drive visibility of complementary products in the product detail pages.

There are two fundamental concepts that Amazing helped us implement in our advertising strategy: the first is establishing an always-on strategy for sponsored ads campaigns that covered the entire conversion funnel from brand awareness to consideration and conversion. Plus, Amazing helped us manage our budget, taking into account product life cycle and seasonality, so that we were prepared to perfectly cover all sales opportunities on Amazon.

– Daniel Grande, Digital Director of Consumer Goods, L'Oréal Paris Dermo Expertise

To optimize the different campaigns, Amazing used the placement report to measure top of shopping results and the search terms report to discover new keywords to add to the campaigns and exclude poor performing ones. Amazing would then redirect the budget from underperforming campaigns and increase bids on top performers as needed.

Key to the L'Oréal Paris Dermo Expertise's strategy was focusing on the key retail and advertising elements of each strategic product in an independent and customized way, maintaining a coherent and coordinated structure of content, keywords, and sponsored ads campaigns for the rest of the catalog.

Since L'Oréal began collaborating with the agency Amazing in 2018, ROAS improved by more than 50% year over year in 2019 and 2020. The brand’s ACOS also decreased by 22% in 2020 versus the previous year.