Publicis helps a leading beauty brand bring awareness to their skin care products on Amazon.ae

Publicis, a multinational advertising and PR agency, has had a 25-year relationship with a heritage global skin care brand. Founded in the 1950s, the brand features a wide range of skin care products, offering a portfolio that helps meet the needs of all different types of skin. The brand sells globally on Amazon and started offering its products to UAE shoppers after Amazon launched in the region in 2019.

Publicis has helped the brand with their advertising efforts since 2020. As the brand looked to develop an Amazon Ads strategy for the UAE, they turned to Publicis for help.

“Publicis worked with Amazon Ads on sponsored ads campaigns once it was offered in the UAE. They have, since then, built their technical and consulting capabilities to tackle various brand challenges and goals making them a reliable collaboration for our Amazon Ads campaigns."

— Local Brand Manager

The skin care brand’s goals for Amazon UAE

As the skin care brand looked to build its presence on Amazon UAE, it tasked Publicis with the following objectives:

  • Increase brand awareness with Amazon UAE shoppers browsing the skin care category
  • Drive return on ad spend (ROAS) performance of branded keywords for key products and bundles
  • Generate sales momentum for premium products

Focusing on retail readiness to help build a foundation for advertising

Publicis recognized there were opportunities for improving the brand’s product detail pages. They started by assessing product descriptions and cross-referencing the most popular terms in the skin care category. Publicis then showed the brand which products might benefit from incorporating these terms within product detail pages. Incorporating these terms allowed the brand to help create a more relevant experience for shoppers browsing the products.

During this process, Publicis helped the brand identify terms that could map to specific product lines, which helped guide the Sponsored Brands strategy. These groups of terms and their corresponding product lines were built into separate Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Using Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to help drive different goals

Once retail readiness optimizations were in place, Publicis began launching sponsored ads campaigns to help drive performance against the brand’s goals. They used these Amazon Ads products for different objectives:

  • Sponsored Products: Sponsored Products campaigns focused on branded keywords (featuring the brand name and sub-brands). These campaigns helped reach customers in the purchasing stage of their shopping journey, at the bottom of the marketing funnel. The campaigns also helped increase visibility of more premium products, which helped drive ROAS performance.
  • Sponsored Brands: Sponsored Brands campaigns were able to benefit from the keyword optimization implemented when improving the brand’s retail readiness. Grouping relevant keywords to specific products allowed the brand to build campaigns featuring custom headline copy that would be most relevant to shoppers as they explored the skin care category. Publicis moved away from branded terms and instead focused on generic category terms, as these terms represented the most opportunity to engage new-to-brand customers. They set the bids to 10-15% higher than what was suggested to help the brand increase impressions and engage with shoppers browsing the category.

“It’s important to understand the category that you are in. Categories such as skin care require that you not just focus on sales but also keep in mind broader business objectives—for example, focusing on generic category terms can help with being more visible and reaching new shoppers who might not have decided on a specific brand. These terms may not yield the same ROAS as brand focused terms, but they are an investment in growing awareness and reaching potential new-to-brand customers”

— Siham Arif, E-Commerce Manager, Publicis Media - MENA

A strategic shift that helped drive results

Publicis had the following to say about the brand’s willingness to try new things with their Amazon Ads strategy as they looked for further growth in the UAE.

“Test-and-learn is important, and the brand team is always up to build hypotheses and test them in real time. The hypothesis the team had was that unbranded Sponsored Brands campaigns would help the brand on all the key metrics (impressions and total sales). We decided to test this theory out in the UAE with all the budget, keywords, and bid adjustments, and saw that our results corroborated.”

— Siham Arif, eCommerce Manager, Publicis Media (MENA)

Performance by the numbers

  • +178% sales attributed to advertising on Sponsored Products campaigns Q2 year over year
  • +98% sales attributed to advertising on Sponsored Products campaigns Q2 year over year
  • +32% Sponsored Brands impressions with a 38% decrease in advertising cost of sales (ACOS)

“Be crystal-clear about the objective you want to drive, establish important context for your business, and then deeply partner with your agency team to deliver on the right KPIs against those objectives. Digital offers a great ground to test and learn, so do not hesitate to always try something you strongly believe in.”

— Regional brand manager

Learn more about skin care marketing.