Cosmetic brand implements cross-product advertising strategy

Forming a partnership

Founded in 1890, Bella Aurora is a leading depigmenting cosmetic brand based in Spain. The brand manufactures and distributes products like anti-blemish creams, sunscreen, anti-aging and anti-dark spot correction serums, and more.

While Bella Aurora began selling on Amazon.es in 2016, they wanted to partner with a specialized agency that could help them optimize their advertising campaigns due to lack of in-house resources and Amazon Ads expertise. In January 2019, the brand partnered with Roicos, a digital marketing agency based in Barcelona that helps brands develop and implement strategies to increase sales, improve positioning, and drive visibility with Amazon Ads.

Standing out in the category

Bella Aurora’s goal was simple: improve visibility and in turn increase sales, while maintaining an advertising cost of sales (ACOS) of 10%. To achieve this, Roicos had to find relevant keywords with an optimal bid for each of Bella Aurora’s products while helping the brand stand.

Unlocking opportunity with a full-funnel strategy

Bella Aurora increased its Amazon Ads campaign budget by 235% in 2020 compared to 2019, which helped give Roicos room to work across all advertising formats—including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display—and different campaign tactics, like manual campaigns with branded keywords and automatic campaigns with generic category keywords.

To start, Roicos wanted to make sure Bella Aurora’s entire catalog was retail ready and SEO optimized, implementing A+ content to improve conversions. They applied the strongest keywords in the product listing and improved the titles, bullet points, and descriptions, using the maximum space allowed. Roicos made sure Bella Aurora had sufficient inventory and reviews. In addition, they played with variations of parent-child relationships between products to encourage the brand halo.

Next, Roicos moved to launching multi-product campaigns, specifically Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Here are the tactics they deployed for each:

  • Sponsored Products: Roicos set up a multi-campaign strategy by targeting type (e.g., using generic keywords like “anti-aging creams” and branded keywords like “Bella Aurora”). They adjusted bids depending on if the ACOS increased or decreased, and used dynamic bids and placements to increase visibility.
  • Sponsored Brands: Roicos set up a multi-campaign strategy by targeting type (i.e., brand keywords, generic keywords, and similar products). They used A/B testing to understand which creatives generated the most impressions and used Store spotlight to highlight the brand’s different product categories. They then used Sponsored Brands video to increase the click-through rate (CTR) in searches.
  • Sponsored Display: Store spotlight encouraged shoppers to engage with the brand’s Store and their detail pages, which helped reengage shoppers with Sponsored Display. To increase new-to-brand customers and raise brand awareness, Roicos used two targeting features within Sponsored Display: 1) product targeting to reach audiences that were considering buying within the category; and 2) audiences to reach new customers using the lifestyle, interests, life events, and in-market segments, and to reengage customers who viewed Bella Aurora’s product detail pages and category within the last 30 days.

For all the campaigns, Roicos used broad match for categories where they wanted to increase the visibility, phrase match for most campaigns, and exact match for the search terms that were converting well. They then used automatic campaigns to find which keywords were driving results, and then built those into manual campaigns that focused on performance. To ensure the brand’s budget didn’t run out, Roicos used an always-on campaign strategy.

“I learned that it is important to carry out a full-funnel strategy and good segmentation to help increase visibility and conversion. Also, it is important to differentiate your brand with specific keywords and audience types to help your brand stand out.”

— Miriam Larrosa, CEO, Roicos

Monitoring the results

To measure and optimize results, Roicos leveraged search term reports to understand the conversions and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to them. Specifically, they used this report to analyze keywords in phrase or broad match and the negative and positive search terms derived from these keywords. Roicos then performed an analysis of daily budget, so that they could maintain Bella Aurora’s ACOS at 10%.

They worked with an external tool, Epinium, to analyze all the reports in one interface.

Generating a 400% growth in sales

Bella Aurora’s sales increased by 107% in 2019 and by 92% in 2020, a 400% growth compared to 2018. Roicos was also able to meet the brand’s key KPI of keeping an ACOS of 10% during the campaigns. Roicos also helped Bella Aurora achieve a 112% increase in impressions in 2019 and a 189% increase in 2020. Overall, new-to-customers generated 42% of sales in 2019 and 62% of sales in 2020.1

“We first started advertising our sunscreen on Amazon in 2018 and the campaign performed well, but we weren’t leveraging a full-funnel strategy to help us really stand out. Roicos was the perfect partner to help us support our growth on Amazon.”

— Gemma Guitart Laguna, National Key Account Manager, Bella Aurora

Through the rest of 2021, the brand plans to continue to partner with Roicos by deploying the same strategies in Germany, Italy, and France.

1 Advertiser-provided data, Spain, 2019-2020.