Skai and Marshall help Active Skin Repair grow new-to-brand to 52% with full-funnel strategy

Goals

Active Skin Repair, a skincare brand focused on natural, medical-grade solutions using hypochlorous acid, had built strong momentum on the Amazon store—growing at a 60% compound annual rate from 2022 to 2024. But as the brand scaled, their growth engine was increasingly reliant on existing demand rather than new customer acquisition.

Diagnostic analysis revealed the extent of the challenge: 56% of total spend was going toward branded search terms, and upper-funnel Amazon DSP investment was underdelivering—with only 36% of purchases coming from new-to-brand (NTB) customers. The brand's performance was heavily dependent on consumers already familiar with Active Skin Repair, creating a ceiling on sustainable long-term growth.

Active Skin Repair partnered with Marshall Associates, a one-stop shop for all retail business solutions and an Amazon Ads partner. They also partnered with Skai, an Amazon Ads Advanced partner whose technology helps Amazon advertisers automate, scale, and measure Amazon advertising with a holistic product and retail advertising platform. The goal was to reframe the growth equation around new customer acquisition and the objectives were clear: increase Amazon DSP NTB rate to 46%, grow sponsored ads NTB share to 50%, and achieve 28% YoY sales growth—all while maintaining advertising efficiency.

Approach

Marshall Associates and Skai took a multi-layered approach that combined diagnostic intelligence with strategic restructuring and full-funnel activation.

The first step was understanding existing spend. Skai's search term grid identified campaigns driving unintentional branded spend, and the Brand Overlap % metric revealed queries with strong brand ownership that didn't need over-investment. These terms were negated in bulk, freeing budget for growth-driving activity.

With branded spend rationalized, the team restructured campaigns to give each a defined role—separating brand protection from awareness and acquisition tactics. Skai's Celeste AI then analyzed non-branded search term performance, aggregating insights and identifying top-performing thematic keyword clusters. The incremental return on ad spend (iROAS) metric helped pinpoint priority keywords with the greatest incremental revenue potential, while competitive insights mapped the competitive set in keyword niches to find whitespace opportunities.

From there, Marshall built dedicated "must-win" keyword campaigns focused on high-priority terms, paired with bid modifiers for Amazon's custom audiences to maximize visibility with shoppers most likely to convert. On the upper funnel, the team launched broad awareness tactics through Amazon DSP using demographic signals to introduce the brand to new customer segments aligned with Active Skin Repair's core audience of families, athletes, and outdoor enthusiasts.

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) reporting tied the system together—tracking which campaign types, tactics, and SKUs were most effective at acquiring new customers. Every insight fed back into budget allocation and audience decisions, creating a connected loop where diagnostic intelligence informed activation and measurement validated the approach.

Results

The strategy delivered results that exceeded every objective—confirming that reframing growth around new customer acquisition, rather than reinforcing existing demand, unlocks sustainable scaling.

Amazon DSP NTB rate increased from 36% to 52%—a 16 percentage point improvement that surpassed the 46% goal.¹ Lower-funnel conversion campaign NTB rate increased by 1,200 basis points versus the year-to-date average, more than doubling the 500-basis-point objective.² Sponsored ads NTB share of purchases reached 60%, exceeding the 50% goal and confirming that restructured search campaigns were reaching new shoppers rather than recapturing existing ones.³ Amazon YoY sales grew 33% in 2025 against a 28% objective, with momentum continuing into 2026 at 56% year-to-date growth.⁴

The strategy produced more revenue while strengthening organic momentum rather than cannibalizing it. Quarter-over-quarter, the percentage of total sales coming from advertising decreased by 210 basis points—even as ad-attributed sales increased 12% and total sales grew 16%. This confirmed that the full-funnel approach was building durable brand equity, not just buying short-term conversions.

The combination of Skai's diagnostic tools, Marshall's strategic restructuring, and Amazon's full-funnel infrastructure created a system where every insight fed back into budget allocation and audience decisions—driving compounding NTB growth rather than simply increasing impressions.

Sources

^1–4 Active Skin Repair, U.S., 2025.