Six tips to help your beauty marketing creative shine
When it comes to beauty marketing, brands should make sure their ads are just as pretty as their products. To stand out from the vast selection of makeup, skin care goods, fragrances, and other beauty products, brands can follow these suggestions to help their ads spark their customers’ interest. Optimizing beauty ads could have a long-term payoff, as well: 70% of beauty shoppers purchased a second beauty product within three months of their first beauty purchases in Amazon’s store.1 Here are six tips to get you started on creating beauty ads for your brand.
Based on insights from Amazon DSP static ads and design elements run in the US, Amazon Ads developed tips to help marketers craft ads to reach customers shopping for beauty products. To check which product categories these recommendations are relevant for, refer to the list of audience segments at the bottom of the page. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for these tips include average click-through rate (CTR), detail page view rate (DPVR), purchase rate (PR), and return on ad spend (ROAS), which are important metrics for helping ad creative to resonate with audiences. Here’s how using insights to select imagery and text could help brands create more impactful ads for brand marketing campaigns featuring beauty products.
Explore ad examples
Here are examples of what ads could look like after following Amazon Ads' tips. There’s more information and tips on display advertising available, too.
Tips in action for CTR driven campaigns
Tips in action for DPVR driven campaigns
Tips in action for PR/ROAS driven campaigns
Consider these six tips
1. Highlight the product
In beauty ads for purchase-driven campaigns, it’s often best to highlight the product. Creatives with a human featured in them saw a decrease in average PR by 15%.2 Rather than spend precious ad space on humans, showcase your products for your customers.
Creatives with a human featured had a 15% decrease in average PR
Creatives with fewer than 10 words had a 12% increase in average DPVR
2. Word count makes a difference
For several KPIs, using a lower word count resulted in better results. Creatives with fewer than 10 words had an average CTR 10% higher and an average DPVR 12% higher than the ads with a count of 17 or more words.3 Therefore, keeping the text concise in beauty ads can help show customers that the products speak for themselves.
3. Consider skipping discount messaging
Creatives with a discount message such as “Save XX%” or “Sale” had a decrease in average CTR by 30%.4 When it comes to awareness-driven campaigns for beauty products, brands shouldn’t necessarily assume they need discount messaging.
4. Mix and match font sizes
There isn’t a set rule about font sizes for beauty ads. Actually, it can help to have a variety of everything from wide words to narrow words to different font sizes in your ad. Creatives with a high variation of word width had an average CTR that was 10% higher than those with a low variation of word width.5
Creatives with high word width variation had a 10% increase in average CTR
Creatives with high left-right color variation had a 25% increase in average PR
5. Color choices can be key
Don’t be afraid to use a spectrum of different colors in your ad. For example, use a different color background on the left and right sides of your ad, for a high left-to-right color variation. Creatives with that kind of high color differentiation had an average DPVR 11% higher and an average PR 25% higher than those with low left-to-right color variation (meaning the colors were monotonous across the whole ad).6
6. Consider the lighting
Using a dark background and foreground could improve certain KPIs. Background and foreground refer to the majority of the ad, so, for example, you could feature a dark background but still have lighter text to make the ad pop. By having a dark background and foreground, ads saw the best performance in both average CTR and PR, compared to other lighting combinations.
However, for average DPVR, creatives with a light background and dark foreground had an increase of 20%, compared to creatives with both a dark background and foreground.7 The lighting you choose could depend on the KPI you’re most interested in improving.
Creatives with light background and dark foreground had a 20% increase in average DPVR
How Amazon Ads sourced these insights
The category insights used here were generated by capturing design elements from 28,000 creative image files from within the US from 2018 to 2021. Creatives were separated into verticals according to their audiences. Statistical and machine learning models then looked at the impact of design elements on awareness, consideration, and purchase KPIs. Creative performance was adjusted to remove the contribution of confounding effects such as placement and serving frequency.
Audience segments included in the analysis: makeup, face/body skin care, sun care, anti-aging treatments, fragrances, hair care/styling products, grocery/health & beauty personal care.
Learn more
Want to find out more about optimizing your advertising creative? Explore other ways to improve ad campaigns with a variety of more creative insights for other types of categories, such as food and beverage marketing.
1 Amazon internal, January 2019 – September 2021, US
2-7 Amazon internal, July 2021, US