Laura Mercier

The objective

Tapping into the power of user-generated content to captivate shoppers

Pioneering the "Flawless Face", Laura Mercier is a world-renowned makeup artist and creator of the iconic namesake cosmetic brand. Rooted in the philosophy “What makes you unique makes you beautiful", the brand saw an opportunity to increase awareness and drive website conversions with a video from a popular creator, who posted a review of their Real Flawless Weightless Perfecting Foundation while using the product. The video garnered 49.4M video views, 1.5M likes, and 297K shares.

The solution

Converting engagement into purchases by retargeting custom audiences

Focusing on users that viewed and engaged with the organic video, and would therefore be more likely to purchase the product, Laura Mercier worked with TikTok to strategize a lower-funnel performance campaign with a Web Conversions objective.

To test the performance of the campaign Laura Mercier created two ad groups: one with broad targeting and the other a combination of custom audiences to hit both Retargeting and Spend Optimization.

For Retargeting: An 'Engagement' custom audience was created by selecting users that had viewed the viral organic video for at least 2 seconds and would be able to recall the brand and product featured in the video.

For Spend Optimization: A 'Website Traffic' custom audience was created by selecting users that had purchased in the last 180 days or performed an 'add to product' action in the last 60 days. This audience was used to exclude certain impressions to optimize ad spend.

The results

Improved cost per acquisition at a lower impression cost

Testing this strategy exceeded the brand's expectations. Targeting a custom audience that had already expressed interest in the brand and product led to more cost effective conversions, outperforming control ad groups that used broad targeting. Leveraging these custom audiences led to an outstanding 15% lower CPA compared to broad targeting, and a 5% lower CPM.