Ulta Beauty
Activating multiple retail media network campaigns throughout the purchase funnel on TikTok.
The objective
Driving holiday impact and mid-funnel performance
Ulta Beauty is the largest beauty retailer in the United States, offering a one-stop destination for cosmetics, skincare, haircare, and fragrance. UB Media, Ulta Beauty's retail media network, aimed to activate several multi-brand holiday campaigns on TikTok to drive traffic and sales for its brand partners during the 2023 holiday season.
In a separate campaign, UB Media looked to reach more Ulta Beauty shoppers throughout their purchase journey and achieve high mid-funnel performance.
The solution
Leaning into holiday trends and creator-led content
During the holiday shopping season, UB Media ran several multi-brand campaigns featuring products across haircare, cosmetics, skincare, and fragrance. The creative leaned into holiday-centric TikTok trends, including gifting ideas, self-gifting, get-ready-with-me (GRWM) content, and most-wanted products. In-Feed Ads were used with the Web Conversion objective to drive sales on the Ulta Beauty website.
UB Media partnered with a leading haircare brand to launch a traffic campaign that leveraged creator content and the brand's own TikTok-first assets. The haircare brand followed TikTok's creative best practices, such as featuring creators, using text overlays, adding voiceovers, and breaking the fourth wall.
Campaign targeting was strategically organized to enable streamlined ad group optimizations, improving performance across cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and engagement rate.
The results
Surpassing benchmarks with high-performing creative
The holiday campaign saw a 40% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to UB Media's benchmark during November and December 2023. Over 1 million purchases were completed across participating brands. The top-performing multi-brand creative had an almost 3x higher ROAS than UB Media's benchmark.
Meanwhile, the creative in the haircare brand's campaign achieved a 25% higher engagement rate compared to the industry benchmark. The top-performing brand creative had almost twice the CTR and over twice the engagement rate compared to industry benchmarks.