Rituals Cosmetics

The
Goals

• Increase the revenue from AdWords campaigns for the UK market by 35%

• Increase the Return on ad spend (ROAS) by 25%

• Expand shopping campaigns and improve their performance

• Implement the organic Facebook feed for the UK market and implement Facebook advertising

The Approach

• Implemented a growth strategy in the AdWords and Facebook setup

• Restructured the entire AdWords account; moved away from a narrow setup with many brand related keywords to a broader, relevant set up to capture a wider audience.

• Used story telling in ads

• Restructured shopping campaigns and analysed revenue stream per product group

• Use of audiences, RLSA, extensions

• Strong focus on major market events, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday

• Use of audiences and remarketing for Facebook advertising

Rituals operates in over 27 countries across the world. The UK market is considered an immature market for Rituals and the brand recognition is much lower than in some Western European countries. From an AdWords perspective, the brand name is more challenging to use compared to non-English speaking countries, as the word Rituals has many other meanings in the English language. This drives up cost per click and generates potential budget waste.
The market is highly competitive with some brands having a very strong brand recognition in the UK market. An additional challenge with AdWords is the limited options of presenting the brand and product line. It is challenging to capture a beauty product with a heavy focus on presentation, smell, experience etc in keywords and text ads with limited character count.

Daan van der Lugt, Global Online Marketing Manager Rituals: “we had been working with several agencies for the different markets over the years for our AdWords and Facebook activities. When Riksta started working on the accounts, we were experiencing a backward trend; the revenue generated by AdWords campaigns was decreasing year on year. Since Rituals experiences strong growth, our growth targets are set at an ambitious level for all channels. We asked Riksta to turn this trend around: going from decreasing revenue to a strong year on year growth. We scheduled biweekly Skype calls with Riksta, our online marketing manager in the UK office and our SEA marketer in our Amsterdam office to make sure everyone was on the same page and up to date with promotions. We had high expectations, but couldn’t have gotten better results with a 96% revenue increase from AdWords and a 274% revenue increase from Facebook. “

The AdWords campaigns for the UK market in the calendar year 2017 delivered a marked improvement in performance compared to previous year: Click-through rates increased by 18%, CPCs decreased by 16%, and revenue increased by 96%. Return on ad spend (ROAS) increased by 55%.  Facebook revenue showed a 274% growth while all other statistics, such as bounce rate, e-commerce conversion rate and number of transactions all improved.

The strategy that was implemented for Rituals was a growth based strategy. The previous campaign set up was very narrow, with many brand related keywords in the account. That is great for return on investment, as these keywords are very relevant to the products, but it won’t help grow the revenue. All campaigns were restructured and more generic, relevant keywords were put in place. All products that were missing from the campaign were added and the campaigns were expanded with many related keywords.

The shopping campaigns were set up differently in order to allow a more granular bid management strategy. For shopping, it was also important to look at products with a low order value, these might get many clicks, but that is not always good for the return on investment.

Another great tool that we used was audiences, RSLA and many well written ads. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are important dates in the UK, so making sure all was live on these days, including call outs, sitelinks, promotion extensions and countdown ads to make sure Rituals would get the most out of our sales. Rewriting all ads was imperative, as the brand messaging, the experience, the richness of the product was barely touched in the existing ads. The AdWords ads were used for storytelling in a limited number of characters. This was essential for click through rates, brand experience and conversion rates.

For Facebook, the strategy that was implemented was dividing the audiences in different target groups. One group for example is people that have not heard of Rituals before, but would be interested in specific products, such as baby products or travel products, based on what their interests are. Another group is friends of people that already like Rituals. Retargeting website visitors and newsletters subscribers. Communicating the sales through the Facebook channel.

In a market like the UK where the brand awareness of Rituals is still much lower than in some of the other European markets, growing the online revenue is a challenge, but Rituals has succeeded greatly.

See Also