Charlotte Tilbury Beauty reduces CPA by 29% with Custom
Bidding
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Case Study
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty reduces CPA by 29%
with Custom Bidding
Tags
Display & Video 360
Google Marketing
Platform
The Goals
Increase purchases of luxury cosmetic
products on the Charlotte Tilbury website.
Maximize ad campaign’s return on
investment.
The Approach
Used Display & Video 360 to optimize bids.
Worked with Scibids, a company developing
custom algorithms to tailor the bidding
strategy.
Assessed performance impact using
experiments & lift tool.
The Results
Reduced customer acquisition costs by 29%.
Increased conversion rate by 60%.
Doubled viewable reach by optimizing
frequency.
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, the
cosmetic line from the celebrity makeup artist
and British female entrepreneur, has quickly
become one of the UK’s biggest luxury beauty
brands. Charlotte believes makeup is about
enhancing natural beauty and empowering women
and men to feel their best selves everyday.
Central to the growth of the brand is its
investment in digital advertising which the
marketing team uses as their primary way to
boost the online purchases of their high-end
goods. Preserving the privacy of its customers
is also a top priority for them. With this in
mind, they selected Display & Video 360 as
their preferred media buying partner to further
develop their business in the UK and expand to
the US.
Optimizing for conversions
The beauty brand’s marketing team started by
turning to Display & Video 360’s automated
bidding solutions to optimize the
performance of their campaigns. This tool
automatically bids on impressions with a high
likelihood of leading to a conversion, allowing
the brand to significantly increase the number
of people who purchased their products.
But soon after, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty ran
into a catch-22 that’s well known by retailers
selling high-value goods – they could not grow
their media spend above a certain plateau
without also growing their cost per customer
acquisition beyond profitability thresholds.
That’s because brands selling high-price point
products drive fewer conversions at a higher
price. This gives bidding algorithms less data
to learn from.
Turning to Custom Bidding
To reach more customers profitably, the
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty team connected with
Scibids, a technology company that
creates customizable bidding algorithms. They
built an algorithm that was made just for the
brand to power-up Display & Video 360’s
standard bidding solutions.
“Display & Video 360 provides the perfect
framework to unlock the power of Scibids’
customizable artificial intelligence. Our
algorithms take the brand’s specific goals into
account to design a personalized bidding
strategy that can help them grow media
efficiency and scale.”
Remi
Lemonnier, Co-founder & President,
Scibids
To account for the fact that the cosmetic brand
had fewer conversions to optimize off of,
Scibids designed a tailored full-funnel
algorithm that factored in relevant event data
higher up in the user journey. For example,
they started valuing visits, clicks, and ad
viewability as new input signals.
The beauty brand didn't have to wait for
conversion data to gradually trickle in. From
the start of the campaign, the custom bidding
strategy provided Display & Video 360's machine
learning technology with more events to learn
from. This made up for a compressed learning
period which saved the brand precious time and
limited their media waste. From there, the
algorithm kept dynamically informing Display &
Video 360’s bidding tool with accurate
conversion weighting, refreshed every few
hours.
Experimenting to assess the impact on ad spend
and reach
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty’s team needed an
unbiased testing framework to verify the
custom-built algorithm was working as intended.
They used the experiment & lift feature in
Display & Video 360 to test how the
introduction of the custom bidding strategy
impacted the campaign’s performance.
Within three weeks, the portion of the campaign
using the tailored algorithm started exceeding
the performance of the control campaign. And in
no more than two months, the brand observed a
29% reduction in acquisition cost and a 60%
increase in conversion rate.
“Scibids’ unique application of Display &
Video 360’s custom bidding solution across our
campaigns generated a step change in
performance. We are excited to leverage this
partnership to further scale our programmatic
effort.”
Andrew
Leung, Global Head of Performance
Marketing, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty
Finally, giving more weight to upper and
mid-funnel events in the bidding process
allowed the cosmetic brand to double viewable
reach. Thus avoiding repeatedly reaching the
same viewers with the same ad which is a common
remessaging pitfall.
Looking ahead
With these learnings fresh on their minds,
Charlotte Tilbury Beauty is looking ahead to
expand even further the efficiency of custom
bidding. The brand is doubling down on their
first-party data strategy and planning on using
those insights to enrich Scibids’ learning
database. As for Scibids, they’re anticipating
helping an increasing number of marketers
willing to take their bidding strategy to the
next level.
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