Lullabellz
Utilising YouTube to drive Return On Ad Spend
Lullabellz provide premium clip-in synthetic and human hair extensions and have a loyal consumer following. However, returning consumers are often tempted by competitors who have different promotions running (such as free delivery). These include resellers of their own products who try to out-price them.
Through running Paid Search & Shopping, we often saw those competitors appearing against us and, in price competitiveness reviews offered by Google, we typically found ourselves around 60% above competitor prices. This had a negative affect on traffic to the website, as well as conversion rates, as customers would head to the cheaper competitors and resellers over Lullabellz.
Bringing users back to the website
Lullabellz asked us to look for new ways to bring consumers directly back to their site, to increase traffic and conversions. We chose to re-engage users through the newly launched YouTube Action Campaigns, reminding consumers of the ease of use and glamorous vibes that Lullabellz brings to hair extensions and that by buying directly, customers would have a greater range of colour and products to choose from, which aren’t available to purchase elsewhere.
We ran a trial activation YouTube Action campaign in order to measure the impact on the Lullabellz website. The upper-funnel campaign type was to be used in conjunction with a product feed, as well as revenue reporting. We also focused on intent, consideration and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), shifting our focus away from awareness driving and website traffic.
Our campaign was run with two different video assets to test engagement, direct revenue, and attributed impressions and revenue. One video was a classic ad, using lifestyle imagery and unique selling points (USPs) to sell to the consumer and encourage searches and clicks to the website.
The second ad focused on user-generated content (UGC), showing how realistic, easy-to-use, and affordable the hair extensions are. This ‘influencer’ style content was created to appeal directly to the user, highlighting various ways they could use the Lullabellz hair extensions, and their ease of use.
All other elements, including the landing page, accompanying copy and audience signals, remained the same.
We create audience signals to target the specific user segments that would bring in the most return. Audience signals were made up of a combination of:
- Website and first-party data
- Users who had not made a purchase in 60 days
- Recently active but no-purchase users
- Once loyal but now cold users
- In market audiences of holidaymakers, beauty mavens, and those who frequent salons
As the strategy was delivered, we continued to see the impact of the audience turning to search, suggesting that the campaign ran at the consideration and intent stage of the funnel as pitched. As well as hitting our KPIs, we noticed that the YouTube ads continued to act as an awareness-driving campaign, providing a secondary benefit for Lullabellz.
When measuring the success of the campaign, we found that direct revenue and direct traffic generated from the YouTube activity delivered around 10% of Lullabellz’s search and shopping activity. Click-through rate (CTR) and GA4 Engaged Sessions were on par with the Performance Max campaigns from the ads.
However, the biggest impact was on search, where we saw an increase of around 15% in impressions, clicks and revenue. When drilling down to the YouTube audience, we saw an 8% conversion rate (vs an account average of 5.5%), an 11% ROAS (vs 6.7% account average) and 15% CTR (vs 2.8% account average). After we paused the YouTube activity, we saw an overall decrease in revenue of around 20%, proving that our campaign worked as a driver of traffic and conversions.
When reviewing the best-performing video ad, the UGC was clearly the most successful: 90% of the direct revenue traffic was attributed to this ad, with 70% of the video ad watched. In comparison, just 30% of an average YouTube ad is watched. The CTR from this video was more in line with a search CTR, at 2% click-through, where the average for YouTube ads is closer to 0.6%.
+15%
Uplift in impressions, clicks and revenue in search
8%
Conversion rate of engaged users moving from YouTube Search much higher intent, compared to Search average of 5%
70%
of UGC created ad watched by users vs YouTube ad average of 20%
