Paid advertising is a fundamental part of any marketing strategy, especially for our beauty brands. However, with new, smaller competitors entering the paid ad space and increasingly aggressive bidding, our ad spend was spiralling. It became more challenging to reach the right customers in the most effective places.

In 2022, THG Commerce set out to find an ad network that could precisely connect our brands with consumers. AdMedia was the clear choice, providing quality traffic that delivered genuine results.

Discover our partnership journey below. 

The Challenges

Following the post-Covid era, we experienced a significant increase in our Google ad spend.

With the introduction of Google’s automated Performance Max (PMax), it became easier for new or smaller competitors to compete against our ads. In response, our primary competitors also started bidding more aggressively.

As the auction environment became more intense, so did the price. This shift impacted our click-through rates (CTRs), cost-per-click (CPC), and conversion rates, making it difficult to manage the overall cost of sale at the scale we needed.

To overcome this, THG Commerce required an ad network with a search solution that could effectively alleviate these performance pressures.

We needed a partner to help diversify our advertising efforts, drive stronger new customer acquisition at a better cost, and lower cost of sale through more affordable clicks and stronger intent-based targeting.

That solution was AdMedia.

The Solutions

Towards the end of 2022, we launched AdMedia across two of our flagship beauty brands, LOOKFANTASTIC and Dermstore.

We started with a limited test budget and saw strong, promising results. This success led us to scale our investment in the first half of 2023, further improving our channel mix.

Our partnership with AdMedia significantly expanded our search advertising, securing exclusive placements on popular shopping apps like Laybuy, Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm. AdMedia also provided intent-based search solutions across privacy-focused browsers, including Firefox, Opera, and Ask.

As a result, our beauty brands reached new, privacy-conscious audiences. This strategy maximized our exposure on shopping sites with unique placements that complemented our affiliate marketing activities and increased our visibility on relevant home and search pages. 
 

The Results

“The results from our partnership with AdMedia have been phenomenal. With significant reductions in cost of sale, stronger conversion rates across the board and an impressive uplift in revenue, it’s a powerful partnership that’s genuinely elevated our brand performance.”  – Richard Ward – CEO, THG Ingenuity

Our collaboration with AdMedia delivered stand-out results for LOOKFANTASTIC and Dermstore.

Globally, our partnership helped grow revenue by an average of +10% month-over-month.

Our average customer acquisition cost (CAC) is $11 lower compared to other ad networks, helping to reduce in-channel new customer acquisition costs. In the regions in which we operate, AdMedia drives 3.6% of our new customer acquisition, resulting in substantial cost savings compared to our other advertising channels.

In Spain, AdMedia contributes 20% of our PPC revenue, with a significantly stronger conversion rate of +3.73 percentage points compared to our other ad networks. This growth has been crucial in offsetting conversion challenges with product listing ads (PLAs) in the region.

In France, the Netherlands and Germany, AdMedia represents 10%, 7.5% and 6.5% of our revenue, respectively. There is still room to scale and achieve incremental gains in non-branded search terms.