Freshly Cosmetics understood the real value of its Paid Social campaigns

About Freshly Cosmetics:

Freshly Cosmetics (www.freshlycosmetics.com) is a clean vegan beauty brand, 100% digital and committed to the environment. With its HQ in Reus, Catalonia, the company sells its products in the UK, France, Italy, and Portugal, and, of course, Spain. The company’s revenues in 2020 reached €30 million and the number of employees grew to 200. 

Part of their secret to success lies in a strong digital marketing strategy. Initially, the company generated awareness about its products through social media and influencer marketing and then started to invest in Facebook and Google Ads to support its growth. 

The challenge:

However, it was very difficult to understand the real impact of Facebook campaigns, and optimise them accordingly. A lot of conversions were not attributed to the original Facebook campaigns, resulting in a poor ROI. 

At the same time, the marketing team was noticing sales growth from Direct and Brand traffic sources. Even though it was intuitively clear that Facebook Ads may have influenced such purchases, there was no hard data to back up such conclusions or decide which particular Facebook campaign should receive more budget. Proper data-driven optimization was not possible. 

One of the reasons for such problems with attribution is cross-browser and cross-device interactions. For example, a lot of users interact with Facebook Ads from mobile devices, so when people click on the mobile ad — the Freshly Cosmetics website opens in Facebook’s in-app browser. However, many people prefer to use their primary browser (like Safari or Chrome) to make a purchase or even buy later from the desktop. In addition, cookie consent policies and other tracking restrictions made the conversion tracking issue even worse. 

Because of these challenges in the upper-funnel campaign measurement, it was much riskier to invest in such awareness campaigns compared to lower-funnel channels like paid search and shopping campaigns, where the campaign’s impact is much more clear. 

However, in order to scale, Freshly’s team wanted to find a way to properly evaluate all marketing traffic sources, including upper-funnel Facebook campaigns. 

Luckily, they’ve found SegmentStream and its AI-powered measurement and optimization platform that tackles these challenges.

Customer testimonial about SegmentStream:

Social media was always one of our main channels used to tell the story about the Freshly Cosmetics brand and acquire new customers. Initially, we heavily relied on SMM marketing by partnering with influencers. After that, we started to experiment with Facebook Ads but for a long time, we couldn’t make it work with the target CPA and ROAS we had in mind.

The problem was that the efficiency of Facebook Ads was not great when measured by Facebook’s Post-Click or Google’s Last Non-Direct Click attribution. We felt that it might be due to the nature of Facebook and Instagram — in comparison to Google Ads where people mostly have a clear buying intent, social advertising is mostly an upper-funnel channel which we use to promote our brand and generate demand among new customers. So the traditional attribution models will not work well. 

However, we knew that this channel is very important for us and will play a huge role in our marketing strategy as we scale the business, so we had to find a way to properly analyse the quality and performance of Facebook Ads before increasing our advertising budgets.

When we found SegmentStream, we really liked their innovative approach that aimed to evaluate all marketing campaigns more precisely, including upper-funnel ones, and overcome all these challenges where other attribution models have failed. 

We decided to try SegmentStream and test it on one of our countries to see if this would bring us positive results, and we were pleasantly surprised by what has been achieved.  Optimisation by SegmentStream’s allowed us to increase our budget on Facebook while improving our Return on Ad Spend, and now we are switching all our countries to this new approach to grow even faster.    

I really enjoy working with SegmentStream, both with the product and their team, and look forward to expanding our partnership as we scale the Freshly Cosmetics business globally!

— Sergi Pijuan Hereu, Digital Product & Ecommerce Manager at Freshly Cosmetics