The Surprise of our Xmas marketing campaign: Youtube Remarketing

How we reached nearly half a million views, and achieved both brand and profitable performance marketing via a Youtube video

Following the rebrand and relaunch of the Boticca website at the end of last September, we ran our first integrated marketing campaign for the holiday season across multiple channels online and offline around the theme of #GiftAStory.

For those of you who don’t know, Boticca is a global curated marketplace allows you to connect with independent designers of fashion accessories around the world, discover their stories through our content and shop directly from their studios.

Whilst a big part of our attention (and budget) was spent observing and trying to quantify the effects of our first outdoor campaign (Tube Card Panels across the London Underground train carriages), a new channel emerged as a winner and the surprise of our entire holiday season campaign: Video ads and remarketing via Youtube.

The Video

We chose to run the campaign on Youtube given its massive reach (more than all the other top TV networks) and targeting capabilities.

The video, using footage we shot in-house, explains our concept, showcases some of our designers, and promotes the #GiftAStory campaign — all under 20 seconds so we could make the ads unskippable as well. We also included calls to action, annotations and a promo code to incentivise users but to be honest, we weren’t expecting many sales from it. This was meant to be a branding exercise.

The video can be seen here:

Wouldn’t you rather gift a story?

The Set-Up

The flow behind this campaign was quite simple actually:

1. Target our relevant audiences with the ad (we ran it with four female UK audiences with different demographics and interests)
2. Retarget those who had viewed the ad with the same ad in the coming days on Youtube (with the frequency capped to avoid pissing users off)

Our four demographics for the targeting (“YUM” stands for “Yummy Mummy”, one of our key demographics, if you were wondering)

After launching the video, naturally, we optimised our campaigns and bids based on the individual views and click-through performance of each key demographic.

The Results

Here are the results for the month of December on this campaign:

Attribution is done based on market motive model (10% conversion credit for first click, 50% for middle interactions and 40% for last interaction)

Key insights from the numbers above are:

• Strong brand reach: Nearly half a million total views on less than £5,000 of spend
• Over 15x higher click through rates from remarketing vs. first-time ads
• Profitable CPA even on a last-click basis (our AOV is around £110 and we take a 45% commission on each sale), even more on an attribution basis
• Video remarketing CTR rates that are much, much higher than traditional remarketing channels
• Lower conversion rate than our site average on a last-click basis but at those CPAs (and as part of a mix), who cares!

If we had not locked up a big part of our Xmas budget in outdoor mediums, we would’ve certainly put more budget behind this channel, given the results above.

Parting Thoughts

All in all, this was a great campaign. We were able to achieve both brand and performance marketing goals via this channel, get half a million views and more than turn a profit from it (we’ll definitely put more funds behind next time around!).

I don’t think enough brands use Youtube as an advertising channel. Sure, all the big luxury brands throw their money at big branding video campaigns with huge budgets and no real performance targets behind it — not realising that with some careful planning, incentives and optimisation, they can turn this into a performance marketing channel as well.

It’s also worth pointing out that some of these numbers should be taken with a (slight) grain of salt given that they were achieved during Xmas, our peak period in terms of marketing performance. We just ran a similar campaign for our Winter Sale which just ended and it didn’t perform as well given the seasonality (still profitable, but less so).

So if you’re looking to increase your brand awareness/reach and drive some performance marketing as well, give the Youtube Video Ads + Remarketing combo a try. With the right proposition and incentive (and timing), it may work for you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article.