Snapchat AR Lenses Fuel Revenue Growth

Social Media Case Study

Ulta Beauty

Ulta Beauty is proud to be the largest beauty retailer in the United States and the premier destination for cosmetics, fragrance, body, skin and haircare products. They also offer extensive services like facials, brow waxing, salon services & more, personalized to fit each Ulta guest. Whether you're looking for the freshest shade of nail color or the buzziest new moisturizer, enjoy the thrill of exploration. The possibilities are beautiful.

The Challenge

Ulta Beauty is constantly looking for ways to excite and delight their guests - in store and online. In order to stay ahead of consumer shopping behavior, Ulta needs to always be pushing the limits. They therefore wanted to create AR experiences that:


  1. Allow consumers to deeply engage with Ulta Beauty products virtually 

  2. Make it easy and instant for guests to go from experimentation to purchase

  3. Accurately measure the entire process to understand the financial output from these new ad units

Plus! It all needed to be done in a way that was personalized, efficient, and scalable. 

The Strategy

Rise recommended building a holistic AR shopping strategy on Snapchat with an always on approach. By jumping into the newest Augmented Reality (AR) ad tech, we created a plan to drive product engagement and sales from consumers where they already are - on social media. 


1) Use technology to reduce effort in creating AR experiences: Rise recommended two new Snapchat products- the Lens Web Builder tool and the Shopping Lens. Snapchat’s Lens Web Builder, a no-coding necessary tool, made it easy to create AR Lenses for a variety of mascara SKUs in a matter of minutes with no 3D skills required. 


We then layered on Snapchat’s new catalog-powered Shopping Lens to seamlessly transform their product catalog into always-on AR.  These Shopping Lenses included product SKUs and drove Snapchatters directly to each product page to purchase all on one Lens experience.


2) Build campaigns & measurement to drive revenue performance:  Rise used Pixel Purchase goal-based bidding to optimize the Shopping Lens campaign delivery towards likely purchasers.

3) Expand audience reach with other ad formats: Since consumers explore on Snapchat throughout the platform, we complemented the AR Lens strategy with video Snap Ads and Collection Ads to drive additional reach.

The Result

Ulta Beauty is thrilled with the results of our Snapchat strategy, and excited to continue leveraging catalog-powered Shopping Lenses with goal-based bidding optimizations as a scalable, efficient AR marketing strategy. 


30M+

product trials

<$0.01

per product trial

+56%

ROAS vs. other lens ads

$6M

in attributable revenue

43%

incremental reach vs. Snap ads alone