Company Overview

A direct-to-consumer beauty brand specializing in premium press-on nails. Founded in 2021 by a first-time entrepreneur, the brand offers an extensive collection of on-trend designs and has become a go-to for high-quality, salon-style manicures at home.

The brand was inspired by the founder’s observation that mass-produced press-on options on the market used poor-quality materials and offered limited design variety — a gap she set out to close with a premium, design-led alternative.

Today, thanks to a proprietary multi-layer gel technology, inclusive nail size variety, and a 14-day press-on application, the brand has grown into a top-selling cosmetic name that delivers salon-quality nails from home. Its non-toxic press-on nails span a wide range of classic and colorful designs, providing an affordable, trendy option for manicure enthusiasts.

Challenges

The primary challenge for the brand was scaling advertising performance efficiently inside one of the most competitive categories on the marketplace, while operating under tight ROAS and spend constraints.

  • Highly competitive beauty category: The advertised products competed in a category where dominant brands already held strong market share, brand recognition, and customer mindshare.
  • Lower ratings and review volume vs. category leaders: Compared to entrenched competitors, the brand had a smaller review base and lower star ratings, which weakened conversion potential and made paid traffic harder to convert at scale.
  • Premium price point: Products were positioned at a premium relative to mass-market category leaders, putting additional pressure on conversion rates and campaign scalability.
  • Strict ROAS and budget sensitivity: The brand operated with a highly ROAS-focused, spend-sensitive philosophy. Budget flexibility was limited, which made it difficult to test new strategies or scale aggressively.
  • Restricted testing capacity: Tight budgets limited the ability to experiment with new ad formats, creative variations, and incremental targeting strategies — capping potential performance upside.

Primary Solution

To help the brand scale efficiently within strict ROAS and budget guardrails, the team partnered with Teikametrics and leveraged a focused set of tools across ARI to drive disciplined, data-led performance.

Key solutions included:

  • Goal-Based Campaign Creation: Product data integration streamlined campaign setup, enabling efficient launch of item-level, goal-based campaigns. This unlocked more granular targeting and tighter performance optimization.
  • Effective Budget Utilization: The campaign daily budget management tool was used to monitor and control spend allocation across campaigns, ensuring efficient use of budget and improved cost management within the brand’s spend ceiling.
  • Keyword Optimization: ARI’s keyword recommendation engine surfaced high-performing, relevant keywords that were seamlessly added to manual campaigns, improving campaign relevance and performance.
  • Placement Optimization: Placement reports drove ongoing optimization — activating high-performing placements and pausing underperforming ones to improve overall campaign efficiency.
  • Search Term Impression Analysis: The Search Term Impression Report was reviewed regularly to identify high-performing search queries, understand platform trends, and refine keyword targeting for stronger visibility and engagement.
  • Market Intelligence & Tracked Terms: Market Intelligence Reports were used to monitor priority business keywords and track competitive performance. These insights informed manual-campaign strategy, helping the brand maintain visibility and presence on high-value search terms even against larger competitors.

Strategy & Execution

Disciplined, Goal-Based Campaign Architecture

  • Built item-level, goal-based campaigns aligned to the brand’s ROAS targets
  • Used product data integration to accelerate setup and reduce manual lift
  • Structured campaigns to isolate top-converting SKUs from longer-tail items

Budget Discipline Within ROAS Guardrails

  • Applied daily budget management to keep spend tightly aligned with performance
  • Reallocated budget away from underperforming campaigns in near real-time
  • Protected ROAS thresholds while still funding incremental growth tests

Keyword & Placement Optimization

  • Used ARI’s keyword recommendations to expand into high-intent search terms
  • Activated top-performing placements; paused or down-weighted weaker ones
  • Continuously refined keyword and placement mix as performance data accrued

Search Term & Market Intelligence

  • Reviewed Search Term Impression Reports to surface trending and high-converting queries
  • Tracked priority business and competitor keywords via Market Intelligence Reports
  • Prioritized share-of-voice on high-value terms against larger category players

Continuous Performance Optimization

  • Monitored ROAS, ACOS, CVR, and CTR on a rolling basis
  • Made data-driven adjustments to creative, targeting, and bid strategy
  • Compounded incremental wins into sustainable efficiency improvements over time

Results

Over the Nov 2 – Dec 26 holiday window, this beauty brand grew Ad Sales 369% year-over-year while lifting ROAS 59%and cutting ACOS from 47.2% to 29.6%. The gains were powered by a markedly stronger traffic-and-conversion engine: impressions rose 91%, click-through rate improved 57%, conversion rate climbed 74%, and ad orders increased more than fivefold (+424%).

New-to-brand sales reached approximately 74% of ad sales, evidence that the brand was acquiring genuinely new customers and expanding share against entrenched leaders in one of the marketplace’s most competitive categories.

Performance reflects the Nov 2 – Dec 26 holiday window, 2025 vs. the same period in 2024.

Impact

By partnering with Teikametrics and leveraging ARI’s Campaign Creator, keyword recommendations, placement optimization, Search Term Impression Reports, and Market Intelligence, the brand was able to scale advertising performance efficiently while honoring tight ROAS and budget guardrails — competing meaningfully against larger, more established category leaders.

This case demonstrates that challenger brands in highly competitive categories can scale profitably when goal-based campaign structure, disciplined budget management, and data-driven keyword, placement, and search-term optimization are combined into a single, continuously optimized strategy.