Meta Performance Spotlight series: How Ulta Beauty is driving omni-channel demand through its retail media network with Advanced Analytics

Performance Spotlight is a series that takes an in-depth look at brands successfully driving better performance and efficiency, with the support of Meta tools, to help grow their business.

Ulta Beauty launched its retail media network UB Media in 2022, to offer brands advertising opportunities leveraging its Ultamate Rewards members, the biggest community of beauty enthusiasts in the industry, which today has more than 41 million active members. Through UB Media, Ulta Beauty is able to offer its guests more personalized experiences and provide its brand partners with new vehicles to drive sales. Today, Ulta Beauty is running ads with its brand partners on Meta and using Advanced Analytics to show brand partners that online awareness is driving sales in-store.

To learn more about how UB Media is driving performance for brands we sat down with Brent Rosso, Vice President of UB Media.

How would you describe Ulta Beauty’s retail media network and how do you go about building stronger relationships with your brand partners?

UB Media harnesses the power of our unmatched, first-party data from our 41 plus million loyal Ultamate Rewards members to transform the way our brand partners can connect with beauty lovers. No one knows the beauty industry and its audience like Ulta Beauty. UB Media reinforces our ability to engage guests where, when, and how they want to connect, with hyper-focused advertising efforts in a dynamic ecosystem and further elevates our position as the brand partner of choice.

The beauty industry is a close network, retail media networks like UB Media allow us to more closely partner with the brands we carry and help support their growth.

How has the rebrand of UB Media led to creating more innovative brand experiences for your brand partners?

Since we launched UB Media in 2022, we’ve enriched our portfolio of ad products and channels. We offer our partners offsite display, videos, social and onsite sponsored products. Onsite display inventory on Ulta Beauty-owned properties is one of several new offerings we’ve introduced in the last year.

How would you define performance for your retail media network?

For Ulta Beauty our retail media network is built on two things: our ability to reach our audience based on our first-party data and our ability to serve media to that audience. Performance for our partners comes in three flavors: measurement or the outcome of the campaign, what insights we can get from the campaign itself, and in the future, incrementality or how effective that ad was. For most marketers, getting a better understanding of insights is the end game, through our partnership with Meta we’ve been able to better help brands understand that social awareness does drive in-store purchases.

Knowing that beauty is a deeply personal industry, how important is it to have a true omni-channel strategy to support your retail media network?

We know shopping for beauty is a deeply personal experience for our guests and they often want to come in store to make sure a product or shade works for them before making a purchase. Helping guests find the perfect item online is a challenge for many beauty brands, and it’s our goal to ensure a seamless shopping experience that delivers the fun of beauty discovery wherever our guests are. With UB Media we’re able to offer beauty brands opportunities to advertise with us on Meta’s platforms and for the first time we’re now able to show them that online awareness is driving meaningful outcomes in-store. Providing our partners with true omnichannel marketing and measurement is a unique differentiator for UB Media.

How are you using Meta’s Advanced Analytics to measure the impact of your retail media network for advertisers?

Advanced Analytics is one of the tools we’re able to use to measure the efficacy of Meta’s ads on driving purchases at Ulta Beauty. By bringing insights from our Ultamate Rewards program into Meta’s secure measurement environment, we’re able to prove that purchases happened after seeing an ad on Facebook or Instagram. What’s great about this solution is that we’re able to provide better measurement for our partners in a way that respects our customer’s privacy. This marks the first of hopefully many ways we are looking to partner with Meta to continue to bring omni-channel value to our business and to our brand partners.

What have you learned from partnering with Meta on these tests? How has it improved your relationship with brands?

By working together on this program we’ve built a stronger relationship with Meta and our brand partners by being able to show how effective Meta’s ads are at driving sales and traffic to our physical stores. As the first beauty retail media network to offer brand level reporting on the performance of their investment, we have a unique position to further enable our partners’ success. We look forward to providing this capability to even more brand partners and we’re excited to see our relationships evolve. By being able to offer true omnichannel marketing and measurement, we have a unique opportunity to help beauty brands craft innovative strategies with Meta.

What advice would you give to brands that may be hesitant to invest in retail media networks?

For our brand partners, now is a great time to invest and experiment with UB Media, especially ahead of the holiday season. As the nation’s largest beauty retailer, no one knows beauty like Ulta Beauty, and we’re proud to be a trusted partner that’s focused on building brands and providing access to the products our guests want. With UB Media, we tap into our unique insights to empower beauty discovery and help connect brands with highly engaged consumer audiences. And now more than ever, we’re able to help brands drive impactful campaigns on Facebook and Instagram that they can feel confident investing in, knowing that Meta’s ads drive sales that help these brands grow.