Vitayes launched an instant-lift eye cream into a crowded German market, with results on video so striking that viewers called them fake. Midsummer Agency built its advertising from scratch, then carried it into Austria and Switzerland.
PPCPaid SocialFeed Management
Vitayes is an anti-aging skincare brand that opened its Shopify store in Germany in 2016. It launched with one hero product, Instant Ageback, an argireline lifting cream that visibly smooths under-eye bags and wrinkles within minutes, for a few hours at a time.
The launch had 3 hurdles to clear.
Vitayes came to us a month after the store went live, to turn a brand-new name into steady sales.
Vitayes had a new website, a new product and a clear brief: win traction in Germany, prove the market, and sell at a positive return on Google, Facebook and Instagram, with Amazon on the list for later.
Before we arrived, the client had tested a couple of Facebook campaigns on its own, showing the before and after videos to new audiences. The sales data wasn’t in place yet to show which of them were working.
We set out to tackle 3 things.
The client’s own target was a low cost per sale, but in the startup phase the priority was volume: as many sales as possible, at the lowest cost we could hold.
We set up tracking and Google Ads first, then relaunched Meta Ads a few weeks later. Microsoft Ads, Gmail ads, native ads on Taboola and Amazon Ads followed as the account found its feet, and within the first year we took the whole setup into Austria and Switzerland.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Microsoft Ads · Feed Management
We started with goals and transaction imports, so every campaign reported real sales from day one. Google Shopping went live just ahead of the January rush, when interest in health and wellness peaks every year.
Vitayes was still a new name in search, so we built Search around the concerns people type in. Each concern got its own exact and broad match campaigns, and we added German keywords week by week as the search terms came in.
We ran an n-gram analysis of the search terms, added negatives in bulk, and paused keywords whose cost per sale ran too high. Competitor campaigns picked up shoppers searching for rival lifting creams.
With a single hero product, the Shopping title did a lot of the selling, so we rewrote it as the data came in. It started as a Faltencreme (wrinkle cream) with instant effect, moved to an argireline cream for under-eye bags, and settled on a cream to remove under-eye bags and dark circles. We added a second image and the jar size to the feed, and gave Microsoft Shopping its own title later on.
We pulled best days and best hours from the data and added dayparting and geo bid adjustments, cutting the small hours everywhere except remarketing and brand.
YouTube did 2 jobs. Video Shopping campaigns put the jar next to the footage, and we fed video viewers into remarketing and bid up on them in Search and Shopping. Later we launched Dynamic Search Ads and Gmail ads, which were brand new at the time, and brought the account onto Microsoft Ads.
We ran a campaign to promote Vitayes at Cosmoprof, the international beauty trade fair, and to book appointments at its stand. We widened it to more countries as the fair approached, then did the same for Cosmoprof Asia.
Over the summer we ran native ads on Taboola. We switched the headline from wrinkle cream to under-eye bag cream, blocked around 100 sites that sent poor traffic, and moved the effort into retargeting once new-user campaigns had run their course.
We then launched Amazon Ads for a month in Germany, the UK, Italy, France and Spain. Automatic campaigns gathered search terms, and we moved the best ones into exact ad groups of their own.
Once Germany had traction, we extended Search and Dynamic Search Ads to Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, gave Austria and Switzerland their own Shopping campaigns, and carried remarketing across.
ServicesMeta Ads
We checked the Facebook pixel first and put custom events to work, so page views and add-to-carts could feed new audiences on Facebook and Instagram.
Then we launched remarketing and lookalike campaigns. Within a couple of days they were bringing in a steady run of sales at a low cost per sale, the first sign the brand could sell at all.
The videos were the brand’s strongest asset and its biggest doubt. We stopped asking strangers to buy from them and split the funnel in two.
Viewers who stayed for the video had already decided it might be real, so the sales ad reached them at the right moment. We raised the budget step by step while the cost per sale held, and when Facebook paused some ads, we pushed the Google campaigns harder to keep orders coming.
Once tracking was in place and the first month of data was in, the optimized campaigns lifted revenue 32%, sales 24% month on month and transactions 37%. The brand had proved it could sell in Germany, and went on into Austria and Switzerland.
We are quite happy with Midsummer’s work on launching and expanding our new brand, product and online store. They are very quick in responding and taking actions, which we find very crucial in online marketing.
The Founder
Vitayes
Micky
Pay Per Click · Paid Social
Built and ran the account from launch: Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, Taboola, Amazon Ads and the Cosmoprof campaign.
Ecommerce plus physical stores? B2B and B2C under one roof? One market or eleven? The businesses other agencies find too complex are the ones we make shine.
