LOOKFANTASTIC turns beauty trends into cart conversions

LOOKFANTASTIC is Europe’s top online premium beauty retailer, carrying more than 22,000 products from over 660 luxury and professional brands. From MAC to Kérastase to Yves Saint Laurent, popular brands ship to over 200 countries, serving millions of beauty shoppers looking for both everyday essentials and indulgent finds.

The busy peak season around Black Friday and Cyber Monday is one of the brand’s busiest times as shoppers seek out holiday purchases. It’s also one of the most competitive. Like many retailers, LOOKFANTASTIC has traditionally relied on lower-funnel search to capture demand. But when everyone is competing for the same ready-to-buy shoppers, it gets harder and more expensive to grow.

The team wanted to connect with high-intent beauty shoppers earlier in their journey, before they started to search. In the intensely competitive beauty retail market, brands compete aggressively for share of voice, and highly informed shoppers research, compare, and switch with ease. So, capturing attention early is critical.

The beauty retailer wanted to show that upper-funnel investment could influence branded search, qualified traffic, conversions, and revenue, in addition to awareness. They also set out to test whether sequencing Audience ads and connecting them to search through impression-based remarketing could drive incremental performance.

Working with Microsoft Advertising, LOOKFANTASTIC turned to a full-funnel approach built around video, native placements, and search.

Here’s how the strategy came together... 

• Build attention at scale and reinforce the message using Audience ads: The team could reach beauty shoppers while competitors focused heavily on search. Image-led native formats kept their brand top of mind.
• Turn views into action through impression-based remarketing: The strategy reconnected users who had seen ads and re-engaged them through search when they were ready to buy.
• Activate high-intent signals using Microsoft in-market audiences: First-party data and customer match layering helped balance prospecting and re-engagement with in-market audiences.

This approach linked upper-funnel exposure directly to lower-funnel capture. Every video view and native impression had a clear path back to search and conversion.

Campaigns using Microsoft in-market audiences delivered a 2.7x conversion lift, showing that reaching high-intent beauty shoppers earlier in their journey translated into stronger performance when they were ready to buy.

Online Video ads achieved a 76% view-through rate, signaling strong engagement and message resonance at scale during one of the most competitive periods of the year.

Most importantly, 50% of impression-based remarketing revenue came from non-branded search. That meant the strategy was generating new, incremental interest beyond users already searching for LOOKFANTASTIC.