February 2023 Performance by the Numbers

It’s February performance roundup time! Curious how your marketing efforts compare to other beauty and lifestyle brands? Let’s look at what we experienced for our clients…

The Numbers

February 2023 Paid Channel Share of Budget

  • Google: 41.1%

  • Meta: 39.3%

  • Pinterest: 3.3%

  • Programmatic: 5.6%

  • TikTok: 7.9%

  • YouTube: 2.8%

February 2023 Average ROAS by Paid Channel

  • Google: 4.2

  • Meta: 3.7 (Advantage+ averages 4.4)

  • Pinterest: 3.1

  • Programmatic: 7.0

  • TikTok: 1.6

  • YouTube: 0.7

February 2023 Average Conversion Rate by Paid Channel

  • Google: 6.24%

  • Meta: 1.10%

  • Pinterest: 3.78%

  • Programmatic: 3.33%

  • TikTok: 1.20%

  • YouTube: 0.55%

February 2023 Average SEO Contribution to Total Business

  • Percentage of Total Site Traffic: 41.6%

  • Percentage of Total Site Revenue: 39.8%

  • Average Conversion Rate: 2.13%

February 2023 Average Affiliate Marketing Contribution to Total Business

  • Percentage of Total Site Traffic: 8.7%

  • Percentage of Total Site Revenue: 11.1%

  • Average Conversion Rate: 2.91%

 

The Summary

Paid Media: while TikTok spend and ROAS remain low, both have grown ~20% compared to Q4; the conversion rate on this platform exceeding that of Meta is a good sign.

Programmatic continues to WIN BIG for ROAS points; not surprisingly, more and more of our clients are diversifying into this channel and away from Meta.

March is the perfect time to push bigger ad budgets across Google Performance Max, Meta Advanage+, and TikTok as these are areas we’re seeing strong MoM and YoY returns. Is there an opportunity for your brand to test these channels?

While Google and Meta’s massive share of marketing budget is eclipsing tactical experiments happening on other platforms, CPMs remain high at ~$13, whereas Pinterest and TikTok have CPMs at less than half the price.

SEO: we’re seeing an average of 12% more ranking keywords for our brands MoM, meaning we are continuing to get ranking positions for more diverse keywords. We are also seeing average position improve by 3.6% MoM.

While on-page optimizations continue to carry a lot of weight for our clients, we are expanding more of our brands into backlink development and content syndication as a way to grow strength signals. And don’t discredit the value of disavowing low quality backlinks, this type of clean up has been paying off well in Q1.

Affiliates: existing publishers are generating the lion’s share of affiliate revenue for our more established programs. However, we are seeing a lot of new publishers joining Rakuten and will be sifting through these pubs to look for others that could deliver quality for our brands.

We’ve found in Q1 that a deep re-evaluation of commission structures and publishers within each structure have been helpful in laying the foundation for the year to come!

The Pennock WayNikki Lindgren