Consonva needed to win attention in a premium category with limited presence in the UK. But early testing showed that Sponsored Ads alone wouldn't work.

The category offered a rough environment on Amazon where premium brands set the price bar, cost-per-click was £0.80 or more, and the ROAS was less than 1.0x.  

So bidding on search terms against established premium brands, with no existing brand preference among shoppers, meant spending budget on expensive keywords with limited return.  

Our objective was to establish a scalable foundation for Cosnova's growth on Amazon U.K. by increasing brand recognition, acquiring new customers, and driving profitable performance from launch.

Success was defined by deploying a full-funnel strategy designed to achieve:

• A total ROAS of 2.0x
• Profitability within 12 weeks
• A 40% new-to-brand (NTB) customer share

We delivered a full-funnel strategy designed to build demand and drive efficient growth in the U.K. market.

1. Connecting brand investment with sales performance

Our initial assessment showed that limited brand awareness—not the product proposition or pricing—was the primary source of inefficiency. We therefore prioritised incremental investment in Amazon DSP to build demand before scaling conversion activity.

By treating awareness and performance as connected parts of one system, we used upper-funnel signals to inform and strengthen lower-funnel outcomes. This enabled us to link brand investment to measurable sales performance through Amazon’s audience insights and advertising infrastructure.

2. Integrating Amazon with the wider brand ecosystem

We integrated Amazon activity with the broader brand ecosystem rather than treating the marketplace as a standalone channel.

When a brand launched a new product, we aligned Amazon video activity with the wider launch campaign. This extended reach and reinforced messages consumers were already seeing across other channels. For brands with established community activity, we applied the same principle by connecting with relevant audiences on Amazon.

For example, essence’s Roblox map created a relevant context for reaching gaming audiences on Twitch, which could then be extended through Amazon advertising. Cultural moments, such as the launch of Maxton Hall Season 2, were approached in the same way. Rather than creating new audience contexts from scratch, we connected Amazon activation to conversations and content consumers were already following.

The guiding principle was simple: understanding an audience is not only about knowing who they are, but also understanding what already captures their attention—and meeting them in those moments.

3. Optimizing campaign performance continuously

Campaign management remained active throughout the launch. We reviewed advertising cost of sales (ACOS) weekly by campaign type, reducing investment in underperforming placements, scaling effective activity, and reallocating budgets as audience response and funnel priorities evolved.

Performance+ AI supported both brands in scaling efficiently, helping to increase results without requiring spend to grow at the same rate.

4. Measuring the connection between awareness and conversion

We tracked total ROAS, media ROAS, and new-to-brand customer share on a weekly basis. This allowed us to assess whether upper-funnel investment was contributing to lower-funnel performance, rather than simply running alongside it.

Amazon Marketing Cloud provided an audience-level view across the campaign, capturing which converter profiles, exposure sequences, and audience segments were driving the strongest response. These insights could then inform future activity, reducing the need to relearn what worked and turning the launch into a compounding growth asset.

Our strategy beat every target set at launch.

The increase in new-to-brand customer share indicated that the campaign was reaching shoppers making their first purchase of essence or Catrice on Amazon, rather than relying primarily on existing Amazon customers.

By comparing U.K. performance with equivalent products on non-activated European storefronts, we identified a significant performance gap. The difference could not be fully explained by product, pricing, or seasonal factors, pointing instead to the role of the media strategy and funnel integration.

The evidence pointed to a clear strategic lesson: upper- and lower-funnel activity deliver greater value when they operate as one connected system. Managed separately, each workstream is limited by the demand it can create or capture on its own. Connected through shared audiences, sequential exposure, and coordinated activation, they can generate outcomes that neither would achieve independently.

Amazon’s advertising infrastructure made this connection possible at scale.

Signals from streaming and other upper-funnel touchpoints informed DSP retargeting, helping to build consideration before shoppers encountered Sponsored Ads designed to drive conversion.

The campaign’s lasting value extended beyond its immediate results. Through Amazon Marketing Cloud, we analysed which converter profiles responded most strongly, which exposure sequences generated the highest ROAS, and which audience segments were ready for reactivation. These insights created a strategic foundation for future campaigns in the U.K. and beyond.

A well-designed launch does more than deliver short-term performance. It creates the audience intelligence and media infrastructure needed to compound growth over time.