How Note Cosmetics Increased ROAS by 127% — While Spending 10% Less

The Client

Note Cosmetics is a global beauty brand built on high-quality, dermatologically tested and accessible makeup. It operates in dozens of countries, and its mission is a simple one: to empower people with colour and confidence.

Its Turkish e-commerce operation runs on Meta catalog ads — the format that pulls products directly from a feed and assembles the ad automatically. On paper, this is the right format for a brand with hundreds of shades, finishes and formats to sell.

In practice, it was quietly underperforming, and for a reason that is easy to miss.

The Problem

Buying makeup online is a high-impulse, high-choice decision. The digital beauty landscape is one of the most competitive environments in retail — users scroll past influencer tutorials, before-and-afters, trend content and paid placements at a rate of several screens per second.

Into that feed, Note Cosmetics was placing the standard e-commerce product shot: the product cut out, centred, on a plain background. Accurate, professional — and interchangeable with every other beauty product on the screen.

The images carried no context. A shopper seeing one had no way to answer the two questions that decide whether a thumb stops moving:

"Why should I stop?" "What makes this special?"

Nothing in the creative said what the product cost, whether it was discounted, what campaign it belonged to, or even — legibly, at a glance — which brand it was. To find any of that out, a user had to click the ad. And a user will not click an ad that has given them no reason to.

This is not only a branding problem. It is an efficiency problem, and it compounds. Every impression served against a creative that cannot convert is budget spent on a lost customer. In a category where CPMs are high because every competitor is bidding for the same attention, a non-performing creative doesn't just fail — it fails expensively. That made ROAS effectively impossible to scale: more spend simply bought more of the same underperformance.

The Solution

Working with Note Cosmetics' agency partner Mediastore, we ran the rollout in two distinct phases rather than changing everything at once. That sequencing was a decision, not a constraint — and it turned out to be the most instructive part of the project.

Phase 1 — Dynamic feed optimization (the data layer)

Before touching a single visual, the entire product feed was optimized dynamically. Product titles, attributes, categorisation and availability were restructured so Meta's algorithm could read the catalogue properly and match the right products to the right audiences in real time.

This is unglamorous work. It produces nothing anyone can look at. But it determines which product is shown to which user — and no amount of creative quality can compensate for showing the wrong product to the wrong person.

Phase 1 results, with no creative change at all:

• +54% increase in ROAS
• +5% increase in transactions
• achieved while decreasing ad spend by 16%

More return, more orders, less money. The data layer alone paid for the project.

Phase 2 — Creative Suite (the design layer)

Only then did the creative change. Using Creative Suite, the now-optimized feed was enriched with dynamic designs: standard product images became branded banners, generated automatically for every SKU, carrying the purchasing triggers that the plain images had been missing.

• The Note Cosmetics brand lockup, legible before the product is even identified
• The current price, with the original price struck through where a discount applied
• The live campaign message — "Tüm Ürünlerde 3 Al 2 Öde", "700 TL Üzeri 300 TL İndirim" — rendered directly onto the creative
• Urgency cues where relevant, such as remaining campaign days

Every one of these was generated from feed data, which means they stayed accurate on their own. When a price changed, the banner changed. When a campaign ended, the badge came off. No design queue, no manual re-export, no risk of an ad promoting a promotion that finished last week.

Phase 2 added a further 43% increase in ROAS on top of Phase 1's gains.

The Results

Across the full rollout, measured against the pre-Feedance baseline:

• 127% increase in ROAS
• 26% increase in transactions
• 10% decrease in ad spend

The shape of that result matters as much as the size of it. Returns more than doubled while the budget went down — which means the gain came entirely from efficiency rather than from buying more impressions. Nothing about the products, the pricing or the media budget was scaled up. What changed was how well the catalogue was structured and how much the creative communicated.

Why the two-phase split is the real lesson

Most brands facing weak catalog ad performance reach for one fix or the other. Performance teams optimize the feed. Creative teams redesign the assets. Each side tends to believe the problem lives on the other side of the wall.

Running the phases separately showed that both were true, and that they are not interchangeable:

• Feed optimization alone delivered +54% ROAS. Real, immediate, and achieved on a reduced budget — but limited, because the creative was still failing to earn the click.
• Creative added on top delivered a further +43%. That gain was only available because the right products were already reaching the right people. Better-looking ads shown to a poorly matched audience would not have produced it.

The data layer decides who sees the product. The design layer decides whether they act. Fixing one without the other leaves most of the return on the table.

In the client's words

"In the intensely competitive digital cosmetics market, our standard catalog ads were failing to capture the quality and dynamism of the Note Cosmetics brand. Feedance allowed us to instantly add key purchasing triggers, like price and campaign details, directly onto our visuals. This enabled us to create branded, 'scroll-stopping' creatives that truly resonated with our customers. The positive impact on our metrics was immediate and very impressive. We are extremely pleased with the results."

— Nilcan Güngören, Digital Marketing and E-Commerce Manager, Note Cosmetics Turkey

What other beauty and e-commerce brands can take from this

Look at your live catalog ads next to a competitor's. Cover the logos. If you can't tell which is which, you've found the problem — and it will not show up in any dashboard, because nothing is technically broken. The ads run. They just underperform silently.

Put the price on the creative. In a high-impulse category, price and promotion are not details the user will click to discover. They are the reason to click. Leaving them off the image means asking for a click before giving a reason for one.

Sequence the work — feed first, then creative. It's tempting to redesign first because design is visible. But creative quality multiplies the value of correct targeting; it doesn't substitute for it. Fixing the feed first also gives you a clean read on what each layer is actually worth.

Efficiency scales better than budget in crowded auctions. When every competitor raises bids at once, incremental spend buys progressively less. Note Cosmetics more than doubled its return while cutting spend 10% — a result no amount of additional budget would have produced on the old setup.