Background and Challenges: 

Our client, Glitterbels, manufactures and sells nail products to the B2B market via their website glitterbels.com. We were tasked with seriously sassing up their online marketing proposition, and delivering results that really shone.

Before appointing Searchup, they were seeing some year on year growth, but this was constrained due to a lack of clearly defined approach to paid media, and due to investment in just a few channels / platforms, when the target audience was active on many more. The client was keen to develop their paid search, and also their paid social media advertising portfolio.

When we were onboarded, there was no paid media testing plan in place, and media spend was inefficient and often wasted. There was also a lack of clarity over how existing Facebook Ads and Google Ads campaigns were performing. We found problems with fraudulent campaigns being ran by companies that were posing as the client on social media, amongst other problems.

The client was prepared to invest in paid media, but needed an experienced agency to set-up new channels, to put together and execute a carefully mediated, planned strategy, and to use this to grow the business faster. They needed confidence in the results.

Rather than just glossing over the existing campaigns, we were focussed on completely redesigning the paid search, organic search and paid social. 

The Solution:

• Produced a well-defined paid media plan for two distinct product categories (products and courses), that used a mixture of channels.
• Extended existing Google Ads paid search activity with good feed management practices such as ‘rules’ in Google Merchant Centre, and development of Performance Max. campaigns and different asset groups, for each defined audience.
• Opened up new channels with all of them connected to the client’s Shopify account to maximize the potential of campaigns in these new platforms. They were TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest.
• We have also recently recommended Reddit, due to the nature of content on the platform, and intend to use it to promote courses and products within feeds where users are discussing nail design.
• Devised multivariate tests within all live activity to understand what worked, and what didn’t in terms of copy, creative and targeting.
• Introduced all available features that could help enhance campaign performance such as ‘advantage+’, ad assets and Youtube advertising.
• Supported the client in advising what sort of assets to supply.
• Produced a clear reporting dashboard for the client that broke out clearly each platforms’ performance.
• Worked with our client to define clear targets, and ways of measuring success which were broken down by platform and advertising objectives.
• Discovered fraudulent campaigns that were posing as the client with paid search ads, and had these accounts closed down by Google.

Results: 

• Google ROAS of 16 over Black Friday weekend
• +100k followers on TikTok in just a few months
• ROAS of 14.7 on Black Friday weekend for Facebook & Instagram Ads
• Total website revenue increased 35.6% in the 12 months since Searchup took over all paid media and organic marketing.
• Total website users increased 48.9% in this time period.

SEO 

Background and Challenges:

The problem was twofold. Firstly, no SEO work had been done on the website and it was losing traction in organic search: 

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Secondly, Glitterbels wanted to rebrand from ‘Nails by Annabel’, in-line with their product, brand and global development plans.

When Glitterbels.com went live the only traffic coming to the site, organically, were branded terms. 

The Solution:

Topical relevance: 

If you sell beauty products where the competitors in organic SERPS are distributors like Amazon or Boots, you will need to start talking about your product on your website A LOT. So after optimising the category pages with FAQs. We produced a series of comparison guides, deep dives and industry predictions to add topical relevance to the key terms which were both of tactical (drives sales) and strategic (international expansion) importance. 

Links, links, links:

The web, by definition, is a series of interconnected websites. They are linked together, by links! 

No link-building had been done to date. Our link-building strategy was three-pronged: 

• PR - company and/or product news 
• Branded - Directories, guides, citations 
• Product - We drove links to the blogs we produced to underpin the topical relevance on-site with external affirmation from across the web 

Results:

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Rankings:

Glitterbels made strong gains in high-impact keyword rankings, especially across product and training terms. We targeted queries with healthy search volume and clear buyer intent.

The results speak for themselves: hundreds of competitive terms moved to position 1 on Google UK, some from as far back as position 74.

These ranking jumps were driven by smart content planning, improved internal linking, and technical on-page fixes.

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These keywords align directly with Glitterbels' core offering: gel systems, acrylics, brushes, and nail tech training. Getting these to page one helped solidify Glitterbels as an authority in the UK nail industry.

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Paid Media Results That Really Pop

• Greatly enhanced reach, with high levels of engagement amongst new customers who had previously been unaware of the brand. 
• Glam Google ROAS, with a figure over 16 in the first November (Black Friday month) in which we managed activity.
• Extremely high social ROAS figures. For instance, Black Friday month saw returns of 14.7 (Facebook), and 6.57 (Snapchat).
• This, combined with the brand awareness and engagement drive through TikTok and Pinterest contributed to a 14% online revenue uplift (likely to be much higher when third party reseller sales are accounted for).
• Positive customer interactions (comments and reactions on paid social posts).
• Extremely high client satisfaction, and confidence in the spend, and results we presented.

Overall website performance

• Total website revenue increased 35.6% in the 12 months since Searchup took over all paid media and organic marketing.
• Total website users increased 48.9% in this time period.

Solving Attribution in a post-cookie world

To improve data reliability in a world moving away from third-party cookies, we introduced server-side tracking via Google Tag Manager Server. This gave us greater control over key behavioural events, like product views, add-to-cart, and checkout steps, by routing data through a first-party endpoint. Unlike client-side setups, which are increasingly blocked by browsers and privacy tools, the server-side approach ensured better signal retention and attribution clarity. This became especially critical given the limitations of GA4’s reporting, which often obscures user journeys behind opaque modelling. By shifting core event tracking server-side, we saw a tangible uplift in data accuracy, crucial for scaling spend with confidence. Crucially, server-side tracking allowed us to define a more accurate new customer funnel, identifying where users dropped off and where intent signals were strongest. This insight informed clear pivots in both paid media targeting and a bottom of funnelSEO strategy.

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