Consumer Spotlight US: The Makeup of Revlon

• Revlon is a well-established and much-loved brand that drives traffic to its site without selling its own products there.
• Revlon invests in paid search to cement customer loyalty and drive brand awareness.
• Selling through third-party retailers demands as much information as it is possible to generate about a brand’s relative visibility on each site.

Founded in 1932, Revlon, Inc. is now a multinational company making cosmetics, skincare, fragrances, and more. Despite maintaining a website at revlon.com, featuring details about its range of products and its roster of celebrity advocates, Revlon does not sell its products directly to the public online.

Nevertheless, while the monthly volume of traffic to the site remains modest, the engagement metrics for visitors to revlon.com compare favorably with similar sites covergirl.com and maybelline.com.

Just over 14% of the traffic to revlon.com comes from paid search, a significant investment, suggesting that the company sees real value in driving traffic to the site. Furthermore, revlon.com claimed almost 70% of paid branded search traffic for Revlon products indicating that the brand is keen to drive consumers to the site even though there is no way to purchase items directly there. These details paint a picture of Revlon as a brand-driven company that places value on product education and building consumer loyalty by funneling them through the site rather than sending them directly to a third-party retailer.

Cosmetics Brands In-Store

To understand the relative visibility of Revlon and other cosmetics brands in four of the top online cosmetics retailers, we looked at the relative proportion of each site’s pageviews dedicated to each of the 13 brands.

The number of page views a site dedicates to a brand is a function, initially, of the relationship between the retailer and the brand. Over time this will be affected by the volume of incoming search traffic a brand generates for the site as well as the volume of sales a brand generates for a site. Revlon already has a presence at walgreens.com and some degree of visibility at cvs.com and target.com. It has a much lower proportion of cosmetics-related pageviews at ulta.com.

Increasing Brand Presence at ulta.com

Once you identify a weakness in a brand’s ability to sell to the widest possible target audience, the only question is whether there is a way to improve. For Revlon to understand how to improve their products’ visibility at ulta.com it makes sense for them to understand the affinity between ulta.com and other sites. The top 10 websites displaying the greatest affinity with ulta.com are:

1. sephora.com
2. rstyle.me
3. allure.com
4. colourpop.com
5. temptalia.com
6. morphebrushes.com
7. target.com
8. shop.nordstrom.com
9. makeupalley.com
10. tartecosmetics.com

Leaving aside Sephora and other retail outlets which compete with Ulta, leaves key sites like beauty blog network rstyle.me and the beauty magazine allure.com as potential partners. Given the affinity between these sites and ulta.com, Revlon would do well to target these sites with ad placements or affiliate partnerships to help raise their profile at ulta.com.

Conclusion

Revlon is a brand that seems in touch with its core values and which invests in promoting them to people searching for the brand and its products. The site revlon.com exists to display the company’s products to visitors who must then visit a third-party retailer to make a purchase. The brand has strong relationships with some third-party retailers indicated by the high proportion of product pages they have there, with clear ways to improve this metric at other sites.