RoC has real store distribution at Ulta. That half of the business moves on planogram and promotion. The .com half moves on search rank, product content, and retail media, and that is the half that still compounds.
April 2026 was the year's peak spend month and its worst efficiency month at the same time: the most money in the account, the lowest return out of it. The job was to make the account smaller without making the quarter smaller.
Spend Outrunning Returns
The highest spend month of the year returned the lowest ROAS of the year.
One Strategy, Two Shelves
Store and .com behave differently, but a single media approach was being applied across both.
New SKUs Without Rank
Recently expanded items had shelf distribution but no search position to convert it.
Cutting Without Retreating
Pulling spend back could not cost the brand its quarter.
We shrank the ad account and grew the shelf.
Read the Shelf, Not the Dashboard
Pulled Ulta's own weekly item-level sell-through and separated store from .com, so media decisions were graded against what actually sold rather than what the ad platform claimed credit for.
Cut What Was Not Converting
Pruned the terms, placements, and items that bought clicks without orders. Conversion rate on paid clicks nearly doubled as the account got smaller.
Back What Was Already Moving
Concentrated remaining budget behind the SKUs whose sell-through was already accelerating, rather than spreading support evenly across the catalog.
Land the New Distribution
Treated newly expanded items as launches, holding stock position while building the search rank that turns distribution into sales.
Ulta fiscal quarter, 3 May to 1 August 2026, this year versus last year, from Ulta's own item-level sell-through. Media figures are Ulta retail media, February to August 2026. Ulta.com grew at roughly twice the rate of RoC's total Ulta business, lifting digital's share of the brand's Ulta sales from 27.9% to 30.3% in a single quarter.
A smaller ad account can be a bigger business
Spend fell 53% from its April peak and the brand still grew double digits at Ulta.
Judge retail media on sell-through
Attributed ROAS is the platform grading its own homework. Ulta's item-level sell-through is not.
The digital shelf is where the growth is
Store sales move on planogram. Digital's share of the business moved 2.4 points in one quarter.
