Linkby – Best Brand Awareness Campaign
for Give Me Cosmetics, with Reach plc · Performance Marketing Awards 2026
Visit linkby.com
By turning trusted editorial into a performance engine across Reach plc’s network, Linkby helped Give Me Cosmetics grow branded search by 127% through the Golden Quarter, with 87% of orders coming from brand-new customers and a 3.77x return on ad spend.
About Linkby
Linkby is a global adtech platform that fills the white space in accessing and measuring PR content. We connect brands with premium publishers on a pay-on-performance (CPC) model, turning editorial coverage into a measurable, scalable growth channel. Our partnerships team works hand in hand with brands and publishers to deliver upper-funnel visibility that is also proven to drive clicks, new customers and revenue.
The challenge
For challenger brands in crowded categories like beauty, awareness and acquisition are usually run as separate budgets with separate scorecards. Brand activity builds visibility but struggles to prove commercial return. Performance channels drive sales, but mostly from customers who already know the brand.
Editorial sits awkwardly in between. It brings the trust and reach brands want, but it has traditionally been bought as one-off placements, judged on impressions and impossible to optimise once live. Peak trading makes it harder still, as during the Golden Quarter every brand competes for the same reader attention and the same shopping-guide space.
The real challenge is to scale credible editorial fast enough to matter, without losing the authenticity that makes it work, and to hold it to the same performance standards as any other channel.
The solution
The strategic approach
We treat editorial as a performance channel without stripping out what makes it editorial. Rather than buying isolated stories, Linkby, Give Me Cosmetics and Reach plc agreed a single KPI framework before Q4, a 100% uplift in branded search to measure awareness and a new-customer order rate above 70% to prove the growth was genuinely incremental. Because Linkby runs on a pay-on-performance CPC model, every article was accountable from day one, giving Reach the freedom to test widely and then scale only what worked.
The technology deployed
Linkby’s platform and Trackonomics gave article-level click and revenue data, and Chartbeat tracked page views in real time. Reach used historical page view, revenue and affiliate data to choose the Black Friday products most likely to perform. Stories launched on its heavy-hitter titles, led by the Mirror, then winning angles were scaled across the Daily Record, Wales Online, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and beyond. AI-assisted tools found the strongest headline keywords and hooks and adapted top stories for each newsroom, driving traffic uplifts of up to 895% on repurposed content.
The boldest decision
Our boldest call was going for volume at peak rather than playing safe. In October alone, Reach published 150 optimised articles across 120 titles and built Give Me into its wider Golden Quarter coverage, including Black Friday live blogs and newsletter, social and WhatsApp distribution. When we spotted that Michelle Keegan was a known Give Me user, the news hook turned into product sampling and hands-on reviews, and review-led content became the campaign’s best-performing angle.
The results
The campaign beat every target agreed at the outset.
- 127% branded search growth (Google Trends) versus the previous period, against a 100% target
- 87% new-customer order rate, against a 70% benchmark
- 3.77x return on ad spend during the most competitive trading period of the year
- 85,000 page views from 150 articles in October, with review-led content alone generating more than 30,000 (57% via Google discovery)
The numbers matter more together than apart. The branded search uplift shows the coverage built genuine awareness. The new-customer rate shows that awareness reached people who had never bought from Give Me before, and the return on ad spend shows it did so efficiently. When editorial is measured and optimised like a performance channel, you don’t have to trade awareness off against acquisition.
This is a very strong campaign that successfully combines editorial credibility with measurable brand and commercial impact. Execution is a standout, particularly the ability to scale content rapidly across a large publisher network while maintaining relevance and performance.
- Ambitious objectives and agility
- Exceptionally clear, benchmarked objectives aligned across all partners, with a responsive test-and-learn approach that analysed past data and tailored titles to shifting audience interests.
- Top-tier execution
- A highly coordinated performance-editorial effort with seamless collaboration between commercial teams and newsrooms, using data to amplify high-performing stories with strong regional and celebrity angles.
- Standout innovation
- The clever use of AI to rapidly repurpose content headers was praised as a highly effective method for driving incremental views, combined with continuous, data-driven tailoring of titles.
- Outstanding results
- Strong growth in branded search, high new-customer rates and clear commercial return during a highly competitive period, with clear, benchmarked objectives delivered against.
Working with Linkby and Reach plc changed how we think about editorial. We got the credibility of trusted press coverage with the accountability of a performance channel. Through Black Friday the results spoke for themselves, far more people searching for Give Me, and the vast majority of orders coming from brand-new customers.
Nicola BlackHead of Performance Marketing, Give Me Cosmetics
Make PR work as hard as performance
If you’re a challenger brand under pressure to grow awareness and new customers at the same time, you don’t have to choose between them. Trusted editorial can deliver both, but only when it’s planned around clear targets, measured properly and optimised in flight. Linkby connects you with premium publishers on a pay-on-performance model, so you only pay for results and every story has to earn its place.
