The Top 10 Personal Care Brands in Digital

In this year’s study, successful personal care brands continued to evolve to meet consumer demands for educational content and new products at the touch of a button. In particular, leading brands invested in site features and content strategies and adopted new business models, including category expansion and direct-to-consumer (DTC) fulfillment, to close the deal. At the same time, COVID-19 has resulted in a chaotic surge and sway in consumer demand for personal care products based on at-home lifestyles. These are the top 10 brands responding to shifting consumer demands in Garner’s Digital IQ Index: Personal Care US. 

1. Pampers
Digital IQ: 149

An e-commerce leader in the diapers and wipes category, Pampers excels in search visibility on Amazon and Walmart. Site investments pay off with traffic growing significantly year over year and higher than the Index average by tenfold. An increased share in video display ads on desktop and mobile further boosted the baby brand’s overall digital performance.

2. Gillette
Digital IQ: 143

This social media leader features corporate social responsibility content across organic and paid channels, achieving the Index’s highest share of voice in Facebook paid impressions. Gillette’s DTC site showcases robust product detail pages (PDPs) with subscription offerings, ratings, and reviews with filtering options and extensive editorial content that links to related PDPs, helping move consumers down the funnel.

3. Burt’s Bees
Digital IQ: 138

Burt’s Bees leads the face skincare category in the path-to-purchase dimension with a site featuring rich guided selling content and the ability to filter ratings and reviews by writer attributes on its product pages. The brand is a category leader on Target, garnering over 90% organic visibility against nonbranded lip balm keyword searches. Burt’s Bees tops the Index on Instagram by leveraging video content that amplifies community voices and achieved over 1 million interactions on the platform last year. 

4. Huggies
Digital IQ: 137

Huggies leads the Index on Amazon, driven by its robust PDPs featuring product comparison tools, FAQs, and high organic search visibility against nonbranded diaper and wipes queries. It’s also the only brand in the diaper and wipes category to see year over year improvement across all nonbranded search metrics on Google, including organic search, showcase ads, shopping ads, and text ads. 

5. Dove
Digital IQ: 134

Dove excels in nonbranded SEO and SEM on both desktop and mobile devices, earning high visibility against deodorants and antiperspirants keyword searches. With best-in-class cross-selling and guided selling features and seamless e-tailer handoff, its brand site is well-equipped to help move consumers down the funnel.

6. Colgate
Digital IQ: 133

Colgate clocks in as the second-most visited brand site in the Index with strong customer service features including chat support and geolocation enabled store locator. An oral care category leader in mobile web ad performance, the label wins with an 11% share of all mobile video ad impressions in the study. Colgate sparkles on YouTube as well, scoring a spot as the second-best Index brand on the platform with over 52 million video views last year and a 71% growth in subscribers. 

7. Aveeno
Digital IQ: 132

Aveeno relies on impressive digital marketing acumen spurred by strong visibility against branded keywords on both desktop and mobile, and a robust nonbranded mobile shopping ad campaign. The skin and hair care company also boosts its performance on Amazon through its above-average search visibility and content-rich PDPs, which earned the brand a top-three ranking in Amazon merchandising.

8. Crest
Digital IQ: 130

Crest is among the top two brands in the Index in the digital marketing dimension due to its high visibility against nonbranded oral care keywords coupled with defense of its own branded terms on mobile and desktop. The brand ramped up its desktop display campaign efforts year over year with product-centric content that helped propel it into the top ten in display advertising—a marked increase as compared to 2019.

9. Oral-B
Digital IQ: 128

Oral-B leads the Index in brand site performance, benefitting largely from parent company P&G’s standardized adoption of key features such as advanced navigation, filter options, and customer service resources. Oral-B also exemplifies best in class site optimization centered around education, with a concerted effort to appear on the top for high-volume non-product keywords in the oral care category. 

10. SheaMoisture
Digital IQ: 124

SheaMoisture excels on social media thanks to the marrying of content, creative, and executional best practices across Instagram and Facebook in particular. As a result, SheaMoisture nets out as a top five brand due to the utilization of Instagram influencers, Facebook in-feed engagement, and as a top 10 brand in Instagram engagement. The label leads the Index in showcase shopping ads, with concerted investments to visually highlight unique product ingredients in the Google SERP.