Finding Scale Within Your Amazon Accounts

While efficiency is great, most brands we work with are focused on one thing - growth. And when focusing on growth from a digital perspective, Amazon seems to be the right platform to meet that goal. Amazon’s ad business is projected to hit $8 billion in 2018 and to grow to be $20 billion by 2020 by most expert predictions. Amazon Advertising (formerly known as Amazon Marketing Services) has been around for many years already; however, most brands have just started investing in it as a marketing channel.
 
For most brands, this means that the last couple of years have been dedicated to testing and dipping toes in the water. This presents a significant opportunity for these brands to act now to better understand performance and start to scale before the space becomes overly competitive and crowded. In this post, we will examine how Rise has helped brands take their Amazon programs to the next level through scaling budgets, revenue, and ROAS/Acos.

Develop a Full-Funnel Strategy

Amazon provides many ways to engage prospective customers. They recently rebranded their marketing products and have three different ad formats within Amazon Advertising (formerly AMS) including sponsored products, sponsored brands (formerly known as headline search ads), and product display ads. There are also multiple ad format options within Amazon DSP (formerly Amazon Advertising Platform).
 
It’s important to understand the value of each ad type, when they should be used, and how they should be optimized. The first step is to understand your goals. Whether you’re looking to do basket building to increase total revenue, conquest against your competitors, or build category awareness, there are different ad types that perform best in each of these scenarios. For example, activating sponsored brands ads against top-of-funnel keywords is great for awareness goals, while more specific product display ads can help build basket size.
 
Once you’ve mapped out your objectives and have chosen the right ad formats to accomplish each, leverage your account structure to create granular campaigns for each objective and ad format. This will enable you to optimize each campaign and each objective differently, so that you can have unique budgets and goals for different objectives (e.g. Category Awareness campaigns will have different KPIs and goals than Basket Building campaigns).

Scaling Above and Beyond

Once you have developed a full-funnel strategy to capture prospective customers within Amazon, you can start thinking about other ways to re-engage customers that may have viewed your products (or even other products that are in your category) but didn’t complete a purchase. Amazon offers many ad formats via Amazon Advertising (formerly Amazon Media Group) to re-engage those customers. Rise has found tremendous success in creating integrated strategies that combine the Amazon Advertising console (formerly AMS) and the Amazon DSP (formerly AAP) into one holistic strategy to engage customers, re-engage customers, and continue to drive them back to your Amazon product detail pages.
 
Another way to expand your account is to identify “Category Adjacencies” to optimize. By leveraging data within ARA Premium (Amazon’s Premium reporting interface), you can identify new categories to target with people who are engaged with your brand and have also shown a preference for your brand. Amazon also gives brands lots of insight directly within product detail pages. For example, on every Amazon PDP, Amazon will tell you that people who buy your product will also most often buy products A, B and C. This is a huge opportunity to explore cross-category and cross-product selling strategies.

Brands looking for new channels to increase sales and find new audiences should invest in an integrated Amazon strategy now. Amazon is still very young when you consider digital marketing’s historic timeline, and brands who are testing into new Amazon tactics today will have a competitive edge for the future. Contact Rise today to take the first steps in finding scale within your Amazon programs.