Case Study – Amazon’s ‘Optimize Your Ad’ Feature (Sponsored Brand Campaigns)

Greetings Entouragers,

As part of our modus operandi for realizing the highest ROI’s in the shortest reasonable time for our Management Services and Sponsored Brand Management Services clients, the Entourage team and I conduct on-going tests to determine ‘what’s working now’. 

We pull on our virtual white lab coats and goggles to…

• closely scrutinize data that reveals trends, 

• perform A/B split tests to gain new insights that lead to new PPC strategies, 

• test-drive new features released by Amazon to evaluate their potential impact (whether good, or not so good), on not only our EMS/Sponsored Brand clients and Seller Community, but also Amazon sellers at large. 

Amazon has a new feature in which they will optimize your ad.

We decided to test just how well this feature worked when used in conjunction with Sponsored Brand campaigns. Our tests ran between August 26, 2019 and Sept 23, 2019.

Background note:

Sponsored Brands are ads that feature an image, a custom headline, and up to three of your products. These ads appear on search results and help generate recognition for your brand and product portfolio.

How to get started

1. Choose the products you want to advertise.
2. Create and customize your ad.
3. Decide which keywords to target and how much you want to bid for clicks.
4. Submit your ad for review. It will be reviewed within 72 hours.

Entourage Methodology – The Nuts and Bolts:

1. The team chose a General Brand Headline: https://ppcentourage.com/spotlight-headlines/
2. Brand Awareness headlines were then chosen
3. We used our logo as the ‘Image’*
4. We set a budget of $10.00 per day
5. We checked the box that allowed Amazon to ‘optimize our ads’.**

* Typically, we do not recommend that you use your logo for the image, unless you are a well-known brand and you are confident that everyone is familiar with it (this was not an ego-driven decision on our part…we simply wanted to keep things uniform throughout the test…no really!)

** This will allow Amazon to take all of the products that we’ve selected (our list page), and then rearrange the order in which the products are shown on the Sponsored Brand ads based upon shopper behavior. The concept is to show the best match between shopper and available products.

Campaign Configuration:

1. We used brand-name related keywords and niche-related keywords with Phrase match type
2. Our Bid Price = the average cost per click (obtained from the search term report) + 50% higher (aggressive)
3. Our ad sent traffic to a product list page.

Results by Test Accounts:

What We Learned:

1. Early results show an excellent conversion rate, but some of our tests have very low impressions.
2. We may need to adjust our bid strategy, by increasing it slightly for another month, then continue to run tests to determine how that change will affect results.
3. We will let the campaigns continue to run for a few months after our one month spot-check.

More Testing Ahead:

• The next step will be to switch the ‘allow Amazon to optimize your ads’ button off.
• We will then compare how our campaigns performed without Amazon’s optimization feature being utilized and report our findings.

Related Information:

• New-to-brand conversion and sales metrics were rolled out to Sponsored Brands in January 2019, to report on the share of conversions and sales attributed to shoppers who hadn’t ordered from the brand on Amazon in the previous twelve months. For Q3 in 2019, 61% of all Sponsored Brands sales were attributed as ‘new to brand’.
  
• Early in the year, Amazon added negative keywords to help eliminate poorly-matched queries, though there are still no search query reports available specifically for Sponsored Brands.
• Advertisers do not need to win the Buy Box in order to advertise on Sponsored Brands. They therefore should be careful about which products they choose to include in their Sponsored Brands ads. On the plus side, Sponsored Brands ads can be linked back to an Amazon Store, providing a seller with the opportunity to introduce potential shoppers to their general brand, or to a specific segment of their catalog, depending on what the shopper might be looking for.