In Part 3 of How to Scale Your Business Using Amazon Advertising we will be covering 4 new strategies that can be used to scale your Amazon business.
If you haven’t done so already, please spend some time to read Part 1 and Part 2, so that you are familiar with a number of strategies for scaling your Amazon business.
Strategies for Scaling Using Amazon Advertising (11-14)
XI. Take Advantage of Sponsored Display Ads – Sponsored Display Ads give sellers the ability to reach relevant audiences who are browsing, discovering, or purchasing products on or off Amazon with ads that may appear on the Amazon home page, product detail pages, or shopping results pages as well as third-party websites and apps.
Sponsored Display Ads are available to sellers who are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. This program is designed to give brand owners increased control of their products on Amazon. The program’s biggest benefit for sellers is the direct influence they have over their detail pages.
This type of ad allows sellers to cross-sell and upsell their products to shoppers in their target audience, as well as connect with shoppers that their competitors’ ads miss.
Not only can sellers retarget online shoppers that have viewed their product(s), but they can also target shoppers who have viewed products similar to theirs or used search terms relevant to their product(s).
If sellers run Sponsored Display Ads and their competitors don’t, they can capture more online shoppers' attention during the different phases of the Customer Buying Cycle, making it easier to scale.
Sellers are able to place their ads under their competitor’s listing, allowing them to pit their best product(s) against their competitor’s products.
There are three basic types of remarketing audiences when using Sponsored Display ads:
Views audience – Views remarketing permits sellers to target online shoppers who have viewed their product(s) in the past 30 days but have not purchased from them. Sellers can also target online shoppers who have viewed their product detail pages that have specific criteria, like star rating, brand, etc.,
Searches audience – Searches remarketing gives sellers the ability to target online shoppers who have searched for keywords related to their product(s) but haven’t specifically seen their product(s),
Purchases audience – Purchases remarketing targets people who have purchased from you in the past. While this may be the smallest audience of the three types, it's worth tracking because engaging this audience is a great way for increasing customer lifetime value.
Sellers with retail-ready products should, at the very least, devote some of their ad budget to experimenting with Sponsored Display Ads to help them scale.
But remember, the process of scaling your business with Amazon advertising is a journey.
Don’t jump into Sponsored Display Ads right away. There’s an unspoken hierarchy among the Amazon ad types, with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and then Sponsored Display. New sellers, especially, should follow this hierarchy in terms of what order to introduce each ad type into their Amazon advertising.
XII. Study Your Brand Analytics – With Brand Analytics, sellers are able to access insightful reports and actionable data that helps to empower them to make informed, strategic decisions about their product portfolio and marketing/advertising activities.
Brand Analytics is currently only available to Brand Registered sellers.
Brand Analytics contains five reports: Amazon Search Terms, Repeat Purchase Behavior, Market Basket Analysis, Item Comparison and Alternate Purchase Behavior, and Demographics.
- Amazon Search Terms: reveals the overall rank of keywords in terms of volume, as well as what percentage of sales and clicks the top three search terms for any keyword gets
- Market Basket Analysis: reveals which other items are being purchased along with your products
- Item Comparison and Alternate Purchase Behavior: reveals the top five other items that shoppers also viewed along with yours
- Demographics: gives an overview of certain key demographics of your audience.
With the insights provided by the Brand Analytics tool, sellers can make smarter decisions and implement improvements on a day-to-day basis, which are crucial building blocks for scaling.
XIII. Study Repeat Purchase Behavior – Repeat Purchase Behavior provides valuable insight into repeat purchases of a seller’s product(s). It reveals valuable information that can help a seller to scale.
Take advantage of the Repeat Purchase Behavior report to:
- Discover which products drive the most repeat purchases
- Strategize how to generate more repeat purchases, (e.g. Amazon advertising)
- Understand the impact of repeat purchases on your bottom line
Sellers can view important data for a specific product and period that can be used to determine when it is an appropriate time to scale, such as:
- Orders: The total number of orders, both first-time and repeat.
- Unique customers: The total number of unique customers, both first-time and repeat.
- Repeat customers: The percentage of repeat customers, based on the number of unique customers.
- Repeat purchase ordered product sales: The percentage of sales that came from repeat purchases. Amazon also expresses this number as a monetary value so sellers can quickly calculate the financial impact of repeat purchases.
XIV. Study Key Metrics, like New-to-Brand – New-to-brand data helps sellers to determine which strategies will drive customer acquisition and efficient business growth on Amazon.
They permit Sponsored Brands users to measure and optimize their campaigns, and to plan future marketing strategies, to help grow their customer base in order to scale.
New-to-brand metrics determine whether an ad-attributed purchase was made by an existing customer or one buying a brand’s product on Amazon for the first time over the prior year.
With new-to-brand, sellers receive campaign performance metrics such as total new-to-brand purchases and sales, new-to-brand purchase rate, and cost per new-to-brand customer. Sellers now have the tools needed to estimate the cost of acquiring new customers on Amazon and identifying the most efficient channels and tactics to achieve their campaign goals.
Another key metric that should be tracked to help sellers in their decision-making process as to when to scale is also found in the Sponsored Brands reporting section is the Category Benchmark Report.
An important and powerful way to gauge the success of a seller's Amazon advertising strategies and campaigns is benchmarking...comparing the seller's performance with that of his or her competitors. Sellers can use this information to improve their ads in order to rise to the top of their categories/niches.
The Search Term Impressions Report is another key tool for deciding the appropriate time to scale. This report will reveal data about which search terms a seller's customers have been using to trigger their Sponsored Brand Ads.
It looks at the search terms inside of a seller's Sponsored Brands search term report and reveals what percentage of Impression share the seller is getting compared to his or her competition.
Sellers should be monitoring these reports to identify changes as early as possible.
All of these reports provide clear pointers as to where a seller's Amazon advertising investment is working and where it isn’t. Used wisely, they will enable sellers to interpret performance, make the necessary optimizations and plan their on-going strategies for scaling their businesses.
Scaling your advertising is a crucial part of building a brand that becomes a household name. But there are a lot of moving pieces to consider and implement. If you suspect that you may have missed a critical piece, our experts can work with you to make sure that everything is 100% on track, while freeing you from the daily grind.
Schedule a call with us to discuss your Amazon advertising needs.
Entourage: Software to Scale Amazon Ads and Results Driven Management.
