How A Data-Driven Amazon Advertising Strategy Faces Risk And Offers Lasting Growth

Move e-commerce operations and paid media investments into overdrive with insights-driven strategies fueled by data

A holistic advertising strategy should align with a given platform, competitive landscape, market, search and display ad type. The Amazon Advertising platform offers Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display for both Seller Central and Vendor Central. These three complementary products allow you to get video ads, search ads, in front of potential customers in a very competitive market.

According to eMarketer, almost 50% of product searches start on Amazon:

Looking outside of Amazon, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others offer ads that communicate deals, offer enticing high-quality images, the ability for a sponsored blog post, and many others options.

All of these tools, types of ads, and platforms comprise a holistic strategy meant to drive efficient and effective sales growth within Amazon.

Digging Into The Questions Of Ads Performance, Optimization, and Efficiency

As a professional seller looking to leverage a broader digital strategy, it is important to look at paid media investments across the board. For example, you want to understand if your automatic targeting campaign on Instagram is having an impact on customer searches for your products on Amazon.

Here are questions sellers and vendors ask themselves as inputs to creating or refining an Amazon Advertising strategy;

  • Which exact keyword is performing best? What about negative keywords?
  • Do I have popular products on Google and social media that do not convert within my Amazon store?
  • Am I missing any long-tail keywords on or off Amazon? Are any of these possible buyer intent keywords?
  • Do my social media or amazon influencers impact sales? Are they profitable?
  • Does my email list work hard enough in driving traffic into priority products?
  • Are there any other keyword opportunities that are being underutilized? Which search terms will need to be optimized or removed from your advertising efforts?
  • Is your default bid working to deliver the results that correspond with the effort and cost for your media investments?
  • Have you explored using product display ads to drive sales? How about experimenting with different campaigns in international markets?
  • How does a search query on Amazon relate to a relevant search on Google Ads for target keywords?

Any type of analysis requires some level of assessment of a given method used for a campaign, across platforms, and tactics. The outcome of this assessment offers critical insights needed to refine ad performance and brand position.

Having your data on hand for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others all unified for analysis, becomes a critical factor in any strategy effort.

Sponsored Advertising Metrics

Regardless of your use of Amazon Advertising, Google Ads, or social media channels from Facebook, if you are Amazon Seller Central or Amazon Vendor Central advertiser, you want to maximize precious media investment dollars.

From metrics like impressions, clicks to sales, subscriptions, or gaining new customers, robust measurement helps you understand what your advertising accomplishes. For example, are you getting the expected brand lift for branding campaigns? How do you define the metrics associated with brand lift?

The following are common types of metric of success used by sellers to inform ad strategies;

  • Conversion rates
  • Keyword bids
  • Search queries
  • Attribution
  • Average cost
  • Advertising costs
  • Cost of sales
  • Cost per click (CPC = Ad Spend ÷ Clicks)
  • Click-thru rates (CTR = Clicks ÷ Impressions)
  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Product sales
  • Reach
  • ROAS ((Revenue — Cost) / Cost)
  • ACoS (ACoS = Advertising Spend ÷ Advertising Revenue)
  • TaCOS (TACoS = Advertising Spend ÷ Total Revenue)

Understanding the data available for each of these can help you measure your performance and make the best choices for optimizing your campaigns.

Save Valuable Time Ditching Messy, Manual Downloads — Moving To Advertising Insights Automation and Optimization

The Amazon PPC platform boasts tremendous potential, but it can be intimidating to pros and novices alike to unpack. As a result, most sellers and vendors default to use the primary reporting console which can limit insights critical to accelerating selling efforts.

They also spend significant time manually downloading reports from the Advertising console, which can be slow, tiresome, error-prone, and out of date minutes after you have clicked “open” in Excel.

The result? All the manual data wrangling makes it impossible to provide timely campaign performance reports, compelling advertising analytics insights across key performance metrics, and deliver profitable campaigns. Your strategy effort suffers.

The leading vendors and sellers recognize automation of performance data is the secret to unlocking e-commerce sales growth.

  • Optimize — develop an informed online advertising strategy by seeing which of your tactics, bidding strategies, and channels are the most effective.
  • Impact — demonstrate proof of types of campaigns and your ads’ creative impact on sales performance or where you fall short of a target profit margin.
  • Audiences — better understand customers and the audiences reached by their advertising.

Here are a couple of examples of the seller and vendor-created reporting using Sponsored Ads API data with their favorite data analytics tool. When compared to the Amazon Advertising console reports, these offer depth, flexibility, and multi-platform insights:

Leveraging your own reporting tools allows you to undertake an in-depth analysis of organic sales, wasteful ad spend and search history.

Having data allows vendors and sellers to optimize ad spend, inform inventory management decisions, target special offers, promotions, and other specific products’ tactics as part of digital marketing efforts on and off Amazon. (see Amazon Attribution and Amazon DSP for extensions to third-party websites)

Tailored and customized data exploration allows you to tap into unified data from multiple sources commonly used in a modern digital strategy. This can lead to insights that allow optimized campaigns to better target customers within an informed holistic strategy across Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others.

The result? Marketing campaigns informed with insights that reveal digital advertising opportunities in social channels, email marketing, keyword targeting, and product search within a customer journey.

Getting Started With Automated, Code-Free Data Pipelines Fueling Strategies Delivering Growth, And Profit

A solid foundation of any Amazon Advertising campaign requires harnessing your data. Openbridge offers an automated, fully-managed, code-free data integration with the Amazon Sponsored Advertising APIs. We provide reliable, integrated data automation solutions for advertisers looking for cost-effective automation solutions, so they can own, model, and analyze their data directly.

Our Amazon Sponsored Ads API connector enables you to bring new seller tools into the mix;

  • leverage best in class analytics tools like Amazon Quicksight, Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Mode, and many others to fuel insights
  • explore amazon advertising reports, search term reports, placement reports, purchased product reports, conversion rate, and many more
  • take control of your Sponsored Advertising data and store it in a private, secure data lake or cloud warehouse like Azure Data Lake, AWS Redshift, AWS Redshift Spectrum, AWS Athena, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery

Your team will quickly get data critical to optimizing performance and accelerating growth. Advertisers can supercharge reporting, business intelligence, and insights software by tapping into data to fuel Amazon Advertising strategy.

The more you know about your customers, the more successful your valuable marketing investments can achieve. Get started today!

>> Get started with your data-fueled Amazon Advertising Strategy

How A Data-Driven Amazon Advertising Strategy Faces Risk And Offers Lasting Growth was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.



source https://blog.openbridge.com/how-a-data-driven-amazon-advertising-strategy-faces-risk-and-offers-lasting-growth-83173ad5ca2?source=rss----4c5221789b3---4

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