Partner Spotlight: A conversation on eCommerce display creatives with Rise

October 28, 2021

Rise Interactive is a digital marketing agency, helping brands drive better business outcomes with their approach to cross-channel media management and customer experience. Rise’s Connex® is a cross-channel media optimization service that enables its analytical marketers to invest each dollar where it will drive the greatest return. We sat down with the Director of Search and Marketplaces at Rise, Blake Kidd, as he shared his teams’ approach to display advertising and how eCommerce display creatives play a part of their Amazon DSP strategy.

What is the story of Rise?

Rise was founded by Jon Morris in 2004. Rise's vision is that driving the best performance from digital marketing requires an approach similar to the financial world—being channel agnostic and investing each dollar where it will drive the greatest return. Morris built a team of analytical Risers who know how to use data in the smartest possible way.

Today, the need for analytical marketers and technology in our industry is even more pressing. Rise has invested millions in Connex, our proprietary technology enabling our vision for data-driven performance optimizations at scale. Connex unifies data from all of the major marketing companies and proactively determines where the best investment opportunities are across channels.

Tell us about Rise’s approach to using Amazon DSP and how you use eCommerce display creatives as part of your Amazon Ads strategy

At Rise, eCommerce display creatives are a part of virtually every Amazon DSP strategy we design. Being focused on product detail page imagery and having availability in a wide variety of placements, eCommerce creatives most often form the backbone of our remarketing initiatives. However, eCommerce display creatives are also commonly used in prospecting efforts as well, especially when driving traffic to product display pages is a key consideration—as with new product launches.

You need to remember that eCommerce display creatives are relatively simple but can be highly effective ad formats. Their ubquity and relatively cheap CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) allow for great “stickiness” by helping drive a high volume of impressions across a large diversity of placements. Even so, these ads can also be tailored to help drive click-through sales, underscoring their ability to be both an upper-funnel tool as well as an awesome remarketing format. These factors mean that not only are eCommerce display creatives used to fill a wide variety of Amazon DSP roles, but their performance often outshines other formats as well.

While Amazon DSP offers an array of ad types that drive good performance, eCommerce creatives are leveraged by all our accounts and are typically the best-performing units. For one outdoor cooking advertiser, eCommerce creatives have outperformed static image ads YTD in both scale (7x click-through sales) and efficiency (return on ad spend +36%)1.

What are your best practices in terms of campaign set up for eCommerce display creatives?

Dynamic ads are each dedicated to one individual ASIN. Responsive ads are also great for very large catalogs as they automatically detect out of stock issues for any ASINs and cease showing them—with Dynamic, out-of-stock issues need to be registered and ads paused on your own. Dynamic eCommerce, on the other hand, offers powerful tailoring options for more compelling ads. Dynamic ads can display a chosen customer review, which can make for powerful prospecting ads.

Responsive and Dynamic eCommerce also typically show significantly different performance levels, with each tending to deliver better results on separate metrics. For one of our snack food advertisers, Responsive delivers much better engagement (+75% click-through rate), while Dynamic yields a higher return (+47% ROAS)2.

Beyond leveraging both Responsive and Dynamic eCommerce ads for their own unique niches, we also tend to employ a handful of structure and setting best practices. In particular, we are very intentional with line item setups—each line item will be either targeting on-site or third-party inventory but not both, desktop or mobile devices but not both, and will only have 1-3 audiences in place. This inevitably generates a large amount of line items to manage. To ensure that spend is being leveraged effectively at this scale, we employ automated budget optimization, which reallocates total order budget across line items according to their performance.

If you had to give a new advertiser one piece of advice before they start using eCommerce display creatives, what would it be?

Both Responsive and Dynamic eCommerce display creatives are extremely versatile and capable formats that can help fill virtually any role in an Amazon DSP campaigns. Knowing when to leverage both formats to take the best advantage of their unique characteristics and understanding how to build strategies with the appropriate level of relevancy to draw out their best performance are keys to help upper-funnel success.

1 Rise Interactive analysis, April - July, 2021, USA
2 Rise Interactive analysis, January - July, 2021, USA