Chatting with GhostBed

December 16, 2016

How they approach building their business anywhere customers spend their time

In the spring of 2016, GhostBed approached Amazon Ads with a few goals in mind:

  1. Increase awareness on Amazon and drive traffic to GhostBed.com
  2. Educate mattress-seekers about GhostBed’s mattress-in-a-box products
  3. Drive sales of GhostBed’s top-rated mattress in a box

“The best-kept secret in the digital world is [Amazon Ads],” said Marc Werner, CEO of GhostBed. To drive awareness among Amazon mattress shoppers and educate new audiences, GhostBed worked with Amazon Ads to deploy a campaign combining sponsored ads (sometimes referred to as search ads) and display ads.

The campaign tapped into four primary ad solutions aimed at reaching customers during various shopper phases from research and awareness to conversion. “Customers searching for mattresses, or any high-price item on Amazon, generally need to experience several touch points before deciding to purchase,” said Anna Hodges, an Amazon Ads account executive leading the home category. “We developed a strategy to reach new audiences wherever they interact online throughout the day or night—at home relaxing with their Kindle, on the go on their mobile devices, or at work on a desktop.”

GhostBed first started advertising with sponsored ads, the most common strategy for brands new to advertising on Amazon. For GhostBed, sponsored ads helped increase visibility to customers as they browsed and searched Amazon’s site for the right mattress for their home. Their ads were optimized to invite customers already considering purchasing a new mattress to check out GhostBed before they clicked “Add to Cart.”

The next step was layering in display ads with the Amazon DSP (formerly the Amazon Ads Platform, or AAP), Amazon’s programmatic offering, which reaches customers and helps drives traffic anywhere they spend their time, across mobile devices and apps. Some Amazon DSP display ads drove traffic to GhostBed’s product detail pages on Amazon, while others linked off to GhostBed’s home page, encouraging customers to learn more about what makes GhostBed mattresses special. Display ads on the Amazon mobile app solidified GhostBed’s presence in front of a mobile-only audience—as more than 40% of Amazon’s audience exclusively visits via mobile.1

Education was an important element of the campaign and was used to highlight Ghostbed’s differentiating points in the category, such as their 15 years of experience, knowledge, refinement, and mattress quality. To educate customers, their team worked with Amazon Ads designers to create unique Fire tablet wakescreen ads that highlighted their mattresses’ “supernatural comfort” and “total-body support.” They also embedded a short video into their Real Time Cooling Pillow wakescreen ad, to further educate customers about their products and special offers throughout the duration of the campaign.

Based on their campaign results, GhostBed felt these touch points drove their desired outcomes for both sales and awareness over their six-month campaign. They’ve continued optimizing this strategy over 2016.

“Our overall business and digital success is unquestionably aligned with the power and effectiveness of these campaigns. [Amazon Ads] connects all the commerce dots,” Werner concluded.

GhostBed continues powering its advertising approach with Amazon, scaling efforts to reach new customers wherever they engage online, and educating them about their one-of-a-kind beds (in a box!).

To learn more and to start advertising with Amazon Ads, contact us.





1 Source: comScore, December 2015