How to approach display advertising with Tinuiti

April 06, 2021

Tinuiti is a digital marketing agency that specializes in performance-driven campaigns and a proprietary technology suite for marketing intelligence and media activation. We spoke to a number of passionate minds at Tinuiti about working with different brands to activate across Amazon Ads products. In this piece, Craig Atkinson, Chief Client Officer at Tinuiti, shares more from his team and their work with Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display.

Tell us about how Tinuiti started and where the company is today.

We were one of the first performance marketing agencies to start and scale a practice focused on Amazon. Since 2014, we’ve established services in all facets of Amazon acceleration for both sellers and vendors, with proprietary technology for advertising, reporting, and marketplace analysis.

In 2019, Elite SEM, North America’s largest independent performance and data-driven digital marketing agency, announced that it would be rebranding as Tinuiti. The move was a result of 40% organic growth and several key acquisitions, including social marketing agency OrionCKB; CRM, email marketing, and creative agency Email Aptitude; and Amazon-focused agency CPC Strategy. Today, Tinuiti specializes in paid search, paid social, mobile apps, CRM, and email marketing.

"We truly have a unique and valuable offer for clients that has a proven track record of growing their businesses. Rebranding to Tinuiti provides a greater brand platform that allows us to tell a bigger story on a bigger stage, and sets us up for the next phase of growth."

– Dalton Dorné, CMO, Tinuiti

We’ve continually grown and evolved our internal technology to help our clients sell more products faster across multiple channels. We know how important ad tech is for achieving growth with ad performance. For this reason, we chose to invest in our in-house technology. For many advertisers, as campaigns scale, the level of granularity needed will increase, which will increase the time spent managing these campaigns. Our custom dashboard, MobiusX, is able to identify incremental budget expansion opportunities across marketplaces by analyzing historical bids, budget, and keyword trends, and making recommendations around areas for growth at the product line level, helping drive ad performance and effectively executing on performance trends at scale.

Our technology unlocks that scalability and the ability to discover new keywords and optimize bids at a level that would be impossible to do manually. For example, we helped our client, Evenflo, an industry leader and manufacturer in baby safety products, scale visibility and sales through Amazon Ads. We used our MobiusX proprietary technology to develop a robust and holistic presence in the Amazon store and inform its advertising strategy. This helped Evenflo grow its Amazon presence and increase ROAS (return on advertising spend) 2X by leveraging MobiusX’s bid strategies.

What is Tinuiti’s approach to display advertising?

As one of the first agencies to offer a dedicated Amazon DSP program, we were able to innovate on ways to leverage Amazon’s display advertising offering to help drive product and brand awareness, feed strategies for sponsored ads and remarketing funnels, and scale growth across an entire catalog. Our “always-on” approach to Amazon DSP helps brands reach brand-agnostic shoppers and retain brand-loyal customers.

We’ve already seen great growth for our clients using Amazon DSP in 2019 and 2020 (the unique selling points of Amazon’s DSP offering have led to five straight quarters of quarter-over-quarter spend growth as our clients leaned into Amazon Ads). If you’re an advertiser leveraging Amazon DSP, then we believe you should be using Amazon Ads audience builder to reach your audiences anywhere they spend their time.

For example, using Amazon DSP, we were able to help our client Noble House Home Furnishings increase its new-to-brand purchases by +84%.

“Running upper- and lower-funnel campaigns via Amazon DSP worked especially well for the brand’s product line. As it relates to furniture, typically shoppers will take their time when making a purchase. Amazon DSP upper-funnel campaigns, reaching in-market audiences, helped to fuel our lower-funnel pool for remarketing purposes. Because the shopping experience isn’t always linear, Amazon DSP provided us the opportunity to not only reach new audiences and bring them into our funnel, but also remarket to audiences once they had shown interest in our catalog.”

– Evan Walsh, Sr. Programmatic analyst, Amazon and marketplaces, Tinuiti

As for Sponsored Display, we use these ads to build mid-funnel awareness based on audiences’ interests, as well as reengaging high-intent shoppers that viewed specific products. We’ve also participated in the product targeting beta in 2020, which helped our clients promote product discovery, measure campaigns more effectively by targeting specific products or relevant product categories on Amazon, and gain greater line of sight into campaign optimization.

Sponsored Display is a great way to access display inventory without the higher requirements of Amazon DSP. Leveraging Sponsored Display campaigns can help us reach shoppers in the consideration and decision phases with both views remarketing and interests audience options, making Sponsored Display a viable component of any Amazon marketing strategy.

“Amazon Ad will continue to create more ad types and audience strategies. I predict that it will continue expanding its Sponsored Display offerings to enable brands to create awareness for their brands and products more easily. It’s important to be early adopters (or work with an agency that has access to new betas). The earlier you adopt, the better.”

– Courtney Macfarlane, Sr. Specialist, Marketplaces, Tinuiti

How have you run Amazon DSP campaigns alongside sponsored ads?

Our work with R+Co is a great example of how to run Amazon DSP and sponsored ads campaigns as part of a full-funnel strategy. When R+Co started, luxury beauty was a brand-new category on Amazon. In 2017, the brand saw a growth of 360% by solely using the advertising console and then experienced 57% growth in 2018 after launching campaigns via Amazon DSP. That wasn’t enough to keep up the momentum going into 2019, when projected growth was just 23%. The next step was to look at how Amazon DSP could help brand and business growth on Amazon and beyond. R+Co wanted to take a mindful approach to layer in a more robust, full-funnel advertising strategy, so it used a “crawl, walk, run” strategy to gradually build up its Amazon DSP advertising.

With a new strategy for Amazon DSP and new tactics, we helped R+Co increase its ROAS by 36% and increase its total sales by 48%, while the mid- and upper-funnel tactics helped increase detail page views by 85%. R+Co’s Store on Amazon inspired shoppers to visit R+Co’s website to learn more about the brand and products.

Here are the key steps we took to achieve these results:

1. R+Co continued with a lower-funnel strategy to remarket its top products while working with us to bring these ads over from the advertising console to Amazon DSP. This ensured we weren’t starting from ground zero.

2. Next, we began to layer in mid- to upper-funnel advertising using Amazon’s in-market and lifestyle audiences to help increase product detail page traffic, and used remarketing ads to reengage with audiences who visited the product detail page. In-market audiences help engage audiences that have recently considered products in a given category, while lifestyle audiences include shoppers who have shown an interest related to your product.

3. We launched static ads for mid- to upper-funnel tactics to help drive traffic to its Store on Amazon. Driving relevant audiences to the Store lets shoppers learn more about a brand, helping them become lifetime customers. This was more of a long-term play than the lower-funnel tactics that helped drive traffic directly to a product detail page.

4. During Prime Day, R+Co offered 30% off its entire catalog and incorporated messaging into static ads that led shoppers to the Store. Despite not linking directly to the product detail page, R+Co saw high conversion rates. With mid-, upper-, and lower-funnel tactics in place, R+Co began to layer in loyalty and retention tactics to nurture current customers.

5. R+Co leveraged Amazon DSP for cross-selling opportunities to help boost customer loyalty and retention. For example, if customers had purchased R+Co’s shampoo but not its conditioner, an ad for the brand’s conditioner would reengage that audience. The ad connects them to the product detail page for the conditioner and ultimately helps grow re-engagement and consideration for complementary products.

Any other tips you’d like to share with our readers?

Our Sr. Specialist, Marketplaces, Tanya Zadoorian recommends testing Sponsored Display against Sponsored Products and their product targeting options to measure which of the two is a better opportunity for your business. “By running the campaigns side by side,” she says, “we can get a true understanding of which of the two campaign types serves as the better option for the goal of the campaign.”