How Intentwise uses Amazon’s Selling Partner API to increase spend efficiency for advertisers

Customers’ purchase decisions in the Amazon store are driven by many retail factors, such as delivery dates, inventory levels, and deals. At Intentwise, we believe that optimizing Amazon Ads campaigns requires the incorporation of these retail factors. Amazon APIs, such as Selling Partner API along with Amazon Ads API, are the pathway to helping accomplish this goal. At Intentwise, we call this “retail-aware ad optimization.” These APIs have allowed us to help forward-thinking advertisers efficiently and accurately analyze and incorporate a number of retail factors into their advertising execution. Some examples of this include inventory-aware advertising management—that is, automatically pausing or reducing advertising spend on ASINs if inventory levels are getting low.

Another example of bridging the gap between retail and advertising is our item profitability view, which combines the sales and traffic business reports from Seller Central and Vendor Central with the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fee preview report and advertising reports, giving our customers the most granular view of their item-level profitability. In addition, selling partners can now construct a complete picture of their channel performance. The metrics and information from these APIs give advertisers additional levers to enable more detailed optimization of their advertising spend.

Selling Partner API allows Intentwise to automate the collection of key information—such as sales metrics, advertising performance metrics, and inventory levels. Intentwise stitches these fragmented sets of information into a cohesive model, which enables advertisers to spend much less time organizing information and much more time actioning on crucial insights. For example, this can provide a 360-degree view of sales, advertising, inventory, and content performance for a given ASIN or group of ASINs by automatically combining data from across multiple fragmented reports, which provides a significant time savings.

With this level of granularity available at an instant, brands can make strategic decisions more quickly, knowing the impact it will have on profitability and other areas of their business without needing to search for those metrics. Intentwise also helps brands integrate their proprietary information, such as product groupings and product costs, to help them further segment their information and extract insights specific to their business, which can then be incorporated into advertising execution.

To support better performance with Amazon Ads, brands and agencies should have a comprehensive, cross-functional understanding of how their channels and individual products perform. Integrating with the Selling Partner API and Amazon Ads API has made this possible, and allows Intentwise to now support many cross-functional use cases, such as:

• The ability to juxtapose sales, sponsored ads metrics, and Amazon DSP metrics into a single view to correlate the impact of all advertising on overall revenue
• Being able to understand product profitability by bringing together advertising spend, fees, deals, product costs, and sales metrics at a product level, allowing advertisers to manage each of their products to the right spend efficiency levels
• Pulling back on media spend for products that are running low on inventory
• Correlating Best Sellers Rank (BSR) changes with ad spend to understand the longer-term impact of advertising on overall sales

Today, you can get a variety of metrics about ASINs individually, but the real value comes from combining these pieces of information together.

For example, Intentwise combines sales information from the Selling Partner API and advertising performance metrics, which means our clients can quickly see differences between which products they are advertising the most and which products are producing the most sales on Amazon. This also will highlight any products that are not being advertised, so brands can decide if these products need additional budgets.

Advertisers also want to understand how much profit they are making from each product. Intentwise connects information on overall Amazon sales, advertising metrics, fees, and our customers’ own costs to create this complete profitability picture, allowing our customers to make informed business decisions about budgets and efficiency goals.

One, have a firm strategy around measurement. It’s important to have a well-defined process of analyzing and operationalizing the information for optimizations. This requires a commitment and investment in the right people, processes, and tools.

Two, connect disparate data sets. The magic happens when selling partners are able to combine disparate data sets and understand new insights. For example, advertisers can now construct a 360-degree view of a particular product’s performance by bringing together metrics from advertising, overall sales, inventory, and promotions.

Three, foster analytics skills on your team, either through internal training or strategic hiring. These analytics skills include mastering spreadsheets, developing an ability to interact with databases—such as Structured Query Language [SQL] skills—and learning statistical analysis.