Partner spotlight: A conversation on measuring success with Kenshoo

Today, most customer purchases are the result of multiple interactions with a brand, making it hard to provide a complete picture within a single system. The consequence is that marketing attribution remains a key challenge for many marketers, and success looks very different for many brands.

So, as you might imagine, we work with our clients to develop a unique approach to measuring marketing success that fits their business. At Kenshoo, our technology platform, which utilizes a variety of integrations including the Amazon Ads API, helps brands find data-driven insights and optimization opportunities. Viewing the big picture of their digital marketing performance helps our clients define success for their business while making informed marketing decisions.

Based on my experience with brands developing Amazon Ads strategies, the overarching theme is finding a way to balance sophistication and simplicity in building out your sponsored ads campaigns. They need to optimize for narrow focus and control but also be easy to manage.

I recommend a crawl-walk-run methodology, launching with a simple campaign structure and getting more segmented with your keyword sets over time. If campaign architecture is too complex, it can be tricky and time-consuming to manage and analyze performance.

For example, properly breaking out campaigns by strategy (category terms, brand terms) and product type allows a brand to optimize performance based upon profitability—ultimately ensuring budget goes to the correct products. This tactic, paired with single-ASIN ad groups, ensures the ideal product-keyword alignment, maximizes performance optimization, and makes it easy to leverage automation.

Eventually, advanced advertisers can evolve their structure to an 80/20 hybrid where the bulk of the account is optimized for speed and flexibility and the most important parts of the program are detailed for tighter control and messaging.

A great example of a client doing this is an agency who implemented a refined campaign structure focused on the different strengths of an advertiser’s two separate outdoor cooking appliance lines. Using Kenshoo’s comprehensive reporting and analytics suite, they were able to spot opportunities to further hone in on different brand and category keyword sets that were working for each of the two brands. This strategic approach to building out a refined campaign structure made it easy to assess what was working and then optimize budgets and bids for the types of keywords driving the most value.

Don’t be myopic by focusing only on sales attributed to advertising. It’s important to keep an eye on the big picture and view your Amazon Ads investment as a holistic program rather than focusing on how a single campaign performs. Since advertising is attributed by last click, the full attribution can often be lost in advertising KPIs alone. Pay attention to how your total sales are trending as you further your Amazon Ads investment.

The phrase "beyond ROAS (return on ad spend)" is something we often use to describe big-picture thinking when it comes to advertising. For a large CPG client, we planned its budgets not on a firm number but instead on a percentage of the total sales on Amazon. It meant we could be flexible allowing for Amazon Ad investment to increase at a pace that matched the brand’s holistic Amazon sales growth.
Create ROI targets by keyword strategy type. Lower-funnel brand terms naturally generate higher ROI (return on investment), but that doesn’t mean category terms aren’t important for your brand. Reaching category level shoppers can help drive brand keyword searches later in the journey. This is why brand and category targeting should have different goal ROI goals since they are at different stages of the funnel. Based on your investment level in each, set a different goal for each and make a weighted average for a cumulative ROI goal. Understand that, while some of these keyword types might not drive immediacy in return, they still play an important role.

Map spend and total sales by ASIN. Understanding how things are performing on the ASIN level can help you identify products that might be growing organically and indicate an opportunity for advertising investment. Mapping out the total sales and spend by ASIN can help inform budget allocation by uncovering areas where the advertiser is over- or under-investing, which can lead to more efficiency. For example, a new product launch may need a higher level of investment to help drive awareness compared to what’s needed for a long-time top-selling product. This type of insight can enable a brand to better plan and understand the necessary budgets to help achieve desired sales levels.

Test everything and then scale up what works. Amazon Ads is a newer channel for many of our clients with plenty of room for new ideas and creative ways to maximize the opportunity. Retail marketers should have a framework in place to try out assumptions, measure the incremental value they bring to their advertising program, and then build out campaigns using those insights. We often recommend this strategy to clients:

• Test different subsets of keywords that are most important to particular product groupings and put the top-performing keywords into Sponsored Brands campaigns with dedicated budgets. This ensures you are giving dedicated support to these key terms, ensuring share of voice, and driving efficiencies.

One of our agency clients used continuous testing to determine that the highest volume of Amazon shopping queries related to one of their advertiser’s products occurred in the afternoon and evening hours. With this insight, they executed a dayparting strategy at scale by leveraging Kenshoo’s ‘Automated Actions’ to automatically focus their advertiser’s investment during what they’d determined to be the most critical shopping hours. This helped them drive greater efficiency in the deployment of the advertiser’s budget.