InnovaMaxx drives sales with Sponsored Brands video in Germany

Based in the heart of vibrant Berlin, InnovaMaxx is an online fitness and wellness retailer. InnovaMaxx has multiple fitness brands on Amazon, such as Sportstech, Bluewheel and Deskfit, and has been advertising on Amazon since 2012.

InnovaMaxx believes that testing new things and learning from it fuels their innovation and helps them get ahead of trends – key to thriving in the fitness category.

When Sponsored Brands video launched in Germany in fall 2020, the decision to try it out came naturally.

During the initial three months of running Sponsored Brands video ads, 90% of InnovaMaxx’s video campaigns achieved an advertising cost of sales (ACOS) between 1 and 10%.

Konstantin Deis at InnovaMaxx tells Amazon Advertising the company’s experience on using Sponsored Brands video together with other sponsored ads solutions and shares a few tips.

Can you tell us about yourself and what you do at InnovaMaxx?
My name is Konstantin, and I lead the supply chain management and am in charge of strategic business development. I started working at InnovaMaxx when the company was founded, so I’m the “go-to guy” for everything.

How is your business using sponsored ads in general?
We’re using advertising for all of our products. On Amazon, we use Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and now Sponsored Brands video. It helps boost our sales and increases the overall visibility of the product. This helps us reach relevant audiences; and it costs only when customers click our ads. We bid on relevant keywords/brands to help increase the reach of our own products. We also try to find a good mix of advertising solutions that best support our goals.

How do you find Sponsored Brands video?
Sponsored Brands video worked very well for us. By using our strongest keywords, we were able to generate sales with a low advertising cost of sales (ACOS). It also helps that Sponsored Brands video and Sponsored Brands ads don’t share placements, so we can bid on keywords separately.

Tell us about how you produce your videos. Creating videos is of great importance to us. You’ll see that many of our product detail pages have videos, because video is a great way to promote our products in action or as tutorials. We have five employees in our video production department, and we create all of our videos in-house.

Are you using the same videos for your product detail pages and Sponsored Brands video ads? We create customized videos for Sponsored Brands videos specifically to meet the allotted video length.

Any tips on how to create successful videos? For all videos that we create, we try to focus on capturing customers’ emotions. I think that this is what differentiates us from other sellers. Customers can find our videos more relatable and can visualize themselves using our products. Highlighting product benefit as well as customer reviews are also a part of our strategy.

Any learnings that you can share? We bid higher on Sponsored Brands video ads, and when some of our products were experiencing delivery delays, our ACOS went up because many customers who clicked our ads didn’t end up purchasing. Our learning here was not to promote products that have extended delivery time.

Finally, what are your top three recommendations to advertisers on how to run successful Sponsored Brands video ads?

1. The ads link to product detail pages, so the product title, images and bullet points should be optimized to increase conversion rates.
2. Don’t be alarmed if you find advertising costs high at the beginning. You’ll get a good conversion rate, meaning that the cost per click (CPC) will drop.
3. Create separate campaigns for important keywords to control the budget better. Also, create a “discover” campaign to harvest new keywords.