Four recommendations to help grow your brand on Amazon.ca

This article provides insights/best practices on the key attributes or strategies by quantifying the degree to which top-performing advertisers in the Home category (Cluster One) and lower-performing advertisers in the Home category (Cluster Four) have adopted each key attribute or strategy.

For more on how we performed this study, see the Methodology section at the end of this article.

We begin our analysis with a comparison of advertising strategies by top- and lower-performing advertisers in the Home category in H1 (1 January – 30 June) and H2 (1 July – 31 December). Our analysis finds two notable statistics:

• The average cost per impression is 7% lower in H1 than H2.
• 49% of total sales come in H1

To improve reach and engagement, we recommend that advertisers focus on budget allocation and events, specifically, advertisers should look to balance their ad spend between H1 and H2 and over-allocate ad spend during H1 events like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Over allocating in H1 allows advertisers to take advantage of the 7% lower impression cost. That said, we also believe a balanced ad spend (between H1 and H2) is important because customers purchase products in the Home category year-round on Amazon.

Advertisers can consider Sponsored Products always-on campaigns year-round, and could also focus on these areas to help optimize campaigns:

• Keyword coverage: Try adopting keywords closely related to product listings. Be sure to try experimenting with new keywords to see which perform and which do not.
• ASIN (unique serial number): To support discovery and relevancy, allow a sufficient time period of support and do not change promoted ASINs too frequently, such as daily or weekly.
• Identify best practices ahead of peak periods: By experimenting during slow periods, advertisers can uncover best practices that can help campaigns perform better during peak times.

• Use Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP): If using an Amazon DSP campaign to reach new audiences with programmatic display, advertisers can extend reach to specific Amazon product detail pages by using Sponsored Display.
• Spend efficiently: When products go out of stock or are no longer the Featured Offer, ad serving stops automatically to prevent any budget wastage. This allows advertisers to control how much they spend by setting budgets and bid per click (with no minimums required).
• Amplify retail deals for greater impact: During H1 holiday events such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, use Sponsored Display campaigns to integrate with Amazon deals so customers won’t miss important promotions.

Since we began researching ways to help advertisers improve their performance in Amazon’s store, we have found that the impact of customer reviews is often overlooked by advertisers. In our analysis of advertisers in the Home category on Amazon.ca we found that top performers had a median of five reviews per unique ASIN or serial number, while lower performers had a median of two reviews.

To improve customer trust, we recommend that advertisers strive for a minimum of five customer reviews per unique ASIN or serial number. For more on increasing and improving customer reviews, advertisers in the Home category should consider:

• If you’re a vendor: Use the Amazon Vine program. Amazon Vine invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions.
• If you’re a seller: Use Amazon Brand Registry. Enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry unlocks a suite of tools designed to help you build and protect your brand, creating a better experience for customers.

• Select brands: 2,600+ brands in the Home category between August 2020 and July 2021.
• Create success metric: Calculated based on year-over-year growth of branded searches and detail page views.
• Identify effective ad or retail actions: Identified top actions to help increase composite score (actions that lead to higher year-over-year growth of branded searches and detail page views). Actions include customer reviews, ad products (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Fire TV, etc.), ad strategies (negative keywords, always-on, audience segments, etc.), and more.
• Group brands: Brands grouped by composite score (branded searches and DPVGR) into four clusters ranked from highest- to lowest-performing.
• Compare brand groups: Identified what strategies top-performing brands (Cluster One) use to increase year-over-year growth of branded searches and detail page views, compared to strategies that lower-performing brands (Cluster Four) are or are not using.