German pet food brand finds new-to-brand growth and efficiency

The partnership

As a part of the Heristo group, a major producer in the German food sector, animonda offers dog and cat food across a variety of product lines, packaging types and bundles. After launching its first Amazon Advertising efforts in April 2017, animonda recognised that they lacked the internal expertise to maximise the potential of its investment. They looked to work with specialists who could help them drive sales growth and continue to improve the brand’s Amazon presence.

In April 2017, animonda partnered with Vorwärts GmbH, a managed-service provider that helps brands develop their Amazon strategies via content optimisation tools and account management for vendors and sellers. Key to the strategy was helping to maximise the performance of animonda’s Amazon Advertising investment. Animonda’s goal was to achieve sales growth while maintaining their existing Amazon Advertising budget.

The challenge

Vorwärts GmbH looked to maximise animonda’s sales potential at the same Amazon Advertising investment level by considering how they deployed the brand’s budget. Although sales were the primary focus, they saw sponsored ads as key to increasing brand awareness and staying top of mind with shoppers as they explored food options for their pets.

Animonda was focused on driving consistent performance of its best-selling products while also generating awareness of new or prioritised product offerings. The challenge for Vorwärts GmbH would be finding the right balance while scaling animonda’s investment, driving sales performance while still delivering greater brand awareness for these key initiatives.

The solution

Vorwärts GmbH started by assessing the content on animonda’s product detail pages by using their proprietary content optimisation tool. Through this process, they were able to identify the most relevant keywords for animonda’s products and optimise the product detail pages to incorporate the keyword learnings.

After making these retail readiness adjustments, Vorwärts GmbH began running Amazon Advertising sponsored ads campaigns for animonda using its proprietary campaign management tool. The tool uses campaign automation technology to make efficient bid adjustments, but also allows the usage of the search term report and the campaign performance reports to make weekly manual optimisations. These campaigns utilised a variety of keyword strategies: category keywords, competitive keywords, branded keywords and content-optimised keywords. Their campaign management tool used machine learning to automatically optimise campaigns, analyse and adjust bids, and track animonda’s key KPIs.

Vorwärts GmbH deployed Sponsored Products campaigns focused on top-converting keywords to ensure steady ROAS (return on ad spend) while leveraging Sponsored Brands campaigns to support newer or prioritised products. These Sponsored Brands campaigns were designed to help support the awareness goal, creating a great opportunity to differentiate the brand’s offering while customers shopped for the right products to meet the needs of their pets.

The tactic utilised by Vorwärts GmbH to aid in differentiating animonda relied on the creative functionality of Sponsored Brands. Customisation allows brands to highlight key elements of each new product’s story to shoppers as they browse. For example, when launching Integra, a food line that is specifically designed for pets that suffer from a set of illnesses, Sponsored Brands allowed animonda to communicate the key product details within the customisable headline while also focusing on keywords that would be relevant to shoppers whose pets had these illnesses.

The results

With Vorwärts GmbH's assistance with both retail readiness components and campaign strategy, animonda drove strong results for its business with Amazon Advertising.

Vorwärts GmbH was able to consistently deliver an ACOS (advertising cost of sales) of 7% since launching animonda’s Amazon Advertising campaign. Most importantly, they were able to show that after animonda scaled its initial investment, they could continue to find growth and improvement without spending further. Animonda saw its sales attributed to advertising increase by 70% from 2018 to 2019 while only adding 14% to its Amazon Advertising spend.

Even more promising, nearly half of animonda’s new orders represented new-to-brand customers, demonstrating that the improved shopping experience and Sponsored Brands campaigns had an influence on Amazon shoppers' purchase decisions. With so many options in the pet food category, securing new customers created a valuable opportunity to foster brand loyalty.

quoteUpAmazon Advertising is straightforward and easy to understand for any online marketer. Our experience shows that you can generate very good results even with a smaller advertising budget.quoteDown
– Lars Wiedemann, Business Development Director, animonda Petcare

Animonda plans to continue investing in Amazon Advertising and working with Vorwärts GmbH to drive performance improvements.