How Brandvault uses sponsored ads for the Urbanista brand

The company

Founded in 2018, Brandvault is a UK-based company that manages multiple brands on Amazon. One of these brands is Urbanista, a Swedish company that offers a range of audio products such as true wireless, sport and over-ear headphones, speakers and earphones.

The strategy

Urbanista’s strategy was to focus its advertising budget on solutions that could help expand its business across multiple countries and drive increased sales. Having already managed several accounts before, the Brandvault team knew that sponsored ads could help Urbanista build its international reach. Before setting up any campaigns, Brandvault reviewed Urbanista’s product detail pages to ensure that they featured high-quality images, videos and A+ content such as banners and text boxes to describe product features.

In 2019, Brandvault created the first Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns for Urbanista in the UK. When the campaigns had been running for two months with positive results, the team launched additional campaigns in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. They also created campaigns in the US, Canada and Japan, expanding the brand’s reach to Amazon shoppers internationally.

The approach

Brandvault started with Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaigns, grouping products based on type and model, to help understand which keywords were the most effective based on how shoppers were looking for similar items. After identifying high-performing search terms, Brandvault added these terms to manually targeted campaigns as broad and phrase match keywords. This approach helped them to create a keyword database that contained the best-performing search terms, which they could add to campaigns with exact match and higher bids. Brandvault continued using automatic targeting campaigns to source new keywords. They also leveraged portfolios to arrange their campaigns based on product categories and seasonality to control their spend across campaigns.

quoteUpSponsored ads enable us to develop brand awareness and product visibility while increasing sales at speed
and scale across Amazon globally.
quoteDown
– Joe Fisher, Brandvault

Following the initial success, Brandvault launched Sponsored Brands campaigns and built a Store as a way to tell Urbanista’s brand story, showcase new products and drive promotional activities. As Sponsored Brands ads can drive shoppers to Stores, they tailored each Store page to match the products featured in different Sponsored Brands creatives. Looking at keyword performance in the Sponsored Products campaigns, Brandvault was able to use keywords with the strongest conversion rates to help drive additional sales.

After running these campaigns for two weeks, Brandvault reviewed the search term reports and advertised product reports to understand the spend, sales, ACOS (advertising cost of sales) and average CPC (cost per click) for each keyword. Using these insights, they added irrelevant and low-performing search terms as negative keywords to ensure that they invested budget in relevant terms. They also analysed which highly clicked keywords were driving purchases so they could focus their spend on them.

The results

After one year, the sponsored ads campaigns and Store helped Urbanista reach new audiences and engage more shoppers, generating over three-million impressions. Urbanista also saw its ACOS decrease 10% year-on-year.

quoteUpAmazon Ads has helped support our fantastic growth.quoteDown
– Anders Andreen, CEO, Urbanista

Following its success, Brandvault put together these recommendations to help other brands maximise their campaign performance:

  1. Focus on high-performing keywords: Add relevant keywords to your campaigns and optimise them by increasing their bids or using exact and phrase match types to improve click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
  2. Maximise your profitability: Start by advertising your top-selling products with tailored campaigns. Leverage features such as ad groups and portfolios to help structure your campaigns based on your advertising goals.
  3. Get your products ready for advertising: Ensure that all of the touchpoints on your product detail pages, such as imagery, videos and A+ content, are consistent to maintain brand integrity and drive customer loyalty.