AstroAI helps build their brand and sales on Amazon with Sponsored Brands

AstroAI is a global automotive and home improvement brand based in Brea, California, and Chongqing, China. Established in 2016, the brand offers a selection of specialized products—from digital tire pressure gauges to mini fridges.

The General Manager of AstroAI, Joe Song, has previous experience in selling and advertising on Amazon as the advertising supervisor representing a brand. Joe’s experience helped the brand kick-start their success on Amazon when they launched as a seller and started advertising in June 2018.

Through advertising with Sponsored Brands, customers' familiarity with the brand and our sales is improved.

– Joe Song (宋华锐), General Manager, AstroAI

Through refining their Sponsored Brands campaigns, AstroAI has achieved an ACOS (advertising cost of sales) best of 23% in 2019 with Sponsored Brands.

For a brand with such specialized offerings, how important is investing in the brand? How does advertising-savvy AstroAI use and manage Sponsored Brands? Joe is happy to share his wisdom with fellow Sponsored Brands advertisers:

• To increase brand awareness, you need to pay attention to brand advertising.
• Increasing your budget helps more shoppers engage with your brand.
• Adjust your ads frequently based on your ad performance.

What motivated you to start using Sponsored Brands? The main purpose was to help expand our brand’s awareness on Amazon.

How are you using Sponsored Brands, and what’s your strategy? We create Sponsored Brands campaigns for different product series with the three best-selling products in each series. These campaigns are all targeted by keywords. We mainly obtain keywords through keyword software and by referring to the search term report from campaign manager. We analyze the traffic of keywords and their relevance to the product to decide whether to add keywords to campaigns or not.

How do you choose which products to advertise? We choose which products to advertise based on their sales volume and functions. Generally, we would select different types of products within the same a product line as much as possible. Grouping the same type of products together can match the same type of keywords, which helps with traffic quality, higher conversion rate, and better brand image.

How often do you optimize your Sponsored Brands campaigns, and what do you optimize?
Almost weekly, we adjust the budget and bid of each keyword based on ACOS, add keywords, or delete some keywords.

What metrics are most important to your brand? New-to-brand metrics. They intuitively show how many total new customers have purchased from us on Amazon.

Do you use keyword match types? Yes, we use them frequently, as well as negative keyword targeting. We use exact match type for precise keywords, and we bid the highest for this type. The next is phrase match, which we use for long-tail keywords. We bid lower for these words than exact match type. And finally, we use broad match with the lowest bid. Once we have enough performance data, we adjust the bids accordingly.

Tell us about your budget strategy. We set the advertising budget according to the specific promotion period of the product. When we launch new products, we gradually increase our budget until our ads show for the relevant keywords. We’d then adjust the budget after the new product phase is over.

How do you check your budget spend and keep it sustainable? We check the ad campaigns’ daily, weekly, and monthly expenses to see whether the budget of each campaign is appropriate—If the ads are performing well and the budget is already used up for that day, we’ll increase the budget of the ads next day. We also check other metrics such as ACOS, CTR (click-through rate), and CVR (conversion rate). When ACOS is less than 30% and advertising cost/marketing sales is less than 5%, we can increase the budget.

When are your demand peaks, and how do you prepare for them? When running deals for shopping events such as Lightning Deals, Best Deals, Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. This isn’t only for Sponsored Brands, but for Black Friday in the past, we gradually increased the advertising budget for three days in the run-up, and by three times on the day of. Our sales increased by five times that day.

You have a Store. Tell us what drove you to create a Store, and how do you use it?
Yes, we created our Store in 2018. As a brand seller, we’ve always been committed to building our brand. In order to let customers get to know us, we need to showcase our profession.