Toy brand grows awareness and sales with Amazon Ads

IMC Toys manufactures products that fit into the Amazon’s Toys & Games category. The products range from baby dolls and plush animal toys to children’s tabletop games. The brand was looking for a way to drive additional awareness and sales for its products on Amazon.it and recognized how Amazon Ads could help them achieve this goal. IMC Toys wasn’t confident that on its own they had the expertise required to attain the results they desired. They found an agency partner in XChannel who could help them manage its ads on Amazon and guide them to new levels of success.

Putting an agency in place ensures that our campaigns are frequently monitored and - through weekly meetings - readjusted based on goals achieved and future targets. We've chosen XChannel for their strategic approach to Amazon Ads, and for XChannel’s previous work within the Toys & Games categories.”

– Luca Di Puorto, Marketing Manager at IMC Toys

XChannel knew that Toys & Games was a crowded category and they needed to home in on the right solution to meet IMC Toys’ awareness goal. They decided that high-visibility ads and a compelling storefront for shoppers would go a long way toward greater awareness and driving more sales for the brand.

XChannel knew a Store would be important for IMC Toys. With Stores, you can promote your brand and products with your own multipage branded destination on Amazon for free. XChannel knew that a Store was a great way to tell IMC Toys’ overall brand story and help shoppers discover different products throughout the product portfolio.

When designing a Store, XChannel guides clients with these three recommendations:

1. Use all three levels of the Store to customize the experience based on what the brand needs.
2. The Store must be simple and intuitive for shoppers to navigate.
3. Try to include rich media content, such as videos, to help maximize the shopping experience.

They applied these strategies when building the IMC Toys Store. Upon completion, they knew they needed to drive traffic to the page so shoppers would become more familiar with the brand and its offering.

In order to drive traffic to Stores, XChannel leveraged Sponsored Brands. Sponsored Brands are ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products. These ads appear on search results and help generate recognition for your brand and product portfolio. XChannel knew Sponsored Brands would be an important part of its overall strategy because the ad unit appears in high-visibility areas during the search experience, and allows shoppers to see multiple brand products with brand messaging.

The awareness strategy was twofold. Not only did the Sponsored Brands ads drive awareness by themselves, but they would also drive to an immersive brand experience, the IMC Toys Store. They created campaigns with engaging messaging and a variety of product images to encourage shoppers to click through to the IMC Toys Store. When creating Sponsored Brands, XChannel used the suggested keywords from Amazon and started with a bid of 55 pence at campaign launch.

XChannel also launched Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaigns for IMC Toys. They let these automatic targeting campaigns run for two to four weeks to gain insights about what search terms drive impressions and sales. They then use the keywords that drove the highest impressions, CTR, and sales to create manual targeting campaigns.

They monitor campaign performance by reviewing key metrics multiple times each day. XChannel then uses these findings to modify keyword bids every few days based on what the keywords performance data best supports its client’s goals.

Sponsored ads and Stores are excellent tools to help increase sales and give visibility to our products, both within the category outside the Toys & Games category. We would absolutely recommend using both tools to any advertiser, we have seen more sales and achieved a great ROI. I would recommend all advertisers to consider working with a top-notch agency, as we are successfully doing with XChannel.”

– Luca Di Puorto, Marketing Manager at IMC Toys

With the aid of XChannel’s strategy IMC Toys has seen success with sponsored ads. Overall, they were able to drive close to €350,000 in ad-attributed sales with a 5.5% advertising cost of sales (ACOS) in 2018.

Specifically for Sponsored Brands and the Store, they were able to create campaigns that generated close to 4 million impressions with just a 7.8% ACOS. 68% of the Store sales came as a result of the Sponsored Brands campaigns. But 32% of the total sales came directly from organic traffic on Amazon. The Store was a key factor in driving these organic sales: now shoppers could navigate from IMC Toys’ product detail pages to an engaging destination where they could easily explore the brand’s full product catalog. The brand views these results as a major win, and is happy they chose to invest in the initiative.