Ghost Controls drives sales and brand visibility with sponsored ads targeting options

The story

Ghost Controls is a leading designer and manufacturer of gate automation solutions in North America. Offering a new generation of automatic gate openers, the company crafts its products to address customer-identified deficiencies in existing retail products that rely on decade-old technologies. With low-voltage and solar-optimized gate openers and accessories, Ghost Controls provides its customers safety, security, convenience, and peace of mind.

The challenge

Ghost Controls originally launched its Amazon Ads campaigns in January 2016 to help boost its brand awareness. However, the brand’s quick growth across the North America region escalated the need for an agency partner to help implement a strategy that consistently increased returns on ad spend. So in March 2019, Ghost Controls partnered with digital marketing agency Logical Position to take over the company’s Amazon Ads efforts.

quoteUpOur brand grew very quickly and my time was better spent on growing other aspects of the business. I chose Logical Position because the agency offered a level of transparency into our ad campaigns that was comforting considering we were handing them a significant portion of our business to manage.quoteDown
– Richard Lacombe, Vice President of Sales, Ghost Controls

The strategy

With the goal of driving brand awareness and growing top-line sales, the team at Logical Position started by executing an account rebuild and restructure across both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns.

To start, the agency relied on a single-product ad group structure for automatic targeting campaigns and a single-keyword ad group structure for manual campaigns. This meant each advertised product using automatic targeting as well as every manually targeted keyword had its own ad group. Taking this approach allowed Logical Position to track the performance of individual products and keywords over time, which ensured it could add negative keywords or change bids on a product-by-product or keyword-by-keyword basis.

Additionally, in an effort to maximize both brand and product visibility, the agency used a variety of targeting options across both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, including automatic targeting, product targeting, and keyword targeting, while using bid by placement to better optimize performance for the ad placements that saw the best results for each given product. For example, the team divided the campaigns by the types of automatic targeting—complements, substitutes, close match, or loose match—to observe trends over time and control bidding by targeting type.

When it came time to optimize Ghost Controls’ campaigns, Logical Position used the search term report to identify new relevant keywords, products, or categories to target. The report also helped the team identify which keywords should be converted to negative keywords to curb wasted spend on irrelevant searches. In addition, Logical Position used the advertised product report to understand which highly clicked products were driving purchases of other products. The combination of these analytics tools enabled the agency to uncover new growth opportunities for Ghost Controls and optimize the campaigns accordingly.

The results

In the six-month period following Logical Position’s account rebuild, Ghost Controls has seen consistent sales growth. As of October 2019, the brand’s Amazon Ads campaigns have generated over 60MM impressions. They have been able to more than double sales year over year, with almost 75% of its total sales attributed to these advertising efforts.

quoteUpAmazon Ads has helped make our brand visible to thousands of potential buyers. It’s clear that Amazon Ads has provided us with a significant stimulus to grow our brand and company.quoteDown
– Richard Lacombe, Vice President of Sales, Ghost Controls