Reckitt Benckiser uses sponsored ads to drive awareness and conversion

The company

Reckitt Benckiser (RB) is a global health, hygiene, and home company with many trusted brands in its portfolio, including Enfamil, Lysol, Finish, Veet, and more. To drive awareness and sales of these brands on Amazon, RB began launching in-house campaigns with sponsored ads in 2015. The company wanted to further optimize performance and scale their strategy, and turned to Performics—a leading performance marketing agency—to manage their campaigns later that year.

The challenge

Performics began with a $50K test for RB, which garnered favorable results and encouraged the brand to increase their sponsored ads investment. Following this test, Performics saw an opportunity to drive exposure of cold and flu brands during the winter months, helping RB achieve ROAS (return on ad spend) goals and boost awareness of their seasonal offering.

The solution: Partnership with Performics

Performics helped Reckitt Benckiser (RB) optimize their sponsored ads strategy with results-driven tactics: leveraging all ad types, maximizing their seasonal presence, and finding new, creative ways to surface complementary products to shoppers.

Performics cites RB’s willingness to test new campaign tactics as one of their chief success drivers. Leveraging insights from Amazon Retail Analytics Premium, RB shared that customers regularly shop Lysol and Finish together. Performics subsequently tested an upsell strategy for them—launching Sponsored Brands campaigns featuring copy referencing both brands, along with a custom landing page featuring products from their lineups. Performics saw strong ROAS (return on ad spend) for the campaigns and considered the test to be a success.

Performics also sees success with "overdriving" during key seasons: launching campaigns with top keywords and ancillary search terms and incorporating offers, including vendor-powered coupons, where applicable. They find this strategy works not only for established brands but for emerging brands as well. Amopé, for example, was a new brand in the foot care space with limited name recognition. Performics doubled down on their campaign strategy for Mother’s Day, Prime Day, and the holidays. The brand is now one of RB’s highest revenue drivers on Amazon.

In addition to these strategies, Performics helped drive results for RB with the following:

  • Launched Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to help maximize sales and exposure. For Product Display Ads,* the agency promoted RB’s top-priority products to gain traction in their categories.
  • Ensured maximum keyword coverage so that ads reached a wide, relevant audience.
  • Ran campaigns using automatic targeting to gather new keyword learnings. Earlier in the year, Performics helped scale under-pacing brands by launching campaigns with automatic targeting for all of their accounts. They let the campaigns run for several months and then applied the most successful incremental keywords to evergreen campaigns. This technique helped them effectively scale the brand while maintaining strong ROAS.
  • Driving Sponsored Brands campaigns to the RB Store for a branded, immersive experience.

The results

In the past two years, RB increased the number of brands promoted through sponsored ads campaigns from 10 to 25, and continues to add new brands regularly. They credit sponsored ads with enabling them to track sales and ROAS, which allows them to clearly see the direct impact of ads on their overall business. Just as importantly, RB finds that Amazon offers their brands the opportunity to become leaders in their categories. This allows them to gain new customers, retain existing customers, and grow their Amazon base, enhancing their presence on site.

*Product Display Ads audience and product targeting features are now accessed within Sponsored Display.

Highlights

  • Ad-attributed sales increased
    113% year over year
  • Ad-attributed units increased
    169% year over year
  • ROAS up 4% year over year