Acorn-i helps Naturediet improve Amazon Ads and retail performance through rapid retail analytics

Naturediet sought help from Acorn-i to obtain faster access to retail analytics to help inform their advertising and marketing decisions. They were also looking for more detailed insights, such as retail metrics, broken down by hour of day. Until now, retail analytics (such as vendor sales or vendor inventory reports) have taken, on average, approximately 72 hours to obtain, and have only been available at a daily cadence.

Acorn-i had recently begun testing rapid retail analytics to offer advertisers deeper analysis on the impact Amazon Ads campaigns have on total retail sales, by hour of day, through their proprietary technology solution, Ignite.

Amazon Ads created rapid retail analytics to providing access to near real-time retail analytics, helping advertisers improve advertising efficiency and operational decisions. With rapid retail analytics, Amazon Ads is providing the last hour’s insights within minutes, enabling holistic optimization of Amazon Ads campaigns joined with retail performance metrics. For example, an advertiser can now understand the number of ordered units and ordered revenue for their ASINs summarized by the hour, such as 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., etc.

For Q1 2023, Acorn-i planned to use rapid retail analytics to help Naturediet understand on how audiences search, browse, and purchase products in Amazon’s store by hour of day. In addition, Acorn-i wanted to use this new information to help enhance their Ignite tool’s auto-optimization feature for Amazon Ads campaigns, helping Naturediet merge retail insights to campaign strategy, activation, and measurement decisions.

Naturediet advertisement example

With rapid retail analytics, Acorn-i’s Ignite application was able to surface hundreds of key performance indicators to their clients such as Naturediet, in near real time. This helped Naturediet better understand their hourly sales by ordered units, ordered revenue, and ASIN; their hourly traffic reports by detail page views and ASINs; and their hourly inventory status by highly available inventory units and ASINs. These insights helped Naturediet understand peak purchase hours of the day, ensuring their budgets and bid strategies were optimized accordingly. They could break down optimization strategies by ASINs and product type levels, optimizing each listing and product range by hour of day.

Additionally, by leveraging rapid retail analytics, Acorn-i’s Ignite tool was able to enhance automated strategies across the shopping journey. Naturediet was able to understand the difference between hours that generate glance views and those that generated sales. Ignite was able to configure automated awareness, purchase, and reengagement tactics to help Naturediet optimize by ad type, helping them improve their budget performance. These automations meant less time required for advertising test and learn during the campaign launch phase before delivering results, helping Naturediet reduce their campaign creation and setup time from around 10 hours with manual methods to less than one hour, through Ignite.

Rapid retail analytics has helped Acorn-i develop enhanced measurement, reporting, and optimization solutions for advertisers, resulting in improved operational efficiencies and performance uplifts. With this new information available, we can help advertisers make smarter decisions. We’re very excited to be able to work in close partnership with Amazon Ads to continue to develop cutting-edge solutions for our clients.

— Ross Caveille, co-founder, Acorn-i

In Q1 2023, Acorn-i was able to help Naturediet improve their Amazon Ads campaign efficiency and optimize performance outcomes for total retail sales. They observed a 27% increase in ROAS during the rapid retail analytics test period, compared to Q4 2022.¹ Additionally, they saw a considerable reduction in time spent creating campaign optimizations through Ignite tool optimizations informed by rapid retail analytics, reducing operational time spent by 90%.²

Naturediet now has a better understanding of when audiences purchase their products. For instance, their puppy food has a higher purchase rate from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., whereas wet dog-food sales occur more consistently during the day, with two purchase peaks in the late morning and early evening. Combining Amazon Ads and Amazon retail metrics through rapid retail analytics has allowed for reporting on total advertising cost of sales, down to the ASIN level, helping Naturediet ensure they’ve optimized their advertising strategies across all of their products.

Additionally, Naturediet is now able to better understand the halo impact Amazon Ads has on sales not attributed to advertising. They discovered that periods of increased Amazon Ads investment correlated to increases in non-advertising-attributed sales.