BBE partners with AME Sleepwear on a successful Sponsored Products strategy
AME Sleepwear (AME) is a manufacturer in kids’ and adults’ character licensed sleepwear and a 10+ year vendor in the Amazon store. They began looking for a partner to support them with an advertising strategy to help increase sales during priority events for sleepwear throughout the year—like seasonal items and new product releases. AME needed to keep a healthy level of inventory across 100K+ ASINs.
AME partnered Buy Box Experts (BBE), an agency that provides consulting, advertising, content creation, and channel management services for brands selling in the Amazon store. BBE helps brands grow in Amazon stores in the US and internationally; their team of experts in the field leverage proprietary technology to help analyze and optimize brand strategy for advertisers with large product offerings.
Getting started
In August 2021, AME began working with BBE to reach their goals, with a key goal: drive 50% revenue growth during Q4 2021.
BBE conducted robust research into the sleepwear category to identify key growth areas for AME. By analyzing reports from the previous year, BBE was able to review past trends and compare them to current trends to determine a best course of action for their 2021 strategy.
Next, BBE began building out their ASIN strategy for AME. Some of the key actions they took were :
- Starting with AME’s ASIN list: BBE began with AME’s pre-selected ASIN list, which AME considered based on variables like inventory allocation, new releases, and seasonal products.
- Cross-referencing the vendor list against sales velocity and past successes: BBE then looked at the last 6-12 months to find the products with the highest sales velocity and products that historically did well with Sponsored Products campaigns. This helped identify ASINs with strong sales potential.
- Promoting profitable ASINs: BBE identified AME ASINs with higher sales prices to help drive a higher return on ad spend (ROAS) during their Q4 campaign.
- Utilizing Amazon tools to analyze and apply learnings: BBE continually identified new ASINs to advertise in Q4 through the use of key Amazon tools, like “the Market Basket report ” within Brand Analytics, Amazon suggested ASINs, and AME’s “Search Term report”.
Choosing Sponsored Products
BBE chose to narrow in on a large Sponsored Products campaign because Sponsored Products allowed them the opportunity for increased visibility on a wide variety of shopping queries, and to expand overall exposure for AME. While BBE’s main ad spend was focused on Sponsored Products, they also launched Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands video, and Sponsored Display campaigns to support traffic coming from well-performing keywords. BBE shared some key strategies they executed while building out their Sponsored Products campaigns:
Working backwards: BBE looked at where in the sleepwear category AME sleepwear did not have a strong presence. BBE then focused on those specific keywords for a campaign to encourage new-to-brand sales.
Product targeting in key moments: BBE was aware that during tentpole moments, like the Q4 holiday events, similar brands run out of inventory, and took that opportunity to promote AME sleepwear products for added visibility and to help drive sales growth.
Retail ready, always: Before focusing on a product to advertise, BBE worked to try and ensure a great customer experience. BBE considers a product optimized and ready for promotion when the description copy has been reviewed, imagery on the product detail page is high-res with A+ content, there is a healthy level of inventory, and the cataloguing of products is optimized and organized for shoppers.
A keyword targeting method: BBE used four different types of Sponsored Products keyword targeting when creating their Sponsored Products campaigns, starting with automatic, branded, and catalog keyword targeting. Throughout Q4, BBE evaluated which automated keywords were most successful and then created manual campaigns using the keywords to optimize reach. Once the manual campaigns were launched, BBE would switch the automatic campaigns to negatively target those same keywords.
Analyze and optimize for success: To understand how their targeted keywords were performing, BBE leaned on Amazon Ads’ reporting tools like “Top of Search reports” and Search Term Query Dashboard to monitor campaigns in-flight. The ability to use ASIN-level metrics derived from the Search Term Query dashboard allowed BBE to adjust keyword targeting and bids to optimize performance. BBE also utilized specific metrics to analyze campaign performance—cost per click (CPC) and click-through rate (CTR)—to view relevancy and conversation rate to indicate if product detail pages needed to be adjusted.
A great Q4
Generating a sponsored ads campaign with a Sponsored Products strategy, that advertised key ASINs, was part of an overall strategy that helped BBE, to ultimately surpass AME’s Q4 target of a 50% revenue increase.
Following that Sponsored Products Campaign, AME observed an 82% increase in revenue and a 64% increase in unit orders compared to the previous year.1
“Nothing replaces market research and understanding the demand in a category. Implementing a strategy with highly relevant keyword targeting strategy, bolstered by the brand’s unique value proposition, allowed us to find further success in Q4.”
— Liz Adamson VP Advertising
1 Advertiser-provided data, United States, 2022