Snack food manufacturer Barcel unlocks sales potential with Amazon Ads

The company

Barcel USA, a subsidiary of Mexico City-based Grupo Bimbo, is a manufacturer of packaged food products. The company produces a wide range of popular savory snacks, sweets, and nuts. One of Barcel’s most popular product lines in the US is Takis, rolled corn tortilla chips that come in a variety of spicy and tangy flavors. In December 2018, Barcel began selling on Amazon to build a new sales channel and drive demand of its snack products.

Before launching its new Panditas and Ricolino snack products on Amazon, Barcel decided to leverage the help of an agency focused on Amazon Ads. They wanted to test whether working with an agency would help accelerate its sales growth in the grocery and gourmet food categories. In March 2019, Barcel began working with Bobsled Marketing, a full-service agency that helps brands scale and drive sales growth on Amazon.

The challenge

With the goal of driving brand awareness and sales growth, Bobsled Marketing first turned its attention to ensuring Barcel’s product listings were retail ready. Using its own keyword research to understand which terms were most relevant to Barcel’s products, Bobsled Marketing made optimizations to the copy of each product detail page. Bobsled Marketing then built out entirely new product listings for the upcoming launches of new Barcel products on Amazon.

After making changes to Barcel’s product detail pages, Bobsled Marketing began building a Store to further tell its brand story. The Store would help provide a visual and engaging way for shoppers to engage with the brand and allow Barcel to have the freedom to capture the fun and vibrant personality of products like Takis.

Bobsled Marketing’s 3 tips for creating a Store to drive sales on Amazon:

  1. Developing a Store will help drive the performance of your Sponsored Brands campaigns. You can also tailor Store pages to match the product collection themes of different Sponsored Brands creatives.
  2. Your Store can be used as a landing page for all your online campaigns, which will help you garner insights about traffic and sales to help optimize your campaigns.
  3. The creative freedom of Stores allows you to illustrate your brand story, giving you the opportunity to express your brand’s personality to Amazon shoppers. It also provides a great way to support themed promotions and showcase new product launches.

With Barcel’s Amazon presence now completely retooled and retail ready, Bobsled Marketing began developing its Amazon Ads strategy to help deliver Barcel’s awareness and sales growth goals.

The solution

Bobsled Marketing used its extensive keyword research as a foundation along with product and automatic targeting for its first Sponsored Products campaigns. This prework allowed Barcel to drive sales almost immediately at launch. Bobsled analyzed the automatic targeting campaign performance each week to select and scale new keywords.

Next, Bobsled Marketing turned to Sponsored Brands to deliver on Barcel’s brand awareness goal and support its new product launches. Using the learnings from its own keyword research and Sponsored Products campaign performance, it was able to prioritize relevant keywords, deploying a testing methodology to improve campaign performance. Every 90 days, Bobsled Marketing would deliver a report and would try out different versions of the customizable headline copy and the products selected. It then secured alignment with Barcel on its next campaign tests and suggested budget allocations. This process allows Bobsled Marketing to create a constantly evolving performance-driven strategy for Barcel.

The key to Bobsled Marketing’s success is how it used reporting to continually help improve the performance of its Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns. Below are some examples of how it used the different Amazon Ads report options to inform its strategy:

  • Search term report (Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands): This report guides understanding of which shopping queries to add to manual targeting campaigns and which to add as negative keywords.
  • Targeting report (Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands): By combining the targeting report and search term report, Bobsled are able to get a deeper picture on how to optimize campaign parameters and tactics. It also allows them to see any inefficiency in terms of keyword duplication.
  • Placement report (Sponsored Products): Bobsled use the placement report to assess whether top of search placements are performing with a better ROI (return on investment). After analyzing, Bobsled can then make bid adjustments for each placement accordingly.
  • Advertised product report (Sponsored Products): Using the advertised product report, Bobsled can identify all instances where a promoted ASIN is driving the sale of a different ASIN. Bobsled can use these insights to revisit the keyword strategy for any campaigns featuring either ASIN.

The results

Bobsled Marketing’s work to improve Barcel’s Amazon presence through retail readiness optimizations and a diverse Amazon Ads strategy yielded strong results against the client goals.

As of October 2019, Barcel’s Mini Takis (Fuego Flavor) ranked within the top 10 Amazon Best Sellers for “Corn Chips & Crisps.” Its Amazon Ads campaigns helped the brand reach new audiences and engage shoppers, generating over 7MM impressions.