Flywheel Digital helps clients drive performance improvements through Amazon Marketing Stream (beta)
Flywheel Digital is a solution provider that offers proprietary technology tools to help advertisers automate and optimize Amazon Ads campaigns.
Managing campaigns intraday
As advertising becomes increasingly sophisticated, Flywheel Digital looked to drive deeper campaign optimizations, exploring concepts such as intraday bid optimizations. Some of their top manufacturer clients wanted to explore ways to optimize campaign budget and increase campaign performance. Flywheel Digital needed a solution to help them implement automated bid changes based on hourly performance, for greater performance and operational efficiency for their clients.
Before using Amazon Marketing Stream (beta), Flywheel Digital had implemented manual workarounds to activate intraday bidding for their clients. They would have to call the Amazon Ads API frequently to try to observe the delta between each hour’s performance. This was a proxy that didn’t really tell Flywheel Digital what happened between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., for example—just what the results were the last two times they pulled a report. This also presented a challenge with API throttling, because APIs aren’t meant to handle this use case.
Testing out a new solution: The Flywheel Digital approach
In April 2022, the agency began testing Amazon Marketing Stream (beta), a new Amazon Ads push-based messaging solution that provides them with the ability to analyze and model hourly campaign performance at the keyword and placement level.
Access to hourly performance reports helps Flywheel Digital automatically update their clients' campaigns programmatically in response to specific changes throughout the day, helping them improve campaign efficiency. Amazon Marketing Stream enables deeper campaign optimizations with access to more detailed insights not available through Amazon Ads console reporting. It provides reports that show cross-dimensional analytics such as Sponsored Products traffic and conversion metrics, at not only an hourly cadence, but also by keyword and various ad placements such as top of search and product detail page.
Flywheel Digital updated their automated solution to programmatically change bids every hour of every day based on insights available through Amazon Marketing Stream. Flywheel Digital starts by observing trends in cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, and traffic to find optimal hours for every keyword and in each placement. With this information, they create an optimal bid for each ASIN to shift spend throughout the day to help maximize sales. This custom hourly optimization can help achieve various key performance indicators (KPIs), depending on situation.
The results
With Amazon Marketing Stream, Flywheel Digital can easily understand changes in traffic, conversion, and cost throughout the day at both a macro and micro level. Starting with a high-level view of their advertisers’ campaigns, they have found that hourly performance outside of the early morning window (12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.) have lower costs, higher traffic and higher conversion rates. Further, Flywheel Digital has performed this analysis to inform a unique strategy with each keyword and ASIN receiving their own models. The agency tested performance results by comparing campaigns before and after the Amazon Marketing Stream bid optimization model was implemented into such campaigns. Three global manufacturer brands worked with Flywheel to be a part of this test.
“We are doing a performance recap for a large brand’s intraday bidding test. Looking at our test ASINs versus the control prior/post enabling Amazon Marketing Stream, spend is flat but sales and return on ad spend (ROAS) are up significantly. Also, this has been a time saver since we haven't had to adjust bids manually.”
— Rachel Cohen, Media Manager, Flywheel Digital
Flywheel Digital observed the following performance impacts on the campaigns of the three global manufacturer brands that implemented the Amazon Marketing Stream optimization model into their campaigns (in a comparison against their campaigns run before implementing Amazon Marketing Stream):
- 7% increase in clicks across all three advertisers' Sponsored Products campaigns1
- 24% increase in sales across all three advertisers’ Sponsored Products campaigns2
- 10% increase in ROAS across all three advertisers’ Sponsored Products campaigns3
“Amazon Marketing Stream has given us a brand new dimension of metrics for sponsored ads, shifting the paradigm for near-real-time ad management. It’s clear that Amazon Ads is listening to customers to build new capabilities to better support brands. Amazon Marketing Stream has unlocked higher quality, higher velocity decisions, creating a new higher standard for Amazon Ads management built on trust and results.”
— Gabe Fishbein, Director of Product, Flywheel Digital
Utilizing Amazon Marketing Stream has proved to help Flywheel Digital and their clients meet campaign goals, helping increase clicks, sales, and ROAS while keeping media spend consistent.
1-3 Data was provided by each of the three participating global manufacturer advertiser, US, 2022 - The research measured the performance impact of three global manufacturing brands’ Sponsored Products campaigns in a comparison between the campaigns prior to the implementation of Amazon Marketing Stream (March 8, 2022 - April 8, 2022) and post-implementation of Amazon Marketing Stream (April 8, 2022 - May 8, 2022).