Case Study
XPN and Skai help JLab optimize ad spend with AMC-based insights on keyword and product performance
Goals
- Gain insights to achieve greater visibility into organic retail signals
- Optimize ad spend
- Identify ideal products to promote to new-to-brand customers
- Identify the keywords driving incremental sales
Approach
- Adopted a holistic approach to tracking brand performance using AMC Flexible Shopping Insights
- Tracked the ratio of organic to paid traffic to product detail pages relative to total searches
- Focused their budget on promoting products most likely to attract new-to-brand customers
- Optimized branded keyword spend and reinvested the savings into upper funnel strategies
Results
- 30% savings on advertising budget
- 50% reduction in bids on highest spending branded keywords
In the crowded consumer technology category, customer expectations evolve quickly. Understanding the customer journey and increasing conversions often come down to gathering detailed information that reveals useful insights about where to allocate spending and focus advertising efforts.
JLab has sold their consumer electronics products on Amazon since 2014, but they wanted to grow their brand awareness and top-line sales. By collaborating with XPN, an Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) service and software provider, JLab gained insights from AMC that helped them achieve greater visibility into their organic retail signals and optimize their ad spend.
Exploring new ad strategies to boost brand awareness
JLab has used sponsored ads and Amazon DSP to achieve substantial global growth, and they wanted to further increase the reach of their advertising by exploring new ad strategies, including the use of Amazon Streaming TV (STV) ads.
The brand decided to create an AMC account to obtain more information about their customers. To help set up the account, in August 2022, they reengaged Amazon Ads advanced partner Skai, a leading omnichannel advertising platform that specializes in unique decisioning, activation, and optimization solutions across commerce media. Then, in early 2023, JLab began to work with XPN on using insights from AMC to enhance their advertising strategy.
Gaining visibility and optimizing for cost efficiency
XPN uses AMC to give advertisers insights into their customers’ online journeys and optimize their digital media strategies. By using AMC Flexible Shopping Insights, a subscription-based feature in AMC providing ad-attributed and non-attributed signals, XPN gained a more holistic perspective of JLab’s performance in their Brand Store. They helped JLab identify the ideal products to promote to new-to-brand (NTB) customers, maximizing customer lifetime value and minimizing customer acquisition cost.
AMC offers brands the opportunity to slice and dice their advertising and retail data to identify insights that lead to smart business decisions. At XPN, we unleash the potential of Amazon Marketing Cloud by making it easy for brands to access the insights they need at their fingertips.
- Michele Giliberti, CEO, XPN
Based on its use of AMC Flexible Shopping Insights, XPN also created the Brand Defense Budget Optimizer, a custom visualization for JLab that tracks the ratio between organic and paid traffic to the brand’s product detail pages relative to the total number of searches for a given set of keywords. This tool allowed JLab to identify the keywords that drove the most incremental sales. As a result, the brand was able to see how to adjust their ad spend to improve efficiency.
Brands often struggle to know how branded keyword spend is optimized. Flexible Shopping Insights in AMC and the advanced analytics tool developed by XPN provided us with the opportunity to build analytics in Skai’s platform to address that question.
- Kevin Weiss, vice president, retail media, Skai
Adjusting keyword spend to reduce costs while maintaining stable traffic
JLab implemented changes to their strategy based on the AMC insights they obtained through XPN’s solutions. In three months, they reduced the bid by 50% on their seven highest spending branded keywords, which saved their advertising budget 30% while maintaining stable traffic to product detail pages.1
Then they used Skai Bulksheets and Automated Actions to focus the budget on promoting the products most likely to attract NTB customers and optimizing bids automatically according to performance goals.
By working with Skai and XPN and using AMC, we optimized spending and freed up the budget to test Amazon DSP in our strategy. It’s an exciting opportunity for JLab, and we are inspired to explore additional avenues to reach high-potential prospects by using AMC insights.
- Andy Curtis, senior vice president, e-commerce, JLab
1 XPN, US, 2024