Silver Life achieves 2,000% ROAS with help from agency Itsumo

From October 2019, Silver Life began working with Itsumo, inc., an advertising agency that is well-versed in domestic selling online in the Japanese market and provides a range of services such as website and advertising strategy, campaign management, creation of video content, and more. Itsumo creates internal teams for each individual client wherein each member is an expert on business on Amazon, with Silver Life having a three-person team.

Since Silver Life did not have online retail experience, they were counting on Itsumo to not only run advertising campaigns that would improve monthly sales, impressions, and cost per click (CPC), but to also support their online commerce strategy for success in Amazon’s store.

Silver Life operated their own Amazon Ads advertising when they first started selling on Amazon, managing approximately 300 keywords in one campaign. It was a challenge to effectively run the campaign while providing in-depth analysis. Therefore, Itsumo proposed using bulksheets to manage their sponsored ads campaigns. In addition to improving the advertising cost of sales (ACOS), Itsumo devised a method to onboard new-to-brand customers as well as increasing sales with their existing customer base, plus using sales rankings to effectively measure success through Amazon Ads.

First, Itsumo split the campaign into different tactics in order to better understand ad performance. In the Sponsored Products campaign, they divided keyword targeting into non-branded, branded, and competitive keywords. They also used product targeting to boost ad placements visibility. In parallel with the classification of this campaign, Itsumo analyzed keyword performance and allocated ad spend to highly effective keywords to improve advertising efficiency.

Itsumo used Sponsored Products to help support sales since they could target specific products. They created campaigns for each audience, such as campaigns for shoppers who are buying products or discovering products they want on Amazon, and used the campaigns to discover new prospective customers. Also, Itsumo used Sponsored Brands to raise brand awareness, since the highly visible ad placements can reach wide audiences.

Along with that, Itsumo used Sponsored Brands new-to-brand metrics to measure effectiveness. They used banner images and text on Silver Life’s Store to relay the charm of the products and brand in a way that product pages alone cannot, which helped raise brand awareness and conversion rate. Since Stores can be used as a landing page from Sponsored Brands ads, Itsumo also used Stores to increase the effectiveness of Sponsored Brands. They used bulk operations to manage multiple ad campaigns, not only significantly reducing the time needed to adjust ads, but also for detailed analysis of campaigns, groups, and targeting. They used reporting to discovered other opportunities, such as the most commonly searched keyword not being used, or when an unexpected keyword ending up being in the top three for click share. Such insights led to a better understanding of areas of improvement for increasing sales.

Itsumo created a foundation for effective advertising management and has continued to improve by using measurement and analysis to understand the relevant audience for Silver Life. As a result, about one year later, in January 2021, the company achieved a 180% sales increase compared to October 2019.¹ The ACOS also improved from 17.4% to 14.9%.² Sponsored ads also improved their ACOS from 18.0% to 15.3%, while Sponsored Brands increased the new-to-brand customers sales ratio from 33% to 44%.³ They were able to acquire new-to-brand customers that they had not been able to reach through previous advertising operations, which not only improved advertising efficiency, but also increased sales.

Takuya Yamamoto, an associate from Itsumo said, “We need to consider advertising as a means for achieving advertiser's goals, and manage and operate strategically, not haphazardly run campaigns. I once again felt the importance of this through this initiative.”

In addition, Misaki Shiraiwa of Silver Life is using Itsumo’s video production service to further raise awareness of the company's “Magokoro Bento” brand.