Combining Amazon and non-Amazon media leads to over 100% growth for SmartyPants

Smartypants' scaled advertising strategy

Founded in 2011 by a group of concerned parents, SmartyPants aims to simplify health. The brand offers a range of vitamins and supplements that suits a variety of needs across age, life stage, and dietary requirements. SmartyPants launched on Amazon.com in April 2015.

To help grow their brand presence and drive sales on Amazon, SmartyPants advertised on Amazon Ads channels, using Amazon Ads display channels, including Sponsored Display. In 2019, to further scale their marketing, the brand decided to expand their efforts beyond Amazon Ads. The SmartyPants team hypothesized that reaching shoppers across non-Amazon channels, including paid search and social media, would help them broaden their reach and grow their business. To measure success, the brand registered for Amazon Attribution (beta), which would give them insight into how these non-Amazon campaigns impacted shopping activity and sales for their brand on Amazon.

SmartyPants’ non-Amazon marketing strategy

To help craft their non-Amazon marketing strategy, SmartyPants partnered with Quartile Digital, a pay-per-click advertising solution integrated with Amazon Attribution through the Amazon Advertising API. While Quartile historically focused on enabling brands and agencies to scale their Amazon Ads strategies, the tool provider has since expanded its offering to include non-Amazon channels. Quartile’s integration with Amazon Attribution has provided a scalable way for advertisers to implement Amazon Attribution measurement through their solution, analyze the on-Amazon impact of non-Amazon campaigns, and optimize accordingly.

"Until we began recommending Amazon Attribution measurement to our clients, there was no way for us to understand the value of traffic sources outside of Amazon. Amazon Attribution has given us the opportunity to expand our services and offer our clients a way to create truly full-funnel, multichannel marketing campaigns that help them achieve their business goals."

– Sylvio Lindenberg, Co-founder and CMO at Quartile

In partnership with SmartyPants, the Quartile team devised a strategy to help grow awareness of the brand and consideration for its products through a series of paid social and search ads. While their social ads would help introduce the brand to new audiences, the search ads would help SmartyPants engage shoppers actively researching vitamins—meeting them in the moment they are looking to purchase.

Once SmartyPants built the campaigns within Quartile’s platform, the team quickly and seamlessly set up Amazon Attribution measurement. Once the campaigns launched, they were able to view Amazon conversion reporting alongside their paid social and search reporting from within the same console they were using for campaign execution.

"Using Amazon Attribution through Quartile’s solution allows us to get a unified view of our non-Amazon advertising strategies. For the first time, we were able to view Facebook, Instagram, and Google engagement metrics alongside Amazon conversion and sales metrics. This comprehensive reporting has allowed us to create a truly full-funnel strategy—one that has led to over 100% sales growth for our brand on Amazon this year."

– Gordon Gould, co-CEO at SmartyPants

In terms of optimizing these campaigns, the brand was able to make adjustments at the ad set and ad level for their paid social ads and at the keyword level for paid search. Using its integration with the Amazon Attribution API, Quartile was then able to ingest the resulting Amazon performance metrics, and use Quartile’s algorithm to make informed auto-optimizations to both campaigns at the ad, ad group, and keyword levels based on predetermined efficiency goals.

SmartyPants’ Amazon Ads remarketing strategy

The Quartile team also launched Amazon Ads campaigns to run in parallel. As a remarketing strategy, the goal was to help SmartyPants continue engaging audiences that showed interest in their products and encouraging them to consider making a first or additional purchase.

To do this, the Quartile team set up Amazon Ads display campaigns, including Sponsored Display, to reach two specific audiences: 1) shoppers that had visited SmartyPants’ detail pages but had not purchased, and 2) customers that had previously purchased SmartyPants’ products on Amazon.

"In partnership with the Quartile team, we were able to create a full-funnel marketing strategy for the first time. Using non-Amazon channels, measured by Amazon Attribution, in combination with Amazon Ads channels, we are able to meet shoppers wherever they are in their journeys to help grow customer engagement and ultimately sales for our brand on Amazon."

– Gordon Gould, co-CEO at SmartyPants

The full-funnel results

Overall, SmartyPants’ cross-channel advertising strategy helped the brand achieve over 100% sales growth year over year by October 2020. Specifically, during the month of September 2020 when the strategy was launched, the brand experienced the following impact across the shopping funnel—from awareness to consideration to loyalty—as compared to the previous month.

  • Awareness: At the top of the funnel, the increased awareness due to its paid social campaigns helped drive 125% growth in new-to-brand orders for SmartyPants.
  • Consideration: Meanwhile, the brand’s paid search strategy helped grow consideration for SmartyPants’ products. Leveraging Quartile’s auto-optimization tool to focus spend toward the ads receiving the highest engagement, the brand was able to achieve a 1.6X ROAS (return on ad spend).
  • Loyalty: Finally, contributing to the year-over-year sales growth, the Amazon Ads remarketing campaigns lead to a 5% sales increase. Additionally, the campaign focus on reaching shoppers that had previously purchased from the brand helped drive a 268% increase in Subscribe & Saves.

By broadening its reach across non-Amazon marketing channels in addition to engaging customers across Amazon Ads channels, SmartyPants was able to not only engage new customers but also grow its base of loyal customers.

"The industry has been talking about cross-channel and full-funnel advertising strategies for a long time. But we’ve never had all the pieces to actually make this happen. Now, with Amazon Attribution integrated into Quartile’s solution, we’re not only able to offer our clients unified, quantifiable reporting for their non-Amazon and on-Amazon advertising campaigns, we’re also able to finally make holistic, full-funnel marketing for brands using our solution a reality."

– Sylvio Lindenberg, Co-founder and CMO at Quartile