Case study
How VASTLAND is turning shoppers into longtime customers with Sponsored Display
VASTLAND is a small brand with big ideas. Founded by an outdoors enthusiast in 2018, the Japanese brand has a goal to reach 5 billion yen in sales by 2026. To do this, growing customer loyalty is key, says Junzo Nozu, a business manager at VASTLAND.
In 2023, the brand used sponsored ads, particularly the tactics and formats of Sponsored Display, to expand their advertising portfolio to reach two objectives: to help customers in Japan who already know the brand easily find what they need, and to deliver the right product information to customers who are not yet familiar with the brand.
Watch how VASTLAND turns shoppers into longtime customers with Sponsored Display
Starting with Sponsored Products to help with product discoverability
VASTLAND originally started advertising with Sponsored Products in 2018. They wanted to showcase a wide variety of camping equipment, like camping chairs and outdoor cooking supplies, that customers may be looking for. In the following years, they expanded to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display as they learned that each solution uniquely serves different placements and goals. Sponsored Brands helped the brand promote their Store and product listings, and Sponsored Display helped them engage interested customers at scale.
Enhancing reach and driving product education with Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display was “very important fuel for our growth,” Nozu says of VASTLAND’s advertising strategy. Its contextual targeting capability helped shoppers learn more about the brand’s products by linking shoppers to the product detail pages from the Amazon store and beyond. The brand also tried Sponsored Display audiences that uses Amazon shopping signals such as previous purchase behavior or interests to show ads in the Amazon store and third-party destinations. This helped them remarket their items or boost awareness. Video creative, which was the latest addition to their advertising mix, also accelerated their ability to communicate product benefits and features in real time.
“We find the video ad format that’s available with Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display very useful,” says Nozu. “For us, videos do a better job at communicating the appeal of camping equipment than still images.”
Doubling performance in the first half of 20231
The brand’s No. 1 tip to see the holistic, long-term benefit of using the different solutions is to look beyond the return on ad spend. According to Nozu, the brand evaluates which metrics to inform success for each campaign, based on its main objective. For example, with some of the brand’s awareness campaigns, they may set metrics like product page views or the number of new-to-brand (NTB) customers as more suitable success metrics than how efficiently they’ve run ads.
Since launching on Sponsored Display, the company saw roughly twice as many impressions, sales, and NTB orders attributed to the solution in the first half of 2023, compared to the same time period in 2022.1 VASTLAND’s growth continues, as they look at expanding their business to the U.S. in the future. “Amazon is an important place to meet customers, and using sponsored ads helps our customers purchase products that meet their needs,” Nozu says.
1 Advertiser-provided data, JP, Jan–June 2022 vs Jan–June 2023