AEG’s new Q4 strategy leads to success

AEG is a global appliance company that sells a wide range of products, including refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, and other home appliances. In June 2018, AEG hired a German agency, factor-a, to manage AEG’s Amazon Ads campaigns in Germany. Their focus was on helping develop and improve their sponsored ads campaigns to help maximize visibility and drive sales of the brand’s hero products.

Initial strategy

factor-a started with a strategy that focused on promoting AEG’s hero products (such as its line of small refrigerators or front-loading washers), grouping similar products together into campaigns and using all three sponsored ads products.

quoteUpWe use all three ad types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Product Display Ads*) to provide the perfect mix of different types of ads and to improve the performance of our campaigns. Generally, Sponsored Products have been great for driving sales, Sponsored Brands is great for brand building, and Product Display Ads for upselling/cross-selling products on AEG’s product detail pages.quoteDown
– Marc Aufzug, CEO, factor-a

Although AEG found success with these campaigns—increasing total sales attributed to advertising by 112% in 2018 compared to 2017—in Q4, factor-a decided to modify its strategy in preparation for the increase in holiday traffic on Amazon.de.

Q4 strategy

factor-a knew using all both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands would allow AEG to reach more relevant customers throughout the sales journey.

As the holiday season started, factor-a increased both bids and budgets across the campaigns, working with AEG to define reasonable increases for each of the product lines and focusing on the top-performing campaigns.

In order to set up each of the initial campaigns, factor-a used Sponsored Products automatic targeting campaigns and Sponsored Brands suggested keywords to generate a targeted keyword list. After months of testing and finding success using the downloadable reports for search terms and ASINs, factor-a doubled the bid values for keywords with the highest number of impressions or sales to try to capture additional impressions and clicks on ads. For the rest of the keywords, factor-a used its proprietary software to automatically adjust bids based on an ACOS (advertising cost of sales) goal it set for each keyword.

Knowing there would be even more traffic on the two days leading up to Black Friday, factor-a looked at the top-performing keywords and increased the bids. After Cyber Monday, factor-a lowered the bids again to the previous holiday levels through the end of the year.

Throughout the season, factor-a guided AEG with these top three tips:

  1. Define goals for each product range.
  2. Use all ad types of sponsored ads to maximize the visibility of your products.
  3. Optimize your bids and budgets to help increase visibility with potential new traffic.
quoteUpWe recommend sponsored ads to any advertiser because they enabled us to easily reach the relevant audiences. The service enables you to analyze insights about how customers find your products through search term performance while also delivering a positive ROI.quoteDown
– Heidi Zucker, Trade Marketing and Consumer Activation Manager, AEG

Results

From October 2018 to December 2018, AEG saw a 35% increase in sales attributed to advertising and a 40% increase in impressions compared to Q3 2018. With a 5% ACOS in Q4, factor-a was able to increase both AEG’s visibility and sales with a great ROI (return on investment). Adopting factor-a’s always-on strategy to drive sales throughout the year with the help of sponsored ads, AEG has continued advertising in January with lower overall bids and budgets compared to the holiday season.

*Product Display Ads audience and product targeting features are now accessed within Sponsored Display.