Essential factors for Amazon Marketing Strategy

The right Amazon strategy is critical to scaling your Business on the world’s fastest growing e-commerce channel where millions of active shoppers search and browse products. While it has become more competitive, there is more opportunity than ever to grow your business on Amazon. Here’s a look at Amazon strategy that accounts for the essential factors to drive your business growth on the Marketplace.

Amazon Operations – You can spend all the time and resources on your product listings, content and advertising – and still fall short if your operations aren’t in order. Your approach to operations will differ if you are a first-party vendor that sells products wholesale to Amazon, a third-party seller using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), or a third-party seller using an alternative fulfillment service. Regardless of your model, the objective remains the same: identify and minimize operational gaps that slow performance and cost money.

This becomes more important when you consider that all operational factors impact one another. Your inventory and order fulfillment impact your in-stock rate, which influences control of the Buy Box, which impacts your Sponsored Products Advertising, which in turn affects sales and your organic product rankings.

Amazon Creative Content – You can drive all the traffic in the world to your listings but if your creative content is lacking or not congruent with the rest of the brand’s assets across the web, you will lose out on visibility and sales. Amazon is making a concentrated effort to empower brands with the creative tools and features they need to establish their brand equity and promote shopper loyalty. Amazon currently offers a multitude of branding features including Amazon Stores, A+ Content, Premium A+ content and Enhanced Brand content.

Not only do these creative features help to improve the aesthetics of brands on the Marketplace but they also provide new opportunities to drive traffic to a brand’s entire catalog and increase detail page conversion rates. Building out your product pages and storefront can contribute to a seamless customer experience that resonates with shoppers across your website, social channels, and Amazon.

Amazon Advertising – Your operations are dialed in, your product pages and stores feature visually compelling creative, now it’s time to power up the advertising machine to get more eyeballs on your product listings and store pages.

The failure to leverage a comprehensive advertising strategy on Amazon significantly limits the ability of brands to reach customers. Because over 70% of Amazon shoppers do not click past the first page results. That means if your products aren’t displaying on page one, you have little chance of shoppers landing on your page. Even brands that have a strong organic ranking need a paid media strategy because, without it, they will fall behind in traffic, sales velocity and ranking. When it comes to generating paid traffic that powers your Amazon flywheel you have several options: Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, Sponsored Brands, and Amazon DSP.

Amazon Sponsored Products – These are pay-per-click ads based on keywords that drive traffic to a desired product detail page within the Amazon platform. SP is particularly important because you can create auto campaigns for keyword harvesting and manual campaigns for more granular targeting. These ads are great for driving traffic and showing up for important keywords that you otherwise wouldn’t display for on the first page organically.

Amazon Sponsored Brands – These are keyword-driven ads that can appear across the top of the SERP. In 2018, Amazon opened up Sponsored Brands to 3 new ad placements including the middle of the SERP and at the very bottom of the SERP. Sponsored Brands are great for driving awareness or branding around a particular keyword.

Amazon DSP – Formerly known as Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), the Amazon DSP is Amazon’s display offering that can be used to target Amazon audiences across webpages and apps that are connected to Amazon Display network. From home page banner placements to HTML offerings, Amazon DSP is a premium advertising offer available within Amazon vendor services.

One of the major perks of DSP advertising is the ability to leverage Amazon customer data to serve ads to past purchases and other shoppers likely to purchase your products on Amazon-owned network sites. Amazon DSP targeting spans the entire marketing funnel: lifestyle segments, in-market segments and retargeting segments – all based on Amazon’s first party shopper data.

Amazon is only going to grow more competitive, which is why it’s important to leverage on Amazon strategy that accounts for the main factors that drive success on the marketplace. These factors call for mastering your operational efficiency, creative content to build brand equity and tell your story, and Amazon advertising to drive visibility and traffic to your optimized listings.

Understanding Amazon Advertising Attribution

Amazon sales attribution is when Amazon assigns credit for a sale to a specific campaign. For example, when a user click on one of your ads and buys a product within a certain time period such as 7 or 14 days, the “sale” is attributed to your campaign. There are three different dashboards you can use to advertise on Amazon.

Seller Central – also known as 3P or the dashboard third party seller’s use.

Advertising Console – known as Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) or the dashboard vendors use (1P/first party sellers)

Amazon DSP – formerly, the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), run by the Amazon Media group (AMG). Amazon DSP is offered through AMG managed service. It is also available through select agency partners as a self-service tool or directly to top-tier, large budget advertisers.

Amazon tracks attribution differently depending on the platform you’re using.

Seller Central Attribution

Sponsored Product Campaigns – Sales attribution is measured on a 7-day click through attribution window. If a user clicks on an ad, comes back up to 7 days later, and buys one of your products from your brand Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign. Sales are attributed only to the last ad the user clicked.

Sponsored Brand Ad Campaigns (SBA) – Sales are measured on 14-day click-through window. Sales are attributed only to the last campaign the user clicked. SBA follows what Amazon calls “Brand Halo” sales attribution. This means that if the user clicks on your ad and buys any product with your brand name on it, not just a product featured in your SBA ad, Amazon will attribute the sale to that campaign.

“Brand Halo” gets very tricky. If you are a brand that has listings with different variants of your brand names, Amazon will attribute any sale from any of those brands, including sales made by anyone on Amazon who sells products under your brand.

Amazon Marketing Services – Attribution for the AMS differs from the Seller Central, even though many of the ad types are the same. Across the board, all the units in the AMS work on Amazon Brand Halo attribution whereas in Seller Central, only SB works on Brand Halo. Instead of a 7-day click attribution, AMS works on a 14 day click-through attribution.

Amazon DSP – There are a few different ways that Amazon attributes sales in the DSP platform, Amazon Display advertising platform. First, if you are advertising a product sold on Amazon, there are two types of reporting metrics or values to measure your return on ad spend: Product Sales and Total Sales.

Product Sales only tracks the ASIN you provide to Amazon for conversion tracking purposes. There is no Brand Halo attribution applied here. Amazon currently has to manually approve each list of ASINs you provide to them to verify they are indeed yours. The Product Sales metric is calculated on a 14-day view through attribution window. Viewable Impressions are based on the Media Rating Council Viewability standards. Only 50% of the display ad needs to be in view for one second or more for a sale to be attributed. Also, only 50% of a video ad needs to be in view for two seconds or more for a sale to be attributed. If user saw a DSP ad but then clicked on an SP ad, SP would take the credit for the sale, not DSP.

Total Sales tracks sales on the ASINs provided to Amazon for conversion tracking and all Brand Halo sales from the brand names included in the tracked ASINs list. If a brand gave a list of the ASINs with 10 different brand names, like the licensed brand, then total sales would be skewed because Amazon would attribute any sale from any of those brands in the list, even if you weren’t tracking those ASINs. Total sales are calculated on a 14-day view-through attribution window.

With Amazon DSP, you can also serve ads sending traffic OFF-Amazon. You can track the number of conversions attributed to the ad campaign but not the amount or type. The same 14-day attribution applies. It’s important to understand not just the numbers, but also the attribution behind the numbers so you can get a complete sense of how advertising is really performing to your specific goals.