Jeremy Brown has been a Customer Engagement Manager in Marin Software London office since 2016, helping some of the world's largest brands meet and exceed their digital marketing and business goals. He delivers proven strategies and tactics to help them drive growth and maximize ROI. He has an extensive background in search advertising, shopping ads, and analytics, and holds professional certifications that span the PPC and SEO ecosystem.
The top-of-search position is prime real estate for Amazon advertisers. Brands can significantly increase their exposure to potential customers by securing this coveted placement with strategic use of Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand campaigns.
For example, check out Kitchen in the Box, who are dominating the top-of-search for terms like ‘handheld kitchen mixer’ and ‘wireless kitchen mixer’ with a sponsored brand ad at the top of the page immediately followed by multiple sponsored product ads. Nice!
Effective top-of-search dominance captures the interest of shoppers who are ready to make a purchase, driving higher click-through rates, conversions, and, ultimately, sales. Additionally, consistent top-of-search visibility reinforces brand recognition and trust, encouraging repeat purchases and customer loyalty.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to dominating the SERP for your key terms, broken out by campaign type.
Follow these steps to get your sponsored products ads in the top three placements on the search results page.
First, determine if you’d like to use automatic or manual targeting – or a combination of the two. When a campaign is set to automatic targeting, Amazon automatically matches your ads to relevant queries. With manual targeting, you’ll choose the keywords and products you wish to target with ads and set your bids. Manual targeting offers you more control over your campaigns, but automatic targeting is easier to set up. You can find more details on automatic vs. manual targeting here.
Here’s what to do next based on the type of targeting you choose.
With manual campaigns, you can target keywords, products, and categories. You can learn more about your targeting options here. Here are the changes you should make for each type of targeting:
Now that your sponsored products campaigns are optimized for top-of-search, let’s get your sponsored brand ads up to the top, too.
There are two main levers to pull here - optimizing your brand bidding strategies and optimizing your product collection ads. Here are the details for each.
Now that you understand the different levers to pull based on your campaign type and targeting settings, here are some tips for managing your budgets.
Here are some additional tips to increase your chances of dominating the top-of-search for Amazon Ads.
In a crowded marketplace like Amazon where search rankings and visibility heavily influence consumer behavior, dominating the top-of-search share makes a big difference. It transforms your brand from just another option to the preferred choice for many shoppers. This strategic positioning boosts immediate sales and builds a robust foundation for sustained growth and market leadership. These tips are all you need to gain that dominance, so go get it!
To learn more about how Marin can manage your Amazon bids for you and all our other great features for retail marketers, click here.
It’s important for brands to measure their digital marketing metrics, including comparing CPC vs vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions). CPC is based on the number of actual clicks the ad receives, while vCPM is based on the number of times an ad is viewed, regardless of whether shoppers click on it or not. Sponsored Display vCPM adheres to the MRC definition for an ad view: at least 50% of the ad should have been in the shopper’s view port for at least one second for it to be registered as a viewed impression.
CPC = Total Spend / Total Clicks
vCPM = Total Spend / ((Total impressions * % in-view) / 1000)
vCPM is often used for advertisers focusing on brand awareness or delivering a specific message, because this pricing model is more focused on exposure as opposed to a cost-per-click model.
In Marin, brands can use both metrics, considering the implications of each, for a more comprehensive view of the performance of their ad campaigns. This information will help advertisers better understand the impact of their Sponsored Display campaigns, regardless of whether you are using click-based (CPC) or view-based (vCPM) attribution.
Conversions and Revenue for Sponsored Display vCPM campaigns are an ESTIMATED value that is attributed to BOTH viewable impressions AND clicks (because the cost type is based on viewable impressions - vCPM). To put it simply, alongside the actual Conversions and Revenue generated via the vCPM campaign, Amazon is also including estimated Conversions and Revenue when someone VIEWs your Sponsored Display Ad, but does not click on it.
It's also worth noting that the vCPM Conversions and Revenue are attributed to your brand sales and not the products in the campaign. For example if you run an 'Advertised Product Report' from Amazon you'll notice that the orders and sales do not match what is being displayed in Amazon's UI at campaign level. See below screenshot from a Sponsored Display Advertised Product Report:
Example
Campaign C generated 8 orders with a total revenue of £112.96 and to identify the estimated view Orders and Revenue, you subtract the (Click) column away from the regular column;
207 [14 Day Total Orders (#)] - 8 [14-Day Total Orders (#) - (Click)] = 199 estimated ‘view’ Orders
£2,564.39 [14 Day Total Sales] - £112.96 [14-Day Total Sales - (Click)] = £2,451.43 estimated ‘view’ Sales
Regardless of the cost type that you specify when creating your Sponsored Display Campaign (CPC or vCPM), Marin is able to report on both attribution models against that campaign.
For example, if you create a Sponsored Display campaign with vCPM as the Cost Type, Marin is still able to show you the Conversions and Revenue generated from the ad being clicked on (CPC Cost Type), alongside the ‘estimated’ view Conversions and Revenue (vCPM Cost Type) that Amazon is providing, and vice-versa.
In the screenshot above you can see that, regardless of cost type, for a Sponsored Display campaign Marin is able to report on both traditional Conversions and Revenue (click based) and also the ‘view’ Conversions and Revenue - which is the combination of both actual and estimated Conversions and Revenue set by Amazon.
The table below shows the Conversion Types available via the MarinOne column selector that you can bring into view alongside your Sponsored Display campaigns.
The decision is entirely yours. In Marin you have the option to either bid based upon actual clicked Conversions and Revenue or use the estimated ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue to target a CPA or ROAS goal - regardless of the cost model you’ve chosen to set up for your Sponsored Display campaign.
If your goal is performance (CPA / ROAS) Marin’s recommendation is to optimise towards actual clicked Conversion and Revenue and not ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue (even if your campaign is set to vCPM) because this is the actual performance of your Sponsored Display campaign and not an ‘estimated’ number of Conversions or Revenue.
If you've used Marin's automated bidding tool to manage Bid Strategies for other publishers, then managing bids for Amazon Advertising accounts should be pretty familiar. Marin manages keyword-level and target-level calculated bids and supports all ‘performance’ Goals for your Amazon activity:
If your goal is awareness advertisers and registered sellers in CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, IN, JP, UAE, UK and the US can set up an “Optimise for Viewable Impressions” strategy directly in the Amazon Ads UI to help create product awareness.
If you have any further questions related to the above please reach out to your Account Representative.
In 2021, more than 250 million items were purchased by Prime members worldwide over the two-day timeframe. This year, preparations for Prime Day should be well underway by now so that your brand can be ready when millions of consumers shop during one of the most significant retail events of the year. Here are a few tips so you can be prepared ahead of time.
Keep the following deadlines in mind for Prime Day as they are right around the corner, and some have already passed.
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Google Sheets has changed the way people collaborate today. This web-based spreadsheet tool serves as a free alternative to Microsoft Excel, the digital marketer’s mainstay. Sheets allows you to create and edit your data within an online spreadsheet. Your spreadsheets in the cloud, meaning your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for your data so that you can analyse and interrogate your data for your reporting needs.
If you’re wanting to maximize Google Sheets’ potential and enhance your productivity, then you must get acquainted with Google Sheets. It's definitely a learning curve, especially if you’re used to using Excel, but once you start using Google Sheets to its potential you’ll quickly see it’s worth your time and effort.
Google Apps Scripts is a built-in coding language based on JavaScript that allows you to extend and manipulate Google Sheets (it also works with other Google Apps, like Docs, and Gmail). We have found Google Sheets to be a great tool for prototyping new features or extending the capabilities of MarinOne to meet specific customer requirements.
Marin has been able to help some of the largest brands in the world automate the management of their marketing campaigns directly from Google Sheets as well as build dynamic reporting dashboards in Google Sheets using multiple Publishers (i.e. Google, Facebook, Bing, ASA etc) and 1st / 3rd Party revenue and conversion data captured by Marin. Below are some of the Google Apps Scripts and solutions we have created to help support our customers’ day-to-day workflows. With these shortcuts, you can easily aggregate data in new ways. This is particularly effective when partnered with the MarinOne tool, as there is quite a bit of data that can be directly imported into, exported from, or copy/pasted bi-directionally between Google Sheets and MarinOne.
As a marketer, it can be very time-consuming to add objects (such as keywords or creatives) to multiple different publishers at the same time in a collaborative manner. Think of Google sheets as all of your offline publisher editors rolled into one with a direct connection to our platform, negating the need for using multiple siloed tools such as Google Ads editor, Bing editor etc. Using a Marin - Google Apps Script, you can create or edit hundreds -- or even thousands -- of campaigns, groups, keywords, or ads with just a single click of a button directly in Google Sheets for multiple different publishers at the same time.
When a search query pairs with multiple keyword match types, and there are various ads supporting these keywords, the flow of regular traffic for the original search term will markedly diminish as your control over the matched keyword behaviour becomes severely hampered. Using a combination of data imported into Google Sheets directly from MarinOne and a Google Apps Script we have created to analyse the data, we can quickly surface those keywords that are cannibalizing your search paid media traffic.
If you are planning to expand your marketing activity to additional markets or regions across the globe and do not have the support internally with creating foriegn language adcopy, fear not, we have a Google Apps Script that will take your current AdCopy and create new Ads in the language of your choice.
There’s the obvious reason that using Google Apps Scripts can save you a serious amount of time, allowing you and your colleagues to focus on higher value activities such as optimising your marketing campaigns. But there’s plenty of other less obvious reasons like:
Once you've recorded a macro or created your Google Apps Script, you can link it to a keyboard shortcut in the form Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Number or even create a button directly within the spreadsheet to execute the task.
These are just a few of the solutions we have created, there are many other ways to save time and increase efficiency using the MarinOne tool in conjunction with other easily accessible tools. if you are an existing customer of Marin and are interested in the above or have other mundane tasks that you would like us to support in automating within Google Sheets then reach out to your account manager today.
If you're new to Marin, contact our sales team to get an analysis of how our platform can fit your needs.
It’s that time again. Over the past few years - typically around mid-July - Amazon has launched Prime Day for its Prime members to shop new deals and discounts. Although last year’s shopping event was delayed to October due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Amazon’s first quarter results call, the company announced that Prime Day will “take place later in the second quarter” of 2021, which means we’re likely to see Prime Day hit sometime in June.
The Prime Day page is up and reads “Prime Day is coming,” although as of this publication no “official” announcement has been made to confirm when Prime Day will actually take place in Q2. However, as the last shipping cut-off date and FBA inventory cut-off date is June 13th (shown below), we’re betting that Prime Day will take place sometime between June 14th and 27th.
According to Amazon’s press release, and SimilarWeb’s research, Prime Day 2020 was a record-breaking event worldwide with an increase in sales of nearly 60% from the prior year and amazing deals across a variety of categories from small businesses to top brands. Some of the key takeaways from 2020 Prime Day are shown below:
These results represent a staggering growth opportunity for any retail company. So if the numbers above aren’t enough to persuade you to take part in Prime Day 2021, bringing with it the potential to reach a colossal number of shoppers, then what will?
Although Prime Day is officially a one- to two-day event, retailers should consider the lead up to the event and also the period after to be just as important. You should consider separating your activity into three phases: before, during and after.
MAY 20 - JUNE 13: Inbound shipping cutoff for vendors. Deal inventory must be in transit:
MAY 28 - Deadline to submit coupons in the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Australia.
MAY 30 - JUNE 13: FBA inventory cut-off date for sellers. Make sure your shipments arrive at Amazon well in advance of key shopping dates. Inventory should arrive at Amazon’s fulfillment centers by this date to ensure your products are available for customers during Prime Day:
In part two of our Amazon Prime Day 2021 blog series, we’ll go into greater detail about our recommendations and techniques to boost your Prime Day performance with key strategies to maximize returns.
In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more, click here to connect with a sales representative or, if you’re an existing Marin Software customer, reach out to your Marin Customer Success Manager for additional information.
Apple’s latest iOS update has now launched and users are now updating their software to version 14.5.
Apple has also announced dates for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which should include announcements for iOS 15, and will take place from June 7th through 11th.
Starting with iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5, you’ll be required to ask users for their permission to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies. Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device’s advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you will not be able to track them.
When a user opens an app, such as Facebook, they will be asked whether they consent to having their activity tracked across apps and websites they use, which if they decline will have an impact on businesses being able to monetize through ads. Given Facebook’s heavy dependence on app advertising, this will negatively impact their Audience Network, resulting in the loss of accurately targeting and measuring campaigns and making it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audiences. According to Facebook, when testing using constrained delivery, more than a 50% drop in revenue occurred when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns.
Ultimately, despite their best efforts, Facebook and other apps have no choice in the matter but to comply with Apple’s new rules and regulations or otherwise have their apps blocked on the Apple App Store.
Apple announced back in February that in early spring 2021, they would add support for Private Click Measurement (PCM) for iOS and iPadOS apps, in addition to websites. Developed by Apple’s browser engine WebKit to support measurement of online advertising, PCM will allow you to measure the effectiveness of advertisement clicks within iOS or iPadOS apps that navigate to a website. According to Apple, “This information can be used to understand which advertisements drive conversions (such as purchases or signups) — while maintaining user privacy”.
While this is a step in the right direction toward heightened privacy, we’re yet to see how this will impact customers and whether PCM is viable in the long run. PCM attribution reports will contain limited data in addition to being delayed randomly between 24- and 48-hours to disassociate events in time. This change is very interesting for Safari users, but other browsers such as Chrome, Firefox or Edge would need to implement PCM for it to become a web standard. What is promising, however, is that WebKit states “We are working with them to get there” so who knows, maybe sometime in the future PCM will become “the norm” to measure advertising.
Make sure that your measurement system is using a first-party approach and, if possible, combat conversion attribution restrictions further using a server-to-server approach.
As mentioned in our earlier blog post about browser cookies, for advertisers relying on third party cookies for ad targeting, you should look to diversify your ad buys to account for potential lost opportunities as these options go away.
For Marin customers, you can leverage our cross-channel conversion tracking pixel – Marin Attribution – which complies with GDPR and CCPA regulations and meets Apple iOS requirements. Our proprietary Marin Attribution dashboards include de-duplicated, click-based conversions with transaction IDs for an unlimited amount of conversion events. As advertisers prepare to sunset ad tracking via cookies, Marin is doubling down on our privacy-first ad tracking and measurement solutions.
Check out our latest Marin Attribution overview, which showcases our solution to privacy-safe measurement for a post-cookie world, the challenges that marketers face, and how using Marin Attribution can combat these obstacles.
If you are a Marin Social customer and have questions about the impact of the iOS 14 updates, read our blog post on the Five Fundamental Changes After the Apple’s iOS 14 Release or, alternatively, reach out to your Marin Customer Success Manager for more information.
Sponsored Brands video is a relatively new ad format from Amazon that can display an eye-catching video alongside the ad on the Home Page, Detail Page and Search Results Page on Amazon, across desktop, mobile and tablet devices. What’s great is that these ads will automatically play when the video is at least 50% visible on screen then pause if the video is scrolled out of view.
Sponsored Brands video ads include the advertiser’s brand logo, a text headline, and a call-to-action link alongside the video player as default and do not require creative design support from Amazon Advertising. Plus, thanks to the standardized mute function, the annoyance level of Sponsored Brands video ads is very low.
The product image and associated information (title, price, review count, star rating and Prime eligibility) are automatically displayed, so the only step to be taken is having the video content created for the brand or product in question. However, once the video is available, the process is simple and the ad can be created in a matter of minutes. As with any video ad, certain guidelines must be met, which can be found on Amazon’s website here.
Ask yourself the following questions;
If you answered yes to any or all of the above then it's a no-brainer--you should unquestionably take advantage of this valuable opportunity to increase your exposure on Amazon.
Marin is here to support our eCommerce customers in any way possible. Amazon Sponsored Brands video is just one of the many ad types supported in MarinOne, giving our customers the opportunity to use our award winning, robust AI-powered bidding solution for Amazon video ads. Below are some additional advantages of using Marin to manage your Amazon sponsored ads:
To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Brands video and beyond, reach out to your Marin Customer Success Manager or click here to schedule a conversation.
We recently wrote a blog on The Power of Web Queries, a type of scheduled report in MarinOne that is hosted on a URL and automatically updated with the most recent data. These are fully customizable reports, right down to the date range, activity type and even how often the data is refreshed.
The flexible nature of Web Queries means that marketers can automatically import their data directly into Microsoft Excel instead of having to manually download their data and then import into Excel, saving you endless hours of time spent generating reports manually. You can even create dashboards and templates in Excel, which get updated with the most recent data at the click of a button.
Since our earlier blog post, we’ve made further enhancements to our Web Query reporting capabilities to not only allow data to be automatically imported into Excel, but now into Google Sheets too.
You’re probably asking why use Google Sheets? What’s the benefit? Well, here’s a few…
Once you’ve generated your Web Query report from MarinOne, copy the URL and open up a Google Sheet then follow the steps below.
Click into a cell and type =IMPORTHTML(
The syntax format is =IMPORTHTML("url", "query", index)
Your formula should look like the example below. Make sure that each syntax is separated with a comma.
=importhtml("https://one.marinsoftware.com","table",3)
Google will now automatically refresh the data on an hourly cadence, so you can be sure that the most recent data is up-to-date - There’s no need to manually refresh like you have to in Excel
Why not give it a try and enhance your workflow with our latest update? And if you haven’t already, check our earlier blog on Web Query reports: The Power of Web Queries.
One of the biggest online retail events of the year is looming on the horizon and fast approaching. Amazon Prime Day 2019 will be the fifth annual event, taking place July 15th and 16th.
Amazon introduced Prime Day back in 2015 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding. It was a one-off sales event offering more deals than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.
Prime Day 2018 may have only lasted a day (and a half), but it was Amazon’s biggest shopping event in its history—sales surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Prime Day 2017 over a 36-hour period. Retailers offered over a million deals worldwide and sold over 100 million products. For any retail company, that’s a staggering growth opportunity.
Prime Day 2019 holds the potential for you to reach a colossal number of shoppers and drive incremental revenue.
Here’s what you need to know to advertise on Amazon.
Advertising on Amazon can be an easy way to promote your listings and get your products noticed when people are shopping for similar items. There are two advertising solutions: Sponsored Products for promoting individual listings, and Sponsored Brands for registered brand owners to promote their brand and product portfolio. These solutions can give your products a visibility boost and maximize sales by bringing those products to a new audience.
Sponsored Products
Amazon Sponsored Products ads are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad (pay-per-click). Keywords trigger the ads, and they also drive the consumer to a product detail page within Amazon. The ads can be displayed on top of, alongside, or within search results and on product pages, and can appear on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Products ads can help you grow sales on Amazon by reaching consumers searching for products like yours and driving them to your product page. This ad type can increase eligibility and placement status for your top Buy Box offers, and help grow your new and low-exposure ASINs.
Sponsored Brands
As with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands are a type of paid advertising where you’re only charged when a consumer clicks your ad. Note that this ad type is only available for professional sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, booksellers, and agencies. You can display your ads at the top of, alongside, or within search results, on both desktop and mobile.
Sponsored Brands ads can help drive discovery of your brand. They're great for generating awareness of a new product, promoting seasonal items, or creating more demand for a bestseller. They also allow you to drive consumers to your Store page, custom URL, or a bestselling product page.
Are you selling products online either via your own website or a third party? If the answer is yes, then Amazon Advertising is a must!
If you’re reluctant, start small. Only sell your top selling product(s) online, and then once you see the value, begin to increase your Amazon inventory. If you need additional help, then a third-party ad management platform like Marin is the solution for you.
We may be biased, but Marin was able to increase exposure by 79% for Buyagift (a leading provider of gift experiences in the UK) by optimizing bids with our leading ad management platform. We were also able to increase click volume by 36%, with a 7.4% lower cost-per-click than before. This grew awareness and engagement, and ultimately helped Buyagift boost revenue on Amazon by 17%. See the Amazon case study for more information.
Take a leap of faith and reap the rewards this Amazon Prime Day!
