Pathfinder Bulletin - May Recap 2022
AMZ Pathfinder
We help great brands scale with Amazon advertising | Amazon PPC Management | Amazon DSP Services | Amazon Store Builder
Hello all, sending the Bulletin a week late this month as I was on holiday for a spell and playing catchup all last week. Won’t happen again, I swear???
Fresh Amazon Info??
When it comes to TikTok advertising for eCommerce, Lazar ?epini? from Sellers Alley has the insight as they run a multi-million dollar ad agency specializing in TikTok ads.
This episode talks about the pitfalls, strategies, and insight into the new wild-west in social media advertising that you’ll encounter as an Amazon Seller, Brand Owner, or Media Buyer.
Every stage of the marketing funnel will always require different actions and approaches, which is why brands need to be specific about planning before launching ad campaigns.
If you’re interested in implementing Amazon DSP in your advertising strategy, see how we utilize what Amazon calls "eCommerce Creatives" to help our DSP clients achieve scale and brand awareness with best practices that keep Amazon happy as well.
Continuing with our Amazon DSP content for this month, we take a look at what Amazon DSP does differently when it comes to audience/shopper targeting.
When done correctly, we are able to target shoppers off Amazon and bring them back to convert. We take a deep dive into Amazon DSP’s targeting options and the best practices involved in our services.
Looking for results that come from using Amazon DSP? This case study shows how our Amazon DSP team performed for Viter Energy, a CPG brand looking to boost new customer acquisition and repeat business.
If you were ever curious about how we manage an Amazon DSP account, this is a great inside look into our methodology, understanding a client’s goal, and executing with outstanding results.
We hope you get to learn more about Amazon DSP and the capabilities it brings to your business.
We hope you aren’t blowing your budget on making Hollywood-quality videos for Sponsored Brand Video campaigns because the data tells us that only a handful of shoppers watch the whole video, but does it really matter?
In this episode of the PPC Den Podcast, I join Mike to break down the impact your Amazon Sponsored Brand Video campaigns are making and what lessons we can take away from the data related to actual view metrics.
Amazon News???
Only if you live truly off the grid have you not heard the news. A week earlier than I bet on but I think Amazon did a great job of telegraphing roughly when Prime would be this year to gave us all time to prepare. It’s been a real guessing game the past few years.
Now, what will this Prime Day 2022 be like??I predict it will be more subdued compared to the last few years with many factors eroding brands profitability: fuel surcharges and fee hikes, volatile supply chain and labor costs, the looming spectre of inflation and a recession in at least the US market.
Many sellers have had to either accept slimmer margins or simply raise prices to compensate, but raising prices is a pretty big deal for an established brand and can certainly have some negative side effects.
I don’t expect promos and deals to be as aggressive, and hearing from our clients that some are planning a smaller ad spend $ outlay during the big days. Depending on the product type and CLTV it still may make sense to lose money on the first sale and acquire a customer for the long term. These are calculations each brand has to work out themselves.
Can you believe it's been nearly a year already??That went by quickly. It seems that Jassy brings more of a dollars and cents business mindset to the Amazon CEO position vs a customer-centric focus that Bezos long stood for. Think of less huge investments in projects with no clear benefit to the company bottom line and more incremental improvements in existing lines of business.
A clear example we have first hand experience with is Amazon Advertising as a platform maturing to the point where it represents a notable % of Amazon’s overall revenue and they are finally taking it seriously.
This is not a bad thing for us on the agency side but I do worry the pendulum will swing too far in one directly (too many ads) before there is a opposite reaction that sees ads on the platform find a happy medium. I believe we are going through this process right now.
The flipside is that Amazon seems to be more communicative and willing to share some of the "why" behind their decision making and initiatives, something the article highlights and I agree with.
One other result of Jassy’s management is being more accommodating towards Wall Street who historically Amazon has not been too concerned with. This video from Bloomberg illustrates this point well:?https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-06-03/what-amazon-s-stock-split-means-for-investors-video
领英推荐
Unboxed is back after an unceremonious cancellation last year due to COVID concerns. I and at least two Pathfinders will be in attendance and are very excited to see what Amazon can do when they go all-out organizing an event in one of the best cities in the world. Please let us know if you’ll be attending so we can meetup.?
The chance to pose questions to Amazon Advertising team members in person is not one I’ll miss (how they answer is of course another matter entirely!) I’ll admit to suffering from FOMO right now as I’m not at the Cannes Lions event just down the coast here in France https://canneslions-amazonadvertising.com/ so we’ll have to make up for it in NYC.
Amazon continues to innovate with fulfillment even after all these years. This program would see packages delivered to small local businesses who then do the final fulfillment step within a certain radius of their business location.
Something kind of similar is common here in France which are small local businesses that act as shipping delivery points.
For example, I often have things shipped to the same store that I go and buy food in bulk. I trust the store owner and its a short walk for me to go pickup my package. No hassle with the courier finding my address, me not being there to take delivery etc. They make a small amount on each pickup.
The difference here is that the United States has such large distances to cover that the local business coming to you in that last leg of the trip makes all the difference.
They are also more likely to know you or at least have a much better idea of where you live if its somewhere rural and hard to find. If they can price this correctly and make it worth the time and labor for small local businesses, It could be a win/win.
I share this link last because I see it as part of a larger conversation about ecommerce in the post-COVID era.
Many (myself included) thought that the trajectory of ecommerce post-pandemic would continue on this steady upwards trend after people became habituated to online shopping, some of whom had never had that habit before, and we’d see blue-ocean expansion into the future.
It's a bit perverse, but the truth is the pandemic was a great accelerator for all of us in the ecommerce industry.
Instead, things have become difficult and YoY numbers are flat and margins compressed. Ecommerce will continue to grow, that's for sure, but who will evolve and thrive and who won’t be able to keep up?
It remains an open question we’ll all contend with for the rest of this year.
Nerd Zone???
Yes, the infamous?AMS?acronym is back! But in all seriousness, this is something wholly different from the AMS in the days of yore. Marketing Stream is certainly the hot topic around the virtual watercooler this month as agencies and tool providers start to discuss their early access to the platform in open beta. We expect to be using it ourselves quite soon thanks to Intentwise.
This data-streaming feed is a kind of modern rethink of how the advertising API could work. Think of it more like push notifications vs fetch email, so instead of having to request data from the API multiple times a day (and hammer on Amazon’s servers even if the data hasnt actually changed, which they didnt care for) data is delivered in near real-time throughout the day. Less API calls and new exciting features.
Some of the uses cases for this include, finally, the ability to get and act on intraday data. Imagine setting bids by the hour instead of by the day, and having access to data that would tell us when aCPC are the most expensive or most likely to convert. You get insights to adjust campaign budgets so they dont run out in the last few hours of the day. Its true you can do some of these things now with existing tools but even those lack the data from Amazon to allow you to truly gauge if you’re making the right choice.
In the future it looks like we’ll have the ability to receive messages in real time about products being ineligible for advertising, bid recommendations, campaigns running out of budget and so on. The possibilities are multitude and we are so excited to give this a spin.
Hit the documentation above if you want to deep dive on what Amazon is talking about publicly so far.
That's all for this month. Thanks for reading! - Brent
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