How PPC Ad sales grew 962%, and DSP ad sales grew 953% in 4 short months ramping up to holidays.
Everyone knows that the very best products are the ones designed to solve a problem for the consumer. Whether that’s keeping your car clean, protecting your phone, or organizing your closet, we love working with clients who seek to make the customer’s life easier!
About a year ago, we started working with a client who designed a kitchen accessory product. Their product is an ingenious solution to a common problem, so we knew it would be a hit! Since we started working with this client last year, TurnKey has helped them to achieve tremendous success on Amazon. Today we’re going to break down some of the keys to their growth, specifically through effective PPC and DSP advertising strategies.
First, Optimize Your Listing
Let’s remember that you can have an infinite ad budget sending paid traffic to your Amazon listing. But if you’re sending potential customers over to a weak listing, it’s not going to convert.
So first, we optimized the listing with keywords, professional images, video, and A+ Content. Infographics also played a big part with this product because there is an educational component to show customers how to use the product effectively. Infographics can answer a lot of potential questions that customers might have. If you haven’t updated your listing in the last quarter, we highly recommend starting with an overhaul of your listing before dedicating more time and budget to your ads.
After fully optimizing the listing, we were ready to roll out our ad management plan. This particular client had been out of stock for 5 months in 2020. So with that in mind, we were essentially starting over when it came to sales momentum in September of 2020. When we start from square one with a client, the first thing we do is conduct new keyword research and competitor research. Regardless of where you are in your sales history, we recommend doing this a few times a year to keep up with the latest data.
Before You Increase Your Ad Spend...
The encouraging thing with advertising is that the solution is not necessarily simply adding more to your budget to achieve growth. Many times, starting by eliminating ineffective campaigns, increasing funding on campaigns that are working well, and targeting new keywords that are proving effective, is the right first step to get your PPC advertising on track.
Once you see the sales increase, then it makes sense to increase your ad budget to follow the growth trajectory. Setting an ACOS goal and then working to keep that target when deciding on your ad budget is an effective way to judge how much to increase your budget. With this client, we were able to keep Total ACOS (Ad Spend / Total Sales) below 15% consistently. We were also happy to see their PPC Ad sales grew 962% in 4 short months, ramping up to holidays. Needless to say, our client was thrilled!
We Added These Ads
A few more specifics on what kind of ads TurnKey added for this client. We used aggressive brand defense campaigns but focused a lot on building non-brand sales. This kind of strategy will vary based upon your brand and the types of competitors you are up against. If you’re competing against 2 or 3 big brands and customers will search outright for a brand name, you’ll definitely want to appear in those queries. Also, if you are one of those searchable brands that customers might search for, it is important to have your brand name campaigns. That's because if other competitors are bidding on your name, you certainly don’t want to appear below them in a search. Trust us; it’s not a waste of budget.
Here’s a peek at some of the PPC strategies that we rolled out for this particular client:
- Brand Defense - Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brand Video, Store Spotlight
- Competitor Targeting in Sponsored Products & Sponsored Display
- Auto Targeting SP campaign. - Product and keyword harvesting from these to the manual campaigns.
- Broad & Exact Low-risk & Medium Risk Keyword Targeting - Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand Video, Store Spotlight Campaigns.
- Category Targeting - product target harvesting to manual product target campaigns.
- Seasons keywords - holidays, Mother's day, etc.
- Promotional Strategy - Enabled more upper-funnel strategies like medium risk keywords, category targeting during promotions. We see these convert better with the urgency a promotion creates.
Have You Run DSP Ads?
Another new venture for this client was Amazon DSP ads. Demand Side Platform ads are impression-based ads that are an exciting newer offering on Amazon. If you sign up for DSP ads through Amazon, you’re looking at a $35k+ ad budget for just a couple of months of ads, whether you make a dime or not. With TurnKey, you can gain access to the DSP platform for as little as $500/month to test whether DSP ads are even a good fit for your products.
For this client, DSP ads have been highly effective. The DSP ad sales grew 953% from October-November. Retargeting is a central focus of DSP ad sales, so using larger listing visitor audiences from Prime Day was a great way to remind customers that didn’t purchase the product originally that they should reconsider it! We also increased bids and look-back windows during promotion times to increase their visibility.
The Results
Again, it is worth hiring an expert for your ad management, as this is what is possible when you are outsourcing to an expert:
- PPC Ad sales grew 962% in 4 short months, ramping up to holidays.
- DSP ad sales grew 953% from October-November. We used retargeting to maximize sales from larger audience sizes from Prime Day.
- Non-holiday ad sales have steadily increased - March was a 378% increase over our first month in September.
- Total ACOS has remained below our goal of 15% every month.
- We have aggressive brand defense campaigns but have focused a lot of effort on building up non-brand sales and have done so month over month.
If you haven’t hired an expert to manage your Amazon ad management, it’s worth a call to see how TurnKey can help offer their expertise and take this important piece of the business off your plate. Book a free consultation call at www.turnkeyproductmanagement.com/talk/. Like this client, their product realized its full potential in record time by partnering with an expert. So make Amazon a priority in 2021, and take the simple first step of booking a free call with TurnKey to see what’s possible for YOUR brand!
By the way, many students inside the Capitalism Incubator as well as brands that the Capitalism Fund invests in choose TurnKey to handle their Amazon product management.
Jeff Lieber and his team from TurnKey Product Management provided this article. TurnKey is an Amazon consulting company that sells over 8-figures in revenue for its clients each year. Whether you're just starting or are an Amazon expert, TurnKey can help take your sales to the next level. Click here to visit TurnKey's website, where you'll find free resources and training on how to scale to 8+ figures on Amazon. Plus, you can contact TurnKey there to help scale your business.
