DSP Archives - Canopy Management Full Service Amazon Marketing Agency Thu, 16 May 2024 19:07:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://canopymanagement.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/android-chrome-512x512-1-300x300-1-150x150.png DSP Archives - Canopy Management 32 32 5 Overlooked Advertising Strategies to Supercharge Your Amazon Sales https://canopymanagement.com/5-overlooked-advertising-strategies/ Fri, 10 May 2024 21:38:26 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=20110 There’s a lot of work that goes into getting your ecommerce products ready to sell on Amazon. Product research, sourcing, shipping logistics, and fulfillment are hurdles that entrepreneurs all need to navigate.  It would be easy enough to imagine that once you made it past all of that, things might get easier. Unfortunately, that’s not […]

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There’s a lot of work that goes into getting your ecommerce products ready to sell on Amazon. Product research, sourcing, shipping logistics, and fulfillment are hurdles that entrepreneurs all need to navigate. 

It would be easy enough to imagine that once you made it past all of that, things might get easier. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Not with millions of sellers vying for the same customers’ attention. You need to find a way to stand out from the crowd and drive targeted traffic to your listings. 

This is where Amazon advertising comes into play.

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

Let’s talk

Amazon’s own native advertising platform gives you a powerful set of tools to increase product visibility, attract relevant customers, and ultimately boost sales. By leveraging the platform’s vast user base and targeting capabilities, you can reach shoppers at various stages of the buying journey, from initial product discovery to final purchase decisions.

This post focuses on two main topics. First, we’ll look at three big reasons why it’s more important than ever to utilize Amazon advertising to put your product in front of the perfect online shopper. The second part of this post details five overlooked strategies that you can use to differentiate your Amazon advertising campaigns from those using a cookie cutter approach. 

To begin, here’s why Amazon advertising matters more than ever in 2024:

Increased Competition on the Amazon Marketplace

  • The number of sellers on Amazon has grown exponentially in recent years, making it harder for individual products to stand out organically.
  • With millions of products available, customers often make purchasing decisions based on the first few search results they see.
  • Advertising allows you to gain visibility and compete effectively, even against larger or more established brands.
  • As competition continues to intensify, investing in advertising has become a necessity, and ensuring that your products are seen by potential customers.

The Rise of Amazon as a Product Search Engine

  • More and more customers are starting their product searches directly on Amazon, rather than using traditional search engines like Google.
  • Amazon has become the go-to destination for product discovery, research, and purchasing, with over 60% of online shoppers starting their search on the platform.
  • By advertising on Amazon, you can tap into this massive audience of ready-to-buy customers and increase your chances of being discovered.
  • Advertising allows you to appear in prominent positions when customers search for relevant keywords, increasing visibility and driving targeted traffic to your listings.
A graphic image of a large futuristic room full of virtual shopping experiences and people around the perimeter looking at all the action

The Evolution of Amazon’s Advertising Ecosystem

  • Amazon’s advertising platform has evolved significantly in recent years, offering you a wide range of ad formats and targeting options.
  • From Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to Sponsored Display and video ads, you can now create diverse, visually engaging campaigns to reach customers at various stages of the buying journey.
  • Amazon’s advanced targeting capabilities allow you to reach specific customer segments based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and past purchasing history.
  • The ability to retarget customers who have previously interacted with your products has made advertising even more effective in driving repeat sales and fostering customer loyalty.
  • As Amazon continues to invest in its advertising technology and introduce new features, sellers who leverage these tools will be better positioned to succeed in the competitive ecommerce landscape.

5 Overlooked Amazon Ad Strategies 

Keywords play a big role in making sure that your product listings AND ad campaigns show up for the right audience. Sponsored Products Ads are a powerful tool for driving product visibility and sales, Sponsored Brands Ads offer a unique opportunity to promote brand awareness and drive customer loyalty. Amazon’s Sponsored Display Ads allow you to reach customers both on and off Amazon, leveraging retargeting capabilities and audience targeting. 

But, to a certain degree, it’s 2024 and everyone is checking those boxes. The next five strategies aren’t utilized by those Amazon sellers that are often putting in the minimum amount of effort. 

Here’s where you, and your product can shine. 

1. Utilize Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP)

Amazon DSP allows sellers to programmatically buy ad placements not only on Amazon but across various third-party websites and apps. With DSP, sellers can reach a wider audience, including those who may not be actively searching on Amazon but have shown interest in similar products.

Sellers can create highly targeted campaigns based on audience segments, such as in-market audiences, lifestyle segments, and even competitor’s customers.

2. Leverage Social Commerce Such as Amazon Live 

Amazon Live is a live-streaming platform within Amazon where sellers can showcase their products, provide demonstrations, and engage with potential customers in real-time.

By hosting live sessions, sellers can build trust, answer questions, and drive direct sales through interactive product links displayed during the stream. Sellers can promote their Amazon Live sessions through social media, email marketing, and even by using Amazon’s advertising options to attract more viewers.

A graphic image of a large work table with 15 young entrepreneurs having a meeting

3. Collaborate with Amazon Influencers

Amazon has its own influencer program where content creators can earn commissions by promoting products to their followers. Sellers can partner with relevant influencers to showcase their products, provide reviews, and drive traffic to their listings. Influencer collaborations can help sellers tap into new audiences, increase brand awareness, and generate social proof for their products.

4. Explore Amazon Attribution 

Amazon Attribution is a tool that allows sellers to measure the impact of their advertising campaigns outside of Amazon, such as on social media, email marketing, or third-party websites. By using unique tracking links, sellers can gain insights into how their off-Amazon marketing efforts contribute to sales and conversions on the platform.

This data can help sellers optimize their overall advertising strategy and allocate budgets more effectively across various channels.

5. Experiment with Amazon’s New Ad Formats

Amazon continuously introduces new ad formats to help sellers engage with customers in innovative ways. For example, Sponsored Brands Video ads allow sellers to showcase their products through short, engaging video content that appears in search results.

Sellers can also explore options like Sponsored Display ads on the Amazon Alexa home screen, which can reach customers using Echo Show devices. Staying up-to-date with Amazon’s latest ad formats and experimenting with them can give sellers a competitive edge and help them stand out from the crowd.

How Canopy Management Can Help

Amazon advertising has for a long time offered ways to help you unlock growth potential and stand out in a competitive marketplace. Over the last year, the platform has grown exponentially. 

That’s both good and bad. It’s also where the Amazon advertising experts at Canopy Management come in. 

What would adding 67% more organic sales mean for your brand?

Turns out that when you combine the massive experience of Canopy’s Amazon Experts with smart tools and tech, you get industry-leading results like this:

  • 84% Average Year-Over-Year Profit Growth for Our Partners
  • 2.7 Billion in Revenue Managed
  • 99.1% Partner Retention Rate

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts.

When you consider the many ways that Canopy Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy.”

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

Start application

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Forget Data Doomsday, Use Amazon DSP to Reach New Audiences in 2024 https://canopymanagement.com/amazon-dsp-first-party-data/ Tue, 13 Feb 2024 22:42:58 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=11488 The impending loss of third-party cookies in web browsers has many online sellers nervous. Cookies – small pieces of data that a website stores on a user’s computer or mobile device when they visit –  allow marketers to track site visitors and target ads, personalizing the browsing experience.  Without cookies, online sellers and businesses worry […]

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The impending loss of third-party cookies in web browsers has many online sellers nervous. Cookies – small pieces of data that a website stores on a user’s computer or mobile device when they visit –  allow marketers to track site visitors and target ads, personalizing the browsing experience. 

Without cookies, online sellers and businesses worry that analytics and attribution will suffer, making it harder to understand the customer journey and purchase funnel. On the advertising side, retargeting ads and customized product recommendations will be more difficult without the user data cookies provide. 

By the end of 2024, sellers will need to find alternative user tracking and targeting mechanisms if they want to continue effective digital customer acquisition and retention. Though workarounds like data clean rooms and zero party data exist, privacy changes mean that brands that need new data and strategies to personalize experiences are going to have to come up with a plan B. 

A modern computer server farm behind a glass floor to ceiling window with a young dark haired woman holding a laptop leaning against it

Data Clean Rooms and Zero-Party Data? 

It might sound a little far-fetched, but Google and every other big player on the internet are directing enormous amounts of money towards exotic alternatives to the time-tested cookie. 

Data clean rooms and zero party data are two of the most talked about options. 

As companies navigate increasing privacy regulations, and access to third-party cookie tracking is reduced, data clean rooms are intended to allow marketers to continue targeted advertising using a version of first-party data. 

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

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The concept is much like a sterile hospital room – a secure, controlled environment for handling sensitive information. Partners securely pool data for audience insights and measurement, with consumers’ interests protected.

Within data clean rooms, advertisers can safely access consumer data from partners to power advertising and analytics. Data is combined and analyzed without ever being traced back to individuals.

Zero-party data is information that customers voluntarily provide to a business about themselves. Unlike data inferred from behavior tracking, zero-party data comes directly from the customer. 

They offer it proactively, often with the expectation of a better, more personalized shopping experience in return.

Businesses can collect zero-party data through questions like:

  • “How often do you want to hear from us?”
  • “What kind of content is helpful to you?”
  • “How would you describe your last purchase experience?”
A top down view of the black Apple logo on a silver laptop

Why Did Apple Come Out Against Cookies? 

The 2021, IOS 14 update from Apple sent ripples throughout the eCommerce marketing and media buying community.

Apple enacted strict App Tracking Transparency guidelines that require iOS apps to explicitly ask users’ permission before collecting data or tracking their activity across apps and websites for third-party advertising and measurement purposes.

They did that for these four main reasons:

  • Privacy – Protecting users’ privacy was a major motivation. Apple wanted to give its customers more transparency into what data apps collect and prevent unauthorized use of user data for advertising by third parties like Facebook.
  • Security – Restricting app access to user data also bolsters iOS security by reducing potential vulnerabilities from uncontrolled data sharing. This aligns with Apple’s broader focus on security and encryption.
  • Competitive advantage – Some allege App Tracking Transparency also provides an anti-competitive edge for Apple’s own advertising services, which aren’t subject to the same restrictions. It allows Apple to limit its rivals’ targeting capabilities within iOS.
  • Corporate branding – The privacy-centric branding aligns with and enhances Apple’s desired image as a company focused on user experience and “thinking differently” compared to data collection-heavy companies like Google and Facebook.
The Google Chrome logo with a mix of Google branded colors and shapes

What You Need to Know About Google’s 2024 Chrome Updates

Third-party cookies have been used on websites for decades to track user behavior across multiple sites. Much like Apple, privacy concerns have led Google’s Chrome and other browsers to eliminate them. (Firefox and Safari have already phased out third-party tracking)

By default, Chrome will soon completely restrict site access to third-party cookies. This means websites will have limited ability to track you across sites or serve personalized ads. It’s part of their “Privacy Sandbox” initiative for a web without third-party cookie tracking.

Starting January 4th 2024, Chrome began testing this tracking protection on 1% of global users. If selected, you’ll get a notification when you open Chrome. As you browse, third-party cookies will be restricted automatically in the background.

This test rollout aims to assess website readiness for a post third-party cookie world. Developers still have time to support alternative user tracking and targeting methods before Chrome fully phases out third-party cookies in mid-2024.

If a site doesn’t work well without third-party cookie access, Chrome may temporarily re-enable them for that domain. You’ll get a prompt allowing you to switch them back on for that website.

Amazon DSP Offers An Alternative First-Party Data Hack

First-party data is information collected by the web property or app itself. For example, when you collect subscriber and buyer information in your Shopify store, that’s first-party data. Similarly when information is collected from Amazon shoppers, first-party data is the result.

All of the restrictions coming from Apple, Google, and other platforms are around the sharing of data to third parties. But when you gain data from a voluntary opt in through a property you control, you aren’t sharing anything with a third party.

This means that all tracking throughout properties you own or within your properties owned by the ad platform (as in the case with Facebook) will still work.

How does this benefit an Amazon seller? That’s where Amazon Demand-Side Platform advertising comes in.

A Canopy Management branded infographic asking What is Amazon DSP?

What is Amazon DSP?

A Demand-Side Platform (DSP) ad offers one of the most impactful opportunities for advertisers to scale in the post-third-party-data world.

Amazon DSP is an advertising technology platform that allows advertisers to programmatically purchase display, video, and audio ads both on and off Amazon. 

Some key things to know about Amazon DSP:

  • It provides advertisers tools to manage ad campaigns and budgets, target audiences, and optimize ads in real-time across various channels.
  • It leverages Amazon’s data and online reach to help match ads to audiences to increase relevance.
  • It enables advertisers to access Amazon’s proprietary video and streaming inventory, as well as other partner networks like video publishers and audio platforms.
  • It streamlines buying across programmatic ad auctions, and the open market.

Importantly, Amazon lends targeting options to DSP advertisers as well.

Amazon DSP Ads Give Advertisers the Power of First-Party Data

Here’s a quick list of targeting options offered by Amazon DSP:

  • In-Market – These are actual browsers and shoppers of specific products or categories ON Amazon.com.
  • Lifestyle – These are people who’s shopping patterns have been identified to fit a specific pattern that can categorize them as tending to make certain lifestyle choices.
  • Demographic – Gender, age, income level, etc.
  • Retargeting – Remarketing people who viewed your detail pages but didn’t convert.
  • Advertiser Audiences – Not only can you upload a custom audience of your own (email list or customers from your website), but you can also add a pixel to your site to create this audience.
  • Other Custom Audiences – You also have the ability to target interests based on things like Prime Video views.
Amazon DSP ad dashboards showing highly successful campaigns

Amazon DSP = Highly Efficient Targeting Opportunities

Extend your reach

Your ideal demographic is probably spending the day on multiple platforms and devices. By leveraging first-party data across your Amazon DSP platforms, you’ll be able to benefit from exponential increases in knowledge and reach

Increase the efficiency of your ad campaign

Maybe you’re reaching back out to shoppers that didn’t buy, or you’re making initial contact with a fresh audience who have searched for products just like yours. In either case, you’re establishing contact with shoppers who have already shown interest. 

Beginning your advertising with that kind of a head start is the recipe for success.

These are the reasons why current advertisers are increasing their DSP ad budget every quarter. However, compared to Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand ads, DSP ads are still underutilized. 

That creates an opportunity for clever Amazon sellers to take advantage of this undervalued ad real estate.

Ultimately, Amazon offers tremendous value for ad-buyers and marketers, and DSP ads are the hottest thing on the block right now.

If you aren’t taking advantage of it, you are leaving money on the table. Period.

A large pile of golden bricks

Amazon Has a Lot to Offer to Media Buyers

Due to their rapid growth and massive revenue, Amazon will continue to invest heavily into offering more robust advertising options for its customers and sellers. They’ve already shown this by expanding into video ads and artificial intelligence algorithms that work to only show the most relevant ads to ready buyers.

It’s important to remember that 48% of Amazon sponsored display ads impact non-Amazon sales. Overall, it appears that Amazon has a lot to offer media buyers, not just Amazon audiences. In fact, in an ad-buyer survey conducted by Cowen of 52 senior U.S. ad-buyers, it was revealed that Amazon ads have the second highest ROI next to Google search!!

Amazon has immeasurable amounts of shopper data that allow audiences to be targeted based on known behaviors. This gives them quite an advantage. Further, Amazon owns many popular websites on which they can track an advertiser audience, gather more data, and serve up ad campaigns as well.

Amazon gains the shopper, owns their data AND the sites they visit outside of the marketplace, creating brand awareness and other critical components of a profitable advertising campaign. 

Potential customers can’t help being influenced by the power of the Amazon platform.

How Canopy Management Can Help

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. 

When you consider the many ways that Canopy Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy.”

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

Start application

The post Forget Data Doomsday, Use Amazon DSP to Reach New Audiences in 2024 appeared first on Canopy Management.

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Crack the Cross-Channel Code: Master Amazon Attribution for 6-Figure Growth https://canopymanagement.com/understanding-amazon-attribution-a-marketers-guide/ https://canopymanagement.com/understanding-amazon-attribution-a-marketers-guide/#respond Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:04:31 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=19796 It’s hard to succeed if you don’t know what’s working or not.  As an eCommerce seller, being able to accurately tie your advertising and marketing efforts to the actual sales generated is invaluable. Not only does it provide accountability and help assess return-on-investment, but it reveals what combination of initiatives, messages and channels drive transactions.   […]

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It’s hard to succeed if you don’t know what’s working or not. 

As an eCommerce seller, being able to accurately tie your advertising and marketing efforts to the actual sales generated is invaluable. Not only does it provide accountability and help assess return-on-investment, but it reveals what combination of initiatives, messages and channels drive transactions.  

This concept of connecting the dots from initial outreach to eventual conversion is known as attribution. For online brands, unlocking those capabilities often separates profitable strategies from wasted budgets.  

Amazon Attribution is an important component of that strategy.

In this post we’ll explore exactly what attribution does, how to leverage insights to optimize efforts, and why getting attribution right can give you an edge on your competition. 

What is Amazon Attribution? 

Amazon Attribution is an analytics tool available to brand-registered sellers that tracks and measures the impact of external, non-Amazon marketing channels on driving sales back to the Amazon marketplace. 

It grants sellers granular visibility into performance metrics allowing them to gauge which initiatives taking place outside of Amazon – whether social media ads, influencers, email activities – successfully result in site conversions or product purchases attributed back to that specific channel. 

Essentially, Amazon Attribution enables a clear understanding of the external efforts most efficiently delivering business results – that way, brands can optimize accordingly.

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

Let’s talk

Why Does Amazon Attribution Matter? 

At its core, marketing attribution means allocating credit across the combination of touchpoints influencing desired outcomes such as site visits, ads-to-cart and purchases. 

In many cases, it takes a variety of marketing efforts to get a buyer over the finish line. 

For multi-channel sellers, connecting those touch points becomes difficult across domains. And without sound attribution, the inability to accurately quantify marketing return-on-spend or optimize elements wastes considerable resources and time. 

If you’re an Amazon seller that’s been using Sponsored Products, or Sponsored Brands Ads you know that it’s critical to constantly use the data available to an Amazon seller to make ongoing adjustments. If you’re using Facebook or Google ads – outside of Amazon – attribution gives you that power. 

Who Can Use Amazon Attribution?

Amazon Attribution is available to vendors, professional sellers, and KDP authors enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. It has functionality for ad campaigns originating off of Amazon. It’s also available to agencies such as Canopy Management and their online-selling partners. 

Users access Amazon Attribution through a self-service console or as part of custom-built dashboards implementing the Amazon Ads API.

Amazon Attribution is currently available in nine countries, including the US, Canada, and Mexico in North America.  

A table filled with laptops and four business professionals with their arm upraised celebrating a victory

3 More Reasons to Drive Outside Traffic to Your Amazon Listing

Data transparency isn’t the only reason that you’d want to add Amazon to your own marketing strategy.

Here are three more good reasons: 

Throw a Bigger Marketing Net

Amazon’s marketplace becomes more competitive every day. Successful online sellers often speak about the value of product differentiation. But, differentiation also extends to HOW you market your product. 

Instead of waiting for prospective customers to find you, placing ads off of Amazon will exponentially widen your marketing funnel. 

Importantly, driving outside traffic allows you to point customers directly to your Amazon storefront —where aggressive competitors can’t reach them. 

Get Amazon’s Flywheel Turning

Few things on Amazon are as impactful as Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank (or BSR). The BSR is an Amazon metric that indicates how your product is selling compared to other items within the same product category in the Amazon store.

This is where the Amazon flywheel effect comes into play. By broadening your marketing efforts, and drilling down into highly-informative data, you’re likely to increase sales. In turn, that increases sales velocity, a crucial component of Amazon’s ranking process. 

With each successive iteration of the Amazon algorithm, there appears to be an increase in Amazon tipping the scale in favor of listings that drive external traffic to Amazon. With that additional rank will come more sales, and better product rank on Amazon. 

All of that increased visibility will bring with it a corresponding lift in rankings for your principal keywords. If your product is able to consistently convert, your organic keyword rankings will improve as well. 

Earn Money From Amazon 

Bonus money from Amazon, what’s not to like? 

For sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry and selling in Amazon’s US store, Amazon has rolled out a bonus for sales generated from non-Amazon marketing efforts. 

Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus is an opportunity to earn, on average, a 10% bonus of the sales price on sales generated from sales originating OFF of Amazon.

Under the program, sellers receive the same credit for any of their products purchased by the same customer in the subsequent two weeks.

A group of 3 young people backpacking in the forest and reaching into their packs to pull out Survieware first aid kits

How This Canopy Management Partner Took Advantage of Amazon Attribution 

Surviveware had been working with Canopy on their PPC advertising for over two years and had seen particular success with Sponsored Display Ads. That led them to wonder, “Are there even more ways to target off-Amazon audiences and bring them back to Amazon?”

Like most Amazon stores, Surviveware was missing out on opportunities to bring back shoppers who previously viewed their pages but left Amazon before they purchased their product.

As detailed in this case study, over that 1-month period, Canopy was able to drive more than $64k in sales. With only a $6k ad spend (much lower than the $35k/month commitment that Amazon’s own DSP management service requires), that’s a 10.4X return on ad spend!

And the best part?

Just over 70% of total sales were new-to-brand!

That’s thousands of new customers who, with the help of DSP’s ability to dig into attribution models and unmatched retargeting capabilities, know just where to go the next time they need to restock their first-aid kit or prep for a new adventure.

A bright green wooden gate locked with a silver chain and a brass colored padlock

The Right Amazon Agency Can Transform Online Selling

You don’t want to remain locked outside without access to critical data.

What separates profitable brands from those just getting by often boils down to being able to access actionable analytics. Attribution presents that opportunity – quantifying the ROI on each marketing element.

Reliable campaign intelligence informs future strategies, promotional budget decisions, and helps online sellers uncover connections between assumption and outcome. At the same time, it helps shine a light on customer segmentation insights that increase relevancy.

There’s no questioning the value of attribution. Brands that leverage attribution are able to elevate their businesses because of the measurable increase in efficiencies at every level. 

But, for increasing numbers of (very) successful Amazon sellers, the total package involves reaching out to an Amazon Agency for help

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. 

When you consider the many ways that Canopy Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy”:

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

Start application

The post Crack the Cross-Channel Code: Master Amazon Attribution for 6-Figure Growth appeared first on Canopy Management.

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The Ultimate Guide to Amazon DSP Advertising in 2024 https://canopymanagement.com/amazon-dsp-ads-work-like-magic/ Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:16:33 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=14743 Selling on Amazon has been exploding in popularity and there are some very good reasons for it. The low initial investment catches the eye of entrepreneurs looking to add to their income flow. Then, there’s the hard-to-pass-up access to Amazon’s enormous customer base.  That’s why Amazon PPC (or pay per click) ads are a must […]

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Selling on Amazon has been exploding in popularity and there are some very good reasons for it. The low initial investment catches the eye of entrepreneurs looking to add to their income flow. Then, there’s the hard-to-pass-up access to Amazon’s enormous customer base. 

That’s why Amazon PPC (or pay per click) ads are a must for an Amazon seller. Using an Amazon ad helps drive brand awareness, and directs traffic to your Amazon Store. It’s a strategy that has made it possible for Amazon FBA sellers to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

To help you understand Amazon advertising, we’ve written a three-part series on the different ad formats, including Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, and Sponsored Product Display ads.

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

Let’s talk

But, there comes a time when online advertisers might want more from their Amazon PPC ads.

Why Amazon Sellers Might Need MORE Than PPC Advertising

A few years ago, Amazon sellers out on the leading edge of eCommerce started using pay-per-click advertising to drive their product launches and give them an edge. Now, a sponsored ad is a part of everyone’s playbook. That’s why those same slightly-ahead-of-the-curve Amazon sellers have pivoted to Amazon Demand Side Platform. 

Are you wondering what all the excitement is all about? Or, how you can implement Amazon DSP in your own eCommerce business? 

The reason you’d want (or need) to do that has a lot to do with data.

Taking Advantage of Valuable First-Party Data

Simply put, first-party data is information collected by the web property or app itself. For example, when a seller collects subscriber and buyer information from their Shopify store, that’s first-party data. Similarly, first-party data is the result when information is collected from Amazon shoppers.

Recently there have been many restrictions coming from Apple, Google, and other platforms focused on the sharing of data to third parties. However, when you gain access to that data from a voluntary opt-in through a property you control, you aren’t sharing anything with a third party. 

That’s perfectly fine!

This means that all tracking throughout properties you own or within your properties owned by the ad platform you’re using will still work.

Amazon is a huge collector of their users’ data. Whether you’ve put a book on your wishlist or were browsing for a new pair of (black) running shoes on Tuesday, they’re aware of it! You won’t find audience insights as powerful anywhere else.

So, what is this magic Amazon advertising platform?

A canopy management branded infographic on Amazon DSP advertising

What is Demand-Side Platform Advertising? 

DSP, (or demand-side-platform) is an algorithm-based programmatic ad platform that serves targeted messaging to ideal audiences at the perfect time.

Self-serve DSP is a great advertising platform because of two very important things, unparalleled audience targeting capabilities and the exclusive creative assets exclusive to DSP that help your product or brand stand out from the crowd.

Demand-Side Platform uses algorithms to collect data from online users in order to show them ads that cater to their needs. The data that DSP collects focuses on demographics, interests, device usage, and online behavior. This information is invaluable to Amazon sellers as well as an Amazon marketing agency. 

Then, an Amazon DSP campaign does the heavy lifting of identifying the optimum location and medium for your programmatic ads.

In the last year, access to the kind of data that helps marketers (and Amazon sellers) make these decisions has become increasingly rare.

DSP’s Audience Targeting Capabilities

Standing out on Amazon is a question of differentiating your product (and brand). To do that, Amazon sellers spend a lot of time tailoring their creative assets to reach increasingly sophisticated buyers. 

At the same time, Amazon sellers realize that with the rapid pace of eCommerce expansion, you cannot market to EVERYONE out there. That’s why audience targeting has become a big part of Amazon PPC management. DSP has doubled down on that. 

  • Amazon’s first-party data and DSP’s algorithmic capabilities combine to allow you to craft an advertising strategy that serves ads to increasingly relevant audiences of shoppers 
  • Use DSP to drill down in niches to target specific demographics with tactically precise campaigns 
  • Retargeting helps build customer loyalty 
  • Easily remarket to customers who viewed but didn’t purchase your products

Exclusive DSP Creatives

  • Set yourself apart from your competitors with custom creatives and carefully branded content that tell your brand story  
  • Increase your presence on prospective buyers’ path to purchase
  • YOU decide how and when customers first interact with your brand
  • DSP’s data transparency helps you understand your brand’s audiences and leads to more relevant creative ad campaigns
  • Remarket to those customers already considering your product with cutting-edge product video
A woman shown from the neck down wearing a black and white checked coat with an open laptop counting money

What is Amazon Attribution? 

Attribution in Amazon advertising refers to assigning or giving credit to the marketing touchpoints that influence a purchase. It helps determine which ad types, campaigns, keywords, creatives, etc directly lead to conversions.

Some examples of attribution modeling in Amazon advertising:

  • Last Click Attribution – Gives 100% of conversion credit to the final ad or click leading to the order. This is Amazon’s default.
  • Multitouch or Position Based Attribution – Spreads credit across multiple ad clicks along the purchase journey, allocating more to recent interactions. Weights first & last clicks more heavily.
  • Algorithmic Attribution – Uses machine learning to determine an optimal attribution model and assign fractional credit to all touchpoints involved proportional to their influence.

Analyzing attribution is key for Amazon sellers and advertisers as it allows them to understand actual Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) performance for different aspects of their campaigns. They can optimize investment towards products, targeting methods, placements that demonstrate the highest sales conversions driven.

The text Amazon Marketing Cloud overlaid on top of an image of a cloud in the sky

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud? 

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a suite of marketing analytics products for brands selling on Amazon. AMC provides brands visibility into consumer shopping behaviors through actionable analytics and attribution across the customer journey.

Key capabilities offered by AMC include:

  • Customer insights: Identify high-value shopper segments based on purchase history data
  • Campaign measurement: Connect marketing activities to site conversions
  • Attribution: Determine ROI and optimize ad spend allocation between different marketing channels

In order to optimize advertising strategy across channels and demonstrate marketing impact on business results, improved access to actionable data and insights is required. By activating Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), brands can gain transparency into customer engagement and conversion behavior data across the purchase funnel.

AMC enables brands to:

  • Connect ad exposure to site behavior for targeted customer segments
  • Identify highest value buyer types exhibiting repeat purchase patterns
  • Uncover additional in-market and seasonal shopper insights
  • Leverage insights to develop lookalike audiences for expanded reach

What is a “Programmatic” Ad? 

Programmatic advertising refers to the automated process of purchasing and selling online ads. This tactic affords advertisers the ability to place ads across multiple channels with little human interaction. The ad buying process is automated and constantly adjusted in real time. 

Increasingly sophisticated algorithms automatically choose the best ad spaces, both on and off of Amazon. You might have questions related to Amazon Sponsored Display vs DSP. Even though they are part of different advertising platforms, they share many similarities. 

In both cases, the algorithm is constantly learning from Amazon customers’ behavior. And, as with any artificial intelligence program, the more you use it, the smarter your ad campaign becomes.

A canopy management branded infographic showing the DSP marketing funnel

DSP Will Help You Grow Your Amazon Audiences!

Amazon is uniquely focused on their customers’ experience. You should be too! 

DSP allows you to upgrade your prospective customers’ experience in several different ways:

  • Shoppers navigate to Amazon for a reason. Leverage the power of Amazon’s branding on your off-Amazon campaigns 
  • The marketing funnel requires a different approach depending on the stage the shopper is at. DSP creates access to hundreds of metrics designed to drive performance at each stage of the funnel
  • Amazon DSP is the only programmatic platform to report on Amazon conversions. Know, don’t guess on your metrics!

How Can You Take Advantage of Amazon DSP?

There are two options to put Amazon DSP advertising to work for you.

  1. Managed by Amazon: The managed-service option is designed for companies that want access to Amazon DSP inventory, with consultative service, or for those with limited programmatic advertising experience. The managed-service option typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000 USD (minimum may vary per country).
  2. (Managed) Self-service: Self-service customers are in full control of their campaigns. Self-service is a bit of a misnomer. This option can only be accessed through an Amazon marketing agency such as Canopy Management. Managed self-service provides sellers and Amazon marketing services with an attractive blend of control, with ready access to the agency’s DSP expertise. It also allows for more flexibility in ad spend. That’s not a small thing!

One of the biggest benefits of Canopy Management’s DSP Services is having the ability to combine the best of both options. Our Amazon PPC management services use algorithms to do a lot of the leg work. It’s the same thing with our DSP pros. That creates enough bandwidth for Canopy’s DSP Experts that they can be “hands-on,” 24/7 with our partners’ DSP advertising campaigns.

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Canopy Management’s Team of DSP Experts Can Help

Amazon DSP offers audience targeting, expanded creative capabilities, and robust analytics to take your eCommerce marketing to the next level. 

By working with an Amazon Agency like Canopy Management, brands can fully leverage DSP through a managed self-service model – blending automation with expert strategic guidance. 

Unlock the potential of Amazon DSP by contacting Canopy Management today, and supercharge your 2024 Amazon advertising strategy with exclusive access, transparency, flexibility, and results.

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Combining AI, Contextual Targeting and DSP to Create “Super Audiences” That Convert! https://canopymanagement.com/contextual-create-super-audiences/ Thu, 14 Dec 2023 22:24:12 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=15537 Artificial intelligence is red hot right now! That’s because AI can help us do, well, everything.  At the same time, seemingly overnight, Amazon advertising has transitioned from a solid product launch strategy to an essential component of eCommerce success.  This post focuses on how these two topics are linked in a way that is going […]

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Artificial intelligence is red hot right now! That’s because AI can help us do, well, everything. 

At the same time, seemingly overnight, Amazon advertising has transitioned from a solid product launch strategy to an essential component of eCommerce success. 

This post focuses on how these two topics are linked in a way that is going to help drive traffic to your target audience and put a lot of money in your pocket. 

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

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Whether you’re just getting started with digital advertising, or are a seasoned pro, AI, Amazon DSP, and programmatic advertising have combined to supercharge your targeting options. 

That’s because the dramatic evolution of AI has acted as a huge lever on Amazon contextual data and dramatically increased the effectiveness and profitability of Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform.

What is Contextual Targeting?

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising backed by AI and machine learning making it possible for your ads to show up on web pages featuring content that’s closely related to your products. 

Marketers often find themselves torn between the exciting reach of large-scale advertising and the effectiveness of targeted, niche-down Amazon ad campaigns with their higher CVR (or conversion rate). 

At the same time, the third-party cookie continues to lose favor with large digital advertising platforms. That might not concern businesses that are singularly focused on massive reach with their marketing funnel. 

However, Amazon and other online sellers who use that data to fine tune their ad placement for their target audience have reason to be concerned.

Access to that data is one of the ways that an Amazon seller is able to properly allocate ad inventory. 

Fortunately for Amazon sellers, there’s a work-around. 

Before we examine how you can use an Amazon DSP campaign to drive brand awareness and supercharge your Amazon ads, let’s look at how we ended up here.

Changes to Data Privileges

In 2022, Google followed up on Apple’s announcement from April of 2021 updating its iOS operating system with new privacy controls designed to limit digital advertisers from tracking iPhone users. Google revealed its own privacy restrictions that cut tracking across apps on its Android devices. 

Since that moment, there’s been an advertising-industry-wide panic as marketers attempt to come up with ways to replace the occasionally annoying, but extremely valuable cookies allowing advertisers to track shopper and buyer behavior. 

Third-party sellers weren’t the only ones affected. Facebook said last year that Apple’s privacy changes would cost them approximately $10 billion in lost ad sales.  

It’s hard to imagine that “cookies,” – those small pieces of data that catalog the behavior of users on a particular website – would have such a massive impact, but they do.

Behavioral (or Audience) Targeting

Cookies are a large part of what makes behavioral (or audience) targeting possible. 

Behavioral targeting tracks people’s activities (with cookies) to better understand which products, campaigns, or ad format they are attracted to. Leveraging behavioral data allows advertisers to adjust their marketing based on several different sources of data. It might be data from website engagement or the behavior of shoppers and purchasers in an online marketplace such as Amazon.

In either case, availability of the data that’s generated by behavioral marketing has been trending downward. That’s led to a resurgence in a variety of different “cookieless” targeting strategies that allow marketers to continue to source the necessary data points they use to build their advertising campaigns.

A Canopy Management branded infographic showing a marketing funnel that represents how DSP drives brand awareness

Cookieless Targeting?

Instead of sourcing user data from behavior, cookieless targeting collects data from the ad environment that a user is navigating. Cookieless campaigns use an algorithm to target ad placements based on keywords, website content, and other metadata attributed to the content that online consumers are browsing at any one time. 

What’s made this all possible has been the same advances in artificial intelligence and data modeling that over the last few years has also fueled the innovations in livestream selling, augmented reality, and throughout eCommerce.

Identify (Real-Time) Audiences with Contextual Advertising 

There are three primary tactics that allow marketers to replace third-party cookies: anonymous first-party data, interest-based groups such as Google’s Topics, and contextual targeting. 

Although a variation of contextual advertising has been around for a long time, the evolution of artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the level of interest surrounding this data-collection strategy. 

By closely examining user behavior, contextual advertising capitalizes on ads based on the environment in which the ad appears. For example, it might mean ads for a running watch or shoes on a news article about trail running, or it could be advertisements for the newest iPhone on a tech site.

In the first case above, instead of anticipating that a shopper is still interested in running because they signed up for an industry newsletter a year ago, contextual advertising lets advertisers know that shoppers are browsing for new trail shoes right now!  

More importantly, contextual targeting is not subject to privacy regulations because it doesn’t use or collect cookies.

A Canopy Management branded infographic showing a circular design with a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop.

Data Just Keeps Getting Smarter

It might be easier to talk about the aspects of eCommerce that haven’t been affected by the ongoing advancement in artificial intelligence and data modeling. 

The increased sophistication of inventory management platforms, omnichannel product discovery, and the rise of highly-effective voice-enabled shopping are just a few of the areas that have benefited from the relentless upgrades to AI. 

Now, AI is helping analyze the “essence” of a web page’s content. That means that you can use that information to target shoppers with a closely “matched” ad campaign. Most of the time, that’s going to result in the right campaign being run to the right audience on the correct platform. 

That sounds like a conversion to me. 

Contextual ad tech strategies allow marketers to target “context” by a prompt including a topic or keywords. In the contextual ad campaign set up, marketers can identify phrases and keywords that are to be included or excluded. 

After that, algorithms help determine the optimum ad placements leading to an ad impression using artificial intelligence.

Contextual Advertising + DSP = Ad Accuracy 

The world is moving faster than ever, sometimes pivoting on a dime.

Amazon sponsored product, sponsored brand, and sponsored display ads are extraordinary assets for an online advertiser. 

Still, the ability of contextual DSP advertising to provide marketers with real-time metrics is a game changer. 

With the right Demand Side Platform Agency, eCommerce sellers can use contextual targeting to identify ideal ad-campaign audiences in seconds, then quickly measure the results. That transparency makes it possible to adjust campaign context and keywords in real-time to increase performance, and reduce ad spend. 

I’ve said before that I feel that Amazon DSP is the best kept secret on the Amazon advertising platform. As the founder and CEO of Canopy Management, the fastest growing Amazon Management Agency in North America, I’ve been privileged to watch the exciting results that pour in from our team of DSP experts. 

If I was going to offer any advice to eCommerce sellers right now, it would be to look more closely at how you are able combine Amazon DSP and contextual targeting to level up your business. 

That will more than make up for the loss of cookies in 2024.

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

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Don’t Miss the Latest News From Amazon Unboxed 2023! https://canopymanagement.com/latest-news-from-amazon-unboxed-2023/ https://canopymanagement.com/latest-news-from-amazon-unboxed-2023/#respond Thu, 26 Oct 2023 21:53:32 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=18987 It’s time to dig deeper into more of the new launches and innovative solutions from Amazon unBoxed 2023. Yesterday I wrote about Amazon’s new AI image generator. Yes, that was the sexy reveal of the day, but Amazon wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.  Sometimes it can feel like Amazon advertising is the center […]

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It’s time to dig deeper into more of the new launches and innovative solutions from Amazon unBoxed 2023.

Yesterday I wrote about Amazon’s new AI image generator. Yes, that was the sexy reveal of the day, but Amazon wasn’t finished, not by a long shot. 

Sometimes it can feel like Amazon advertising is the center of the ecommerce universe. In many ways, that’s because it is. At the unBoxed 2023 conference, Amazon Ads announced a wide range of new capabilities that have given advertisers new tools and applications across ad campaign planning, activation, and measurement. 

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Multi-Channel Selling Requires a Sophisticated Ad Platform 

With selling on Amazon increasingly becoming a multi-channel endeavor, maintaining consistency and transparency across parallel advertising efforts has become a trouble spot. 

At unBoxed 2023, it appears that Amazon is listening. 

“Advertisers tell us demonstrating the impact of their marketing is their biggest challenge, and that they are still having difficulty measuring performance across the customer journey. They need more actionable insights to reach current and potential customers at scale,” said Kelly MacLean, vice president of Amazon DSP.

Amazon Ads announced several complementary capabilities across multiple platforms including, Amazon DSP, Amazon Ads APIs, and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

Amazon’s stated goal is to empower advertisers through more holistic audience insights; advanced campaign planning, activation, and optimization controls; and comprehensive measurement.

A New “Clean Room” Data Solution

Do you feel your eyes start to glaze over any time there’s talk of “cloud” computing? It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around an ad platform or operating system, let alone something that’s up in the cloud

In this case, it’s well worth stretching ourselves a little bit. As the deprecation of internet cookies closes in on third-party data, we’re all looking for new, relevant data sources to help inform our – expensive – advertising decisions. 

Amazon Cloud is a very big lever that sellers have been able to pull to find new ways to take advantage of audience targeting. 

The solution has to do with something called a “clean room.”

A data clean room is a digital space that allows for the collection (and study) of aggregated and anonymized user information. The clean room makes it possible to protect the user’s privacy, while letting advertisers target a specific demographic and make like-for-like comparisons. 

Amazon’s – just released – Publisher Cloud is the first and only clean room solution that enables a publisher to analyze its first-party signals with Amazon Ads insights to create deals optimized for reach. Amazon says that “publisher deals are made available for activation in Amazon DSP through a single, streamlined workflow.” 

This matters because now you’re better able to understand how contextual signals index against Amazon Ads audiences that are in-market for products, such as pet supplies or cookware. That way you can construct a specific deal to reach those niched-down shoppers . . . sitting in front of their televisions. 

Why Amazon’s New Sponsored TV Ad Solution Matters 

Also at unboxed, Amazon introduced Sponsored TV, a Streaming TV ad solution for brands of any size to connect with new customers in the most unthreatening place possible, their living rooms.

Amazon says that the ad solutions are “pre-packaged with retail aware, shoppable ad formats.” 

Sponsored TV allows marketers to buy Streaming TV with the same flexibility of Amazon Ads self-service ads — no minimum spend requirements or upfront commitments. With this launch, Amazon has revealed that campaigns will be optimized in real time, simplifying the complex process of buying programmatic TV ads.

Amazon advertisers can quickly get started with Streaming TV. There are no minimum spend requirements. Additionally, as mentioned above, access to Amazon’s first-party insights help brands reach engaged audiences that are already halfway to the Buy Box. 

More Amazon unBoxed Updates 

Amazon has been busy. Here are just a few of the additional updates that Amazon revealed over the past 24 hours. 

Strategic Campaign Planning

With multi-channel selling rapidly becoming the norm, Amazon’s recently updated cross-channel planner – part of a new media planning suite in Amazon DSP – provides important insights related to audiences and supply, across both Amazon and third-party sites and apps. 

Advertisers can drill down to study reach by channel then decide where to duplicate reach based on campaign performance and allocate campaign budgets correspondingly. 

Sponsored Products Campaigns for Premium Apps and Websites

At unBoxed 2023, Sponsored Products campaigns have been extended to premium apps and websites starting in the US, including Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, Raptive, and Ziff Davis brands like Lifehacker and Mashable. 

Amazon says that the ads will “link to the Amazon product page, making it simple for customers to move from inspiration to browsing or buying, in just one or two clicks.”

Amazon DSP Goal-Based Bidding

Continuing to lean into their underutilized advertising format, demand side platform, or DSP, Amazon DSP has just launched goal-based bidding. Advertisers can specify a performance target for their campaigns and allow Amazon DSP to automatically optimize their bids in real-time. That will help optimize distribution at their performance target. 

Focusing on advertising goals is an intuitive process and this update makes it possible to maximize delivery at a performance threshold that you’re able to easily define. 

For example, this update allows you to maximize your campaign goal, such as conversions, while at the same time adhering closely to a specified target cost per action (or CPA).

How Canopy Management Can Help

Selling on Amazon can be pretty straightforward. 

The problem, as always, will come down to two things; bandwidth and ability. Maybe you have the ability, or lack the time. Maybe it’s the other way around. If either case is true, Canopy Management is here to help. 

Canopy’s Amazon Advertising team has a long, successful history of helping some of the biggest brands on Amazon get noticed on the increasingly crowded marketplace. In 2023, Amazon Advertising has become the big leagues, and requires professional level expertise to not just survive, but thrive. 

Want to know how to level up your own brand’s Amazon advertising, just ask!

Thinking About Hiring an Amazon Management Agency?

Canopy’s Partners Achieve an Average 84% Profit Increase!

Let’s talk

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Roadblocks to Riches: 5 Reasons Amazon Sellers Ignore the Lucrative DSP Ad Platform https://canopymanagement.com/5-reasons-amazon-sellers-ignore-dsp/ Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:11:49 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=16017 Advertising is the lifeblood of eCommerce, and Amazon offers an array of advertising solutions to help sellers promote their products. By leveraging its vast network, brands can reach potential customers in new markets while boosting sales with strategic advertising. However, some Amazon sellers may be hesitant to venture beyond Pay per Click advertising to try […]

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Advertising is the lifeblood of eCommerce, and Amazon offers an array of advertising solutions to help sellers promote their products. By leveraging its vast network, brands can reach potential customers in new markets while boosting sales with strategic advertising.

However, some Amazon sellers may be hesitant to venture beyond Pay per Click advertising to try Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP), the programmatic advertising platform that offers exciting new targeting capabilities.

DSP is often viewed as the NEXT step – beyond PPC – in Amazon advertising.

Why Are Amazon Sellers Saying “No” to DSP Advertising

In this post, we’re going to drill down into the five main challenges that many Amazon sellers face when confronted with the question of Amazon DSP. Then, we’ll take a look at the way a leading Amazon DSP Agency would address those concerns. 

When it comes to Amazon DSP, identifying objections that advertisers might have, THEN solving those concerns can help us to better understand the platform’s benefits and overcome any obstacles to using it. 

As an Amazon Management Agency that specializes in Amazon advertising, Canopy Management has experience with addressing objections and helping sellers to effectively use Amazon DSP to drive results.

What is Amazon DSP?

Demand-Side-Platform advertising is algorithm-based, and serves targeted messaging to ideal audiences at the perfect time.

DSP is a great advertising platform because of two very important things, unparalleled audience targeting capabilities and the exclusive creative assets exclusive to DSP that help your product and brand stand out from the crowd.

The Demand-Side Platform algorithm collects data from online users in order to show them ads that cater to their needs. The data that DSP collects focuses on demographics, interests, device usage, and online behavior. This information is invaluable to Amazon sellers as well as an Amazon marketing agency. 

So, why wouldn’t Amazon sellers want to take advantage of such a powerful advertising platform? 

Here are the top 5 reasons why Amazon sellers might say no to Demand-Side Platform Advertising. 

1. DSP is Hard to Understand

Yes, it’s a little complicated to understand how DSP works. Standing out on Amazon is a question of differentiating your product (and brand). In order to do that, Amazon sellers spend a lot of time tailoring their creative assets to reach increasingly sophisticated buyers. 

Amazon DSP’s algorithmic capabilities and audience targeting combine to allow you to craft an advertising strategy that serves ads to increasingly relevant audiences of shoppers.

 DSP is a programmatic advertising  platform that automates the process of purchasing and selling online ads. This tactic gives advertisers the ability to place ads across multiple channels with little human interaction. That’s right, the ads follow shoppers, on and off of Amazon. 

The problem is that it’s a little bit complicated. 

If you’re like many Amazon sellers, you just don’t understand the benefits of Amazon DSP and how it can help you to effectively target and reach potential customers. Without a clear understanding of the platform’s capabilities, many sellers may opt for more familiar or traditional advertising methods.

2. The Complex Setup

An Amazon DSP campaign can be hard to set up. It helps to have special tech skills such as an understanding of data analysis and audience targeting.

There are two ways to get started with Amazon DSP, Managed by Amazon, and managed self-service. The managed-service option is designed for companies that want access to Amazon DSP inventory, with consultative service, or for those with limited programmatic advertising experience. 

Self-service customers are in full control of their campaigns. Self-service is a bit of a misnomer. This option can only be accessed through an Amazon marketing agency such as Canopy Management. Managed self-service provides sellers and Amazon marketing services with an attractive blend of control, with ready access to the agency’s DSP expertise. It also allows for more flexibility in ad spend. That’s not a small thing!

3. Higher Cost

Yes, it’s true. Amazon DSP can be more expensive than other advertising options available to sellers, particularly if you’re just starting out and haven’t been able to trust the success of Amazon advertising. It’s tempting for those sellers to dedicate their ad spend to the parts of their Amazon advertising that they know better. With the managed-service option typically requiring a minimum spend of $50,000 USD, it’s a significant hurdle. 

4. Limited Control

As an automated advertising platform, Amazon DSP takes the tedious task of optimizing campaigns out of the hands of Amazon sellers. That gives you more time to focus on driving sales. But, with its algorithmic approach comes a trade-off. Some sellers feel that giving up manual control in favor of convenience and speed is a step in the wrong direction.

5. A Reduced Audience

Amazon DSP is primarily focused on the Amazon marketplace and Amazon-owned properties, such as IMDb, Audible, Twitch, Goodreads, Zappos, and Woot. That means that some sellers might feel that they’re not able to reach as wide an audience as they would like.

With omni-channel selling a trending topic, this could prove problematic for entrepreneurs looking to expand their reach well beyond the Amazon ecosystem. 

Canopy Management’s DSP Team Has the Answers 

As a Full Service Amazon Management Agency, the Advertising Team at Canopy Management understands that using Amazon DSP can be a complex, intimidating process for eCommerce sellers. That’s why we wanted to address the principal concerns and provide a clear path forward. 

The simple truth is that Amazon DSP is just too good to pass up. 

Let’s dig into the top 5 objections to Amazon DSP and discover how our Amazon Agency can help you tackle any challenges head-on. Learn more about how a lack of understanding, fear of setup complexity, the overall expense, and the limited control could be holding your ad campaigns back.

1. DSP is Hard to Understand

This is where the experience of an Amazon Management Agency is invaluable. Canopy Management’s team of DSP experts can help you to understand how the platform works and develop a strategy that meets your specific needs.

According to Inc Magazine, Canopy Management is the fastest Amazon Agency in the world. We reached that point by partnering with eCommerce sellers to help them find success. And, because it’s a partnership, a big part of our success lies in our ability to share our knowledge and experience in ways that opens the door to more understanding about the facets of Amazon’s marketplace. 

Here are the two main elements of Amazon demand-side advertising that create a barrier for eCommerce sellers. 

The Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a data-driven approach to digital advertising that uses algorithms to buy and place ads. Many Amazon sellers may not fully understand the benefits of programmatic advertising, including the ability to target specific audiences and track campaign performance in real-time.

The whole world is talking about ChatGPT and the many AI programs are changing the way we live. Programmatic advertising will overhaul the way you sell on Amazon. 

The Technical Skills Required

Yes, Amazon DSP is a complex platform that requires technical skills, such as data analysis, targeting, and campaign optimization. Because many Amazon sellers may not have the necessary skills or resources to effectively use the platform, this can lead to frustration and a lack of confidence in using Amazon DSP. 

For Amazon sellers, the workaround involves either trusting Amazon to run your advertising on their platform or reaching out to a leading Amazon Agency such as Canopy Management.  

2. The Complex Setup

Amazon DSP can be a complex platform, particularly for Amazon sellers who are not familiar with programmatic advertising. 

As I mentioned above, Canopy’s close relationship with our partners includes detailed explanations of how the DSP platform works, the benefits of programmatic advertising, and how to effectively set up and manage campaigns.

Yes, our DSP experts will be running your advertising campaigns, but you’ll know how and why they’re making the moves that they make!

3. Higher Cost

Amazon DSP presents a unique opportunity for sellers to expand their reach, but those just starting out may find the cost prohibitive. However, with the careful planning and budgeting strategies that an Amazon Agency can provide, DSP can provide long-term value that far exceeds other advertising options.

While Amazon DSP can be more expensive than some other advertising options, it’s become increasingly popular for the higher return on investment (ROI) that it’s known for. That’s due in large part to its advanced targeting capabilities. 

With the right Amazon Agency, eCommerce sellers can use contextual targeting to identify ideal ad-campaign audiences in seconds, then quickly measure the results. That transparency makes it possible to adjust campaign context and keywords in real-time to increase performance, and reduce ad spend. 

Marketers often find themselves torn between the exciting reach of large-scale advertising and the effectiveness of targeted, niche-down campaigns that inevitably lead to a higher CVR (or conversion rate). 

Reach out to a Canopy Management Advertising Expert to find out how DSP might involve less financial commitment than you might imagine. 

4. Limited Control

Yes, Amazon DSP uses algorithms to optimize your ad campaigns. However, when you partner with an Amazon Agency, you’re able to have a high level of control over your campaigns. Canopy’s DSP team works with you to make informed decisions about campaign setup and targeting, as well as analyzing the data and to optimize your campaigns based on performance

We’ll work with you to set specific audience targeting guidelines then develop bespoke strategies to align with your overall eCommerce goals. 

5. A Reduced Audience

While the strength of Amazon’s DSP platform is concentrated on their own ecosystem’s platform and associated properties, this can be a benefit for sellers who want to target a highly specific audience. 

Whether it’s long-tail keywords, or drilling down into lucrative selling niches on Amazon, “reducing” an audience often allows you to decrease spend and raise ROI. 

Canopy Management can help sellers determine the best approach for their specific goals and develop a targeted advertising strategy that maximizes the effectiveness of a focused, niched-down ad campaign. 

How Canopy Management Can Help

Amazon DSP is the best kept secret in advertising.

It’s time to look more closely at how you can use Amazon’s Demand Side Platform ads to level up your business. 

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. When you consider the many ways that Canopy Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy.”

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

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No Cookies, No Problem – Is Amazon Signaling the Future of Advertising? https://canopymanagement.com/amazon-signals-future-of-advertising/ Fri, 11 Nov 2022 15:41:10 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=15406 The internet in 2023 is a place that’s fraught with uncertainty and suspicion.  For marketers, it’s been an amazing playground of glass houses without curtains.  It all comes down to tracking, and targeting.  I’m not sure that there are too many of you out there who love the idea of being followed around the internet […]

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The internet in 2023 is a place that’s fraught with uncertainty and suspicion. 

For marketers, it’s been an amazing playground of glass houses without curtains. 

It all comes down to tracking, and targeting. 

I’m not sure that there are too many of you out there who love the idea of being followed around the internet by an increasingly intelligent machine, but, for advertisers trying to save money and only send their ads to browsers ready to make a purchase, 2021 internet was a very good place. 

That’s rapidly coming to an end. 

Cookies are On Their Way Out as a Marketing Tool

Apple’s launch of iOS 14.5 brought with it a new initiative to return to users control over the way their data is aggregated and used by third-parties for advertising. 

Google is following suit and has indicated that it’s looking to entirely phase out the way that marketers can track their users in their Chrome Browser by 2024. 

Advertisers are less enthusiastic about the apparent demise of these capabilities as marketing tools. 

If it’s not clear by now, I’m talking about cookies. Not the delicious kind, but the small files, or snippets of information that a web server generates and sends to a browser. 

For a long time (in internet terms), cookies have helped advertisers better understand browsing and shopping behavior.  

Cookies give marketers a glimpse into what users might be thinking, and make it possible for websites to personalize the browsing and shopping experience. They give a sort of Xray vision that allow you to see how users move through your websites (or Amazon listings) and ultimately give you a good idea what you should be doing with your advertising campaigns

A Next-Level Audience Targeting Strategy

If an advertiser is using Behavioral Targeting, they monitor the user’s browsing behavior, then place ads based on their activity.

Cookies are what make that possible. 

However, clever advertisers are sourcing VERY similar information and doing it without cookies. 

Here’s how. 

Contextual advertising is the practice of placing ads on web pages based on the content of those pages. For example, if someone is browsing a site that advertises running shoes, they might be shown ads that advertise running shorts or a headlamp for those early morning outings.   

Instead of behavioral targeting’s reliance upon cookies, contextual targeting utilizes (accumulated) session data to determine a user’s intent and interest.  

Advances in AI and Data Modeling are Opening the Door to New Contextual Options

Although contextual targeting isn’t a new idea, exponential advances in machine learning, data modeling and artificial intelligence have all combined to supercharge contextual strategies so that they often match those of cookie-based targeting. 

Innovations to image recognition, predictive analytics, natural language processing, and neural networks have made for data sets that dwarf those of previous generations. 

And now, enterprise-scale companies such as Google and Amazon are crafting “data clean rooms,” ecosystems will help marketers distill, and cultivate that data even further. More importantly, they will allow for the continued growth of post-cookie advertising revenue. 

What are Data Clean Rooms?

Data clean rooms are technology services, or software that help content platforms keep first-person user data private when interacting with advertising providers. They provide “aggregated” data from “anonymized” user sets. 

That makes it possible for the clean room to furnish advertisers with valuable (non-identifiable) information allowing them to target a specific demographic or audience. 

What Will Data Clean Rooms Offer eCommerce Sellers? 

To begin with, data clean rooms are an enormous lever that will help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in a cookieless world. 

The combination of data clean rooms and contextual advertising’s new AI-enabled targeting capabilities will give advertisers a much better idea of advertising performance regardless of the specific ad platform they choose to use. 

Data clean rooms will help advertisers to:

  • Target increasingly relevant audiences
  • Optimize the experience of their site users with A/B testing
  • Take advantage of cross-platform strategies
  • Run deeper campaign analysis

Amazon Marketing Cloud Hints at the Future

Meanwhile, Amazon has been constructing their own proprietary clean room. 

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based clean room solution in which advertisers can easily perform anonymous analytics signals, including Amazon Ads signals as well as their own inputs. 

Amazon has constructed this on top of their robust Amazon Web Services platform that provides servers, storage, email, networking, remote computing and security to its users. AWS has quickly become a principal profit stream for the eCommerce giant. For example, Netflix alone pays Amazon 19 million A MONTH in fees to use AWS. 

Amazon’s Marketing Cloud dovetails nicely with their existing Attribution capabilities and offers a complementary and comprehensive view of an advertiser’s overall marketing attribution.

Amazon Marketing Stream

First launched for North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico) on June 21, 2022, Amazon Marketing Stream (now in Beta), is a service that delivers Amazon Ads campaign metrics and information to advertisers’ or integrators’ AWS accounts via a push-based model in near real time.

In October of 2022, Amazon updated this release and expanded AMS to all countries currently supported by the Amazon Ads API, with the exception of India. 

Amazon Marketing Stream is an Amazon product that delivers Amazon Ads campaign metrics and information to advertisers’ or integrators’ AWS accounts via a push-based model in near real-time. 

You can subscribe to campaign data sets available on Amazon Marketing Stream using your existing Amazon Ads API token and by providing your AWS account details. Once subscribed, Amazon Marketing Stream will deliver hourly performance metrics, with details such as targeting expression performance by placement and budget consumption messages in near real-time. 

How CANOPY Management’s Amazon Ad Pros Can Help

One terrific thing about all this new data transparency and leveled-up technology is the accessibility. If there’s a problem with an ad campaign, it’s made it possible for Amazon sellers to “lift the hood” of their Amazon PPC advertising, roll up their sleeves and take a good look inside. 

Unfortunately, that first peek under the hood more often than not results in a lot of very puzzled expressions. 

Automobile engines, with their hybrid technology and twin turbos are not at all like the Volkswagen Westfalia that I could repair with duct tape and bailing wire. Similarly, Amazon advertising campaigns are a completely different animal than they were even 12 months ago. 

It’s one more reason why reaching out to an Amazon PPC Agency expert at CANOPY Management has become the first step for increasing numbers of eCommerce sellers looking to get to the next level. 

CANOPY Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. When you consider the many ways that CANOPY Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy.”

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

Start application

The post No Cookies, No Problem – Is Amazon Signaling the Future of Advertising? appeared first on Canopy Management.

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Where Do Amazon Agencies Go Wrong? https://canopymanagement.com/where-do-amazon-agencies-go-wrong/ Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:09:11 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=13684 Amazon is a wildly popular platform for sellers and shoppers alike. The Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) platform makes things even more interesting. You sell it, Amazon ships it. What’s not to like? Taking full advantage of Amazon FBA, many sellers have made quick work of scaling their businesses. Over the last few years Amazon’s […]

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Amazon is a wildly popular platform for sellers and shoppers alike. The Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) platform makes things even more interesting.

You sell it, Amazon ships it. What’s not to like? Taking full advantage of Amazon FBA, many sellers have made quick work of scaling their businesses.

Over the last few years Amazon’s marketplace has really begun to mature. It’s more important than ever to have an Amazon marketing strategy in place.

Are you wondering why your Amazon store isn’t getting the kind of traction that you had hoped for?

Increasingly, sellers on the Amazon platform are relying on account management agencies and Amazon PPC consultants to help them to continue to grow their businesses.

Unfortunately, as befitting the e-commerce-money grab that the Amazon marketplace has become, a lot of inexperienced management marketing services have rushed in to fill the void.

It’s a little like how the e-commerce explosion led to large numbers of Amazon aggregators buying up Amazon businesses (often with the help of Fintech investments).

Unfortunately for those same investors, many Amazon aggregators have a lot more enthusiasm than they do Amazon-selling experience. That’s part of the reason why so many of those same aggregators are struggling right now.

E-Commerce Enthusiasm Will Only Get You So Far

Getting started selling on Amazon (and buying up Amazon brands) is relatively easy. What’s complicated is making sure that you’re profitable. The rapid maturation of the Amazon marketplace and the increasing number of sellers is forcing everyone to level up their business game and take e-commerce seriously.

Just because you’re working from a laptop doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat selling on Amazon as seriously as a “brick and mortar” business. If anything, given the rapidly-changing nature of e-commerce, it’s more important than ever to follow procedures and develop solid SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures).

That’s why a lot of sellers might reach out to an Amazon marketing agency for help.

At the same time, software has become a big part of our everyday lives. Whether it’s making sure that you have the latest security patch installed for your computer, or an app stopped working because you forgot to install an update, we’re bound to the whims of these technological marvels.

That’s why we’ve become so dependent upon them to solve our every need. Ecommerce isn’t any different. Entrepreneurs have come to rely on SaaS (Software as a Service) companies to answer many of the questions that seem to stand in the way of success.

Are they really to be trusted?

Software to the Rescue?

At the end of the day, it comes down to time.

Selling on Amazon, like parenting, studying at night for a college degree, or keeping in shape, is all about time management.

An Amazon account management agency usually deals with this through a bunch of automated software. I love cool new software as much as the next guy. Every time I upgrade the firmware on my iPhone I’m halfway expecting the latest update to allow my phone to make my morning cappuccino for me.

Admit it, with a world full of people willing to put their lives in the hands of Tesla’s autonomous driving technology, we’re clearly fans of advanced software.

Why Do Amazon Sellers Need to Use Software?

Amazon sellers might not really NEED software for their first product. It’s when business picks up and they begin to scale, that e-commerce technology becomes their friend.

Let’s say you had success with your first product. A lot of Amazon sellers might be tempted to try to use software to take a closer look at their digital marketing wins to try to repeat them.

Are you seeing your sales start to drop? Software can help you investigate your competitors, to see who, and why they’re cutting into your profits. Then, it might be time to run offensive targeting ads to siphon off a little of their business.

Or, you can use A/B testing to determine better images or copy in your Amazon marketing efforts.

Let’s not forget about Amazon PPC (pay per click) advertising. For a lot of new sellers, trying to fine tune their Amazon PPC management, automated ads give them the confidence to get started and hit the ground running.

Automated PPC Advertising

PPC automation allows sellers to control their Amazon advertising campaigns with e-commerce software. The software takes advantage of machine learning and algorithms to do a lot of the entrepreneurial heavy lifting. It’s a big time saver for Amazon sellers.

Amazon PPC management software makes it easier for new sellers to optimize their digital marketing. It also saves them the time that they’d otherwise need to put into learning the finer points of bids, timing, and ad campaign strategy.

You know how important it is to launch your Amazon product with a lot of momentum. A lot of very smart Amazon sellers say that Amazon-selling software makes it possible for newer sellers to get a head start with their PPC.

Are Amazon Listings Written by AI Software a Good Thing?

If you spend enough time listening to e-commerce experts, one of the first things that you’ll hear is that as you begin to scale up your Amazon business, you need to learn to delegate. Work smarter, not harder. What’s your time worth? You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, etc, etc.

These are all nice catch phrases, but when it comes to Amazon SEO, is it true? Should you delegate this to a robot?

An AI-optimized listing might be fine for an Amazon seller just starting out. However, as the e-commerce ecosystem grows, search engine optimization battles will only become more competitive. That’s why human input will continue to be the difference between a brand that makes money, and one that falls by the wayside.

What a Lot of Agencies Get Wrong

Many agencies that have jumped into the e-commerce space do so with the same degree of excitement as newer Amazon sellers. In doing so, they end up taking advantage of many of the same tools and strategies that brand new Amazon sellers use to get started.

Artificial intelligence copywriting, Upwork photographers, and fully automated PPC account management allow Amazon agencies (many of them new to e-commerce) to get up to speed quickly.

Levi Strauss became one of the success stories of the late 19th century gold rush with well-built work clothing for those working in the mines. Now, Amazon has become a sort of 21st century gold rush.

SaaS companies such as Helium 10, Jungle Scout, CopyAI, and Anyword have made a lot of money equipping Amazon sellers and Amazon management agencies alike.

But, here’s the big problem with this.

Amazon’s Marketplace is Reaching Maturity

That maturity has made it a little harder for everyone to be successful. If you listen to e-commerce podcasts, you’ll often hear the phrase, “treat selling on Amazon like a real business.”

This is a good thing.

The old, ‘everything goes,’ wild-west days of Amazon when sellers could simply buy reviews are thankfully (for the most part) in our rearview mirror.

What’s happened now is that everything from your Amazon listing optimization to your PPC advertising requires an increased level of sophistication to scale past a certain level.

This is where SaaS software can be a double edged sword. Amazon management agencies (and sellers) need to have the depth of experience to know what part of the work they should trust a robot to do.

Unfortunately, newer agencies have a habit of trusting artificial intelligence a little bit too much.

CANOPY Does Amazon Agency Differently

Don’t get me wrong, CANOPY Management isn’t technology adverse.

The difference is this: CANOPY uses software to free up the bandwidth of our Amazon-selling experts. To lapse into a football analogy, most agencies are in deep zone coverage. CANOPY Management isn’t simply man-on-man, we have entire teams monitoring individual Amazon brands.

We love a good piece of technology as much as the next person. But, it’s a tool. Our most extraordinary resources are our teams of e-commerce experts that are producing amazing creative assets, fully optimizing listings, and closely monitoring custom PPC and Amazon DSP advertising campaigns.

Expert Skills are Required for Amazon DSP Advertising 

Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) uses mined data to target (and retarget) shoppers once they’ve left Amazon’s marketplace.

Amazon DSP allows advertisers to really drill down to identify a specific audience. But, it takes a true Amazon expert with the ability to know how (and what) to track in order to effectively utilize the global implications revealed by this shopper data.

Only a limited number of Amazon advertising agency experts are entrusted (by Amazon) with the privilege of working privately with their own high-level digital advertising option. CANOPY Management is one of them.

How CANOPY Management Can Help You In 2022

CANOPY Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts. When you consider the many ways that CANOPY Management can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy”:

  • Strategic Growth Planning
  • Listing Copywriting Optimization
  • Listing Photography
  • Product Videography
  • Advertising Management
  • Customer Service
  • Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
  • Amazon Posts
  • Full Service Management
  • Amazon Review Aggregation

Ready to Grow Your Amazon Business?

Start application

The post Where Do Amazon Agencies Go Wrong? appeared first on Canopy Management.

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Want To Maximize Your Cyber Monday Revenue? https://canopymanagement.com/maximize-cyber-week-sales-with-dsp/ Mon, 23 Aug 2021 18:39:39 +0000 https://canopymanagement.com/?p=11672 Cyber Week and the Holiday Season are two of the most crucial periods in the year for your business. Demand is high and millions of potential customers are looking to hand over their money for your products. But your business isn’t the only one out there. Amazon is a crowded marketplace and your competitors will […]

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Cyber Week and the Holiday Season are two of the most crucial periods in the year for your business. Demand is high and millions of potential customers are looking to hand over their money for your products.

But your business isn’t the only one out there. Amazon is a crowded marketplace and your competitors will be doing their best to grab your customers’ attention and rob you of those Cyber Week dollars. And to make matters worse, CPC costs have increased in 2021, making it even more expensive for you to drive traffic towards your store.

However, there is a way to supercharge your chances of success this Cyber Week and Holiday Season. But to take advantage you need to act quick. Preparation is key, and while the majority of businesses will attempt to make the most of these busy periods, few will take the steps needed to truly capitalize on what’s on offer. 

Being prepared well in advance can make all the difference, and that’s where Amazon DSP comes in

What is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform) is software that allows advertisers to buy and display video/custom image ads at scale on Amazon and other Amazon-owned websites. You can use it whether you sell products on Amazon or sell off-platform. Crucially, the automated design of Amazon DSP provides a way for businesses to buy media from multiple sources with minimal stress. 

Amazon DSP helps sellers drive hyper-relevant traffic to their Amazon stores and product pages. By using CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) instead of CPC (Cost Per Click), Amazon DSP can give your brand powerful reach and added visibility while ending the excessive costs often involved with paying per click. This extra visibility helps expose your brand to new audiences, letting visitors become more familiar with you. In turn, this allows you to build a relationship in the lead-up to those busy Holiday and Cyber Week periods. 

Amazon DSP is designed to let you engage in proven strategies that can help you hit your goals. Want greater brand reach? Then place a video off-site to expose your brand and your hottest products to a whole new audience. Did somebody visit your site then leave without ordering? That’s a potential buyer right there – try remarketing the products back to them while they’re on Amazon and likely in the mood to buy.

You even get provided with a host of metrics from Amazon that both show you everything you need to know and tell you where your efforts are going right or wrong. These insights will help you understand how effective your campaign is and let you observe your retail activity at every stage. 

From the analytics you can determine the most effective way of turning a random visitor unaware of your brand into a loyal customer with a penchant for repeat purchases. In turn, this allows you to fine-tune your campaign to work best for your brand and help you achieve your goals.

You can also choose whether to create your own custom ads or take advantage of the templates and tools on Amazon to make your images, ads and videos. Using this latter method allows you to benefit from the performance-driving elements Amazon automatically generates in each piece.

What exactly are the benefits of using Amazon DSP?

When used right, Amazon DSP can help you ‘beat the crowds’ in extremely busy times such as Cyber Week and the Holiday Season. As every seller is aware, Amazon gets overcrowded with sellers clamoring for a slice of that multi-billion dollar pie each time the spending seasons roll around. 

This means sellers need to be increasingly smart and well-prepared to truly capitalize on the potential offered by these customer-crammed periods. Thankfully, when used correctly Amazon DSP can give you everything you need to get a competitive advantage, even in your highly competitive marketplace.

So how do you achieve that advantage? 

As previously mentioned, Amazon DSP helps you reach audiences at scale by tapping into Amazon’s exclusive inventory and reliable 1P data, so you can finally boost your branded searches. By increasing awareness of your brand while driving first time purchasers to your store, you also lay the groundwork for establishing a stream of loyal repeat customers rather than one-time buyers. Plus, because the targeted advertising of Amazon DSP operates across devices and formats, your brand visibility won’t be restricted by the format your audience is browsing on!

These smart targeting abilities also help you ‘hone in’ on your ideal audience when launching a product. And by getting your goods in front of buyers who are actively shopping for products in your niche, you increase the probability of executing a successful product launch.

As well as this, businesses often find customer targeting results in increased session lengths from your traffic. This is a natural outcome from receiving more visitors who are interested in your products and happy to spend more time exploring your store.

Another benefit of using Amazon DSP is the brand safety tools it offers sellers. By advertising with Amazon DSP, your brand will only appear in online environments that are safe and appropriate for your audience. This ensures your advertisements don’t end up in any of those dark corners of the internet you’d prefer to stay clear of and keeps your brand image squeaky clean. 

Amazon DSP has built in brand safety tools from companies such as Comscore and Sizmek to ensure your ads and traffic quality remain safe. Additional security features can also be activated using tools such as DoubleVerify, Oracle Data Cloud and Integral Ad Science.

Crucially, Amazon DSP supplies you with detailed performance reports along with audience and retail insight data. This data includes extensive information on metrics such as your page view rate and how many viewers are new to your brand, all of which gives you the opportunity to optimize at every stage of the funnel. 

Ultimately this can help you measure the success of your advertising campaigns so you can understand what truly drives performance for your brand and achieves long-term revenue. 

How to get the most from Amazon DSP…

So are you curious about how you can turn these tempting platform features into tangible income for your business? Well luckily help is at hand.

Canopy Management uses a custom metrics-based strategy to help you harness the power of Amazon DSP for your business. This is designed to take the stress out of learning the intricacies of the platform and stop you missing lucrative opportunities. Crucially, this also helps you avoid those newbie errors that all too often cause a seller’s early advertising campaigns to become expensive flops.

We use a full funnel approach designed to drive sales by retargeting customers. Along with this, we test upper funnel tactics combined with display and video ads to bring new customers to your store. 

Amazon DSP can be used with either the self-service(ish) option or managed-service option.

To access the self-service option, sellers must use an accredited agency such as Canopy. This gives you access to the same inventory, 1P data and reporting, without a minimum budget. 

On the other hand, the managed-service option gives you access, but at a minimum spend of $35,000 to start and per order minimums for new campaigns, though this figure can vary from country to country.

Canopy does not have a minimum fee for providing assistance with the self-service option, however. This means we can help you test a new segment before allocating a greater portion of your budget to it.

We are also able to run DSP for sellers based in the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, giving our services extensive reach across much of the Americas.

It is important to realize that your store is totally unique, and the Amazon DSP techniques that work for other businesses won’t necessarily work for yours. This means you should thoroughly test any Amazon DSP campaigns well in advance of critical time periods (such as Cyber Week) to ensure they’re suitable for driving traffic to your store.

For this reason we advise our existing partners to begin testing their Amazon DSP campaigns at least 6 weeks ahead of busy times in the year, and for new partners to start 8 weeks in advance.

Our team tests new InMarket segments of shoppers in-aisle for your category who haven’t yet had contact with your brand. Thanks to Amazon’s 1P data, these segments can be easily identified and harnessed to allow swift scaling. This lets us test segments and custom creatives to see what truly works well for your business. In turn this helps us achieve the results you desire.

The retargeting campaigns we run drive highly targeted traffic to your store to boost your branded searches, raise your organic ranking, and increase your inventory limits for those busy periods. Ultimately these factors synergistically work together to increase your sales velocity.

Once our team can see what works best for your store, we can execute your custom Amazon DSP campaign when Cyber Week or the Holiday Season rolls around.

This is done primarily to capitalize on the opportunities offered by busy periods. However, our approach is also designed to give your business evergreen retargeting campaigns that help drive sales in your store all year round. 

So should I try Amazon DSP?

While results will vary from business to business for obvious reasons, the fact remains that Amazon DSP only began two years ago and remains a relatively new and underappreciated platform. 

Most of your competition will not be running Amazon DSP or will opt for less effective platforms in an attempt to make the most of Cyber Week and the Holiday Season. This leaves the door wide open for sellers willing to take advantage of this powerful new platform while making use of the expert assistance available.

By using these tools to build brand recognition and trust, Amazon DSP helps your visitors grow familiar with you so you become their brand of choice before the buying season has even begun. And by pulling traffic into your Amazon store both on and off-platform, Amazon DSP maximizes your chances of making this happen.

Put simply, using Amazon DSP with the specialist assistance provided by Canopy Management will put your business at a distinct advantage over your competitors. 

However, building familiarity with your audience and discovering how to create the strongest campaigns for your brand takes time. Starting early is absolutely essential if you are to make the most of Amazon DSP and take advantage of the hordes of hungry buyers in those busy periods.

Giving potential buyers the repeat exposure they need to feel comfortable and familiar with your brand is only possible when done over a longer timescale. By simply trying to snatch your customers’ attention once Cyber Week has begun, you compete with every other seller on Amazon. This usually results in wasted opportunities and lower sales than anticipated during the most profitable times of the year.

However, by building familiarity with your audience you also create comfort in them – the comfort they need to flock to your store over the competition and part with their hard-earned cash.

When used correctly, Amazon DSP offers you a platform filled with powerful tools to make this happen. It’s true that harnessing Amazon DSP to its full potential requires time, preparation and expertise. But as more sellers begin using the platform, it no longer becomes a question of whether your business can afford to take the plunge into selling with Amazon DSP, but whether your business can afford not to. The question is, how much do you want an advantage over your competition this Cyber Week?

If you want to discover what Amazon DSP can do for your brand, get in touch with our team at Canopy Management for an initial consultation and discussion about the options available to you.

Recap of the DSP Cyberweek Optimization Strategy

  1. Start DSP ads 8 weeks in advance of busy period or “tent pole” event to allow for enough time to test audiences and ad-creatives.
  2. Run full-funnel campaigns, testing top of funnel InMarket segments and custom creatives and then making intelligent use of retargeting.
  3. Test Display and Video ads to reach broader audiences.
  4. Optimize working campaigns that reach the right in-aisle shopper segments, gain new customers with custom creatives that work, and retarget proven audiences both on and off Amazon’s platform. This creates the perfect storm for building an audience of shoppers anticipating your deals come cyber-week.

Other Important Q4 Prep Items

Aside from running DSP to maximize your cyber week, there are other important “housekeeping” items to note if you want to leverage the holidays to the fullest.

First, know your key FBA dates.

Aug 3. Holiday promotion submissions opened early this year. So get your Best Deals, 7-Day Deals, Lightning Deals and Coupons in NOW!

Sept 17. is the deadline to submit these deals. After this date, deals for Cyber week will no longer be available. (This only applies to the US and Australia. All other marketplaces have until Oct 8).

Nov 3. FBA inventory cutoff date for sellers in the US (even earlier for Canada and Mexico). This is the last day you can set up inbound shipping into FBA to have your items available for sale during the holidays.

Once you’ve ensured you will be IN STOCK, and set up promotions (remember, promotions are a key to visibility during the holidays and the volume will help in maintaining and gaining keyword rank), next you should plan your external traffic strategies.

Cut Through the Holiday Noise

Social Media: Holiday season is a great time to produce and distribute content throughout your social media channels. However, most brands use this time to share promotions and giveaways. This makes sense, since it is the gift season, but it also presents an opportunity to stand out.

Use this time to create emotionally charged content. Holidays are a time when people are more prone to feeling emotional, so if you connect with your audience on that level, you stand to create stronger relationships (and bigger fans).

Livestreaming: This may also be a good time to participate in Amazon lives. There is a good possibility that buyers will be exploring the platform more in their free time, especially if they suspect they’ll get great deals from it.

Google: Amazon very much likes traffic from Google. While it may be too late in the year to depend on SEO tactics to organically rank on Google, Adwords is a great second choice. Not only will this (ideally) lead to more sales, but also keyword rank.

Most importantly, have a profitable and safe holiday season this year!

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