As Amazon storms the established advertising stronghold of Google and Facebook, the retailer is seeking to position itself as a brand builder. One of the ways it offers to help brands understand and establish their presence with Amazon advertising campaigns is through the Retail Insights Report.
Many brands find it difficult to make the case for using Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP). Even more, as brands do use it, it can be difficult to pick the right data to inform a cohesive strategy. The Retail Insights Report shows the bigger picture around individual ad campaigns, and offers a way to measure a brand’s product presence against similar products in a subcategory. It is a useful tool in creating a fine-tuned advertising strategy and helping brands quantify success.
What Can Brands Learn from the Retail Insights Report?
Advertising on Amazon can create a lasting effect on product consideration, awareness, and sales after the campaign has ended. The Retail Insights Report measures this effect by showing data 30 days prior to a campaign’s start date, during a campaign’s flight, and 30 days after the campaign ends.
The report provides the non-ad attributed data which includes glance (product detail page) views, sales, search impressions, and other metrics about products’ overall retail health.
The data available in the Retail Insight Report helps advertisers understand the correlation between an advertising campaign and performance. This comprehensive view of shopping activity can be used by brands to make informed decisions on their campaign strategy.
For example, a brand may look at the report and see low traffic before a display advertising campaign, and high traffic during the campaign. After the campaign is over, the report may show that traffic remained slightly higher than pre-campaign levels. Sounds like a success! However, the brand may notice that conversions dropped. Given the higher levels of traffic, this makes sense (although the brand can always take a look at their product page content). If the report shows sales increased during and after the campaign, they are on the right track. They can compare the lasting effects of different types of campaigns and create strategies that drive further traffic increases, while working on improving conversion rates.
In addition to campaign time frame data, the report provides category-level insights. Brands can use these insights to track growth against competitors, looking at indexed retail health metrics within the same subcategory.
How the Report Can Help Your Strategy
Unfortunately, advertising campaigns aren’t ran in a vacuum. There are always factors both inside and outside a brand’s control that influence campaign outcomes. Seasonality, price point, product detail pages, lack of customer reviews, low star ratings, competing advertisers, and more can all impact campaigns.
A good, comprehensive strategy takes factors outside individual campaigns into account. The Retail Insights Report is one tool brands can use to get a more complete picture. There are a few ways that the report can help.
Recognize correlations. Monitoring shopping activity of products before, during, and after the campaign can help identify correlations to advertising.
Observe effects of ad campaigns. The report can help advertisers understand the lift across various metrics made by a campaign. Specifically, it can reveal the effect of your ad spend on product awareness, consideration, and sales.
Unlock competitive insights. By analyzing subcategory growth, brands can compare the retail metrics such as search impressions, glance views, and conversion rates to understand performance relative to other advertisers. Looking at these metrics can help with understanding some of the external factors influencing campaign data.
Using the Amazon Insights Report Effectively
There are a few keys to making the most of the Amazon Retail Insights Report.
Set smart goals. Understand the data (i.e. your organic traffic and metrics) without advertising first to inform the goals for your ad campaigns. Are your conversions high, but your detail page views are low? Focus on launching an awareness campaign for the product to increase the traffic to product detail pages and continue tracking the impact on sales.
Understand your campaign objectives. Determine which parts of the report are most relevant to you, based on what you are seeking to accomplish. For an awareness goal, focus on evaluating impressions, while a consideration intent goal would focus on clicks and detail page views.
Use the report to improve performance. Did you meet your objectives? Did your campaign fall flat? Use the Retail Insights Report as a tool for improvement to help build your brand.
