Mid-Season E-Commerce Tips to Maximise Your Holiday Performance

With the Holiday season upon us, many of our retail clients are ramping up spend on e-commerce channels to take advantage of the expected record breaking holiday season. Consumer spending over the Black Friday weekend is expected to increase by 47% from the same period in 2016 according to a recent survey by RetailMeNot and is also forecast to be the biggest mobile shopping day ever in US history according to a new report by AppAnnie.

It’s no surprise that Amazon is also set to break new boundaries, with Suntrust forecasting that almost half of online sales during the holiday season will go through Amazon.com.

Although many brands are well into executing their holiday season advertising campaigns, we wanted to share some mid-season insights, learned from leading brands and agencies taking advantage of Skai’s first to market Amazon Ads API.

Listen to your Product Data
Focus on your product level data. Don’t assume what the best products (ASINs) are, use the product insights and see it in the data. Consider giving more products the opportunity to drive sales. Give all your ASINs a chance to help understand which are and aren’t suited to AMS promotion.

Harvest the Right Keywords
Using Amazon’s Automated Campaigns, brands can see what searches and keywords delivered the most clicks, awareness and sales; and this intel can then be used to optimize future campaigns. These insights can also reveal negative keywords, to help drive the right traffic to products.

It’s also useful to utilize the different keyword match types, and create campaigns with different match types to further harvest the most relevant keywords. Broad terms will give brands maximum traffic exposure, and it’s good to see which terms are also driving sales. Phrase and exact keywords will prompt ads to a more specific and targeted audience, often resulting in higher conversion rates but smaller overall volume. Use a combination to find the right keywords portfolio.

Use keywords from your paid search activity on other publishers to harness additional terms and kick start new campaigns.

Bid Strategically and Aggressively
With demand increasing, so will the competitiveness of the auctions. Enable bid+ on your manual campaigns to help increase your chances of winning that top-of-search placement.

Think about increasing the bids now – Black Friday is only a week away! Activity is rapidly increasing now – as we speak! Start now to capture those shoppers who are browsing, shopping and looking for the best gifts for their friends and family.

Continually Adjust your Budget
It’s a best practice to round out your results and recommendations, paying attention to and continually adjusting your budget. In 2016, the number of clicks increased to 75% and ad attributed sales up shot up to 125% from Q3 to Q4 according to Amazon Marketing Services. Brands should expect growth in demand, and make sure the budget reflects it. To ensure campaigns can keep running, check on spend at least once a day during this busy holiday season as some campaigns will inevitably run “hotter” than others. Intra-day is preferable as some campaigns run out of budget mid-day, resulting in missing out on shoppers who search later in the day. Consider updating the caps with additional budget or reallocating funds from other campaigns.

Ensure Accuracy of your Product Pages
With the holiday season more traffic and more interest is expected, driving more views to your product detail pages. Make sure those are accurate, detailed, and provide consumers all the information they are looking for. As consumer behavior shifts and they are looking for more help in a hurry, accurate product details page can make the conversion happen.

It’s not too late to get the most out of your holiday shopping campaigns. Leading brands and agencies are taking full advantage of the new Skai support for e-commerce channels as part of their overall digital strategy.

“Skai has been a reliable partner in tackling problems that require flexibility and customization based on our clients’ business needs. With Skai’s view into search, social, and now e-commerce with Amazon, we can manage across key biddable channels in one platform, making it far easier to understand how they can work together and contribute to the bottom line.”
– Jason Hartley, SVP, National Head of Search and Paid Social, 360i