Bryan Porter’s Post

I wouldn't call branded ads on your PDPs as shenanigan's coming from Amazon. Branded strategy should realistically have a cap as for a percentage of your ad spend and not be done flippantly. For example you can just choose to run Sponsored Brand ads and forego the SP branded ads as a strategy, or just cap your daily budget for branded spend. Certainly don't let it run wild. You can also be focused with SP ads for branded search and be very specific with which ASINs you want to advertise and be strict about which products to advertise on. For example when I worked at LEGO, I created a strategy to break up branded defensive ads between current products and retired products, with a third category of licensed products as a 3rd option if we had additional budget. I'd stick to a certain budget and if I needed to cut somewhere, I'd cut the group with the lesser impressions. Realistically you could cut back on branded search, but you might also lose sales. In that situation, a lot of brands would create sets that looked like ours, and often I'd see competitor ads being the top clicked and bought products for our brand name if the budget didn't allow for 100% coverage.

Bryan Porter The same thing happened with one of the brands in the cookie niche, where we had to pause due to cash flows, but to my surprise, we only dropped a little. Now over the period, we were investing in Highly competitive keywords by maintaining the ranks and thought that our organic sales on said keywords were due to our aggressive strategy on those keywords (via SQP) but it was not that. Yes, we did drop in ranks but remained on the first page, and if I say the overall drop was not more than 6 - 8%. But imagine now no PPC, no ACOS nothing and it is all organic. We lost some sales on branded terms by 3 -5 % and before that 10% of total spending was dedicated to this part at 3 - 4% ROAS.  What I got from this test was 1) our performance got better on competitive keywords as we were not competing enough (sessions dropped) so our CVR got better against the sessions we received versus when we were spending. 2) there is a lifecycle of PPC as well & you might need to focus on traffic from outside Amazon only (maybe DSP or SM ads), 3) if your products are worth buying once you pull them enough high that you get good sell-through then you don’t have to worry on maintaining the ranks rather focus on quality & branding.

I contemplated commenting on this post because I knew it would take me quite a bit of time to structure an appropriate answer. 😂 For one, thank you for sharing!  I want to give a shout-out to our podcast episode if people want to hear more about your brand-building strategies.  For two, I want to dive deeper on some of the aspects you called out here.  🔶 "Amazon ads takes credit for sales that would've happened organically. Like 40%. Dramatically inflating performance." If you “Cast a wide net” and have little control over your campaign setup and reporting, then yes. You WILL run into problems with cannibalization.  But IMO, this is NOT due to “bad / non trustworthy data” but rather user error. Amazon now gives us almost all of the insights we need to understand the relationship between organic rank and advertising, as well as full-funnel attribution and path to purchase.  If you segment your campaigns by ASIN, strategy, and small batch keywords you can directly control WHERE your spend is going and HOW your budget is being distributed, thus mitigating wasted spend.  Layer in AMC which allows us to see ad type overlap and path to purchase, and we get a much deeper understanding of our Advertising attribution.

We have spent millions on Amazon as well, and our lesson: Build your business and brand outside of Amazon, and have Amazon only as one of the channels to acquire the customers. Focus on the products, so customers come back to you directly again and again.

Paid search incrementality must be driven by digital shelf signals. Brand, non-brand, and competitor segmentation is the minimum but understanding how likely a consumer is to find your product, per keyword, based on your organic position is key. Otherwise, you run into that problem of paying for clicks you would have secured organically. Over time, investment in those keywords should drive sales velocity to increase organic visibility - then rinse and repeat w/ the next set of keywords. That's the beauty of retail.com paid search: influencing the organic SERP.

Congratulations and great examples and proof of why a surgical approach to advertising on Amazon is a necessity - when done right, it’s a powerful tool that drives incremental growth that can’t be found through organic, trade or off site efforts. Working with a partner with deep experience and expertise can help to ensure money isn’t wasted by ads taking too much credit, or spent on learning curves. The agency I led for the last 3.5 years almost always used ASIN level, single search term, single placement campaigns that ran at specific times of day. B vs NB mix (along with conquesting, autos and DSP of course) was always carefully balanced against brand objectives vs desire for incremental growth. And now that I’m on the other side, I appreciate the technology and approach more than ever, but also that it isn’t one size fits all. Agency vs in house Vs hybrid models should match to culture, resources and even c-suite level of sponsorship but the right partner can make all the difference, saving time, money and valuable resources. Good luck!

Great post! Thank you for taking the time and effort to share it. I’m an ads novice, can someone explain the term ‘additive’ that’s used throughout?

A thorough and engaging post! A thought on the statement “don’t run bestsellers, customers see them organically.” When you measure which items were clicked vs. what was actually purchased within a client’s portfolio often times a sub set of ASIN’s drive sales across the entire portfolio. It’s not always what’s clicked that ends up being purchased. Best sellers can be an entryway for consumers to discover your items/brand but may ultimately lead a sale of a different item than the one they engaged with.

"Brand is the ultimate investment". This cannot be restated enough.