You probably know that your typical ad won’t just drive sales of your advertised ASIN. It’ll also boost other items in your catalog.
These non-advertised sales are called brand halo sales. Your ad got the shopper in the door—but ultimately, a non-advertised product is what compelled them to make a purchase.
For a long time, it has been difficult to see exactly which ASINs are part of your brand halo sales.
Sure, the Ad Console will tell you how many of your sales from a particular ad were attributed to brand halo versus direct product sales. But you can’t know which ASINs were purchased as a part of that brand halo.
That stops today. Now, through Amazon Marketing Cloud for Sponsored Ads, you can map search terms directly to ASIN sales. Which search terms are driving which ASIN purchases?
With a bit of skill, you can forge these connections, and build a much stronger understanding of how your advertising is working holistically.
Why do brand halo sales on Amazon matter?
The reality is, just because a shopper clicks an ad for one of your products doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to purchase that particular product.
Let’s say you sell a line of vacuum cleaners. A shopper searches the keyword “vacuum,” and clicks a Sponsored Products ad for your plug-in vacuum cleaner.
Ultimately, though, they click around your page and eventually purchase your cordless vacuum cleaner.
Amazon Marketing Cloud makes all of these connections visible. Because AMC lets you see all of the interactions a shopper had with your brand before purchasing, you can see how a single Sponsored Product ad click led to the purchase of an entirely different product.
Scale this out across all of your customers, and suddenly you have yourself a holistic map of the keyword to ASIN connections.
You can pair specific keywords with the non-advertised ASIN that shoppers are more likely to purchase.
Which keywords are driving the most brand halo sales? Which non-advertised ASINs are shoppers most often purchasing? Which ASIN-and-keyword pairs are driving the most conversions?
All these answers are now at your fingertips.
Why build a search-term-to-ASIN map for brand halo sales?
There are some obvious use cases here:
Identify high-performing keywords for specific ASINs. If you’re advertising Vacuum A on the term “vacuum,” but oftentimes the people who click your ad are buying Vacuum B, that’s a sign that you might want to advertise Vacuum B more heavily on the keyword instead.
Knowing which non-advertised ASINs are frequently purchased after an ad click lets you get smarter about which ASINs you advertise on which search terms.
Locate the standouts in your catalog. If you’re looking at your search-term-to-ASIN map and you see that the same few ASINs are often purchased as part of a brand halo, that tells you these products are particularly strong at enticing customers.
It’s worth considering whether you’re taking full advantage of those ASINs.
If they are already your top sellers, of course, this data isn’t super interesting.
But if an ASIN that’s not a hallmark of your catalog is getting a lot of love among halo purchases, you just found a diamond ASIN in the rough.
Recalibrate your keyword strategy. If certain search terms are driving a disproportionate number of brand halo sales, that might mean you’re advertising the wrong ASIN on that search term.
Use AMC to see which product shoppers are actually buying after searching the particular term, and pair them with the keywords that are truly working.
It’s time to rethink your brand halo sales today
Big picture, these search-term-to-ASIN maps can give you a much sharper picture of your business. Knowing the products that pair well with different keywords lets you get a lot smarter about your advertising strategy.
And it doesn’t take a lot of work to make these connections. For instance, if you don’t want to build a whole ASIN map for every search term in your campaigns, that’s understandable. Mapping every search term to every ASIN is a lot of processing power.
Instead, you can simply use AMC to investigate only those ads that have strong brand halo sales.
Let’s say you know from the Ad Console that a certain ad campaign is driving a disproportionate number of brand halo sales. Which ASINs are those shoppers actually buying? Through AMC, you can isolate just those ads with a lot of halo sales, and map out the specific brand halo purchases.
It’s a fantastic data point to keep in your backpacker, and rejigger your advertising strategy accordingly.
(Want to know more about how to use AMC for Sponsored Ads? We have two whitepapers that can help—read our AMC for Sponsored Ads for Brands whitepaper here or our AMC for Sponsored Ads for Agencies whitepaper here.)
