The problem:
Keith Hamann, Senior Director of Marketplaces at the kitchen products brand Made In Cookware, relies on an accurate forecast for their ad budgets. Made In Cookware advertises across a number platforms, including Facebook, Google search, and YouTube.
For every dollar the brand spends, Hamann forecasts the amount of branded search traffic on Amazon.
These forecasts are essential for evaluating the performance of the Facebook and Google ads. They are also a core part of how he allocates his Amazon budget. If he expects branded searches on Amazon to increase, for instance, then he’ll need to increase spend on brand defense.
The problem was, Hamann realized that Google and Facebook ads weren’t the only ads driving branded searches on Amazon. The Amazon ads he was running on non-branded keywords helped lift his branded searches, too.
In other words: People were searching “chef knife” on Amazon, seeing a Made In Cookware ad, and then typing in “Made In Cookware.”
How could he plan for this when budgeting his ad spend for the year?
The solution:
Hamann went to the Intentwise team looking for a query that can track this phenomenon. How many times were shoppers searching for a non-branded keyword, followed by a branded keyword?
Amazon Marketing Cloud is the only platform that allows for this kind of holistic evaluation of shopper journeys. And Intentwise Explore takes all of the hassle out of using it.
Hamann wanted to turn this into a query. We talked through the data sources we could use, wrote it from scratch, and tested it to ensure everything was working. Two weeks after his initial inquiry, Hamann found the custom query sitting in his Intentwise Explore account. “It was seamless,” he said.
Now, the query runs automatically in the background. He schedules it to refresh every month, so he can adjust his brand defense budget more nimbly.
Measuring the success of his Google and Facebook campaigns is easier than ever. Hamann can simply subtract all of the branded searches that came from non-branded Amazon ads, to have a clearer sense of how many of those searches Facebook and Google ads are actually driving.
This is important for evaluating the success of off-platform ads—but it’s also important for making sure those off-platform ads aren’t cannibalizing DTC sales.
Many DTC brands, including Made In Cookware, want their non-Amazon ads to refer people back to their website.
Many brands might assume that an uptick in branded searches on Amazon means those Google and Facebook ads just drove shoppers to Amazon. But this query helps Hamann see when he’s creating that increased branded demand from ads on Amazon itself.
“It just helped me to be much more accurate,” he said. “It helped me tell the story of where all these extra branded searches were coming from.”
