The problem:
As VP of Marketing at Totally Bamboo, Kyle Erickson heads up a small team that, among other tasks, manages the brand’s $1M+ annual digital advertising budget.
It was a massive undertaking for a brand with such a large catalog. Totally Bamboo has 500+ ASINs across its portfolio. Each ASIN can run up to 8-10 ad campaigns. All told, “it’s difficult to really discern what our ad spend per ASIN is like, what the return per ASIN is like, and are we maintaining the margins that we need?” Erickson said.
Within the Amazon Ad Console, these clean, ASIN-level views were not easy to get. He was stuck manually downloading dozens of reports, taking the ASIN column, and combining the tables.
Soon, he reached the inevitable conclusion. “It really wasn’t possible with the catalog of our size.”
The solution:
Erickson leaned on the Intentwise Ad Optimizer to audit performance on the ASIN level. It changed his life.
One useful feature was our built-in rollups, which allowed him to slice and dice his ad performance numbers as he pleased. He could roll up performance by campaign, portfolio, label, ASIN, or sub-brand. “Being able to have that rollup feature is really helpful, especially for some of our items that have tighter margins,” Erickson said.
Auditing is now a breeze, too. Last year, Erickson realized that one of Totally Bamboo’s traditional bestsellers—a cutting board set—was underperforming in sales. It used to be a top seller in its category, but suddenly, it was flailing.
He couldn’t figure out what was going on. When he rolled up his ad performance by ASIN, however, he saw that the ACOS was still strong and that its product targets were performing well. The ad spend had just dried up.
So Erickson decided to up spend, which he could do directly in the Ad Optimizer, too. The results were immediate. “We’ve seen really explosive growth out of that,” he said. “That report really helped me figure out how to reinvigorate that listing.”
A similar situation occurred more recently, when another major product in the Totally Bamboo portfolio slipped out of the brand’s top 10. This time, Erickson turned to another feature of the Intentwise Ad Optimizer: What Changed.
What Changed is our machine-learning software that automatically identifies which factors—an ASIN, a campaign, a keyword, etc—most contributed to a swing in performance.
When Erickson ran a What Changed analysis for this particular product, the software automatically flagged a few keyword targets that weren’t converting as well as they were last year. Thanks to What Changed, he could see the problem was not with the product listing—it was with the advertising.
Share of Voice has also proved to be a boon to business. Using real-time Share of Voice data, Intentwise automatically surfaces competitor products that frequently show up next to Totally Bamboo’s—but over which Totally Bamboo has a competitive advantage. Erickson can add these new product targets to its campaigns with a single click.
“It’d be pretty time intensive to keep tabs on all of our products and see what new listings may be rising up the ranks,” he said. With Intentwise tracking its organic position automatically, “it's saving us a lot of time from having to do that research.”
