Avoid wasted ad spend: why you need to be retail aware

To maximize the impact of your ad spend, optimizing your ads based only on ad metrics is not enough. You need to gain a holistic view of how your sales are growing across your account, and to do this you need to look at retail metrics and ad performance side-by-side.

When you measure both retail and ad performance together, you can identify more opportunities to scale, whether supporting organically high-performing products or reducing ad spend on low-inventory products, ensuring that your ad dollars are being allocated to the products that will drive the most sales.

Ad Performance: Amazon Marketing Stream

Amazon Marketing Stream allows you to measure ad performance (impressions, CPCs, ACOS, sales, and more) by hour of the day and day of the week to track trends across your business. These granular metrics give you insight into how consumers are shopping for your products—perhaps they are browsing in the mornings (driving increases in impressions and CPCs) but not converting until the evening (higher sales and click-through rate). Using these insights you can then adjust your advertising strategies with dayparting schedules based on whether your goal is to maximize sales, visibility, or efficiency.

Retail Performance: Amazon Rapid Retail Analytics

Understanding your organic performance and retail metrics allows you to identify opportunities to drive incremental sales with advertising support. With Amazon’s Rapid Retail Analytics you can gauge organic performance via near real-time analytics across:

• Sales: ordered units, ordered revenue, and ASINs

• Traffic: detail page views/glance views and ASINs

• Inventory: highly available units and ASINs

Tracking these metrics can help you gain insight into how consumers engage with your brand at an ASIN level, helping you identify peak organic shopping periods and adjust your ad strategies to meet the organic demand for your product. Using inventory as a key lever, you can, for example, scale up your ad campaigns for high-performing products that have available inventory, or conversely, reduce spend on products that are low inventory or out-of-stock to avoid wasting ad spend on ASINs that won’t result in a sale.

Retail Awareness: Rapid Retail Analytics x Amazon Marketing Stream

Cross-referencing your retail and advertising performance with Rapid Retail Analytics and Amazon Marketing Stream allows you to build more robust dayparting strategies that leverage the freshest and most accurate data.

For example, using Rapid Retail Analytics and Amazon Marketing Stream you could identify select hours of the day where your organic retail traffic is low but has a high conversion rate. This may indicate that shoppers are likely to convert but your products are not getting enough visibility on the search results page. To increase your organic rank, you could increase your ad spend during those select intervals to ensure top-of-search placements and maximize your potential for sales.

Leverage Rapid Retail Analytics in Perpetua

Closing the gap with data

Leveraging Rapid Retail Analytics data, we’ve helped close the 4-day data lag on retail metrics, populating these retail metrics in near real-time to help you better measure how your products are performing organically.

Faster access to inventory volume with real-time notifications

We’ve recently implemented real-time Inventory Notifications to alert you when you’re running low on inventory to help avoid wasted ad spend. When you receive the notification you can pull back your ad spend from those goals and reallocate to products with more inventory, or ramp up your advertising to help sell out the product faster so Amazon can replenish the stock sooner. 

With Perpetua’s real-time Inventory Notifications, advertisers can define one minimum inventory threshold for all the products in a goal and will be notified when those products dip below the threshold. Similarly, when the inventory goes above the threshold, users will be sent recommendations to enable the product across all goals where it is present.

Using insights garnered from Rapid Retail Analytics, advertisers are able to build robust, granular advertising strategies, allocating your ad spend to your products that will drive maximum impact and reduce wasted ad spend. 

To learn more about how to leverage retail metrics and advertising performance to drive incremental growth, email us at hello@perpetua.io