Amazon Advertising in Europe: Tips and Success Stories

Transcript

Colleen: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today for our webinar on Amazon Advertising in Europe. I'm excited to have our friends from Tinuiti with us today to share some tips and success stories. Jeff Banks and Rylee Boland are both account specialists at Tinuiti. They work with sellers every day. They have a lot of great information to share.

Colleen: Jeff has actually been with the Tinuiti marketplaces team for over three years. He specializes in Amazon search and display. He works with both Amazon vendors and sellers. Rylee has been in the Amazon industry and digital advertising for about eight years, I guess, at this point. Five plus years in digital advertising plus another three as an Amazon Account Management Specialist at Tinuiti. Rylee specializes in search and display strategies for both large and small brands on Amazon as well as the Walmart marketplace. They have a lot of great information to share with you today.

Colleen: I'm going to turn it over to them for most of the day today, but first, I'm going to just hop into the agenda just to cover the points that we're going to talk about. Jeff and Rylee are going to give you an overview of Advertising in Amazon Europe as well as lots of tips on advertising strategies including how to target keywords in Europe ad unit best practices and what marketplaces the ad units are available, campaign bidding strategies and recommendations on what they have seen has proven to work for Amazon sellers.

Colleen: They'll also share some of their predictions on what the future of Amazon EU Advertising looks like. We're excited for them to be here today. I know most of you are as well or you wouldn't be joining this webinar.

Colleen: Then, just a brief background on me and eComEngine. My name is Colleen Quattlebaum. I'm the marketing manager at eComEngine. We have a full suite of Amazon tools starting with FeedbackFive, which is a feedback and review management tool. It's available in 15 Amazon marketplaces. So all of the European marketplaces including Netherlands can support the review and feedback requests in FeedbackFive.

Colleen: MarketScout is a product research tool for Amazon sellers looking up different ASINs finding out how many other FBA sellers are selling an item, some pricing information, and fees. That's a great intelligence tool. Then, RestockPro helps with FBA inventory management. That is available in the UK as well as in Canada and the US. Then lastly we have SmartPrice, which is an algorithmic repricer for Amazon merchants.

Colleen: At this time, enough about me and eComEngine. I want to turn it over to the true experts that are here today about Amazon Advertising in Europe. Jeff and Rylee, take it away.

Jeff: Thank you, Colleen, and appreciate being here. Thank you for the intros. Just a quick note before we get started on Tinuiti, Tinuiti is a performance and data-driven digital marketing leader in the space. Our focus is really on every aspect of the customer journey across what we call the triopoly of Google, Facebook, and Amazon and, of course, beyond those three big players as well.

Jeff: Today though, we're going to be focusing on Amazon and on European marketplace looking at advertising and how you can expand into it if you're already there, how you can get the most out of your advertising budget and really just having kind of an open discussion about some opportunities there.

Jeff: To kick things off, I'm just going to do a really brief overview of what European advertising looks like today. You're going to see this table on the right repeated really throughout the presentation just because one of the really complicated things about European Amazon advertising is the availability of everything.

Jeff: On the right are the five major marketplaces that Amazon Advertising is available today. Netherlands is a notable marketplace or country that isn't included. Obviously, not everything covered here. We'll call out some specifics on things that are and are not available in certain countries throughout the presentation.

Jeff: To kick things off though, one of the things we wanted to talk about was volume opportunity in these countries. We have these separated into two major tiers. This is based on advertising volume that we see from our existing clients and partners that we have within these five. We typically have the United Kingdom and Germany as sort of that tier one group.

Jeff: The reason for that is there is significantly more demand for the majority of the businesses that we work with in those two countries. Then, Italy, Spain and France are definitely seeing lower volume through advertising today. When we say volume, we mean everything from impressions to sales revenue we get through ads, but I think it's noteworthy that Italy, Spain, and France are all seeing very significant growth in 2020 really seeing a big explosion in the advertising space in those three. We may be talking about this again next year at this time and say that they're all in a tier one.

Jeff: Now, of course, this may not be the same for your business, but this is a really good guideline if you're in Europe already or you're looking to expand there and you're not sure where to focus on with limited resources and team resources. We definitely recommend looking at the United Kingdom and Germany as a good starting place.

Jeff: First, we'll briefly go over all the Amazon Advertising Units that are available just some basic information on what they are, what they look like. Then, from there, we'll go into a little bit more on there's the strategic side. There are three main units for Europe advertising on the Amazon search or pay-per-click side.

Jeff: The first being Sponsored Products, the second Sponsored Brands, and the third Sponsored Display. They all have really unique qualities about them especially in terms of how you can reach customers at different parts of the journey from awareness to consideration all the way down to the purchase experience.

Jeff: First for Sponsored Products, this is the most universal ad unit available in Europe. It's available in all five of the major countries. It's really broken up into two main areas, so automatic campaigns and then manual campaigns as well. We'll be diving into some recommendations for structure and how to leverage these.

Jeff: But you can think of automatic campaigns as setting a general product level bid and letting Amazon and its algorithm match you up with customer search results based on your relevancy to those queries whereas manual campaigns are a little bit more in your control. You pick the exact keywords or the exact competitor products that you would like to target. There is a little bit more level of control there.

Jeff: There are also some major campaign tools that we like to recommend when looking at Sponsored Products, mainly Amazon's bidding strategies that are available and negative targeting which was recently upgraded within the last month or so to include more granularity and how you can exclude certain things from your targeting and make your campaigns more efficient.

Jeff: So really Sponsored Products, we typically see for businesses as a bread and butter a really good starting place for advertising in Europe. It's where we're also seeing the greatest scale today in terms of being able to quickly grow revenue and grow impressions against your products and your catalog.

Jeff: We're going to go through a couple examples of what these look like on the Amazon search results page just so there's some context here to what we're talking about. This is an example of sponsored products showing up on the top of the search. There's typically two to four placements that show up here as the first level of advertisement. We're going to be using the example of water bottles a lot today. I hope everyone really enjoys talking about advertising water bottles on Amazon because it's our go-to.

Jeff: There's also a carousel called the sponsored products carousel on ASIN detail pages. When you're on an individual product page below the bullet points with the information about the item. There's typically a rolling carousel with sponsored offerings as well. You're eligible to show up on competitor pages. You can show up on your own pages to cross-sell gives you a lot of opportunities to take market share in these countries.

Jeff: As we move into Sponsored Brands, first, a quick overview here. This is also available in all of the major five EU marketplaces today. Sponsored Brands is ultimately a tool to showcase a collection of products, whereas Sponsored Products is focused on a single item. Sponsored Brands is great for brand building and offering a wide array or driving customers to your Amazon store page and showing them your entire catalog.

Jeff: It's really effective for getting your brand out there, putting a cohesive message about what your brand wants to be and showcasing that to the Amazon shopper in these countries.

Jeff: There's a lot of different targeting opportunities with Sponsored Brands. The ones that we'll dive into today are the product collection, the store spotlight, and the video. Product collections are probably the most widely used type of sponsor brands. They've been around the longest. That's simply where you drive to either a storefront and highlight three ASINs or you build out a custom page, and you put like-minded products together and drive to that.

Jeff: With that, we're targeting keywords. We're targeting products as well. There's also an opportunity in the United Kingdom only. This is our first kind of region exclusive opportunity right now which is called the Store Spotlight. That's really effective for just showcasing your Amazon store page. I know a lot of businesses have put in a lot of time to making those store pages look great on Amazon. This is a way to drive traffic to those pages.

Jeff: Then, finally, there's Sponsored Brands Video which is a beta that just got released in the United Kingdom. We'll talk about that as a completely separate section today, definitely one of the new and exciting things that Amazon Europe has to offer.

Jeff: In terms of campaign tools and strategies, I mentioned it a couple of times, but the Amazon store and Sponsored Brands really go hand in hand. You're creating that rich brand tool. One of our greatest recommendations to leave you with today is if you've invested in that brand store and made that great, definitely look at pairing that with Sponsored Brands linking those two together and pushing customers to that store. There's also custom image opportunities which we'll dive into and then negative targeting which is the same things that we have looked at for sponsored products as well.

Jeff: In terms of placements, this is an example of top of search placement for a headline ad showcasing a brand logo, advertising copy as well as featured ASIN. You can select three featured ASINs to show up here. In this example, there's only two. Then, this can drive to either a custom landing page or back to your Amazon storefront.

Jeff: This is an example of three Sponsored brands from three different businesses showing up at the bottom of a page. So, really good opportunity here at the bottom as well to drive customers a little bit more simple with this inventory. It's just focusing on ad copy, a brand logo, a brand name and then a click-through link as well. You don't get as big of a placement that you're taking up like you are on the top of search, but still a good way to highlight a brand page.

Jeff: Then, finally, a relatively newer placement this year which is on the product detail page in something called the brands related to this category feature. This focuses again on just really a simple main image with a brand text and a logo and then a link to click-through to an Amazon store page or landing page.

Jeff: All that being said, that covers it for just a brief overview of sponsored brands. I want to kick it over to Rylee to talk a little bit about sponsored display.

Rylee: Perfect. Thanks, Jeff. I wanted to give a brief overview of Sponsored Display. This is going to be one of the newly available ad types within the EU. It is something that Amazon has really worked on expanding overall capabilities over the past six months to a year on Amazon. As a Sponsored Display is going to be a little bit different than your standard keyword targeting campaign, we do not have the option to target keywords. Rather, there are a couple of different targeting types you'll see listed here.

Rylee: The first is audiences, and the second is product targeting. Audiences will be a little bit of a different strategy essentially looking at customers who viewed your specific ASIN or customers who are interested in specific products and categories.

Rylee: We do have the option to target both on and off Amazon audiences with the Sponsored Display campaigns. Product targeting is going to be a bit more specific and granular looking at individual ASINs as well as individual categories that you can choose to show up for.

Rylee: Looking at the different campaign tools and strategies within Sponsored Display, you do have the option to take advantage of ad copy and a brand logo. That capability is only available for audience targeting whereas refined category targeting is only going to be available for the product targeting section of Sponsored Display meaning if, for example, our water bottle example, you want to go ahead and show up within the category of water bottles. You can refine that targeting by price point or review count so that your product has an advantage against the category products that you are showing up against.

Rylee: We'll go over to the next slide for a quick example of what those ad types look like. Here's an example of the placement on a product detailed page. You'll see that there are a few different places where these ads can show up. This could be someone targeting a specific competitor, for example, Chilly’s Bottles, or if someone is targeting the water bottles category, you can show up within underneath the bullet points or underneath the buy box which are both highlighted in orange here.

Rylee: These ads are a great option for someone who does want to show up on your competitor detail pages. You can see it has a pretty premium placement. It's very easy for the customer to see and click on that ad then go to your own detail page.

Jeff: Thanks, Rylee. Moving now into what we had mentioned which we're treating as kind of a separate area of Amazon advertising is Sponsored Brands Video. Great call out from, I believe it was Alessandro in the chat as well that this is actually available now in Germany too, so not check mark here, but definitely wanted to confirm that that is a beta opportunity for Germany advertising accounts as well. Thank you for the comment there.

Jeff: In terms of a brief overview of Sponsored Brand video, this has been a really significant development for a lot of the businesses that we work with. It offers a completely new inventory auction because they've created dedicated inventory available for videos. This is a great brand building opportunity. We'll have an example or two here on the next few slides that focuses on what these look like, but it allows you to pair a brief video with a standard Sponsored Product looking feature for your ASIN to really focus on showing a lifestyle or maybe a use case for a product.

Jeff: And so taking the next level in terms of communicating the value proposition of your product to a customer outside of just showing them a Sponsored Product ASIN. We've already seen a lot of examples where this has helped impact click-through rates in a very positive way for businesses that we work with again with the ability to communicate through that video to customers.

Jeff: There's really not a lot like it on Amazon today so definitely a unique opportunity that we highly encourage for advertisers in Europe that have established themselves with some of the other ad types and are looking for ways to incrementally grow their business.

Jeff: In terms of some examples, here's one that showcases it in the middle of a page on desktop. Quick call out that desktop inventory is showing up here and there. Amazon seems to be testing it, but you can't always get a result to show on the desktop side of things. Keep that in mind, but again, it just highlights a video on the left-hand side with the traditional Sponsored Product style of the main product information on the right.

Jeff: Then, on the mobile side of things, here's what it looks like on the mobile app. One of the reasons why we are highly recommending people who haven't tested this before to really push into video advertising is because of how much space it takes up on the mobile app in most cases. You can see here just takes up almost half of the screen and so definitely a great opportunity to really put your product in the face of consumers and again highlight the strong quality of your individual product or brand.

Rylee: We'll hop into our last unit review which is going to be Amazon Display which is also referred to as DSP. I'll give a high level overview. Display Advertising as well is going to be a newer availability or capability within the EU, but we do have them available with all five marketplaces right now. DSP, it stands for Demand-Side Platform and essentially what that is, is Amazon allowing you to programmatically reach audiences both on Amazon sites, as well as Amazon owned or partnered with third-party websites.

Rylee: You can show up on Amazon as well as off Amazon with this specific ad type. Programmatic display advertising is going to be allowing Amazon's machine learning to really optimize the campaign for you and allow you to programmatically show up against different audiences just depending on what your targeting strategy is going to be for the campaign.

Rylee: We'll go into those in a little bit more detail as well so that you know all of the full capabilities available within this ad type. This is going to be different than the standard search CPC model. It's going to be a CPM model which stands for cost per thousand impressions. You're really paying for views and impressions rather than the actual click that you do on Amazon search.

Rylee: As I mentioned, you can target customers at each stage of the funnel both on and off Amazon. We'll go through the different funnel positions as well as what those strategies look like in just a second. Then, as well, these do show up both on mobile and desktop really across any device type that's available to browse the web.

Rylee: Looking at our targeting strategies and campaign tools, there's going to be three really main strategies that you can take advantage of with DSP. The first is going to be retargeting then in market and then consideration. These are also going to lay in different positions within the advertising funnel.

Rylee: Retargeting is going to be lower funnel retargeting customers who did view your products. In market, you're going to move up the funnel a little bit more to viewers who may be interested in your product but have not viewed your actual ASIN. Consideration is going to be the highest funnel position.

Rylee: We have another slide to go and go through this in a bit more detail as well. Another main tool you can take advantage of with display is going to be creative. Creative will be either Amazon generated or custom. I wanted to point out a few of the main differences between search and display advertising because they are pretty different from one another.

Rylee: As mentioned for display advertising is going to be a cost per thousand impression model rather than cost per click or CPC. The banner, they again do serve both on and off Amazon, on Amazon owned or Amazon-operated sites and across different screen types. So, a really huge difference there is on search. We're really just showing up on Amazon and across the Amazon app.

Rylee: The audience for display is going to be a bit more passive especially as you move to the mid and upper funnel strategies because it could be someone who had viewed your product in the past, but maybe have not viewed it within a more recent time frame like within the last week, for example.

Rylee: It also helps to fuel awareness and consideration for search advertising. So, a good example would be with our water bottle example, maybe me personally, I had viewed a water bottle detail page a few weeks ago. I had not purchased that product. What the display is going to do is it's going to target me and remind me that I did view that product, so I can go back into the search bar on amazon.com, search for that product and then purchase it or I can click on that add and go straight to that product detail page.

Rylee: Then, the next slide is going to give us a bit more detail on the different targeting strategies and as well funnel positions. To give a little bit more detail on the different segments that you can target with display, first is going to be that retargeting or the bottom funnel awareness.

Rylee: You'll see here, it's Amazon shoppers who viewed but did not purchase your products so ASIN retargeting, someone who viewed the water bottle, but did not purchase it within a given date range.

Rylee: The next is going to be the in-market segment. It could be someone who is searching for that specific type of product. I had put in my search bar on amazon.com water bottle. I'm in market for that type of product, but I may have not viewed your specific ASIN. I am interested in it. I might not be familiar with the brand.

Rylee: Then, the last segment is going to be the top funnel or upper funnel awareness which is going to be lifestyle segments. It could be something as broad as a snack enthusiast or a coffee lover in this example. If I'm looking for a water bottle, I could be in market for other types of products like a water backpack, for example. In that general category, but it's going to be a pretty broad interest group.

Colleen: Thank you so much Rylee and Jeff. A lot of awesome information about all the different types of ad units. We did get one question. Maybe, before we move on to the next section, we have somebody who asked that they have an established brand and product in Norway. Do you have any suggestions on what to choose to get their brand in Europe. I don't know maybe sponsored products. Is that the way to go since that's kind of the bread and butter, the entry level advertising program that you would recommend.

Jeff: Yeah. It's a good question. Going to throw it back a little bit on the person who asked and say it depends a little bit on ultimately your goal for the brand or the products. If you're looking to just test the waters and try and maximize the return and the sales you're getting, I think sponsored products would be a great start to advertising just because it's a little bit lower in the funnel and offers typically a really strong return.

Jeff: But if you're also looking to really build your brand long term and increase the brand awareness, then leveraging display, leveraging sponsored brands would be great options because they give you a little bit more flexibility to showcase your brand and bring that to consumers. Ultimately, it depends on your goals as well, but definitely some good options to choose there.

Colleen: Okay. Thanks. That's the only question we have so far. But, everybody, feel free to put any other questions in the Q&A, and we'll be sure to get to them. Thanks.

Jeff: Yeah. Absolutely. I did see a quick question I believe in just the chat about reviews and ratings carrying over as well. Did you want to take that, Colleen, or would you like me to comment on that as well?

Colleen: Sure. I can comment on that. Can ratings and reviews carry over from the same product in the US marketplace to the EU marketplace? If there are differences in the product you sell due to the different environment.

Colleen: In this case, it's like a charger that ask to have a different plug-in configuration. Reviews do not carry over from one marketplace to another. There have been some cases where we have seen some reviews carry over initially, but they will not stay long-term. It is important that you ask for reviews on those items in each new marketplace.

Colleen: If you have a hundred or a thousand or whatever reviews in one marketplace, those will not carry over. You do have to ask for reviews individually in each marketplace. And especially in this case, it sounds like it would be a different ASIN, totally different product in a way with different configuration too for the plugin.

Jeff: Awesome. We will continue to dive on in here. That was the end of our section really just about going over the major ad types. Also, wanted to dive into some more advanced strategy recommendations. We laid things on the table, but now we want to talk about a little bit more of what we recommend doing in different scenarios and really answering some of the most common questions that we've been getting about advertising in Europe, some of the biggest hurdles that people run into. Rylee, I'll let you go ahead and start there.

Rylee: Perfect. Thank you. The first section we'll dive into is going to be the Sponsored Products campaigns. Really, what we've seen as successful and as well best practice recommendation on overall structure for those campaigns. With sellers and vendors, we've seen that a shift in structure really can lead to more scale most times without a diminishing return because everything from utilizing search term reports budget allocation is more impactful with extra granularity.

Rylee: Really, what we always will recommend for the overall structure is going to be breaking out products in a one-to-one structure which allows for granular keyword targeting and again more control of budgets and then as well mirroring the auto and manual campaign structure for easy keyword harvesting. Essentially, what we mean by one to one is going to be whether it's one ASIN or a group of ASINs and a parent-child relationship with one auto and one corresponding manual campaign.

Rylee: You can always separate out additional manual campaigns. For example, branded versus non-branded keyword targeting, competitor keyword targeting for a few if that works well for you as well and if your budget allows you to do that.

Rylee: Then if you are unable to do one-to-one at the campaign level, for example, if you do have a limited budget with a larger catalog, that might be a limitation for you, we would recommend to do it at the ad group level. For our classic water bottle example, let's say you have three different types of water bottles. You want to do a more general water bottle campaign.

Rylee: We would recommend putting each different product in its own ad group. That way, you can control which keywords each of those products show up for. You can also allocate specific budgets to those products depending on which campaign structure you go for as well the reason we do recommend mirroring your auto to manual campaigns is when you do upload keywords within a bulk file to the Amazon platform, putting the same ad group and same campaign naming structure from your auto to manual really makes that process a lot easier and faster when you are adding in new keywords to those campaigns.

Rylee: Then, lastly, just keeping the naming consistent between those. Typically calling out the type of product. Then as well auto to manual, but really keeping the same structure within the names of your campaigns.

Rylee: Then, we'll hop into bidding strategies for those on the next slide. Perfect. Thank you. With our sponsored product campaigns, there are several dynamic bidding strategies that you can take advantage of. Those are just listed within the campaign settings or in the ad group settings of your specific auto or manual campaign.

Rylee: There are three different options that you can choose from, dynamic bids down only, dynamic bids up and down or fixed bids. Really, what the explanation for each of those is down only essentially you are allowing Amazon to reduce your bids if your product is less likely to convert for the sale. Up and down is allowing Amazon to either increase or decrease the bids just based on if you are more or less likely to convert for the sale.

Rylee: Fixed bids means that you are telling Amazon don't touch my bids. They will just stay where they are unless you change them yourself.

Rylee: For the placement bid options as well, this is going to be our top of search, our product pages or rest of search. You can increase the bids for that campaign that you can win additional placements on the high traffic areas of the site.

Rylee: For example, top of search would be that really the first set of ads that you see on page one. Product pages would be, for example, the sponsored product carousel showing up on a competitor detail page.

Jeff: Rylee, we've had a question on with the bidding strategies, what's the best one to use out of the three for if you're looking to maximize ROI on a campaign versus maximizing like eyeballs to the page.

Rylee: Great question. Typically, if you are really focused on your return on investment, you want a strong return, a low ACoS within those campaigns. We always recommend that you set your campaigns to dynamic bids down only because that will help you achieve the best ROI within those campaigns. It's going to be the most efficient option.

Rylee: If you do really want to focus on visibility, we recommend up and down because again you are allowing higher bids where you can really push for visibility and have a higher chance of winning over that sale.

Rylee: Then, that we'll hop into sponsored brands next. If there are any additional questions on that, please, feel free to put them into the Q&A section of the chat within the Zoom meeting as well.

Rylee: For recommendations for Sponsored Brand campaigns, best practice for a campaign structure and then as well tips and tricks really maintaining groups of similar products and then pairing them with relevant keywords to each campaign as well as relevant ad copy allows you to really create a general theme within your sponsored brand campaigns.

Rylee: We want to make sure that if someone is searching for a water bottle on Amazon, the odd that they are served has a product or brand specific ad copy or headline, it's showing those relevant products. Then as well, your campaign will have a higher chance of showing up if you are targeting those relevant keywords to the customer search as well.

Rylee: I'm always keeping within theme of the product type within the campaign structure for Sponsored Brand campaigns as well as where you want to input ad copy landing page and targeting keywords again just keeping those all married together within the same theme.

Rylee: For some best practice recommended tips and tricks for Sponsored Brand campaigns, there are different areas where these campaigns will drive traffic to on Amazon. For a Sponsored Product campaign, if a customer does click on that, it takes them straight to that product detail page.

Rylee: Sponsored Brands are a little bit different. They do drive either to a custom landing page or again to the storefront. It does help really drive brand awareness by giving customers access to your Amazon storefront if you do have one available. We definitely recommend A/B testing driving traffic to a landing page and a storefront to test what has stronger performance.

Rylee: There also is a new available beta testing custom images to drive a better click-through rate within your Sponsored Brand campaigns. When you are building out the actual creative, you can implement essentially a lifestyle image. It could be someone who is using the product really just giving the customer a better idea of how the product is used. Again, drive that click-through to the storefront or to the landing page.

Rylee: The last beta that is available is going to be the Store Spotlight beta which helps to really showcase the different products you have available as well as the different pages on your storefront tab.

Rylee: If you have a storefront that has multiple pages, you can highlight those different pages within that beta to really drive awareness to those different portions of your catalog. Then, we're going to hop over to sponsored display next.

Rylee: For camping structure and tips and tricks, what's recommended for best practices for sponsored display, again keep in mind, this isn't newer ad type, but it is still available within all five marketplaces within the EU. This really allows a seller to test retargeting with a smaller investment level than DSP retargeting. However, you do have a less granular option for reporting for this ad type.

Rylee: For someone who is focused on ROI, we definitely recommend a few different things when you are looking at the different targeting options. Again, as a reminder, you can target based off of different audiences or product targeting which would be targeting specific ASINs. Audience targeting again, you're looking at someone who viewed your detail page or viewed similar competitor detail pages.

Rylee: Product targeting, you are going to be targeting specific ASIN or specific categories on Amazon. For a seller who has focus on ROI, we recommend pausing the similar product views when you are using the retargeting feature within sponsored display.

Rylee: That will allow you to really hone in on an efficient campaign. With the recommended products for sponsored display, we always recommend to start with your strongest ASINs if you haven't tested this out quite yet. A one ASIN per campaign will allow for more granularity and control within your budget and overall reporting within this ad type.

Rylee: For product targeting, we also recommend splitting out offensive and defensive strategies. If you are targeting competitor ASINs, you'll want to make that more of an offensive campaign. You also can input your own ASINS and target defensively.

Rylee: Then, you can split budgets between those two strategies so that you can really control if you want to spend more towards offensive targeting or defensive targeting.

Colleen: Rylee, if you don't mind, there are a couple questions related to this. You talked here about the product targeting and taking up real estate, I mean competitor detail pages. Somebody's asking what is the difference or can you clarify the difference between the placements for product targeting through SPA and display.

Rylee: Great question. They are a relatively similar feature available. For product targeting within sponsored product ads, you do have the option to target specific ASINS. If you look in the campaign builder itself, those options do look very similar. Really, the main difference is going to be the actual placement on a detail page. Sponsored display, it does have a preferred or a higher placement on the detail page.

Rylee: In the example we showed on our previous slide, really underneath the buy box or underneath the bullet points on a detail page, sponsored product targeting does show up a little bit lower on the detail page. Typically, the main placement there is going to be that sponsored product carousel.

Colleen: Okay. Thanks. Then, in regards to budget, how should a seller think about their budget? I think maybe what this question is getting to is maybe is there a certain percentage that they should put towards their advertising budget. How do you figure that out?

Rylee: That's going to really depend on your overall goals. For budget for sponsored display, we typically recommend starting off on the more conservative side. Really, maybe just five to 10% if you really are just looking for a baseline recommendation. Because it is newer, you really want to start off low and then build up as you start to see the successes within this ad pipe.

Rylee: But also keep in mind if you do have a more of awareness strategy across your campaigns and you're not too concerned on the overall ROI for these, then, you can definitely start with a more aggressive budget. It's really just going to depend on overall if you are more focused on ROI or overall visibility.

Jeff: I can comment too on just for the overall budget if that's what the question was asking as well, that we typically see a range of anywhere from maybe six to 12% of total business on Amazon directed towards the advertising side. It's really going to vary based on what works best for your business, how aggressive you want to grow.

Jeff: If you have a really aggressive three-year plan, you may want to have a higher percentage if you're focused on keeping a high profit margin and slow and steady growth. Maybe, you're closer to that 6%, 5% area. That's a really rough range and a pretty wide range of what we see, but again, I would balance making sure you're investing at least a decent percentage of your total business into advertising to grow with maintaining a healthy profit margin and not diluting that too heavily.

Colleen: Okay. We have another question. You covered this pretty early on in the presentations. They may have joined just a little bit late, but they were asking about for building a brand in Europe, is there a particular country that you recommend starting with? I think early on, Jeff, you said that there were kind of a tier one and tier two that the United Kingdom and Germany were your tier one opportunities and Italy, Spain, France for the tier two.

Colleen: If somebody's just getting started, Germany and UK is what you recommend. Correct?

Jeff: Definitely. If you have the opportunity to, definitely still conduct your own research to see what the market for your brand and category is looking like. If you don't have that opportunity, then that's a really rough guideline we like to go by just based on the body of work that we've seen so far.

Colleen: Okay. Great. I think we can move on to the next few slides now. Thank you.

Jeff: Awesome. Just to keep moving into some more specifics on sponsored brand video and some recommendations we have there, in terms of campaign structure, we look at this a lot like we look at sponsored product manual campaign structures. You're only allowed one ASIN for video campaigns currently.

Jeff: There have been potential theories that they'll expand this in the future, but for the time being, we think it's best to try and mirror your video campaign with a corresponding one-to-one manual sponsored product campaigns when possible and when the budget allows.

Jeff: The reason for this recommendation is because it helps you share keywords across the two of them. We've seen a really significant head start in a lot of our video ads by pulling from the keywords that we already have for that item in sponsored products.

Jeff: The real goal there is just setting yourself up for future efficiencies both in being able to get started quicker, but also in taking the learnings you've already gained from sponsored products. A few tips and tricks here, a bid one may not be as competitive for your video campaign right now due to the newness of the beta.

Jeff: That's what we're seeing in both the United States and in Europe for this. And so being an early mover here if your budget permits it is a really great opportunity to jump in while things are relatively cost effective and try it out for yourself. We've also seen a lot of interesting learnings from testing brand versus product specific videos. So, videos that maybe focus on a how-to or an unboxing versus just a generic all-encompassing brand video. Definitely, two options to take there. We recommend AB testing where possible to see what yields the best results for your brand.

Jeff: Another big thing that we've seen is that, in general, we've seen shorter length videos outperform longer length videos. You have a range of six to 45 seconds that you're allowed. We've seen anywhere around the 10 to 20 second range be mostly that sweet spot. It doesn't mean don't test the longer video if you already have the asset, but again keep in mind, if you're not seeing the results you like and your video's a little bit longer, maybe try to tone that down a little bit and cut it out.

Jeff: In terms of seller anecdotes that we've seen on the video side, we've seen a lot of companies we work with atop this already. A lot of them are seeing results in terms of return on investment being in line with or better than sponsored products. So, really exciting opportunity from that perspective in our mind.

Jeff: The one other thing to keep in mind is that the scale is typically lower than sponsored products because there's less ad inventory available for videos. Don’t expect the spend to be quite as high, but the engagement and return metrics that we're seeing are really positive.

Jeff: Last few things we wanted to touch on on the strategy side are some common questions we get that really apply to a lot of these different ad types. First and probably most importantly being keyword strategy. The big tip up there at the top is remember to treat each marketplace as its own entity. That may seem relatively straightforward because there's different languages used in all these countries, but we've really seen the importance of tailoring your keyword strategy to be unique to each country, make a tangible difference in the performance for clients.

Jeff: When we look at strategies, there's really two main things that we look towards. One is leveraging automatic campaign learnings, and the second is manual translations.

Jeff: The automatic campaign learnings are a really good option if you don't have access or resources to manually translate keywords. Maybe you're a United States-based business that doesn't have a team over in Europe currently or doesn't have a team that you work with a third party to translate those. You can just go ahead and launch automatic campaigns and start to see what converts in those.

Jeff: It's really effective because you're going to get back the information from Amazon exactly on what works and what doesn't. It's a little bit less risky than using something like a Google translate to try and translate a list of keywords from, say, English into French.

Jeff: Again, this is most impactful when paired with the one-to-one campaign strategy that Rylee mentioned earlier just because it's easy to assign those keywords that are working from your auto to your manual.

Jeff: The second strategy would be leveraging an in-house team or a third-party service to manually translate lists if that is an approach that you need to take making those translations for each country. Really, important tip here is that we've seen it work best when ensuring that you have a native speaker to translate that information.

Jeff: We have seen things go less positively when it's using some tool like a Google translate that may not have the right translation that you need there.

Jeff: In terms of the match types, there's three main ones on Amazon broad phrase and exact going from broad to exact. They get more specific in terms of the queries that you're targeting. Broad lets you target anything that contains the keyword in any order including plurals, variations, and related terms. It's a little bit of a wider net that's being cast whereas phrase, you're going to be using the exact sequence of keywords.

Jeff: If you bid on the keyword water bottle, you may get returned best water bottle as a search query that you've been bidding on. Then exact is exactly matching the sequence of keywords that you've put in. If you bid on water bottle, you're going to show up for a water bottle.

Jeff: We definitely recommend using a combination of all three of these to mix performance with scale. We've seen broad work well for some sellers and broad not work well for some sellers. It really does depend on the products you're advertising. This is a big area where you definitely want to start with all three. Then, you can always remove certain ones that aren't performing well if you see fit.

Jeff: The other major tip here on keyword strategy is just a little bit of a pro tip for Germany specifically. We've seen that in the German marketplace. There is a decent amount of volume for English keywords as well as, of course, the majority of volume going on German keywords. If you have the time and the resources to do so, we recommend testing out English keywords as well.

Jeff: You can see here a search for water bottle in English and water bottle in German still showing results on the page, still showing a decent amount of traffic estimated on both, so definitely something to consider for Germany. We don't typically see a high degree of English keyword search volume for Italy, France and Spain. That may change. It may be something worthwhile to test out for your business if you're looking for new things to try.

Jeff: But we haven't seen a strong significance of search volume there. One thing that we've mentioned throughout the call a couple times is negative targeting which is available for sponsored products and sponsored brands for keywords. Then, they also recently rolled out negative product targeting. This ultimately allows you to just remove non-converting spend in your campaigns.

Jeff: This gets more and more important as you scale up your business and you're scaling your investment into ads. You want to make sure that you're not consistently spending over time on things that just aren't yielding results for you. You can add keywords, or you can add ASINs that you do not want to show up for.

Jeff: Amazon will essentially prevent you in that campaign from showing up for them. These are added at the ad group level and campaigns. It's not something you can apply account wide, but it's something that you can pull information from the search term reports and see which keywords and ASINs are not doing well and then go add those in. Definitely a great tool for efficiency over time, something that we recommend for everyone whether you're starting out on advertising or whether you've been doing it for several years and you're looking to take the next step in inefficiency.

Jeff: Then, the final thing here in terms of the strategy portion of the call is looking at advertising copy strategy similar to the keyword strategy and making sure that you're utilizing automatic campaigns or a native speaker to properly translate into different marketplaces, audience specific translations for advertising copy are going to be really important as well.

Jeff: Employ the same level of focus that you do to keywords for your advertising copy to make sure that you're delivering the best message. We've seen this have an impact on click-through rates as well as conversion rates. If you show the customer the right product at the right time with the right message, you're going to have a better opportunity to ultimately convert them.

Jeff: In terms of how we leverage the ad copy, again, it's really to create and spread a brand message. So, a great opportunity to call out something specific about your products to really put it in the face of all the customers shopping and get it out there. That was really it. The only other tip here on advertising copy is really making sure you maintain this over time and update your ad copy and campaigns or launch new campaigns to stay current with product lines, changing seasonal changes.

Jeff: We have Q4 coming up. So, a lot of opportunity to really drive home a unique message during the holiday season as well.

Colleen: Before we hop into the future of advertising in the EU, we have a question here about store spotlight. The seller's asking, "How do you suggest that you monitor the performance of store spotlight when you have multiple portfolios?"

Jeff: To clarify by multiple portfolios, if the person who asked that can respond, do they mean multiple brands that they work with within the same account or just multiple portfolios within one business that are relatively unique?

Colleen: Okay. We'll see how they respond. I think it was Alessandro, if you don't mind clarifying that.

Jeff: In general, while we wait on that, I would say that for store spotlight, there is a little bit of a gray area because you don't get reporting back on which pages from that ad are driving the best performance. Okay. It look like it's one business with different categories.

Jeff: If possible, I would say separate them at the campaign level with related categories together. Even if it's all leading to the same storefront, you feature three sub-pages on an advertisement for the store spotlight. I've still seen pretty good results by having related portfolios.

Jeff: Then, if the keywords are wildly different there, I would recommend picking a hero page that you really want to focus on and tailoring the ad copy and the keywords to that. It's almost like saying we want to drive to this page, but if these somewhat related pages also get a little bit of love as a result of that, then great, but the focus in that case would still be on one page. It does definitely get tricky if the products aren't super well related to each other.

Colleen: Okay. Good advice. Thanks. All right. Let's hear your predictions for the future.

Jeff: Yeah. Absolutely. We'd love to hear any predictions in the chat as well. These are pretty safe predictions. We didn't go the hot take route on this call, but obviously want to keep the discussion and conversation going as well.

Jeff: We really just wanted to call out a couple things that are in our mind pretty obvious on the roadmap in one form or another. One is the continued effort to bring US advertising tools to Europe. The reason we say US advertising tools is there's a pretty good history of things being tested in the United States marketplace through advertising. Then a couple of months to a year later, the ones that are successful get brought over to the Europe side as well typically starting with US and Germany.

Jeff: Sponsored Brand Video is one really good example recently. Sponsored display, we expect this to offer more ways to just scale advertising in Europe. If you feel like you're a little frustrated with the lack of scale you can get today in a marketplace, keep in mind that being present making a footprint now and getting a foothold and growing market share will set you up well for the next couple of years as they provide you more and more ways to approach advertising.

Jeff: The other thing here is just the scale of existing marketplaces. We already hit on it a little bit, but we're seeing really strong growth year over year in France, Italy and Spain. We think those are going to really continue to grow over the next several years with all the recent momentum, and then, new marketplace opportunities. The Netherlands seems like our best bet for what may come down the pipeline next.

Jeff: Just a couple of things to think about in terms of getting started on Europe, there's really good opportunity today, but getting started now also puts you in a better position relative to your competition to succeed as more and more comes down the pipeline.

Colleen: Great. As Jeff said, if you have any predictions, feel free to share them in the chat. We can share them with the audience. We have a couple more slides. One is a special offer slide, FeedbackFive, one of our tools. We are offering a 30-day free trial so to get feedback and reviews and all the marketplaces.

Colleen: Then, Jeff and Rylee are kind enough to offer a one-on-one free strategy evaluation. I'd highly recommend that you do this, but in order to make sure that we can connect you with them appropriately, I'm going to go ahead and just launch a poll. If you could answer yes, if you're interested in speaking to them and having that evaluation and answer no if you're not interested.

Colleen: But if you do answer yes, we'll be sure to pass your information along so that you all can connect and get that free consultation scheduled.

Colleen: Then, while folks are filling that out, I did also just want to mention kind of as a public service announcement for anyone who did not see this message last week, but Amazon did announce on September 8th that they are updating the communication guidelines. The updates are in effect as of November 3rd.

Colleen: We do have a blog post actually that really outlines this in a pretty good format versus the PDF that Amazon shared. We detail what you need to do between now and November 3rd, and our team is also available to help review your messages and take a look at what you have and what needs to be updated, but I highly recommend my co-worker, Becky, just put a link in the chat, so you can take a look at those guidelines. Be sure to take a look at those.

Colleen: Again, we're happy to have a free consultation with you as well, but all right. Looks like we'll give it a few more seconds. A couple more people are still voting or voting or saying yes or no here to the evaluation. We'll go ahead and close this out in just a second. Then, we can tap into any more questions that everybody has.

Colleen: All right. Go ahead and end that poll. All right. As far as questions, let's see we have. Is there a way to add photos with text in the different languages in each EU country for one same ASIN? This looks like it's more about images. I guess maybe in the listing or is this in advertising.

Colleen: Until recently, if you modified a photo in one EU country, it got changed in all other EU countries. I think this is on the listing level.

Jeff: Correct. I'm actually not positive on that, but that's interesting. Let me re-read the question.

Colleen: Okay.

Jeff: I don't believe there's something that would apply that to all of the other countries, but again, I'm not positive on whether you can apply that across all of them. There may even be a service provider that would allow you to do that, input things on there. Then, they send it out to all the countries, but not sure.

Colleen: Then, we have somebody who's asking about manual ads versus automated ads. Can manual ads always be achieved better than automated ads in terms of ROI? If we find automated ads have always outperformed manual ads, should we just go with auto for now?

Colleen: It sounds like if one is outperforming the other, then go that route. I don't know if you have any advice on automated versus manual.

Jeff: Definitely not a one size fits all. Go with the approach that's giving you the best results. Obviously, if everything's working, we always recommend trying to scale everything, but even within our general strategies of trying to keep an auto paired with a manual, we may turn off one or the other for certain products. So, definitely stay nimble based on what each product is yielding in terms of results.

Colleen: Okay. Good. I think that's most the questions. If for some reason we did not get to your question, I will be following up with an email later today with a recording of this webinar as well as information, so you can contact Jeff and Rylee directly with any questions, but we really appreciate your time today and all the information that you shared about advertising in Europe it was very, very helpful. Thank you again.

Jeff: Yeah. It was great to be on. Appreciate the time.

Rylee: Thanks, everyone.

Colleen: Thanks. Bye.