How does our brand stack up against the competition?
It’s a common question posed by clients at Direct Agents, especially in regard to the ever-evolving landscape of Amazon advertising. In a saturated market ripe with competition at every turn, the need for brands to maintain a pulse on what keywords they, and their competitors, are bidding (and winning) on is crucial. This is measured by Share of Voice (SOV), which is the percentage of time that a brand’s ads show up for a given keyword.
With limited information on SOV available to brands in the Amazon Advertising platform, and third-party tools that fell short of clients’ needs, Direct Agents built a proprietary technology tool to help its clients answer the question: Are my ads showing up, and if not, who is instead?
Driven by AI technology, this SOV tool measures who is winning paid and organic placements multiple times an hour, allowing for real-time data and AI-led bid strategies to change bids based on the most recent data.
Armed with a customizable bidding tool that reacts in real-time, the Direct Agents team leveraged this technology to help a large brand in the grocery category achieve maximum brand protection, thus ensuring that other brands weren’t outbidding them on their own branded terms. The result was increased revenue from branded search.
With a solid grasp of owning their branded search terms, the brand wanted to capitalize on the wealth of data available through the SOV tool which included identifying high revenue-driving, non-branded search terms. While non-branded terms can be great sales drivers, they tend to have a very high CPC in the grocery category. With the help of Direct Agent’s AI bidding tool, the brand was able to increase its paid impressions by 10% from January 2021 to February 2021 while keeping media investment constant. This rise in impressions also led to a 31% increase in attributed sales and a 41% MoM increase in total ordered revenue.
As shoppers continue to shift their holiday shopping online, it’s incredibly important to capture as much SOV as possible during high-traffic timeframes. One of the largest peaks for candy throughout the year is Valentine’s Day.
Direct Agents helped this brand gain a huge competitive advantage using a constant feedback loop on Valentine’s terms to understand 1. Top Search Terms, 2. The brand’s SOV for the terms (both Paid and Organic SOV), and 3. Minimum bids are needed to maximize SOV.
This data was also used to optimize SEO and A+ content to improve organic ranking and increase conversions for Valentine’s shoppers. The result? A 101% increase in ordered revenue YoY from February 2019 to February 2021.
As Easter approaches quickly, Direct Agents is using the same SOV strategies to extend the rapid growth this brand is seeing on Amazon.
Unlike other tools, Direct Agents’ proprietary SOV tool allows clients to not only see if they are winning an ad placement but also which brand is winning when they are not. This allows clients to see what competitors are bidding on – and in the case of this specific grocery client, that led to surprising insights, like the fact that a large toy brand that had not been considered a competitor in their category was aggressively bidding on grocery terms.
By utilizing the insights available through Direct Agents’ proprietary SOV technology, analysts at Direct Agents were able to quickly pivot strategies and capitalize on the new keyword learnings, thus leading to more efficient bidding and an increase in product sales on Amazon.
– Lauren Stobbs, Account Manager & Jack Lindberg, Amazon Associate
If you’re interested in learning more about how Direct Agents and our SOV technology can help your brand stand out from the competition, please reach out to us at [email protected] to learn more.