Ads Series: Using Advertising Category Benchmarks - Episode 185

DESCRIPTION

The ADS SERIES with Stefan Jordev continues! This week we are joined by PPC Manager Brad Kempfer to discuss the new reports available within Amazon: The Search Term Impression Share report, and the Brand Category Benchmark report.

Make sure to tune in to find out more!

Brad Kempfer is an ex-Amazonian and a PPC Manager here at Bobsled Marketing. With over 5 and a half years of experience with Amazon Advertising, Brad specializes in programmatic/DSP, campaign management, product/program management and campaign strategy.

“You want to look at all the data points that are at your disposal before making long term optimizations or executing your strategy, because you might not know what’s out there from a competitive standpoint.”

— Brad Kempfer

KEY TAKEAWAYS

There are two relatively new reports available within Amazon. These are the Search Term Impression Share report, and the Brand Category Benchmark report. The Search Term Impression Share report is available for both sponsored products and sponsored brands, while the Category Benchmark report is only available for sponsored brands.
The two main metrics that the Search Term Impression Share report tracks are search term impression rank, and the search term impression share metric. The search term impression rank metric shows, for all your keywords that you are advertising to Amazon PPC, how you rank for different search terms, and different keywords. Search impression rank is your rank versus all the other advertisers that are utilizing that keyword as well on Amazon PPC. Impression share metric tells you how much of all the impressions are you capturing, versus everybody else that is utilizing those keywords to advertise.
If you're ranked number one, and you’re capturing 100% of the market share, you could lower your bid, and see if you can still capture that impression share 100%. If you're the only one bidding against it, then you can definitely lower your bid and still capture 100% of the market share. If you're only capturing 5% of the market share or the impression share, that means you could increase the bid. And there's a lot of opportunities for you to capture more impressions for that specific keyword.
The Search Term Impression Share report gives you insight into all the competition for the keywords. To see how you rank on the different keywords combined with your internal metrics on performance is really the best way to figure out what kind of optimizations you should do on those keywords.
When you get the basic data dump of the report, that's gonna have a few different metrics, the search term impression ranking, search term impression share, but also metrics like spend a pass. When downloading the report, filter by spend to make sure you have given that keyword enough spend to capture accurate performance data.
If you're performing really well on a keyword, and you have less than 50% of the market share or low market share, for those impressions, that's an opportunity to bid higher and to capture more impressions.
Brands should be able to compare themselves with competitors, and have their own internal data, but have competitive data as well.
The new Brand Category Benchmark report is only available for sponsored brands. The easiest way to think about this report is the category. This term is basically the browse node on Amazon.
The Brand Category Benchmark report gives you really good insight on if you are overextended or if you're performing really well in a category, and on which categories you want to attack or increase your share. This report can also give you insight into how you're performing compared to your competitor brands in that category as well. You get to see how your performance compares to the brands that are performing in the top 25% of all brands in that category, all the brands that are in the median, and then all the brands that are in the bottom 25% in that category.
When downloading the Brand Category Benchmark report, the main thing you should look for is an internal benchmark you want to focus on.
When combining the Search Term Impression Share report and the Brand Category Benchmark report, you should look at the Category Benchmark report first, and figure out which categories you're doing well and figure out which categories you're not doing as well as your competition. Then you can go into that category, and go into those keywords and figure out how you're going to overcome either performing poorly in that subcategory or how are you going to maintain performing a lot better than your peers in that category.
Whenever you get a chance to compare and have data right next to your competitors’ data, the end result will be brands investing more budget within advertising.