As Amazon continues to dominate the digital landscape, advertising is becoming increasingly competitive, and strategies to influence customers are progressing across multiple channels. But many brands still develop ad objectives, measure performance, and make costly decisions through business-specific sales, customer, and profit data.
This finite approach lacks consideration for the larger market that includes competitors, industry trends, and consumer shopping habits.
So how can you develop a market-aware advertising method to optimize your strategies and improve brand performance?
When making industry-informed decisions, identifying your ideal market is fundamental to your strategy. Traditional methods of pinpointing an audience involve positioning products into categories. Yet this approach may be either too broad or too narrow since Amazon has over 16,000 dynamic subcategories, and brands often misclassify their products.
A more effective model is to determine a specific set of product ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that generate sales volume and address shopper needs. Customers express their intentions through search terms; two similar products may rank with the same keyword if consumers purchase both products after their search. Your established ASINs must reflect Amazon’s overall competition and consumer trends, so referencing the Amazon Search Terms report is crucial to ensure a comprehensive collection. This report displays Amazon’s top-ranked keywords by frequency and popularity. You can also search for your ASINs to determine bestselling items and correlating terms and compare those against trending words and products.
By gathering and analogizing keywords and similar-ranking products, you can compile ASINs that help you create small, precise markets for tactical decision-making.
Once you’ve defined a profitable market for your ads, it’s essential to implement a strategy to extract value from your efforts. Competitive intelligence drives sales and consumers away from competitors to your Amazon storefront. The optimal way to expropriate sales from adversaries is to create targeted ad campaigns like sponsored displays that allow you to advertise on another brand’s product detail pages. It’s recommended to optimize this strategy by targeting the top-selling item in a brand’s category.
Another technique is to employ Amazon DSP to entice customers who viewed a competitor's product detail page without making a purchase. You should retarget shoppers after they’ve left the page to compare your ad or product with the rival. The third competitive approach involves leveraging your competition’s top-ranking keywords through an aggressive top-of-search campaign. After confirming these search terms, compare your organic rankings with a contender and place bids on the top-of-search placements to outrank them.
Quantifying your advertisements’ impacts on sales and revenue is crucial for business development. The conventional approach to measuring performance involves developing a target ROAS (return on ad spend) to structure your advertising methods. But to compare sales and profits with your competitors, you must consider your company’s market share.
Analyzing market trends and developments helps you determine the seasonal factors — namely Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — impacting your sales volume. You can also utilize these measurements to assemble an ideal ad budget consistent with your target market. For instance, Franz Jordan, Perpetua’s VP and General Manager, says, “If your market is growing by 20% on average, then your budget should also grow by 20%.”
Ultimately, a competitive advertising landscape should implement intentional solutions that drive sales and maximize profit for long-term prosperity.
