A few months ago I wrote a blog on how Amazon hasn’t only been surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, they've triumphed. As we have now found ourselves in a second lockdown I am going to revisit this blog with a twist: how we have helped our clients succeed on the back of Amazon's success in COVID-19.
So we all know that this is a never seen before global crisis, it’s definitely the biggest pandemic I’ve ever experienced, what was less expected is how well some of our clients have performed throughout this, and no, I’m definitely not complaining.
A brief respite from Amazon bidding in Google search
One of the first things I noticed way back at the beginning of this was the drop of competitor presence on my Google Ads for a lot of my clients, especially from Amazon.
Amazon has always been a very active competitor for most of my eCommerce clients but we gradually saw them reduce their impression share across Google and in some cases completely drop off.
Note: please scroll through the five images above detailing our impression share vs. Amazon's impression share on Google Ads throughout lockdown across various different eCommerce businesses.
As you can see this was across most of these examples. As Amazon was seen as one of our stronger competitors this led to a drop in CPC in a lot of areas and as a result we experienced a sharp rise in impression share due to the lack of their presence.
This obviously had a reaction of better performance for our clients across the board, even in instances where conversion rates stayed the same or dropped slightly the additional traffic from the higher impression share led to more conversions and so, more revenue.
So this is how our paid search activity thrived thanks to Amazon's reaction to COVID-19.
Fishing where the fish are, advertising within Amazon
Now for how we helped our clients boost revenue within Amazon via Amazon ads.
Obviously people have spent more time online due to COVID-19, retail therapy has definitely found a home with people that are bored of being stuck inside.
Pre COVID we were happily sitting at an average monthly revenue from Amazon advertising at between £15-£20k for one of our clients. Within the first month of lockdown this climbed to over £31k, the following month, almost £60k, and the third month smashing just over £97k! This obviously incurred a similar MoM increase in spend however achieving an ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) as low at 12.5% this was an absolute achievement. That means that only 12.5% of the overall revenue generated was spent on advertising.
This was made possible due to the increase in demand and with the inclusion of automated targeting in our Amazon advertising strategy just months before lockdown we were able to fully target the correct audience, with Amazon’s help.
The cards were also in our hands with Amazon advertising as for this client in particular we seem to have beaten the majority of their competitors to this platform so the competition was low and didn’t increase throughout lockdown which led to us achieving 12,800 conversions in August alone with a CPA lower than £1 and extremely low CPCs.
We are also fortunate that we adopted this platform long enough before the pandemic that it gave the automated targeting algorithm time to develop.
What does this mean after COVID though?
Well it certainly set a target that may never be achievable again, people have never been so willing to spend so much time trolling through Amazon or so purchase ready. It also means that our products experienced an influx of ratings and reviews, which is something that Amazon advertising thrives off so this will serve us well for years to come.
If you’re an eCommerce business now is honestly one of the best times to set yourself up with an Amazon store and consider advertising on this platform, I’ve covered the basics of Amazon advertising in this blog but if you have any questions about introducing your business to Amazon please get in touch with a member of our team.
