admin_fortress | Mar 18, 2021
Published in The Marketplace Playbook
In our last two Storefront Series you’ve been reading about what storefronts are and how to customize your brand experience.
In this feature we are going to explore how to drive traffic and new customer acquisition. Storefronts combined with sponsored brands are vital tools for communicating your brand story, increasing cart size, and further educating the Amazon customer on why your product will fulfill their needs.
What are Sponsored Brands?
Sponsored Brands, formerly known as Headline Search ads, are creative ads that utilize lifestyle imagery, headline copy, and up to 3 highlighted products that appear at the top and bottom of the Amazon Search Engine Results Page (SERP), along with occasional placements on Product Detail Pages (PDPs). Sponsored Brands are served to shoppers based on your keyword or category targeting strategy matching customer search terms.
As of March 2021, Sponsored Brands are the sole ad type to direct traffic to Storefront pages.
Creating Storefronts that Convert
Impactful Storefront pages occur from 2 different perspectives: the customer experience and trending search terms.
Considering the Customer Experience
To nurture the customer experience, treat Storefronts as you would your e-commerce site: UX-friendly and easy to navigate. There needs to be a clear structure of where customers can find the products they’re looking for.
For example, if you’re selling pet supplies, make sure your Amazon audience is able to locate collars, treats, and toys within your Storefront with appropriately titled pages – there’s no room for clever naming conventions here. You can read more about this in our previous feature.
Considering Search Trends
In addition to a more UX-friendly approach, think backwards! Consider customer search trends when creating and curating additional Storefront pages.
Because the more accurate and tailored reach of Sponsored Brands will be based on keyword targeting (as opposed to category targeting, where you have less control), this approach will be the most effective option when planning to invest in sending traffic with Sponsored Brands.
Staying with the pet supplies example, imagine that stylish dog collars are a trending search term. On your Storefront home page, collars are positioned towards the bottom because your dog treats are your best seller. You don’t necessarily want to rearrange this page, as you should maintain your best selling product above the fold.
In order to still take advantage of the dog collar trend, create an additional storefront page to show off your selection of collars, and send your Sponsored Brand ads to this page. These custom, search term-driven pages can be stacked under a main component so you aren’t clogging up navigation with seemingly random page options.
Sponsored Brands and Storefronts in Harmony
To drive traffic to your Amazon Storefront and acquire new customers, you’ll need to master Sponsored Brands. Keep the following in mind when utilizing these two tools:
- Build additional Storefront pages based on high-potential keywords (not too high volume, but not too low where impressions will be dismal)
- Launch an SBA bidding generously on those same high-potential keywords
- Monitor CTR and CVR at the Sponsored Brands and Storefront levels
- If most Storefront revenue is attributed to Sponsored Brands AND your ACOS is healthy, budget should be increased
- If most Storefront revenue is attributed to organic discovery, meaning that Amazon shoppers are landing on your storefront page organically and then convert with no ad interference, utilize that Sponsored Brands budget elsewhere
Here is an example to put all of these best practices together: A hot search term in the skincare space is “skincare fridge”, leading you to a search results page full of miniature fridges to cool your skincare products.
Your brand happens to sell skincare fridges, amongst other products. With this insight, launch a fridge-specific landing page. Then, utilize Sponsored Brands by bidding on “skincare fridge” and associated keywords. If you have optimized bids and an attractive custom image, you’ll grab a ton of eyes at the top of search.
Search volume over time for “skincare fridge”
Data source: Helium10
The bottom line with Storefronts and Sponsored Brands is keep things simple and keep customer search trends in mind.
If you need help with your Amazon presence please reach out to us at [email protected]