A mid-size apparel company sought to shine a spotlight on some of its Halloween season products that had performed well but needed more visibility. With the opportunity to double a normal month’s revenue in October, the company reached out to its Seller Labs Managed Services (SLMS) team. The company’s account manager worked with the client to develop aggressive advertising strategies two months in advance of the peak buying time.
The SLMS team developed a multiple part strategy that included a mixture of price adjustments, fixed bidding with bid modifiers for placement, and aggressive manual campaigns.
Learn how the SLMS team sought to grow ad sales early in the season, and optimize later in the season to reduce ACoS while enjoying the improved organic rank from high sales.
How Seller Labs Managed Services Delivered
Working closely with the client, our SLMS team developed a strategy that involved multiple tactics that combined would translate to high advertising growth and organic improvement.
1. Getting the Most out of Pricing in the Holiday Season
First, the apparel company reduced pricing on the targeted Halloween products and product bundles by 20% through the first week of October. During this time, the SLMS team isolated all seasonal products into a single portfolio to manage them deliberately outside the normal thresholds the team maintains for the client’s non-seasonal products.
2. Picking an Optimal Amazon Bidding Strategy
As soon as the prices were dropped, the apparel company’s account manager set all campaigns within this specific seasonal portfolio to a fixed bidding strategy, but with a bid modifier for Top of Search placement. Fixed bidding prevents Amazon from deviating from your set bid, but by using this bid modifier, we were able to adjust our client’s bids only for the very best placement of ads, which was first page appearance.
Our client quickly began to see results from this strategy with very high click-through rates. However, these advertising placements are much more competitive and thus expensive, so it took a few weeks for ACoS to stabilize for the client’s products. After this short initial time period however, orders began surging—and the influx of orders drove the ACoS down drastically for the portfolio.
3. Running Manual Campaigns to Drive Organic Traffic
Meanwhile, the SLMS account manager also ran manual campaigns. While growth through improved advertising performance was important, the SLMS team sought to also grow overall organic rank by capitalizing on the early seasonal buying traffic.
The account manager knew that building up conversion velocity early on specific targeted terms would drive organic indexing gains, which would pay off during the later peak buying season. In order to activate these gains, she took an even more aggressive approach in the manual campaigns with regard to targeting first page traffic.
4. Redirecting Resources to the Top Performers
Finally, the SLMS team took a close look at the performance across the portfolio of seasonal products. For any placements and products that didn’t convert as anticipated, the account manager reduced investment to redirect resources to top performers, resulting in an ACoS of 16.6%, well below the client’s goal of 30% for this portfolio.
At a Glance:
- Delivered a 147% increase in ad revenue compared to the previous year.
- Outperformed target ACoS by 14.4%, and only increased YOY by 1.3%.
- Increased the share of revenue attributed to advertising by 9% to 47%.
- Grew total revenue for the month of October by 103% to over $3M.
Further, the client saw $1,497,932.63 in advertising sales, in addition to strong performance in organic sales. The additional boost in organic sales helped catapult total revenue for the period of October to more than $3M, an increase of more than 100% overall.
| Prior October | With SLMS | Text | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad Revenue | $605,102.60 | $1,497,932.63 | 147% |
| ACoS | 15,3% | 16,6% | 1.3% |
| Total Revenue | $1,585,146.90 | $3,221,060.75 | 107% |
| Total Share of Revenue | 38% | 47% | 9% |
