Insights
Marketplaces
The past two years have brought immense change to the world of marketplaces. April and May of 2020 saw more ecommerce growth than the previous decade. With multiple lockdowns and changes to in-store shopping experiences, the debate remains around whether consumers will return to the high street or continue to shop online.
However, customers have returned steadily to in-person shopping. Both time and money spent in brick-and-mortar stores have risen 11% in the US since last year. However, marketplaces are still witnessing rapid growth and purchasing online has become a habit for many consumers.
Look Fantastic is a retailer with over 20,000 products in the beauty field representing over 600 brands. The platform has signed up as Criteo’s newest retailer providing the opportunity to use sponsored ads in the browse window.
Scope for sponsored placements presents a strong opportunity for new and growing brands to improve visibility and target niche audiences on the growing platform. Over 660 brands feature across the site and revenue share has grown 40% year on year for the past four years, illustrating the potential in the beauty retailer.
Source: LookFantastic.com
Image shows sponsored placements at the top of search results.
When working in paid media, optimizing campaigns frequently is something that comes naturally to the role. To help with regular campaign optimization, Citrus Ad has introduced search volume and anticipated winning bid to campaigns.
In the below example we can see the search volume and winning bids for “cat food jelly” and “wet cat food”.
The search volume and winning bid is calculated based on the last 30 days of platform data and from our tests is proving to be accurate. Visibility of these metrics is useful to help decide if a keyword should be added to a campaign and gain clarity over what is currently performing well.
This is currently only available when clicking through into a campaign so is often tedious if you are covering several campaigns at scale. However, Citrus has said they plan to incorporate this data into a report.
Many marketplace clients operate in several countries and Amazon is working to simplify the management of these accounts. It is now possible to enter keywords in your preferred language rather than the region you’re advertising in, and instantly translate the keywords from your preferred language to the Amazon site’s language.
It can currently be used for Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brands ads. This feature is very useful for improving the pace of account creation and optimization and, in theory, keyword research only needs to be done in a single language.
Despite the use of this update, we would not recommend relying on this alone. Conducting keyword research in local languages allows you to get closer to the nuances of each market and direct translation isn’t always effective. The software runs the risk of spelling and meaning errors and doesn’t consider localization. Many terms that make sense in one language may cause offense in another.
Additionally, the search habits of users can be very different across markets. Often keywords have large search volumes in one market but fall much shorter in another. Although it can speed up the process, we believe it’s best not to rely too much on Amazon’s help for this. We have a specialist team of mother-tongue marketers managing international campaigns to localize content and get closer to audiences and their behaviors.
When making changes to an advertising account at scale, the bulk upload feature has been very useful in helping to save time. To date, it was not possible to use bulk upload on Sponsored Display ads which meant these needed to be done manually in the console itself. However, a new bulk sheet has now been created to allow the ad type to be created at scale, which when you have many campaigns can save a lot of time.
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