But the Amazon DSP platform is a mystery to many. Whereas everybody has access to the Amazon Sponsored Ads platform by default: Every seller, every vendor on Amazon, and all the agencies working for them, access to the DSP is gated. Only agencies with a “seat” and Amazon teams delivering « managed services », have access to the tool. Getting the seat requires a capable team in place and a commercial engagement on a minimum level of spend in the platform, and those stakes are getting higher.

But in these days of AI empowerment, why not simply ask ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot to explain difference between Amazon PPC and Amazon DSP »?

Oh, I am a big fan of ChatGPT, but the answer regarding Amazon DSP is actually pretty far from reality. Maybe the reason for this is that there is not much public information available about the Amazon DSP on the internet. There are probably more people talking about it, who have never actually worked with it, than specialists with an in-depth understanding. Additionally, it is a relatively new and exclusive tool and the chatbot has only been fed data up until 2021. An AI can run really fast, but if you feed it with incomplete or wrongful data, it is not going to correct or improve that. It works by the SISO principle.

Without getting too much into why ChatGPT is wrong, let’s instead look at the two points on which I can’t agree in the description:

1. Amazon DSP Inventory is outside of Amazon
2. The purpose of DSP campaigns is to build brand awareness

Amazon DSP inventory is both inside and outside the marketplaces

Amazon is on a path to conquer more digital advertising budgets. It has a superpower compared to its competitors Meta and Google in the fact that its “media” is growing. This is due to the strong growth of its ecommerce which has had a growth rate of 20-30% before a recent slow down to 8-9% in 2022. What it means for advertising is that its inventory is growing by at least that rate – actually, it’s been growing a bit over double the rate of ecommerce growth in recent years.

One of the big characteristics of the Amazon DSP is indeed its capability to reach outside of the Amazon marketplaces, but its main attraction as a DSP is actually to be able reach open ad exchange like any other DSP, and then also have exclusive access to Amazon marketplaces and Amazon-defined audiences.

The DSP works with 4 levels of inventory

• The marketplaces and marketplace apps
• Other owned and operated (O&O) inventory (ex: Twitch, IMDB)
• Partner publishers with priority-serving deals
• Open ad-exchanges and mobile exchanges

Video inventory will be outside of the marketplaces but all other campaigns will run on the inventory you choose. In a standard European set up, I have often seen around 75% of the inventory delivered on the market places, themselves. Those campaigns were heavy on the platform and could even be restricted to only apply within. The balance between external and internal inventory depends on the audiences you are targeting and the purpose of your campaigns.

The Purpose of a DSP campaign is not just visibility, it is to sell

At the end of the day, or perhaps the end of the financial quarter, any communication campaign an ecommerce player carries out has a sales purpose. It can be a short-term perspective or a long-term perspective but sales are still the end purpose for its advertising. One of the great reasons for the rise of retail media, is the fact that the advertising and the sale are part of the same loop. This means reporting sales related to advertising becomes much more reliable than in settings where the two happen on different platforms.

The Amazon DSP has the capability to reach outside of the user context that the Sponsored Ads platform (the other Amazon Ads platform, also referred to as Amazon PPC) will target. It can reach audiences that are a little further away from the purchase. It is of course nice to build brand awareness along the way, but it is much more compelling to qualify audiences that are likely to be interested in one’s products on Amazon. This is the strongest application I have found of the DSP in conjunction with Amazon PPC. Increase the reach of campaigns, touch people who are a bit further away from the sale and guide them towards the merchants offering.

AMC reporting via Pacvue of overlapping DSP and Sponsored Products.

Source: E-Comas, 2022

As the Amazon DSP is integrated in the entire Amazon universe, it can play that role while maintaining the sales objective in place. Using it to build from the bottom of the funnel and towards higher levels, is one of the most efficient advertising tactics I have been confronted with across all digital advertising channels, and it would not be able to carry that function if its inventory were exclusively outside of Amazon and if its main purpose were to build brand awareness.

Let’s have a look at how performance driven DSP campaigns can be built below.

Media planning for Amazon DSP

The marketing funnel is such an outdated tool for understanding audience engagement and sales enablement, isn’t it? The problem is I’m just not capable of building media plans for performance without that model in mind. I think it is the concept of a hierarchy of decisions or influences a user moves through before a sale can happen. That speaks to behaviour in an online environment where touchpoints are measured and controlled.

Going through the inventory types mentioned above, I immediately qualify them on a scale of “far from conversion” to “close to conversion”. It’s the funnel waking up on me. Sending an Amazon product listing banner through an ad exchange out to some random site on the internet in order to match the right type of audience is bound to be a further fetch than showing the same ad inside the marketplace. So, we already have a hierarchy of inventory we can apply to the media plan. Inventory we expect to former better, and inventory we will test before keeping in the plan.

In my experience with Amazon DSP in the past years, there is a clear difference in direct performance between advertising inventory on the marketplaces themselves and inventory on other Owned & Operated sites, Partner publishers and ad exchanges. Reality is not as linear as shown in the illustration above, but the principle holds. In some cases, certain ad exchanges will perform better than partner publishers or other owned sites. This can depend on the type of product one is promoting and also on the audiences you are targeting on that inventory.

The same funnel-thinking applies to audience targeting. We know that users who have already bought the product, albeit a long time ago, are going to be an easier audience to convert to repurchase. This can be some of the easiest sales you make via your campaign but you always doubt whether these users would have bought the product anyway. That, however, is no reason for not using them as they help build audience data in the system, enabling us to find overlapping audiences which can open for more reach. But let’s put repurchase audiences a side for a moment.

The second-best performing audience type I have used is of course retargeting from product views. If a user has already been to the product detail page or performed a search for the brand or product, we know we are in the consideration phase already.

A little further away from the purchase, we will find users who have searched or visited pages for similar products. They are a bit further up the funnel, a bit further away from the purchase, just like any competitor audiences we are targeting. And finally, also in the consideration phase, we will find the best fitting inmarket audiences, machine-learning generated audiences Amazon has created based on user data and a prediction model for future purchase.

Only outside of these circles do we reach audiences that traditional advertising would target: lifestyle audiences and demographically defined audiences.

The stricter the retargeting, the higher the measurable ROAS – and the higher the risk you are converting the already converted, ie that you are simply tracking a conversion that would have happened anyway.

At the demographic and lifestyle audience level, we are very much in a higher-funnel brand-building exercise, but as we will see in the next section, even these branding efforts can be tied back to sales in a full-scale Amazon advertising operation. And inside a closed system, we can actually guarantee that we are reaching “New-to-brand” audiences by means of exclusions.

Two-phase Amazon DSP campaigns with a tROAS target

“We want to launch Amazon DSP to drive performance”. A classic client statement which is not always easy to work with. One should go on to Amazon DSP with nuanced expectations. The platform is good for reaching people and learning what works, but it can be a long ride and performance is rarely immediate. It is also a higher-volume platform where you can work through budgets very fast.

If the main drive for an Amazon DSP campaign is fast performance, the setup will be biased to retargeting and repurchases, and those are no guarantee that the advertiser will gain market share. They do serve a purpose, though, as they allow you to predefine efficient inventories and identify interesting overlap audiences when the campaign has been running for a while.

The most efficient set-up for exploiting both the conversion capability and reaching new audiences at scale, is probably what we have called the two-phase set-up. A two-phase DSP campaign consists of 2 mutually exclusive campaigns. One to reach audiences that have not been exposed to the brand and drive them to the product pages. And another to target users from the product pages to the conversion.

The platform itself is geared to this setup, as it can help optimize toward those objectives.

Phase 1 in the user journey DPV campaign: objective to generate visitors to product pages

Phase 2 in the user journey RTG campaign: objective to generate conversions

In the two campaigns we are actually targeting the same audiences, but in phase 1 we will exclude audiences which have been exposed to the brand. We can be sure they are “New-to-brand” (NTB). In phase 2, we will only target people who have searched for the product or been to the product pages, and of course, we will exclude users who have purchased the product during the last 30 days (or whatever time frame corresponds to the duration of a product).

One essential thing to keep in mind when running a two-phase campaign like the one described here, is to only consider return on ad spend at the account level. The Phase 1 campaign will have a low ROAS and its target KPI is the DPV rate: the rate at which ads are generating visits to the detailed product pages. It can also generate sales directly, but that function is actually reserved to the Phase 2 campaign which is geared to conversion. A successful campaign is not aiming to generate the best possible ROAS. It is aiming to generate the highest possible revenue at an acceptable ROAS. This guarantees account growth, and, yes, we are getting to it: it actually builds the brand recognition within the Amazon universe. Over time brand searches will increase and perhaps sales velocity too. These are the ingredients for an additional boost in organic sales which you can measure via the Total ROAS of the account (total sales/ad spend).

Amazon DSP is for non-obvious sales

The Amazon DSP is really good at reaching audiences that didn’t already have your products on their mind and drive them on a path to purchase. Perhaps that is what building brand awareness should actually mean: activate sales for audiences that didn’t know the brand before. With what we have called a two-phase setup, you can use the Amazon DSP to do just that. Build sales-enabling brand awareness to new audiences, and you can monitor and improve you process as you go.

The key to successfully marketing on Amazon as a Seller is right there in front of your eyes, haven’t you noticed? It is a bit like the forest you can’t see because the trees are blocking the view. Although we tend to imagine that success is ruled by some algorithm we can’t understand, once you realize where your own objectives actually coincide with Amazon’s and learn to work along some its principles of operational excellence, customer obsession and long-term thinking, you will significantly increase your chances of success on the marketplace.

What Amazon success looks like.

As a merchant having set up your account as a Seller on the marketplace, your main interface with Amazon is “Seller Central”. It is your dashboard and your management interface. Did you realize that the components of the dashboard are direct indications of what Amazon considers the dimensions of your success? Let’s have a look at it in depth.

The seller central interface is directly telling us what is important and what we can work on. The top line dashboard shows the number of orders, sales today, buyer messages, buy box wins, money earned, inventory score, (the IPI: Inventory Performance Index) and the effect of your promotions. To sum it up, Amazon is telling us what matters: sales, customers, competitiveness, balance of earnings (sales minus cost of advertising) and stock.

Rephrasing those provides us with the following 5 key points to Amazon success:

• Maximizing sales
• Winning the buy box
• Minimizing stock (managing the IPI)
• Providing excellent customer service
• Controlling the ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales)

Most of them are not things you just fix once and for all. The Amazon game is a long-term project where you will have to constantly monitor and maintain your key ratios. A winning Amazon marketing strategy is one in which the ratios are stable and gradually improving all the time.

Flow-and-grow rather than Stop-and-Go

One of the worst things that can happen to your account is if it goes into a stop and go mode. I have seen this way far too often working with Amazon Sellers over the past few years. It goes something like this:

1. Get the product listings up
2. Put some stock in
3. Push promotions and advertising
4. Get sales going
5. Run out of stock
6. Lose the buy box
7. Panic
8. Restock
9. Return to 3)

In a stop and go scenario, the seller needs to restart the marketing machine every time products have run out of stock. Bad for users, bad for Amazon, bad for you.

Let’s embark instead on a flow and grow strategy where the aim is to create continuous improvement by working on each of the 5 success points one by one, as we explore below.

Maximizing sales

Of course, you want to maximize your sales, everybody does. But have you realized that Amazon also wants you to? Sales velocity of a product is one of the key signals Amazon works with. It helps the platform propose the best performing products and thereby maximize its own sales. This also typically has a positive impact on your IPI because your days-in-stock will be lower.

At the level of a merchant, this focus on best-sellers and maximized sales has some concrete implications. Let’s say you have a catalogue of 10 products and one of them has much higher sales than the others. Your best strategy will be to enhance advertising on your best-seller to make it sell even more. On your less performing products you should focus on content optimization and only use advertising defensively until you get some kind of traction.

Bet on your best products.

Winning the buy box

In order to sell your products, they need to appear in the “Buy Box” as often as possible. This is something end-users on Amazon don’t realize: the product page does not belong to the Seller, there can be several different Sellers proposing the exact same products with different prices and delivery settings. At the time of an end-user visit, Amazon will decide which Seller will “win the buy box”. The main determining factor is the price.

The illustration below shows you where to find the buy box on the right-hand side of a product detail page allowing you to buy a product in a single click. Being a marketplace, Amazon can have a number of different sellers distribute the same product. But there is only one product detail page for each ASIN (product code), and on that page, only one of the sellers is put forward in the buy box.

Make that be you!

The buy box is indicated by the red rectangle and the arrow points to the winner of the buy box on this product page.
Source: Amazon.co.uk

Amazon makes the best performing seller appear, so the end-user doesn’t have to make that decision. Amazon’s objective with this exercise is to provide an excellent user experience by selecting the best provider of a product. This arbitrage made in real time is of course executed by an algorithm, and the signals it takes into account are stock level, price ranking, sales history, past user experience, past delivery performance. Obviously, the capability to deliver to your location is the very first filter that is applied. Be in stock, be distributable.

By having the right price, a low return rate and a compelling product listing, you increase your chances of winning the buy box. Optimizing product listings serves more than one purpose: it helps the user in the buying process and it helps the Amazon algorithm understand what keyword searches the product should appear on.

Minimizing stock (but maximizing IPI)

On the Seller Central dashboard, Amazon shows sellers their IPI score, the Inventory Performance Index. This score gauges the way inventory is managed over time by sellers using FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), and therefore have inventory in Amazon warehouses. Merchants of course pay for the warehouse occupation, so that is an interesting revenue source for Amazon, right?

No, wrong.

Amazon charges for your inventory, but if it could carry stock only on the products which make a margin when you sell, it would earn more. Additionally, Amazon has a huge storage challenge due to the physical and invariable nature of warehouses and its strong growth. It is in both Amazons and your interest to optimize inventory to only occupy space for goods that are sold frequently. To further optimize its warehouse resources, Amazon has even created a new mechanism to put warehouse space on auction.

Amazon describes IPI, the Inventory Performance Index as a metric for how efficient and productively Sellers manage their FBA inventory via a number of factors. The key factors it measures are the following (Source: Amazon):

• Avoiding excess and aged inventory.
• Long-term storage fees.
• Speed at fixing listing problems (that immobilize stock)
• Right levels of stock of popular products

Most sellers on Amazon will appreciate the IPI as a score for how they are doing. A stop-and-go account will have a low IPI and it will take time to rebuild it after having been out of stock. What most sellers don’t realize is, that it is one of the quality signals that Amazon uses. It can influence whether you win the buy box and may even have an impact on your ranking in search results.

Additionally, the IPI can be a cost saver. You pay for the amount of stock and the time it stays in Amazon warehouses. Amazon inventory space is never unlimited and non-moving inventory is not efficient for anybody. Amazon charges for it but also penalizes non-efficient stock management. Your objective is to be lean and efficient. Another objective that serves both you, Amazon and the end-user.

Make your stock management lean.

Providing excellent customer service

Amazon is obsessed with the user experience. It doesn’t do surveys of user satisfaction, though. Instead, it obsessively measures any signal that can be interpreted as a success parameter for the user experience. User reviews and ratings, return rates, customer service requests, speed of dispute resolution.

Source: Amazon DSP training material. https://learningconsole.amazonadvertising.com/

The best way to influence those signals is simply to strive for excellence. But providing excellent customer service is both challenging and costly. It requires preparation, processes for problem resolution, fast intervention and sometimes generous return or refunding conditions.

So, will that investment pay off? Odds are it will help you win the buy box which can contribute to more sales on Amazon. It can also spill-over into your ratings and reviews and help boost conversion. It might even enhance your customer care in other distribution channels. So, don’t neglect or underprioritize customer service, it is one of the keys to success of your business in the long run, both on Amazon and beyond.

Make your clients happy.

Controlling the ACOS

Marketing your products on Amazon is practically impossible without advertising. “Products that sell themselves” is a concept of a distant past, don’t fall for it, however proud you are of your product development or research.

On Amazon, you don’t win if you don’t play the advertising game.

When you are just starting to sell on Amazon, you will need to invest a higher proportion of your sales in advertising. The ACOS at the outset might even be too high for you to turn a profit.

ACOS means Advertising Cost of Sales and is a metric primarily used in Amazon marketing. In other advertising we usually use the inverted value of ACOS, which is the ROAS: Return on Ad Spend. Both metrics score how much value you are getting out of your advertising. The reason for the adoption of ACOS by Amazon is probably found in the way Seller relationships are structured: a merchant sells on the platform and thus earns a balance to be paid by Amazon. The seller can use a proportion of that balance on advertising and will only receive the difference between total sales and advertising and other fees on its bank account.

As you learn from your advertising investment and from the outcomes of your campaigns, you can optimize accordingly to reduce investment for the same result or increase sales with the same budget. This will mean your ACOS goes down, but more importantly, your sales velocity goes up. At this stage, you should experience both an improvement in your buy box ratio and a rise in organic sales. The flow is kicking in. Amazon is more likely to show your product on relevant queries in its search results if you have ramped up your sales.

This mindset of investing to learn what works – making small bets all the time – is a great way to grow your account. You can bet on keyword targeting, on competitive products, on complementary products on past buyers, on non-buying visitors to your product pages. All of these can be performed inside the Amazon Sponsored Ads platform, and if you max out on that platform, there will be plenty more bets to do on the Amazon DSP, where targeting options are supercharged providing almost endless optimization levers.

But before we get carried away with all the potential customers, let’s remember that a high ACOS won’t be sustainable in the long run. In order to earn money a company generates margins on the sale of its products. The margin is the difference between the sales price, the cost of goods sold (COGS) and the costs of marketing. Gradually taking the ACOS down to a sustainable level while maintaining sales growth is the key to growing your account.

In reality, however, a much better measure of success is to take a wider view of your performance by looking at total ACOS (or tACOS/Tacos, as it is often called). Total ACOS better takes the derived benefits from advertising into account (more organic sales) and is a better measure of your success.

Optimize your advertising to reach a sustainable ACOS, then expand.

Position your products, then invest to learn and grow for the long run

As your product flows and your sales grow, you will need to maintain your level of customer service and your control of efficient stock levels. Remember, you are in it for the long haul. Your advertising bets will show you how and where to develop your account further and while this iterative process  can be long, it can also put your business on track to conquering a market at a pace of 10, 15 or even 25% growth per month until you reach you market potential.

Being impeccable on price level, customer service and stock, and having faith in your strategy could steer your business to unprecedented heights. And the dashboard for your performance is right in front of your eyes in Amazon’s Seller central.

“OMG, Anders, PPC Performance was awful over the weekend ” 😲😱

“How can we get our paid search and shopping campaigns back on track?” 🙄

The PPC Panic List

Before the weekend, I had been in discussions with Norman (not his real name) and his team about a PPC benchmark of their US, UK and FR operations against the cluster of leading PPC agencies we analyzed for the Search Marketing Trends Report. The benchmark analyzes the 5 dimensions of digital marketing maturity established by Boston Consulting Group in the 5A’s framework: Audiences, Assets, Automation, Attribution and Access.

But the message from Norman this morning called for something else. He was clearly struck by extreme PPC Panic, and the question was no longer whether the agencies and the internal operation were set up for success, it was about correcting campaign flaws that had put the entire operation at risk.

I drafted the following PPC Panic list off the top of my head.  I considered what I would have done if it were me waking up that day and missing performance targets massively on a budget of hundreds of thousands.

PPC Panic checklist (original but numbered)

1. Is your offering competitive?
2. Is your data feed working and updated?
3. Is the user experience consistent?
4. Is the attribution insight useful for understanding the user experience?
5. Is automatic bidding based on sufficient relevant data being used?
6. Is retargeting not being overused?
7. Are audiences being built and applied?
8. Is shopping vs text ads being prioritized?
9. Is impression share sufficient?
10. Is auction insight showing a reasonable competitive positioning?

I realized afterwards, that a few of these may need a bit more explanation to be useful. It is not a yes/no check list, it is a list of items to go through within a context. Additionally, there is no prioritized order in the list.

Is the user experience consistent?

My favourite starting point is point number 3: Is the user experience consistent? I think this is the most important task of any marketer: create consistency in the user journey. Make it clear where you are taking users in every step of the journey. This is about putting yourself in the user’s shoes and going through the marketing steps one by one, imagining use cases, touch points and interactions. It is not an easy exercise because communication channels and advertising have become so fragmented. When advertising was in its infancy, in the days of “Mad Men”, it would be aimed at creating one strong message and repeating it. In today’s digital era, it is about creating a strong and clear direction and weave partial messages into the path in a consistent manner to build a complete understanding and a frictionless interaction towards the end goal.

The Top25 PPC’ers additions

After sharing with Norman, I went on to activate that magical value catalyzer for digital marketing knowledge: the PPC community around the Paid Search Association and #PPCChat on Twitter, many of its participants are on the list of Top 25 most influential PPC Experts in 2021. During the day, the Twitter thread was quite animated and the initial checklist was augmented by a number of PPC specialists that I greatly respect and enjoy exchanging with. The Marketing O’Clock team seems to have picked up the conversation too.

In the PPC community, Navah Hopkins was fastest on the keyword. It may be a time-zone thing or it may just be a personal trait. Thanks Navah for being fast and incisive. She added a few interrogations: is the problem real? Is everything working as it should?

One of her first additons was to check date settings to make sure of the reality of the reason for panic. Are you looking at the right time frame? Could it be that conversions are simply delayed due to a long decision or reporting cycle? Are their multiple and conflicting objectives that draw results in the wrong direction?

From a more technical point of view, she also indicates a couple of check points: location targeting, auto-apply, the landing page. An eye-opener for me was “auto-apply“, a functionality were the ad engine will kindly apply changes to your campaign automatically as it sees fit. Go put your brains in the cupboard, they are no longer needed!

After Navah’s tweet, more recommendations rolled in. Kirk Williams sounds like he has been confronted with this type of situation many times before. The most common reason he encounters is that tracking is down: “Did you check the conversion pixel and check that conversion tracking is still working as it should be?”

Never make changes on a Friday

Kirk and his team have had their share of PPC Panic messages from clients, and after the first check on the reality of the problem, their next checkpoint is the following: “Did your dev/design team make any changes to PDPs or the checkout experience, or anything else that could impact UX?”.

This reminded me of one of the golden rules of digital marketing which I have always tried to live by: “Never make changes to your website on a Friday”. This includes minor tracking, UX or plugin updates that are seemingly harmless. Want to quickly get those changes implemented before you leave on weekend? Don’t do it!

I am thinking this rule actually might apply to other situations in life. Making hurried or not thoroughly tested changes to a system that will keep running while you are away is not something I would recommend. Probably not something they do in nuclear power plants or in payment verification systems, and I am thinking water supply infrastructure and gas pipes maintenance probably have similar golden rules they apply.

Is campaign data flowing as it should?

Mike Ryan provided a quick three-step verification in “feed, budget and changelog“, but also mistakenly called it a “cute over-the-weekend scenario” which it clearly wasn’t 😲. I make tweet typos all the time too. Hate that you can’t correct a tweet once it flies, but I know it is part of the Twitter deal: Fast and as-is. The “feed” that Mike mentions corresponds to the point 2 in the original list: 2. Is your data feed working and updated?

A data feed is typically an ongoing process in which data from a product catalog is being fed into an advertising system. The process can be a manually built system or it can be based on a tool. Once it is up and running, it is part of the magic of real-time advertising, as a products most recent information including, price, stock level and product images is provided into the advertising system. The downside is of course that it is magical when it works but it is a horror story if it stopped working and you’ve ended up offering a Halloween promotion for Easter. By going through some of the user experience testing mentioned earlier, you may be able to pinpoint this type of problem, but another approach is of course to check the data flow to make sure the latest and correct data is in the data feed and received correctly in the advertising systems.

A great additional check from Julie Bacchini is to verify for any outages on the platforms over the weekend. Platforms failing to stay up or provide complete data has become a more frequent problem these past years.

The Ultimate PPC Performance Panic List

Starting with a top of mind list and adding some great input from the PPC community, let us now review and reorder the list so that those in panic can get a structured and well through-through action list to work by. Through the various inputs, it becomes quite clear that the check points can be grouped in specific areas and prioritized to form a step by step list. I therefore dare to call this the Ultimate PPC Performance Panic list and will accept to update with any missing advice that is shared with me over time so this can remain applicable and to the point. I want to assist victims who have been struck by PPC misfortune over the weekend, during the night or perhaps when the manager was off on vacation.

The prioritized 5 steps to go through in case of PPC Panic.

1. Reality check. Is the panic justified? (pixels, dates, reporting updates, data delays)
2. Waterproof check. Is your operation intact or is there a leak (feed, site, certificate, payment process)
3. Environment check. Is there a force majeure (pandemic, climate catastrophe, monetary crash, shitstorm, …)
4. Consistency check. Is what you are advertising consistent
5. Pulse check. Are your campaigns live and in shape?

Let’s go through each of them to see what they are all about.

First step: Reality check

With a little luck you can calm the panic before going much further in the list. You panic because the results you are seeing are way worse than what you expected to see. But are you looking at the right data set?

• Check that you are looking at the right dates and that they are comparable with your baseline.
• Check that your pixels are in place to track the data you are measuring. Check any website updates that were done recently and shouldn’t have been implemented on a Friday.
• Check that the reporting interface you are looking at has been updated. Maybe go back to the source data and check for consistency.
• Check for data delays. Could it be that the results you are expecting to see have not yet produced the desired and measurable outcome.

I am so much hoping that you found the glitch in the above points and that reality is not as bad as you first thought. If that is not the case, move one to a more in-depth check up on your system in the next step.

Second step: Waterproof check

We have concluded that the data we are seeing is not showing the results we hoped to see. In this second step we therefore dive deeper to check whether or not the entire advertising system is watertight, or whether some element of it has stopped functioning. If the results we are seeing are real, we are hoping to find a simple flaw to fix in this step.

• Check that data feeds are updated and arrive in the right location.
• Check that the secure server certificate has not expired and that the site is up and running. Why not check domain name expiry dates at this point.
• Check for any signs that your site has been hacked.
• Check that the payment system is up and running.
• Check that the campaign landing pages are functional.

Although at this point you know you have lost performance, we are hoping that one of the above reasons can explain the drop and that fixing it will get you back on track quickly. If you didn’t find any explanation in the above points, then let’s move on to the third step to check for environmental explanations.

Third step: Environment check

We are now pretty certain that the lost performance is real and that the advertising is technically up and mechanically running the way it is supposed to. No quick fixes seem to present themselves to us and we must look outside the box for reasons for the drop. Here are some of the things to check for.

• Did any pandemic just hit your target audience?
• Any climate situation that could explain a sudden change in user behaviour?
• Is the economic situation stable or are households suddenly scared of a stock exchange crash, is inflation ramping, have there just been austerity announcements from the Prime Minister?
• Closer to your brand, was there a shitstorm on social media or did one of your competitors just get an award for strongest brand or best place to work?

Some changes in the environment can strongly affect a campaign. They may have arrived suddenly but have the potential to change user behaviour in depth either for the short or the long run. They affect strategy and if they are at play, you may be best off reducing spend and reviewing what impact they may have on the way users find, consider, select and buy your products. If you haven’t been able to identify external factors to explain your performance drop, it will be time to look for the worm inside the apple. Let’s get digging.

Fourth step: Consistency check

In many cases, I am the alert and well-organized marketer, so I might jump straight to the consistency check. I would have felt or even avoided that any of the first three steps would affect my campaigns. Consistency is quite subjective and hard to see. Inconsistency, however, stands out quite clearly when you meet it. This consistency check is about putting yourself in the users’ place and experiencing your marketing as the target audience receives it. Here are some of the things you might undertake in that process:

• Go to sites you have targeted for advertising and try to get a glimpse of your own ads. This is not always possible because digital advertising targets users rather than sites today.
• Try to mimick user behaviour and characteristics of your target audience. Search as they do, browse as they do, simulate using the language and location they are in. Are your ads triggered and do they make sense?
• Take screenshots of your own ad occurences, click on them, screenshot your landing page for documentation. Does it all make sense?
• After clicking through on the advertising, go through the user journey towards the purchase. Take screenshots again and anything creating friction or confusion, and obviously anything blocking your path.
• You ran into some competitors along the path. Were they doing promotions like it is the end of the world? Is your offering competitive?
• For each of your advertising channels, go through the above exercise to check and confirm consistency in the user journey.

You may not find one single point blocking your way to fulfill the user journey and purchase your own products, but in many cases you will find a number of points where you can improve the user journey with your messaging or imagery. You may also be able to build a number of hypothesis for what might be wrong with your campaigns. Some of them could lead to resolution and others simply to better performance or new audiences ot reach. Regardless of the level of troubleshooting you have done in this point, you should probably complete your checklist by going through the last step.

Fifth step: Pulse check

I have called the last step in this process the pulse check. In many cases, what we are looking for is whether there are any signs of performance in the campaign. Is there a pulse? The pulse check is in reality a small PPC audit and it has the potential to take your campaign to the next level. I really like the detailed walk-through of an account audit shared in this thread by Amalia Fowler. She divides the audit into seven sections: Objectives, Account structure,  Campaign targeting and Keywords and match types, Ads, Changelog, Display and audiences. Find a run through by Amalia in this thread.

In the following list I have incuded a number of the points uncovered by Amalia and the PPC community on Twitter. If you feel it is incomplete, don’t hesitate to suggest additions:

• Correspondence of tracked goals with objectives
• Account settings: conversion, attribution, account integrations
• Usage of extensions: using what make sense and not what doesn’t?
• Account structure: campaigns, adgroups, keywords.
• Smart bidding and consistency with data volumes and outcome
• Audiences: do they make sense? Do they add value?
• Retargeting (audiences): are you doing it and not overdoing it?
• Geolocation settings
• Auto-apply settings
• Impression shares and auction insights: what is the competitive setting?

At this stage you have hopefully identified what was not working with your campaign in this instance. You have also started undertaking a number of auditing measures which can help you avoid PPC Panic in the future and contribute to your campaign performance overall.

Strategy, governance and a clear process will help you reduce the likeliness of panic coming your way.

PPC performance has been something quite predictable for many years but it is becoming more volatile. This is caused both by more rapid user behaviour changes and by the increased share of machine-learning and AI in media optimization. The more you rely on automation and tools, the less visibility and end-user insight you get. This makes it more difficult to take corrective action once something goes wrong. The more automation, the more opacity. This is where PPC strategy implemented by human pilots and enhanced by automated processes and AI will be the ideal way to manage digital advertising in the future.

Please contact me via Twitter for any additions to this list. I am happy to update it to include all the best tips and tricks for getting through PPC panic and restoring campaign performance.

Stay tuned on the Innovell blog and subscribe to the Innovell newsletter if you want to learn how the landscape evolves and how marketers adapt to this ongoing change 🙂

The Social Commerce Dream

Social Commerce is the dream of impulse buying on digital media come real. Careless, flawless, and not least frictionless shopping on mobile, tablet, surface and yet-to-be-invented digital interaction devices with augmented reality. You may agree that we are still a bit far from it in 2021, or perhaps you are one of the pioneering consumers trying out every new way of shopping available.

With social media, brands can interact directly with consumers. So, marketing has become interactive, the customer voice has become audible, and social commerce could have the power to make shopping great again.

What is social commerce?

The concept of Social Commerce was coined by Yahoo back in 2005. It represents the activation of a purchase behaviour triggered by social media interactions. But Yahoo couldn’t make it work, and more than 16 years later, it is still looking for its final form. Ecommerce first emerged out of dusty distance-buying post-order catalogues. Its first embodiment on the internet was text-rich, image-poor and devote of any emotional dimension. In a parallel trend of comparison shopping, rational buying became the default for internet shopping and deals-sites were the most fun places around.

In recent years, the internet has become more commercial, and by projection both more fun and more superficial. Social media helped make a shift away from human-to-machine relations and back to human-to-human relations. At least we got that far. Emojis conquered text messages crying out loud, that “emotions are back”. 📢❤💥

Perhaps these are indications that full-scale social commerce is actually possible despite its long journey in the dark.

What features will make social commerce successful?

The features of social commerce allow for a wholesome social experience within in a full ecommerce journey. We propose to define its components as the following list of commerce-enabling elements:

• A product catalogue (also called a product feed)
• A product selection and check-out feature
• Peer-to-peer (social) communications related to products and services
• Influencer integration
• Live video
• Behaviour-based ad targeting
• Shopping enablement in rich media (such as product tagging in images or video)
• Reviews, ratings
• Recommendations
• Fulfillment
• Client services

Social commerce today emerges from two different horizons: On the one hand, you have the social media-enabled ecommerce into which Amazon falls. And on the other hand, you have the ecommerce-enabled social media such as Instagram and the Facebook Shop. Let’s have a look at these species in more detail.

Social-media enabled ecommerce

Most ecommerce platforms integrate a number of the elements we mentioned, but Amazon is the most advanced social media-enabled ecommerce model with reviews and ratings, peer recommendations and “people also bought” as driving elements. We can also put Etsy, Vinted and Shein in that category. To take the example of Amazon, it is pushing further into social media and hoisting itself up the funnel with things like the following:

• Amazon posts: social posts on “brand stores” and now coming to product detail pages
• Influencer integrations: activating the ecommerce dimension of influencer partnerships by allowing them to build a store front directly on Amazon with products from their partners
• Live commerce: live video product presentations of products on Amazon Live. Around the clock Shoppingtainment.

Where Amazon is still very much at the end of the purchase journey for most users, it is trying to build a more entertaining user journey opening up for upsells and impulse buys. It’s social gaming platform Twitch may come to play an important role in the set-up moving forward. The strongest element in Amazon’s social commerce play is clearly the Live commerce initiative. It feels like the return of TV Shopping and merchants are flocking to the opportunity to present their products in a live stream on the platform. Build more awareness, give their products a more humane touch, show the founders, reach new audiences, nudge users further towards the purchase. Real humans, real emotions, real persuasion.

Ecommerce-enabled social media

On the other extreme of the spectrum, Pinterest and Instagram have long been considered the most advanced social commerce players. With slowing user growth, it has become essential to monetize their audiences more strongly in order to survive, and ecommerce seems like a much more powerful economic model than advertising.

Instagram has the power to recommend fashion items that make people buy. At least that is the case for Andreas Reiffen, founder of Crealytics and heavy internet users. Where traditional commerce was always based on the location, location, location paradigm whereby the location of a business and its flow of traffic was determining for its’ success, the success parameter for social commerce could be closer related to the quality of the recommendation.

Instagram’s Mothership, Facebook has picked up the challenge in a serious manner with Facebook Shops, a new commerce-oriented solution after their Places and Marketplace. One of the strongest motivators for advertising spend being ecommerce, it is crucial for Facebook to make the connection, especially in a world where cross-platform data integration becomes increasingly difficult (read more about the battle of the cookies here). The impact of advertising higher up the funnel is becoming more difficult to measure and prove.

The most significant step for Facebook Shops is the integration of a payment solution which is already operational in the US market. This will allow for an end-to-end shopping experience from discovery to purchase without leaving the platform. It also opens up for an interesting opportunity: A Facebook Shop with Amazon fulfillment at the back end (combining a Facebook Shop with payment and an Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment solution). Ecommerce without a webshop, who would have expected that?

And let’s not forget Snapchat and TikTok. TikTok is building out its advertising offering and is already integrating shopping functionality into the mix. TikTok Shopping, however, is mainly an integration with Shopify enabling for a simple pass-through from the social media to the shop. It looks like social commerce-enablement is becoming a mainstream feature for all platforms. Snapchat has long been integrating its offering with ecommerce solutions and has a similar force of persuasion to TikTok among its users. Snapchats social commerce case studies are an interesting read. Its main tool for ecommerce enablement is a deeplinking feature for linking ads to shops. For younger audiences, these platforms have an enormous persuasion power, but the ecommerce-enablement still requires jumping to another channel.

Ecommerce everywhere

Over at Google, there is pondering as well. Already three years ago, Google went on a mission to provide “shopping everywhere”. I called it an Ozone-approach to shopping (ozone is a variety of oxygen present everywhere around us in the air and with the interesting characteristic that too high doses can be lethal to human beings).

The ozone initiative aimed to provide ecommerce activation in all of Google’s media channels. In search marketing it is already present via Google Shopping and product ads which appear in an integrated manner into search results. But Google is pushing this further with a purchase button and an integration with Google Pay. I call it the Google Buy button although it appears to have a less Amazon-like name in Google documentation.

It is also working on an integration of a purchase function inside videos on YouTube and in images. The approach is similar to the tags Instagram has enabled in its images to link to a product page, but it is reasonable to assume that Google might push this further via image recognition and propose purchases of practically anything you see.

There is an app for it

But what if it all ended up in an app instead. With the open internet being closed up and user journeys more restricted, the place to be is in an app. The superapp phenomenon is expanding beyond China, where WeChat has always been the app to offer everything: Uber, Paypal, Spotify, Messenger, eh I mean WeChat transport, WeChat payment, WeChat Music, WeChat just chat etc.

Superapps are social media by definition and some are natively ecommerce enabled. Perhaps social commerce is already here.

Social Commerce Champions

Taking a first look at the various contenders to the title of social commerce champion and giving them a first rough rating on the features listed at the beginning of the article, the top contenders seem to be Amazon, Instagram (Facebook) and Google. The triopoly of digital advertising are seriously addressing this.

Rough rating of the main emerging platforms for social commerce. Please disagree and contact the author for improvement 🙂

Get social proof, inspire and reach your audience via ads or influencers

Instagram and the Facebook Shop seem like interesting places to go in 2021. For ecommerce players strongly anchored in Amazon, there is social turn to take and a live commerce opportunity to seize where available (US so far). The key will be to understand end users better and engage them with content earlier in the user journey. For brands with little ecommerce penetration, it will be about learning how to drive users to the sale and to take the purchase and fulfilment experience into consideration. An impulse-buy with a 7 day deliver span may not be a viable solution for social commerce. Social commerce is fast, fluid, frictionless and fulfilling.

And in the future, augmented reality may allow for immersive experiences merging the online and offline user experience and creating an entertaining and fulfilling user experience. Facebook heading for the Metaverse and Snapchat activating Augmented Reality in its campaigns, may be signs of an emerging social commerce paradigm.

Google Ads versus Amazon Ads: Who Eats Who?

Some 12 years ago, I was point man for all European Google Ads spend for a large media agency group. At the time, our claim was to be the biggest spender on Google Ads. And whereas it didn’t provide us with any monetary benefit, kickback or commission, it did give us some prestige, some clout, and a few privileges. We were the number one revenue stream, after all.

Fast forward to the 2020’s: Amazon is the biggest advertiser in the Google Ads auction. My good friend Mike Ryan, calls it the “Elephant in the room”. When the elephant makes a turn, the room is shaking, and sometimes things are breaking.

In the midst of the pandemic, we saw signs of Amazon pulling its advertising on Google Ads. Whether all advertising was stopped or this was only partial or local, we do not know. What we do know is that it coincided with the first ever negative growth quarter in the history of Google Ads. There was of course a generalized drop in advertising spend across all media, but Google took the biggest blow. There must have been some painful video conferences taking place in that quarter.

Let’s not be carried away by that fact, however. With its 69% YoY growth in Q2 of 2021, Google Ads has recovered from the blow. It is also still 6-7 times bigger than Amazon Ads and almost double the size of Facebook Ads. It had been a while since Google Ads had experienced higher growth than Facebook which only reached 56% YoY growth this time around. Surely, this must confirm have been overseen by those thinking Facebook advertising has played its role out.

Pandemic turbulence

Are we through with the pandemic yet in Q3 of 2021? It doesn’t quite feel that way, but for sure, digital advertising has surfed the wave for 18 months at this point in time. Growth rates for Gogle Ads, Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads were 69%, 56% and 87% respectively in a year on year perspective for Q2 2021. All-time highs since 2018 for all of them. When we compare the sum of the three ad platforms’ revenue to the worldwide digital advertising spend estimated by Statista, they represent 75%. It is the rise of the triopoly. Digital advertising has indeed survived and recovered from the pandemic.

In my quarterly recap on the Triopoly of digital advertising, Google Ads versus Facebook Ads versus Amazon Ads, I dubbed Q2 of 2020, “Christmas in May”, as the seasonal spikes of Q4 was suddenly equaled by a Q2 spike in ecommerce which was a high as we would expect the end of year season. Would it all come back down? Had everyone now spent all their beer money? Not quite, the Q4 spike was back as well and a new pattern was showing.

Shifting budgets to retail media

We detected anecdotal evidence of a shift of budgets within the Google Ads mix in our research for the 2018 Paid Search Trends report. We believe this trend has existed for the past 10 years. Text ads budgets are shifting to Shopping ads. We could call this the rise of retail media, a term that has become popular alongside the rise of Amazon Ads.

I am tempted to give this a less flattering name, such as the tyranny of last-click attribution. Tracking on the internet becomes harder the further away from the measurable conversion you get. And conversion tracking has been one of the keys to the explosion of digital advertising. Comparatively, advertisers always favour last-click. It is easier to measure conversion on a marketplace than in an influencer campaign, but does that mean the marketplace is more important than the influence generated from reaching out to wider audiences?

A shift from Google Ads to Amazon Ads?

The biggest shifts in advertising budgets we are seeing are two-fold. Google Ads budgets are shifting to shopping internally. And Amazon advertising budgets are draining Google to feed its marketplace and consequently its own advertising offering.

Is this a story pattern that repeats itself? In the 1990’s, Google managed to sign a deal with the market leader for internet search, YAHOO! to provide the backfill for organic search results on the the catalog. This coincided with Google becoming a household name, and as we all know, the leading search engine is now Google and Yahoo! has all but disappeared.

Is Amazon draining Google and winning the battle of product search in the process by being such an omnipresent advertiser on the search engine? Or is it on the contrary Google which benefits from the surge of Amazon to monetize its huge covering?

Viewed from the trenches Google and Amazon are not substitutes

For large online retailers, there may well be a need to aim for native ecommerce in each available online media channel: provide a native ecommerce experience on Facebook and Google, just like the one Amazon provides. But for most merchants, the duality of Amazon and non-Amazon is a really complex setting to be in.

Seen from the trenches, Amazon is fast and dynamic, but merchants would much rather drive traffic via Google to their website where they can generate higher margins and a better client relationship in the long run.

Whenever I am in a discussion where both Amazon Ads and Google Ads are discussed, they are never seen as direct competitors for a budget line. They are separate universes an advertiser will consider strategically and in most cases want to address separately to get the best of both worlds. In some cases, Google Ads can also be an external advertising challenge for Amazon, something the ecommerce platform is incentivizing as of late.

Amazon Ads is booming but it would be wrong to say Google Ads isn’t. The big difference between the two is that retail media is growing at a much higher rate than search. Additionally, Amazon Ads has created an advertising product which merchants can hardly live without. That in itself doesn’t guarantee sustained future growth, but at the moment retial media and Amazon Ads are the winners of the day.

Holisitic Optimization of Digital Marketing for Ecommerce

If you are spending less than 8% of your sales on advertising, you may be underspending! Digital Advertising is driven by Ecommerce. And perhaps a little by branding, which is financed by commerce  too. Global Ecommerce was over 4 trillion dollars in 2020 (statista). Comparatively speaking, digital advertising is a midget, at 330 billion. So, global digital advertising as a proportion of global ecommerce is 8%. There is your benchmark, but how should you spend your advertising budget?

Spending where it works

Wanamaker famously said that one half of advertising spend is wasted, the trouble being that you don’t know which half. Fortunately, we are now in the world of digital advertising where everything is measurable, right? If only it were that easy. As we have undercovered in the Digital Marketing Report, all marketing decisions are taken on the basis of partial data: incomplete, unreliable, unshared, adblocked, webproxied, wrongly attributed. All digital marketers know this, most advertisers too, the majority of end-users don’t. “When I enter information into a website, why should it be shared with all those other sites?” – well it isn’t. Apple’s current advertising is about removing all the other platforms’ partial data collection so that only Apple can monetize that data. Logical movement of troops in the what we call the Data Wars, but not motivated by Apple wanting to protect it’s users, in my opinion.

When marketers look at data from the big marketing platforms, there can be biais in the interfaces too. Did you know that Google analytics shows “sampled results” over a certain threshold of data volume: you see a simulation of what data trend is in your activity, not real data. Explain that to your CFO, will you? Newer concepts such as “data-driven attribution” and “modeled conversions” are pushing in the same direction of predicted data rather than real data.

And most platforms are excellent at pushing their collection of packaged data to marketers. The big platforms are marketing data to their clients, the marketers, using great packaging, promotional outreach, gamification.  Dear marketer, did you not know realize that it is you the target audience?

Digital media spend is biaised to promotion

The most reliable data, is found when a marketing operation is carried out exclusively on one platform, and when the path between product discovery and the final purchase is short and uncomplicated. The longer the path gets and the more complex the decision-taking, the less reliable the data tends to be.

Unsurprisingly therefore, Amazon is booming. It is concentrated on the final path to purchase. Also unsurprising, retargeting works really well. Both are close to the measurement point for your sales KPI. And a well-known observation from search marketers, “brand keywords convert”: first users search for category words and when they have found the brand they want to buy from, they search for the brand name. For this reasons, brand keywords are more often attributed the sale.

This challenge of “attribution” has a huge impact on the way budgets are engaged. The data is biased, and subsequently, so are budgets.

In many cases, the data doesn’t tell the story of what happened before the final conclusive action that made a user purchase. Whether this was other keywords that were searched for, or how the person you retarget was identified in the first place. If you really want to optimize your marketing investment, you must look at your entire marketing and communications operation holistically from end-to-end.

Understanding the user journey

Heard of the “funnel” for digital advertising? It was invented in 1898 so predates most digital marketing by a century. Kind of old and outdated, right? Or maybe it isn’t.

The reference concept behind the funnel is the AIDA model. It is a “hierarchy of effects” model in which users are described as moving through stages before buying a product. Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. The funnel model is for digital marketers, what the “economic man” model is for economists.  The economic man model explains that people make rational purchase decisions and will be more likely to buy a cheaper product than a higher priced similar product.

The funnel model, explains how a user goes through various stages before coming to a decision to buy a product, including becoming aware of the products’ existence, understanding it’s characteristics and finally acting on an impulse to buy it.

Marketers instrumentalize the funnel model to create “awareness” around a product to target audiences, then provide them all the product information they need in order to appreciate and consider buying it. This drive through the funnel is designed to persuade and eventually incite users to buy the product. Here is a more detailed walk-through of digital marketing mechanisms and the stages of the user journey.

Opportunistic marketing

In the TV age, there were few but powerful marketing channels and few but powerful distribution systems. Optimization cycles were long. Study the market, build a creative concept, produce assets, run the campaign flight, stock up in distribution channels, analyse communication and sales results post-campaign. Marketing was a high budget, high risk and high returns business.

In the digital age, marketing channels are fragmented and fast. So are distribution channels. And user behaviour can be erratic too. It has become less risky but more confusing to be a marketer. You can trial and error, you can seize opportunities as they arise. If you are doing no marketing whatsoever, your first action can drive amazing results, and subsequent additional actions can have seemingly no effect. Worse, you can run a number of parallel marketing activities and find conflicting conclusions in the data sets.

What happens when you optimize holistically?

Because of this opportunistic marketing behaviour, the bigger picture is often lost of sight. Applying a funnel view of marketing activities can help identify bottle necks or explain why performance diminishes over time. The key to holistic optimization is to keep an eye on your total investment and your total outcome. It doesn’t have to be 8%, it really depends on what is profitable for your business. It also depends on your goals: if you want to win more marketshare, you should probably spend more than your competitors. If you have a strong brand, perhaps you can get away with spending less to maintain your market share.

With your eyes fixed on that overall performance, you can now look into individual channels and opportunities. It is quite common to see advertisers spend a lot of their budget at the bottom of the funnel, because it is measurable and gives the illusion of high performance. But in some cases, bottom of funnel budgets are cannibalising what we call “organic” performance. You put an ad up and it drove the sales, but the user was going to buy the product anyway. And sometimes you can end up bidding up your own marketing in other channels or perhaps your distributors’ marketing costs for selling your products.

If you think this may be the case in your marketing set-up, try moving some of your budget up the funnel. Reach your target audiences on facebook, target category keywords in search and promote your brand on Amazon. This can stimulate overall performance and allow you to generate better results holistically.

Don’t trust channel-specific performance

One of my favourite films is Minority Report. It depicits a society where truth is established in a closed room where three extraordinary beings can see what will happen in the future. Except, sometimes they don’t agree, and one of them will disagree to generate a minority report.

This can be compared to marketing reports emanating from one marketing channel. All the data isn’t there, but the truth that emerges seems compelling, whereas in reality it is incomplete and sometimes even false.

Everything is measurable in digital marketing, except for all the incomplete data, the biaised data, and the fact that advertising platforms are marketing their product to the advertiser without disclosing their minority reports.

Only a holistic view of all marketing activities can help you learn what balance of media spend and channels works for your brand, so check with your CFO before signing off on the next advertising opportunity you are presented with, and take a chance on channels that make sens from a funnel perspective. They may be more inclined to drives results in the long run.

Native Ecommerce

Native Ecommerce will power the shopping craze of the 2020’s. Watch a film and be attracted by a dress the actress is wearing. Pause, click, purchase right there, then resume your film. See a designer watch in an influencers’ feed on Instagram, click, purchase and scroll along. Watch a start-up founders’ live demonstration of an innovative product and buy it on the spot. Native Ecommerce is the future of impulse buying. Making the user experience great again.

Native ecommerce is when then entire shopping process from product discovery to purchase and checkout happens natively on the same platform. Such a process is already native to Amazon, but in most other online purchase journeys online, you still jump to another platform when it comes to the final purchase of a product. This disrupts the user journey, puts tracking off and represents a monetization loss for the platform you left.

Over the past few years, industry observers have described a trend known as social commerce, whereby more and more of the purchase journey is integrated into social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Social commerce, however, is no longer the only type of native ecommerce on the rise. Native ecommerce is coming to most of your existing online platforms, changing the nature of the online purchasing journey and making ecommerce into a feature applicable to any existing platform. Facebook shops are accepting payment and Google now has a buy button which we will find in videos on YoutTube, on it’s shopping experience and even in search results. Every online platform is working to complete its’ range of features for online shopping so that you no longer have to click through to an ecommerce site or go over to Amazon to buy products. Stay put, native ecommerce is coming to you making shopping a feature of any online experience.

The Trinet and the compartmentalisation of the internet

Some will consider this trend of compartmentalisation of the internet a disturbing trend. It certainly wasn’t the way the internet was conceived to be. With the strong growth of Apple, Google and Facebook and the walled gardens they raise around their users, the internet of the 2010’s started to be called the trinet, as each of the three players were pretty much building their own internet and raising barriers around it to avoid users and data to flow between them. In these Data Wars, the end user has a seamless experience within each of those walled gardens, and an inconsistent one when the boundaries are crossed which is perfectly natural user behaviour. The marketers nightmare.

When I launch a Facebook or LinkedIn page, I am much less concerned about feeling blind. I am more concerned of being misled by the stats I receive from the platforms and not receiving the ones I am interested in. The first time business owners are confronted with the reality of their Facebook page can be a bit awkward. They have heard so much about all the data Facebook holds on users. Didn’t Cambridge Analytica have 5000 data points on each user thanks to data collected via Facebook? Then how come you can’t even know who the  fans of your business page are, and less so contact them?

You can access the data for marketing purposes. Show advertising to all your fans, to all the fans of your fans, to people in specific demographics, geographic segments, those interested in footwear, or those who are likely to buy insurance. Facebook has the most powerful targeting machine on the internet due to that user data, but you don’t get it, you can only rent it, even if it was built with your own contribution.

In the 2020’ies the compartmentalisation is much broader than a trinet. Most online platforms are using similar same techniques of impeding user leaks and blocking data flows. Amazon, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok. Each platform will penalize the distribution of content taking the users outside of their platforms and will impede most tracking of activity from any other platforms.

How tracking and data restrictions are reinforcing this trend

When I launch a new website I always feel entirely blind until an analytics tool such as Google Analytics is active. Imagine you opened a fashion retail shop and you would stand in the middle of the shop and not be able to see any of your visitors nor hear when the door opens. The only thing you could know would be when the till rings a new sale. People have come to hate cookies across the board but sometimes miss some of the essential things they help us do. Please don’t remove first party cookies! Please don’t block all cookies when you go to a website. Don’t prick out the eyes of the store owner!

On the expanded trinet, platforms don’t allow you to do any tracking on their own. You have no raw data, can’t extract it, can’t consolidate with any other platform data you may have. Don’t say you didn’t know, it was in the terms and conditions you accepted when you created your page!

If marketers could get their right, they would ask for tags to be placed on every page of their brand’s presence. These tags would allow them to understand how their marketing impacts end-users, and especially allow them to use automated optimization allowing for advertising to be efficient. But those signals are absent from any cross-platform advertising, except traffic sent to your own website.

The end of cookies is one of the big topics in our digital marketing report.

The opportunity for online merchants

Whereas marketers are struggling with this segmentation of the internet into closed circuits, it might actually provide an opportunity for online merchants because of the desire of each of these platforms to provide all the functionality necessary to complete a purchase.

It is already quite common to have an ecommerce website and an Amazon store in parallel. Merchants are managing the challenge of maintaining a catalogue in two places and driving traffic and optimizing each of them.

In order for such a dual approach to work, a number of opportunities present themselves to merchants:

• Maintain a single source of catalogue, for example by using a PIM (Product Information Management) tool, and upload the catalogue to each ecommerce channel.
• Optimize inventory and fulfillment, for example by using MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfillment) from Amazon whereby you hold one FBA inventory (Fulfillment by Amazon) and pass orders from other channels to Amazon

Being an omnimerchant is not something reserved for large ecommerce operations. The tools and processes are constantly improving to make this possible.

A blueprint for operating native ecommerce

In a small ecommerce set-up, a catalogue can be managed via an excel file. Perhaps taking a first step further and making this a shared online version would be a great idea. Google Sheets can do wonders. With one single source of the catalogue, each native ecommerce channel will be fed the same information.

For large catalogues, a product information management tools becomes necessary. It can maintain the latest product information and ensure consistency between channels.

For driving traffic to each ecommerce channel, the job of the marketer suddenly became much easier. For a Facebook shop, advertise on Facebook and Instagram, for a Google Shopping set-up advertise on YouTube and Google, for an Amazon store, no need to look for external traffic.

One of the big challenges for ecommerce has always been the checkout. This is where a large part of the current revolution is taking place. Google and Facebook are starting to do the checkout. Facebook probably even has its own currency on the roadmap. Other players such as TikTok, may move in the same direction dragging Pinterest and Snapchat with them. Payment on Google and Facebook is currently only possible in the US market, and in other markets, the solution may be an ecommerce solution such as Shopify allowing you to run your own ecommerce website and provide the checkout for Facebook and Google operations.

In the future, however, an ecommerce operation may not need a site. This changes the nature of a merchants’ infrastructure and budgeting.

Remains to be see whether agile ecommerce corresponds to what users want

The infrastructure for the omnimerchant is here. All the big marketing platforms are enabling native commerce and raising their walled gardens. The only ones who weren’t asked their opinion were the end-users. Do you really want to buy that dress in an instant while you are watching a film? There is an opposite trend of buying less, recyclying and sharing. Of giving it a good think before you do your purchase in order to not overconsume. And many users cherish their freedom, doing what they can to not be locked into the user journey the marketing platforms laid out for them.

Native ecommerce is definitely a trend, and it can bring efficiency to merchants, and consistency to marketing operations. But whether users will go all the way remains to be seen.

Johnny was weary. He felt caught between countering forces demanding his allegiance. He had fought in the Battle of the Browser and knew that the long-term consequences of which side he chose to support could be important. It was still the same war the giants were fighting. The War of Data. The giants had an insatiable thirst for more data. They would ingest petabytes of data in one draw and spill it into their inner lakes of data patterns, enriching here and there, invalidating in other parts. But having acquired the data once was not enough, they constantly needed fresh data to ensure the value of the data they already had.

In the Battle of the Browser, it had been the soft components which had been important to win subjects over to their cause, but in the Battle of the Cookies, it was privacy that was at stake. The White front were eloquently addressing their subjects describing how they would do anything to protect them and that the Blue front was out to exploit them. The argument was compelling. After all, subjects had grown fearful, like Johnny, of constantly risking cookie attacks, and weary of repeatedly moving through checkpoints to allow or disallow dataflows. It provided them with a feeling of false security.

It was certain giants’ practices of covertly harvesting data in the other giants’ gardens that had triggered the Battle of the Cookies. The White front had adopted a defensive strategy dubbed internally as the antibiotics initiative. They were willing to partially break down and renew their own systems if this remedy could harm the other giants in greater proportion than themselves. Who had the most to lose? Clearly the Blue front. But in reality, removing the cookies didn’t enhance privacy, tracking didn’t go away and the total sum of data would not diminish, only be redistributed. Johnny couldn’t help feeling that was a hypocrite stance.

For a while, Johnny had considered joining the rebel front over at Adblocking, but he feared their leitmotivs too. Who financed them? When they only partially blocked data flows, how were those deals struck? And then he was not ready to wear their special outfits which felt a bit like deprivation of freedom to roam.

The easy choice seemed to reject the Blue front who had been known to greatly surpass their remit in exchange for their wonderful, fun and engaging experiences. They harvested all the data they could and by any means possible. There were rumours of shadow profiles, of master databases, of initiatives influencing presidential elections, even. It was ugly and an abuse of trust.

Johnny felt squeezed between hypocrisy and abusive practices. The digital revolution was far from what he had imagined. It was supposed to bring more freedom, more equality of opportunity, more literacy, more intelligence to all. Instead it was creating a divide, it was becoming compartmentalized and entirely driven by commercial interest. This Cyberspace is not quite the superconsciousness we were expecting to encounter at the end of the journey.

Battle of the Cookies

Apple has released its IOS 14.6 which effectively allows users to disallow third-party cookies on iPhones, Ipads and anywhere the Safari browser is used. Google has announced the phasing out of third-party cookies too. This is despite using them heavily in its own advertising solutions. A new targeting solution based on “cohorts” – groupings of similar profiles – going under the name of FloC is to replace the third-party cookies for Google. Microsoft Advertising on their side is working on a similar alternative named Parakeet. Facebook has the webs’ most advanced targeting engine for advertising which is its sole revenue source. It relies in large part on third-party cookie data in many ways, same as Google, Amazon and the entire digital advertising industry.

Marketers are having great challenges with these platforms. This is not new. And it is not even because of cookies. Ever since Facebook disallowed Google analytics on a company’s page, being able to understand user interactivity across a brands own content across the web is virtually impossible. The issue probably reaches even further back than this barrier between Google and Facebook. Digital marketing platforms are blocking data flows between them.

It is scary for an end-user to discover just how much information these platforms know about them. I have experienced this by showing their Google Ads Settings or Facebook Ads Settings to people during training sessions. And we also had laughs when someone would try to figure out why something they hated was showing as an interest, or why everybody is supposedly interested in American Football and BMW cars if we were to believe those settings. Facebook thinks I like penguins and the River Thames, so we are clearly far from George Orwell’s Big Brother. These platforms don’t share the data and cannot really understand the data they are monetizing. They repackage these partial data views and sell them off to marketers.

Third-party cookies were one of the few ways marketers could build up a richer view of a user journey across the internet. That capability which becomes creepy when it addresses one user or a small user group, is something marketers will no longer have access to. Maybe this is a good thing.

However, the tracking doesn’t go away. Simply the access will now be reserved for these digital marketing platforms themselves to monetize. The battle is not so much about protecting users’ privacy as it is about owning their data for monetization purposes. Clearly not the internet Tim Berners Lee envisaged when he invented the world wide web.

Marketers will survive. They just need to resaddle and rethink the way digital advertising works. Hopefully this will be for the better.

The question remains whether respect of users’ privacy will improve in any way. I am crossing fingers for that while I am expecting cost of digital advertising to go up in coming years.

Driving external traffic into Amazon can be a great paid search strategy in 2021 because the conversion rate is so high, but getting there can feel a bit like sailing through the Bermuda triangle. The compass goes berserk.

Apple’s is also messing with our digital compasses with the IOS 14.6 update, killing off cookies. Have you seen the latest Apple advertising campaign about privacy? It is a fun illustration of the privacy challenge. It is clear to everyone that Apple rids us of all that annoying tracking. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”. The AppleID used everywhere to personalize services in the Apple cloud, clearly isn’t tracking anything, is it?

In reality, the battle over cookies is just another battle in the “data wars” between the large American data-driven platforms who represent such a large part of our connected lives. I always have a laugh when I hear conspiracy theories like “they know everything about us“. Sure they do, Apple knows where you are, Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you are looking for and Amazon knows what you buy. But they just don’t sit and have tea together and discuss how they can control you. They don’t communicate or share any data. At all. That’s why the compass is off.

Walled Gardens

One of the best metaphors for describing this data impermeability is the “Walled Gardens” metaphor. Each of the platforms is raising walls around its users to prevent them from leaving and to avoid any of their data to escape. Apple is just raising a cookie wall in the current battle.

When you have a website, you can install Google Analytics for free. This gives Google all the data from your website. When you set up a Facebook page, it belongs to Facebook who will give you some nice inroads into the data. It is pretty hard though to actually figure out who is in your Facebook audience. That is not where any privacy issue lies. If you want to actually communicate with your community, you pay Facebook through advertising. And you certainly can’t track any user behaviour when someone came from outside of Facebook.

“People! Can you just stay in one garden at a time, so we can count, please!?”

Why drive to Amazon?

Unfortunately, these end-users that marketers are trying to understand are unruly. They like to surf, to browse and to zap, much to the dismay of the platforms they were just on. One click, one touch, one slider and they are gone. Away to another channel. Did you notice that when you publish a post with a link to your website on Facebook or LinkedIn, it rarely performs as well as if you publish a similar post without the link?

“Please have your audience stay on our platform so we can monetize.”

Pay for the click via advertising and the barriers is gone.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are an online merchant, and that you can choose only one channel to send your users to. Which one will it be? Your app, your site, your profile page on a social network?

No, you want them to be on your product detail page on Amazon, with your seller account in the “buy box” ready for a one-click sale. Simply because that is the best selling page on the internet for your product.

Amazon is a strong component of any ecommerce strategy. It is one of the main forces of ecommerce worldwide, and the marketplace is growing at a pace of 40% per year. Amazon Advertising is growing at an even higher pace suggesting the advertising spend is actually driving value to advertisers.

For an equal amount of visitors, an Amazon page typically converts much higher than a website. Perhaps twice as high. The service is fast and reliable, it is providing you with all the information you could possibly ask for, and it is backed by the promise of the lowest price and the fastest delivery. Ever. Amazon is obsessed with customer experience, so things will most likely work out quite well when a user purchases there. Hence a higher propensity to buy. A higher conversion rate.

Are you trying to kill my Shopify ecommerce?

“Do you wanna just kill the ecommerce business I am running on Shopify, or what? Amazon converts really well but I have a much higher margin on my direct ecommerce.”

Let’s do some calculations. Let’s say your ecommerce generates 10k in sales per month, your Amazon account generates 25k. You are spending 3k on paid search for 6k sales. Why would anybody send that profitable traffic into Amazon where margin is lower due to fees? If the Amazon channel converts at a rate which is double that of one’s website, those 3k could generate 12k of sales. Even at a 20% increase in costs – 15% referral fee and then some – your money is better invested in a higher converting channel. And a 100% higher conversion rate is not at all uncommon.

In this scenario, your sales increase by at least 6k and your costs by maximum 2,4k. A net benefit of 3.6k which is likely to increase further due to the organic boost which is likely to happen on Amazon. The higher the sales velocity, the higher you rank in Amazon search results and the more additional sales you generate. The net win could be 5-6k due to the shift to an Drive-to-Amazon strategy.

Downside of driving traffic to Amazon

Many years ago I remember having a client who only sold on Amazon. Running search and social media campaigns for the client was really frustrating because there was no data feedback. We could only control and optimize the click-through-rate for our campaigns and were dependent on the client to feedback on the effectiveness of a full campaign. As a real-time marketer, having a client sign off budget without proof of conversion was a new experience. We had no control on where we were sending the traffic, but as the client asked for more, the bottom line must have worked out for them.

It is common practice for advertising platforms to rely on conversion pixels. These are composed of a few lines of code which are placed on the pages where your advertising traffic is sent. If you send traffic from Facebook to a Shopify site, you will insert pixels which track key events such as a purchase. This communication feedback, allows the advertising platform to collect data on which ad created an event and at what time. And in turn, it allows the marketer or an algorithm to optimize the advertising campaign towards the desired actions. Amazon, of course, does not allow an advertiser to insert a pixel into it’s site. Neither does Facebook, Instagram or any other online platform for that matter.

On Amazon, a part of the solution to this problem is to use a tool called Amazon Attribution which allows you to tag external traffic when it arrives in the platform. The tool is still in beta and clearly in it’s infancy, difficult to set up and is fairly true to the “last-click” attribution model Amazon mostly uses. If a visitor comes from Google or Facebook into Amazon and click on an ad inside the platform before buying a product, the original source of the traffic will not be counted. If it does attribute it to the external traffic, however, you will be able to know from which ad group or keyword the conversion originated and thereby refine your campaigns.

There are obviously some more reasons for not driving traffic to Amazon: you pay referral fees (although it was actually you just referring that sale), you won’t get your clients email address and thus cannot address them directly for recurring sales. Additionally, you actually risk referring your prospects to competitors inside Amazon if they change their mind after the click. So, perhaps this is not a long-term strategy as you are simply increasing your platform dependency.

How to set up a drive-to-Amazon campaign

If you are used to running Google Ads campaigns, there is nothing new in the setup required for an Amazon campaign, but there is some preparation to do in your Amazon Seller account in order to detect the impact of your campaign. Going through the steps below should put you in a good place.

1. Prepare the set-up on the Amazon side

On the Amazon side, you should open a free Amazon Attribution account for tracking purposes. In order to qualify you must have brand registry. You should also make sure that you have access to the brand analytics report which can provide valuable overall insights for your Amazon account. If you are using a tools such as Helium10 you can track keyword rankings. Any keyword tracker will do, but make sure you have one activated. Also find a sales rank tracker such as Keepa which will allow you to estimate indirect effects of your campaign.

2. Keyword definitions

Now extract keywords from your Amazon Sponsored Product Ads and compare with your existing Google search keywords if you have any. We are assuming you are already using Amazon Sponsored Ads for your account. If not, start there rather than driving external traffic to your products! On the Google Ads side, spend some time charting Amazon’s own activity in your keyword territory by using the Auction Insights reports in Google Ads. Steer clear of keywords Amazon is already bidding on. No reason to bid them up.

3. Specific Google Ads set up

Now set up specific ad groups and keywords for your Drive-to-Amazon campaign. Once they are ready to deliver you will be able to pause the old campaign without ruining its history in case you need to reactivate at some point. The Drive-to-Amazon will be void of any conversion data and can’t be managed with automated bid strategies targeting conversion.

4. Campaign destination within Amazon

Within Amazon, you have various options for sending traffic. For product names and any brand-related terms you should send the traffic directly to product detail pages. For category terms, the brand store can be a better destination. There is also an option to create specific landing pages for your campaign. This could improve your measurability.

5. Measuring and evaluating

Welcome to the Bermuda triangle. Every time you change campaign parameters you need to wait for a while before you can see a consistent pattern of anything. Steer you campaign on the basis of click-through rate at least for a week and check your auction insights for overlap with Amazon every day. After a week (or longer if you have a long sales process), the main metrics to look at are total advertising cost of sales and sales growth. Amazon Attribution won’t show you the full scale of impact you generate. You may see lower attributed sales than expected but higher overall sales. Take the evolution of search rank positions into account to see if you are generating more organic sales.

How about we do that Kessel run in 12 parsecs?

The Millenium Falcon in Star Wars is the fastest ship in the Galaxy, right? But when Han Solo does the run to Kessel in 12 parsecs, it isn’t about speed, it was about taking a short-cut through the deadly fog surrounding the planet. Yeah, love Star Wars.

Driving traffic to Amazon is a short-cut to conversion, and thinking about the strategy holistically, there are many cases in which this is better for the end-user although you generate less margin. If it is right for the user, it must be good strategy.

For merchants building their e-commerce site, it must be terribly frustrating to adopt, and for marketers it can be a challenging path. You will need to prepare your campaign in detail, use manual optimization and find the right direction by monitoring a variety of indicators all the while not trusting everything the data tells you.

And finally, the Drive-to-Amazon is contrary to the overall objective of many marketers in 2021, namely that of building more and higher quality first party data. Nevertheless, the Drive-to-Amazon strategy can be a real kickstarter giving momentum to both you e-commerce and your Amazon activity. It is deeply rooted in an approach of enhancing your best performing channel and your best performing assets, it has the capability of multiplying your sales and at the same time giving users a better experience and provide learnings in the process. We are down to the essence of what Amazon provides: a shaky ride for marketers capable of generating outstanding short term results! You should try it!

“Branding is not about creativity, Don! It is all about the data!”.

Being a father of four, I discovered myself a certain creative talent for inventing doudou stories on the fly. A doudou is a teddy bear in French and some of my youngest sons favourite teddies are owls with large shiny eyes. So, as a person I may have creative qualities, but as a child of the digital age and a marketer, any professional advice I give is typically built on data or at the very least datamodels.

It is only natural that brand positioning in the 2020’ies should be a process of optimization, rather than one of creativity. 

As my good friend and digital visionary Igor Beuker puts it: “the future is for Math Men not for Mad Men“, referencing the awesome TV series about Madison Avenue, the craddle of advertising.

Brand SERPs

The idea behing the term of scientific brand positioning, emerged as a funny way to describe the experience I had building my brand SERPs and in discussions with the “Brand Serp guy”, Jason Barnard. SERP is the abbreviation of search engine results page and brand SERPs are the results pages that appear when you type in your company name or your personal name. In my case “Anders Hjorth” for my personal brand on one hand, and “Innovell” for my company brand on the other.

Ranking on my name was actually one of the first things I succeeded in SEO when I first started working with it around 1997. At the time, the major search engine was Altavista, and the trick to ranking was keyword density; the number of times your keyword occured divided with the total number of words in a page. Making a personal page describing who I am in 4 different languages did the trick back then. Of course, today the target is no longer Altavista but Google search results, and repetition is no longer the trick.

For Innovell, the brand SERP is not well controlled. The Kalicube Pro SaaS platform which Jason Barnard built focuses on just that. It monitors how much control I have of that page, which isn’t much at this stage – another site is ranking in first position, I get a grade C for securing the second position.

Most people understand that backlinks; links from other pages pointing to yours, are important to rank in a high position. And they are. But. That’s not all. There is a broader aspect of authority and popularity in relation with the links, and sometimes without the links, which we will come back to.

What is a brand?

Controlling a brand SERP is an exercice of positioning your brand. But what is a brand, really?

It started with cattle and cowboys. Cattle was branded with the initials of their owner. Today, knowing which cow belongs to whom would probably be better solved with NFC chips and blockchain applications, but at the time, the visual and persistent mark was of outmost importance.

The notion of brand was carried into the industrial era and became increasingly important in retail for products to stand out. They became the carrier of identity and the connection manufacturers could create between advertising and product sales. And this is still the case today both offline and online. A stronger brand typically drives higher conversion rates when a user is looking for a product.

Today, it is often considered that your brand is your reputation. Your brand is what it represents to the general public. Jeff Bezos is famous for having said that “your reputation is what people say about you when you are not in the room”. Accepting that idea, would make it sensible to let Google’s results page be the mirror of that reputation.

What is brand positioning

Brands are an incredibly value intangible asset. The notion of branding carries a veil of mystery. Building brands is about values, about emotional cues and associations. The exercice of building and positioning brands is done incrementally by some. When a company sells a product or a service, its reputation increases. It becomes more famous. It becomes the brand.

Others build brands for specific purposes. They analyze their target audience and position the values, the imagery, the message it conveys. There is employer branding, product branding, personal branding. For most businesses, it remains an area for Mad Men to analyze and define.

Scientific brand positioning

But here comes the digital age, and if you accept the notion of the Brand SERP, then you can enter the univers of semantic analysis. Find brand attributes through entity searches, improve your positioning by aligning with the collective mindset. It may sound a bit wild, but Kalicube has made it very concete with its technical platform.

I have had the priviledge of being invited to try it out. The process is fairly simple – well, with the help of Jason and his team at least. You define an anchor point for your brand, work on an ideal description, provide some fundamental facts and the platform then builds something called schema markup to insert into your anchor page. Once that is done, you go through all the places on the internet which influence your brand and try to make them more homogeneous so they can convey and reinforce your brand positioning.

The most fascinating stage in the process is when you submit your description to Google’s natural language processing interface to see what the machine understood.

You can rewrite and resubmit this description to perfect it. You are tweaking your brand positioining in the process. Something I didn’t imagine would be even possible. Even small changes can radically change Google’s interpretation or shall we say understanding of your brand. In my case, “Innovell” was understood as a person until I added Ltd to the name in the subtitle which made Google understand that it is a company. This in turn made my entire brand positioning more intelligeble for the platform. I am tweaking my brand.

Once you feel your description is final, the platform helps you use the same wording across the most significant places in which your brand is mentioned. The effect of this is more control of your brand, more consistency in the way it is presented and more chances of being put in knowledge panels, of tying all the different information about it together so that users get a clearer picture of your brand.

Yes, you can tweak your brand

I have worked more or less seriously on my personal brand for the more than 20 years that I have worked in digital marketing. I became aware of it when I first started presenting on conferences, which was in reality something I did with the intention of making my former company more visible.

From a brand positioning perspective, conferences are interesting in that they promote you to promote themselves. They try to make your profile as attractive as possible. I gave extra care to provide a good “bio” and a high quality photo.

What I have discovered with the systematic approach to optimizing brand profiles is that you can actually both influence and take control of your personal brand and your company brand. I probably already knew this intuitively, but I didn’t know where to start and what was the most important things to do to achieve this.

For my company profile, this helped me redisover Crunchbase which is probably quite important for company profiles. For my personal profile, I found I had an author profile referencing some of my articles on Muckbase which I could update and use to my advantage.

The work you do when you tweak your brand SERP is very far apart from brand positioning exercices companies did in the past. It will be interesting to see where and how those two worlds meet and overlap. The creative and inductive approach from branding experts, and the data-driven and semantically based approach from a brand SERP guy like Jason.

Brand optimization is a case of high marginal benefits

It can sometimes feel pointless to build a brand. The return on your investment always seems so far away. I usually say that any real value you get out of speaking at a conference appears three years after. I haven’t even bothered working on building the Innovell brand outside of our digital marketing insights reports. However, as for anything that can be optimized, when you actually make some investment in a brand, it would be silly to not optimize the outcome of that investment with tweaking and optimizing once’s wording and all the places in which it is being shared. Perhaps this is where scientific brand positioning fills a gap.

I am hoping the work I do on this will help my brand win a “knowledge panel” on the right side of SERP and become ten times more visible on Google when people search for it. Wish me luck!

Thanks to Jason Barnard for providing an access to his Kalicube.pro platform and assisting on tweaking my personal brand as well as that of Innovell.