Incrementum Digital’s advertising efforts drove a 268% topline sales increase in six months using simple campaign optimization strategies. This brought Camp Galaxy’s average monthly sales from $41K in H1 2020 to $154K in Q1 2021.

What were the challenge(s)?

COVID lockdowns drove unprecedented traffic to Camp Galaxy’s top selling products in Amazon’s greeting card subcategory. Camp Galaxy’s sales went from a monthly average of $29K prior to April 2020, to a $41K average by the end of Q2 2020. Specifically, sales hit $34K in May, $51K in June, and $93K in July. The brand’s leadership team began to notice signals of market share loss as competing advertisers increased offensive attacks on the brand supported by large advertising budgets, and began searching for a new advertising agency.

When Incrementum Digital’s team began investigating the account, it became clear how poor campaign structure was limiting the brand’s ability to capitalize on increasing demand in the category. Specifically, some campaigns contained over 200 targeted keywords with no segmentation by match type. In other campaigns, category keywords weren’t being targeted at all despite listings being optimized to appear on high-traffic terms. Long tail terms were left out completely, while campaign budgets were being wasted on placements with low conversion rates, and high cost per click thresholds. As a result, Camp Galaxy’s average monthly ACoS was 43% prior to partnering with Incrementum Digital, with an average monthly spend of $4K prior to COVID. Camp Galaxy eventually increased budgets to $8K during COVID’s initial lockdown in June, 2020, but topline sales growth was beginning to decline as competitors quickly captured paid and organic visibility in the greeting card category.

What was the approach?

Incrementum Digital’s team recommended that campaign structure and targeting be optimized without increasing monthly allocation for at least three months. The team proposed a plan that would increase attributed and organic sales without driving ACoS above the historical 43% during that time. This, in theory, would lay a strong foundation for success in the impending Holiday season.

To hit Incrementum’s proposed targets, the first step was to create new Sponsored Product campaigns for all product categories. The team chose to group primarily by category and search volume, as opposed to grouping campaigns primarily by keyword/product relevance. During the initial 5 months of launch, Sponsored Products were the only ad unit that our team used to drive sales. Campaign Ad Groups were segmented according to keyword search volume so that high volume/highly relevant terms would benefit optimally from Amazon’s budget allocation algorithm.

Campaigns containing duplicate keywords for two different products were isolated and prioritized with bids and placements based on relevance. For example: generic colored foil card ASINs were set to target a completely different set of terms than the colored foil birthday card ASINs. In any scenario where a keyword had to be duplicated due to its relevance to both products, the more relevant product was prioritized with a higher bid. Finally, more long-tail terms were added to the targeting strategy in “test” campaigns. Instead of wasting 90% of the budget on non-converting clicks from keywords that had significant search volume, the budget was shifted to a 50/50 split. 50% of allocation was targeting head terms like “birthday cards” and 50% targeted long-tail terms like “handmade watercolor birthday cards for adults”.

What was the result?

Prior to the relationship with Incrementum, (H1 2020) Camp Galaxy’s average monthly topline revenue was $41K. In the first three months of the partnership (Aug – Oct), average monthly sales increased by +70%. Sales in August, September, and October were $66K, $71K, and $78K, respectively. As topline sales continued to increase, Incrementum recommended that Camp Galaxy increase advertising budgets as well. In November and December, Camp Galaxy spent $14K and $16K (roughly +40% budget increase) advertising on Amazon. This generated a lift in attributed and organic sales that drove $107K and $123K in topline revenue for November and December of 2020. The ratio of Attributed/Topline sales remained at an average of 40%.

In the months following Camp Galaxy’s Q4 sales increase, it became clear that a halo effect driven by increased organic ranking continued to drive growth in Camp Galaxy’s Topline. Additionally, increased sales meant that more advertising allocation was available to launch new ad types. Incrementum launched Camp Galaxy’s first Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display campaigns in January of 2021. As a result, topline sales hit $167K in January, $132K in February, and $164K in March – three of Camp Galaxy’s best sales months ever.

Conclusion:

To summarize, Incrementum Digital’s Advertising efforts brought this brand’s topline sales from $41K to $160K+ in six months while maintaining an ACoS of less than 40%.