advertising technology
Sellics Benchmarker: How to Benchmark Your Amazon Advertising Account
There are often times that we wonder, as marketers, how our ad spend is doing in compared to other advertisers in our industry or across a specific channel. Benchmark systems are designed for this reason – and Sellics has a free, comprehensive benchmark report for your Amazon Advertising Account to compare your performance to others.
Amazon Advertising
Amazon advertising offers ways for marketers to improve visibility to customers to discover, browse, and shop for products and brands. Amazon’s digital ads can be any combination of text, image, or video, and appear everywhere from websites to social media and streaming content.
Amazon advertising offers plentiful options for advertising, including:
- Sponsored Brands – cost-per-click (CPC) ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products. These ads appear in relevant shopping results and help drive the discovery of your brand among customers shopping for products like yours.
- Sponsored Products – cost-per-click (CPC) ads that promote individual product listings on Amazon. Sponsored products help to improve the visibility of individual products with ads that appear in search results and on product pages
- Sponsored Display – a self-service display advertising solution that helps you grow your business and brand on Amazon by engaging shoppers across the purchase journey, on and off Amazon.
Amazon Ad Benchmarks
To surpass the competition, you need to understand it. And this is what makes the Sellics Benchmarker tool better than anything else on the market: it will put your performance into context and provide you with actionable insights to make you a more profitable advertiser on Amazon. The Sellics Benchmarker analyzes your performance in Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display and shows you exactly where you are doing great and where you can improve.
Key benchmark reportings metrics that are compared are:
- Sponsored Ad Formats: Do you use all the right formats Amazon has to offer? Each one has its unique strategies and opportunities. Analyze Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands & Sponsored Display
- Detailed Score: Understand if you belong to the top 20% – or the bottom
- Compare Advertising cost of sales (ACOS): What’s the percentage of direct sales you made from sponsored ad campaigns in comparison to the median advertiser? Are you too conservative? Understand profitability dynamics in your category
- Benchmark Your Cost Per Click (CPC) How much are others paying for the same click? Learn how to find the perfect bid
- Grow Your Click-Through Rate (CTR): Do your ad formats outperform the market? If not, learn how to increase the chances of getting a click
- Improve Amazon Conversion Rate (CVR): How quickly are customers completing specific actions after clicking on an ad. Are your products more bought than others? Learn how to beat the market & convince consumers
Based on data representing $2.5B in ad revenue across 170,000 products and 20,000 product categories, the Sellics Benchmarker is the most powerful ad performance tool on the market. And it’s free. Each marketplace, industry, format cluster includes at minimum 20 unique brands. Averages are technically median figures to account for outliers.
Benchmark Your Amazon Advertising Account
Getting Started With Your Sellics Benchmarker Report
Once you put in your request on Sellics’ website, you’ll receive your free report within 24 hours. When you open the report, you’ll see a performance badge in the top right-hand corner giving you an overall account score. Right away, you get a great overview of how you are doing and what your growth potential is.
The different badges reflect the overall standing of your account in the following way:
- Platinum: Top 10% of peers
- Gold: Top 20% of peers
- Silver: Top 50% of peers
- Bronze: Bottom 50% of peers.
PRO TIP: Use the book a call button for a free chat with one of Sellics’ Amazon ad experts. They can help you interpret your Sellics Benchmarker report or tell you more about how you can use Sellics to optimize your advertising campaigns.
Just beneath you’ll find the summary section, which displays your overall performance and best and worst performing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at a glance. You can use the button in the top right to choose whether you’d like to compare your performance to the relevant benchmarks or to your previous month’s performance.
Understand changes in your Amazon Advertising KPIs
High-level KPIs like ACoS are influenced by so many different factors, it can be difficult to know what’s causing changes in performance.
The performance funnel is great because
- You can see all of your metrics in one place.
- The funnel shows how each metric factors into your KPIs, allowing you to easily identify what is causing changes.
In the example demo report above, you can see that ACoS rose because ad spend increased more than ad sales. Furthermore, I can see that a decrease in conversion rate and average order value (AOV) held back ad sales.
Make sure to click the Month-Over-Month Changes button just beneath the funnel to track your performance over time.
Identify Amazon Products With The Largest Impact (Positive or Negative)
With the Impact Driver Analysis, you can quickly see which products are contributing the most—both positively (green) and negatively (red)—to your month-over-month performance changes for all main KPIs, including ad spend and ACoS.
The Impact Driver Analysis will answer key questions, like:
- Why did my Ad Sales increase/decrease?
- Which products caused a drop/increase in ACoS, ad sales?
- Where did my CPC increase over last month?
Using any of this tool’s three charts (waterfall, treemap, or product table), you can quickly and effortlessly identify your strongest performers and your biggest opportunities for optimization.
This is an indispensable tool for any advertiser!
Benchmark Your Amazon Advertising Account
Get A Deep-Dive For Your Top 100 ASINs
First, I like to use the Filters button to filter for a minimum amount of ad spend. This way, I know I’m optimizing products that have a significant impact on overall performance.
Then with the remaining products, I look at the colored circles next to the KPIs to see whether they are above or below the sub-category benchmark. The color-coding system works as follows:
- Green: you’re in the top 40% = good job
- Yellow: you’re in the middle 20% = you need to improve
- Red: you’re in the bottom 40% = you have huge opportunities for growth.
Because ACoS is basically determined by click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), and cost per click (CPC), I usually look for red and then yellow dots next to my CTR, CVR, or CPC, and then begin optimizing those with Sellics’ software.
While you don’t need the Sellics software to get your free Sellics Benchmarker report, I definitely recommend it! They have automation and AI features that harness the power of big data to do all of the heavy lifting for you.
Benchmark Your Amazon Advertising Account
High-Level Campaign Strategy
The internet is full of advice about how to optimize your KPIs, but very few people will get into the nuts and bolts of how you should structure your ad campaigns. Unless you’re paying them a lot of money, that is.
This is another area in which the Sellics Benchmarker delivers incredible value. The Account Structure section gives you an overall view of how your account is set up and compares it to other high-performing accounts.
- green: good
- yellow: consider making some changes
- red: you probably need to restructure your campaigns.
Unless you’re an advertiser who has more than $10,000 in ad spend per month, here are some of the general guidelines that the tool recommends.
- Ad groups/Campaign: Having fewer ad groups per campaign will give you more control over your budget.
- Advertised ASINs/Ad Group: For most advertisers, up to 5 advertised ASINs per ad group will be ideal.
- Keywords/Ad Group: For most advertisers, between 5 and 20 keywords per ad group will work best.
The Amazon Ad Format Deep-Dive
For advertisers who run both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display, the ad format deep-dive is probably one of the best parts of the Sellics Benchmarker report.
A graphic displays my ad spend distribution compared to the category benchmark, so that I can easily see if I should consider investing more or less in an ad type.
Scrolling down, you can get ad-format-level KPI grades and Benchmarks. If you click on the “+” button next to any one of the KPIs you’ll be able to do an ASIN-level analysis for the ASINs that you advertise with Sponsored Products.
One of the greatest aspects of the Sellics Benchmarker is that after you sign up for your first report, you’ll get a report every 30 days that contains data from the previous month. In this way, you can continue to optimize and fine-tune your account to reach your Amazon advertising goals.
The value offered by this tool is tremendous. Get your free Sellics Benchmarker report today to take your advertising to the next level and beat the competition.
Benchmark Your Amazon Advertising Account
Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Sellics.
