[Kenshoo] The Amazon Advertising UI: Wins and Woes
July 21, 2020
Meet The Speakers
Listen to the podcast
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Kenshoo’s most frequently used tools outside of what Amazon offers, and the value they add to Amazon sellers
- Julia Nelson’s tips for optimizing your listings and building a good advertising presence on Amazon
- How Kenshoo measures the performance of Amazon ads
- Julia talks about Kenshoo’s automatic bid-to-ROI optimization tool
- Does Kenshoo track competitor ads serving and show brands their top competitors?
- Julia explains Amazon dayparting and custom tagging
- The best place to start when using a tool like Kenshoo
- How Kenshoo provides cross-retailer support for users that are advertising on both Amazon and Walmart
In this episode…
The Amazon Advertising UI has a number of limitations when it comes to optimizing listings and tracking the performance of ads. Despite having a wealth of data at its disposal, Amazon has not released the same tools and insights as other platforms, choosing instead to keep things close to the vest. This is where third-party advertising software, such as Kenshoo, comes in handy.
The Kenshoo platform provides a number of benefits and invaluable tools to help Amazon sellers and marketers maintain an effective advertising presence. With this software, you have access to greater historical data, smart bidding tools, performance metrics, and so much more.
In this episode of the Buy Box Experts Podcast, Julia Nelson, the Director of Ecomm Expert Services & Enablement at Kenshoo, joins Eric Stopper to talk about the many ways Kenshoo adds value to the selling and marketing experience on Amazon. Stay tuned as Julia breaks down Kenshoo’s various advertising features, from dayparting optimization, to custom tagging, to cross-retailer support.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.
The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.
Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.
Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:09
Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast we bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.
Eric Stopper 0:18
Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast This is Eric Stopper. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. We’ve got a team of consultants who would love to talk with you about your Amazon presence. Please reach out to us, go to buyboxexperts.com, click on the free analysis button and you’ll be connected with me or a member of my team. We would love to help. This episode is a part of a 10-part series we’re doing with the geniuses at Kenshoo. We thought to bring together our collective knowledge in a way that was fun and essentially educationally indispensable. If you’re trying to get to the next level of advertising on Amazon, then this is the podcast series for you. Today I am joined by Julia Nelson, Director of Ecomm Expert Services & Enablement at Kenshoo. Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Nelson 1:10
Happy to be here.
Eric Stopper 1:12
So today, we’re talking about the Amazon Advertising UI. And the title of the episode is wins and lows, which I think can mean a lot of a lot of things to a lot of people. And one of the things that I wanted to focus on is some of the limitations that sellers and vendors might not be aware of right there, they only have their seller or vendor tool. They’re just doing their best with what they have. And they don’t realize that there are tools out there that can help them do a whole lot more. And so the first question that I have for you is just about Kenshoo in general. Right? What are some of the things that people see as a value add when they’re using the software, and what are some of the most frequently used tools that are outside of what Amazon offers?
Julia Nelson 2:09
Yeah, kind of where to start with that. I think there’s a lot of elements, I think first and foremost kind of a low hanging fruit would be reporting flexibility. So within the Amazon UI, you have quite a bit of limitations about historical data with the types of data that you can extract from the UI. So within the tool I can show you, you can aggregate historical data. And once you were loaded onto that platform, you can slice and dice your data as far back as you can, as well as other access to other specific reports like out of budget information, serving time information at the campaign level, or even ad level so that you can start to make really granular optimizations at the product out within your campaign, and separately would be optimizations in general, within Amazon. A lot of that is going to be really manual within the campaign you can make in a bulk sheet like bulk change within the UI, or you have to go through a bulk sheet with maybe Excel rules that you’ll upload backup and become a really manual process. So anything that’s repeatable, you can essentially set a rule for within Kenshoo, you can make that an automated action to increase or decrease bid, you can use it for a day party strategies to stretch your campaigns longer into the day. And then alongside that, we also have bidding algorithms. So as obviously not something that’s present within Amazon, but it will essentially aggregate campaigns together in one bucket and focus them towards a KPI goal. So whether that’s return or spend threshold, whatever that is, you can essentially set that as your target with intent you and it will do the heavy lifting from a bid management perspective to get you there.
Eric Stopper 3:45
So tell me a little bit , this is kind of a challenging question. But we have found that some of the brands that we talked with find that if they just turn on their automatic campaigns, and they’ve written a really good listing They set a budget, a daily budget. And then they track just even the silliest of metrics like a cos there’s they’re typically able to do like a decent job. All of these little, I guess not little all these big features allow for the user to set these goals and to make these optimization rules. And so have you seen, like, a trackable difference between the efficiency of some of the best amazon seller central only campaigns and the Kenshoo advertising platform leverage campaigns?
Julia Nelson 4:40
Yeah, so the question about automatic campaigns or just kind of seller versus vendor, I think it’s all about kind of the approach and what your goals are. So like, if you’re, you know, myopically focused within advertising metrics, and just with auto campaigns and you’re strictly looking at return, then of course, you can achieve those things. But are you really making a movement within the category overall? And kind of more incremental budget levels or even the share within the category as well, are you getting first page placements within that so there’s placement reporting, that you can also aggregate within Kenshoo or limited views within the UI as well, you can kind of see where what places my using picking up is just gonna be a sustainable growth for my product or brand overall. versus if you kind of crank up your spend and grow from a share boys perspective, and also looping in what’s that what that’s doing to your organic and more sustainable sales, right? Like, if it’s gonna feed that flywheel, then why not crank up your ad spend right to make that more fruitful?
Eric Stopper 5:42
So there was a lot of very technical expertise in what you just said. And some of the folks that listen to our podcast, they, you know, maybe they’re, they’re kind of new at this. And so, as kind of a very special Simple breakdown of these optimization goals that people have. What are some of the things that people should be looking at in terms of having a really good Amazon advertising presence? Like, are there like a top three optimized for this, this and this? Or is it really more dynamic than that?
Julia Nelson 6:23
I think it’s as dynamic as you want to make it right. But if we are first starting out, and maybe you do just have those auto campaigns running, then certainly let’s go through the search term report, see what kind of terms you’re picking up on and what may be the highest returning search query, or maybe you want that are really low returns, and not relevant to your products, to kind of combing through that report and seeing what is and then putting that back into your manual campaigns. So then you can start to layer in these more sophisticated strategies and be intentional on what products are serving for what keywords but really, you need to make sure that you’re graduating To manual campaigns and not just getting focused on, you know, my auto campaigns are running, it’s a great ROI. But being more intentional on what you’re bidding on exactly. As well as segmenting out your different strategies, right within autos, you don’t know what those queries are. Maybe it’s all a brand. And that’s not completely incremental if you want to be spending your money. So the only real way to control that would be to put that into manual campaigns, and again, being more intentional on what you’re bidding on.
Eric Stopper 7:27
Interesting. One of the things that you talked about is Kenshoo allows you to track how frequently your ads are served, how long they last, what was that about tracking the serve rate, or would you call it?
Julia Nelson 7:45
Yeah, there’s a couple different paths within that. So one would be out of budget notifications. So we essentially have a report that will track at what hour certain campaigns are running out of budget. So that would be certainly a spark for conversation. Maybe we should try de partie strategy. If budgets are currently capped and you don’t have those resources, then maybe we could start to pause them earlier in the day, so that they will last until 5pm, when we know shoppers are really at their peak shopping trend. And we can kind of monitor that, right. And as you would expect, is less competitive later in the day, because a lot of people are running out of budget early in the day. And so there’s less people in the often that the longer you can last. So that’s kind of one approach. And then the other would be serving time. So this is really going to be driven by the ad level, serving status. So if you’re lost by box, your ad serving, and that can get really convoluted and hard to track within the Amazon UI. We have certain reports that can you know, pull that over time, and we can see what those errors are. For example, maybe this Jason’s last five bucks 80% of the time over the last week, do we really want to be supporting this with an advertising or other times it could be something within the content. There’s kind of a nuance on product image, I could be preventing that ad from serving. So really Escalades kind of retail insights so that you can go, go make those changes on the back end and be more effective within your advertising.
Eric Stopper 9:10
Also using advertising and the reporting inside of this tool to be able to fuel the optimization and management efforts of the front end listing.
Julia Nelson 9:20
Absolutely, or even just what assortment you’re supporting with an advertisement is something very unstable, and losing the buy box, then maybe switching that out with anything that is more stable.
Eric Stopper 9:31
Very interesting. So one glaring question that I’ve had is, you look at Amazon and they’re this you know, 8000 ton gorilla. And they have this team of data scientists and software engineers and all kinds of folks who are always updating this tool. They don’t, they don’t even incorporate some of the things that the other traditional online average Timing platforms provide, like Facebook even gives you a log of all the changes that have happened inside of an account. But Amazon doesn’t do that. And they don’t have all these robust tools that Hsu has available even though they definitely have the data. Right? It’s gotta be sitting around there somewhere. Why don’t you think that they incorporate these into their UI as it currently exists?
Julia Nelson 10:27
It’s a fantastic question. And, and some, you know, they kind of have kept a lot of things close to the vest. And, you know, it could be as simple as they just don’t know how to package that or present that back to the advertiser or what the use case would be for utilizing this. And it might just open up a can of worms on you know, all of the different perspectives from vendor and Seller Central as well. So, I mean, that has presented the solution for other third party technologies to step in and solve That void and fill that gap. I will say, you know, out, Amazon can be a partner in providing those types of data, you know, maybe outside of the UI, but it’s certainly a huge gap within the UI. And it’s really hard to tell why.
Eric Stopper 11:14
Yeah, it’s hard. We look into this, this crystal ball and try to figure out what Amazon’s doing. And it’s typically pretty impossible. You guys are pretty close to them, though. You have developers that are in that API all the time making tools for them, right. All right. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 11:33
Okay, absolutely.
Eric Stopper 11:36
Now, I have lots of questions. So you’ve hit a lot on a lot of different points. I kind of want to talk through the things that Kenshoo and the Amazon advertising UI have first and I’ll just list them off either you guys provided me with an easy list here. So Amazon and Kenshoo do international markets. They both do sponsored products management sponsored brand management combinable filters And standard reporting, like quote unquote, for Amazon, you can be creative with those. But having an automated tool is really super nice. And then the list stops. Amazon doesn’t have any of these other like 12 features that you guys have. The first one that I see is automatic bid ROI optimization. You touched on that a little bit, but give me a little more a little more substance there.
Julia Nelson 12:29
Yeah, so essentially, this is our algorithmic big bidding tool. Again, it’s gonna set grouping of campaigns towards an ROI targets set by the advertiser. So this means that Kenshoo was going to go in on a daily or multiple times a day to make good adjustments to strive towards that ROI cool. And we can also layer in a budget on top of that if you want to meet a certain budget threshold within a given amount of time. So that kind of dynamic sort of optimization and management is just simply not provided within the Amazon UI. They are pervasive. The campaign’s essentially, and it’s up to the advertiser to make any sort of changes on top of that. So within can do, we can take that day to day lift off the advertisers, by using this pitch ROI optimization,
Eric Stopper 13:12
I have a hard question for you, and you may or may not be able to answer it. I didn’t prompt you with this beforehand. But in order for something to be optimized, right, I’m gonna, I’m going to put forth my bid. And I’m going to have a click right my first click, and then if it didn’t result in a sale, can Kenshoo just just turn that one off? Or is there like a certain amount of clicks, a certain amount of impressions that are automatically baked in, pull back the veil a little bit for me and help me understand?
Julia Nelson 13:46
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don’t have all of the inputs depending on what’s going into all of those things, but it’s certainly taking into account. You know, how many impressions or clicks it has behind that before it’s going to make changes. It’s certainly not going to be volatile on Making an optimization off of one click. For obvious reasons, you want to have certain click thresholds, especially depending on the product, right, it might take 100 clicks to get a sale for a really expensive project, or it might take five for a CPG product. So it really depends right on that click threshold, but certainly taking into account all those different elements, and the campaign history as well. So you can put a campaign into this policy when it has at least seven days of data. So by then hopefully, it has more than a couple clicks, for keywords. And then you can kind of graduate into something a bit more sophisticated, a product called budget navigator where you can marry your ROI targets with your budget, and that requires 30 days of data. So we do want to have that historical reference so that our y tool can be as accurate as possible, and start to make those changes based off of clicks, impressions, etc.
Eric Stopper 14:51
This is amazing. So even without all the different kinds of data science behind the decision I mean, that’s a pretty compelling thesis for that aspect of the Kenshoo UI, in that you are wasting money. That’s the that’s the underlying assumption there is that you since you are not bid optimizing bid to ROI, optimizing your your purchase probably wasting money on keywords and campaigns that are just not going to get you any money at all or lower amounts of money than if you would have used the Kenshoo app Is that a fair summary?
Julia Nelson 15:32
That’s a fair summary. And then on the inverse, also, maybe not maxing out or capitalizing on the keywords that are driving a lot of our large business and making sure that you’re, you know, maxing out that potential, again, within your ROI constraint. So it’s not going to overdrive. They still have that you know, to fall back on your ROI targets but it’s going to push where it sees opportunities.
Eric Stopper 15:51
Incredible. Now is there like a sweet spot in terms of how much revenue or how much ad spend you should have before These features are critical, where it’s like, okay, now you’re spending 10,000. Like, you can’t afford not to be using these, these types of tools.
Julia Nelson 16:11
Yeah, I think that’s a great call out. And the more data that you have behind your campaigns is, the more budget you have behind your campaigns, the more accurate and kind of sophisticated or other algorithms can be versus that you’re spending, you know, five or $10 a day, then it’s going to be, you know, there’s not a ton of margin of error, right, you’re getting really kind of specific bids to not exceed that daily budget, there’s not a lot of wiggle room. So I think that 10 came mark, actually, that you said, is probably that sweet spot on, you know, you should be introducing an algorithm to help you out with that campaign management and to make sure that you’re being as effective as possible,
Eric Stopper 16:50
in reference to how much data is necessary to make the tool really effective? Is there a point of diminishing marginal returns or is just more done? Data is always better.
Julia Nelson 17:02
More data is always better if there’s diminishing returns within an advertising spend threshold that addresses that. In regards just to data, no more, more, the merrier.
Eric Stopper 17:14
Right on, save your data, guys, save the data, always export it, that historical piece that you talked about. Is, is in here as reporting, right. So I see scheduled then automated reports, comprehensive analysis, right. A lot of these things kind of hit on multiple variants. But I think I can only go back I think 12 months or so for my business reports. And then for my advertising reports, I don’t know that I can go 90 days in the past. Is Kenshoo held to the same constraints or is able to go even further?
Julia Nelson 17:54
Yeah, so the advertising UI it’s very finicky on what reports you can go back to in polls. So some are 60. Some are 90, they did just release within the UI that you can pull sponsored products campaign level beta, I think it’s two years or through 2018. But that’s very granular. And it’s only at the campaign level. So any sponsored brands not going to be accounted for or anything like that. So that is a compilation on the Amazon side. But when you’re loading into a platform like Kenshoo, when you first get on board, you can go back 60 days within the API. And then if you are able to get your advertising historical data in a format, we can load that back into Kenshoo. But once you log on to Kenshoo, then all of your data will aggravate there on so if you’re on the platform for five years, you’re gonna have five years of data that, you know, nuanced, historical reference,
Eric Stopper 18:48
man. Amazon doesn’t care about you. Amazon doesn’t care about any of us,
Unknown Speaker 18:53
but there’s always a catch, always the cats
Unknown Speaker 18:56
and Okay.
Eric Stopper 18:59
Now one question, I have To ask it before I forget the fact that you can track like, if, if an ad is serving your buy box winning percentage, right? So you can make these optimization decisions. Does it also track competitors ads serving like on the front end of Amazon? Will it go and like scrape the different ones that are populating and see like, how many times they’re populating? Or are we still not quite to that point in the Amazon advertising space?
Julia Nelson 19:29
Yeah, so strictly within the serving area that is going to be focused on your products and your products only. And when you as a seller are in the buy box, regardless if there’s another seller in the buyer box that will be only focused and not give any sort of competitor information. With that said, there are other datasets that we can pull in like share a voice to kind of get that competitive insight. So you can monitor you know for given keywords, maybe that keyword that’s most specific to your category or products. If you start to track that keyword, you can see what other competitors are really maybe overdriving, within sponsored products. And so you can kind of address Okay, this is a key competitor, and they’re really dialed in, within sponsored products, or maybe some opportunities to target competitors that are not very well supported within sponsored products and kind of introduce some concreting strategies on top of that. And from that you can infer right if they’re having some buy box issues, or if they’re even serving their products on whether they’re actually spending any money on advertising or not, but it’s not going to get down to that level just yet.
Eric Stopper 20:31
Okay, that makes sense. It seems right now. And I talked with brands literally everyday, right, like, and they’re telling me about their problems. One of the questions I asked them is, Who are your competitors? And would be so surprised at how often they do not know the answer to that question. In terms of price in terms of product quality. It sounds like the advertising UI that Kenshoo has is able to shed some light on who those competitors really are. And how Share of Voice is dictated in that market?
Julia Nelson 21:04
Yep, absolutely, it’s really going to give you a quick view of the landscape within the search results page and what brands are most present or kind of your top competitors. And you can kind of get a lay of the land from a search results page perspective. Another kind of nuanced piece to this will be that search term report. So that same thing that we talked about earlier with auto campaigns, making sure that we’re coming through there, and maybe we’re finding some diamonds in the rough or some brand where you’re really opportunistic, and maybe have a high return against those brands and really making sure that you implement that is a strategy and again, scale that out and kind of find what that pull opportunity looks like.
Eric Stopper 21:43
That’s perfect. So going down this list some more. We’ve mentioned day parting a couple of times. My definition of day parting is scheduling your bids or your ad groups to turn on at a certain time of day. Would you extend that definition at all?
Julia Nelson 22:02
Yeah, you can really do it within a new level of the campaign. You do that the whole campaign level, you could do certain ad groups to do certain products, you could do certain keywords. I’m kind of the approach we’ve taken to getting that notification at the campaign level. Is that port reported discussed earlier, where you’re getting the notifications on what campaigns are running out, what hours a day. So the ones that are running out really early in the day, let’s maybe address those and get creative on how we can stretch that budget. So maybe it’s re evaluating what is the strategy here, in general, should it be increasing my budget, maybe pulling back on other campaigns, or let’s test out pausing it from 12am to 3am. And maybe that lasts me eight more hours into the day, because it’s less competitive. So you could see maybe CBT starts to drop or conversion rates, increase ROI, increase all of those metrics, and you see that your budget is running out later in the day, or maybe not at all. So those are the types of things that you can start to test and get creative with the budgets and campaigns that you have active.
Eric Stopper 22:58
When you have a bunch of this, this can get super difficult right to be able to track when, when each of your campaigns for each of your products is running out. Now I have products that I can just see in the morning, I make most of my sales because they’re for construction workers who, you know, might might not be like bought into the idea of day parting, Is there like a metric that we can point them to inside of their seller vendor central that would help them kind of realize, hey, maybe I do have a like an issue that would be solved by dayparting.
Julia Nelson 23:36
Yeah, I think first you can like advertising as well. I think that’s a really good call out with construction workers and that you could track your real time sales to see that it is happening earlier in the day. I think there’s some other brands within CPG or b2b even but Monday through Friday, their sales are most consistent and then over the weekend, it drops off so then you can start to implement those types of strategies to buy at a higher level. by pausing on maybe certain days or dialing back spend on certain days, but I think pulling in real time metrics, whether what’s an area premium as well, where you can see your spend kind of spike at the beginning of the day and then level out. For a lot of brands, it could be the inverse, that after 5pm sweet spot, when people are out of work at home, relaxing for the evening and making all of their buying decisions as well.
Unknown Speaker 24:24
Genius. So
Unknown Speaker 24:27
custom tagging.
Eric Stopper 24:29
I look at this, and I see dimensions, categories, calculated metrics, and it feels like my first day of calculus back in the day, so can you break this down for me? What is custom tagging?
Julia Nelson 24:44
Yeah, they’re basically it’s a column that you could add alongside all of your campaigns. So kind of use cases for this to be product categories that you want to make sure you have separate reporting for Oregon, the strategy types, what campaigns are devoted to what strategy types of campaigns devoted to all branded keywords, this campaigns devoted to conquest seeing things like that. And then once you tag those, then you can get super granular within your reporting, like show me all of my branded campaigns. And let me see those KPIs, show me all of my campaigns associated with that specific sub category. And so you can start to compare and contrast performance metrics against each other. And then also layer on additional optimization opportunities as well. So really, it’s kind of the gateway or the enabler for all the tools by making sure that you’re really granular within how you can slice your data.
Eric Stopper 25:37
And I guess right now, the way that you would do this inside of Seller Central is you would just name your campaign and ad groups really carefully so that it’s like manual discovery started on this date, non brand stuff like that. So Kenshoo makes it so that you can just tag them and just track all that separately.
Julia Nelson 25:56
Yes, and so that you can filter multiple things. So when you have that long string Within your campaign name, you can only really search rate for the text and contain whatever. But you can’t layer that on top of each other versus if you have multiple dimensions and bags now you can just filter multiple columns like you would for what ad type or impression thresholds or whatever the filters Amazon provides you. So it’s just like adding like that column as another KPI you can filter for
Eric Stopper 26:22
sounds like a data scientist dream, are you able to like create charts and reports and graphs with this data?
Julia Nelson 26:32
Yep, absolutely. So everything there’s a Reporting Suite, basically. So anything that you see within catch you can make into a report yourself. So if you wanted to look at sponsor products, and you have daily level export, you can export that yourself and maybe put it into an Excel document, or the workflow we really like to do is to have this delivered automatically on a daily basis to something like Google Data studios. And then you can set up a custom view with whatever graphs you’d like. You can have the same filter off But it’s essentially self sustaining, once you set it up within one template that you want to see on a recurring basis, and then Kenshoo will take care of the rest. So there’s a lot of flexibility within our reporting options. Just depends on you knowing what you want to do.
Unknown Speaker 27:15
Man, that’s fascinating.
Eric Stopper 27:19
So, moving down this list, I mean, there’s there’s so many things in here and it and it feels like the, the average e-commerce manager, right, who is that sometimes they’re just like, hey, like the brands like, Hey, we should get on Amazon. Can you just own that and they’re like, listening to this podcast, you know, just trying to learn stuff. It seems it seems pretty complicated for them to be able to like wow, you’re showing them all these amazing metrics. Where’s typically the best place for them to start when they’re using a tool like Kenshoo?
Julia Nelson 27:59
Yeah. I think there’s kind of a crawl, walk run approach, right, you want to make sure you’re laying the right foundation. And really that starts with your campaign structures. Going back to those auto campaigns, making sure that we’re going through the learnings within that search term report, setting up manual campaigns, getting the right agent supported kind of focusing on that foundational piece. So then we can start to layer on additional tools. So once you have that kind of laid out, then we can start to group campaigns that what their ROI goals are, and then you can introduce the ROI algorithm on top of that, and then getting more sophisticated by introducing the share voice elements or budget navigator or custom reporting, introducing those things after you kind of get that foundational piece addressed. So you could certainly take a phased approach, an onboarding to a fairly complex tool
Eric Stopper 28:47
and come to us for help as well. We’ve done it a bunch of times. The Buy Box Experts guys, yeah, can we love Kenshoo. So we’ve talked about scheduled and automated reports. We’ve talked a little bit about it. Advanced reporting. I see oh ob, under the out of budget, oh, the out of budget. Okay, we’ve talked about that. Amazon stores AR AP and DSP integrated reporting. Yeah, I’ve seen stores inside of Amazon . there’s something that we can do there by building them. But I’m guessing this is talking about tracking them and understanding how people interact with that page.
Julia Nelson 29:25
Yeah, you could start to export that and aggregate it together. But really, we like to look at it within sponsored brands as well. So you can drive to a product list where you pick yours as an assortment or you can drive to particular pages within a brand store. So when you do that, within Kenshoo, you can have the visibility to kind of maybe, you know, test for different sponsored brands, campaigns, driving different landing pages on your brand store, he was most fruitful and then you move forward with the kind of winner of that test, if you will. So we give that visibility onto what type of landing page sponsor grants are driving You so that again, you can implement a test and learn approach within sponsored brands. And the other element? Oh, go ahead.
Eric Stopper 30:07
No, yeah, yeah, on still on this note, go ahead.
Julia Nelson 30:11
I was just gonna mention the other data elements of s AP, and our Seller Central data, you could either aggregate that within that GDS report that I discussed, Google Data Studio, where you’re sending all of your information from Kenshoo. And to kind of a customized view where you can build whatever graphs or charts that you want to see on a regular basis. You could also start to marry that, marry that and pair that with your top line sales data that could be airy premium. That could be Seller Central Business reports. So when you start to bridge those things together, then you can understand you know, what’s doing to my top line sales. Because we don’t want to be too myopically focused right? With advertising certainly there’s a ton of optimizations that you can do, but our ultimate goal is going to be driving top line sales. So the only way to really have that visibility is to bring the datasets together. So that’s something we do within GDS. And then within the analysis grid or within Kenshoo all together, we’re working on solutions there as well. We have air EP support right now, that’s gonna marry alongside Jason level data, so we can start to make more sophisticated advertising decisions on the fly. So that’s certainly something we’re building on top of constantly to ingest other data sources was all
Eric Stopper 31:22
incredible. Okay. And then data warehousing, integration with S, three, FTP, GCD, MBI systems. Those are a lot of
Unknown Speaker 31:35
Yeah, give me some help here.
Julia Nelson 31:37
Yeah, that’s essentially the GDS path I discussed. But you could also go to any of these other systems as well like Power BI, and FTP, and any kind of destination that you want your data to be sent to, we can plug into that. Okay. Again, the one that we use the most is going to be GDS just because it tends to be the most seamless and kind of user friendly for getting a dashboard set up with your broker. KPIs
Eric Stopper 32:01
That makes sense. And Amazon doesn’t, doesn’t allow you to, like export that data into these into these other systems. No integration, no,
Julia Nelson 32:10
no, no scheduled reports. I think you can schedule it to email you mean, you’re always gonna have that data cap issue. There’s a lot of nuances within that versus this is just going to be repeatable.
Eric Stopper 32:24
Now, the last piece of this and something that we’ll probably discuss on another podcast is the cross retailer support of the fact that you can plug into Amazon and Walmart. Is it just copy and paste? Is it duplicated? Does the machine know that there are different platforms and there’s different types of consumer behavior? How deep of a dive does it do on each of them?
Julia Nelson 32:48
Yeah, so our product support or our kind of tech support within both of those are going to be a little bit different depending on what the API provides us or what Walmart provides through KPIs are no different than Amazon’s there’s a lot of nuances within that. But the beauty is going to be at the same workflow for the advertiser, or the agency, whoever’s managing campaigns, when they go into Kenshoo, they’re going to see their Walmart campaigns right alongside their Amazon campaigns. So you can start to do more bulk optimizations and just have that plain visibility into both platforms. And then you can start to leverage your learning between both of those. They’re both dynamic e commerce channels. And there’s lots of opportunity to kind of marry your learning together on both platforms. And this is similar to how you would approach multiple accounts within Amazon. So if you are advertising in the EU, and you have five different marketplaces, you have to toggle into each different login within Amazon versus country with one login you’re going to see all countries all alongside each other, so that you can get that insight right away.
Eric Stopper 33:52
Incredible. So is there anything else that you have to say about the Amazon native UI in the context of comparing it to the Kenshoo tool that you think is important for our listeners to understand?
Julia Nelson 34:08
I think we really probably covered a lot of detail that kind of encompasses the major differences between the two platforms. But ultimately kind of the line in the sand is Amazon showing you all of your campaigns and you can make basic changes. But as far as scale goes, that’s where Amazon is extremely limited. And that’s where something like Kenshoo steps in, so that you can scale out your campaigns, get more granular with your data, and just have plain visibility and control is where again, something comes up.
Eric Stopper 34:41
Great, you can find the list that I was referencing in the show notes. And then you can of course go to Kenshoo. dots is it.com I think it’s dot Yeah, kenshoo.com. kenshoo.com to go and check them out Julia, thanks so much for coming on the show. To finish today’s podcast I want to share some final thoughts. For large brands who are seeking to wholesale product to a trusted Amazon reseller. We at Buy Box Experts are big fans of the team over at Pattern. They’ve helped hundreds of large brands to capitalize on the Amazon channel while also helping implement channel governance best practices that allow the brands to have consistency across all their sales channels. For more information, go to pattern.com and reach out to their team there and they’ll be able to help you. We hope to see you soon on the Buy Box Experts podcast.
Outro 35:30
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