Sidecar has released a new technology solution for retailers looking to maximize what they can accomplish on the Amazon Advertising platform. The new AI-powered solution, Sidecar for Amazon, addresses the lack of transparency in reporting and introduces the ability to customize campaign structures and bidding strategies to meet retailers’ ACOS (advertising cost of sale) goals.
Amazon’s rapidly growing advertising business and audience of 200 million shoppers, who are ready to buy, make it a vital platform for retailers. The e-commerce giant generated $10.1 billion in ad revenue in 2018, an increase of 117% year-over-year from $4.7 billion, and in 2019, Amazon’s U.S. ad business is projected to grow more than 50%.
Despite the massive opportunity that Amazon Advertising presents, the platform is in its infancy. Retailers’ efforts to leverage Amazon are often defeated by time-consuming campaign setup, sparse data, limited reporting, and nascent bidding tools. What’s more, Amazon’s high fees leave retailers no room for error when determining the products, pricing, and advertising approaches that could make the channel profitable for them.
“Amazon sees advertising as a major growth driver for its company,” said Mike Farrell, Senior Director of Market and Customer Intelligence for Sidecar. “However, retailers need increasingly robust capabilities to make Amazon’s ad platform viable for their business. Success requires several major components: custom campaign structures, sophisticated bidding tools, adequate reporting, and strategic planning. This combination of elements has been limited—until now.”
Key features and capabilities of Sidecar for Amazon include:
- Campaign Structure Builder: Assigns products to similarly performing ad groups, continuously placing smart bids that surface bestsellers while pulling back spend on low performers even as retailers add new products.
- Advertising Eligibility Management: Uses retailer-defined business rules to automate product advertising eligibility based on attributes such as margins or brand policies.
- Search Query Manager: Continuously evaluates search queries to identify new terms buyers are using to discover products, offering insights that are otherwise unavailable on Amazon’s platform.
- Bid Management: Dynamically adjusts bids on every ad group and keyword to maximize the performance of every product, even when Amazon’s bid range doesn’t accurately reflect true performance.
- Reporting and Data Visualization: Reveals advertising campaign performance with comprehensive week-over-week and month-over-month comparisons, despite Amazon’s limited reporting windows.
Sidecar for Amazon complements the company’s existing line of cross-channel solutions, which includes support for shopping and paid search campaigns on Google and Bing, as well as campaigns across Facebook/Instagram and Pinterest.
“With Sidecar’s exclusive focus on solving performance marketing challenges for retailers, it was a natural extension for us to build a solution that addresses the issues our customers face with Amazon Advertising,” added Farrell. “We’ve combined our proprietary data, AI technology, and performance marketing expertise to empower retailers to better align their spend with business goals and shopper intent on Amazon and all their ad channels.”
