Introduction
Skoy Enterprises LLC is a woman-owned business located in Encinitas, California. Skoy was founded in 2007 with the launch of the Skoy Cloth by its current owners, Michelle Lundqvist and Karen Petersen. Offering a product line under the kitchen category, Skoy sells a variety of kitchen scrubs, cloths, and towels.
The Partnership
Skoy has been partnered with SalesDuo since 2020, working actively together on creating content, creatives for their Amazon catalog, and managing Amazon Ads with the key goal of growing their business on Amazon. Skoy has a presence on Amazon through the Amazon Seller Central FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) program and has always been keen on targeting its competitors to increase its brand presence on the platform in the Swedish Cloths and dish Scrub space.
The Goal
The goal was specifically to target competitor's listings, allowing us to display our ads on their product detail pages. This provided an alternative product option to potential customers who already had an interest in competitors’ offerings. Another focus was the placements of the competitor's ads on Amazon. If they consistently appeared on certain product detail pages or in specific categories, we strategically targeted these placements with our own ads, thereby increasing the likelihood of attracting customers interested in similar products. Another goal was to increase sales by 1.5X through competitor marketing on AMS.
In Q1 2022, we created a manual campaign for scrub and cloth products by targeting competitor-branded keywords. However, this competitor keyword campaign was not successful as it resulted in a high ACoS of 158%.
As the branded keywords strategy did not yield the desired results, we paused these campaigns and created 2 new competitor campaigns for their range of Kitchen Cloth and Kitchen Scrub. These campaigns targeted specific competitor ASINs by considering three parameters: product similarity, higher price, and lower product rating and reviews compared to our products. This approach increased account sales and lowered ACos in the long run. We need to increase the product targeting campaigns for other product types in the future to protect our own product detail pages from being targeted by any other competitors.
The Cloth competitor campaign achieved an ACos of 34% with 2X in sales from January to June, resulting in good brand visibility with 734K Impressions. The Scrub Competitor campaign is currently the top-performing campaign in the account, achieving an ACos of 20% with 3X in sales and a 5 ROAS.
To further enhance brand awareness and revenue, we modified the bidding strategy for all the top campaigns by using a Dynamic Bids down only strategy and increasing the top of search bids by 30 to 50 percent. As a result, we were able to improve sales by 22% with <20% ACos for our top-performing campaigns. To increase efficiency and decrease the ACos further, optimization was done by adding Negative keywords, which had no sales but more than $10 spent in the previous 65 days, along with creating manual campaigns with keywords having a high impression share and high impressions rank.
By combining these tactics with ongoing optimization through item-level budget transfers from temporarily ineligible ASINs, we released additional budget which allowed top ASINs to perform better. Consequently, Skoy saw an increase in sales by 16% in 2023, accounting for 23% of their total monthly sales. We also saw a steady decrease in overall ACOS, from 30% to 20%, with an average of 2MM impressions for this year.
Our Learning from These Campaigns
The initial campaigns suffered from a misallocation of bidding strategy and budget, without understanding the potential of the campaign. Creating competitor campaigns by targeting the competitor branded keywords with high CPC resulted in high spending with low sales and high ACoS.
After adequately allocating budget for the right campaigns, selecting the top moving products with the right bidding strategy, and creating Sponsored product competitor campaigns by targeting specific competitor products based on the price and ratings and reviews, we saw significant improvements.
Customer Testimonial
“Our experience using SalesDuo, specializing in Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), to target our competitors has been nothing short of exceptional, within a short period, we witnessed a significant decrease in our ACOS, from 30% down to an impressive 20%. This reduction in advertising costs allowed us to allocate our budget more efficiently and reinvest in other critical areas of our business. Not only did SalesDuo help us optimize our advertising spend, but they also played a crucial role in boosting our sales. We experienced a remarkable 16% increase in sales as a direct result of their targeted competitor ads approach”. --- Michelle Lundqvist.
Frequently Asked Questions
About the Author
With a wealth of experience in Amazon account management, Maaz Javeed Mohammed excels in refining sales strategies and amplifying brand presence. Committed to achieving impactful outcomes, he blends deep industry insights with a fervent drive for e-commerce triumph. Beyond work, Maaz enjoys hiking, capturing moments through photography, and reveling in music.
