Using A.C.T. Frameworks to Ignite Growth While Safeguarding Against Wasted Ad Spend

Safeguarding against wasted ad spend is a key component of long-term profitability.  

Reports like Next & Co’s 2023 Digital Media Wastage Report—which disclosed that $6 Billion of ad spend in 2023 failed to produce results—are showing symptoms of a much larger and more significant problem related to strategies that are designed to spend recklessly.  

While there are many components to long-term profitability, reducing wasted ad spend has to be a priority before a brand can position themselves for long-term profitability. The solution is less about pulling back in ad spend and more about understanding how to focus your spend and optimize it for the greatest opportunities. 

To safeguard against wasted spend, your strategy needs to A.C.T.:  

(A) Align your approach with your goals. Investing in Amazon advertising without aligning your approach to your goals is like buying a plane ticket without knowing where you’re headed. There are lots of possible destinations, but your goals will help you determine if they are the right destinations or just (very expensive) distractions.  

(C) Combine the right ad tools that help you capture today’s revenue and increase tomorrow’s opportunity. By combining the right mix of complimentary ad products, you can utilize tools and KPIs that will work together to influence the full path to purchase, not just the point of purchase.  

(T) Test & learn across all ad products and creatives. With consumer patterns constantly shifting and Amazon’s ad products evolving at the same pace, there are always optimization opportunities for those curious enough to look for them. By designing your strategy with a commitment to always test and learn, you’ll foster a level of curiosity that helps identify those optimizations and new growth opportunities that can compound your success along the way. 

CASE STUDY: How A.C.T. Helped Reignite Growth while Safeguarding Against Wasted Ad Spend 

Before partnering with GO, a Pet Brand was able to fuel strong growth for several years on Amazon without advertising. They relied on organic relevancy, word of mouth, loyal followers from their D2C website and social media platforms, and a very compelling brand story. While this approach worked well in the beginning, their sales and glance views began to ebb, and they weren’t maintaining the growth they needed to hit their goals. 

The brand recognized what was happening and wanted to get back on track. They reached out to us to help them launch advertising for the first time on a limited budget. We loved the brand’s story, their products, and their potential, so we knew we wanted to help them navigate the challenges.  

GO’s strategy followed an A.C.T. framework that would (A) align the budget with their brand goals, (C) combine the right ad tools to meet those goals, and (T) test & learn for every optimization opportunity.  

1) Align the budget with the goals.  

Since this brand had not advertised on Amazon before, we helped them understand category and consumer data, including a careful competitor analysis, to identify what was possible for the brand to achieve with their limited resources. This exploration helped us align on a strategy that balanced their growth goals with a careful stair-step approach that protected us from wasted ad spend with things like: 

• a focus on profitable growth in both new-to-brand and loyalty, 

• leveraging a carefully selected multi-touch strategy with KPIs that focused on total lift and efficiency, along with utilizing Amazon’s free brand-building tools, and 

• an ongoing commitment to testing and learning to ensure we’re constantly proving the impact of a tool before expanding investment and then optimizing for performance and profitability.   
  
  

2) Combine the right ad tools.

We designed a strategy that integrated a range of ad tools across sponsored ads and DSP, as well as Amazon posts and customer engagement emails. Each tool had a unique role in driving efficiency and generating impact that would compound as the tools collaborated to influence the consumer along their path to purchase.  

First, we built a firm foundation with Sponsored Ads:  

• We split the campaigns into brand (15% of budget), category and competitor ads (combined 85% of budget) to hone in on driving new qualified traffic.   

• For brand campaigns, we utilized Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand for brand protection around new item launches. This would help us leverage ad tools to drive basket building within PDPs and the Brand Store and increase incrementality rather than cannibalizing our organic sales. 

• For category and competitor campaigns, we utilized Sponsored Products to grow our presence in non-branded search results and Sponsored Display to conquest competitors’ shoppers by targeting their PDPs. This helped drive net-new consumers to the brand.  

• We spent a month testing and learning across each of these campaigns and tools to find the iteration that would create the strongest and most efficient impact. This gave us a chance to prove the performance of the strategy, creating a firm foundation before adding more ad tools and increasing total spend. 

Then, we leveraged Amazon DSP to maximize the impact: 

• We complemented our search advertising tactics with DSP campaigns that focused on two of the brand’s top-selling product lines and ran retargeting campaigns that reengaged past PDP visitors. This would help us grow new-to-brand performance by influencing potential shoppers while they were initially browsing and then staying in front of them until they purchased.   

• We also implemented DSP loyalty campaigns to support the brand’s new product launches. This would help increase awareness of these new products with current customers and encourage repeat purchases to help increase LTV.  

Simultaneously, we utilized Amazon’s Free Brand-Building Tools:  

• Knowing that the brand had a lot of success growing a passionate following through their own website and social media, we wanted to leverage Amazon’s free brand-building tools to see if we can create similar engagement on Amazon. We focused on their Brand Store, Posts, and Customer Engagement emails (a feature which has been discontinued as of Feb 2024).  

• For the Brand Store, we wanted to mimic the look and feel of their D2C website so that they had a cohesive brand identity across platforms. We utilized GO Studio, our in-house creative department, to do an initial update of the Brand Store and then continue to make updates as we tracked the impact of the new user experience and launched new items.  

• For Posts, we leveraged the brand’s existing social media content and creatives, tweaking them slightly so that they were optimized for Amazon. We also used them to showcase new item launches. This helped us reach customers through multiple channels on Amazon’s platform and required minimal lift.  

3) Test & learn for every optimization opportunity.  

Testing and learning is a part of the DNA of every strategy we create for our clients. Since this pet brand was new to Amazon advertising, we utilized our test and learn approach to educate them about the opportunities for each ad tool and then prove the impact before scaling the budget. You’ll notice that this was baked into our stair-step approach with the combination of ad tools we utilized. We built a strong foundation with Sponsored Ads by learning which combination of tools and products created the greatest impact before expanding to a tool like DSP that potentially comes with a higher cost and risk.  

Additionally, having a commitment to test and learn baked into your strategy helps you identify even more optimizations across ad tools and creative assets along the way. If your strategy doesn’t already integrate testing and learning, A/B testing your creatives is a great place to start. Here’s a post that can help give you some ideas. 

What were the results?  

This A.C.T. framework helped the brand reignite their performance, beating their shipments goal by 73% while protecting them from wasted ad spend. One great example of this protection at work is in the growth of monthly ad-attributed NTB purchasers compared to the increase of monthly spend when looking at Month 1 vs Month 10: 

Comparing Month 1 to Month 10, monthly NTB sales increased by 317% while monthly spend only increased by 168%.  

Is an A.C.T. framework right for you?  

There are billions of advertising dollars spent on Amazon every year. That means there are also billions of ways to waste ad spend, and we believe a strategy that utilizes an A.C.T. framework can be one of the ways to help safeguard brands against that wasted spend.  

If you’re worried about how much of your advertising budget is wasted, click the contact us button below and we’ll set-up a time to chat about your goals and how we might help.