Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, and Amazon.com. All retail channels owned by the same company, which just so happens to be the 3rd largest advertising platform in the world. So advertising for these channels should all just connect together, right?
Wrong.
Grocery and CPG brands who sell to Whole Foods and/or Amazon Fresh in addition to Amazon.com often face a number of confusing situations when trying to advertise their products. This may include not being able to run ads at all on Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, even for long-standing ASINs that are performing really well on Amazon.com.
As we work with many CPG brands to manage their Amazon advertising, we have learned the ins and outs of these systems over time.
Here is what we have learned about these systems - how they work best together and strategies to drive the best results.
1. Strategies for running Amazon DSP on Amazon Fresh
Amazon’s DSP offers exciting brand-building opportunities, including the ability to target specific audiences both on and off Amazon. (We have covered Amazon DSP extensively on our blog - check out all our past content here).
So naturally, many brands want to use the DSP to retarget lapsed buyers, new-to-brand customers who are in-market, and many other potential use-cases that are possible within Amazon’s enormous customer data set.
Additionally, Amazon sometimes uses Fresh stores to run interesting media experiments, such as a beta program for “Fresh Digital Signage” which was recently introduced to ADSP.
The issue is that by default, promoting ASINs to Amazon Fresh audiences would redirect clicks to the main Amazon.com product detail page. And that can cause issues for brands looking to make an investment in Amazon Fresh specifically.
For example, one of our clients had committed over $100K of ad spend on Amazon Fresh specifically to unlock some marketing packages. But without the right approach, these ad dollars would have driven all traffic over to the core Amazon.com ASINs, and the marketing package opportunity would be at risk.
The solution that we identified in working closely with our Amazon Advertising partners, was to create a custom landing page on Amazon Fresh, so that all the DSP traffic gets directed to that destination, as opposed to the Amazon.com (core) page. There are various options when it comes to setting up these pages, whether its a simple string of products, or a more highly merchandised page with a branded banner, as in the example below.
We have also found specific audiences within the DSP perform better when setting up an Amazon Fresh DSP campaign. The most obvious one is targeting the zipcodes where Amazon Fresh stores are located. The others - we will keep up our sleeves for work with our clients :)
2. Unique ASINs may be necessary for an effective PPC strategy
A related issue we have found is that setting up and managing ad campaigns on Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, are major issues sending traffic to those destinations when a brand has an existing ASIN on Amazon.com. It seems like Amazon Advertising’s system wants to advertise the Amazon.com destination by default every time.
One workaround here is for a brand to set up a unique set of ASINs that are only listed as inventory for Fresh and Whole Foods. This setup will allow a brand to run Sponsored Product campaigns only to those destinations.
In conclusion
As much as it would be great to “check a box” to advertise a certain product on Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, that’s not the reality of the current system. Working with an agency with both deep experience and a verified Amazon Ads partner like Acadia can help you navigate these quirks much faster than simple trial and error.