Timing is everything in retail, but retail media platforms offer few options to advertisers who want to control spend by time of day, week or month. To compensate for self-service retail ad-tech’s limitations, we partnered with Pacvue, a single retail buying platform that enables buying across platforms, including Amazon.

Here’s how we partnered with Pacvue to solve three common retail media bidding problems to make sure our clients are spending the right amount at the right time.

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The problem: Campaigns run out of budget before prime shopping hours

Retail media platforms lack the functionality to optimize spend for time of day, or to spread spend throughout the day. Without this option, campaigns frequently run through the daily budget early in the day, meaning ads aren’t being served in the evening when customers are most likely to buy.

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Our solution

Using Pacvue, we’re able to set client campaigns to bid less aggressively early in the day, when consumers are less likely to buy and traffic is down, saving more of the daily spend for prime shopping hours. For one apparel client, we implemented rules to decrease bidding early in the day to ensure budget was left to continue delivering ads between 4pm and midnight, when customers are more likely to make a purchase. 

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The result

We were able to increase the hours ads were served each day by 95%, so customers were seeing ads for 16.5 hours, compared to 8.5 hours before. Return on ad spend (ROAS) also increased 95% and cost per click decreased 58% as more customers took action on ads that were reaching them when they were more ready to buy.

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The Problem: Campaigns run out of budget before the end of the month

Without control over when your budget is spent, you may not have enough left to serve ads on the days when they’ll be most impactful, and the problem is made even worse if the fiscal month begins or ends on a weekend. Manual optimization with Amazon’s budget rules is time-intensive and standard logic rules aren’t able to adapt to real-time pacing. An automated solution would be much more cost effective and adaptable. 

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Our solution

For our apparel client, we implemented budget scheduling across all search campaigns, which allowed us to map spend level by day for accurate pacing and to pre-set budget targets so budget optimizations could happen automatically, without needing manual optimizations to be made outside of typical business hours. 

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The results

Pacing increased to 100% across our client’s brands, and pacing remained steady from the end of one fiscal year and the beginning of the next, despite changes in budget. 

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The problem: Too much budget is going to underperforming ads

For most campaigns, optimizations have to be made manually to ensure budget is reallocated towards the highest performing ads throughout the campaign, but manual optimizations can be slow and inconsistent, with only campaign volume and keywords to rely on for insight.

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Our solution

We enabled automated bid rules for our client to accurately optimize ad budget based on ROAS performance, and to allow for more consistent optimizations based on performance goals. The automated rules increased bids for top performing campaigns, where ROAS is greater than the campaign average, and decreased bids for poor performing campaigns, where ROAS was less than campaign average but still breaking even. And for campaigns where the ROAS was less than the average of the campaign or below goal and spending a considerable amount of budget, we automated a decrease.

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The results

With automated bid rules in place, average campaign ROAS increased by 10%, and the average ROAS for top performing campaigns increased by 54%.

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"Pacvue has been an invaluable partner to us in providing a framework for advanced optimization of our retail media buys with Amazon,” says Fred Seddon, Director of Marketing Analytics and Insights, and Optimization and Innovation at Kepler. “Their feature set is a significant improvement over what's available within Amazon Advertising platforms. It has helped us focus our time away from granular media management, and towards uncovering insights and seeking new pockets of performance and efficiency for our clients."

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‍Kepler is an Advanced Amazon Sales Partner and a certified Amazon Marketing Cloud partner servicing retail and non-retail clients and agencies globally. Learn more about how we help brands succeed on Amazon.

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