When it comes to Retail, Amazon is a company that can not be overlooked. You can shop their enormous offer going from clothing, the latest tech or even your toilet paper. Their giant worldwide webshop has become indispensable to many consumers.

As an online retailer they are a player to definitely take into account. Especially when you monitor your Google Auction Insights and see part of your share being taken by Amazon.

More often consumers not only see Amazon as their go-to webshop for a new purchase but also as a research platform for products they are thinking of buying. This makes Amazon not only relevant in the buying phase of the customer journey but also for those first awareness moments. In short, consumers end up on Amazon in every stage of their customer journey.

Your potential clients are influenced by Amazon from the moment they start browsing until they actually make the purchase. Try to not only see this as a threat but mainly as a business opportunity.

Via Amazon you get access to this growing pool of people that are fully engaged shoppers ready to spend their money on their next purchase. This makes it the ideal place to offer your products.

Sponsored Products

Amazon offers various advertising options for both Amazon sellers and companies that do not offer their products through Amazon. In this article we focus on one of the options for Amazon sellers, Sponsored Products.

By using Sponsored Products you give your product offering on Amazon a visibility boost. This type of ad displays your products on the first page of the search results or on the product detail pages. 

Retail readiness

Before you go live with your Sponsored Products campaign it is important to take a number of things into account. Amazon Advertising puts a lot of emphasis on the quality of the product pages of the products you want to promote. They describe this as 'retail readiness'. The products in your ad should be Retail Ready as much as possible. When this is not the case the products are not suitable for advertising. This is the case if they are, for example, "out of stock" or if they do not win the buy box.

It makes little sense to advertise products that are not retail ready because Amazon will not often or not at all show your ads. Your campaign won't spend and all of your effort will not pay off.

Retail readiness sounds like a really difficult concept while it really isn’t. It consists of a number of basic principles that make total sense and you would apply yourself if you had a webshop. It is in itself a small effort that helps you to make the most of the great potential on Amazon.

Products that are retail ready meet the following conditions:

A good product title, description and image

Provide an engaging product name and a clear description. Make sure the product is correctly described and mention important elements such as price, color, material or size. Mention the USP's of your product here. To keep your description neat you can use bullet points. 

The consumer wants to have the best possible idea of what he is buying, so good images are crucial. Use multiple images so the consumer gets an idea of all the important details of your products. It is also a good idea to add a video to show how your product works.

Consumer reviews

When we buy something, we often rely on other consumers to give us advice. A product that gets a good rating immediately seems a lot more reliable. It is important that products have at least 4 stars and at least 15 reviews.

Inventory

To be able to use a product in advertising, there must be sufficient stock. It doesn’t make sense to pay to advertise products that are out of stock or whose stock is very limited. You can download an inventory report to check how much stock is left of each product.

Buy Box 

You can only promote a product if you are the winner of the 'buy box'. In concrete terms, this means that you are the one who benefits from selling a product. Whether Amazon will let you win the buy box depends on several factors such as the stock of a product, your order defect rate and customer service.

Enhanced Content 

On the product detail pages you have the possibility to add A+ Enhanced Content using a template. This allows you to add extra interesting and relevant information to the product pages that can influence the consumer's decision. It is an extra element that enriches your detail page. 

The detail page should be seen as a landing page for your Amazon ads. It is important that it is of the same quality as, for example, a landing page on your website. Enhanced Content can help.

Conclusion

Offering your products through Amazon is a possibility that should definitely be considered. Amazon.fr has been doing well in Belgium for years and with a Dutch version of Amazon.de the Flemish market also opened up. With the arrival of Amazon.nl, the Dutch and Flemish consumers will be even better served.

When you decide to sell on Amazon it is recommended to use Sponsored Ads to bring more attention to your products. Make sure these products are "retail ready" as a first step to succeed with Sponsored Ads.

Of course, this is just the beginning. With your Retail Ready products you can then set up your Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Product campaigns, but there are many other possibilities on Amazon. So this is certainly not the last article we will write about Amazon.

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In a forever evolving world, a company cannot only do its business on its own. Today, we wanted to share one growing trend in our markets: Online Trade Marketing. 

Trade Marketing is actually a pretty old B2B marketing concept, well known by retailers and suppliers in the offline world. Trade marketing is the basic idea of marketing your products through the value chain and at the point of sale i.e. the store. In the offline world, trade marketing can mean a whole range of promotions of the supplier’s products at the retailer and includes activities such as - ensuring prominent display of the product, branded merchandise or more shelf space. According to a BCG study in 2012, Trade Marketing represented a 500 billion dollars business.

The ultimate goal of the supplier is then to increase demand through partnership.

Over the past years, we have been observing 3 major trends: 

1. Ecommerce sales are booming
2. In-store traffic is declining
3. Online marketing efforts have a growing influence on brick and mortar activities.

Given these major trends, at Semetis, we believe it makes total sense to take the Trade Marketing as an opportunity to grow the digital side of your business. 

To summarize, online trade marketing is the process of a supplier shares ressources (financial, creative materials, ..) with a chosen retailers with the goal of promoting one or more of the supplier’s products. This enables the supplier to increase its visibility online and within the retailer’s environment. This process will then generate increased sales and increased revenue for both partners.

Here is another definition given by Google in their Think with Google article: 

“Digital trade marketing gives retailers a way to increase sales and margins, fund traffic acquisition and strengthen supplier relationships. For manufacturers, these tools are a way to increase sales, gain insights into campaign effectiveness and optimise return on advertising spend.”

Here is what Trade Marketing look like in digital: 

Trade Marketing is then linked to benefits for both parties:

• The Retailer will be able to unlock larger marketing spends, which will generate incremental revenues and budget. This will also lead to gains in market share. Pursuing Trade Marketing budget is then a way for retailers to stimulate their own growth
• The Supplier will increase its reach and visibility online as well as on the retailer’s website. Trade Marketing will then also lead to an increased market share for the supplier compared to other suppliers of the retailer. Finally, investing in such tactics will surely strengthen the relationship between the supplier and retailer which could lead to incremental benefits.

Another really interesting plus side of online trade marketing is the improvement of consumer experience. Indeed, by activating trade investments online and by doing so using the technology and data, retailers can show the right product of the supplier to the right person at the right time and place. Online ads can be personalized and will drive relevant traffic and sales rather than in-store media for everyone and anyone to see. With today’s technology, retailers can not only count ecommerce sales but also measure store traffic and sales.

As the trend continues, we see solutions popping up to help both retailers and suppliers to engage in online Trade Marketing. As an agency, it is our role to educate our clients (both retailers and suppliers) on the concept as well as on the best strategy for them. At Semetis, we aim to guide them through the challenges they will face and share our best practices in order to establish and maintain these key relationships.

 

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Why combine Shared Budget and Smart Bidding in Google Ads?

You want to leverage Google’s newest automation features to boost your Google Ads performances, and your efficiency.

More specifically, you want to automate budget management and automate bidding in Google Ads.

Automated budget management implies that you no longer will have to adjust daily budgets per campaign. Instead, the proposed solution in this article will manage the foreseen (daily) account budget across all Google Ads campaigns.

Automated bidding takes over the manual work of placing bidding on keyword or ad group level. Instead, the proposed solution will automatically adjust the bidding in function of your objectives. 

Google’s Automation Features to make this happen:

• Shared Budget: An automated way to allocate budgets across different campaigns depending on their performances in relation to your objective. 
• Automated bidding strategies: 

• • Maximize Clicks, 
  • Target Impression Share,
  • Target CPA*,
  • Target ROAS*,
  • Maximize Conversions*,
  • and Maximize Conversion Value*.

*Smart Bidding is a subset of automated bid strategies that optimize for conversions or conversion value by using machine learning.

As of now, we will focus on the combination of the Smart Bidding Strategy: Maximize Conversions and Shared Budgets.

How to combine a Maximize Conversions Bid Strategy with Shared Budgets?

In this section, we will guide you through the set-up of a Google Ads campaign with a bidding strategy set to Maximize Conversions while using Shared Budget. 

Troubleshooting

You were trying to maximize conversions for a Google Ads campaign that is part of a Shared Budget and you got the following error message:

“The bidding strategy does not support shared budgets”

We have the solution. 

It will allow you to optimize your campaign* for conversions while being part of a Shared Budget. 

*Limitation of Shared Budget: you can not use Shared Budgets for Smart Shopping campaigns (February 2020).

You need to create a portfolio bidding strategy. 

We will show you how to complete the set-up with an exciting example: 

Optimizing towards Google Store Visits with a Shared Budget

In this set-up, the objective is to maximize the number of Store Visit Conversion while applying a Shared Budget across all campaigns. 

As a reminder:

• Maximize Conversions: A Google Ads Smart Bidding Strategy designed to Maximize Conversions.
• Store Visits (in Google Ads): An extrapolated estimation of the number of Store Visits that were generated after an interaction with a Google Ads ad within a (by default) 30 days post-click window. 
• Shared Budget: An automated way to allocate budgets across different campaigns depending on their performances in relation to your objective. 

How to set it up?

Portfolio Bid Strategy

As mentioned, Portfolio Bid Strategies are the key to combine smart bidding and shared budgets. 

In your Google Ads account go to ‘Tools & Settings”. Under the column “Shared Library” click on “Bid strategies”. 

Click on the blue “+” and choose “Maximize conversions”. Name your portfolio bid strategy and select the campaigns for which you want to maximize the conversions within the same Shared Budget. 

The selected campaigns are now set to optimize for all conversion actions you've set to be included in "Conversions" at the account level. This is the default set-up.

As you might know, in a Maximize Conversions bidding strategy, you can specify which conversion you want to optimize for. This could be any of the conversions which you find back under ‘Tools & Settings’ > Measurement > Conversions. Then you would need to make sure to tick the boxes for ‘Include in “Conversions”’. 

In your campaigns settings under ‘Additional Settings’, you can select the specific conversion (or conversion set) you want to focus on. 

In our example, it is here that you select the ‘Store Visits’. 

Shared Budget

Next, go on to create the Shared Budget. Go back to “Tools & Settings”. Under the column “Shared Library” click on “Shared budgets”. Click on the blue “+”. 

Name your shared budget and enter the average you want to spend each day. 

Then add the Shared Budget to the campaigns which are optimizing for the portfolio bid strategy. 

You are all set !

 

Use case

Context: Omnichannel player with a strong focus on in-store sales. 

Goal: Maximize Store Visits

Maximize Conversions (Store Visits) x Shared Budget 

Company Z’s focus is to drive footfall traffic to their local dealer network.

During past years, they have always pushed towards a 'Dealer Locator' functionality on their website. ‘Searching for a dealer’ on their website has been the most meaningful conversion in the struggle to close the loop between digital investments and the actual return on ad spend.

Now, a powerful new feature: Google Store Visits, allows them to optimize one step further in the buying journey: visiting a dealer. 

To make 'Store Visits' the centerpiece of their digital advertising strategy, we have altered their Google Ads accounts. By combining Portfolio Bid Strategy, Store Visits Optimization and Shared budgets we are set-up to drive maximum football traffic to the dealer stores. 

Moreover, this strategy ensures highly automated and cost-efficient management of their Google Ads investments. 

• Portfolio Bid Strategy: optimize bids across multiple campaigns
• Store Visits Optimization: optimize bids for Store Visit Conversions 
• Shared budgets: optimize budget across multiple campaigns.

Moving from an online to an offline conversion strategy has boosted traffic to their dealer stores and overall improved the relationship with their dealer network. 

It allows their sales representatives to say: ”Thanks to our (national) digital campaigning, we influenced X number of store visits” when they visited a local dealer. 

 

Shared Budget - An Automation Solution or A Lazy Solution? 

The Pro’s and Con’s of Using Shared Budget

Pro’s:

• Shared Budgets are created to help you save time. If you manage a lot of small campaigns bundling the budget management of these campaigns could save you time. 
• In theory, Shared Budgets should shift budgets across all campaigns included in the Shared Budget based on the performances. This would imply that your available budget is always managed in the best possible way to reach your objective. In practice, you need to test and learn if indeed you have better performance in a Shared Budget set-up.

Con’s:

• Loss of control. With a Shared Budget, you obviously won’t be able to control the ad spend per campaign. You won’t be able to push specific campaigns if you have promo’s, products or categories to push. You could however create a shared budget per category if that suits you better.
• Uncertainty on the objective. It's not certain that a shared budget actually takes your objective into account to optimize your spend. It has never been put on paper that Shared Budgets are looking at your objective to make the budget distribution.

In summary, some might argue that using Shared Budgets is the lazy solution. Others would praise it as a great automation solution. The truth is as always somewhere inbetween. 

Therefore, we recommend testing the approach for your specific client.

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Aside from Google, Apple and Amazon we see more and more companies exploring the area of voice. As stated in the previous article “Voice Assistance - Is voice the new wave of digital transformation” the value proposition of voice AI is that it significantly improves customer experiences and in turn allows you to enter in deeper conversations with your customers. In short it is going to be a game-changer. It is a great field to play in, but where do you start? Suppose you discover a great business case for a voice application and you want to develop one yourself. The purpose of this article is to assist you in kick starting your first project.

Build a voice persona

It all starts with a voice persona. In any case, a persona is the face you show to the world, it is the impression that people have of you. It is a topic that has been heavily researched. The book Wired for Speech  shows that we are hard-wired to have biases because of the voice that we hear. Basically within a second of hearing any voice you assign a personality to it, with all kinds of dimensions: age, gender, a local accent that gives you a sense from where they are from, the relationship (my superior, my peer, …). All of this comes through in one second. From that, you make assumptions such as intelligence, ability, and even trustworthiness. All of these factors are milling around in our brains when we are hearing someone's voice. Therefore it becomes absolutely essential that brands design these voices and these personas. Otherwise, listeners are going to design it themselves, and that can be problematic.

To build a voice persona as a brand there are few steps to take:

1. Make sure to have a deep understanding of the brand and the brand dimensions
2. Understand the task that the voice needs to do
3. Who is the user group, what are they like and what are their expectations

This needs to be taken down to some principles of what the persona should be like, in the form of a biography. It will first assist the actors, responsible for recording the speeches, to get into the persona. Secondly, for the person writing the actual application to guarantee that the conversation design is consistent with the characteristics of the persona. The persona creation can be built by any creative expert. Once it is robust you can go ahead designing a conversation. A conversation designer can curate the conversation, defining the flow and its underlying logic in a detailed design specification that represents the complete user experience. 

Build a conversational UI

A conversational user interface, CUI, has the purpose of creating seamless communication between a consumer and a device. To get a little bit more technical, it is a digital interface that allows customers to connect with your business based on principles of real-life human interaction. The core technology used by CUI is Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is a field of artificial intelligence that gives machines the ability to derive meaning from human languages. It is a discipline that focuses on understanding the real intent of a user’s command.

A key question you might ask is whether the ecosystem is already here to link up your users with voice? The answer is yes. To bring your voice experience to life there are end-to-end development tools available in the market that can be called upon by Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

Build a voice-interface with Dialogflow

DialogFlow, is a Google-owned platform for natural language processing that allows developers to build conversational UIs. It is designed to model voice interfaces. The tool offers voice recognition and processing as a service. The steps to create a working voice-interface are simple and straightforward:

1. Training phase: Input a large number of question your customers might ask to train the system
2. Iterative process: Test it with real users to identify potential bottlenecks and adjust the process accordingly
3. Go live: Integrate the conversational UI to the platform
4. Maintenance: Use the build-in analytics tool of Dialogflow to see track the performances and guide you to improve your conversational interface

The solution is not limited to Google’s own speech assistant, the conversational UI can be integrated with a variety of platforms: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Hangouts Chat, Twitter, Amazon Alexa, etc. Because DialogFlow is developed by Google, the platform is well integrated within Google’s ecosystem. For example giving you access to any Cloud Function, which allow you not only to boost your conversational UI with AI technologies but to scale it on the backend side of things.

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