Overview
OneStone, a full-service eCommerce agency, used Pacvue to help Essentia Water, the best-selling alkaline water brand in the US, improve their Amazon DSP advertising strategy.
Through Pacvue and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), OneStone justified increasing Essentia’s budget for a more robust Amazon DSP strategy. This allowed OneStone to create a more unified advertising approach which filled the top of the funnel and pushed shoppers down to the point of purchase. By investing more in DSP, Essentia saw a 10x increase in purchase rate.
The Challenge
Essentia partnered with OneStone in 2018 to drive growth and efficiency in their Amazon advertising strategy. In 2020, Essentia began leveraging Amazon DSP advertising as a secondary tactic to support their established search advertising. At the time, DSP served as a secondary advertising tactic to the established search advertising. In 2021, Essentia faced increased competition in Sponsored Ads and stagnant growth.
The current ad strategy devoted 85% of the budget to search and 15% to DSP. OneStone and Essentia knew they needed a deeper understanding of their consumers and the customer journey in order to grow household awareness and gain unaided brand salience. They needed to diversify their media mix plan and knew that DSP could bring them more value. Unfortunately, high-level key metrics such as impressions, conversions, and click-through-rates still supported a focus on search ads. They lacked the advertising data to justify a larger budget for DSP.
The Solution
OneStone used the advanced measurement and analytics tools provided by AMC and Pacvue to diversify their media mix plan. Pacvue unlocked visibility into AMC data with ad overlap reports, dayparting analysis, conversion path analysis, assisted conversion analysis, and an audience size report segmented by different levels of the Amazon Marketing Funnel.
The Results
“The AMC Dashboard gave our team the extra inch of data we were needing to justify a diversified media mix approach to advertising. With the Path to Purchase Analysis, Ad Overlap Report, and other out-of-the box reporting, we could finally measure the full-funnel impact of each ad campaign. This tool validates the hand in hand relationship between DSP and Search ads. With AMC, we have the data at our fingertips to lead Essentia to make the smartest decisions for an advertising strategy.” — Chase Arnold, Senior Advertising Lead, OneStone
Based on Pacvue’s budget suggestion algorithms, Essentia devoted 46% of their ad spend to DSP in May 2021. With an immediate improvement in ROAS month-over-month, Essentia could justify putting 55% of ad spend towards DSP in June. They also increased total ad spend by 42% and started running OTT ads.
Full Funnel Advertising Strategy
Using data from AMC and Pacvue, OneStone was able to remove the silos in Essentia’s advertising strategy. The combination of upper-funnel Amazon DSP advertising and lower-funnel search tactics helped drive consumers to the point of purchase and increase conversions.
With a siloed ad strategy search saw only a 0.30% purchase rate and DSP saw only 0.67%. Purchase rate for consumers exposed to both search and DSP increased to 10.35%. While the audience exposed to both ad groups was only 5% of total unique reach, these consumers made up more than half of total purchases.
“At Essentia we knew we needed to step change how we were advertising on Amazon in order to remain competitive and fully optimize our marketing budget. OneStone worked with us to provide the data and tools we needed to feel confident in diversifying our marketing mix budget. The insights from Pacvue have not only helped shaped our strategy for 2022 but allow us to continuously optimize and adjust our plan in real time to maximize our efforts.” — Brianna McDaid, Omni Strategy Manager, Nestlé
Intelligent Budget Management
By using Pacvue’s budget management tools and AMC data to get granular, month-over-month insights into advertising tactic success, OneStone was able to create a more flexible, intelligent ad strategy for Essentia. The brand could focus ad spend on consumers who were exposed to Essentia and ready to convert. Pacvue and AMC unlocked actionable insights into which audiences were most likely to convert and where ad spend could have the highest value for Essentia.
“Amazon Marketing Cloud has transformed how we look at advertising on Amazon. Traditional Amazon advertising was about winning an ad space when a consumer has expressed intent to purchase your brand or in your category, now it’s about finding the consumer who is most likely to purchase and to create a relationship with them as they travel from awareness, to purchase, to loyalty. By doing that we have proven to have increased conversion rate, new to brand percentage, and loyalty.” — Jacob Snelson, VP Head of Marketing, OneStone
