Overview

Cisco needed a more efficient way to manage eCommerce campaigns across multiple markets.

Using Pacvue’s keyword research, rule-based optimisation, day parting which allows you to adjust the bids based on the time of day, and budget pacing tools, Merkle helped Cisco to increase ROAS on Amazon, and save time on optimisations.

The challenge

Cisco EMEA currently runs activity in 5 different European markets. Each market has a very high number of live campaigns, and each of these in turn has a huge number of keywords.

The current capabilities of Amazon Advertising platform made the day-to-day optimisation time consuming and inefficient. Some of the challenges that we faced were, for example, not being able to access one combined view of all 5 markets and not being able negate keywords across multiplate campaigns at once.

At the time, Amazon also did not offer the option to optimise bids for more than 1 ad group at once, so to optimise the keywords and bids the user had to go to the individual campaign / ad group and asses the campaigns / ad group one by one which again due to the size of the accounts was very time consuming and inefficient.

The approach

We onboarded onto Pacvue to help with optimisation and increase ROAS across all 5 markets. Pacvue is the enterprise software suite for eCommerce advertising, sales, and intelligence, which combines end-to-end retail data with the tools needed to take recommended actions. Brands and sellers use Pacvue to grow their business across Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, and other marketplaces.

Once we onboarded, we implemented the following automated tools:

• Day parting to reduce bids during times & days when people aren’t buying the products, such as early morning hours or the weekend and vice versa.
• Rule-based optimisation to automatically negate irrelevant search terms triggered by generic keywords, optimise keywords to boost revenue, reduce waste spend, improve ROAS.
• Automated budget pacing to adjust the campaign budgets according to the campaign performance.

We also utilised Pacvue’s keyword research tool to identify additional keywords to expand the existing coverage, especially in the non-English speaking markets

All these tools allowed the account to become more automated. This meant we were able to allocate more time to strategic decisions and roadmaps to encourage account growth.

The outcome

The UK saw the biggest improvement in ROAS with a 73% increase, followed by France which saw an 85% increase in ROAS. Both countries also saw a significant increase in orders with a 35% increase in the UK and 42% in France.

In Spain, ROAS improved by 33% and the number of orders increased by 13%. In Italy, the number of orders increased by 20% and ROAS remained stable and above the ROAS target.

Germany did not achieve the ROAS target, but the number of orders rose by 22% and revenue increased by 8%. The budget was also higher during that time, hence this external factor made improving efficiency more challenging.

Overall, both revenue and orders increased by 24%, which led to ROAS improving by 22% (cost remained stable QoQ).

In terms of improving time management efficiency, we saved roughly 3 hours a week on manual optimisation which we were able to allocate to other areas of the account. This allowed us to improve our visibility by creating and testing additional ad formats such Sponsored Display or Store Spotlight. We were also able to utilise Excel Pacvue Add-On for our QBR which again saved us time by creating charts on our behalf and making YoY comparison which aren’t possible to do in the Amazon Advertising platform.