Business goals can be broadly summarized into three:

(1) Increasing Product Awareness

(2) Increasing Revenue

(3) Increasing Return-on-Ad-spends (ROAS)

While there was a favourable increase in demand, the market segment was overwhelmed with new products leading to aggressive competition. The major challenge for the campaign was to sustain the ROAS while increasing product sales.

The Strategical Solution

To test the waters and carve out demand, the campaign started off with niche targeting of surrogate products’ categories where Savlon had performed well.

Additionally, owing to the pandemic situation, there was a significant rise in the unique search terms within the disinfectant product category. The team, with the help of the search analytics tool, quickly identified and capitalized on these potential keywords.

After acquiring a decent daily order volume, the next milestone was to establish the product as a category leader. At this stage, primary competitors facing product shortages were identified and competition products were targeted. Price mapped competitor targeting was enabled to ensure product awareness and to grow order volume.

Execution

The entire campaign used 3 ad formats, (a) Sponsored Brands, (b) Sponsored Products, and (c) Sponsored Display. The teams fully leveraged both targeting capabilities of Amazon: Keyword targeting, and Product Page targeting.

Initially, guided by data from the top keyword tools and due to lack of product awareness, the analysts kept low spends on the generic search campaign. The volume of potential keywords within category was being tracked and targeted, for example ‘Disinfectant Spray’.

With demands surging, the keyword theme saw an exponential rise in search volume. The teams filtered 60+ generic, 12+ competitor and 75+ brand keywords to target maximum relevant searches. While the product specific search terms were low, traction for the product was boosted by targeting surrogate categories like Sanitizers, Hand washes & Household Cleaners.

Simultaneously, the team was working on the product page SEO and A+ Content to increase the relevancy for the Amazon A9 algorithm.

Soon, there was growth in the Brand Searches and it helped in increasing the brand consideration. Hence, to optimize returns, ad spends on generic campaigns were reduced and were increased on the brand campaigns.

After a substantial achievement in daily order volume, we used Savlon’s Brand store to portray COVID-concerned communication and a subpage was created for the Disinfectant Sprays. The Sponsored Ads were diverted here and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) specific calls were taken.

“Direct to Consumer (D2C) continues to become a significant revenue channel with the increasing online customers, and Savlon was no exception. Backed by our data-driven expertise and proprietary tools in e-Retail marketing, we could leverage Amazon Ads and the usually ignored Amazon SEO strategies to deliver an exciting 4x revenue growth for ITC.”

Anubhav Sonthalia

Chief Executive Officer