Combining Amazon and non-Amazon Media Leads to Over 100% Growth for SmartyPants

Founded in 2011 by a group of concerned parents and leaders in health & wellness, SmartyPants is on a mission to simplify health without sacrificing quality. As industry leaders in testing, transparency and advocacy, from sourcing the highest-quality ingredients to testing and packaging, the brand wanted to apply this same philosophy to its advertising campaigns.  

SmartyPants launched on Amazon.com in April 2015 and relied on Amazon Advertising, including Sponsored Display, to help grow their brand presence and drive sales. In 2019, the team decided to include paid search and social media to scale their business and reach shoppers off Amazon sites. To holistically measure how the off-Amazon campaigns impacted shopping activity and sales, SmartyPants registered for the Amazon Attribution beta.  

To help craft their new digital marketing strategy, SmartyPants partnered with Quartile, an Amazon Advertising solution provider integrated with Amazon Attribution through the Amazon Advertising API. Quartile’s exclusive integration with Amazon Attribution provides a scalable way for sellers to measure and optimize their ad campaigns both on and off Amazon.com within a single platform.

SmartyPants’ Off-Amazon Marketing Strategy

Quartile worked with SmartyPants to plan a strategy to grow awareness and consideration for the brand and its products through a series of offAmazon paid search and social ads. The social ads aimed to introduce the brand to new audiences while the search ads would engage new-to-brand shoppers researching vitamins and actively looking to purchase on Google.

“Until we began recommending Amazon Attribution measurement to our clients, there was no way for us to understand the value of traffic sources outside of Amazon. Amazon Attribution has given us the opportunity to expand our services and offer our clients a way to create truly full-funnel, multichannel marketing campaigns that help them achieve their business goals.” Sylvio Lindenberg Co-founder and CMO at Quartile

SmartyPants’ Amazon Advertising Remarketing Strategy

The Quartile team also relaunched SmartyPants’ Amazon Advertising campaigns to run in parallel to the new paid search and social campaigns. The goal was to help SmartyPants re-engage Amazon shoppers that showed interest in their products and encourage them to make a first or additional purchase.  

To do this, the Quartile team set up Amazon Advertising display campaigns, including Sponsored Display, to reach two specific audiences:  

1) Shoppers that had visited SmartyPants’ detail pages but had not purchased.  

2) Customers that had previously purchased SmartyPants’ products on Amazon.

The Full-Funnel Results  

The SmartyPants team, with the help of Quartile experts, seamlessly set up the Amazon, search and social campaigns within the Quartile Platform to feed into the new Amazon Attribution suite, leading to a 360 degree view of their new campaigns alongside their Amazon Advertising and conversion reporting within the same console.  

This holistic view, along with Quartile’s proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, enabled SmartyPants to optimize campaigns both on- and off-Amazon at the ad, ad group and keyword level to predetermined efficiency goals.

"Using Amazon Attribution through Quartile’s solution allows us to get a unified view of our non-Amazon advertising strategies. For the first time, we were able to view Facebook, Instagram, and Google engagement metrics alongside Amazon conversion and sales metrics. This comprehensive reporting has allowed us to create a truly full-funnel strategy—one that has led to over 100% sales growth for our brand on Amazon this year.” Gordon Gould, co-CEO at SmartyPants

When the strategy launched in September 2020, the brand saw the following impact:

• Awareness: At the top of the funnel, paid social campaigns helped drive 125% growth in new-to-brand orders.

• Consideration: Auto-optimization via Quartile’s machine learning technology focused spend on search keywords receiving the highest engagement, driving a 1.6X increase in ROAS (return on ad spend).

• Loyalty: The Amazon Advertising remarketing campaigns led to a 5% increase in net sales and drove a 268% increase in Subscribe & Saves among existing buyers.

By broadening its reach across off-Amazon marketing channels, in addition to re-engaging customers across Amazon Advertising channnels, SmartyPants was able to not only reach new customers but also grow its base of loyal customers, leading to sustained growth in sales and revenue.  

Overall, SmartyPants’ cross-channel advertising strategy, enabled by Quartile, helped the brand achieve over 100% year-over-year sales growth in October 2020.

“In partnership with the Quartile team, we were able to create a full-funnel marketing strategy for the first time. Using non-Amazon channels, measured by Amazon Attribution, in combination with Amazon Advertising channels, we are able to meet shoppers wherever they are in their journeys to help grow customer engagement and ultimately sales for our brand on Amazon.” Gordon Gould, co-CEO at SmartyPants

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