Who is responsible for setting my account up on the Self-Serve platform?
Once the IO is signed, our team will set you up as an user in the Self-Serve platform, grant user access (based on emails provided), and add budget.
What are the inputs required to set up a campaign?
Campaign Name – Use a naming convention that reminds you what type of products are included in this campaign. You can create as many campaigns as you want within the limits of your media investment, and we find success with setting up campaigns by product category.
Start & End date – Choose to start your campaign immediately and end when the budget is depleted or stage your campaign to start and end at a later day.
Campaign Budget – This input needs to be less than or equal to your total investment. If you want to see your remaining balance at any time, you can access the Billing tab. Budgets can be set at a daily or total level.
Bidding Strategy – Choose to set up an automatic or manual bid. Automatic bidding is recommended and will employ our algorithm to target a 10% ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale). You can also use the advanced option to choose your own desired ACoS
Products – Search and drag over the products you wish to promote. You also have the option to bulk upload SKUs.
Keyword Strategy – You can choose an automated or manual keyword strategy. The eligibility for all keywords is based on our keyword algorithm, which measures relevancy scores to ensure only relevant products are served.
Think about the automated option as casting a wide net and the manual option as choosing more precise keywords or excluding keywords that could be served through the algorithm. Keywords that do not fall into our keyword algorithm will not be served to protect site relevancy (ex: no brand conquesting).
Is there a campaign checklist I can refer to?
Yes, please refer to the Campaign Launch Checklist.
Can you target certain page types?
Currently, we cannot target certain page types. When opting into Sponsored Products, your product will be eligible to be served across all available site placements.
How can I influence where my campaign appears?
The best way to do this is by making optimizations to your keywords as you are setting up a campaign and optimizing it after it is live. You can choose to negatively target certain keywords or turn off keywords that may be underperforming or unimportant to your business. To learn more, please see Negative Keyword Targeting.
What is the minimum bid?
All bids must be set at the minimum bid as provided in the platform. We encourage you to set your bid 20% above the minimum floor bid to remain competitive.
Where on the platform can I see what the minimum bid is?
This can be found in two places:
Firstly, when you are setting up the line item, and selecting optimizer, it will show the minimum bid.
Secondly, once set up, the minimum bid is visible when you view the product level details.
To learn more, please see Bid Recommendations.
Can I stage my campaign to start in the future?
Yes! You can choose the start and end date for your campaign or set it to go live immediately.
What kind of keyword model is required during campaign set-up?
We recommend starting with the automated keyword strategy and turning off under-performing keywords as data starts to flow through, following the campaign launch.
Starting broad with an automated strategy will help you to see which keywords perform well and allow you to scale your spending.
How long does it take to add manual keywords to a campaign?
Manual keywords can be added at any time but can take up to 5 business days to go live due to the QA process.
When should I exclude keywords?
Excluding keywords is a great way to optimize your campaign! We recommend excluding keywords that are pulling down your overall average KPIs or keywords that are not important to your business.
How often should I make optimizations to my campaign?
As a best practice, we recommend making small, incremental optimizations to your campaign once a week but monitoring campaign performance on a more regular basis.
Allowing a week between optimizations will allow enough time to see if the changes that you made were effective or not. When first launching a campaign, we recommend not making any changes to your campaign for at least two weeks, to allow the algorithm to perform and adapt accordingly to support optimal performance.
What are the recommended optimizations to ensure great performance?
The two biggest recommendations to optimize campaigns are adjusting CPCs for individual SKUs and turning keywords on/off.
For example, if a particular SKU is performing very well, you may choose to bid higher to win more placements. If a particular keyword is pulling down your KPIs, you can turn that keyword off. To learn more, please see Sponsored Products Optimization Tips.
Can I edit my campaign after it’s live?
Yes, you can edit SKUs and keywords on the campaign dashboard page. Additionally, you can adjust more generic campaign settings like start/end date and daily caps by accessing the campaign settings link on the top right corner of the campaign page.
Can I add more budget to my campaign after it’s live?
You can only add the budget up to the investment level of your signed IO. If you would like to add incremental funds, please work with your representative to sign a new IO and they can help you load more funds into the platform.
What is the importance of setting your attribution mode?
Attribution impacts the data you see in the dashboard and reporting. It does not impact bidding or ad serving and can be changed at any time. To learn more, please see Understand Sales Attribution.
What are the Attribution Settings available in platform?
The last part of your campaign setup process is to set your Attribution Settings. Attribution is the process of determining which actions led to the sale of a product. In the self-serve platform, sales attribution is measured to understand the impact of your retail media activity on customer purchases.
This measurement is done through attributed sales and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend metrics). The attribution model consists of three components:
User Matching: Only purchases made by shoppers who have been exposed to your ad(s) are attributed.
SKU Matching: Only purchases of products that are related to your ad(s) are attributed.
Look Back Window: Attribution is given to purchases made within a selected time period after your ad was clicked on or seen.
A lookback window is a crucial element in managing attribution in retail media advertising. It refers to the specific timeframe during which a conversion can be attributed to an ad. In other words, it determines how long after a user clicks or views an ad that a subsequent purchase can be attributed to that ad.
The default in the platform is 30 days for post-click attribution and 1 day for post-view. To give you more flexibility, you can choose from the following options when setting up your campaign.
The other setting to consider in your attribution set up is Product Match. The Product Match setting allows you to determine how specific you want your attribution to be. You can select whether attribution is registered for just the product featured in your ad, for products of that brand that are in the same category, or for any product by that brand.
The flexibility of the platform allows you to align the attribution model with your campaign objectives and the specific characteristics of your products. This allows for more accurate measurement of ROAS and a better understanding of how different sets of actions contribute to sales.
In the beginning, we recommend that you set up an attribution window that you’re used to, in order to compare apples to apples. Then, as you turn on more campaigns, you can consider changing your model to see the impact of those changes.
When you are ready to make a change, it can be done at any time, and the data and dashboards in the platform will update retroactively to reflect your new settings within a few hours.
How does Ad Scheduling (Dayparting) work?
The Ad Schedule (Dayparting) functionality allows you to create granular hourly and daily schedules for Sponsored Products line items.
Why should I run an always-on Sponsored Products program?
Here are the top reasons why Sponsored Products works best as an always-on program:
Increase SEO Value
Low funnel tactic
Leverage AI learning
Avoid start and stop
Zero-cost brand exposure