There is an underused tool in Amazon Ads that you can use to design and evaluate advertising strategies before launching campaigns, and to estimate their performance: Amazon Ads Planner.
Whether you are launching a new product, promoting an existing one on Amazon, or increasing brand awareness, advertising is the primary tool. The most preferred method for launching campaigns is to select a few keywords, set a daily budget, or launch an automated campaign, then wait to see if they work.
While testing is unavoidable in marketing, you have another choice in Amazon advertising besides blind testing.
There is a tool on the advertising console dashboard that can eliminate much of this guesswork. It's called Amazon Ads Planner, and it might be the most underestimated feature in the entire Amazon advertising ecosystem.
Amazon presents aggregated data from millions of transactions, impressions, browsing history, and clicks in its own ecosystem to its sellers for free. You are effectively accessing the world's largest database of consumer purchase intent without paying an extra fee, and most likely accelerating the learning phase by gathering data on who responds to your ads.
Specific estimated data that sellers can see in Amazon Ads Planner is as follows:
If you are a registered brand, you have access to this promising feature that lets you forecast impressions, reach, and conversion potential before you spend a single dime.
Amazon Ads Planner is located under the Insights and Planning tab in the Amazon Advertising Console.
Once you access the ads planner, you can start creating your campaign plan. You can select your brand (or not). It's optional, but if you choose it, the system recommends categories for your plan and your industry based on the category under which the product you want to advertise falls.
Also, if you have access to or have been using DSP products, you can include them. (Industry option appears when you check the "include DSP products" button ) Then select the planned period. Choose a 90-day window (usually the best for forecasting seasonality) for your ad campaign, and optionally set the budget you plan to allocate. You can allocate budget to selected ad types in the following steps.
In addition, if you want to see traffic data for specific product categories, you can select them in the plan details section.
In the next step, based on your campaign goals (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty), select a goal from the options, determine which KPI it uses, and create a plan. You can choose a single goal or multiple goals.
On the last step of plan creation, you need to choose an audience opportunity. Depending on the product in your campaign plan, you can select from the suggested categories, or, if you already have some planned, you can search for them. You will find an extensive selection of categories based on the campaign goal you chose in the previous step, and most categories here have subcategories as well, so you can make it as granular as you like to get a more specific estimate of your campaign's performance.
After you choose your audiences here, the system will make some estimations, and on the right side, you'll see audience insights. Here you can check details such as demographics, shopping insights, which will give you data about audience interests, what products they are in-market for, and an affinity score, which is defined by Amazon as "Affinity compares your opportunity audience to all Amazon customers. The higher the number, the more likely your opportunity audience is to be in this audience segment."
Once you're all done, you can create your plan. In this new page, you'll see details about your planned campaign and estimated data for your chosen goals. For a goal, you can select which type of Amazon ads, such as sponsored products or sponsored display, and edit the budget underneath. The system will then calculate and try to optimize your selected budget based on historical data, and show you its estimates or forecasts for each ad type in your campaign.
For instance, you can see forecasted impressions, detail page views, clicks, and more. You can also manually adjust the numbers to see the estimations for different budgets. Also, the audience insights we mentioned on the previous page will be available here, above the metrics, so that you can check them anytime. Keep in mind that if the audience is too small, the system may not be able to generate insights. If you want to change your audience or goals, click the edit button in the top-right corner of the page.
While knowing whom to target is essential, knowing when to target is what saves your budget. Ad Planner's Forecasted Shopper Traffic section combines your brand data with category trends to predict traffic fluctuations over your planned period. You can view these trends monthly, weekly, or quarterly.
By using this valuable data, you can adjust your advertising budget to align with your category's demand curves.
By clicking "View Detailed Forecast" for each ad type at the Sponsored Ads Plan section, you will be able to visualize the efficiency of your proposed budget. In the Sponsored Brand forecast, the parameters used to define the forecast include the plan period, budget, target KPI (Detail page views in this chart), reach, impressions, clicks, historical ROAS, forecasted sales and average frequency (how often the same person sees the ad).
In the given case, we see that, with the selected categories, budget, and other variables, you might achieve sales, but the critical point is the Average Frequency, which is 16.53. This number indicates that the same user will see your ad more than 16 times during the planned period. With this insight, you now know you need to either lower your budget or broaden your targeting to reach "new-to-product " audiences.
Amazon Ads Planner offers you a rare opportunity for clear thinking and validating your strategy before launching your campaigns. Stop paying for the data and start using the data Amazon provides you for free.
Forecasting is powerful, but execution is everything.
Reach out to the Ecomglue Team to turn these insights into sales.