Every Man Jack

The challenge

Men's personal care brand Every Man Jack (EMJ) was looking to optimize their retail media campaigns and drive continued growth. Thus, EMJ tasked Croud with achieving a 50% increase in Net SKU Profitability for EMJ Beard products with Amazon Ads campaigns, while maintaining total revenue volume.

In addition to helping EMJ drive their net profit, Croud also sought out to win EMJ’s approval to extend testing to the brand’s Body category, and prove the effectiveness of Amazon advertising for incremental growth.

The strategy

In order to drive profitability for the brand, Amazon Sponsored Ads were employed, targeting audiences across the UK, US, and Canada, with a combination of short-tail, long-tail, brand and competitor keywords. 

Rather than using revenue or ROAS as our KPIs, Croud’s team knew that driving sales of products with higher profit margins would ultimately drive more profit - not just revenue. Doing this would mean they could make advertising on Amazon even more profitable, unlocking more budgets to spend on upper-funnel activity. Croud identified the client’s commercial priority SKUs within selected product categories and grouped them according to their profit margins. They then used automated bidding strategies in third-party platforms to bid based on margin, rather than revenue.

Recognizing the need for a technology partner, Croud integrated Skai, an omnichannel advertising platform, to centralize campaign management and activation, and utilize data to achieve results rooted in evidence. Leveraging Skai’s technology, Croud was able to delve beyond superficial metrics toward KPIs that ensured advertising efforts were driving true business impact.

The results

The results achieved through the integration of profit margin data were remarkable, significantly boosting the business across all SKUs. The test demonstrated the benefit of taking an incrementality-centric approach to advertising where our advertising strategy generated a substantial increase in net profit and factored in all associated costs behind each SKU. The results of our work for EMJ included:

• A net profit increase of 216% in the Beard category, well exceeding the 50% target 
• A maintained and even slightly increased total revenue volume through organic and ad-attributed sales on Amazon.com (+1%) 

Additionally, Croud was able to prove the value of profit-based bidding to the client and was able to roll out this approach across the entire product catalogue, scaling the success to the entire Amazon Ads account and every ASIN within it.