What’s new in online marketplaces: 2021 Q4

Look Fantastic

Look Fantastic is a retailer with over 20,000 products in the beauty field representing over 600 brands. The platform has signed up as Criteo’s newest retailer providing the opportunity to use sponsored ads in the browse window, placing products directly at the top of search results.

This scope for sponsored placements presents a strong opportunity for new and growing brands to improve visibility and target niche audiences on the growing platform. Over 660 brands feature across the site and revenue share has grown 40% year on year for the past four years, illustrating the potential in the beauty retailer.

Source: LookFantastic.com
Image shows sponsored placements at the top of search results.

Citrus Ad

When working in paid media, optimising campaigns frequently is something that comes naturally to the role. To help with regular campaign optimisation, Citrus Ad has introduced search volume and anticipated winning bid to campaigns.

In the below example we can see the search volume and winning bids for “cat food jelly” and “wet cat food”.

The search volume and winning bid is based on the last 30 days of platform data and from our tests is proving accurate. Visibility of these metrics is useful to help decide if a keyword should be added to a campaign and helps gain clarity over what is currently performing well.

This is only available when clicking through into a campaign at present which is often tedious if you are covering several campaigns at scale. However, Citrus has said they plan to incorporate this data into a report.

Amazon updates

International scale

Many marketplace clients operate in several countries and Amazon is working to simplify the management of these accounts. It is now possible to enter keywords in your preferred language rather than the region you’re advertising in, and instantly translate the keywords from your preferred language to the Amazon site’s language.

It can currently only be used for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads. This feature is very useful for improving the pace of account creation and optimisation and, in theory, keyword research only needs to be done in a single language.

Despite the use of this update, we would not recommend relying on this alone. Conducting keyword research in local languages allows you to get closer to the nuances of each market and direct translation is not always effective. The software runs the risk of spelling and meaning errors and doesn’t consider localisation. Many terms that make sense in one language may cause offence in another.

Additionally, the search habits of users can be very different across markets. Often keywords have large search volumes in one market but fall much shorter in another. Although it can speed up the process, we believe it’s best not to rely too much on Amazon’s help for this. We have a specialist team of mother-tongue marketers managing international campaigns to localise content and get under the skin of audiences and their behaviours.

Bulk upload

When making changes to an advertising account at scale, the bulk upload feature has been very useful in helping to save time. To date, it was not possible to use bulk upload on Sponsored Display ads which meant these needed to be done manually in the console itself. However, a new bulk sheet has now been created to allow the ad type to be created at scale, which when you have many campaigns can save a lot of time.