December 14, 2022

What's inside:

• A Message from our CEO

• Announcing: Cartograph Dashboards Beta

• Key Amazon Dates

• Tracking Search Terms

• Our Favorite November Amazon Tidbits

• Cartograph Director Retreat

A Message from our CEO

Hi everyone,Happy holidays! Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving, and if you’re anything like our family you've been watching a lot of sports these last weeks. Between the World Cup, NCAA, and NFL, it's been an action-packed shopping season. But, onward to online shopping...This Past MonthNovember came in a bit slow compared to expectation. While we expected a slower month vs. October due to the Prime Day, we still came in below sales expectation for the month.Some of this is shape of the curve. Holiday sales uplift has hit later in the season than prior years. Our friends at leading eComm retailer shopping tools shared that they lagged projections for November until the week of Thanksgiving, and have only as of Cyber Monday caught up to expectation. Take this in the context of how early brands ran Black Friday deals this month, and we have a season of changing consumer behavior. One theory is supply chain woes in the news pulled shopping earlier the past couple years.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday don't deliver for CPG like a Prime Day does. It makes sense: many other categories rely upon these days to have their biggest sales and therefore have their big deals, and food isn't on the mind. Nonetheless, our clients who participated in BF/CM deals had much better follow on days in the last week and a half. This was especially important if you're a holiday-related product. Big sales days are an opportunity cost to "front run" trends for the following weeks: our gift sets that sold well saw dramatic sales in the following week.This logic should be used again in the run up to the New Year. In prior years we saw traffic start to uplift on the 27th or 28th: it's important you get ahead of these curves as a higher sales rank when healthy food trends will result in more free traffic from Amazon. We're running lead-in promotions and changing our copy to ensure we are in front of the increased volume. We saw inventory limits increase again starting the week of Thanksgiving. We’re moving quickly to send in inventory to cover December and January, following frustrating limit decreases in November. The global supply chain looks very different from last year: both container costs and freight truck costs dropped significantly in the last month, in some cases to below pre-pandemic levels. After 2 years of traffic like the 405 on a weeknight, speed is picking up.

Looking Ahead

Cheers,Chris MoeCo-Founder, CEO, Cartograph

Our Black Friday and Cyber Monday Fast Figures

• Introduce gifting terms in content and ads at start of November.

• Run coupon in 2 week lead-up to build momentum.

• Lightning Deals: adjusted quantity through the day to ensure scarcity (i.e., deal 75%+ sold out).

• Adjusted ad budgets dynamically through the day to ensure none went out of budget.

Cartograph Dashboards Beta - now open to non-clients! 

We are opening up our P&L and Repeat Purchase Dashboards (both a big part of our process!) to non-clients. They're connected to a direct API data feed, which has more data than you can get from Amazon's dashboards. Reply to this email to be added to the waitlist for our Beta! I know we announced this last month: we'll start contacting beta participants before the holiday. 

Join our Team! Cartograph is hiring for Brand Management Roles

[email protected]

 End of Year  

➞ December 22 - Anticipated Last Day of Christmas Gift Shopping➞ December 27th/28th - Beginning of New Year New You shopping for "Better for You" products.

Amazon releases data that ranks the most frequently searched terms on Amazon. We follow these to get a sense of what people are interested by week, and time seasonality and trends. The lower the Search Frequency Rank, the more popular the term is. 

Terms with an Improved Search Frequency Rank in November:

Terms that Declined in Search Frequency Rank in November:

Preparing for January and New Year, New You

January is typically the strongest month of the year for “Better for you” brands. A few tips:

• Focus on promoting ASINs designed for health, fitness, diet or organization.

• Set aside extra advertising and promotions budget to help attract customers who are starting a new healthy lifestyle.

• Add high traffic “healthy” keywords to your ad setups and your copy.

• Utilize all DSP strategies to target customers focused on their new healthier goals, bring back lapsed purchasers with remarketing and use the large audience pool from BFCM for retargeting.. 

Send Sponsored Brand Video Ad Clicks to Store PageAmazon added the ability for your brand store to be the landing page for Sponsored Brand Video ads. Previously, you could only link them to a single Product Detail Page. Now you can show off multiple products in Sponsored Brand Videos and then link customers to a store page to shop your full catalog.

Sponsored Display Launched Video FormatAmazon Advertising recently launched Sponsored Display Video ads. The new video format empowers advertisers to showcase their products and brand through immersive storytelling (e.g. tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials). The video can be up 45 seconds and will serve on and off Amazon.

In November, our leadership team held a retreat in Wimberly, TX. The theme was "finding your leadership style": this was taken in front of the Wall Street Western boutique where they all got hats!

Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to see our weekly Amazon tidbits and company updates.