Martech Spotlight: How Kenshoo does digital commerce ad management

Kenshoo Ecommerce combines holistic measurement of Amazon Advertising activity, retail analytics and product-driven data with optimization technology. Advertisers have access to product-driven campaign management at scale. Features such as bulk creation, automated actions and keyword management provide a way to control complex Amazon Advertising programs.

Target customer

Enterprise B2C and B2B marketers, including brands and their agencies.

Platforms and ad types/formats supported

Amazon (Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands), trial access to other emerging retail publishers, Facebook / Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Google, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Apple Search Ads, Yahoo Japan, Yandex and Baidu.

In addition, reporting for Amazon Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP (programmatic Display and Video) is supported.

Bid management

Kenshoo provides numerous bidding management options including automated bid policies, keyword models, custom bid rules, shopping campaign specific bid rules and a proprietary solution, Kenshoo Portfolio Optimization (KPO).

Kenshoo provides the ability to execute plans and define what the plan should look like by analyzing multiple “what if” budget scenarios. Additionally, Kenshoo can pull data from Amazon intraday and drive automated actions and decisions — identifying when a campaign is out of budget and automatically readjust to advertiser needs.

Early in the campaign optimization lifecycle, many clients use Kenshoo to set linear rule-based automation rules. By filtering and creating repeatable automated bid adjustments, clients can align market response and campaign performance.

As campaign portfolios mature, clients layer-on Bid-to-ROI or Bid-to-Spend machine- learning algorithms to allow the machine to aid optimization.

Once portfolios perform well, clients use Kenshoo’s Budget Navigator tool as a forecasting tool and as an umbrella policy manager to optimize across a group of portfolios to find continuous incremental opportunity for performance gains. KPO drives advertisers spend to reach an overall portfolio goal by compiling historical data and building hundreds of thousands of predictive models managed by custom AI-driven algorithms.

Kenshoo can sort and filter across multiple channel accounts — both seller and vendor, profiles, campaigns, ads and keywords.

Additionally, clients can automate changes based upon specific performance criteria across these levels, such as identifying high and low performers by multiple variables (ROAS, CPA, ACOS), pausing low performers, changing budgets and adjusting bids.

Reporting metrics

The Kenshoo platform provides dashboards, reports and data insights to allow for more informed decisions on Amazon Advertising and across publishers. Users can leverage Amazon Retail Analytics, Competitive Brand Insights and advertising analytics on Amazon — both from a campaign and a product-specific perspective.

Kenshoo consolidates Amazon Advertising, Amazon DSP, and Amazon Stores reporting data to holistically reveal product performance insights. Kenshoo goes beyond Amazon’s 90-day reporting window to deliver QoW and YoY results and Kenshoo can align these reports with results from search term analysis, ARAP and third-party data.

Additionally Kenshoo provides many reports to enable advertisers to identify new opportunities and discover the root causes of issues impacting advertising performance, including: products not serving, campaign serving time, out of budget report and search terms report.

Competitive Intel and Share of Voice can be tracked for top 50 keywords by profile at the brand level and across paid/organic, key placements and over time, including: share of first page by organic and paid, share of first page by top brands, distribution appearances on first page and share of first five positions by top brands.

Kenshoo’s Product Manager tool delivers product-specific insights by connecting organic and paid activities with competitive and market signals, revealing pricing threats, cross-channel ad performance and ASIN-level reporting combined with client- defined custom metrics.

Additional digital commerce functionality

While Kenshoo is not a feed management solution for listing products or integrating orders, nor a solution to automate EDI or other operational infrastructure for running an Amazon business, the Kenshoo platform does automate the aggregation and normalization of Amazon Retail Analytics Premium (ARAP), competitive and share information and key operational product insights — like eligibility, buy box %, reviews, ratings, etc.

Integrations

Separately from these services, Kenshoo has developed more than 100 third-party software integrations with partners across channel management, optimization, analytics, creative and more. Optimization partners include, but are not limited to, affiliate marketing, call tracking, comparison shopping, CRM, DMPs, feed management, retargeting, social publishing, SEO and video.

Analytics partners include, but are not limited to, attribution, ad serving, tag management, mobile measurement and web analytics.

Pricing and support

• Annual contract is required
• Free trial is available.
• SaaS-based pricing based on package and spend levels. Typically, contracts are based on a percentage of media spend managed through the platform. That percentage is always relative to unit economics/volume-based pricing.
• Multiple account management is supported.
• All clients receive 24/7 online and phone support and an online education and training portal.
• Expert consulting services are also available at an additional charge to meet transitional needs, channel expertise and consulting. These services include:
  • Amazon Consulting to help a client develop a structure to optimize the holistic Amazon business and drive success in Amazon Advertising performance. These services are available at a project-based fee, estimated after discovery and review of brand and ASIN count, available in one-time or annual engagements.
  • Kenshoo Consulting to help a client drive value and performance from the Kenshoo relationship and use of an advertising solution. These services are available at an hourly rate, with project-specific caps estimated after discovery or account set up. Typically these are for one-time engagements.
  • Implementation Services provide managed service support with expert execution for temporary outages or transitions on a client’s team. These services are available at a percent of ad spend calculated during the proposal stage and are typically 3-6 month engagements.

Key customers

• LG Electronics via iCrossing
• Kimberly-Clark via Mindshare
• Philips via Content26
• L’Oreal, Coty via Content26
• Unilever via Mindshare

Company overview

• 600 Employees
• Founded in 2006
• Kenshoo provides holistic measurement and management of commerce advertising along with data-driven insights and machine-learning optimization technology to help brands make decisions and scale performance.
• With 27 international locations, Kenshoo generates over $350 billion in annualized revenue for brands.

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