Graco partners with Amerge to help increase sales on Amazon.co.uk

Leading baby gear brand Graco launched over 55 years ago, and has become a household name in strollers, car seats, high chairs, and more. The brand began selling on Amazon.co.uk in 2019, and in August 2020, partnered with an agency Amerge to help them drive sales and scale advertising spend, while maintaining a 6% advertising cost of sales (ACOS) and a 17X return on ad spend (ROAS).

Graco had ambitious goals for growth on Amazon both in their core product lines (like car seats) and various new product development categories in the Baby category. To help meet their goals, Amerge started by splitting their budget and remarketing strategies across three core lines—car seats, strollers, and home—and then focused the majority of the spend on incremental sales growth.

Amerge coupled sponsored ads campaigns like Sponsored Brands video and Sponsored Display with ads on Amazon DSP to help Graco reach new-to-brand customers—those who hadn’t purchased from them in the past 365 days. See below for a breakdown of the tactics Amerge deployed:

• Sponsored Products: Amerge leveraged these campaigns to help customers find Graco’s products in shopping results and product pages. They focused on branded keywords (keywords that included the brand name), non-branded keywords (keywords that are more generic, like “car seat,” “baby swing,” etc.), and similar keywords to help promote brand discovery.
• Sponsored Display: To reach relevant shoppers wherever they spend time, Amerge launched Sponsored Display campaigns. They used views and purchases remarketing for Graco’s products and other products in the category to help promote repeat purchases and reach shoppers who had recently browsed the Baby category. Amerge then used a proprietary tool, Amerge View, to integrate a list of the top 100 best-selling products within the category into Graco’s Sponsored Display campaigns. These campaigns allowed Graco to reach shoppers who were browsing in the category and led to an ACOS of less than 2%.¹
• Sponsored Brands: Amerge leveraged non-branded Sponsored Brands campaigns to reach new customers and link products to the brand’s Store. To stand out in desktop and mobile shopping results and help customers discover Graco’s brand and products as they shopped on Amazon, Amerge used Sponsored Brands video to showcase new products, like the Turn2Me 360° Rotating IsoFix car seat.
• Amazon DSP: With the goal of reaching new-to-brand shoppers and driving incremental sales, Amerge launched ads on Amazon DSP, splitting campaigns by product group (such as car seats, strollers, and home). They then set up individual campaigns against each segment (using both custom and standard in-market lifestyle Amazon audiences). Amerge looked to ROAS and new-to-brand sales to estimate the impact of Amazon DSP on Graco’s total retail sales. Amazon DSP campaigns helped Graco drive 10x ROAS, 3x the ROAS benchmark for the Baby category.²
• Amazon Ads API: Amerge described the Amazon Ads API as the “core” of their strategy³, as it allowed them to run a “one keyword, one campaign” strategy across all ad types (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display) with thousands of campaigns. “This would be impossible without automation,” says John Doyle, CEO at Amerge, who says the tool allowed them to feed all metrics dynamically, giving Graco an always-on view of performance.

Amerge leveraged their own proprietary reporting tool, Amerge View, to measure success. Amerge View consolidates metrics from various sources—like the Amazon Ads API, vendor electronic data interchange, and Selling Partner API—into a singular dashboard, and allowed the agency to focus on strategies that helped drive Graco’s total sales on Amazon.

Between September 2020 and March 2021, Graco’s Amazon DSP campaigns generated a 17% increase in sales and a new-to-brand return on investment (ROI) of 444.10%, which drove 43% of Graco’s year-over-year growth in that period.⁴ With the help of Amerge, Graco exceeded category growth on Amazon.co.uk for car seats by 2x, strollers by 5x, pushchairs by 3x, and feeding by 2x.⁵

Amerge also helped Graco achieve their 6% ACOS goal and a ROAS of 10x for Amazon DSP in the baby category (the benchmark is 2.3x), says Doyle.⁶

Graco is now present on Amazon in Spain, France, Italy, and Germany.