Mindshare and Castrol Leverage Budget Manager, See 40% Lift in RoAS on Amazon

The Challenge

Mindshare manages many successful digital marketing programs for their client, Castrol. Castrol had been using Amazon Advertising as a focus ad destination for their ecommerce program since early 2016, but needed additional help to build out a larger, more detailed program on Amazon with additional budget for the 2018 fiscal year.

Goals included:

• Access detailed insights into Amazon products and ROI
• Increase RoAS with a focus on budget optimization
• Decrease need for manual budget management
• Increase Sales for the Amazon program as a whole
• Added automation and scale for general team time savings.

The Solution

The Mindshare team decided to use Kenshoo Ecommerce for Castrol’s Amazon business in 2018. Additionally, since goals were specifically related budget optimizations for increased RoAS, they participated in the Design Partner program of Kenshoo’s Budget Manager for Ecommerce at the same time.

Budget Manager is Kenshoo’s premier budget management solution, often used in tandem with Kenshoo Ecommerce for the best results. It provides automated planning, forecasting and optimizations to ensure the best return on ad spend in Amazon Advertising. With Budget Manager, the Mindshare team created budget plans for Castrol in advance and had Kenshoo’s algorithms pace the budget towards a specific ROI, all based on historical performance.

While focusing on budget management, Mindshare also used Kenshoo Ecomm capabilities to help reach Castrol’s goals:

• Bulksheets – for added scale and efficiency in every day campaign management.
• Fusion Reports – to analyze all campaigns, ad formats and metrics in Mindshare’s Castrol program.
• Out of Budget Report – so Mindshare could see if they ran out of budget for Castrol’s campaigns and how many times a day it happened, allowing them take appropriate action to ensure they never ran out of budget in times of need.
• Products Not Serving Report – to see cross-brand, product level issues that stopped ads from serving and the reasons why.
• Bid to ROI –  used alongside Budget Manager to forecast the marginal ROI of every keyword in Castrol’s Amazon program and adjust bids accordingly. This way, they could achieved their desired ROI and spend goals for Sponsored Products ads.

The Results

By leveraging Kenshoo Ecommerce and the Budget Manager solution, the Mindshare team generated outstanding results for Castrol. ROAS for Sponsored Products increased by 40% month-over-month and total sales increased by 28%. With these results, May 2018 had the most total sales generated and the strongest ROAS in a single month and was Castrol’s most successful Amazon campaign ever.

Mindshare continues to successfully utilize Kenshoo Ecommerce and Budget Manager for Castrol’s Amazon Advertising needs.

Company Background

Mindshare is a global media and marketing services company created in 1997. As one of the world’s largest media agencies, Mindshare is responsible for a large majority of GroupM/WPP’s global marketing billings and campaigns.

Castrol is a British global brand of industrial and automotive lubricants offering a wide range of oils, greases and similar products for most lubrication applications. The Wakefield Oil Company was founded by Charles Cheers Wakefield in 1899.