Managing Media investments in Sponsored Ads: measuring efficiency and optimal budgeting for Pilot

The context

Pilot makes significant investments in Sponsored Ads on Amazon, particularly in two strategic markets with contrasting maturity levels: France and Germany. Despite these substantial budgets, the brand lacked a clear vision regarding the true profitability and incremental efficiency of these spendings.

The major and recurring challenge was to better allocate budgets to maximize media impact without wasting resources.

To achieve this, we supported Pilot in answering three fundamental questions for the brand’s acquisition strategy:

What is the true incremental efficiency of Sponsored Ads?
What is the optimal investment amount before reaching audience saturation?
In which product categories does this channel deliver the most value?

The solution

To tackle this measurement challenge, we designed a custom protocol called “Stop & Go”, deployed simultaneously in France and Germany. The principle is simple: temporarily suspend, and then reactivate advertising investments. This allows us to observe actual variations in sales and accurately isolate the incremental impact of the campaigns.

A 4-Step Key Methodology

Our analysis is based on the comparison of four distinct periods:

Control 1: Maintaining the usual budget to establish our baseline.
Pause: Complete halt of advertising investments.
Overspend: Injecting an exceptional budget to test the audience saturation threshold.
Control 2: Returning to the usual budget to validate the stability of the results after the pause.

To ensure our measurement was scientifically rigorous and free from platform biases, we implemented strict safeguards:

Products (ASINs) that experienced stock shortages during the experiment were systematically excluded from the analysis.
To prevent natural sales fluctuations from skewing the results, we statistically adjusted the data from the pause period based on the daily averages of the control periods.
The final incremental result is calculated by smoothing the performances between Control 1 (before) and Control 2 (after). This double verification guarantees an extremely solid foundation for evaluation.

The results

The initiative was a success, revealing the excellent performances generated by the Sponsored Ads campaigns while paving the way for continuous budget optimization:

144 %

sales uplift in France

133 %

sales uplift in Germany

30 %

(minimum) of purely incremental revenue is generated by advertising across almost the entire catalogue.