Perpetua, a global leader in eCommerce advertising and intelligence software today released their 2021 Q4 EU Amazon Benchmark Report showcasing the most important trends and metrics on Amazon, across five European regions, including UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Perpetua’s Amazon Advertising Benchmark Report reveals that, as expected, Q4 2021 has been the strongest quarter to date with an increase across all key metrics, impressions seeing the highest percent increase (25%). The UK saw the highest increase in all key performance metrics on Sponsored Product, followed closely by Italy and Germany.
Perpetua’s 2021 Q4 EU Benchmark Report is based on performance data from campaigns under Perpetua’s management, and examines performance across 13 categories, including: Beauty, Books, Clothing & apparel, Electronics, Food, Health & Supplements, Home Improvement, Appliance & Supplies, Household CPG, Jewelry, Pets & Animals, Toys & Kids, and Sports & Outdoors.
Increasing competition and CPCs have been the story of Amazon advertising for 2021, and in Q4 Sponsored Brand CPCs increased on average 3% and Sponsored Display CPCs were up 5% quarter-over-quarter in Europe. The report also shows an overall increase in CPMs in Q4 due to the busy Black Friday Cyber Monday and Christmas shopping seasons where we typically see much higher engagement and conversions quarter-over-quarter, which led to more competitive CPMs in Amazon DSP and a decrease in ROAS.
“Q4 was undoubtedly the most competitive quarter ever on Amazon DSP,” says Mark James, Head of Perpetua EU. “It was perhaps the first quarter where we started to see a shift towards mass adoption of the DSP as a marketing channel with many advertisers hoping to realise the benefit of upper funnel marketing tactics to drive incremental sales at tentpole moments in their calendar such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
In Q4 2021, most advertisers began placing greater focus on top of funnel campaigns to reach new-to-brand shoppers to drive brand and product awareness ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday shopping. With that, new to brand purchases increased significantly (36%) and aided in growing the retargeting audience pools.
We expect to see significant growth in new markets in Q1. Benelux and Nordics remain an untapped opportunity, where advertisers can take advantage of high-in-supply and, right now, low-in-demand inventory. This presents a lucrative first. mover advantage that capitalise on market share.
Q4 2021 Amazon EU Benchmark Report Highlights:
- Unexpectedly, Black Friday underperformed this year with only a 70% increase in sales, a significant decline in 2020.
- Sponsored Display CPCs in Spain saw highest jump, up 36% quarter-over-quarter, whereas UK actually saw CPCs for Sponsored Display decrease 2%.
- Sponsored Product saw CPCs increase on average 0.4%, driven by Spain, France and Italy, with Germany (-5%) and UK (-2%) campaigns seeing a decrease in average CPCs.
- Sponsored Brand saw a 25% increase in spend from advertisers quarter-over-quarter across Europe, with the highest increase in spend coming from Germany (+38%) and UK(23%).
- Categories such as toys and kids saw a 52% increase in sales
- Electronics continues to be one of the highest performing categories with 68% growth quarter-over-quarter
- Household CPG sales decreased by 13% as did health & supplements, down 2% quarter-over-quarter
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