How Intentwise helped Wind River pick the “winners and losers” in its ad campaigns

The challenge

When Wind River, a Virginia-based vendor of wind chimes and bells, first began advertising on Amazon, it relied on Amazon’s automatic ad campaign feature. With a small marketing staff, “we can only be experts in so many different areas,” explained Luke Croushorn, vp of sales at Wind River.

Amazon’s automatic campaign worked well at first. Amazon’s algorithm selected the best keywords for Wind River to target, and offered bid suggestions. But Wind River began to realize it was hard to experiment with an automated campaign. There was no way for the company to locate fresh keywords on which to place bids, for instance.

Plus, Amazon’s automatic campaigns also don’t factor in seasonality. Wind River’s products are especially popular in warm months—but with Amazon’s automated tools, it couldn’t ramp up spending on its own.

The solution

Wind River chose Intentwise because it wanted to build a marketing strategy customized to its needs. Wind River manufactures 8 brands, including a brand of bird houses and feeders. What’s working for one brand doesn’t necessarily work for the other.

Rather than run all campaigns with a one-size-fits-all approach, Intentwise fine-tuned its bidding strategy to each specific product and campaign. 

Intentwise also helped Wind River innovate. Back when it relied on automatic campaigns, Wind River skipped out on a lot of potential keywords in the name of optimization. “You never get to find out which ones are winners and losers,” Croushorn said. 

With Intentwise running its account, however, the company could see suggestions for new keywords to target—and, potentially, new audiences to reach. 

In the Intentwise platform, Wind River received access to hourly ACOS and ad budget data, search term and product-targeting suggestions designed for multi-brand accounts, and rules-based bidding tools that can be used with AI. 

Working with Intentwise, the company has quickly scaled its ad campaigns. This past January, for instance, ad revenue increased 55.9% year over year.