Amazon Advertising can be quite tiresome and unrewarding, until you have a professional assistant ready to do all the heavy lifting on your behalf. We had a quick talk with one of our clients, Matt Aiken, the Chief Executive Officer at Keymaster Games, telling his own story about the challenges his company had to confront and how the Seller Labs Services team helped to resolve them.

Keymaster Games: Background And History

Keymaster Games is a full-service board game publisher and retailer. They design, manufacture, and illustrate games, shipping them across the globe. The company was founded in 2015, with the intention of designing and licensing games to publishers.

Keymaster Games publishes board games with captivating experiences and elegant designs. Our games are meant to be easily played with the friends and family around you in the hopes of creating deeper connections and fun memories.

They started by taking their designs and putting them on Kickstarter, with great results. The company linked up with a consolidator a year later and continued putting new game ideas on Kickstarter. In 2017, with a few titles seeing consistent success, they decided to put those successful games on Amazon in addition to their ongoing campaigns on Kickstarter.

Amazon Advertising: Main Challenges

However, Amazon was “not great”, and Matt Aiken, the Chief Executive Officer at Keymaster Games, handed management of that off to a third party but didn’t see the success he expected. Upon bringing management back in-house, Matt knew he didn’t want to “go down the advertising rabbit hole.” So, he began researching other options to focus his time and effort on different aspects of the business.

“I’ve got a tremendous amount of responsibility and not enough time and the rabbit hole which is Amazon was not something that I was ready to go down.

He found that with typical board game shoppers being so specific in their searches, he wouldn’t have the time and resources to put Keymaster Games in front of shoppers who wouldn’t otherwise find them. “Our sales were great, but there was an opportunity to capture passive shoppers,” he says.

Looking for a Solution: Seller Labs Services

While Matt Aiken landed on our Seller Labs Pro software, he only used it for a few days before learning about our Services offering. However, as soon as that happened, he jumped at the opportunity.

When asked what about Seller Labs he found particularly attractive, Matt immediately said, “A human!” He found that having someone you can talk to consistently, someone with expertise in advertising, and a full scope of successful selling on Amazon resulted in immediate success.

Below are the examples of Amazon A+ Content banners designed by the Seller Labs Services team for Keymaster Games.

Even so, Matt didn’t intend to sell on Amazon only. Instead, he preferred to focus on cultivating success as a third-party seller on the platform, along with continuing to sell in stores such as Target or Walmart.

Seller Labs Services in Action: Results

Speaking of that immediate success, Seller Labs exerted significant effort on Matt’s seller account right out of the gate, turning up the dial to 11. Before starting with Seller Labs Services, Matt had been spending a few hundred dollars on advertising each month. The team increased that ad spend dramatically, reaching as high as $10000 in a single month, with returns remaining healthy the entire time. With the increased ad spend, the revenue shot up, which was the ideal situation for Matt.

We went from having an ACoS of 126% one year down to 15% in our first year with Seller Labs. We saw our revenue grow from $130k to $500k year-over-year.

Results that Speak Volumes

Within a year of utilizing Seller Labs Services, Keymaster Games saw an astonishing total revenue bump. One of the ways to reach high revenue numbers is consistently increasing ad spend, which is what the Keymaster Games company did.

What Keymaster Games Values Most about Seller Labs

When asked what he would impart to another seller interested in shopping for advertising agencies, Matt called Seller Labs a trusted partner helping to reach business goals.

Each time Keymaster Games launches a new product, Matt brings that to the Seller Labs team to discuss and make a joint plan for promotion. For him, every meeting with the Seller Labs team not only drives results, but showcases the consistency.

It’s exciting to see sales numbers every two weeks. Plus, as we run an omnichannel business, we need to check how other platforms besides Amazon perform. So I’m glad to have someone scheduling the meeting and saying, ‘Hey, show up, let’s talk about this. These were our notes from last time. How did it perform this week? What are we doing? Let’s make these changes.’ That’s really helpful.

At the same time, having trusted and productive relationships with clients has always been the core business value for the Seller Labs Services team:

The partnership between Keymaster Games and Seller Labs is so much more than just two meetings a month. It’s a relationship where we collaborate, analyze data, learn from one another, and always question, “What else can we be doing to move forward?

Matt also takes care to emphasize that, while he’s an expert in the board games industry, having an expert on Amazon advertising at his disposal makes his life so much easier. He looks at how each industry, each channel, performs on a regular basis but he doesn’t have the added stress of worrying about how the Amazon channel is going because an expert, a trusted partner, is working on that for him.