Amazon Advertising - Strategies for Best Results

Amazon is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms, which implies that advertising on Amazon serves a multitude of purposes. It helps you find your target audience and boosts sales.

With an increase in the number of online shoppers over the past few years, advertising has become more competitive. A seller’s Amazon PPC strategy should be well planned and aimed towards improving brand image and scaling their business for optimum results.

Amazon’s ads work on a PPC (pay-per-click) model. You get charged for it only when a customer clicks on the ad. In this article, I have discussed all the powerful Amazon advertising strategies that a seller can utilize.

Amazon advertising strategies

Amazon has different types of ad solutions for sellers to promote their products - Sponsored Product ads, Sponsored Brand ads, and Sponsored Display ads are amongst the most popular.

You may be someone who has been selling on Amazon for a long time or you may be a novice. In both cases, your campaigns must be strategically planned and optimized to improve your presence while staying within budget.

Prepare and set well-defined goals

To make the most out of advertising on Amazon, first, it is important to decide on your goals and budget. Decide whether you want to advertise to increase sales or to drive more traffic to your listings and build awareness for your brand.

Once that is done, plan everything out accordingly. Select what products you want to advertise,

prepare content that is concise and interesting for your product pages. Ensure that the information and images are of good quality and consistent with the features of the product.

When it comes to your ACoS goal, it is best to keep it as low as possible but it is ultimately dependent on your intentions for individual products. For example, when it comes to best-selling products, there is no need to advertise them a great deal since they already have good visibility so you can keep advertising costs low. On the other hand, you will need to budget for a higher ACoS while launching new products primarily to get people to view your product and convince them to buy it.

New sellers need not focus too much on ACoS but on organic ranking instead. This is because, at this stage, your primary goal should be to make a good amount of sales so that you can first sustain yourself and later focus on maximizing profits with advertising.

Go international

Expanding into international markets is a smart thing to do if you know your products have potential demand in other countries. You will need to conduct a good amount of research into the most favorable countries that you can sell your products in and the cost at which you can sell. Also, take into consideration global fulfillment options and taxes of those countries. All of this can vary depending on the country.

The important thing is, once you determine that it is worth it, you can become a part of Amazon Global Selling. You can then use Amazon Sponsored Products to market your products and the best part is that the cost of advertising on Amazon is lesser in some countries and you can benefit from this.

Selling on global markets also lets you take advantage of instances where there is less competition. You can supply products that aren’t easily available locally. This leads to an increase in conversation rates and reduces your CPC (cost-per-click). Amazon sellers can distinguish themselves from competitors in the same niche by improving their visibility at an international level and make use of low CPCs offered abroad.

Competition

Competitor analysis forms an important part of your advertising strategy. Perusing over a competitor’s pricing, keywords, and product detail pages gives you great insight, especially if you are a new seller.

If you are targeting the same products as your competitors, you can start by looking at those that have lower ratings or cost more, so that you can leverage that to advertise your products better. You can also use a good bidding strategy to ensure that your product displays on the product details page of a well-established competitor, thus driving traffic to your listings.

Studying your competitor’s advertising strategies can help you leverage them to get more impressions and a higher CTR from your ads.

Keywords

Keyword research is a very important part of Amazon PPC campaigns. Including as many relevant keywords in the product, titles are crucial to Amazon’s A9 algorithm. Looking at BSR products and their sales volume throws light on how well their keywords rank. In order to enhance your presence and visibility on Amazon, you need to optimize and develop a good keyword strategy.

Determine what keywords are most important to your listings and prioritize them for your campaigns. You can use SellerApp’s expert Keyword tools to simplify this process.

More importantly, take into account negative keywords because this will help you reduce unnecessary ad spend and ACoS. Simply put, negative keywords are those that you can have marked negative in your campaigns or ad groups so that your ads don’t display for those particular search terms. Those that have fewer conversions but a high number of clicks and are irrelevant and costing you more ad spend should be taken into consideration.

Negative keywords ensure that only customers who are genuinely interested in your niche will see your ads and thereby be directed to your listings. You can also make use of the Customer Search Term Report to reveal keywords known to not generate any sales. This report provides information on the top search terms and you can filter it to a certain period of time or category of products. It also includes information about the top three most clicked ASINs over a certain period.

Optimizing for Amazon SEO

If you want your ad to perform well and give you good results, it has to also be very well optimized for the Amazon search engine to easily find and display your product at the top of search results. This has everything to do with keywords and listing optimization.

Make use of Amazon search terms to uncover what keywords shoppers are using to find your products. You must also optimize your product listings by including terms that shoppers regularly use to find your products as well as terms that are unique to your listings so that the process is simplified further for your target audience.

Your product listings should also include relevant phrases or long-tail keywords that customers use to discover your products. It’s also a well-known fact that professional, high-quality product images enhance your listings to increase sales. Optimized descriptions mean better automated campaigns because they enable Amazon to pick the right keywords for your PPC campaigns.

Bidding strategies

A seller needs to constantly monitor and adjust his bids. This is important in case the bids are not optimized to get conversions. If you don’t make the necessary adjustments, then it will just be eating into your budget.

As obvious as this may sound, if you are a brand owner, you need to bid on your own brand name because if you don’t, a competitor will. This will result in their products being displayed under your brand name. Alternatively, if you are a new seller, bidding on your competitor’s keywords is a way to improve your own visibility and sales while keeping in mind how much CPC is.

Some important things to take into consideration while bidding are the relevance of keywords and ads, impressions, and daily budget to reduce ad spend.

Mix it up

There are two ways to manage your PPC campaigns on Amazon - manual and automated.

When a campaign is automated, you don’t really have to do any daily monitoring. All you have to do is set a price for CPC, add keywords, and let Amazon do the rest. This is ideal if you’re not running too many campaigns at once.

Manual campaigns, on the other hand, require you to optimize everything on your own - budgets, keywords, etc. This is ideal if you want to micro-manage and control your campaigns. Since it is quite a laborious process, SellerApp has the best PPC management tools to make your life easy.

The best thing to do is to utilize a perfect mixture of both automated and manual campaigns as both give you different results that you can benefit from. You can assess which one is more suitable for your needs based on your campaign goals.

Manage your campaigns

Whether you’re using manual or automated campaigns, they require constant monitoring. Individually assigning actions and modifications to each campaign is bound to become a laborious task. Your goals for one set of campaigns will vary from another set.

For this purpose, you can use SellerApp’s new Bulk Actions feature in your advertising strategy.

It has been designed to save you precious time while making changes to bids for multiple campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. You can also create new campaigns, add SKUs to an existing ad group and do so much more.

Conclusion

Amazon has a plethora of advertising options to choose from. As a seller, your strategy should revolve around what’s going to help you make the most money with a minimum ad spend.

Competition is fierce on Amazon owing to how big of a marketplace it is and it is impossible to have a presence everywhere so you must focus on who your target audience is so that you can earn a good ROI. The strategies mentioned above are meant to help you achieve just that along with increasing sales and building your brand image.

This is a guest post by Arishekar N, the Head of Marketing at SellerApp, who specializes In digital marketing, In addition to website keyword optimization for search engines. His areas of expertise Include enhancing the organic ranking of webpages on search engines with Innovative SEO strategies and online promotions.