The high popularity of Selling on Amazon has led to an enormous surplus of available products. Any winning strategy on Amazon will use all the available tools to stand out in the flood of listings. Amazon PPC is a tool that helps your products compete in a field of similar products.
Ad campaigns on Amazon provide a boost to the whole brand rather than just added clicks and sales. Customers associate your highly ranked sponsored products with quality and legitimacy and will be more likely to click on your organic listings as well. Increased clicks and page views of your sponsored listings add to your overall brand performance and make it easier for all your listings to rank higher in search results.
Ad campaigns on Amazon provide a boost to the whole brand rather than just added clicks and sales. Customers associate your highly ranked sponsored products with quality and legitimacy and will be more likely to click on your organic listings as well. Increased clicks and page views of your sponsored listings add to your overall brand performance and make it easier for all your listings to rank higher in search results.
Using paid search is often required to generate a high level of page views so that Amazon will offer the option of A/B testing on a particular listing
Creating search campaigns is a great way to get insight into customer search behavior. Sellers who advertise can access detailed reports on specific customer searches and keywords that are otherwise unavailable. Paid search provides you with exclusive data such as
- Impressions
- Click through rate
- Conversion rate
- CPC (Cost Per Click)
- Performance Metrics
- Spend
- Orders
- ACoS
- Sales
This data presents you with a better picture of what is working and what is not. You can use these insights to make improvements to listings that otherwise would go unnoticed. All this will result in more sales and return on ad spend brand-wide. Unlock your brand’s full potential with Amazon Sponsored Ads.
The Basics of Amazon PPC
Amazon PPC technically stands for the billing method, Pay-Per-Click, but the name is used to refer to general digital advertising options available on Amazon. Merchants create PPC ads to promote their brand or products and set a daily budget. Amazon charges the advertiser every time a customer clicks on the ad. Those clicks are subtracted from the daily budget until it is gone.
Amazon provides advertisers with 4 different targeting methods for PPC ads.
Amazon provides advertisers with 4 different targeting methods for PPC ads.
- Keywords
- ASINs
- Categories
- Interests (Vendor Central accounts only)
The vast majority of Amazon Ads are Keyword based, ASIN targeting is used somewhat commonly, and Categories as well as Interests are almost never used except in very specific cases with a specialized product. Using Keywords is an art in itself. Watch the video below for some explanation.
Merchants choose targeting method and a daily budget for every product or brand. High daily budgets make it easy for your products to be seen, but cut into your profits unless you add negative keywords. Low budgets may run out of money quickly or generate too few impressions. Optimize your keywords, bids, and budget to profitably generate sales for your products.
Proper Amazon PPC optimization is about finding the right keywords and setting the right bids that allow your products to be visible and profitable
Amazon Sponsored ads include 3 different ways to be seen: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display Ads. Sellers must have a professional account and be Brand Registered to run either Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products ads.
Sponsored Products
The most popular ad format on Amazon is Sponsored Products. These “ads” are really just boosted product listings, and the only difference from an organic listing is a small “sponsored” text block. Sponsored Products appear in search results when a customer searches for a particular keyword. They will often appear above organic results, but can be found anywhere on the search results page depending on relevancy to the customer query and the Merchant’s bid for that keyword.
Businesses report higher sales and lower ad spend with Amazon Sponsored Products ads vs Google Adwords
Sponsored Products ads are a good choice to promote a new product, boost sales of a product with low organic rank, or give a product an edge in a competitive category. The ads are simple to create, but require experience to manage well. Please reach out to our Amazon PPC experts if you would like help setting up a Sponsored Products campaign.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands ads are displayed as a banner above the product listings in a customer’s search. These ads contain a headline and at least one, but up to three branded products. When a customer clicks on the ad, they are taken to the Brand’s Amazon Store, or a custom landing page. Clicking on any of the featured products will take the customer directly to that product’s detail page.
These ads are a great way to set your brand apart from the crowd and build your reputation
Recent updates to Sponsored Brands ads now give merchants the option to target both keywords and ASINs, as well as the option to include a product video in the ad. Our team is here to help set up your campaign, choose the best targets, or even create branded videos.
Sponsored Brand ads are designed to drive new customers to your business that have not previously interacted with your Brand or products. They are highly noticeable and quickly capture customer attention. A customer who sees a Sponsored Brand ad will be more likely to click on that brand or product the next time that they see it on a search results page. The addition of video almost guarantees that a customer will stop, even for just a moment, and look at the ad.
Sponsored Display
Amazon Sponsored Display Ads can be served both on and off the Amazon Marketplace, which makes them a potentially powerful tool for consumer retargeting. On Amazon, these ads are displayed along the side of a search results or product detail page or below the content. They feature promoted products that consumers may be interested in. The Ads will look similar outside of Amazon, but include the Amazon logo as well as the product being advertised
Display ads are designed to retarget customers who recently viewed other relevant products on Amazon
As they were conceived, Sponsored Display Ads seem to be a great tool to increase brand awareness. However, we at Commerce Rev seldom recommend these ads to our clients. The statistics show that merchants simply don’t see high level results compared to ad types such as Sponsored Products. This may be because Amazon largely exists as the end point in the typical consumer journey, rather than a research tool. Most consumers visit Amazon to buy, and therefore present little value as a retargeting prospect.
Final Step to a Great Listing
Amazon ads allow you to provide a boost to your entire catalog. Amazon Sponsored Ads are ideal for launching a new product, increasing sales, building customer loyalty, and promoting your brand image. Amazon offers high levels of control to advertisers, so you can create and adjust your campaigns with precision to target your ideal audience, and align with your budget and performance goals.
Amazon Sponsored Ads are a great capstone to a well-put-together product, but they are not a magic cure-all for a poorly optimized or poorly reviewed listing. We have found that an attempt to advertise before an account or listing is ready often results in high ad spend with low sales in return. We see the most advertising success on optimized listings with good reviews.
Our team will be more than happy to evaluate your account for advertising readiness and is capable of making any changes or preparations needed to give you a higher chance of success. Contact us whether you are ready to advertise or starting from the ground up: We are here to provide you the tools for success.
Amazon Sponsored Ads are a great capstone to a well-put-together product, but they are not a magic cure-all for a poorly optimized or poorly reviewed listing. We have found that an attempt to advertise before an account or listing is ready often results in high ad spend with low sales in return. We see the most advertising success on optimized listings with good reviews.
Our team will be more than happy to evaluate your account for advertising readiness and is capable of making any changes or preparations needed to give you a higher chance of success. Contact us whether you are ready to advertise or starting from the ground up: We are here to provide you the tools for success.
