Selling on Amazon is not a simple task. It is like a dance. You must learn all the moves so you don’t trip up. Whether you are a novice or a veteran seller, we have put together some helpful tips to improve your advertising strategy.
Here are 15 expert tips on Amazon Advertising:
1. Targeting Campaigns
Targeted campaigns narrow the field of view of your campaigns to reach the target audience and drive conversions. If your Amazon report includes ASINs or product categories you should use product or category targeting.
Product targeting
Product targeting is beneficial when advertising ASINs that are already on the market.
Despite being similar, PAT cannot be used within the same PPC ad group as Amazon keyword targeting.
Product attribute targeting (PAT) enables advertisers to claim a space alongside other specific products or brands to boost brand recognition and conversion rates.
Product targeting allows your ad campaigns to appear next to top products and brands for people considering that specific product.
Having your ad campaign appear here builds brand recognition and target audience, whether they buy the product or not.
Category Targeting
Category targeting is another form of PAT, but it is category specific instead. This targeted approach is most beneficial for new product launches when the intention is to reach a broad target audience and understand the competition.
Examples of specific categories are outdoor footwear, musical instruments, and hair products. Targeting categories can reach interest-based audiences immediately, having a much greater impact on brand awareness for new products.
If you narrow the category targeting to specific brands, price ranges, and star ratings, you can hone in on your target audience. This is a beneficial advertising strategy as it equates your brand with other well-performing established products.
2. Setting Up Ad Groups
Ad groups allow you to organize, manage and track the performance of a product through manual targeting. It is useful when your ad campaign includes items with multiple variations since they would share bids and key terms. Ad groups remove the need to create individual ad campaigns, which saves you valuable time in the long run.
As the campaign progresses, Amazon retail insights can generate more specific keywords for you to target. Introducing these would significantly increase your appearance in Amazon search results and in correlation, generate sales.
Retail insights could help you use negative keywords to exclude underperforming search terms and prevent unwanted ad spend.
Ad groups can also use price points, which are most useful for products with a variation. They allow you to have more control over your bids and ACoS than most other campaigns.
Having control over these is incredibly important. If your conversion rates decrease without sufficient control over your bids, you will lose money.
Depending on the purpose of the campaign you would want to adjust your ACoS (advertising cost of sale). It is beneficial to keep advertising costs low, but for new product launches, it could be better for the advertising strategy to increase ACoS for more reach and to gain reviews.
3. Sponsored Campaigns
There are multiple sponsored campaign options to utilize depending on the campaign goals. For example, sponsored products are great for driving short-term sales, display ads can re-engage target audiences and brands can generate awareness.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored products are excellent in the consideration and purchase stages of a customer journey. They can be used to clear inventory, showcase well-performing products, and promote seasonal products.
Using sponsored products could prevent the aged inventory fees, which Amazon are introducing this year. Product campaigns use keyword targeting to seamlessly place relevant products within shopping results and product pages; having your ad appear at the top of the search results.
Sponsored Display
Display ad campaigns appear in numerous places, including the home page, product detail pages (PDPs), and search results.
These ads are especially useful for reengaging and spreading brand awareness to old and new customers. They have excellent visibility and can showcase an entire product catalog. This makes it much easier to engage with audiences who have viewed, browsed, or purchased your’s or similar products in the past.
You could also appear on your PDPs, which can increase brand loyalty by showing other product offers to your audience.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored brands are most effectively used when your campaign strategy is to increase brand awareness.
They appear above the search results as a form of top-of-the-funnel advertising; making the campaign the first thing customers see when they are searching for products. Sponsored brands can be used for keyword or branded searches and allow for a custom headline, logo, and ASINs, drastically advancing your brand awareness goal.
4. Amazon Video in Search Ads
Video ad campaigns have become an invaluable tool to build brand awareness, through their ability to engage audiences and convey a brand message across platforms.
The more interest you can develop around your product, your chance of conversion is much greater. In a recent survey, Hubspot identified that 93% of marketers say video helped them increase brand awareness as well as 94% saying it helped to increase consumer understanding of their product.
Video campaigns are keyword targeted and link directly to the PDP and allow for a cross-device campaign to reach audiences on whichever platform they are using!
5. The Flywheel Effect
The ‘flywheel effect’ could be compared to pedaling a bicycle. The momentum of the pedaling gives the bike the initial push it requires to move, then gravity does the rest.
The flywheel effect uses the original paid advertisement to gain initial traffic to product pages. This traffic then increases the likelihood of your product gaining the ‘Amazon’s choice’ tag, which leads to more product attention.
Like a peddled wheel, the idea is that the traffic will eventually carry itself, leading to greater profit margins. Through gaining enough traction from initially paid advertising the product and brand can carry itself with continued success.
To use this method, you need to capitalize on numerous areas of customer experience. For example introduce lower prices, more third-party sellers and better customer service, etc. The more of these small pushes you give the wheel the more momentum you are putting into it, making growth easier to maintain. It’s science.
6. Using Negative Keywords
As mentioned before, utilizing the exclusion/ negative keyword feature for your ad campaigns can save you money on wasted advertising costs.
Excluding low-sale keywords will remove them from the larger search results. Doing this will ensure your ad money is not wasted on people who have no intention of buying your product. Negative Keywords can exclude specific brands like Nike or Android users from the search terms.
This can be helpful when you are selling a specific product or simply do not want to compete with those brands. For example, it would prove unprofitable to advertise to consumers buying Samsung earphones if you are selling iPhone cases.
A good way to take advantage of negative keywords is by using the customer search term report (or bulk optimization) to understand data regarding the performance of keywords.
Looking at the traffic compared with conversions would be a start, which would prevent you from paying per click without the sales.
You can filter out less profitable terms and maximize long-tail keywords, to whittle down the target audience, for higher conversions. For example, using ‘floral iPhone-12 phone case’ over ‘phone’ will remove unwanted phone users clicking on your ad.
In conclusion, specificity makes money.
7. Lowering Your ACoS
There has been a lot of talk about advertising costs. But what should your ACoS look like? Naturally, maintaining a lower ACoS is the goal as it means you are spending less money.
However, there are certain times when increasing your advertising budget could be beneficial for a campaign. For example, when you are launching a new product it requires extra traction than an already established item.
This is when increasing the advertising cost can aid in traffic and gaining reviews, which helps with gaining momentum for the flywheel effect. On the other hand, for your best-selling products, you would want a lower ACoS as it has already developed the required traction; it is easier to find as they are higher in the organic search results.
Amazon has recently brought out a new budget rules feature, which will significantly help with optimizing and managing budgets for campaigns according to performance and events.
8. Bidding Optimisation
Bidding optimization is essential to prevent you from losing money on unsuccessful keywords. Not all of your keywords will be successful so it is important to optimize your bidding to prevent unwanted ad spend.
To prevent this you must set your default bids at the keyword level that you can afford.
You will want to continuously watch your conversion rate metrics as they will not remain the same throughout a campaign. Through doing this you can adjust the bids accordingly, which will prevent you from losing valuable money.
It is useful to recognize what your profit margins are and which keywords are performing best. Through these insights, you can raise the bids on the well-performing key terms and reduce the keywords losing you money.
You will not have the same profit margins on all of your products, so you must understand that the bid spend will be different as well. However, as mentioned above it may be advantageous to raise bids on new products to gain search history and prevent Amazon from favouring products with a greater selling history.
The goal is profit and business progression and that is the same for Amazon as well, so keep that in mind.
9. Amazon SEO
Search engine optimization ensures your product lands at the top of the search results.
Using the Amazon Search Terms feature enables sellers to optimize their search results by identifying which keywords work for their products as well as their competitors.
This gives sellers the ability to steal the audience of well-performing products. Therefore, campaigners should optimize their head terms and long-tail keywords for Amazon SEO. This will enhance the campaign’s visibility, which in correlation increases sales and brand awareness.
Head terms are basic words and short phrases that are used in more general search results. For example, broad terms like ‘cooking appliances’ if you were selling a blender.
As opposed to long-tail keywords which are more specific and are used to target a narrower audience. For example, ‘multipurpose-portable-blender’ has a far greater effect in more specific search results.
The most search-relevant key terms should be included in the title, backend descriptions, and bullet points; the greater the amount of SEO in a campaign the more effective it will prove in search results and reaching your target audience.
Using relevant head terms within your phrases will open the campaign so that those using long-tail keywords can find the product. Also, remember to ensure you have good image quality and a thorough approach to your product description; these all engage with your SEO for the best campaign outcome.
10. Using Long-Tail High Purchase Intent Keywords
Long-tail keywords have been mentioned a lot. But why are they so important and what does it look like to use them? It may appear obvious to some but the more specific a search term is then the more relevant the search result will be.
An example of this is if I were to require a new S J Maas book I would have more success searching for S Maas, Throne of glass, and book 2 rather than just searching for a ‘book’ or ‘fantasy book’. This is a simplified version but the understanding is the same.
These keywords are often three or more keywords put together and can be used in conjunction with phrase matching and head terms. No tip is one size fits all and it is beneficial to use a combination of these to improve a campaign. Long-tail keywords engage your campaign with more relevant searches, which leads to a higher conversion rate.
11. Product Level Profitability
To develop your campaign you will also need to look at more granular/detailed data by looking at product-level profitability.
Understanding the profit margins of individual products will lead to a greater campaign strategy; you will want to understand the gross profit on items before introducing paid advertising.
Assessing this data will give the seller an indication of which products present as benefiting the most with the lowest risk. This will prevent overspending on advertising costs for risky products.
Risky products are those that produce a small number of conversions, which would benefit less from advertising than a product that is performing well without advertising. Shifting the budget to high-performing campaigns aids in the flywheel effect.
12. Using the Advanced Amazon Ad Placement Report
The Amazon placement report is one of the most important tools at your disposal as an Amazon seller. As you are likely already aware, selling is an ever-changing environment and what was successful this week may not stay successful next week.
It is important to constantly monitor the performance of your campaigns and adjust the ads accordingly. This will prevent you from losing visibility with the knock-on effect of losing conversions.
The report identifies which placements are proving useful on the customer journey compared to those needing to be tweaked. These adjustments will also be affected by your advertising strategy and ACoS goals, depending on your TACoS targets.
Naturally, keeping advertising costs low is the goal, but page placement affects the cost and campaign performance. With a high budget and high visibility goal, it may be a good idea to place ads top of the funnel rather than at the bottom. These are the small adjustments that can have a significant impact on your campaign.
This report can also indicate a return on investment (ROI) to determine which keywords are performing well.
13. Landing Page Optimisation
Your landing page should pique the curiosity of your customer.
Here are some ways you can optimize your landing page to grab your audience’s attention:
- Optimize above the fold – it is the first thing customers see, so it is crucial to make this as engaging and exciting as possible in a short amount of time.
- Have a clear call to action – staying compliant with Amazon’s campaign requirements, it is very useful to include a clear CTA. It will direct customers to the next step of their journey and make the intention of the ad clear.
- FOMO – we don’t want to miss out on a party and it works for advertising. Including scarcity features like a limited-time offer will push traffic. Remember to include the deadline of the offer to enforce the urgency.
- Branding – this is the time to stand out from the competition and identify what makes you different. This will engage audiences and build brand awareness for future purchases.
- Use visuals – images and video engage a different part of the brain and break up the information. People gather information differently, so adding a variety of aspects would make your brand more memorable.
- Add evidence – using reviews and testimonials of previous customers will push conversions. We often trust other people’s judgments, so proving you are trusted by other consumers will aid sales substantially.
- Keep things simple – you want to provide a positive customer experience. Keep your ad copy clear and concise to prevent any miscommunications. ‘Simples!’.
14. Using Match Types
Match types are useful for producing an ultra-targeted campaign, to reach buyers with the greatest amount of purchasing intent.
Once you have put together your campaign you will be asked to enter keywords as well as if you would like to use the broad, phrase, or exact keyword match. What do these do and which one should you use?
- Broad match – this is useful for new campaigns as it creates a wide audience whilst you are figuring out your most responsive keywords.
- Phrase match – this limits the search results to phrases or words just before or after your indicated keywords; including plurals or misspellings. This narrows the search to those looking for your product and helps gather information about useful search terms.
- Exact match – proving to be the most restricted of the types it only includes misspellings and plurals. This is perfect once you have gathered enough information as it sends the ad directly to the interested target.
15. Competitor Keywords
You can use keyword insights to engage your own and your competition’s audience. Using this can help you to understand the performance of your own campaign as well as theirs and adjust accordingly.
There are automatic tools like Keyword Inspector, which can be used to prevent researching terms manually. These tools can reverse-search ASINs in seconds.
They would provide information about which keywords are working for those products and use the ones with the most potential.
If you desired, you could also negate the low-performing keywords from your campaign as well.
The ability to practically steal the audience of your competitors is game-changing, especially if you are new to selling and have limited keywords of your own.
To summarize, staying clear and understanding your campaign strategy is key to developing a successful campaign. Know your win conditions; what you need to do to stay aware of the changing consumer environment, and be aware of what your competitors are doing. Keywords are your best friend, whether you negate them, add them or match them, you should use them.
Clear Ads are Amazon advertising specialists who are trained to use the Amazon advertising platform to help your business grow. We are trained to keep up to date on the latest techniques and know when it is best to increase the budget or when a product is too risky to spend advertising budget.
Our job is to support your business, so if you want to upgrade your advertising strategy and incorporate all of the above, request a callback.
