Table of content:
1. What is Amazon PPC, and why do you need it
2. The challenges of advertising on Amazon
2.1. How to choose the right Amazon advertising strategy?
2.2. How to minimize Amazon ACoS?
2.3.Are you truly in control of your Amazon PPC campaigns?
2.4.What influences the success of your Amazon ads?
3. Is Amazon advertising genuinely worth it?
4. Are your Amazon PPC campaigns set up correctly?
1. What is Amazon PPC, and why do you need it?
Amazon PPC is an internal Amazon advertising system allowing different merchants (i.e., third-party sellers, brands or agencies) to target potential buyers (via keywords, product targetings or remarketing) in a campaign, thereby attracting quality traffic to your listing while only paying a certain fee (aka bid) for each click. These advertisements can appear in Amazon search results and your competitors’ listings. In this manner, sellers offer appropriate goods at an appropriate time to the buyers willing to make a purchase.
However, how important is it when selling on Amazon? As buyers continuously swap to online platforms like Amazon to fulfill their shopping needs, especially following the advent of the pandemic, switching to e-commerce is now a must — not just a possibility, if you wish to succeed. Yet with this change comes a plethora of competitors eager to take your share of profit.
As such, it is vital to establish an effective Amazon PPC campaign to distinguish your brand among untold millions (namely, 350 million) of products on Amazon. Organic ranking, although important, simply isn’t enough. Through PPC, you can reach out to a wider audience.
2. The challenges of advertising on Amazon
Given the number of products available on Amazon and the ever more competitive environment on the platform, a plethora of challenges arises when promoting your brand. In the following few paragraphs, we would like to shed some light on the most important of those and offer solutions to them.
2.1. How to choose the right Amazon advertising strategy?
The effectiveness of a particular strategy largely depends on the goal you seek to achieve via advertising. For example, there are different strategies for sustaining a certain ACoS, increasing overall or PPC profit, launching a new product, expanding your keyword arsenal, etc. As such, you would have to set your priorities properly or seek assistance from various tools specifically designed for this purpose.
Sponsoreds is one of such tools. Based on the 6+ years of expertise, based on working with hundreds of Amazon sellers, their team has developed a unique approach to PPC campaign setup. Their strategies revolve around attracting customer traffic by optimizing and ranking keywords correctly. The number of impressions and sales increases, so you slowly but steadily reach the wanted “bestseller” status. At this point, you not only gain new customers but pull them away from your competitors. That’s the core of all strategies available in Sponsoreds software.
2.2. How to minimize Amazon ACoS?
Many of the advertising strategies are based on minimizing your ACoS. But how exactly do you achieve that? Your different campaigns may include duplicate keywords, which causes unnecessary competition between them; thus, their overall performance drops, and ACoS rises. Insufficient data monitoring via subpar tools can also lead to unwanted peaks in spending.
For example, the original tools provided by Amazon for automatic campaigns operate with a limited AI and offer no opportunities for optimization since Amazon runs these campaigns basically on its own. As a result, bids are the same for both high- and low-converting keywords. Moreover, Amazon picks the search terms based on their relevancy, not profitability. To top it all off, your ads can be placed in an irrelevant category, thus, rendering the ad useless. Therefore, users resort to third-party software, which resolves many existing issues, improves various metrics and allows for the sharpest decrease in ACoS possible.
For example, to solve the mentioned low-relevancy keywords problem, software from Sponsoreds utilizes the power of an AI, letting it negate (and essentially remove) most of the irrelevant search terms using ‘Negative Exact’ and ‘Negative Phrase’ keywords. The primary point is to set exact or phrase keywords that are irrelevant to the product but considered by Amazon as the opposite, as negative keywords for a campaign. Doing that before starting your campaigns prevents unwanted wasted ad spend on irrelevant and low-converting search terms, that otherwise would only be discovered after campaigns have been running for some time.
Another technique used by Sponsoreds is “Search Terms isolation”. It ensures that each search term pool is associated with a unique keyword in your advertising campaigns, thus preventing competition between different keywords for the same search term. It removes the possibility for artificial bid increases and prevents advertising data from being split between two keywords for the same search term. That means that you are not overpaying for your keywords and you get clear data on how each keyword or search term is performing.
“Search Terms isolation” is achieved in two ways: by deleting any keywords but one that target the same search term pool (this includes duplicates, singular/plural forms, keywords that only differ by articles, etc.); and by marking all keywords from the semantic core as negative exact or negative phrase keywords in automatic or broad targeted campaigns to avoid competition between any campaigns managed by the software.
For Product Targeting, the Sponsoreds software sets your ASIN targetings as negative ASINs for automatic campaigns, Category and Audience campaigns to prevent competition between those campaigns on competitors’ listings.
Therefore all of the above methods help Amazon Advertising tools reduce your ACoS and optimize your campaigns pursuant to the chosen strategy.
2.3. Are you truly in control of your Amazon PPC campaigns?
To give you a brief answer here: you are, yet there is plenty of room for mistakes. Within the current environment on Amazon, you ought to take into account all the necessary information, such as target ACoS, potential CVR and the CPC stemming from it, level of competition, etc. Unfortunately, people tend to get overwhelmed easily, and, as a result, their PPC campaigns’ performance suffers.
To add insult to injury, automatic campaigns within Amazon itself are designed poorly (i.e., they are too difficult to set up and show lacking results) compared to other software for setting up such campaigns. However, Zero to Hero tool from Sponsoreds allows for the automatic creation of various in-depth campaigns guided by modern AI, and, combined with Automation software, can make optimal decisions 24/7 and notify you of any changes made, facilitating the management of the numerous campaigns you have and helping you divert your time elsewhere.
2.4. What influences the success of your Amazon ads?
The two major factors impacting the success of your campaigns are the choice of keywords, including negative ones, and the correct bid. Additionally, off-site decisions, proper analytics, and calculations can skyrocket your chances of success. Unfortunately, Amazon is unwilling to share the best-performing practices, leaving you effectively blindfolded to your marketing potential.
Luckily, Sponsoreds has the capacity for analyzing and processing data from numerous accounts through their custom-made AI combined with years of experience in this field, allowing them to formulate the best-performing strategies and offer them to you together with their software.
3. Is Amazon advertising worth it?
To put it mildly, not using Amazon PPC while doing business on this platform is like rowing a boat without an oar: you technically can manage that; however, there are so many more productive methods to achieve the same goal. So, your campaigns have to be set up correctly to avoid unnecessary spending. Furthermore, in order to stay competitive, it’s best you use professional AI-based software rather than rush in blindly and waste your limited resources. Other than that, you should definitely use Amazon PPC to further advance your business.
4. Are your Amazon PPC campaigns set up correctly?
As we have previously established, data is everything when dealing with PPC campaigns. But how do you know exactly what is happening and when? Of course, you can be diligent about managing your ads, but it is so much easier with an online tool, even more so with a free one. Thus, jump on the bandwagon and analyze your PPC campaigns with the 100% Free PPC Audit tool!
