Success on Amazon is tied to product visibility. For new sellers with very little sales history or reviews, getting to the first page of the search results is an uphill task. This is where Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns come into the picture.
Through Amazon PPC, sellers can create advertisements for their products. These ads will show up for specific keywords in Amazon’s search results and other related product listings, or even on platforms outside Amazon. They are one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates and discoverability for your products on Amazon.
- What is Amazon PPC?
- Types of Amazon PPC advertisements
- Amazon PPC Tips & Hacks
- Use Automatic Campaigns
- Structure your campaigns
- Keep similar products in your ad groups
- Use negative keywords
- Leverage the power of data
- Bid on your own brand
- Cut out the non-performers
- Optimize your campaigns regularly
- Make the most out of your PPC campaigns
What is Amazon PPC?
Before we dive into the deep-end of Amazon advertising, let’s start with the basics. When you set up an Amazon PPC campaign, you’re bidding on keywords. When a customer searches for a product, the sellers with the highest bids on the relevant keywords win the auction. Based on the bid and the competition, Sponsored Products are listed in the search results.
Don’t forget, this is an auction. This means you only have to pay a single cent more than your competitor’s bid to have your product show up in Amazon’s search results. The best part? You only have to pay the bid price if consumers click on your sponsored product’s listing!
With over 12 million products on Amazon, new sellers face the risk of getting lost in all the noise. A well-managed PPC campaign can help new sellers turn the tide, and gain more visibility. Hence, better Amazon pay per click management and Amazon PPC optimization is crucial. For expert sellers who are already at the top, a well-managed PPC campaign is key to holding on to that top spot in Amazon’s search results.
The ideal Amazon pay per click management strategy varies from seller to seller. The most important thing you need to do is to identify the main goal of your PPC campaign and practice proper Amazon PPC optimization. If you’re looking to kick-off a brand new private label and create brand awareness, a higher ACoS might be a reasonable target. If you’re looking to drive sales and increase your profit margin, it is important to keep your ACoS below 30%.
Whether you are a novice or an expert seller, these advertising campaigns are key to improving visibility and conversions! Let’s look at how you can make the most out of your Amazon PPC campaigns through tested and proven Amazon PPC tips.
Types of Amazon PPC advertisements
There are three types of PPC ad campaigns that you can start on Amazon. Here’s a brief overview:
1. Sponsored Product ads
These are the advertisements on Amazon that appear within the search results and product listing pages. All third-party sellers can create a sponsored product ad. This makes it the most common type of PPC advertisement on Amazon.
Sponsored product ads can be further divided into two types:
- Automatic-targeting: Automatic-targeting allows you to take your hands off the wheel. Amazon’s algorithm finds relevant keywords from your product listing. Over time, Amazon uses the data it collects from clicks and purchases to adjust the ads to increase your conversions. Automatic-targeting ads cannot be manually optimized.
- Manual-targeting: In a manually-targeted campaign, the seller inputs the relevant keywords and bids. The entire process is manual, so you’ll need to constantly monitor the keywords and bids, and make adjustments where applicable. Manual optimization usually leads to more effective ads in the long-run.
2. Sponsored Brand ads
These ads are only available for brand-registered products on Amazon. They are banner ads that include a brand’s logo, message, and products in Amazon’s search results. They are displayed on the top of search results on Amazon, on the left-hand rail, or at the bottom of the page in search results.
Sponsored brand ads are great to target top-of-the-funnel customers.
3. Sponsored Display ads
When compared to the other two types of PPC ads, Sponsored Display ads are an outlier. These ads are not targeted using keywords. Sponsored Display ads show up depending on customer behavior. If you need a detailed breakdown of the differences between Sponsored Display ads and Product ads, you can check out this great article.
Thanks to its targeting algorithm, Sponsored Display ads are a great way to poach bottom-of-the-funnel customers from your competitors. Sponsored Display ads are available to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, and agencies with clients who sell products on Amazon.
Amazon PPC Hacks
This is a difficult question to answer. Depending on your goals, the definition of a ‘good’ strategy varies. However, there are a few proven strategies that every PPC campaign should follow to be successful.
1. Use Automatic Campaigns
While manual-targeted campaigns give you the chance to optimize your ads, automatic campaigns have their benefits. They are a great source to discover new high-converting long-tail keywords that lead to conversions.
Keyword research is a key part of optimizing your PPC listings. You should run a manual campaign and an automatic campaign simultaneously for an ad group. Let the campaigns run for a couple of weeks. The automatic campaign is bound to bring up relevant keywords that lead to conversions.
All you have to do now is move the high-converting keywords to your manual campaign for further optimization. Manual campaigns give you more control over your ad spend and will help you achieve your target ACoS (advertising cost of sale.)
2. Structure your campaigns
Always make sure you organize your campaigns. The worst thing you can do is spend money bidding against yourself. You can group your products when creating ad groups under the following categories:
- By product category
- By brand
- By top sellers/your top competitors
Make sure you are consistent with your categorization to avoid potential overlap.
3. Keep similar products in your ad groups
Do men’s sneakers and women’s running shoes belong in the same ad group? While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, most of the time they do not belong together. When you are creating your ad groups, ensure that all the products in an ad group share similar target keywords.
This is all the more important if you have a large portfolio.
4. Use negative keywords
If you discover that there are keywords that have a large volume of clicks, but no conversions, it is probably because the keyword is not relevant to your product. In such cases, you need to ensure that your product is not advertised for these search terms.
The best way to do it is to mark irrelevant keywords as ‘negative’ keywords. Your products will not be advertised for those keywords afterward. Be careful not to mark too many keywords as ‘negative’ keywords, especially if they are relevant to your product. If low conversions are the issue, it might be better to lower your bid on the keywords in question.
There are two ways you can fine-tune your campaign using negative keywords:
- Negative Phrase: Your ads will not show for the search term or close variations of them.
- Negative Exact: Your ads will not show for the exact search term.
Identifying negative keywords is key to reducing your ad spend and improving your ACoS.
5. Make data-informed choices
Data is the new oil. Optimizing your PPC campaigns on Amazon is impossible without coherent and actionable data. While Amazon provides all the relevant information about your campaigns, it is often difficult to extract useful information from the clutter. Campaign reports are key to growing your Amazon business, so how do you make sense of them?
Many tools like SellerApp offer data analytics solutions to help clear the clutter and stay competitive in the e-commerce marketplace.
6. Bid on your own brand
You’re probably wondering why you would want to launch PPC campaigns targeting your own brand name. It’s because your competitors are doing it too. If you have an established brand, it is important that you protect your customer-base and prevent your competitors from stealing your market share.
On the flip side, if you’re looking to expand your brand name and customer base, bid on your competitors’ brand names. This will ensure that your products turn up when consumers look for your competitors’ products.
7. Cut out the non-performers
When you’re advertising on Amazon, you’re either looking to boost sales or improve brand recognition. Either way, selling on Amazon is about finding the right product. If your product isn’t flying off the shelves even after a dedicated PPC campaign, it’s recommended that you stop advertising it. In some cases, you may even need to remove the listing to save your hard-earned cash.
Your money is valuable, so only spend it on products that offer high returns!
8. Optimize your campaigns regularly
Make sure you check on your campaigns on a regular basis. This holds true for your manual and automatic campaigns. At the end of every week, check which keywords brought the most traffic and resulted in the highest conversions. Adjust your bids to reflect keyword performance. Your decisions should be driven only by data. You can find the ACoS for each of your keywords with SellerApp’s PPC dashboard.
- If a keyword’s ACoS surpasses your target, decrease the bid.
- If a keyword is performing well and the ACoS is lower than the target value, you should bid higher.
- If there are keywords that do not drive any traffic at all, you can try increasing the bid for a week.
- If you notice keywords that are not relevant to your listing, mark them as negative keywords.
Optimizing your PPC campaigns is a full-time job. Services such as SellerApp can automate your campaign management process. All you need to do is set your target ACoS. The SellerApp algorithm will take care of the rest. It will optimize your ad campaigns based on high performing and low-performing keywords.
Make the most out of your PPC campaigns
As I mentioned earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. However, these tips will help you throughout your campaigns – no matter what the goal. With rising competition in the e-commerce marketplace, a well-managed advertising strategy is non-negotiable for long-term success. Amazon’s PPC campaigns are tailored to help you reach consumers at all points of the sales funnel.
Whether you’re looking to drive sales or lower your ACoS, you can fine-tune your campaigns with SellerApp’s data-driven algorithm.