You need to monitor your keywords and optimize your bids to make your ads run profitably. If you can automate all these processes, you can save a lot of time and effort, can’t you? 

Advertising automation can really help you streamline your Amazon ad management.

Besides, automating your campaign management will also give you precise results. 

This article tells you everything about how automation can benefit you as a marketer and helps you with techniques that can make you stand out in the competition. 

What to consider before beginning with automation

The problem with Amazon PPC campaigns is you constantly need to test and track them. But automation allows you to be productive and save a lot of time and effort – more about that later. 

You need to know all the aspects of your Amazon ad that you can automate. 

Here are the three key aspects of your Amazon campaign that you can automate:

• Bids
• Keywords
• Campaigns

Along with that, we’d suggest you track your campaign budgets so you can effectively automate your campaigns. 

Why should you automate your Amazon campaigns?

Amazon advances every day, and so does the competition. Therefore, any advertising efforts demand quick and precise results in an unprecedented way. And, automation helps you achieve just that. Besides, instead of monitoring and optimizing manually, you can focus on other activities, including product research, inventory management, and other activities of your business.  

Advertising automation can benefit Amazon sellers in multiple ways. 

Automation saves time

This is a no-brainer. Automation allows you to save time for engaging yourself in other productive activities that may help boost your business, apart from ad management. If you have a large portfolio of products and run multiple automatic and manual campaigns, you need to spend more time managing and optimizing ad campaigns. 

It reduces effort with built-in features

When you leverage automation and tools that can optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns, you can find insightful features that give you actionable data on existing campaigns. Let’s say these advanced Amazon optimization tools can suggest negative keywords depending on your target ACoS, help you find top-performing keywords from automatic campaigns, and suggest you take necessary actions. 

These built-in features help you launch, optimize, and scale your campaigns seamlessly.

Automation Improves scalability

The campaign’s scalability increases if you run and manage multiple campaigns without spending much effort and time. This would save you time in strategizing your advertising efforts.

It helps in documentation and data collection

Analyzing historical advertising data is helpful for creating campaigns. The search term report and targeting report are very helpful to advertisers. But, Amazon only allows access to advertising reports for 65 days and 90 days respectively. That means you should download all the data periodically or you will lose the historical data. 

On the flip side, if you use third-party advertising automation tools, you can access all your data from the time you sync your account to till date.

It operates based on a set of rules

There are two cases that arise if you change bids manually without automation. You lower the bid beyond a limit so that you no longer deal with many important keywords. The second case is where the bid goes higher than expected. In this scenario, the ACoS increases unimaginably.

When you automate the process of optimization, the system decreases or increases bids based on several pre-set rules. This helps you maintain an optimum ACoS and ensure that you do not omit relevant keywords. 

Optimizes round the clock

The automation mechanisms work round the clock without any break so that the reports and analyses are available at any time. 

Lowering the scope of human errors

When you are doing the PPC management manually, it is quite natural for mistakes to creep in. Unlike manual PPC management, automation does away with mistakes and false interpretations. 

Things to keep in mind before you automate Amazon ad campaigns

Before you automate the campaigns, there are certain steps you should follow to ensure your automation process runs smoothly. 

Fixing the goals

Setting a clear goal for your campaigns will help you create the right PPC strategies. These goals may include, increased brand visibility, more brand awareness, better organic ranking, improved market share, etc. 

Set the ad budget and closely watch the metrics

Keep in mind the budget. You also need to possess an understanding of the metrics you want to watch. Watching the metrics for some time will help you find what’s working for your campaign. This will lead to the refinement of your PPC strategies.  

Choose the right way to automate your campaigns

There are two ways in which you can automate your campaigns. 

Use an advertising tool like SellerApp to automate some of your PPC tasks. 

You can either optimize manually or go for automation. If you choose automation, you can also decide if you want to go with the defined rules or the machine learning algorithms. 

Difference between rule-based automation and machine-learning automation

A step-by-step guide to automating your Amazon PPC campaigns using SellerApp 

Now that you know the many benefits that automation brings to your Amazon ads, let’s see how to automate your PPC campaigns. Here is the step-by-step guide. 

SellerApp’s automation rules work based on pre-defined rule sets. You can automate your PPC using these rules. To begin with the automation, you need to:

• Log in to the Dashboard
• Navigate to “Advertising”
• Click “Automation”
• Select “Automation Blueprint”

You can either “Create from Blank” or “Choose from template”

Choose from Template

If you click “Automation Blueprint,” it will show three rule templates to choose from. They include:

• Increase visibility
• ACoS Optimization
• Budget Management

You can increase your product’s visibility by incorporating search terms that will gain you more impressions. You can use Keyword Harvester and ROI Optimizer to achieve this. 

ACoS optimization allows you to adjust your ad spending according to the performance of your keywords. It helps you boost your ROI while maintaining your ACoS. You can curb the wastage of money by optimizing negative keyword targets in your campaigns. You can use the feature called Money Saver to attain optimum ACoS. 

The third rule is Budget Management, which helps you use dayparting to optimize your campaign budgets. Dayparting helps you run your ads at the most optimal times of the day. You can use dayparting at the campaign and account levels. 

Create from Blank

Apart from choosing from the pre-set rule templates, you can also create your own rule from scratch. The “Create from Blank” option allows you to create your own rules or set different conditions for your campaign. 

Click “Create from blank” and add the relevant information about your new rule.

Final words

Automation minimizes your workload to a great extent. But you can not lean back imagining that automation will bring the desired results. It is always a good idea to review your campaigns at least once a week. Also, give the right suggestions to the automation system at the right time to gain maximum benefit. 

——

About the Author:

Arishekar is a multi-faceted marketing professional with a proven track record of success in the highly competitive e-commerce industry. As the Senior Marketing Director at SellerApp, Arishekar has been instrumental in driving the growth and success of the company. With over ten years of experience in digital marketing, he has specialized in areas such as SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing, making him a multifaceted marketing professional.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arishekar/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arishekarn

Naturally, everyone reading this is asking the same question: how do I calculate the right bid then? My answer to that is it’s not so simple. There’s an important distinction that needs to be made before discussing bids and it’s the difference between your bid and CPC.

Why Your Bid Is Different Than Your CPC and What to Do About It

Amazon gives you the option of three strategies that you can use when bidding on a keyword, they are dynamic bids up & down, dynamic bids down only, and fixed bids.

Any form of dynamic bidding allows Amazon to change the actual bid you place which can cause a massive difference in CPC. A $0.75 bid can quickly turn into a $1.50 one with up & down and if you have a placement boost on top of that your bid could reach $3 and beyond.

This means setting the right bid isn’t really what you should be aiming for, the CPC is actually what you end up paying and consequently matters a lot more.

The ACoS vs Sales dilemma

Every seller could theoretically achieve a 1% ACoS, they’d just have to be fine with selling only a couple of units each month.

Every seller could also achieve seemingly infinite sales growth, they’d just have to be okay with a high ACoS and a massive ad budget.

Unless either of these scenarios appeals to you somehow, you’re going to have to find a balance.

You need to find the sweet spot between sales and ACoS where all the profit is made, and the way you do that is through the concept of the marginal increase in profits.

With this concept, you basically ask yourself if making that next sale at a higher ACoS will increase the overall profit for your account or decrease it. Essentially, is it better to sell 10 units at a 20% ACoS or sell 11 units at a 21% ACoS?

Let’s say you have a $50 product with a margin of 30% and you’re presented with two scenarios, either sell 100 units at 17% ACoS or 130 units at a 23% ACoS, which one do you choose? The 100 units scenario leaves you with a net profit of $650 after ad costs whereas the 130 units will leave you with $455. So in this scenario, it would make sense to keep your target ACoS at 17%.

Finding the magical number that actually works for you will require some testing, which is why most sellers rely on back-of-the-envelope calculations at the beginning, which can work for the time being.

Bidding based on your ACoS target

Now that you have a target ACoS in mind it’s time to learn how to reach it, which requires a bit of math. You see, achieving your target comes down to a simple mathematical formula that goes like this:

Ideal CPC = Target ACoS x CVR x Average Order Value

So, if you have an ACoS target of 30%, your CVR is 12% and your AOV is $54 you’d need a CPC of $1.94 to hit that goal.

Identifying that target ACoS is pretty much the hard part, after that it’s just a matter of working with the numbers you already have.

Is It Really This Easy?

While this all looks simple in theory, calculating CVR for the hundreds or even thousands of keywords you have on a regular basis and updating bids accordingly can be a pretty daunting task. You’d also have to consider the fact that you’re making these calculations based on past data which might not necessarily represent what the future holds – so you’d actually need to predict future CVR for your bids to be 100% accurate. On top of all that, you’d need to figure out the right campaign bidding strategy to use for each scenario and the effect of placement boost on CPC.

You’d essentially need to turn into a machine, calculating CVR for keywords 24/7, managing bidding strategies, and setting the correct placement boosts if you want to make this work.

That doesn’t sound fun or realistic. This is why it makes sense to enlist the help of an actual machine, or software, like AiHello to do this for you.

An AI-based PPC bidding software takes into account dozens of different factors and billions of dollars worth of advertising data that actually allows it to predict the future CVR of your keywords. They’re capable of doing these mathematical calculations in a split second while also managing placement boosts and changing bidding strategies on all your campaigns automatically.

This means that software is pretty much one of the only realistic ways to keep your account at target ACoS that doesn’t require you to work on your campaigns 20 hours a day or to be a mathematical genius.

Conclusion

Whether you decide to go the software route or not, success with ads comes down to selecting the right ACoS target that will maximize profits and working backward using mathematical formulas to get there. If you know your numbers well enough you’ll always do well in the world of PPC.

——

About the Author:

Saif is the Co-Founder and CRO of AiHello, a one of a kind AI-based PPC software used by 4000+ sellers worldwide. Saif is an expert in both the quantitative and qualitative parts of Amazon where he’s able to incorporate positioning, branding and mathematical concepts together to outsmart the competition. You can find more of him on Linkedin.

However, if done the wrong way, it can prove costly and reverse your marketing efforts. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the mistakes that sellers make with Amazon advertising and what you can do to avoid committing them. 

What is ROAS?

In the world of Amazon advertising, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is one of the key metrics used to measure the performance and efficiency of a campaign. It is the metric by which you can calculate the amount of money generated or lost from the amount of money invested into a campaign. It is the inverse of ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales).

ROAS is calculated using this formula:

ROAS = Total revenue from ad spendTotal ad spend OR ROAS = 1/ACOS

Top PPC Mistakes to Avoid for a Good ROAS

Using the right ad types according to your objectives

Launching PPC campaigns should always align with your business goals. Sellers use various strategies to ensure the success of their campaigns. But choosing the wrong ad type can be detrimental to improving your campaign ROAS as well as your long-term profitability. 

Amazon has 3 different ad types – Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Each of these serves a different purpose and helps you achieve different goals. 

For example – if you’re looking to build brand awareness and visibility by achieving more impressions and are less focused on increasing sales, then Sponsored Brand ads are better than Sponsored Products. Sponsored Brands should be used to target customers at the top of the sales funnel, whereas Sponsored Products work best for improving conversions. 

Remember, it is important to have a well-planned long-term strategy. This lets you understand and analyze which customers clicked on your ads and at what point of their shopping journey, along with the right ad types. On the whole, this helps improve your ROAS overall. 

Regular bid optimization

Your bidding strategies need to be constantly checked on as it is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of concept. How much you bid changes according to the time as well as during peak shopping season when you will have to bid more aggressively for a particular keyword because of high competition. If you bid too low or moderately, you can lose out on important sales to your competitors. At the same time, if you’re bidding too high, it means your ACoS will be very high, and your ROAS will be low. Optimizing bids need to be done frequently along with monitoring them, preferably on a weekly basis if not daily. 

Measure the right KPIs

When it comes to measuring the performance of your ads, there are several important ad metrics – impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, CPC, etc. However, analyzing all these metrics for all campaigns will do you no good. You need to measure KPIs depending on your campaign goals. You may see high numbers, but if they’re for the wrong performance indicators, you’re not going to know if you’re on the right track in terms of your business goals or not. 

So how can you know what KPIs to focus on? 

Many sellers think that a high conversion rate and clicks are good. But if you notice that your CTR is low, it is an indication that you’re missing out on optimizing several other crucial factors. On the other hand, if you’re looking to increase your brand awareness and exposure, then a high CTR and clicks are good indicators. 

Ultimately, many advertisers want to achieve a high ROAS. While you may have achieved this, if your ad spends, on the whole, doesn’t take into account the profitability of your product, it is an indication that your overall profitability and revenue are moving on a downward trajectory. 

To ensure a good ROAS overall, you need to always ensure that you’re looking at the bigger picture and focusing on your brand/company’s long-term goals.

Targeting the right audience and relevancy 

Amazon Sponsored ads are known to be useful in reaching a wide audience. However, targeting a wide audience is not always as fruitful as targeting the right audience, however large. Your ads have to be relevant to the shoppers you’re trying to attract. Otherwise, you’re spending your precious ad dollars with the chances of a low ROAS. To remedy this, what you need to do is define your goals, as this will help you define the right kind of traffic that is guaranteed to convert better. 

Amazon Sponsored ads allow geo-targeting so that you can target your ads to specific regions where you’re most likely to get high-converting traffic instead of targeting an unnecessarily large audience. Another method to ensure a good ROAS is with dayparting so that your ads run only at times of the day when your target audience is most likely to shop. 

In terms of keywords, make sure you focus your research on forming a list of negative keywords because they help you cut down on wasted ad spending. Also, for a good RoAS, many sellers often forget the importance of long-tail keywords. These have better conversion rates as they bring in shoppers who are searching for a very specific product and hence are high-converting. 

Strategy, structure, and Sponsored Brand ads:

While optimization and automation are important, sellers need to focus on sustainable profitability and adopt ad structures and strategies that facilitate this. While running PPC campaigns, sellers need to remember that they need to drive their profitability without spending a lot of money on making a sale profitable. 

Another important thing is to focus on improving organic ranking and traffic side by side with PPC. Keeping this in mind, after a thorough analysis of different ad types and structures, Sponsored Brand ads have been noted to generate a ROAS that is higher than the other two ad types. 

Automation with SellerApp for a good ROAS

The SellerApp advertising suite comes with automation features that allow you to optimize your campaigns for a high ROAS. With the ability to create custom rules from scratch by defining the conditions for which you want to set triggers, you can optimize your bids and control ad spending. 

You can also choose dayparting for your ads or choose from pre-defined rule templates for automation. The three rule templates – Keyword Harvester, ROI Optimizer, and Money Saver help you. The Money Saver helps with negative keyword targeting by optimizing bids for keywords that bring in low conversion. 

The ROI optimizer lets you set a target ACOS and ROAS so that your bids are optimized for the most potential campaign keywords so as to help you achieve your goals easily. The Keyword Harvester allows you to optimize your bids in such a way that you reach relevant customers and increase conversions, impressions, and visibility for your products. SellerApp automation is a safe way to ensure your campaigns are on the right track to achieving a good ROAS. 

Final thoughts

As stated earlier, Amazon PPC offers a range of benefits to sellers but make sure you tread carefully, especially while structuring your campaigns and optimizing your bids. While automation software may be slightly pricey, it can help you save your money by ensuring that you don’t make costly mistakes. 

Don’t lose sight of your brand and company goals and structure, and deploy your campaigns accordingly. Regular monitoring and optimization are important. As long as you are on top of your campaigns and don’t forget to check on their performance and progress regularly, you are sure to be on the right track to PPC success. 

——

About the Author:

Arishekar N, Director of Marketing & Growth at SellerApp, is a specialist in digital marketing, in addition to website keyword optimization for search engines. His areas of expertise include enhancing the organic & paid ranking of web pages on search engines with innovative SEO & SEM strategies and online promotions.

You may also know them as sponsored campaigns. They are paid ads that target specific users on Amazon, and they only charge per impression. 

That means you can increase visibility and conversions, without breaking the bank.

Today, we’ll take an inside look into Amazon PPC ads. We’ll tell you how they work, and how much you should invest to enhance your revenue.

Let’s dive right in.

What are Amazon PPC Ads?

PPC Ads is short for “pay-per-click advertisements.” When using PPC ads, sellers only pay a fee when a user clicks on their ads.

Amazon PPC ads are among the top marketing strategies for sellers. That’s because sellers can create unique digital billboards to showcase their catalogs.

Once a user clicks on your ad, they’ll go directly into your sponsored listing. You’ll just need to pay a small fee.

The marketplace features 3 types of PPC ads. They can reach target audiences on and off Amazon, and at any stage of the sales journey.

Sponsored Products

The most basic PPC ads target a single item from your catalog. You can find them within product listings, or alongside search results.

One of their key perks is that they offer great control for sellers to target customers.

Sponsored products are available for both kinds of professional sellers. These PPC ads use keywords to target specific items from a seller’s catalog. 

Here are a few interesting sponsored product strategies:

• Catch-all. Use targeted keywords and publish as many product ads as possible. The idea is to leave little space in the search results for the competition.
• Top item defense. This one is about defending your ASIN. Here, you’d focus your ad spend on your best-selling offers. That way, users have fewer chances to find ads from your competitors.
• Substitution. Make your products stand out from similar offers. This strategy pairs up ads promoting related products, such as accessories or new models, with your own listings.

Sponsored Brands

These are customizable ads that highlight up to 3 products in a single banner. 

They are a bit more expensive than sponsored products. But they also come with unique perks:

• Sponsored brands are customizable. You can include unique headlines and your logo to attract followers.
• You can set up carousels to display three offers on a single page. So, you get more ad space and stop other sellers from profiting off your listing space.
• Use them to redirect users into your Amazon store, where they can look at your entire catalog.

Note that Amazon takes 72 hours to approve sponsored brands. 

Other than that, you can set up these ads in the same way as you would with sponsored products.

Sponsored Display 

This is how you can advertise your complete catalog. 

They appear below the Amazon Buy Box, right under the “Add to Cart” button. Plus, sellers can also use Sponsored displays to advertise off-Amazon.  

Sponsored display ads are not keyword-focused. Rather, they’re designed to track a user’s online behavior to improve their conversion rate.

When a customer clicks on your ad, you can then keep promoting your item using the “Amazon Display Network.” 

This means you can ‘follow’ the customer, and showcase new ads on Amazon listings, or third-party sites.

It’s a good idea to pair up display ads with your other sponsored campaigns. This way, you won’t deal with the legwork, and you’ll also double your visibility rate.  

Also, note that sponsored display ads are exclusive to merchants enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.

Should You Invest in Amazon PPC Ads?

In a word, yes, because Amazon PPC ads not only target general customers. They can also convert users who are ready to buy your products.

Amazon PPC ads rely on keywords to work their magic. These are search terms you can use to target a specific audience online. Here’s the process in a nutshell: 

1. Go to the Campaign Manager in Amazon Seller Central.

1. Select a product you want to highlight with a PPC ad.
2. Choose some relevant keywords to include within the campaign.
   1. For sponsored display ads, submit your target audience.
3. Set up a PPC bid for each keyword.

When a user searches a specific keyword, your sponsored ad will show up on Amazon

search. From here on, customers can click on the image and go to your store.

But the best part about Amazon PPC ads is that sellers get full control of the ad fees. You set the budget, ad placement, and keyword bids. It’s all in your hands!

Amazon PPC Ads Fees

All Amazon PPC ads charge on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. As we said, that means you’ll only pay for each user that clicks on your ads.

But how does the marketplace set the CPC for each ad? Each seller can submit an ideal price for each click. Amazon then takes those bids to run a pricing auction.

As you can imagine, the highest bid earns the best ad placement. However, said merchant will also pay the highest cost-per-click. The final bid only needs to be $0.01 over the second-top bid.

Such auctions take Amazon’s average CPC as a set reference. Most CPCs go from $0.02 to $3.00. The pricing changes depend on product categories and the ad type you want to run.  

Dynamic Bidding

Amazon PPC ads also feature dynamic bidding. This means the marketplace can modify your CPC bids. Here are the three options available:

1. Down Only. The bid goes down if a bid is not likely to convert users. In rare cases, bid deductions can go as low as 100%
2. Up and Down. Bids with high-conversion potential go up. The rate is up to 100% in Amazon search results, and 50% on other ad placements.
3. Fixed. Amazon deactivates dynamic bidding, so your CPC stays the same.

[Please embed this video from Seller Central]

Seller ads are set to down-only bids by default. The marketplace then adjusts the bid, based on customer behavior and item performance.

Adjust Bids by Placement

The “Adjust bids by placement” can boost a CPC bid (as much as 900%) to three different categories:

1. Top of Search. Sponsored ads appear on the first row of Amazon search results.
2. Product Pages. Ad placements appear alongside product listings or outside search queries. For example, Amazon can also place your ads on the “add to cart” page.
3. Rest of Search. You’ll get placement in Amazon search, but below the “top of search” results.

Let’s say you have a $1 bid. In case you select one of the first 2 options, your bid can go up to $10 to earn the placement you want. 

Final Thoughts

Amazon PPC ads are the key to setting up successful marketing campaigns. With these unique tools, you can boost your visibility and sales on and off Amazon.  

Take the time to design unique Amazon PPC Ads. Start off with your best-selling ASINS to reap better results. Then, work your way up to category targeting.

PPC ads are quite the tool for marketing on Amazon. Each type offers a unique chance to reach customers, at any point of the sales journey.

First off, they’re ideal to draw the interest of new users. But most of all, such ads can drive customers to make the purchase they’ve wanted to make for a while.

Such a full-fledged tool will surely drive your conversions, while generating brand awareness. And you’ll get to do it with minimal investment. If you require more help managing your PPC campaign, consider an Amazon PPC management expert“

Best of luck!

——

About the Author:

Esteban Muñoz is an SEO copywriter at AMZ Advisers, with several years’ experience in digital marketing and e-commerce. Esteban and the AMZ Advisers team have been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts and creating in-depth content marketing strategies.

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.

1. What is Amazon PPC?
2. Types of Amazon PPC advertisements
3. Amazon PPC Tips &  Hacks
   1. Use Automatic Campaigns
   2. Structure your campaigns
   3. Keep similar products in your ad groups
   4. Use negative keywords
   5. Leverage the power of data
   6. Bid on your own brand
   7. Cut out the non-performers
   8. Optimize your campaigns regularly
4. 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.