How Do I Optimize My Amazon PPC Campaign Better Than Anyone Else?

Ads.

Ads everywhere.

Whether you’re shopping or not, you’re bound to see several ads online. The internet is filled with constant commercials and advertisements for just about anything. It doesn’t matter if you need ads or not. These ads will always show up anywhere, especially if you spend most of your time on Amazon.

Amazon is among 2020’s Top 10 Fortune 500 Companies. What started as a bookseller is now the world’s largest online retailer since its expansion to selling a wide variety of consumer goods, multimedia devices, and even a streaming service called Amazon Prime. There are many things you can find on Amazon, thanks to different sellers across the globe.

However, not all sellers are having great luck on the platform. It’s no surprise that there would be similar items sold by different sellers, which makes sales and marketing a bit more difficult. Still, if you’re up to the challenge, you can always find different ways to advertise your products on Amazon and, possibly, even Google!

What Are Amazon Ads?

Setting up an eCommerce store on Amazon seems like a whole new wonderland for you to explore. Like Alice, you’re going to face far more difficulties as you walk deeper into this new wonderland. But if you’ve already established your business outside of Amazon, then you have no trouble optimizing the same business strategies for an online platform. From metrics to SEO terminology to common ad prices, you’ll need all the information you can get to create better processes.

Besides streamlining your processes to suit the online market, you might need advertising help. Besides updating your business profile on Amazon, you might want to check out the different ways you can market your business on Amazon with ads!

Amazon ads work similarly to how Google Search works. By typing keywords into the Amazon search box, you’re bound to find results that match those keywords. You’ll be seeing a few Amazon ads on the top results. These are sponsored posts, one type of Amazon ads you’ll often see once you keep searching for various other items and products on the platform through Amazon pay-per-click campaigns.

Amazon PPC campaigns have served as a way for sellers to gain more visibility on their products. How it works is that advertisers pay for the top positions through bidding on specific keywords. Winning the bidding wars lead to more visibility in Amazon Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs. Every time someone clicks on their ad, Amazon charges the advertiser. Think of it as Amazon’s version of AdWords. You can also see that Amazon ads appear on specific product pages. After all, this type of ad can be launched by anyone with an Amazon Seller Central account.

Plus, the more you search on Amazon, the more ads you’ll find. These ads might even serve as references for your own products. But keep in mind that there are other ad options for you to explore when you navigate this amazing wonderland.

What Are Pay-Per-Click Campaigns?

Now that you know how to spot Amazon ads, you’ll probably want to know how to do pay-per-click campaigns and how you can utilize them to amplify your sales online. First, you should know that Amazon ads start with an advertising method called pay-per-click advertising. It is a popular advertising platform available to third-party sellers, allowing advertisers to create ad campaigns and only pay for ads that a potential buyer clicks and views. It also offers you a wide variety of common ad prices and payment methods you wish to experiment on for your store.

Aside from increasing your product sales, Amazon PPC campaigns can improve your organic rankings, too! However, this only works once you’ve created, managed, and executed your campaign properly. Focusing on understanding Amazon’s integral PPS metrics is a must when you start getting into the details of pay-per-click advertising.

Amazon has a way of describing each of its metrics:

Advertising Cost of Sales. In short, ACoS. It is a percentage of the attributed sales which is spent on advertising. Understanding how much your ACoS is simply done by dividing the total ad spend by the attributed sales.
Attributed Sales. Within a week of ad clicks, you’ll see the total product sales generated. However, these sales data take up almost two days to populate, making it unavailable in your Campaign Performance report’s “Today” and possibly even your “Yesterday” date ranges. Viewing the advertisements and other products’ individual sales totals can also be done in the Campaign Performance.
It refers to the number of times your product ads were displayed. Identifying impressions is no big deal but removing invalid clicks from your report takes up to three days. Take note that the last three days’ clicks may even be adjusted because of invalid clicks.
As its name suggests, it is the number of times your ads were clicked. Similar to impressions, invalid clicks take up to three days to be removed from your reports. It follows the same adjustment period as impressions.
It refers to how much money sellers have spent on a keyword. With this, you can increase and decrease bids for any keywords based on relevance, impressions, and CTR.
Click-Through Rate. It helps in working out the relevance of each keyword you use on your ad.
Knowing keywords helps sellers build a better understanding of their target audience and provides more keywords relevant to your listings. Keywords are used to track the various things people search for on the platform and other relevant keywords they use when searching for the products. It helps if you know SEO terminology, too.
Match Type. Increasing your keyword bid in different match types such as the exact, phrase, or even broad keywords help you increase impressions as well.
Customer Search Term. Finding new keywords is a challenge that leads you to learn new keywords you can target in all your future campaigns.

These Amazon PPC campaign metrics help you create brand awareness and optimize your ads to understand and reach your target audience better. It’s a daunting process, but as soon as you get it done, you’ll surely have no problems making ads work for you in the future.

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How Does It Work?

Here’s a quick way to help you understand how Amazon PPC campaigns and their common ad prices work in a nutshell.

Let’s start with a shopper searching for a “hair straightener.” By collecting and compiling all the relevant ads that target the keyword being searched, Amazon displays the ad with the highest bid wins during the auction. Having Amazon display the winning bid ensures that the shopper searching for “hair straightener” clicks on the winning ads.

Once the potential customer clicks on it, the advertiser pays the winning advertisers and pays the second-highest bid. Amazon operates on a second price auction, which many sellers are attracted to. With this type of auction, the winning advertiser doesn’t have to pay their winning bid but instead pays the second-highest bid price.

Creating a PPC Campaign Strategy

Whether you’re here to drive sales or maybe boost your products’ visibility, creating an Amazon PPC Campaign is a very detail-oriented yet profitable process compared to creating ads on Google. But you should know that this advertising strategy takes up a significant amount of time. However, as a seller, it is a way for you to scale your business. You’ll surely get quick at how this type of campaign is done.

There are a few requirements needed to run an Amazon PPC Campaign, and these are:

Seller Account. If you’re a seller on Amazon, you should also have an account to manage everything happening in your store—from inventory to sales.
Buy Box. Running Sponsored Product ad campaigns means you have to be eligible for the Buy Box. To meet this requirement, you’ll need a professional seller account along with stock availability.
Amazon Brand Registry. Protecting your intellectual property is critical to ensure that another store on Amazon won’t copy it. Plus, this is also another requirement when doing a headline search advertising campaign.

Now, you have the requirements down. You should know the different types of Amazon ads you can explore and use for your store.

3 Types of Amazon PPC Ads to Use

There are a few different ways you can advertise on Amazon. The PPC campaign offers you a few ad classifications you can implement on your Amazon store. However, you should always keep these things in mind—product type, audience, and objectives—when deciding what type of ads to run and how much their common ad prices are.

Product display ads

Another type of PPC ads you can try for your business is the product display ads. These ad types are the products you usually see on a product page in the Similar Product section. Product display ads are created to be a self-service option paired with Amazon Standard Identification Number or ASINs. Product display ads give marketers a deeper understanding of how their customers behave. With each type having its own screen placement section and budget, you can easily analyze conversion rates and clicks.

However, sellers should match their deals with their intended target audience for this type of ad. Targeting a product details page, related categories, and interests help when you can also match it with complimentary listings.

Headline search ads

Like how sponsored product ads work, a headline search ad is also limited to certain product categories. Headline search ads appear on top of search results along with brand logos. Most people refer to this as banner ads whose primary purpose is to lead buyers to click from the featured group of products. By placing them on top, the possibility of these products to be seen increases.

Displaying multiple products in a headline search ad is also made easy. Sellers can quickly customize their landing pages along with the ad copy. This particular Amazon PPC ad is the one offering a wider range of ad customization options. Choosing from a range of brand pages, product pages, search results pages, or even a custom URL. Plus, you can choose which images and ad copies will be shown in the ad.

Match your brand objectives with each ad type you choose to run. Know that sponsored ads are utilized to target buyers and customers with purchase intent, while headline search ads work better if you’re raising brand awareness, and the product display ads are designed to work in ways that combine both ad types.

How Do You Optimize Amazon PPC Campaigns?

When doing an Amazon product launch, creating a PPC campaign helps. But if that’s already something you’re currently doing and you feel like it isn’t generating enough leads and sales, then maybe it’s time for an Amazon PPC optimization.

Structure your ad campaign.

One ideal strategy to create a more structured ad campaign is to ensure that you have created individual campaigns for each primary category. Then, that’s when you create a more specific ad group. If you’ve used AdWords before, then you’ll surely understand how this goes. That skill set can also be used to create ad groups and campaigns, too!

Allow us to give you an example.

Assuming that your store is selling sportswear and bikini for women, then you might want to consider starting ad campaigns for the top three high-selling products you have:

Women swimsuits
Women sports sunglasses
Women’s track pants

Under every campaign, ensure to create individual ad groups reflecting those specific categories. You can also do your own research on a few significant keywords for each ad group, which leads you to create more relevant ads for every group.

You should also ensure that you have a proper account structure, which won’t only ensure all your ads are related but also helps you save more money and gain more profit.

Convince your potential target market with creativity.

Ads involve creativity. It can make or break your marketing strategy. In line with this, you must create an ad copy that is:

Accurate and easy to understand
Introduces the product in detail
Creatively one-of-a-kind

Ad copies are very challenging since you’ll have to stand out from many cluttered results. Take note of the different promos you’re running as well since your ad copy can help you highlight your sales by using words like “Hurry Up” or “Urgent.” With this, you can make your potential buyers feel the urge to click.

Precision is key in your ad.

In addition to creativity, precision plays a huge role, as well. Your ads should be able to describe your product through your specific description. Ensure that the words you’re using aren’t confusing and misleading to your potential buyers.

Defining your product’s key elements through words helps you in creating a specific ad. Highlight the essential features of your product. It’s difficult to add all the necessary information in your ad headline by bringing in a few key terms to make that sale.

Include keywords in your title.

This is where your knowledge of SEO terminology plays a huge role. Keywords help generate traffic, which converts them into clicks. Utilize Amazon’s Search Term Report to comprehend the different terms of better triggering product categories.

When talking about Amazon keywords and including them in your title, understand the following types:

Negative keywords
Phrase keywords
Exact keywords
Broad keywords

You can learn more about these key terms and even see the potential keywords which work best for your ad campaign.

Use high-quality photos.

One crucial element to Amazon PPC optimization is the product image. Adding a high-quality photo makes your product listing on Amazon even more attractive. A great image also helps increase the product’s value and your store’s brand value, as well. You have the option to upload 7-9 product images you can utilize to garner more sales and increase your leads to your store. Having Amazon SEO knowledge you’ll know that product photography is essential.

Aside from having professionally shot photos in high resolution, you must ensure the product looks realistic, too.

Enhance your default bids in your group ads.

Creating default bids for all your keywords in ad groups is possible by having group bids. Although you have the choice to modify each bid manually, you can still set a strong bid for your ad group. Take advantage of auctions amid all the raging competition, even when you’re not actively monitoring your individual bids.

Experiment with various ads and see which one works best.

Statistics have shown that sponsored ads yield the highest and fastest ROI. However, it takes time to perfect sponsored product ads. Experimenting with various ads helps you create a marketing strategy that works best for your products and brands. You can even create a better spending budget for the ads you will run in the future than the ads you’ve currently run in the past.

Final Thoughts

Unlike traditional marketing, promoting in Amazon helps you focus on getting external traffic. Finding ways to increase your product listing’s internal visibility on Amazon is a challenge you’ll eventually succeed in with the various pieces of advice we’ve laid out for you.

With a very competitive market, finding ways to be more innovative to ensure that your brand’s products stand out against competitors helps you succeed. Simplify your marketing strategies on Amazon by applying the seven tips we’ve laid out for Amazon PPC optimization. From basic metrics to doing an Amazon product launch, these tips are designed to help you out!

If that doesn’t work for you, you can always ask ad experts to help you make your ad work for you! There are different ways you can proceed with promoting your products on Amazon. You can even track results resulting in even greater sales.

How Do I Optimize My Amazon PPC Campaign Better Than Anyone Else? – An Expert’s Advice