Amazon Advertising Advanced Guide

Improve Visibility & Maximize Your Ad Budget

To be successful on Amazon, you need to be selling unique or limited products with dynamic pricing, great reviews, and quick restock options.

But one of the most relevant factors that will determine your long-term Amazon success is simply being on display to possible customers. Product visibility on Amazon is increasingly difficult, as millions of sellers fight to position on an increasingly limited screen space.

Leading brands and retailers increase their visibility on Amazon with two things: great product content and great advanced Amazon Advertising strategies.

Fortunately, Amazon has launched plenty of new Amazon Advertising features recently — regardless of being a wholesaler through Vendor Central or a third-party retailer via Seller Central — to maximize your Amazon presence.

This is why we gathered up some ways to get a higher ROI from your ad accounts and, ultimately, make sure shoppers on Amazon  ultimately come across with the products you want them to find.

Tip 1: Setting up your campaign

The basic campaign setup starts off with a structured account plan. It implies building clearly defined campaigns that are segmented by similar products or characteristics. So whether you’re pulling reports, organizing product content or segmenting keywords, you’ll always need to keep organized.

 

Use Clear Naming

To make all that testing insightful, ensure your account structure can actually tell a story. Use naming conventions that sound logical to you and your team. Try not to use unclear campaign names, such as, “Campaign 1.” 

This can turn into a nightmare weeks later when you don’t remember which products were even incertain campaign. Rather, use very detailed naming  with longtails so you know the purpose and products behind the ad.

Test Everything and Keep improving

Once you know which products you want to advertise, you will need to get granular and decide which strategies to implement. From there, the most relevant thing you can do is to continuously test what works and what doesn’t work. Test the ad types,  auto vs. manual, test copy and Store page layouts.

The more you experiment with Amazon’s offerings, the better your campaigns will be in the long run and the better results they’ll produce.

Never Stop Optimizing

You may think your campaigns are running smoothly and your ACoS levels have, for the most part, been consistent. But there is always more to do and more ROI to acquire from a campaign.

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Tip 2: Amazon Ad Types

Amazon Sponsored Products

It can seem like the whole search results page consists of Sponsored Products.

Amazon Sponsored Products is a keyword-targeted, cost-per-click program that can be used to promote individual listings. These ads appear together with or above organic search results and are driven by search keywords you choose. Targeting with this type of accuracy will ultimately give you more converting clicks on your listings — since these shoppers actually looked for terms related to your product — and will potentially result in a much higher ROI than many other cost-per-click programs.

Shoppers who click on these ads will be taken to your product detail pages

Sponsored Brands 

They can be an effective way to reach consumers who are browsing but don’t yet know what they want to buy, and thus may be using broad keywords such as “sunscreen” or “sundresses.” Like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands run on a cost-per-click pricing model.

Product Display Ads

Product Display Ads are cost-per-click display ads that generate traffic to a product’s detail page. They use product or interest targeting to deploy highly relevant ads to shoppers with certain interests or shoppers who are actively viewing specific products.

You can see  them on the product detail page, on the right side of search results, at the bottom of search results, on the customer reviews page, at the top of the offer listing page and in Amazon-generated marketing emails such as follow-ups and recommendations. Product Display Ads actually  run across desktop, mobile web and the mobile app.

Tip 3: Overcoming Amazon’s Real-Time Data Limitations

If your business goes through any holiday or seasonal spikes, keeping track of your advertising in real-time may be important to you.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not make it easy to quickly analyze real-time and daily reporting. However, there are a number of precautions you can take to prepare for high-demand days, such as Prime Day, seasonal holidays or Cyber Monday.

Portfolios

The Portfolios program gives you the opportunity to group campaigns into, well, portfolios. Once grouped, you can pull metrics for that portfolio, add/remove campaigns from that portfolio, and set budget caps for those campaigns.

So, to use the previous example of a retailer of tents and backpacks, let’s say you put all your “tents” in one portfolio and all your “backpacks” in another. You can now see how each subset is performing with just the click of a button.

When it comes to controlling spend, Portfolios gives you a budget cap option. Here you can specify the max amount of money you are willing to pay for a specific timeframe for that portfolio. This is specifically helpful during high-traffic holidays or times when you want to spend more money over a short period of time.

If you have 10 campaigns in Portfolio 1 and set a budget for $1,200 for the month of February, that portfolio will not spend more than $1,200.

Epinium Tip: The portfolio does not pace the budget over your date range.

Unfortunately, portfolios cannot pace that $1,200 evenly over the month.The campaigns within the portfolios will spend the $1,200 as they naturally would and would be prevented from spending any additional dollars once  you reached the budget limit.

During peak sales days like Prime Day, you’ll want to make sure your budgets and portfolios have enough room to adjust for the influx of impressions/clicks/spend that is bound to happen.

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Tip 4: Elements of a Well-Run Amazon Advertising Account

While every business is different, well-run Amazon Advertising accounts have certain commonalities that make them successful. This are some of them:

Have Clear goals

When setting up a new campaign, or even kicking off your company’s Amazon Advertising program, determine what you want to get out of it. Try avoiding, “more sales” since it is not a clear goal.

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You must be able to articulate exactly what success means to you. Think about your goals like a summer goal: “Get fit” is not as effective as “Lose 10 pounds by December 1st.” You should set a target you can actually aim for with true precision.  

Obviously, every single goal depends on your business needs, and there is no blanket target that works for every brand and retailer. However, in order for you to better analyze which goals work best, we gathered up some tips that might help you identify some key goals. Some of them are:

Have Specific Strategies

Achieving the big goals you set for yourself requires the successful execution of many smaller strategies and managing the many moving pieces involved with Amazon Advertising.

Developing specific strategies means knowing your products and being able to recognize how they can be differentiated from those of your competitors. Here are a few questions you can ask  yourself :

Are some of your products high-margin? If so, you could spend a bit more to win some of your high-converting keywords.

Is your product reviewed really high compared to your competition? Perhaps targeting competitor ASINs with lower reviews makes more sense than keyword bidding.

Set Useful Reporting

What good is doing all the work if you can’t drive actionable insights? When setting up your advertising campaigns, be cognizant of your naming structures — they play a critical role in reporting.

Each campaign should be named in a way that can give you at least three major takeaways, such as:

  • Brand vs. Non-Brand
  • Product Type 
  • Descriptor

When you pull reports and start your pivots, naming conventions like these give you a lot of information. For example, using the names above, you could pivot for all brand campaigns, all shoe campaigns, all branded shoe campaigns, etc.

These names can provide quick insights into how broad categories are performing. But don’t stop at three levels: Do what makes sense for your products and get granular with your approach:

Using of All types of Ads

To cover 100% of advertising real estate on Amazon, you have to use 100% of the tools available. As we outlined earlier, vendors and sellers have slightly different ad options.

For vendors, you have access to Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Product Display Ads.

For sellers , you have access to Sponsored Products and, if you are a registered brand, Sponsored Brands.

Each ad type has different strategies, reports, and conversion rates. Get to know them and find out what works. And also get to know the variations within each ad type. For example, auto campaigns for Sponsored Products behave differently than manual campaigns, which behave differently than ASIN and Category targeting.

All Levers Pulled

Once you’ve started experimenting with all the Amazon ad types available to you, it’s time to start pulling all the levers Amazon provides for making the most of these campaigns. That means continuous testing and optimizing of all the various features to maximize your ROI, including:

  1. Category and ASIN
  2. Refined Targeting within Sponsored Products
  3. Placement Bid Adjustments
  4. Dynamic Bidding
  5. New Automatic Campaign Match Types
  6. Automated Bidding within Sponsored Brands
  7. Brand Stores
  8. Pro Tip for Brands: Leverage the Power of the “Store”

The Stores program is Amazon’s way of giving registered brands more control on its platform. As a seller, your Store gives you the ability to curate the experience of your potential customer. It’s your opportunity to leverage the brand awareness and trust you’ve built up on Amazon.

You can create pages on your Store for a single product or multitudes of products. And just like your granular campaign structures and naming conventions, you’re able to get extremely detailed on the pages you build.

For example, if you sell makeup and brushes, you can create a page specifically for makeup and then sub-pages for different varieties (oily skin ,dry skin, normal skin, etc.). Then, you can drive traffic to these broader or specific pages through Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Tip 5: Specific Strategies for Success

Once you have a solid foundation for your account, it’s time to start experimenting and testing with various bidding, reporting, and targeting features.  

Placement Bidding

Within Sponsored Products campaigns, Amazon’s platform now has a “Placements” tab. Within That tab, Amazon gives you placement data, as well as an additional placement: Product Pages. From that section, you can see all your favorite metrics for each placement and make bid adjustments. These bid adjustments take the place of Bid+ but are available for all Sponsored Product campaigns, not just manual campaigns.

Product Targeting

Advertisers now have the ability to target by category and by ASINs. After you mine for ASINs using the search term report provided by Amazon, you may want to dive deeper into competitor targeting by identifying specific ASINs where you want to place ads.

New-to-Brand Metrics

Amazon now has seven new-to-brand metrics that allow advertisers to measure orders and sales of products generated from “first-time” customers on Amazon. The new-to-brand metrics all provide insight into new customer acquisition and/or brand loyalty and can help brands and retailers shape their Amazon Advertising strategy.

As you can imagine, knowing what percentage of sales for branded campaigns are actually coming from returning customers will influence your ad investment. 

On the other hand, if you know the lifetime value of a customer, you may be willing to invest a bit more into strategies and campaigns that are driving new-customer acquisition.

Major Takeaways

Are you an Amazon seller, or trying to become one? If so, we’d love to know how you got started, or what you’re planning to sell on this huge marketplace. Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts in the comments  section below.

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