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:
- Category and ASIN
- Refined Targeting within Sponsored Products
- Placement Bid Adjustments
- Dynamic Bidding
- New Automatic Campaign Match Types
- Automated Bidding within Sponsored Brands
- Brand Stores
- 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.