This last year’s semester can be a crazy and stressful time for any retail company, and with competition stiffer than ever in the marketplace world, online retailers are looking to take on any advantage to get their messages out. Amazon gets a huge piece of the cake when it comes to online holiday shoppers, so competing on their platform is vital for most businesses. Yet, how can yours get a competitive edge?
You want to have great conversion rates and strong sales on Amazon during the holidays. Well, everyone does!
Hence, PPC turns critical at this time of the year!
Placing all your efforts on organic search results to get your product in front of shoppers is quite risky if you don’t have a big market share, so it’s important to use PPC as your way to help you get there.
And even if you’re already doing great on Amazon, PPC can help you boost your performance. However, we all know that during the holiday season, things work a little differently, and so does PPC. These following key strategies will help your business refine its PPC operations and make this holiday shopping season your best one yet.
A great PPC campaign usually isn’t built in one day. Most will require some time to fine-tune keywords and bid strategies. The longer you have a campaign running for, the more eyes you’ll have gotten it in front of, and the more relevance you’ll have built up in your customers’ minds.
This is especially important for shoppers who start looking early. Whether or not they consciously remember the ad they saw at the beginning of October, when they see your ad again in December, it will make them remember the message that your brand has an established .
One particularly effective way you can outperform this strategy is to start automatic exploratory campaigns using Amazon’s suggested keywords in the third semester, then check their performance and zero in on your best performing keywords later through manually targeted campaigns. This allows you to get the best of both worlds: refreshing your campaigns with new persepctives in the keywords while selecting only the best performing and important terms. Remeber, it is always easier to do this with the help of an Amazon PPC Management software to reduce your Marketing’s team efforts and time wasted!
Getting great 4th semester sales performance on Amazon means treating with detail the critical periods on Amazon’s sales events calendar when most shoppers are looking to buy. Those periods are literally Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.
Black Friday. Cyber Monday.
December 12 Days of Deals.
Customers that are shopping during these periods are likely to have strong intent, even if they’re not sure exactly what they want yet. Whatever stage of the journey they’re at, these are some of the most effective times to seize your advantage by increasing PPC bids and offering coupons or Lightning Deals. Even if you’re not running big promotions during some of these periods, you’re likely to benefit from the increased traffic.
To avoid wasting time and ad dollars during a period when both are at their most precious, you should have a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t by the time the holiday shopping season kicks. You can get started on this by running some A/B tests during the third semester. Test your CTR, CPC, conversion rates, and any other metrics important to you on PPC points such as images and image angles, copy, which products to place with which keywords, and so on.
Keep in mind, that you’ll need to optimize product detail page content as well, so don’t ignore it in your comparison tests. And if you’re dreading the process of testing each variable, using a professional Amazon PPC management software can make your A/B tests easier and more effective and take some of the stress off your marketing team!
PPC efforts can get your customers in the door, but great content is what drives conversions. To shift your customers down the funnel efficiently, it’s important to optimize your product detail pages and fill them with appealing content that gives them both the information and the motivation they need to convert, such as:
Multiple colorful, high-resolution photos that show the product from every angle, as well as “lifestyle” images that show the product in use and build your brand.
Critical product information that’s easy to find and organized logically—if the shopper has to spend more than a minute or so hunting for product specifications, they’ll probably move on to another listing.
Bullet points and product descriptions that are seeded with the critical keywords you’re targeting (but not keyword-overloaded or dificult to read). Enhanced Brand Content, customizable rich visual content that allows you to create website-like templates for your product and tell a next-level story.
Not all Amazon PPC ad placements areor need to be the same. CTR and conversion rates for products in the first SERP row, referred to here as Top of Search, are considerably higher than on-page placements and placements lower in the SERP.
Fortunately, Amazon’s PPC interface now includes an “Adjust bids by placement” option that allows you to maximize your ROI by automatically adjusting bids by up to 900 percent when your ad has the chance to appear in the Top of Search position. Using this option is a good way to double down on your best-performing and most profitable items.
The holidays are when most Amazon advertisers will go all-out, and using Epinium will help you stay in the race as you and your competitors sprint toward the finish line.
Whichever way you choose to go about it, keep in mind that the ultimate goal of designing a great Amazon PPC campaign is to deliver advertising that’s useful to the customer and helps them make the choice that will in return, give them the happiest holidays.
By implementing these tips into your Amazon advertising Campaigns, you can help make your holidays just as great as your customers!
As usual, thanks for reading this post! If you have any doubts, please feel free to leave them on the comments section down below!