This blog post is intended for those individual sellers on Amazon who are struggling to work their way up on Amazon on their own. Therefore they are thinking on investing in Amazon ppc ads.
As an individual seller doing it yourself, we recommend running an Amazon automated campaign to start.
An automated campaign will give you with everything you need to kick off. Amazon will provide you with suggested keywords at a low bid price, and then you can pick up which ones convert into sales.
Amazon does a pretty good job with the keyword selection, and your ads will also show in your competitor’s listings as well as search results.
Once the automatic campaign has run for a while, you can use the data and keywords generated to kick off a manual campaign. To do that, you will need to focus on:
- Selecting keywords.
- Creating logical ad groups and campaigns.
- Getting your campaign optimized.
- Understanding different keyword match types.
- Setting your advertising bids and budget.
New PPC users are lucky since the platform is fairly simple compared to Google. It’s an easy way if you start with PPC, test, and learn while experimenting at a significantly low cost.
How much do I need to spend on Amazon PPC ads?
Well, the answer to this question will depend on your product, the competition in your category, your sales goals, and your profit margin.
Here are some steps you can implement to determine what the right number is for you.
First, you’ll need to analyze your budget, and determine your profit margin. To do this, simply browse for an FBA calculator, including Amazon’s own, to help you do this.
Next, analyse how competitive the product and category is, and how much of your sales are organic against a result of the PPC campaign.
From there, you can decide to spend your ad budget in several ways such as:
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Choose a predetermined spend and enter this into your campaign settings.
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Use the 25/25 Rule. In this model, you optimize for an ACoS around 25%, and try to have 25% of your total sales come from your PPC ads.
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Base your spend on your ACoS, starting with a low daily budget and bids, then gradually increase it until you reach the top of your acceptable range.
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Spend as a percentage of total sales (organic and paid). A typical ratio is 8% to 12%.
The goal is usually to maximize profit, so experiment with these approaches until you find one where !math makes the most sense for you.
Can I run both automatic and manual campaigns for the same product?
Yes, you can and it’s in fact a common strategy to run both automatic and manual campaigns simultaneously.
The manual campaign can focus on proven keywords and have higher bids, whereas the automatic campaign works as a research tool and has lower bids. Over time, you can simply transfer the best keywords that result from the automatic campaign to the manual campaign.
To make sure you are not double paying for the same keywords in both campaigns, you can actually set the manual campaign’s bids higher than the automatic campaign or also add negative keywords to block your ad from appearing in certain search results.
In terms of success, a manual campaign should achieve better results compared to an automatic campaign in the long term. The main reason is that you gain full control over each keyword and can optimize match types and bids.
Why aren’t my Amazon PPC ads showing up?
If you’re not getting any impressions from your PPC ads, there are a few common issues that you can address to try and fix the problem.
We recommend you take the following steps:
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Check your listing and make sure every part of it is optimized.
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Change your keyword match types.
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Increase your bids for specific keywords.
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Adjust your keywords to include longer and more specific search terms.
Amazon is a highly competitive marketplace, and you may find that a low bid is not going to give your campaign the visibility you need to get conversions.
We gathered some of the most common reasons for low impressions that are worth checking:
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Your product is in the right subcategory. Manual campaigns have at least 300 keywords (and only use phrase match in the beginning).
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The keywords are relevant to the listing.
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The campaign has been live for at least seven days.
If an automatic campaign is not having any impressions, Amazon may not trust your product yet. Be aware that zero impressions can also mean that your ad campaign is blocked by Amazon.
Should I use broad, phrase or exact keyword match types?
There are three keyword match types that you can use in your Amazon PPC ad campaigns: broad, phrase, and exact.
Broad match will include your ad in searches related to the keyword, and can include quite loosely related terms.
Phrase match lets your ad appear when someone searches for a relevant phrase that contains your keywords, including slight variations or misspellings.
Exact match means your ad will only appear if the shopper searches for the exact keyword or phrase you’ve chosen.
Each of these match types has pros and cons, and can work well in the right circumstances. For example:
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Broad match is useful for finding new keywords.
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Exact match works well to target very relevant keywords with higher bids.
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Phrase match can help to reduce ad spend while remaining open to minor variations.
It is worth testing all three match types to find which one performs better for each keyword. Amazon includes a lot of factors when deciding which PPC ads to show, so the results can be surprising.
For example, if Amazon reckons that the customer is ready to buy, it will be more likely to show exact keyword matches. If the algorithm decides the customer is still in the research stage, it is more likely to show broad keyword matches.
Why aren’t my Amazon PPC ads getting any clicks?
If your ads are actually showing but you’re not getting any clicks, it’s probably a problem with your listing.
We suggest you try the following:
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Make the main image more appealing
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Improve your title
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Make sure you have the right keywords in your listing
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Increase your bid so you get more impressions
In this video we discuss five tips to improve your Amazon listing conversion rates.
My Amazon PPC ads are getting clicks but no sales. What should I do?
If your ads are driving traffic to the listing but it’s not converting, you’ll want to check:
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Pricing
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Listing quality
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Reviews
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Time
Make sure your pricing is competitive in the category. High prices might be holding buyers back from buying.
Look at the quality of your listing. We can’t emphasize more on this, but make sure it’s optimized to create sales with great photos, a descriptive title, correct keywords, and relevant content explaining the features and benefits of the product.
Last, but not least, be patient since it may take a while for listings to begin converting. If you have been running your new PPC campaign for less than seven days you might want to hold on a while before you start making any changes.
After all that, if you are still getting a significant amount of clicks but no sales, your product is likely just not good enough.
We hope this post helped you acquire more knowledge on Amazon and encouraged you to keep working on it.
If you have any doubt, please do not hesitate to ask us on the comments section below!
