Amazon is a community of millions of buyers who visit the site solely to look for products to purchase. This means that if you’re an online seller who isn’t using the Amazon Marketplace platform, you’re missing out. On customers and money.
The additional benefit of selling on Amazon is that you are only competing against other products, which narrows the field of competition in comparison to other options such as Google.
On Google, you’re competing not only with other product-based pages, but also with YouTube videos, Pinterest pins, Facebook pages, and so on. With more selective competition on Amazon, getting eyes on your products is far easier.
The caveat is that Amazon has millions of products and more are added every day.
Because of the vastness of the marketplace, simply posting your products may not be enough to garner the attention and, more importantly, the purchases you require to sustain and grow your business.
Amazon PPC
Because Amazon is so flooded with products, they took a cue from Google and launched an initiative called “Sponsored Products” in an attempt to increase profits.
Sponsored Products are Amazon products that appear higher in search results because the sellers who list those products pay Amazon for every click on their listing.
I’ve had triple-digit returns with Sponsored Products and believe it’s the best way to get your Amazon business off to a good start. If you have the resources, you can significantly level the playing field in terms of visibility when compared to long-standing competitors.
Pro tip: Employ the best Amazon PPC agency to optimize your ad campaigns, lower your ACoS, and increase your ROI.
Here are seven ways to maximize your Sponsored Products campaign.
1: Make use of automatic targeting
Automatic targeting is an excellent way to maximize exposure early in the life of your campaign.
You can choose your keywords or let Amazon choose them for you when you create your campaign.
I like to use automatic targeting for a brand-new campaign. The majority of the main keywords that sellers can think of are already in the product’s title and description, so Amazon’s algorithm is useful because it displays product ads for not only relevant keywords, but also less common phrases.
2: Allow for some wiggle room in your budget.
The truth about most PPC campaigns is that if your keywords are highly trafficked and have a high level of competition, you’ll usually spend a few dollars more than you planned.
For example, if you set a daily budget of $40 for a competitive, in-demand product, you may find that you spent between $40 and $45.
Because your campaign will not end at exactly $40, you could end up spending around $100 more over the course of a month!
Keep this in mind as you plan your campaign and ensure that you have enough wiggle room in your monthly advertising budget to account for these extra dollars.
3: Keep profitable keywords
Allow your automatic targeting campaign to run for two or three weeks after you’ve set it up and started making sales!
When you’ve received a sufficient number of orders from your campaigns, it’s time to optimize. You can download advertising reports from Amazon Seller Central’s Campaign Manager tool by clicking the “View Advertising Reports” link.
You’ll be able to see how many clicks and sales the keywords chose for you were bringing in.
Select the keywords that generated the most sales and incorporate them into a new manual targeting campaign. So to speak, these are your golden eggs.
If any keywords performed particularly poorly, add them to your negative keywords list, which is a list of words and phrases for which you do not want your ad to appear. Navigate to your campaign, then to your ad group, and finally to the “keywords” link.
Set aside a larger portion of your budget for the new manual campaign and a smaller portion for the original automatic campaign. Rinse and repeat once every few weeks.
4: Take advantage of your higher sales ranking.
As you increase your sales through Amazon Sponsored Products, you’ll notice something else: your natural Amazon sales rank will rise as well.
After implementing this strategy for one of my products, I achieved a sales rank of around 7,000 in the entire category, which was very exciting for me! I was selling about 8-10 units per day, and in addition to my sponsored results, I was also showing up in the organic results.
If you’ve been collecting reviews from all of your PPC sales, your sales volume and review count should help boost organic results as well, so you can eventually reduce or even eliminate your paid campaign once your product has enough traction on its own.
5: Use keyword data to improve your organic rankings.
Another clever way to boost your organic rankings is to include the keyword data generated by automatic targeting campaigns in the “keywords” section of your product listing.
While the keywords you use are entirely up to you, you will almost certainly select the most popular and highest-performing keywords.
Using keyword data to inform your product listing is an excellent way to further optimize your costs while covering all of your bases with this two-pronged approach.
6: Monitor your metrics
Without proper tracking and monitoring, no paid advertising campaign is complete.
“You might as well be losing money if you don’t know what your money is doing and where it’s going.”
The following are the key metrics to monitor:
Spend:
This is the total amount you have spent on the campaign thus far. You can select from a variety of time frames, including daily, weekly, monthly, all-time, and even a custom date range.
Sales:
The total number of sales generated by your ad campaigns. Keep in mind that this is your revenue, not your gross profit.
Your sales metrics will rise by $20 for every $20 product sold. However, Amazon will deduct fees from the revenue before distributing funds to you.
ACoS:
ACoS is an abbreviation for Average Cost of Sales. Amazon will show you the ACoS for each campaign, ad group, and even individual keyword. ACoS is the average of how much money you spent and how much money you made.
7: Pay for advertisements with your earnings.
To avoid making keeping your accounts a chore, change the default setting for how your fees are deducted.
Amazon charges your fees to your default credit card in your Amazon Seller Central account, which means you can’t see how much money you’re making or tell when and where the charges are coming from.
To avoid this misunderstanding, navigate to the Amazon Campaign Manager tool and click the “Advertising Settings” tab. Then click “Update Advertising Billing” and select “Deduct Advertising Fees from Disbursements.”
Amazon’s default settings deduct your advertising fees from the credit card you’ve saved in your Amazon Seller Central account.
Conclusion
While pay-per-click advertising is always a work in progress that necessitates constant nurturing and monitoring, when done correctly, it has the potential for exponential dividends and growth.
You can use PPC to take your business—and your profits—to the next level of success if you use the right strategy and take care to maximize your return.
Recommended Guide: Amazon PPC Strategies for 2022.
