Amazon PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, serves as a powerful tool for sellers and brands to boost their online product sales. In essence, it operates as an advertising model where sellers can create targeted ad campaigns for their products. Each time a potential customer clicks on one of these ads, a small fee is charged to the seller by Amazon.
By bidding on relevant keywords, businesses can strategically position their products or services within Amazon’s search results. This not only expands their visibility to a broader audience but also drives increased sales and revenue.
How Does Amazon PPC Work?
Amazon PPC operates through a straightforward process, yet grasping its intricacies is vital for successful implementation. Amazon PPC allows you to show your items to the front customer if you are willing to pay. The more you are willing to pay for advertisement for each ad, the more front position you will get. The higher your position on the first pages you get, the more traffic, visibility, and orders you will get. Ultimately, this will lead our item to more orders and organic rank. This will boost your overall sales and grow your business.
Amazon PPC also helps you to achieve organic rank for your target keywords. If you get enough orders for sponsored product target keywords, you will get an organic rank for that keyword. After that, you will get more organic sales for those keywords as well. So, that’s how Amazon PPC works and helps you to boost sales.
- Shopper searches for a product: When a shopper initiates a search on Amazon, such as “area rug” or “Bedding sheet,” Amazon compiles relevant ads associated with the searched keyword.
- Bidding on keywords: Sellers participate in an auction by bidding on specific keywords related to their products. The highest bidder secures the opportunity to have their ad displayed.
- Displaying the winning ad: The winning Sponsored Product ad is showcased prominently on top of search results and relevant product detail pages, ensuring maximum visibility.
- Clicking on the ad: When a shopper clicks on the ad, the seller incurs a nominal fee to Amazon. This fee is paid for each click, contributing to the overall advertising cost.
Importance of Amazon PPC
Unlocks the potential of Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to market your business, product, or service effectively. Here’s why PPC is an essential tool for your marketing strategy:
- Expand Your Reach, Minimize Costs: With Amazon PPC, you can extend your reach to a larger audience while optimizing your budget, offering cost-effective solutions compared to traditional advertising methods.
- Target Quality Traffic: Leverage PPC’s targeting capabilities to attract highly potential traffic actively seeking your offerings, ensuring maximum ROI on your advertising spend.
- Experiment and Optimize Campaign: Enjoy the flexibility of PPC to experiment with various marketing campaigns and track their performance, enabling you to refine strategies and achieve optimal results over time.
- Gain Market Share: Start your PPC journey without a lot of hassle, gaining market share. Launch campaigns with as little as $100 per month, making PPC accessible for businesses of all sizes and budgets and gaining market share gradually
- Unmatched Campaign Management Flexibility: Unlike traditional advertising, PPC offers unparalleled flexibility. Pause or stop campaigns at any time, ensuring resources are allocated effectively and delivering desired outcomes and sales.
- Facilitating Brand Enhancement: Amazon PPC serves as an anchor for retail brands, driving brand enhancement, traffic generation, and revenue growth in the competitive landscape of Amazon selling.
- Standing Out Amidst Competition: In the crowded marketplace of Amazon, leveraging PPC advertising becomes indispensable for brands aiming to stand out and capture consumer attention amidst fierce competition.
- Driving Traffic and Sales: Amazon PPC helps to direct traffic to your listings, enhance visibility, and ultimately boost sales on the platform, driving tangible results for your business.
- Essential for ecommerce Success: In the dynamic ecommerce landscape, Amazon PPC emerges as a vital tool for amplifying brand presence, enhancing visibility, and driving sustained success in the competitive digital marketplace.
- Gain Market Insights: Amazon PPC helps to get data about market trends, traffic trends, customer behaviors data, keyword trends, and a lot of other data.
Amazon PPC Advertising Campaign Types
As you embark on your PPC journey on Amazon, you’ll encounter three distinct ad types tailored to various advertising goals:
- Sponsored Products
- Sponsored Brands
- Sponsored Display
Each ad type serves a unique purpose, allowing sellers to align their advertising strategies with their specific objectives.
Amazon Sponsored Products Advertisement
Sponsored Product Ads stand as the preferred choice among Amazon sellers, dominating the platform’s advertising landscape. These ads enjoy prime placements, appearing prominently on the top of organic search results, sprinkled throughout search pages, and nestled within product listings. Comprising 70% of third-party sellers’ ad preferences, Sponsored Product Ads seamlessly blend with organic search results, preserving the shopping experience.
Integration with organic search results ensures a seamless user experience. With strategic keyword research, these ads offer immediate visibility, propelling sales for newly launched products and enhancing Best Seller Ranking (BSR). When setting up a Sponsored Product ad, sellers are presented with two distinct targeting options: Automatic Targeting and Manual Targeting.
Amazon Automatic Targeting
Amazon’s automatic targeting feature leverages shopper behavior data to determine which keywords to target, based on the keywords present in your product listing. Over time, Amazon adjusts bids to refine targeting and maximize conversions based on it’s algorithm. Automatic targeting proves ideal for newly launched products lacking specific keywords to target. However, it comes with limitations, as campaign control is relinquished to Amazon’s A10 algorithm. This can lead to increased spending in exchange for gathering relevant data. When it comes to automatic campaigns, Amazon offers different targeting groups:
- Close Match: Your product ad displays when a buyer searches for closely related terms. For instance, if you sell Queen bed sheets, your ad may appear for searches like “bed sheet”.
- Loose Match: Your product ad shows for searches loosely related to your product. For example, if you sell Queen bed sheet, your ad might display for searches like “bedding”.
- Substitutes: Your product ad is shown when a shopper searches for a similar product from another brand. For instance, if you sell running shoes and someone searches for “Nike shoes,” your product might appear.
- Complements: Your product ad appears on complementary product listing pages. For instance, your running shoe ad might show up on the product details page for socks.
On the other hand, manual targeting provides greater campaign control. Additionally, you have the flexibility to set custom bids for each keyword. We’ll delve deeper into keyword and product targeting in later sections of this article.
Amazon Sponsored Brand Advertisement
Sponsored Brand ads, previously known as ‘Headline Creative ads,’ are an exclusive advertising feature accessible solely to brand-registered sellers and vendors. These ads serve as a potent tool for boosting brand visibility and driving sales, presenting products through captivating advertisements on pertinent Amazon shopping results.
Typically positioned at the top, side, and bottom of Amazon search results, these ads prominently feature the brand’s logo, tagline, and select products, offering a compelling showcase of the brand’s offerings.
Advantages of Sponsored Brand Advertisement
Amazon Sponsored Brand mainly emphasizes brand awareness and branding. The benefits that come from a brand campaign take time as branding of any item needs a long time and proper planning and strategy. Amazon’s brand campaign allows customizable creative options by which you can optimize your branding by item persona and ideology. Moreover, you can use for Amazon brand video campaign to reach out to more customers effectively with the dynamic visual experience.
- Enhanced Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Sponsored Brand ads drive shoppers directly to the brand’s storefront or a personalized landing page, eliminating competition and potentially yielding higher returns.
- Cross-Promotion Opportunity: Sellers can showcase complementary products alongside their main offerings, enticing buyers to explore additional items and increase their cart value.
- Diverse Ad Formats: Sponsored Brand ads offer sellers three distinct formats to choose from, including Product Collection, Store Spotlight, and Videos, allowing for versatile and engaging promotional campaigns.
Amazon Sponsored Display Advertisement
Amazon sponsored display campaign is their type of advertising campaign. This type of campaign is specialized in the case of Amazon off-site advertising, showing PPC advertisements beyond Amazon websites such as Amazon affiliate websites. Not only does this type of advertising campaign allow you to reach outside Amazon but also it allows you to use creative options such as brand logos, Customized images & headlines. Amazon sponsored display campaign not only allows you to reach new potential customers with customization but also it helps to complete the Amazon purchase funnel.
- Comprehensive Shopper Engagement: Sponsored Display ads offer sellers the opportunity to connect with shoppers at various touchpoints along their purchasing journey, facilitating higher conversion rates.
- Versatile Placement: These ads have the flexibility to appear across a wide array of platforms, including Amazon affiliate sites, mobile apps, popular streaming services like Netflix, social media platforms like Facebook, and even on Google.
- Enhanced Visual Appeal: Amazon’s recent introduction of video creatives for Sponsored Display ads enables sellers to captivate shoppers with compelling visuals, both on and off the Amazon platform, driving excitement and interest in their products.
Advantages of Sponsored Display Advertisement
Amazon Sponsored Display mainly focuses on reaching out outside Amazon and in Amazon with limited creative options. Amazon’s display campaign also helps to reach out to repetative customers who bought previously or have seen the seller’s items previously. Amazon now allows the usage of customizable images or video for the creative option which can help for building brand and awareness.
- Precision Targeting: Amazon Sponsored Display ads leverage shopping signals to precisely target audiences showing high purchase intent, both within and beyond the Amazon platform, effectively re-engaging with potential customers.
- Off-Amazon Outreach: These ads extend their reach beyond Amazon, reaching out to potential customers and directing them back to your product listings, thereby expanding your customer base.
- Enhanced Sales Performance: Particularly beneficial for products with longer sales cycles or higher price points, Amazon Sponsored Display ads contribute to improved sales performance by strategically re-engaging with potential Amazon customers and guiding them towards conversion.
Goal of running Amazon PPC Campaigns?
- Increased Product Visibility
- Improving market share
- Launching new product
- Ensuring Long-term profitability
- Liquidation of low-converting stock
- Broadening your customer reach
- Reach & maintain profit margin
- Improve organic sales and brand awareness
- Outrank competitors brand
- Utilize seasonal sales opportunities
- Improve CTR & CVR
- Rank for keywords
- Get Data from the Market
How to start the Amazon PPC?
When you need to start PPC, everything should be preplanned and organized. Complete market research and competitor research need to be done at first. Understanding market trends and analyzing competitors’ strategies can provide valuable insights to inform your campaign.
- Lay Out Goals: Work out your goals, sales target, and profit margin. This foundational step sets the tone for your campaign and guides subsequent decisions.
- Set Up Time Frame: Establishing realistic time frames for achieving small-scale PPC advertising objectives is essential. By breaking down your goals into manageable segments, you can track progress more effectively and make necessary adjustments along the way.
- Aligning Targets with KPIs: Decide what items to advertise based on stock, KPIs, and targets. Aligning your advertising efforts with tangible metrics enhances the likelihood of success.
- Keywords Layout: Choose which keywords you want to bid on. Strategically choose the keywords you intend to bid on, considering their relevance, search volume, and competitiveness. A well-researched keyword selection maximizes the visibility of your ads to potential customers.
- Structurize Advertising Campaign: Choose what type of advertising campaigns to start and maintain. Whether it’s search ads, display ads, or remarketing campaigns, each serves a distinct purpose in reaching and engaging with your target demographic.
- Frame-up Advertising Strategy: Decide what type of advertising strategy you need to follow. Determine whether you aim to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or boost conversions, and tailor your approach accordingly.
- Advertising Budget Optimization: Set your bids for different keywords and select your daily or monthly budget. Additionally, establish a daily or monthly budget to allocate resources judiciously and prevent overspending.
- Optimizing Through Monitooring: Watch closely and continually improve your keywords as you learn what works. Adapting and optimizing your strategy as you gain more experience ensures ongoing improvement and success in your PPC endeavors.
Amazon PPC Keywords research
Before delving into the intricacies of keyword research for your PPC advertising campaigns, it’s essential to have the fundamental concepts that will be referenced throughout this discussion.
- Keywords: These are the specific words and phrases that you provide to Amazon to specify where you want your advertisements to appear. They serve as the bridge between user intent and your ad placements.
- Search Terms: Unlike keywords, search terms refer to the actual queries entered by shoppers into the Amazon search bar. These queries trigger the display of your ads when they match the criteria you’ve set with your chosen keywords.
- Targets: This encompasses both keywords and ASINs within your PPC campaigns. Targets serve as the focal points around which you structure your advertising efforts, aiming to capture relevant customer attention and drive conversions.
How to Start Amazon PPC Keywords Research:
- Manually Type Keyword in Search Bar
Leveraging Amazon’s auto suggest functionality can provide a wealth of keyword suggestions. Simply start by entering the seed keyword for your product and peruse the suggested phrases that Amazon generates. This approach allows you to tap into real-time data reflecting popular search queries among users.
For a more advanced approach, consider utilizing specialized Chrome extensions such as AMZ Suggestion Expander or Helium 10’s Chrome extension. These tools augment your manual research efforts by dynamically expanding your initial search query with additional keywords. By appending keywords to the beginning, end, or middle of your seed phrase, these extensions offer a comprehensive array of keyword options to explore.
By incorporating manual keyword research techniques and leveraging innovative tools, you can uncover a diverse range of relevant keywords to enhance the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, even on a limited budget.
- Amazon PPC Keyword Research Tools
Although opting for the free route may seem like a cost-saving measure, investing in a reputable keyword research app can yield significant time savings and should be viewed as a strategic investment to bolster your long-term sales potential. Among the plethora of Amazon keyword research tools available, Helium 10 has emerged as my preferred choice over the years.
Helium 10 offers a comprehensive suite of tools tailored to streamline the keyword research process and enhance campaign efficacy. One such tool is Magnet, which serves as a user-friendly entry point for beginners. However, for optimal results, leveraging Cerebro within the Helium 10 suite is recommended.
Within Helium 10, several methods can be employed for effective keyword research, Utilize Xray to analyze competitors’ strategies and glean valuable insights into their keyword usage.
Conduct a thorough Cerebro keyword analysis to uncover high-potential keywords aligned with your product offerings and target audience. Employ advanced filtering techniques to refine your keyword selection and prioritize the most relevant and lucrative options.
By using the capabilities of Helium 10’s robust suite of keyword research tools, you can expedite the process of identifying high-converting keywords and optimizing your PPC.
Organize Amazon PPC keywords
- Keywords Harveting and Sorting: After compiling a comprehensive list of keywords, the next crucial step in the process is to export this data into a spreadsheet for future reference and analysis.Once the list is exported, it’s prudent to conduct a thorough review to identify and eliminate any broad keywords that may have inadvertently slipped through the filtering process. This ensures that only relevant and targeted keywords remain in your list.
- Keywords Segmentation: Depending on the overarching strategy of your Amazon PPC campaigns, it’s advisable to segment keywords based on various criteria to optimize campaign performance.
- Keywords Categorizing: One effective segmentation approach involves categorizing keywords into different volume tiers, such as low, medium, and high-volume keywords. This segmentation strategy enables you to prioritize your focus and allocate resources effectively, targeting the most impactful keywords for campaign launch.
- Analyzing Historical Data: Leveraging historic keyword data provides an opportunity to create segments based on conversion rates(CVR), Click Through rate(CTR). Identifying keywords with a high conversion rate signifies their potential as strong performers in driving sales and enhancing organic ranking. By isolating these high-converting keywords into dedicated campaigns, you gain greater control and can tailor your optimization efforts more precisely.
Segmenting keywords based on conversion rate not only maximizes the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns but also serves as a strategic pathway to bolstering organic visibility and fostering sustainable growth within Amazon.
How to Create Amazon PPC Keywords Campaigns?
Ideal Amazon PPC campaign should have 10-20 keywords per campaign. It is recommended to try out all types of match types at first in different campaigns so that you don’t miss out any opportunities of good match types. There should be only one Ad group under one Amazon PPC advertising campaign and the ad group should have 10-20 keywords. You need to also align bidding strategy based on your target, goal, market position etc.
How to Create Amazon PPC Automatic Campaigns?
Creating an Amazon PPC automatic campaign setup entails several key steps to optimize your advertising efforts effectively.
- Campaign Setup: The initial step involves inputting essential details such as campaign name, portfolio, start and end dates, daily budget, and selecting automatic targeting.
- Campaign Name: When naming your campaign, it’s beneficial to include the advertised product, campaign type (e.g., SP Manual Campaign), and the primary keyword being targeted. This naming convention aids in organization and clarity within your advertising dashboard.
- Portfolio Organization: Utilizing portfolios facilitates efficient campaign organization by grouping similar products together. For instance, if advertising various types of footwear, creating portfolios for boots, heels, and flats streamlines campaign management and analysis.
- Start and End Dates: While any start date can be selected, it’s advisable to leave the end date field open-ended. This flexibility allows for easy campaign extension and prevents ads from running unnecessarily in case of stock shortages.
- Daily Budget Allocation: Begin with a modest daily budget to gather data, conduct tests, and refine your strategy cost-effectively. Starting with a budget around $20 per day is recommended, though adjustments may be made based on campaign objectives.
- Targeting Options: Automatic targeting is suitable for novice advertisers, as Amazon’s algorithms determine ad placements based on relevancy. In contrast, manual targeting offers greater control over keyword selection, match types, and bidding strategies, ideal for experienced advertisers.
- Bidding Strategies: Sponsored Products campaigns offer three bidding strategies: dynamic bids – down only for profitability, dynamic bids – up and down for scalability, and fixed bids for bid management expertise. Careful consideration should be given to selecting the most appropriate strategy based on campaign objectives and budget constraints.
- Adjusting Bids by Placement: While Amazon provides the option to adjust bids by placement, caution is advised when implementing this feature in automatic campaigns. The lack of manual control can lead to aggressive and costly bidding behavior, with bids potentially increasing by up to 900%. Thus, it’s generally recommended to avoid this option in automatic campaigns to maintain cost efficiency and campaign control.
Final Thoughts
Amazon PPC is only a significant part of the overall Amazon sales boost way, not the full way. It helps you boost up sales, increase market share, improve brand awareness, and lead sales. But like any other marketing/business working method, it needs market/competitor research, proper planning, keyword research, etc. It’s compulsory to keep this in our mind before starting a successful Amazon PPC
We are going to continue the Amazon PPC Masterclass and release Part 02 very soon. Stay tuned.
If you have any queries, please let us know through the comment box or email us at info@ecomclips.com. We are the go to expert for managing PPC Advertisement, so we offer a personalized approach to our service.