If you’re selling a product and you want to maximise your sales, an Amazon ad campaign is a great way to boost profits. After all, people come to Amazon to buy, so during their search, you want them to discover your product.
A pay-per-click advertising campaign will help you move inventory and will also help increase your organic rankings in search results. So, how to make the most of an Amazon ad campaign? We’ll look at five strategies to get the most reach with your campaign.
1. Structure your campaign
Build your ad campaign with a structure. This can be around the characteristics of your products, such as by brand or product category. Once you determine an organisational structure for your campaign, be consistent. If you change your structure, for instance by having one campaign by brand and another by category, it can lead to repeat ads.
You can also organise your campaign by how your products are performing. As you track your product performance, you could create a campaign for top-selling products and devote a larger percentage of your advertising budget to that campaign. At the same time, you could have a separate campaign and dedicate fewer advertising dollars for products that aren’t doing as well.
2. Optimise product listings
In order to optimise your product listings, use the same keywords as in your ad campaign.
In order to determine your keywords, start with an automatic campaign in which Amazon determines the search queries that will display your ad. Download the search report and study the keywords generated by Amazon. Let that campaign run for a couple of weeks, and use the search term data to get reports on what people are searching for to find your product and what keywords are the most profitable.
You’ll be able to gauge what’s working because this information is from actual paying customers. It’s the best way to see how they found you and how much money it took to convert them.
With that information, you can then move to a manual campaign, where you choose the keywords to show your ads. You can use a list of keywords that you find on your own, using a keyword search tool, or by using the search terms report from your automatic campaign, or a combination of both. To maximize exposure, use all three match types in your manual campaigns: Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match.
If you have more than one campaign running, be sure they aren’t competing against each other by using the same keywords.
3. Let it run
Once you have your campaign running, let it run for at least a week without adjusting it. There can be a lag in reporting conversions, so don’t be upset if there are no results after a day or two.
4. Track and adjust
After a few weeks, you will have access to enough data to allow you to look at what’s working and what’s not. This is when you can really optimise your money making by using the data available to you.
Some things to consider adjusting:
- Identify and change irrelevant search queries by checking your search term report from Amazon and finding keywords that don’t generate any sales. Update the negative keywords list with these irrelevant keywords, which will ensure your ads will not be shown to users who issue these search terms.
- Switch to long tail keywords. This means your ads will be less likely to compete against other ads, as these keywords typically convey a very specific intent that one of your ads can satisfy.
- Test new keywords. When you do this testing, set a higher bid for these searches to generate data on whether the new keyword is profitable.
- Optimise your bids. To compete on Amazon, you need to be adjusting your bids constantly. This helps you stay ahead of the competition and grow your sales.
5. Examine your keywords
As you continue your campaign, there are a few ways you can examine your keywords to make adjustments and maximize the campaign:
- Filter by Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS): Amazon sellers typically aim for an ACoS of 2%. Identify which keywords are converting to sales, and at what ACoS. You can then reduce the bids on those keywords that have a higher ACoS than 25% (or your own established threshold), and increase the bids on those keywords that are below your ACoS.
- Filter by order numbers: At a high level, you will know which keywords are driving the most conversions.
- Filter by spend: Make sure you know all the keywords you’re investing in and that they are converting for you. It’s important to be sure you’re making a profitable investment in your ads because an optimised campaign is all about making sure qualified traffic gets to your listing at a profitable – and efficient – cost to you.
Like many other parts of managing a successful business, running a successful Amazon ad campaign requires work. You have to be willing to analyse the data and make adjustments as you go. Using these techniques will help ensure you get the most reach with your Amazon ad campaign.
