Amazon Ads: The Ultimate Guide For Beginners

Contents

1. What Is Amazon Advertising
2. Is Amazon Worth It: Pros & Cons
3. How Amazon Advertising Works
4. Before You Begin
5. Amazon Ad Types
6. Create Your First Campaign
7. Amazon Ads Campaign Optimization Tips
8. Conclusion

What is Amazon Advertising?

After launching in 2018, Amazon Advertising (previously known as Amazon Marketing Services) has become one of the largest digital advertisers, enabling Amazon vendors to gain a competitive edge on the platform through different ad types to capture consumers’ attention and increase the visibility of their products. And it’s been growing ever since, making up $24.47 billion in digital ad revenues in 2021 with 55.5% growth over the prior year. 

Being the world’s largest eCommerce marketplace for sellers and consumers, unlike most of the digital advertising platforms, Amazon Ads provides access to a large audience of shoppers, actively looking to purchase products online, which can potentially lead to higher conversion rates (CVRs) than on any other platform. However, Amazon’s leading position as a marketplace also means high competition against sellers, looking to capture the user’s interest. Thus, to ensure the best possible results from your campaigns you’ll need a strategic and flexible approach as well as a deep understanding of Amazon Ads best practices and trends.

Is Amazon Worth It: Pros & Cons

Like any other marketing platform, Amazon Advertising, while offering many opportunities for business growth, may not be the perfect fit for every brand. And, when building your marketing strategy, it’s crucial to consider both the pros and cons of the platform to understand if it can bring value to your business.

Some of the strong suits of Amazon Advertising include:

1. Purchase-intent audiences – Amazon is a marketplace, where people are actively looking for their next purchase. The chances of generating a sale, when targeting an audience of interested shoppers, are significantly higher than converting a “cold” audience with no purchase intent. This means higher chances of conversion even for new brands.
2. Organic ranking improvement – running sponsored ads can have a significant impact on your product’s organic ranking, which majorly depends on its sales history. Because ads can help drive traffic and increase sales for the products, they might rise higher in Amazon search results, which can be especially beneficial for newly launched products.
3. Wide reach and ad type diversity – Amazon Ads can help you reach millions of active shoppers through a good variety of formats, including search, video, display, and audio ads all of which can help you significantly boost the visibility of your products. If you want increased reach – you can also consider using Amazon’s DSP (demand-side platform).
4. Brand loyalty – for many customers, Amazon is a trusted company. Some claim to shop exclusively on Amazon, whenever they make online purchases, demonstrating an outstanding amount of brand loyalty. This trust may also spread to the brands across the platform and the products they sell – especially if they’re recommended by Amazon. Advertising on Amazon can help you capture and convert that dedicated audience.

Getting an “Amazon’s Choice” label can increase trust in your product and certainty in its quality, improving your CVR

On the other hand, there are a few aspects to Amazon Advertising that may have a negative impact on your marketing campaigns:

1. High competition – you’ll be competing against a multitude of brands for good ads and organic rankings, which can lead to higher CPCs, and requires a long-term strategy to navigate fluctuating performance trends;
2. Targeting & optimization  – if you target the wrong keywords and audiences, as well as fail to optimize the pages for the keywords you intend your products to show up for, your campaigns will most likely end up with low traction and low sales volume. Planning out your campaigns and making your ads as relevant as possible is a must in order to achieve good results;
3. Costs & selling fees. As with any advertising platform these days, advertising on Amazon gets more costly each year. While some product categories may not have overwhelming costs, others can get rather expensive (CPCs may range from $0.05 to $10 and higher. On average, advertisers pay around $0.81 per click) – so depending on your industry, budget, and product prices, Amazon may not be the best choice for your business. 

How Amazon Advertising Works

Placements & Targeting

Across Amazon Advertising, your ads can show up on a variety of placements – among search results, on product detail pages, and even off Amazon retail sites, including Amazon-owned properties, like Twitch or IMDb, and third-party websites, depending on the ad type.

Image Source

Where your ads get to be displayed – and in front of which user – largely depends on your targeting method. There are several targeting options available to advertisers on Amazon.

Amazon Keyword Targeting

With keyword targeting, you can control user queries, for which your ad will be shown. You can use broad, phrase and exact match type keywords. Match type determines how closely the user query will be fitted to your keyword, making your targeting broader or narrower, depending on which you choose.

For all the match types, however, there are several rules you need to keep in mind.

Close variations refer to plural or singular forms of a word. Ex: “Mugs” is considered a close variation of “mug.”

Misspellings are not accounted for across any match types. Ex: If a customer searches for “bycicles”, an ad, using close match, for example, will be only associated with “bicycles” and won’t serve. It is a best practice to add common misspellings as keywords.

Ignored words. The following words are ignored: “the,” “of,” “when,” “and,” “if” for all match types.

Exact match. With exact match keywords, the ad will appear for search queries that are either the exact same keyword or phrase, or a very close variation of it. In this case, the search query needs to be in the same order and can’t contain additional words. So, for example, if your exact match keyword is “christmas socks”, your ad will show on queries like “christmas sock”, however, it’ll be ineligible for search terms like “christmas stockings” or “socks for christmas”.

Phrase match. With phrase match keywords, your ad will show for search queries that include either the exact phrase or close variations of the keyword in the exact same order. The search query may contain additional words, either before or after the keyword. For example, the phrase match keyword “bbq grill” will make your ad eligible for queries like “brands of bbq grills” and “best bbq grills”, however, your ad won’t show for search terms like “grills for bbq” or “bbq outdoor grills”.

Broad match. With broad match keywords, your ad will show for search queries that contain all the keyword terms, or their close variations. Words can be arranged in any order and contain additional words. For example, if your broad match keyword is “kids barbie doll”, your ad will show for queries like “barbie doll for kids”, “girl barbie kids doll”, but won’t be eligible for search terms like “girls barbie doll” or “barbie doll”. 

It’s important to note that, as a best practice, it’s recommended to bid highest on exact keywords, less for phrase, and bid the lowest on broad match keywords.

Further reading:
Google Ads: Manual Bidding vs. Automated Bidding
Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Which One Should You Bid on?

Product Targeting

With product targeting, advertisers can get more control when ads appear on product detail pages and search results. You can target:

• Specific ASINs – Amazon’s unique identifiers for individual products, similar to a SKU or an inventory code – showing your ads to people who browse certain product detail pages;
• Categories, reaching users that are browsing within specific product categories (e.g. Women’s Sunglasses), with options to refine the price, brand, and ratings.

You can use product targeting to show your ads on the pages of your known competitors, capturing market share from them. Research what products or brands are being considered against your own, and test advertising against them, promoting best-selling or similar products to see how they perform. 

You can also use product targeting to defend your own products against competitors bidding on them. Don’t focus on products with competitive prices, good sales rank, and good reviews as they’ll be too expensive for your competitors to effectively target them – unless you’re seeing a decline in sales and conversion rate – but rather on weaker products or brands.

Product targeting can be especially useful if you’re looking to market a newly launched product, especially if you target ASINs or brands that are more expensive, have less or lower ratings, or lose in quality or functionality compared to your product. 

Audience Targeting

Available for Sponsored Display Ads, this type of targeting allows you to show your ads to specific audiences, determined by their shopping behavior:

• In-market – users, who have been recently shopping for products in a specific product category.
• Lifestyle – users, who exhibit a variety of shopping and viewing behaviors that reflect shared preferences and map to lifestyle segments such as “foodies,” “sports enthusiasts,” “tech enthusiasts,” etc.
• Interests – these audiences can help brands find prospective customers based on what they frequently browse and buy. Examples of these audiences include “interested in Canadian history” and “interested in interior design”.
• Life events – these audiences give advertisers the opportunity to drive awareness and consideration for their products based around life moments, such as “traveling soon” for shoppers planning a vacation.
• Remarketing audiences – users, who viewed or engaged with your products;
• Similar to remarketing audiences – users, who exhibited similar behaviors to those, who engaged with your brand.

Further reading: How to Effectively Use Retargeting Ads

Manual vs. Automatic

There are two main types of targeting in Amazon: automatic and manual. The automatic targeting matches ads to all relevant user queries based on your product information – its category, related products, and keywords in the product title and description.

Automatic targeting is a good way for brands that are new to Amazon Ads to discover search terms or ASINs that bring great results for their products, which can be later used in manual campaigns, and show their ads on long-tail and very specific keywords that aren’t covered by their existing campaigns.

The manual strategy allows you to select keywords or ASINs you want to bid on, giving you the most control over where your ad shows and how much you spend on each keyword or ASIN, and how broad or narrow your targeting is. 

Generally, it’s recommended to use predominantly manual targeting as it’s best to keep as much control over campaigns as possible and it will enable you to make the most cost-effective decisions for your business. However, don’t disregard the usefulness of automatic campaigns, and don’t be afraid to use them for keyword research and expanding your reach.

It’s important, however, to continuously monitor the performance of your campaigns – both manual and automatic – as the performance tends to change over time. 

Ad Ranking

Similar to Google Ads, Amazon Advertising is a service that operates on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which means sellers pay only when users click on their ad. 

Every time someone searches for something on Amazon a real-time auction

occurs for an ad to win the spot. Your ads can show up before and throughout the organic listings, however, the position of your ad and whether your ad reaches the viewer at all depends on where your bid lands among others in the auction and how your ad is ranked by the algorithm, which factors in:

1. Performance metrics, such as: 
   • CTR history
   • Conversion rate
   • Overall sales
2. Relevance metrics:
   • Product title
   • Description
   • Search terms
   • Seller name

The algorithm matches the data of your ad’s performance and relevance to the keyword, audience, product or brand you intend to show your ads for. While Google ranks ads based on how likely the user is to click on the ad, Amazon ranks ads based on how likely the user is to buy the product, focusing on sales conversions that result from a search. Thus, listings with a high conversion rate and a good sales history will rank higher, resulting in better traffic and, in turn, possibly better sales, which can boost the ranking even further. 

Considering that most of the shoppers don’t make it past the first page of search results, you’ll want to rank as high as possible to reach your audience. You can improve your ad rank by testing different targeting options to find out which keywords work best for your business or bidding higher on said keywords if higher cost-per-click (CPC) and ACoS (advertising cost of sales: Ad Spend/Total Sales) would be profitable for your business. Alternatively, you could test optimizing your product pages:

• Check if your products display the featured offer – the featured offer is the section of the product detail page where customers can add items to their cart or buy now; 
• Optimize images – use highest-quality images that are 1,000X1,000 pixels or larger to ensure it’s compatible with Amazon’s zoom feature;
• Product pricing – to maximize your sales your product’s price should be competitive. Different prices have different conversion rates and to achieve the most optimal results for your business you may want to run a couple of A/B tests to find the sweet spot between returns and conversion rates;
• Create strong product titles – it’s recommended to craft informative, easy-to-read titles that focus on key facts and keywords for your product, approximately 60 characters long;
• Product descriptions – craft clear, concise and compelling descriptions, integrating the keywords you want your product to show for in the text. However, mind that repeating one keyword multiple times throughout your description has no benefit. Amazon also recommends to use bullet points in your description;
• Enhance your product detail page with A+ content –  once you enroll in Amazon Brand Registry, you gain access to A+ content that lets you describe your products through enhanced images, text placements, and stories.

This product page example contains a high-quality image that works well with zoom, a bulleted description, and plenty of positive reviews, following best practices, recommended by Amazon.

Optimized product pages have a far better chance of ranking higher, both as ads and in organic listings, as, when adhering to all of the best practices, they effectively use SEO to push their products for relevant queries, contain compelling images and videos, and offer all the information and elements needed to drive a customer to the purchase. And, ideally, you want to build your Amazon ads around keywords your product listings rank most strongly for to get the best results. 

Before You Begin

Even though there are many different ad and campaign types on Amazon Ads with different best practices, there are a few general tips and prerequisites for building your marketing strategy on Amazon.

• Create a Seller Central account

First of all, it’s a must to have your Seller Central account ready with multiple active ASINs, and your product listings optimized in order to drive better traffic to your products. It’s important to ensure that you’ve done your research to determine whether Amazon is the right platform to showcase your products in the first place and they don’t fall under the category of products Amazon prohibits for advertising. 

• Determine your goals & KPIs

You’ll need to set your goals and KPIs before planning out your campaigns. Amazon gives vendors an opportunity to align their targets with their goals, focusing on achieving higher ACoS if you’re looking to boost sales volume, or a bigger number of clicks if your marketing campaigns are geared towards driving brand awareness.

You can also tailor your landing pages depending on your goals, using different images or video materials to help deliver a personalized experience for your users. 

Once you have set your goals, it’s easier to understand which Amazon ad products would work best for your brand – whether it’s search, display, video, audio ads, or even custom advertising solutions – and which strategy could bring the most impactful results for your business needs. 

• Choose products to advertise

To achieve the best results from your campaigns, you’ll need to select the right products to advertise. Promoting your best-selling products is always a safe bet as they’re most likely to bring in more clicks and conversions – and as they get more sales they also might rank better organically, increasing the sales volume from non-paid traffic. It’s important to make sure, however, that these products are in stock and are competitively priced.

Alternatively, depending on your goals, you may want to push a collection of new products to gain traction for them and drive awareness. You should also consider which products fit better for which types of campaigns and ads to achieve the best results – e.g. using video campaigns for brand awareness, and search ads for driving conversions.

Thus, when choosing products for your campaigns, it’s important to keep your marketing goals in mind. It’s also crucial to keep an eye on the performance of the products throughout the run of your campaigns, making adjustments to your product selection if necessary.

If some of your items don’t have a high conversion rate, check if your targeting is relevant to the products you sell, or try optimizing your product page and observe if the adjustments will make an impact on your sales.

• Keyword research

Bidding on the right keywords and implementing them into product descriptions and titles is a crucial step to ensure your ads get enough visibility and bring in a good amount of high-quality traffic. Determine the keywords that are most important to your listings – there is a variety of Keyword Research tools that can help you do that.

It’s also important to build a list of negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant queries and strategically add them to your campaigns

• Weekly optimizations

As with any marketing campaign on any advertising platform, regular management is a must to make the most out of your campaigns and maximize their delivery and results. It’s especially true for campaigns, using automated targeting and running on a high budget. Furthermore, it’s important to check that your best-performing campaigns don’t run out of budget throughout the day – and raise the budget if necessary to not miss out on potential sales.

• Use all available features

It’s important to test different Amazon ad types and solutions, bidding strategies and targeting options – explore the advertising opportunities that are available to you to understand what brings the best results for your business. Advertise your products on storefront pages and make unique landing pages for product categories. Experiment with Amazon display and video ads. In the end, you’ll have a deeper understanding of your ad performance, enabling you to make data-backed decisions and improve your marketing strategy. 

Amazon Ad Types

Amazon Ads offers a great variety of ad types that include sponsored ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display), display, video, and custom ads. To run successful Amazon Ad campaigns, you’ll need to understand all the types of Amazon ads available to you, what their purposes are, and which ones are best suited for your brand and products.

Sponsored Product Ads

Sponsored Products are PPC ads that promote individual products, using keyword or ASIN targeting, showing up on searches typed by consumers (e.g. “sneakers for women”) or on other product detail pages.

Sponsored Product ads can help you reach customers that are actively searching for a product similar to yours, and are usually the starting point for many Amazon advertisers due to the low cost of entry, impact on product visibility and ease of set-up. They can also be used to ensure a higher ranking or exposure for specific keyword searches or to get the product in front of an interested shopper, looking at similar products.

You’ll be able to see Sponsored Products: 

• Across the search results;
• On product detail pages adjacent to the Buy Box;
• On product detail pages in the carousel.

Across search results, Sponsored Product ads can look just like organic listings with the only visible difference being the gray “Sponsored” tag that appears above the product title.

With Sponsored Products ads, you can choose from 3 bidding strategies: 

• Dynamic bids – down only. This strategy automatically lowers your bids when your ad is less likely to convert to a sale. 
• Dynamic bids – up and down. This strategy will raise your bids (by a maximum of 100%) when your ad is more likely to convert to a sale, and lower your bids when there’s a lower chance for conversion.
• Fixed bids. With this strategy, Amazon will use your exact bid and any manual adjustments you set, and won’t adjust your bids based on the likelihood of a sale.

Amazon Sponsored Products ads can drive awareness, engagement and conversions across nearly every product lifecycle stage. However, when launching a new product on Amazon, you may need to be more aggressive to achieve better CTRs and CVRs as you won’t have a high organic ranking on the search results page to rely on.

Sponsored Product ads can also be used to push products with decreasing sales rank to boost the sales volume and improve the ranking.

The main benefit of running this type of ads is simplicity. You don’t need to come up with additional headlines or descriptions, you also don’t need to produce videos or high-quality lifestyle images to promote your brand. All you need is optimized product pages, a list of relevant keywords or ASINs to target, and you’re good to go.

Amazon Sponsored Product Ads Best Practices

1. Set competitive bids – you may want to set higher and more aggressive bids on long-tail, purchase intent keywords or keywords that are the most important for your business. This will give you a chance to rank better than your competitors. For broader and more generic keywords it’s recommended to bid lower as you’ll reach a wider and potentially less relevant audience with these keywords.
2. Keep an eye on trends & performance – customer behavior and performance trends tend to fluctuate quite a lot. The performance of keywords, targeting and bidding combinations may change over time. It’s important to adjust your strategy, bids and budgets along with it. 
3. Keep keyword match types separate – for better performance, it’s better not to mix different keyword match types in the same ad group as their costs and ACoS may significantly differ. Instead, create different ad groups or campaigns for different matches – this way you’ll have more visibility and more control over the performance of your keywords.
4. Use negative targeting – prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant queries and placements, exclude low-quality traffic and reduce costs of your campaigns by adding negative keywords and brands to your ad groups and campaigns. Pay close attention to 1) ASINs, brands and search terms with a large amount clicks, but no or low sales; 2) ASINs, brands and search terms with high CPCs; 3) ASINs and brands that aren’t complementary or related to yours.
5. Create different ad groups and campaigns for different product categories – use separate campaigns or ad groups for each product group to keep your advertising strategy focused and your keywords and budgets organized.
6. Strategically group your ASINs – it’s considered best practice to include ASINs from the same category in one campaign. Consider how you want to group your products, either based on targeting (which keywords, which products are included in your plan) or price ranges and conversion volume so as not to mix products with different performance and ROAS.  You could bid higher for products with a higher-end price, and still see a high ROAS, while you may want to set lower bids and budgets for products that cost less.
7. Leverage bid adjustments to boost the chances of your ad appearing at the top of search results and keep your best-performing campaigns competitive.

Sponsored Brands Ads

Sponsored Brands is another type of PPC ads, based on keyword and ASIN targeting, perfect for driving brand awareness and, ultimately, increasing sales for your business. Similar to Sponsored Products, the ad shows up when a customer is looking for a specific product, however, with Sponsored Brands you can show multiple products at once.

It’s important to note, however, that Brand Registry is required for this type of advertising. 

Sponsored Brands ads appear on product detail pages and at the top, within, or at the bottom of shopping results.

With Sponsored Brands, you can choose from three ad formats: Product collection, Store spotlight and Video.

Product collection allows you to show up to three products in the ad, which will direct shoppers to an Amazon Store, product listing page, or product detail page. You can also create a unique headline and include a custom image, which will show up in supported placements, to capture the attention of users.

Store spotlight allows you to drive brand awareness by showcasing your product categories, leading traffic to your Amazon Store or a special selection of products.

Sponsored Brands Video ads are a great option to drive recognition and sales for your individual products through compelling and narrative video creatives, directing traffic to a product detail page.

Given the purchase-driven Amazon audiences, your video content should be educational, demonstrative, and product-focused. Amazon’s research shows that videos that feature the product prominently within the first second typically perform better than those that don’t. 

It’s recommended to limit the video length to 15–30 seconds and focus on a handful of key selling points to relay your message and hold customers’ attention. 

Sponsored Brands Ads Best Practices

1. Test different ad creatives – it’s crucial to continuously test different headline texts, landing pages, video creatives to observe shifts in the performance. Alternatively, you could run A/B experiments, creating campaigns that differ only by one variable, then use the learnings to build your future Sponsored Brands strategy. It’s also important to give your campaigns enough time – it takes around 2 weeks to run a successful experiment and draw conclusive results based on the performance. 
2. Use the learnings from Sponsored Products campaigns – if you tested Sponsored Products campaigns, you can use the results of their delivery to identify best-performing products, keywords, keyword match types for your brand and craft a strategy, based on existing data.
3. Match your Sponsored Brands headline closely to your keywords – matching your headline to the keywords targeted in the campaign, or most common queries or adjectives shoppers use to look for the product could improve the ad’s click-through rates.
4. Combine headlines with calls to action (CTA) – having a CTA in your headline could be an effective way to draw the attention of the potential customer and boost your ad’s click-through rates.
5. Use both keyword and product targeting – because ads with different targeting options usually get different placements, targeting both keywords and products allows your products to get better visibility.
6. Landing pages and product selection – Sponsored Brands ads allow advertisers to direct shoppers to their Amazon stores or a custom product page. You could test different variations of pages and selections of products to see how it affects your engagement and conversion rates.

Sponsored Display Ads

Amazon Sponsored Display are pay-per-click ads, used primarily to drive brand awareness and improve the visibility of products as well as cross-sell or up-sell to customers. Unlike previous ad types, it can appear both on and off Amazon, including third-party websites and apps.

For Sponsored Display Ads, you can use product targeting, showing your ads on products similar to yours. 

Alternatively, you can target specific audiences: In-market, Lifestyle, Interests, Life events, Remarketing and Similar to remarketing.

Sponsored Display Ads Best Practices

1. Test different targeting options – test targeting competitors pages, complementary and related ASINs, and product categories. Refine your category targeting by specific brands, price range or rating.
2. Target your own products – defend your products from competitors bidding on them by creating a branded campaign, targeting your own ASINs. You can also use this feature to cross-sell on your own product detail pages to prospective customers.
3. Include products that do well on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands – if you’re launching your first Sponsored Display campaign, the safest bet would be to include products that show the best results across your account. Alternatively, you can include your newly launched products to gain more traction. For accounts with little to no historical data, however, you could try running an all-products campaign, or several campaigns based on different product categories to see which of your ASINs perform best for Sponsored Display.
4. Include at least 10 ASINs in your campaign – Amazon recommends starting your Display campaign with at least 10 ASINs. With more products, you can participate in more auctions, which increases your campaign’s impressions and reach. 
5. Advertise products running on deals – Sponsored Display ads support automated deals and savings badges to help users spot special offers, which you could use if your products are on sale. This can significantly boost your CTRs and drive additional traffic to your products.

Amazon Demand-Side Platform

Amazon DSP allows advertisers to programmatically buy ads at scale. It’s the only type of Amazon advertising that uses a cost per mille (CPM) pricing model – where you pay for impressions rather than clicks. So, for example, if you set a $2.00 CPM bid, it means you’ll be paying $2,00 for a thousand impressions.

DSP ads appear both on Amazon and across third-party websites, and use audience targeting to find prospective customers. DSP ads are a great option for advertisers looking to expand their presence, drive brand awareness and nurture prospects at all stages of the funnel, offering increased reach.

Amazon DSP’s audience building tool allows advertisers to create highly customizable user groups based on their engagement with specific ASINs across Amazon:

• Product viewers;
• Product purchasers;
• Users who viewed the products on the search engine results page.

This way, with DSP ads you can effectively retarget your past purchasers, product viewers, users who have viewed or purchased your competitors’ products as well as related or complementary products.

Another benefit of DSP ads is that they can link not only to a product detail page or an Amazon store, but also to any non-Amazon page, which can be beneficial for brands that are looking to drive traffic to their own website.

It’s important to note, however, that Amazon usually recommends a budget of at least $10,000 per month for a period of no less than three months, which makes it a great advertising solution for large-scale brands that are looking to expand their reach and capture a bigger audience.

Across Amazon DSP, you can launch display, audio and video ads.

Within Display Ads, you can launch static and dynamic ads. Static ads combine one creative asset and a CTA. These ads can link back to storefronts, product detail pages, or custom landing pages. 

Unlike static ads, dynamic ads can automate and rotate creatives displayed on the ad, based on your goals. They include multiple images, calls to action, reviews, etc. However, these ads can link only to a product detail page.

Audio Ads can help you reach your audiences as they listen to the free tier of Amazon Music across Alexa-enabled devices, including Echo and Fire TV.

Amazon Video Ads are divided into in-stream and out-stream ads. In-stream video ads appear within video content – either before, during, or after – and can be used on unique inventories such as IMDb TV, for example. Out-stream video ads, on the other hand, do not appear within video content and typically use space reserved for a display ad on a website or app.

Best Practices for Amazon DSP Ads

1. Invest in high-quality ads, backed by data – to see great returns with Amazon DSP, it’s crucial to pair high-quality creative assets with data analysis. Observe metrics such as click-through rate, detail page views, and new-to-brand purchases to evaluate how your ads perform against your business goals and make adjustments to steer the performance towards desired marketing outcomes. Test a variety of assets to determine what drives the best results for your business. Consider what assets, headlines, descriptions and CTAs work best either across Amazon Advertising as a whole, or across other marketing platforms, and if you can apply these learnings to Amazon DSP.
2. Exclude irrelevant websites – to avoid wasted budget, it’s important to exclude websites that you don’t want your ads to show up on (e.g. kids’ games websites). Run a performance report, review your ad placements, and add low-performing ones to the exclusion list.
3. Don’t overdo it  – once you’ve made a significant change to your campaign or account, you should give the algorithm from 7 to 10 days to learn from the changes and optimize the performance. This will also give you enough time and data to see how your adjustments impacted the delivery and the results.

Amazon Custom Advertising

Amazon Custom Ads are unique solutions, tailor-made for brands to fit their goals and capture the target audience. While they can be quite costly, they allow advertisers to reach customers in an unconventional way and test new executions and formats, built on the basis of Amazon’s retail insights and information provided in the advertiser’s creative brief.

Create Your First Amazon Campaign

Generally, most advertisers start out with Sponsored Products ads as they’re the easiest to implement and allow you to effectively evaluate the impact of your marketing campaigns even at small budgets.

To create your first Sponsored Products campaign, you’ll need to:

1. Log into your Amazon Ads account
2. Go to “Sponsored ads” section and click on the “Create campaign” beneath the performance dashboard
3. Choose the campaign type you want to create
4. Choose the name of the campaign, the daily budget (the minimum daily budget is $1), the duration and targeting: manual or automatic. To easily navigate your account, your naming should reflect your campaign type, if your campaign is manual or automatic, if you’re targeting keywords, products, product categories or audiences, what products serve in your campaigns, etc..  
5. Set the bidding and keywords/products. You can choose from the list of keywords and bids, automatically suggested by Amazon, based on the advertised products’ data, or make your own list of targeted keywords or ASINs and set bids manually.
6. Add negative keywords or products. Exclude any potential irrelevant traffic by making an exclusions list.
7. Click on “Launch campaign” and you’re done. Your campaign will be reviewed and published, usually in less than an hour. 

Amazon Ads Campaign Optimization Tips

1. If you’re unsure how to build your account, structure your campaigns according to the product categories, creating a separate campaign for each of the major product categories and more specific ad groups within each of them. Alternatively, consider organizing your campaigns by your products’ performance. You could create a campaign for your best-sellers with higher bids and bigger budgets, and a separate campaign with a smaller budget for the products that don’t perform as well. You can also make separate individual campaigns for your best-selling products – this way you can control the spend over your products better. 
2. Don’t mix branded and non-branded keywords and ASINs. It’s recommended to create different campaigns for branded and non-branded keywords and products you’re targeting. This way, you’ll have better control over your traffic and spend.
3. Set bids in accordance with performance and value. Not all your products will have the same profit margin, so don’t bid the same amount for all keywords, ASINs or audiences. Bid higher on keywords that can potentially deliver the most value and profits. Carefully select the keywords related to low-profit products (you may want to focus on more specific and long-tail keywords) and set your bid in accordance with the ACoS you want to get for those ASINs. If your campaigns are new, you may need to set higher bids to gain traction for your ads, as Amazon might give preference to competitor campaigns that have a proven history of sales. 
4. Test new keywords. It’s important to always be on the lookout for new keywords with the potential to bring value for your business. You can use Amazon’s search terms report or automatic campaigns to find new areas to cover. When testing a new keyword, you could set higher bids for them to quickly generate data and determine if it’s going to be profitable.
5. Avoid keyword cannibalization. If you’re using the same keyword in different campaigns, you might be bidding against yourself. Go over the keywords you use for each campaign, removing duplicates, and set negative keywords if needed.

Amazon Advertising: Is It Worth It?

Amazon Advertising can be a great opportunity and an impactful marketing strategy for vendors, providing them with access to purchase-driven audiences and the potential to significantly expand their reach and sales volume. 

While the platform may seem daunting at first, the right marketing strategy can set your brand on track to success and achieve your marketing goals, whether it’s maximizing growth or improving sales efficiency.

If you’re looking to advertise on Amazon, feel free to reach out. Our experts will be happy to answer your questions and help you navigate your Amazon Ads strategy.