Amazon Advertising Optimization
Marketplace Valet manages millions of dollars in advertising budget for our clients every year. We utilize powerful machine learning bid management software for programmatic ad spend. This means that we are out there uncovering every possible profitable search term for your products, while maximizing impression share and sales but decreasing ACoS.
Thinking About Sponsored Products?
Amazon Paid Advertising
Amazon Advertising is an incredibly useful mechanism if used correctly to drive consumers to your product pages and storefront pages, while creating brand awareness and putting eyeballs on your products. Amazon Paid Advertising is a Cost Per Click spend model, whereas you only get charged your allotted click budget if a customer clicks on the ad.
There are several KPI’s that should be considered when using Amazon Paid Advertising. ACOS (Average Cost of Sale) is generally the most used data point when factoring if Amazon Paid Advertising Campaigns are performing well, but brands should not focus on ACOS alone when determining their success with Amazon Paid Advertising. Because Amazon Paid Advertising can contribute to organic search indexing on Amazon, it is important to take into consideration total lift in sales and not just those sales that are a direct result of the paid placement.
We will focus on three primary Amazon Advertising methods such as:
- Sponsored Product Ads (SPA)
- Sponsored Brand Ads (SBA)
- Sponsored Display Ads (SDA)
SPA’s is probably the most effective Amazon Advertising Method and 80% of your Amazon Advertising Budget should be focused on this area of Advertising. Sponsored Product Ads look just like a normal search result, but have a small “Sponsored” watermark above the title in search results:
There are many strategies that are commonly used for SPAs. The most common strategy we use is the keyword mine. Once we make sure that all of the product page content is built out, we start with either an aggressive or conservative approach mostly depending on a products history. If a product is new or newer to Amazon perhaps with little or no reviews, we opt for a conservative approach meaning that we start the CPC bids low and target an ACOS from a lower percentage and grow into the target ACOS. If a product has strong reviews or BSR (Best Seller Rank), then we will apply a more aggressive CPC, expecting a higher ACOS and then work towards the target ACOS. We will start with an Automatic Campaign(s) in which Amazon will select when our product appears in paid search based on our content, bid amount, and relativity score with relation to the customers search term. As we continue to capture impressions, clicks and conversions, we are then able to make some data driven decisions such as adding negative keywords or lowering bids for poor performers and creating phrase and exact manually targeted campaigns for those keywords that are performing. We carry out this process until we feel confident that we have mined out the converting keywords and move forward with our manual campaigns to explore more opportunity in additional keyword stings.
Another one of the strategies we use include boxing out competitors which is usually what larger brand with bigger budgets can deploy in order to outspend and outplace the competitors in paid search results. The idea here is to soften sales and increase spend for their competitors, while dominating a category or search term(s). Another common strategy is targeting specific keywords in order to convert which moves organic rankings higher in indexing for each sale made on that targeted keyword. A process like this can take some time and may yield some higher ACOS in the short term so product selected for this type of strategy must be in it for the long haul. Similarly, when a brand has a new product launch Sponsored Product Ads can be used as a tool to get products to index faster organically by accelerating Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions which are all factors in organic indexing on Amazon.
Sponsored Brand Ads (Formerly referred to as Headline ads) are the paid banner ads that may appear at the top of an Amazon search result such as this:
Sponsored Brand Ads are reserved for brands that are registered with the Amazon brand registry which makes for less competition. Although the SBA link can be directed at ASINs, we strongly recommend using the SBA to direct the customer to your branded Amazon storefront. This way, you are capturing the customer to only view your brand and your product assortment without the interference of other products in search results. If your brand does not have a SBA ad for their branded search term, then who does and is stealing your customers?
Sponsored Display Ads (currently in Beta) is paid retargeting to re-engage shoppers off the Amazon site who viewed your products or similar products, and drive them back to Amazon to your item detail pages. Because this form of advertising is in Beta, there is not much data that is offered. We tyically recommend a very conservative bid because the lack of data provided. See separate attachment for details.
Reach relevant audiences
Engage the right audiences for your business, beyond those actively shopping on Amazon.
Maximize impact with minimal effort
In just a few clicks, create a display campaign that promotes your full catalog with auto-generated ad creative that is then optimized for performance.
Support your business objectives
Sponsored Display helps you achieve your goals from product demand to conversion.
