Advertising on Amazon: features and nuances of customization

Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce platform. And it has its own in-house advertising tool, Amazon Ads, which allows businesses to market their products even more efficiently on this platform. There are three ad formats in the ad account: Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, Product Display (or Sponsored Display). Separate formats of Display Ads and Video ads are also available, but on a different service.

The main advertising on Amazon is a Sponsored Product, which looks similar to Google Shopping ads, but is closer to a regular Google Ads search campaign.

* * *

General scheme of work of Amazon advertising:

• traffic starts to flow to your products
• you start selling
• the coverage of your listings is growing, as a result, the products rise in the organic ranking
• your brand awareness and free impressions are growing
• you receive feedback from your customers, as a result of which trust in you both from the system and from users grows
• the efficiency of using Amazon as a trading platform is growing

Sponsored Brands is used to promote a new product or seasonal products. Used to generate demand, promote the seller’s brand and for repeat sales. Works for any goods, except for products “for adults”, used goods, including refurbished ones, and goods from closed categories (which require prior permission from the site administration and often supporting documents)

Sponsored Brands’ ad creation process is similar to Sponsored Products. Although there are a number of nuances:

• you can set a general budget for the entire advertising period
• if you sell different brands, then you need to select the brand advertised here
• up to 3 products can be presented in one block
• the ad unit contains the brand name, logo and title

An automatic campaign (Sponsored Product – Automatic targeting) is launched for each product, in this case the settings are minimal, you just need to mark the product listing and set a budget. Also, advertising by keys (Sponsored Product – manual targeting) is launched for each product. The keys can be collected not very carefully, both target and near-target, you can even run ads without minus words and with keys in a wide type of match.

Keys are collected in special parsers https://keywordtool.io/amazon
and http://sonar-tool.com/us, but Google Ads Keyword Planner is also quite suitable for selection.

After a month of work, a new and main advertising campaign is created for each product – also by keys (Sponsored Product – manual targeting), but key queries are collected from two running campaigns. As a rule, only those that bring conversions are added. Accordingly, negative keywords that are either irrelevant or spend a lot, but bring nothing, are also collected from these campaigns. This campaign should get a bigger budget and should monitor bids by raising bids for more conversion requests. It is also worth optimizing the product listing itself for the most effective keys.

The first campaigns are essentially the generation of conversion semantics that need to be tracked and added to the main campaign.

* * *

A typical Amazon advertising work plan looks like this:

Stage 1. Customization

• Selection of keywords
• Selection of negative keywords
• The very creation of campaigns
• Setting budgets and choosing settings

Stage 2. Maintaining

• Downloading reports
• Analysis of campaigns
• Analysis of the work of keywords
• Collecting conversion keys from running campaigns
• Analysis of search queries and formation of a list of negative keywords
• Cross backing track
• Listing Optimization
• Optimization of rates
• Structuring and restructuring campaigns, adding new ones

Campaign type – Product Display (banner). The banner is actually created automatically, from the pictures of the listing and the logo, you can add only advertising text.

Another type of display advertising is Display Ads (not to be confused with Sponsored Display – these are different types of advertising). It is configured through a separate service (https://advertising.amazon.co.uk/products/amazon-dsp) and is displayed on the sites of Amazon partners (by analogy with Google KMS). In the same service, one more type of advertising is configured – Video advertising.

The advantages of advertising campaigns of the first two types, automatic and by shared keys, are very simple to set up, and the fact that with a small budget you can get inexpensive conversions and generate conversion keys. Cons – sometimes it can work badly and waste the budget, but it rather depends on the listing, if it is poorly worked out, then it may be the situation described above.

Main campaign. Pros – advertising goes only by conversion keys, the most relevant and effective, is the main generator of sales, with long work you can get many inexpensive conversions. Cons – requires careful study and analysis of the first two types of campaigns and analysis of the campaign itself, careful work with bids, negative keywords and listing.

Banner. Pros – Easy setup, Cons – This is not advertising for sales, but for brand awareness.

Amazon advertising has its own peculiarity – you shouldn’t turn off the advertising campaign in principle (unless the advertised product has just ended in the warehouse), otherwise the advertisement fails and in order to further advertise the product, you will need to spend much more money than without stopping.

There is also a feature of the Amazon advertising office – advertising reports are limited to three months, so for comparison, it is worth downloading all available reports every week or month.

Statistics on conversions in the Amazon ad account is available only for the last week, even if statistics are uploaded for a longer period. These are such metrics as Total Sales, Total Orders, Total Units, Conversion Rate, Advertised SKU Units, Other SKU Units, Advertised SKU Sales, and Other SKU Sales.

You need to set up advertising as soon as the product is launched and issued. It is advertising that is the engine of trade on Amazon, since the new product does not have a rating or reviews, and, accordingly, there is no organic traffic.

The first search campaigns can be launched in just 2 hours. Automatic starts in 10 minutes, for a keyword campaign you need to collect at least some semantic core, both relevant and near-target keywords will do without much sorting.

In the first month, only about 2-3 hours are spent on work (during this time, you can launch an RK under 2-3 categories of goods).

The main work will begin from the 2nd month. In this case, the analysis of launched campaigns and setting up the main search engine for the same 2-3 product categories will take from 10 hours, depending on traffic and collected data. Here you need an individual approach to each product.

Further, the work time can increase, since time is added to correct the listing and it will be necessary to analyze not 2, but 3 campaigns for each product, that is, the 3rd month of work can already take 15 hours or more.

The key indicator of HR quality is ROI, in other words, profitability. On Amazon, this indicator is marked as ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale). It is calculated as follows: ad cost / revenue * 100.

For example, if $ 2 is spent on advertising and goods are sold for $ 20, the ACoS will be 10%. Accordingly, the lower the ACoS, the higher the return on advertising.

Other indicators also affect the conversion of ads – a good listing, the number of positive reviews about a product, adding products to a wishlist – all this increases the product’s rating.

Depending on the product, advertising can pay off in a month, but more often it takes about 2-3 months. If the product is good and is bought often, then it gets more reviews and more trust from Amazon – and as a result, clicks are cheaper and there are more clicks.

Ads on Amazon also affect organic listing visibility. That is, the more people see a product in the SERP, the more they buy it, leave more reviews, and the number of reviews in the ranking on Amazon plays a big role, they greatly increase the degree of trust and therefore such products sell better.

Why do you need to entrust the setup of advertising campaigns in Amazon to specialists? Non-specialists, as a rule, do not devote much time to analyzing work, and few of them know that in addition to an automatic campaign and a campaign by keywords, you need to create a main campaign, into which it is worth transferring conversion keys. They also don’t bother with adding negative keywords and keyword matching types.

That is, an ordinary user will not conduct a thorough analysis, and when advertising ceases to bring tangible profit, they will not know what to do. That is why it is worth contacting specialists for a competent advertising setting, which will bring profit to the business.