Introduction
As an emerging brand on Amazon or looking to scale up your business, Sponsored Brands can help you engage shoppers as they browse and discover products. The Amazon-Sponsored Brands understand the value of visibility when it comes to advertising. In addition to boosting brand awareness, it can also boost sales. You should definitely focus your efforts on Amazon Sponsored Brand ads if you want more success with pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
What is Amazon PPC?
If you recently heard “pay per click” advertising and thought you heard “paperclip” advertising, you might be new to this whole Amazon PPC thing. Let’s jump into some quick terms: Amazon Advertising (sponsored ad placements) is also known as “Amazon PPC” or “Amazon Pay-Per-Click”.
Amazon PPC is the advertising platform Amazon makes available to its third-party sellers. It allows sellers to create ad campaigns for their products and then charges them each time a potential customer clicks and views their ad.
Before we get into the details of PPC though, it’s important to understand Amazon’s key PPC metrics. This is how Amazon describes each one:
a. Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): The percent of attributed sales spent on advertising. This is calculated by dividing total ad spend by attributed sales. For example, if you spent $4 on advertising resulting in attributed sales of $20, your ACoS would be 20% (ie. $4/$20 = 0.20).
b. Attributed Sales: The total product sales generated within one week of clicks on your ads. Your sales data can take up to 48 hours to populate so, as a result, sales data is not available in the ‘Today’ date range and may be delayed to the ‘Yesterday’ date range. You can view the individual sales totals for advertised products and other products in the Campaign Performance report.
c. Impressions: The number of times your ads were displayed. Once identified, it may take up to three days to remove invalid clicks from your reports. Clicks from the last three days may be adjusted due to click invalidation.
d. Clicks: The number of times your ads were clicked. Once identified, it may take up to 3 days to remove invalid clicks from your reports. Clicks from the last three days may be adjusted due to click invalidation.
Types of Amazon PPC Ads
Amazon Brand Advertising has majorly three options for you under their portfolio of Sponsored Brand Ads. Let’s discuss the types of Amazon PPC ads available, in order of their popularity among third-party sellers.
2. Sponsored Product: ads are pay-per-click advertising campaigns that are the most like the general PPC ads you would run in Google or Bing. This type of ad uses keyword and product targeting to advertise specific, individual products and appear alongside other products on the search results page or in a carousel on a product detail page.
Source: Amazon
There are majorly two types of Sponsored product campaigns that are:
1. Manual Campaign: Contrary to the automatic campaign, the manual campaign allows you to choose (and customise) which keywords to target on your ads. You can do this by using an Amazon keyword tool or by evaluating and analysing the performance of the keywords in your automatic ad campaign.
2. Auto Campaign: Automatic Campaigns is where Amazon decides when to display your product ad based on the keywords identified from the title, description and other sections from your product listing.
Manual Campaign can be targeted in two ways that are Keyword targeting and Product targeting
1. Keyword targeting: Keyword targeting is a feature in Amazon ads that allows you to select specific, relevant keywords that will show your product ads in searches. Amazon Academy > Amazon Advertising Configurations > Amazon Keyword Targeting. These are done considering three keyword match types, viz. Broad match, phrase match and exact match.
2. Product targeting: Amazon rolled out a new update to the Sponsored Products, called Product Targeting, wherein sellers can target certain brands, categories, and products to display their ads. This feature has given granular control to the marketers and sellers over Amazon PPC campaigns. This can further be targeted in two ways that are Individual product targeting and category product targeting.
Auto campaigns can be targeted in four ways viz.
1. Loose match: Loose match terms show your products when shoppers use search terms loosely related to your products.
2. Close match: Your products are shown to shoppers who use search terms closely related to your products.
3. Compliments: Complements are targeted to shoppers browsing product pages for your products. According to the findings from our experiment, complements only appeared on product detail pages.
4. Substitute: Substitutes are targeted to shoppers considering products that are substitutes for your items.
3. Sponsored Brands ads
Sponsored Brands ads, formerly known as “headline search ads,” allow sellers to drive awareness to more than one product at a time and catch shoppers’ eyes with more robust visuals than with Sponsored Products.
Source: Amazon
There are majorly two types of ads in Sponsored Brand Ads that are:
1. Headline ads or Banner ads: Headline Search Ads are a type of advertising campaign that allows Amazon sellers to promote their products and their brand to Amazon customers. These ads are targeted by keyword, and operate on a cost-per-click basis.
Source: Salesbacker
2. Video Ads: Amazon video ads allow advertisers to reach Amazon customers with targeted video on Amazon’s websites, mobile apps and Fire Tablet wake screen. Convey your brand message without-stream autoplay video for an engaging ad experience.
Source: Amazon ads
3.Sponsored Display Ads
Sponsored Display ads allow sellers to retarget customers who have visited their product detail pages, on and off Amazon. Unlike Sponsored Products and Amazon PPC, Sponsored Display ads can appear on Amazon’s affiliate sites, including Google, Facebook, Netflix, and even mobile phone apps. Like Amazon PPC, a seller must have a registered brand in order to utilise them.
Source: Jungle Scout
Is Amazon PPC really necessary?
The answer is yes!
If your brand is relatively new and products are not ranking on page #1 for the top most keywords, a huge chunk of your sales will come from PPC initially. With Amazon Sponsored Ads, you can temporarily rent the coveted real estate on page one of SERPs and get your products in front of shoppers right when they are searching for your product.
Effective PPC campaigns result in more sales, increased reviews and better organic positioning. While you should not entirely depend on PPC for sales, you must use it in the initial stages of product launch for getting a head start in sales and the latter stages for retaining your market share.
Even name brands with thousands of reviews and organic positioning on page one continue to advertise aggressively to stay in the competition.
Advantages of Amazon PPC
1. Gives Exposure to Amazon Flywheel
The amazon marketplace is often referred to as a Flywheel. You appear more organically (in searches + best seller rankings) as you gain sales pace, which results in more overall sales.
Source:Upriver Instagram
2. Fuel your Brand Awareness
Sponsored Brand Ads could be used to increase visibility and set the vibe of your brand in your customers’ eyes. It helps communicate your brand message and value through custom headlines. You can also optimise your bid strategy for the placements that best meet your performance goals.
3.Targeting Shoppers
Sponsored Brand Ads even aids you in driving your product awareness by reaching customers while they’re on the lookout. It also helps increase conversions by folds by directing your target audience to your store or custom landing pages and specific product pages.
4.A Branded Shopping Experience
Sponsored Brand Ads help link shoppers candidly with your Store, so that you can engage your shoppers in an immersive environment that’s all about your brand.
5.CPC Ads let you Control Costs
You can set your limits and choose your cost through a bidding system, and obviously pay only when customers click your ads.
How to Create an Amazon PPC strategy
Here are the basic aspects of building a solid Amazon PPC management strategy:
1. Test out each type of PPC ad campaign, and play around with automatic and manual keyword targeting to see what’s best for your brand.
2. When starting out, set daily budgets and default bids 50-100% higher than what Amazon recommends.
3. Let ad campaigns run for at least two weeks before running reports and making adjustments.
4. Use ad reports from your automatic campaigns to find keywords for your manual campaigns.
5. Before adjusting or removing a keyword from a manual campaign, make sure the keyword gets at least 10 clicks.
6. Continue reviewing your ad reports once a week, subtracting, adding, and adjusting keywords as needed.
Conclusion
Amazon marketplace is becoming increasingly pay-to-play and thanks to COVID, CPCs are higher than ever. Besides, there are so many advertising updates rolled out by Amazon that tempt brands to leverage Amazon ads to make their presence felt. Sponsored Products introduced a new search term impression report, Sponsored Brands can now feature a custom headline and logo and Sponsored Display now allows advertisers to promote their products on numerous platforms.
We hope this Amazon PPC guide will help you with your advertising efforts on Amazon. This guide features a lot of valuable information so be sure to bookmark it for future reference.
