10 Expert Tips to Optimize Amazon Advertising Campaigns

A robust advertising campaign is a bedrock on which a seller’s Amazon success is built. With competition rising on the Amazon marketplace every day, it has increasingly become a pay-to-play game. The question is, how can sellers make sure that their Amazon advertising campaigns are worth the investment? How can you make sure that you’re not throwing your advertising budget into a void? Here’s how:

Top 10 Amazon advertising hacks

Depending on your business goals, the definition of a ‘good’ PPC strategy will vary. These hacks are proven strategies that you can use in all your campaigns to maximize revenue and ensure long-term profitability.

Tip 1: Use auto and manual campaigns

Manual campaigns are great to optimize your return on investment and lower your ACoS. So, manual campaigns are always the best option, right? Not exactly.

Many top sellers use automatic campaigns along with manual campaigns. Both can be strategically used to complement each other. This is because automatic campaigns are a great way to discover new high-converting long-tail keywords and high-converting ASINs for product targeting ads.

Finding and using relevant keywords is a crucial part of optimizing your Amazon sponsored campaigns. Auto-targeting campaigns do a lot of the work for you. Just finding the keywords isn’t enough.

Once you find these converting keywords, you need to shift them to your manual campaigns for further optimization. You get more control with manual campaigns, so you can optimize them to reduce ad spend and lower ACoS. When you’re shifting keywords from your auto campaign to your manual campaign, make sure you mark those keywords as negative in the former.

What is a ‘negative’ keyword? That’s another attribute you need to use to optimize your sponsored ads.

Tip 2: Utilize the negative keyword/ASIN feature

Have you noticed keywords or targeted ASINs with a high CTR but next to no sales?

There are usually two reasons why this happens.

1. The keyword/ASIN may not be relevant to your product
2. The keyword/ASIN is relevant, but its conversion rate is low.

Whenever you see this happening, it is a good idea to mark the keyword or ASIN as negative. Your products will not be advertised for that keyword/ASIN afterward. This will help you reduce your ACoS and minimize wasted ad spend.

When you’re marking a keyword as negative, you have two options:

• Negative phrase: Your ad won’t be displayed for keywords that contain the complete phrase or close variations. For instance, if you mark ‘wine glass’ as negative with phrase targeting, your ad won’t show up for ‘set of 5 wine glass’ or ‘wine glass red tint’. Your ad may still show up for the search term ‘glass wine’ – indicating that the order is important.
• Negative exact: Your ad will not be displayed for search queries that contain the exact phrase or close variations. This means that if targeting is exact for the ‘wine glass’ example, the ad may still be displayed for ‘set of 5 wine glass’ or ‘wine glass red tint’.

Tip 3: Organize your campaigns

This may seem unimportant at the beginning. Do not make the same mistake that countless other sellers have made. A messy campaign structure directly affects your bottom-line. This is because it is almost impossible to scale and optimize unstructured campaigns.

This is an issue that can easily be avoided if you structure your campaigns properly.

The first thing you need to do is decide how you want to create and categorize your ad groups. You can group your products when creating ad groups under the following categories:

• By product category
• By brand
• By top sellers/your top competitors

You can sort the group further by:

• Similar products
• Similar keywords
• Same match type for keywords

It is important to ensure that you are consistent with your campaign structure to avoid potential overlap within your campaigns. The last thing you want to do is end up bidding against yourself.

Tip 4: Have a naming convention

This is more of a follow up on the need to organize your campaigns. Having a naming convention for your campaigns will save you a lot of time and help you quickly identify the different ones if you have a large catalog.

The point of structuring the campaign and creating a naming convention is to make it easier to manage different Amazon advertising campaigns. So make sure you keep it simple!

Tip 5: Bid on your brand

Wait. Why would you want to waste money by bidding on your brand? When consumers search for it, they are going to find your products on the first page of the search results anyway. Well, let’s test it out. I searched for the popular diaper brand ‘Pampers’ on Amazon. These are some of the first few search results:

Huggies is aggressively bidding on the Pampers keyword – giving them a chance to steal some customers right from under Pamper’s nose!

You need to bid on your own brand to prevent this from happening. Most top brands do it, and they do it because it is worth the investment. You need to retain your customer-base and prevent your competitors from stealing your market share.

Tip 6: Bid on your competitor’s brand

Do what Huggies is doing – bid on your competitor’s brand name. This is vital if your competitor has a larger market share and more loyal customers!

It is a great way to expand your brand name and customer base. If you catch your competition unaware, you’re sure to reap the rewards!

Tip 7: Stop advertising serial non-performers

Being successful on Amazon hinges on finding the right product. It doesn’t always work out. If a product isn’t flying off the shelves, despite a lot of money being pumped into sponsored ads to promote it, it may be time to let go. Stop advertising it – that’s the first step. If it’s costing you money, then you may even need to remove the listing and liquidate what you can.

Tip 8: Optimize your campaigns regularly

Keep optimizing your Amazon ad campaigns regularly. An effective and optimized PPC campaign cannot be created overnight. Successful Amazon advertising campaigns are the result of months, if not years, of optimization. It is an iterative process that demands your constant attention.

So, what can you do if you don’t have all that much time?

You can always turn to an  Amazon ppc management service like SellerApp. This will ensure that your campaigns are managed by PPC experts who use the strategies that are proven to work.

Tip 9: Make data-informed decisions

Never rely on your instincts when it comes to Amazon PPC. Your competition will be using advanced data analytics tools or will be carefully analyzing their search reports before making any decision – you should too.

If you’re apprehensive about using a third-party tool, you can still get a lot of relevant information from Amazon’s search term reports. It’s difficult to extract useful information from so much data, but it’s possible!

Tip 10: Use sponsored brand and display ads

You have a lot of options when it comes to advertising on Amazon, and the list keeps getting longer. Each different advertising channel has different benefits and targeting customers at different parts of the sale-funnel.

You need to identify the perfect Amazon advertising solution that aligns with your brand strategy. You have a lot of options, so you need a little research. You can read this detailed article to learn about all the different types of advertising options on Amazon.

Author Bio:

Arishekar N has over five years of web development experience and is the senior digital marketing strategies at SellerApp, Specialist in SEO, SEM, and best conversion rate optimization strategies that deliver industry-leading ROI. Arishekar has helped companies through more effective search engine marketing and SEO strategies. He is most passionate about working with e-commerce companies.

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