You might have heard about people becoming millionaires by selling products on Amazon. And you can become like that, too. One of the best ways to maximize your earning potential is through an internal advertising system called Amazon Pay-Per-Click (PPC) (Explore our Amazon PPC Services). Running Amazon PPC campaigns can boost your sales fast!
Article Contents
Why invest in Amazon PPC?
About 80% of consumers buy products they see on the first page of Amazon’s search engine results. Although not all 2.3 million active Amazon sellers offer the same products… The competition for the products you sell can be very tight. Thankfully, running Amazon PPC campaigns can help you buy a space for your products at the top of Amazon’s search results. This gives you more visibility to consumers. Utilizing Amazon PPC can also help increase brand awareness and generate more sales.
If you have no idea how to run Amazon PPC campaigns, we offer an Amazon advertising tool. Our tool can help you get started and easily navigate Amazon PPC.
How does Amazon PPC work?
Amazon PPC allows sellers to advertise their products on different parts of Amazon. This includes Amazon’s search engine results pages (SERP), product pages, headlines, and email newsletters. On the SERP, your ads will be tagged as “sponsored”. The difference of paid ads from organically ranked products is that paid ads can appear more than in one place. They can be placed above, between, below, or on either side of organic search results.
What we like about Amazon PPC is that you will only pay for the ad when a user or a potential buyer clicks and views your ad. Just like other PPC methods, sellers are required to bid on keywords that they think their target market would likely use to find their products – although, you can also let Amazon choose relevant keywords for you. The bigger your bid for the keyword, the higher the chance that your ad will be displayed on the search results. You can manage your bids on keywords based on your profit.
The number of sellers who strategize using Amazon PPC continuously increases year after year. This is also why your Amazon PPC campaign must be well thought of and must follow the correct structure right off the bat, to achieve optimal results. Proper structuring may also become more crucial as your business expands and as you manage multiple ad campaigns.
If you’re doing Amazon PPC for the first time, here’s a step by step guide on how you can structure your Amazon PPC campaigns to achieve your sales and marketing goals.
Determine what type of ad is best for your campaign.
There are three types of Amazon PPC ads:
a) Sponsored Product Ads
These ads promote a single product, and keywords are the main variable in helping you reach your target market. Sponsored product ads appear on search results, to the right of organic listings, on product detail pages, and below headline search ads. Product sellers, vendors, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors, and agencies can use this type of ad. Categories that cannot use sponsored product ads include used products, adult products, products in closed categories, and refurbished products.
b) Sponsored Brand Ads
You will find these ads above sponsored product ads and organic listings. Also known as headline search ads, they’re the first thing that a shopper sees after they search. They stretch across the entire top of the search results page, allowing the ad to stand out from the rest of the search results listing. Just like sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads also use keywords in targeting audiences. These ads allow you to advertise multiple products and your brand, and write a unique ad copy. They can also be linked to a landing page outside Amazon with more products, or even an Amazon store.
c) Sponsored Display Ads
These ads are best for targeting competitor product pages, and for gaining insights into customer needs and behavior. The algorithm used in this type of ad is also interest-focused, so it helps serve the purpose of targeting an audience based on their interests, specific categories, and relatable listings.
Setting clear business goals can help you determine which type of ad is right for you. If you need help with this, enquire about our Amazon Sponsored Display Ads Services.
Start with an automatic ad campaign and let it run for 1-2 weeks.
You can start an automatic ad campaign as soon as your product is up and running. To kick off, log in to Seller Central and click the “Advertising” drop down menu. Select “Campaign Manager” on the drop down. Then, choose your campaign type, whether “Sponsored Products,” “Headline Search Ads,” or “Sponsored Display.” Then, click the yellow “Create campaign” button, and enter all the information required. These include your campaign name (you can put any), daily budget (you can start with $10-$25, depending on what you’re comfortable with), start and end date, and targeting type (automatic).
Next is the “Create Ad Group” form. You also need to fill in your ad group name, the products you want to advertise, and your default bid (the amount you’re willing to spend when a user clicks on your ad). Click “Save and Finish,” and voila! Your ad campaign is now live!
Now sit back, and let Amazon make wonders on your ad, as you let it run for a week or two, before evaluating whether it worked or not for your products.
Evaluate how well your campaign did by generating a Search Term Report.
After one to two weeks of running your campaign, go back to Seller Central and click the “Reports” drop-down menu. Then, select “Advertising Reports” on the drop-down, and you will be directed to the campaign type page. Click on the “Report Type” drop-down and choose “Keyword.” Fill in any name for the report; choose “last month” as the reporting period, and keep the data unit field as “Total.”
Once you’ve downloaded the report, organize the data, then go to the”7 Day Conversion Rate” column. Click the filter button, and select “sort largest to smallest.” This will sort the top keywords based on their conversion rates. From there, you can select which keywords to target on your next campaign, but we suggest that you choose keywords that covert at least 10% and are offered at a lower rate at the same time.
Come up with more keywords.
From the search term report, you can now start generating a list of long-tail keywords (which are observed to lead to higher conversion rates). You can do this by getting short keywords that had a good conversion rate on your campaign and turning them into 10-20 topics or keywords with at least three words. Compile them in a document so you can test them on your next campaign.
Start a manual ad campaign.
To start a manual ad campaign, follow the steps you did on Seller Center when you created an automated campaign, but for the targeting type, select “Manual targeting” instead of automatic. Then, choose the same product you used on the automated campaign and bit at the amount you’re comfortable with.
Use the keywords you came up with on the manual ad campaign.
You can use as many suggested keywords provided by Amazon as you like, just like in the automatic ad campaign. But be sure that you also click on the “Provide your own keywords” tab, and input all the high-converting keywords and long-tail keywords that you generated. For the “Match type” box, we recommend creating three separate ad groups (for each keyword match type): one for broad match, one for an exact match, and one for phrase match. Once all the manual targeted keywords are up, you can move forward and click “Save and Finish.” Then, wait for a week before touching anything.
Generate another report and evaluate it.
After a week, you’ll have more data on the manually-targeted keywords. From there, you can come up with a much better list of keywords for your campaign based on their performance.
Set the duration and budget for your automatic and manual campaigns.
We recommend that you keep the duration open-ended for potential changes in your campaign. For your manual campaign, look at what’s converting well and what isn’t based on the ACoS column to prevent losing money. If the ACoS is low, it means that the keyword is converting well. From there, you can increase your bid. If the ACoS is high, you can adjust your keyword price (i.e. $0.10 to $0.25) or you can also just pause it.
Final Thoughts
Formulating the right Amazon PPC campaign structure requires enough research, proper targeting, constant testing, and patience. If you’re interested in starting your own Amazon PPC campaigns, whether you’re a new Amazon seller or have been on the platform for quite some time now, we can be of help.
Here at SellerMetrics, we offer an Amazon advertising software that can help you easily navigate Amazon PPC. We know that running PPC campaigns can take a lot of time and energy, that’s why we’re here to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. SellerMetrics can do bid automation, variance reporting, manual bidding, benchmarking, keyword whitelisting and so much more. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about our Amazon tool and how we can help you reach your Amazon sales goals.
Good luck! We’re rooting for you!
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
