When it comes to Amazon PPC, your Intuition may Mislead you
Without a doubt Amazon advertising plays a critical role in boosting brand visibility and driving sales for sellers. With the right strategies, sellers can effectively reach their target audience, make sure that their product listings appear on top of the Amazon search results page and maximize their return on investment (ROI). Sounds like a charm, doesn’t it? While things may seem straightforward, many Sellers make common mistakes when running their Amazon PPC ads. In this blog post we list the most common and most costly mistakes that we have seen and also tell you how to avoid making these “Amazon Advertising Mistakes”.
1. Poor Amazon Ad Campaign Structures
A poorly structured Amazon ad campaign can lead to budget waste and low returns. Below are a few examples of lapses in campaign setup that are indicative of a poor campaign structure. As you read through you will find that the common denominator of ‘poor campaign structure’ is a lack of consistency: If you mix things that don’t match, performance will suffer, data is hard to analyze and optimization nearly impossible.
Adding too many Product Listings to a Campaign
This is a classic mistake. Unless you only sell very few products that are all very similar, lumping all your products (or too many) into one single campaign is a sure-fire way to sink any campaign. The reason therefore is that later in the campaign setup, keywords or audiences that you target need to be aligned with the products that shoppers see in ads. If your brand sells sofas and tables, putting both types of products in the same campaign will be a problem if you later decide to bid on the keyword “sofa”. No matter how nice your tables are, shoppers who search for “sofas” are not looking to buy your tables.
A good way to segment your products into different campaigns is to consider product similarity, as well as product sales performance. For certain campaigns, you may only want to show your best-selling product pages to increase conversion probability.
Poor Keyword Selection & Keyword Match Types
This applies to sponsored brand (learn more about our Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads Services) and sponsored product campaigns. Ideally, you would want to create an ad campaign that revolves around a single keyword cluster. For example your brand name, or specific, common search queries centered on an important product feature. When you start throwing too many different keywords that are not topically aligned into the same campaign, the performance of different keywords can vary a lot. Shoppers who search for your brand name, for instance, are more likely to convert than shoppers who search for more navigational, product category type of keywords. So mixing these very different keyword types in the same campaign would not lead to ideal results.
Structuring your campaigns in a logical way, based on semantic proximity of different keywords is thus important.
Campaigns that Rely Too Much on Broad Match Keywords
Amazon Advertising offers three basic keyword match types: exact match, phrase match and broad match (Here our blog posts on Amazon Keyword Match Types). Many sellers get confused by this because they are not aware that there is a difference between a ‘keyword’ and a ‘search query’. A search query (or search term) is/are the word(s) that a user has actually typed into the Amazon search bar and a keyword is essentially a word cloud that targets a query/queries. How narrowly that word cloud is defined depends on the keyword match type you select. Let’s break it down:
Broad Match Keywords: Any search query that contains your target keyword may trigger your ad. So if you bid on the keyword ‘table’, your ad would show up for queries such as ‘wooden table’, ‘cheap table’, ‘return table’ and so on. The advantage of broad match keywords is that they tend to cover a wide range of search queries and thus get many impressions. The downside is that many of these queries may be of low commercial intent or even contain competitors’ brand names. That is why, from a return of ad spend (ROAS) point of view, these keywords tend to not perform as well.
Phrase Match Keywords: Phrase match keywords allow you to narrow things down a bit. You can target a term such as “wooden table” and your ad will only serve for queries that contain the words “wooden table” in that order (for example ‘brown wooden table’). This increases keyword vs search query fit.
Exact Match Keywords: With some exceptions (misspellings, plural vs singular etc), exact match keywords will only trigger your ads when a shopper’s search query EXACTLY matches your target keyword. Thus, if you pick commercially viable keywords, this increases the chances that shoppers buy your products and this is the reason why this keyword match type tends to perform best. The downside of using exact match keywords is that the search volume for a very specific term may be limited and that you may also be losing out on sales if shoppers search for slightly different terms.
Selecting too Many Audiences
When running Sponsored Display Campaigns you can select different types of audiences, such as remarketing audiences (so shoppers who have viewed your product pages but not yet purchased your products), shoppers who have viewed products similar to yours, or Amazon users who may just have a loose interest in your product category (learn more about our Amazon Sponsored Display Ads Services).
You can probably already see why bundling up all these different types of audiences in one campaign is a bad idea: their levels of intent and also the sizes of these audiences differ vastly. While the size of your remarketing audiences may not be that big, these shoppers are more likely going to convert. Amazon visitors who have just started researching your product category on the other hand are far less likely going to buy your products straight away. For these reasons it is better to keep these different audience segments separate. This way you can more accurately evaluate and optimize their performance and also make more informed budget allocation and bid setting related decisions (For more on this topic read our guide on Amazon Ads Target Audience Selection).
2. Inadequate Keyword Research, Including Negative Keywords
We have already discussed the issues of keyword overload and keyword match types. Not selecting the right keywords and most importantly not reviewing search term reports to weed out ineffective keywords is another cardinal sin that will tank your advertising account performance (Deep-dive on Negative Phrase vs Negative Exact Amazon). Keep in mind that the Amazon advertising platform ultimately generates revenue from clicks. So while the algorithm has your best interests at heart (irony mode off), it most deeply cares about Amazon’s own interests. That’s why conducting thorough keyword research and efficient Amazon keyword targeting is the starting point for setting up any Amazon PPC campaign (also interesting How to conduct Amazon reverse keyword search)
Especially for new Sellers figuring out which keywords work and which ones don’t, can be a lengthy and costly exercise. After all you need to spend on clicks before you know which ones convert and which ones don’t. As an Amazon ad agency one of our advantages is that across all the accounts that we manage we can draw on accumulated experiences spanning several million USD in ad spend. Based on these learnings we already have a good understanding as to which type of keywords perform better. Enquire about our Amazon PPC Services to learn how we can help you get a head start.
3. Not Optimizing Amazon Product Listing Pages
This point may not be obvious to everyone managing Amazon PPC ads, but it is a vital one: The quality of your Amazon product pages matters! Driving quality traffic to your product listings won’t work if your product copy is missing important product details, or if product images look like they were taken with a 1990s Polaroid. This is also where Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO intersect: Well optimized product pages with well-crafted product listing headlines, comprehensive bullet-point copy, best-practice product images and infographics and value adding A+ content will perform better across organic and paid search. Also keep in mind that for Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, your product listing IS your ad creative (If you need help with this check out our Amazon Product Listing Optimization Services). So it’s really critical that you use high-quality images and detailed, engaging descriptions to attract buyers. Include and add relevant keywords in product titles, bullet points, and descriptions to improve search rankings (Learn which ranking signals the Amazon A9 Algorithm uses).
If you are not sure how to optimize your Amazon product listing pages, explore our Amazon SEO Services.
4. Inefficient Bidding Strategies
Amazon PPC bidding strategy is also a huge area where we often see room for improvement. Consider a scenario where you constantly bid more for a keyword than you should to hit your target Advertising cost of sales – ACoS (What is ACoS?). You would sabotage your Amazon success click by click (Related blog post on Amazon PPC Suggested Bid). If you bid too low on the other hand, you may be underbidding and thus miss out on sales. While bid optimization is one of the most direct levers a Seller can adjust to boost sales performance on Amazon it is also the one that is most difficult to calibrate. This is precisely the reason why we have built our own Amazon PPC Management Software. Our proprietary bid optimization software uses advanced algorithms to automate your bidding 24/7. This ensures that your bids are fully optimized towards your ACoS target.
5. Over Reliance on Automatic Campaigns
With automatic campaigns you put Amazon in the driver’s seat: Amazon decides when to serve your product ads based on the keywords that Amazon deems appropriate (based on your product title, description and other sections of your product listing page).
While there are certainly scenarios where automatic campaigns can make sense, we generally advise brands to be very cautious (everything you need to know about Amazon PPC Automatic Campaigns). With automatic campaigns you simply have insufficient control and there is a risk of budget waste. As a general principle, it is probably not the best idea when an advertising platform that manages the ad auction is also in charge of selecting keywords and setting bids. Imagine a casino deciding your bets for you – you can see how a conflict of interest may arise.
6. Focusing on the Wrong Amazon PPC Metrics and KPIs
With Amazon ads, as with any advertising platform, a lack of data is a problem that no one has ever heard of (Everything about Amazon Advertising Reports). As soon as you start spending on ads your analytics reports surface all sorts of metrics: Click-through-rates (CTRs), Cost-per-click (CPC), impressions, clicks, ACoS and many more.
The question is: which of the metrics matter? ACoS may seem like a straightforward KPI to track, but is it really if you run a campaign that only targets your own brand keywords? In scenarios where shoppers are already looking to buy your products and your ad is just the last nudge that reminds them to click and buy, ACoS may NOT be the most relevant KPI to track. Likewise brands that are obsessed with a certain target CPC, or an industry benchmark CTR (What is a good CTR on Amazon?) may also be missing the point. KPI selection is thus a highly strategic task that heavily depends on the type of campaign you are running.
7. Not Bidding on Your Brand Keywords
The last point we want to include in our list is brand bidding. Brand bidding describes the process of a brand bidding on keywords that contain their own brand or product names. While one may argue that it is a waste of money to show ads to Amazon shoppers who have already set their eyes on your product listings, you need to remember that you are not the only fish in the sea. Defending your brand keywords is vital for maintaining visibility and protecting market share. Plus if you do not bid on your own brand keywords your competitors will likely fill the void and take a bite out of your business. A common misconception is that ranking in position one organically is sufficient. This myth has been debunked over and over again. Many Amazon shoppers may not even recognize that there are ads on Amazon and click-through-rates of top of the search results listing are easily double digit numbers. This is high quality traffic that you never want to miss out on.
However, there are certainly ways to cost-optimize bidding on your brand keywords so that you end up spending as little as possible to secure these high value clicks. Contact us to learn how we help our clients achieve this (more about our Amazon Sponsored Products Ads Services).
Conclusions: Avoiding these Common Amazon PPC Mistakes will help you save time and money
Avoiding the common Amazon advertising mistakes listed in post can significantly improve ad performance and ROI. We encourage Sellers to review their Amazon advertising strategies and to implement the best practices shared here. Continually optimizing your advertising campaigns will help you push the barrier and to succeed in the competitive Amazon marketplace. If you are new to Amazon advertising check out our step-by-step guide on how to edit Amazon ads.
