Amazon advertising: Which strategies to adopt?

Although many of the world’s leading e-commerce platform’s users are still unaware of it, there are advertising links all over Amazon. It must be said, the light grey used to mark a sponsored product is not visible at a first glance. Most people assume the relevance of search results would be the only criteria used to order products on a shopping website.

Yet advertising is omnipresent on Amazon. There are side bar retargeting banners, SEM banners, sponsored products in search results, and sponsored ‘similar products’ on product pages. This means merchants have all the keys to reach the highest position in the search results of a marketplace that made nearly 10 billion dollars in profits in 2018. That’s 10 times the profit made in 2015!

If your product catalogue, customer comments and SEO organically promote your products to appear in the search results following a relevant request, the advertising campaigns proposed by Amazon will allow you to affirm your positioning on the marketplace.

Although perceived by some sellers as a constraint, paid referencing opens a new opportunity to make your offer available to buyers. By choosing clear objectives, you can take advantage of Amazon’s PPC tools.

For most, the main objective is to increase sales, while maintaining reasonable margins.

Bidding on too wide a selection of keywords is not necessarily the best option, as you may end up spending unnecessary costs on keywords that bring little conversion.

To avoid this pitfall, you can:

– Launch automatic campaigns and extract the keywords with the best conversion rates and significant click rates,

– Apply these keywords in ‘broad match campaigns’ to make more astute bids,

– Extract the best performing keywords from these campaigns to pass them on to ‘exact match’ campaigns and manage your keywords with even greater precision,

– Regularly adjust your bids to react to changes in the marketplace and maintain a good margin.

Launching a new product on Amazon can be a long and sometimes difficult process because it takes time to display among the top search results.

It’s a paradox: you need to sell for your product to go up in the search results, and the product has to go up in the search results to sell!

To make things easier when launching new products, Amazon’s PPC services provide some good practices to follow to make your launch a success:

– Automatic campaigns make it possible to identify niches that react best to the product. Don’t hold back from spending a bit of money to see which keywords have the best conversion rates in these campaigns. After identifying one or two niches that react favourably to your product, update the product sheet. Make it more attractive for the identified niches and change the product category – your chances of being well positioned in a more specific category are always better than in a category that’s too generic.

– Find the right level of bidding for your products by trying to free up as much budget as possible for the launch of your products, even if it means selling them at a loss or breaking even for a while. The number of sales and the comments you will collect are elements that will promote both organic SEO and SEA!

– Refine your campaigns following the tips offered for performance campaigns, extracting the best keywords as you go along.

Bidding on the keywords of your own brand may seem counter-intuitive: organic SEO is often already excellent on these keywords. However, your brand name can easily become a target for your competitors! To counter this risk, it could be worth setting up bids that are high enough to counter those of your competitors:

– In practice, regardless of whether a competitor bids or not on your keywords, your clicks will have a very low cost on one of your ads that target your own brand name. Amazon favour highly relevant products. Your margin will, therefore, have very little impact, especially since the conversion rates on your brand name are high.

– If a competitor attacks, they won’t necessarily take first place, even if they bid more than you (the relevance of their product will also play a role). If their bid is higher than yours, they’ll pay more for each click than your own bid, which will end up costing a lot of money and having a big impact on their margins.

In 2017, Amazon introduced an API to help manage sponsored product campaigns in a programmatic way, which paved the way for automation and accelerated the product positioning competition.

Amazon’s offensive against the historical giants of SEM leaves many players, of all sizes, without the appropriate tools to wage the war of SEO on the platform. The end of the virtual Adwords/Facebook duopoly puts pressure on the historical players of PPC campaign management, as currently they often only have semi-automatic tools at their disposal, at best.

It is increasingly important to look to automation tools which are beginning to develop. They can save you time and optimize your campaign’s performance while allowing you to maintain control of your campaigns, without forcing you to dive into actions such as changing keywords and auctions.

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