Though anyone can put up a business, the outcome isn’t the same for everyone. There are tons of variables at play and there’s no such thing as overnight success. And this is the same with Amazon selling.
Aside from having a customer-centric approach, online marketplaces such as Amazon openly encourage competition, which means a lot of hard work and strategizing on the seller’s end. And one of the must-haves in ensuring the success of your Amazon business is utilizing advertising, or more specifically, running PPC campaigns.
Advertising is particularly beneficial for e-commerce businesses due to the vastness of the space they are operating in. Though the network and reach are wider and almost boundary-less in e-commerce, the more it becomes challenging for sellers to be visible to their target market.
Now, Amazon advertising not only makes you visible to more consumers, but also to relevant and intentional buyers. This targeting capability makes it more effective as well. Whereas adopting the pay-per-click, or PPC, the model allows for a more cost-efficient way of advertising on Amazon since you only get to pay for every click the ad gets, since logically, every click signifies high intent to purchase, increasing the conversion rate.
But as more sellers deploy their own PPC campaigns, the more that you have to be strategic about yours. In this article, we will tackle different innovative approaches you can adopt today in your PPC campaigns. The goal is for you to achieve that competitive advantage faster and more effectively.
Advanced Amazon Advertising Strategies
Elevating your PPC strategies increases your chances of success on the platform. Their goals are for you to drive as much traffic and high-quality leads to your listing, capture past and interested customers, increase customer loyalty, and lower your advertising cost to bring the profits up.
In essence, advanced or innovative PPC strategies such as retargeting, strategic bidding, and audience targeting all help improve your ad performance and consequently, get more sales. Let’s tackle them one by one.
Retargeting Strategies (Amazon DSP)
We may see that the goal of advertising is to capture as many new customers as possible. However, only focusing on this perspective is lucrative, slower to give results, and only part of the bigger picture. As you see, sales funnels have now become more dynamic in that you can enter at any point and then still clinch a sale. This is what retargeting is all about.
Retargeting is re-marketing to shoppers that may have interacted with your ad or listing at some point. But yet, for various reasons, did not purchase it. Re-engaging the shopper having known your brand or product brings you closer to the sale. Ads at this point are crafted to persuade them to finally close the deal.
As for now, re-targeting is confined to the realm of Amazon DSP. And you can use the latter to complement and boost your PPC campaigns.
Firstly, you have to define what type of audience you’d like to re-market to. For example, do you want to show ads to shoppers that have previously clicked the ad but did not buy? How about those shoppers that have added your product to their cart but haven’t checked them out?
Next, you have to craft good ad copies that will finally persuade these shoppers to buy the product. Make sure the ads are compelling, informational, and actionable.
And as with the rest of your PPC campaigns, strategize on your bids, monitor your performance, and optimize as necessary.
Retargeting is a great option for sellers looking to maximize their sales opportunities. You can re-target supposedly customers you’ve instead lost to your competitors. Your ads can also serve as a reminder that they can still check out the items on their carts. These PPC campaigns can also help drive repeat customers.
Retargeting is also a good way to improve brand awareness. It is essential to retain your brand or product as a top-of-mind choice for as many customers as possible. Brand awareness is also helpful if you are aiming to achieve customer loyalty.
Bidding Strategies
Now, as you remember, PPC also works via a bidding process. You bid a cost-per-click (CPC) for a specific keyword, and if you win, you’ll pay the CPC plus $0.01 for the second-highest bidder.
Now, PPC is not just about making the highest bid, but also strategizing when it comes to bidding amounts, keywords to bid on, and other targeting components.
The good thing about bidding strategies is that they are flexible to fit a seller’s budget and/or goal. But then, it boils down to continue fueling your PPC campaigns with an ample budget to ensure that the results compound up and work for you over time.
Bidding strategies can give your listing these advantages:
Optimal ad placements
You can maximize your visibility by targeting the optimal ad placement that provides you with the highest click-through and conversion rates.
Maximized ad spend
You are not just reaching the right customers, but you make more from less ad budget.
More conversions and sales
You can control how you bid and what ad placements you want to show from depending on which converts are based on sales.
You have the option to do automatic or manual bidding. Automatic lets Amazon bid for you depending on different scenarios. Whereas in manual bidding, the control is yours, and you have more flexibility to adjust the bids depending on how your keyword research goes or the performance of your campaigns as you see them.
Dynamic Bidding
This is where you set your bids to automatically “react” to a certain situation. Your bids can increase or decrease by as much as 100% in real time. It will increase if the algorithm perceives that the ad will highly likely convert to a sale, and decrease if it doesn’t.
Rule-based Bidding
Do you want more control over your PPC campaigns? Rule-based bidding can maximize your returns. With it, you can set the target ROAS of your campaigns and ask the algorithm to make the bid adjustments for you based on the criteria you set. So ideally, you set the goal and the parameters but still allow the algorithm to do the work for you.
Bid Multipliers
Another approach to your bidding strategy is the use of bid multipliers. Here, you’ll be targeting ad placements and ask the algorithm to increase the bid accordingly for you to land on these coveted spots. After all, not all ad placements will give you the best visibility. You must know where your ad works best to maximize your budget, time, effort, and of course, results.
You can adopt this after you’ve made a careful observation of how each campaign performs in various ad placements. The key is to explore and test different ad campaigns, which means capitalizing on experimentation at the beginning, and then, applying the insights to more focused campaigns later on.
It works by assigning a bid multiplier for the placement of your choice, either on the Top of the Search or on Product Pages. You set any integer up to 99 as your bid multiplier so that the algorithm will automatically increase your bids as it spots the opportunity.
This strategy would need some intermediate to advanced knowledge of how PPC campaigns work. It will also work best over mature campaigns that have plenty of data and history to observe and derive insights from.
So, if you are just learning the ropes of Amazon PPC advertising, here are some tips for you when it comes to bidding strategies:
Start with conservative bidding
Make preliminary research on the average bids in your product niche. And then, make conservative bids that are not as far from these bids. Monitor the performance of your campaigns and adjust bids accordingly. The key here is testing.
Performance metrics
Make it a habit to use data and reports when making decisions. Amazon gives you performance metrics that you can derive insights into. Regularly monitor how these metrics fare, such as your click-through rates and conversion rates. And from there, you can now determine the optimal bid for your campaigns.
Amazon’s Bid+
This feature allows for a more refined automated response for the algorithm over your bidding activities. However, it is only available for manual campaigns.
Activating this feature allows the algorithm to automatically increase your bid to as much as 50% to help you win the auction.
We advise running your campaigns without this feature first and then running them with it activated. Compare the performance results and see if it works to your advantage.
Audience Targeting
Audience targeting puts you in the perspective of your customers. You must have a good grasp of where your customers are and what they want so you can better guide them on your sales journey.
You must know who your target market is and everything about them like demographic data and purchase behaviors. But you can focus on interests and behaviors and consider them in your strategies.
When doing PPC campaigns, you can infuse audience targeting in several ways:
Product targeting
This configures your ads to reach customers that have viewed or purchased similar products from your competitors. With this approach, you must highlight your best features to entice them to buy from you next time.
Behavior targeting
Compared to product targeting, this approach looks at the shoppers’ past purchases or searches. Those that exhibit relevant behaviors depicting they are interested in your products will be shown your ads too, increasing the conversion rate and sales opportunity.
Interest targeting
Similar to behavior targeting, interest targeting looks at historical behavioral data that will link your ad/product to their interests based on past searches but mainly on the aspect of common interests like hobbies or professions.
When doing audience targeting, test different campaigns or targeting options and see where you convert best. Over time, optimize your campaigns based on data and performance metrics results. You can also use custom audience strategies like making email lists to fuel the campaigns and improve your visibility towards the right audience.
With audience targeting, you can reach the right customers, increase your ads’ conversion rates, and improve brand awareness as well.
Campaign Monitoring and Optimization
For you to see if all of your strategies are effective, you have to measure your ad’s performance. And one of the best things about doing PPC campaigns is that they display metrics that will give you a good view of how your strategies are working, or not.
At the beginning of your campaigns, you have to define your goals and the results you want to achieve. Campaign monitoring ensures you are on top of everything. You can check metrics like impressions, views, clicks, cost-per-clicks, etc., and make data-driven decisions out of them. A PPC campaign provides you with this through a dashboard.
Next, optimization is the process of fine-tuning the results of individual metrics based on the results on the dashboard. You can differ the values of variables like multipliers, bid ranges, etc. and monitor the results accordingly and tweak them as necessary. This step is continuous since we all know that the algorithm is ever-changing, as well as the marketplace landscape.
Another important reason why every seller doing Amazon advertising should monitor and optimize is to improve the ROI of the ad spend. The dashboard helps you identify areas you need to improve. You can also catch opportunities early on and seize them before your competitors do. You can as well mitigate possible risks to avoid wasting time and resources.
You can follow these best practices for effective campaign monitoring and optimization:
- Setting specific goals you can measure the actual results to
- Regularly reviewing campaign performance and adjusting strategies accordingly
- Optimizing the bids to ensure your ads are showing to the right audience
- Testing different ad creatives and copies that will best capture your target market’s attention and impart your message effectively
- Using targeting options to reach the right audience
Conclusion
Doing advanced Amazon advertising strategies can further increase your success rate in Amazon selling. They are targeted to help you stay on top of your ad performance and derive data-driven insights you can use to better reach your audience, lower your ad spend, and drive more sales.
Amazon selling is rewarding, but you also have to do your part. It requires continuous learning and applying the best practices to make sure you are always on top of the game.
We at Signalytics can lend our expertise about Amazon advertising through our services that can be tailored to your needs. Contact us today to know more.