When Amazon released its Amazon ad campaign feature, it revolutionized marketing online. The online retail giant still uses other sources of pay-per-click advertising, but it monopolized ads on its own website for the products sold there.
This compelled sellers to reallocate their Amazon advertising spending Amazon instead of relying heavily on Facebook and Google.
Knowing the basics of how to run your ad campaigns can significantly boost the performance of your online store.
1. Review What Amazon Has To Offer
Amazon might seem like the best advertising prospect for your online business, but who’s to say it’s right for you? Make an informed decision by reviewing what Amazon brings to the table.
One of the most important offerings is that it can expose your ads to 300 million active Amazon buyers around the world.
The company also knows how its customers use its website and can optimize to meet that usage better than a third-party ad company. These are its current advertising offerings.
Amazon Stores
Create an online store that facilitates storytelling and a branded experience. It also makes it easier to catalog your products, so customers have an easier time finding additional products to match what they already like from your store.
Sponsored Brands
These pay-per-click ads feature one card in shopping results with multiple products and services, a brand logo, and a custom headline. It operates almost like a preview of an existing store, so you can showcase what you have to offer to customers.
Sponsored Display
This is another type of pay-per-click ad that is curated based on what specific shoppers are interested in and usually buy. For example, a customer who often looks at e-bikes might get more e-bike recommendations alongside safety gear, such as helmets.
Sponsored Products
These also show up in shopping results but often appear on pages showcasing product detail. Sponsored posts offer the perfect opportunity to compete with brand rivals and poach their customers, especially if you have a lower-priced product or better reviews.
Video Ads
Video ads can appear on Amazon and on other platforms, such as IMDb. They also appear on connected TVs. Sometimes, these ads accompany other video content, but this is not always the case.
Audio Ads
If you suspect your customers spend a lot of time listening to music, audio ads are a great way to reach them via music streaming platforms and devices. Amazon streams audio ads to Alexa-enabled devices and via Amazon Music.
Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
Amazon allows sellers to programmatically buy ad space and reach exclusive audiences. It makes it easy to create ads that appear in brand-safe environments. Unlike most other options, this is also open to entities other than Amazon sellers.
Custom Advertising
If your business has a bigger marketing budget, you can work directly with Amazon account executives to create custom ads that meet your unique needs. Accessibility varies by country.
Amazon Attribution
Want to know how well your ads are doing and to what you can attribute your sales? Amazon Attribution (Beta) provides a centralized performance analytics solution for ad managers.
2. Identify the Purpose of Your Amazon Ad Campaign
Before you invest in ads, it’s important to determine what your goals are. Are you trying to improve brand awareness, build customer loyalty or drive sales? Most sellers would answer with all of the above. Fair enough, but one goal must take precedence.
How you structure an ad differs based on the goal. You can spread yourself thin to tackle everything on a list or you can put a concerted effort into one item at a time and treat the other goals as periphery focuses.
Product Consideration
When people are shopping for solutions, you want them to include your product in their shortlists. Even better, you want to beat out your competitors in the same categories.
Sales
Convert visitors, wish-list makers, and lurkers into paying customers. This directly feeds your bottom line and is the eventual goal of every marketing campaign.
Brand Awareness
Choose this focus if you want to improve your customers’ ability to recall your brand when looking for relevant products. This would compel them to search specifically for your company.
Loyalty
Once customers become more aware of your brand and have tried a product or two, keeping them is important. Nurturing repeat business is cheaper and easier than acquiring new customers.
3. Budget for Advertising Costs
Whether you plan to put all your eggs in the Amazon basket or diversify your marketing interests, you need a total maximum budget for pay-per-click ads and a budget specifically for Amazon ads.
Finally, you should set limits for each campaign per day, per week, per month, and per quarter. This makes it easy to ensure you don’t overspend, and you can track where every penny went in your marketing budget.
These are the three most common costs to look out for:
- Cost-per-thousand impressions: The average cost of reaching 1,000 impressions with each ad
- Cost-per-click: You pay every time someone clicks on your pay-per-click ad
- Bid: The cost of bidding with competitors for your customers’ attention
4. Review Amazon Ad Campaign Results
No matter how big or small your campaign is, it’s important to review how well it performed. This can help you determine how to chart the way forward and what changes to make.
You might even decide that other marketing channels are delivering better results. Whatever the case, you won’t know the results without deliberately combing through the data and drawing your comparisons.
These are some of the most important things to keep an eye out for when determining the effectiveness and value of your return on investment:
- Advertising cost of sales
- Click-through rate
- Return on ad spend
- New-to-brand metrics
- Reach
- Conversion rate
Does managing your own Amazon ad campaign make you feel anxious? You’re not alone.
Click Fluency has spent the past half-decade fine-tuning marketing campaigns for Amazon sellers, so they can grow their businesses and achieve true financial freedom. Find out how we can simplify your marketing process.
Sources:
- https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/basics-of-success-understanding-amazon-advertising