Whether you’re selling products or services, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising lets you reach more customers and generate high-quality leads quickly and easily. One of the best channels for PPC is Amazon, and advertising on Amazon is an excellent option for driving consumers to product detail pages. 

One of the biggest questions in PPC is whether to target branded keywords — keywords that contain your brand and product names. Bidding on branded keywords offers several benefits, although they shouldn’t make up the majority of your digital marketing budget. Read on to learn how to select, use, and monitor branded keywords in your marketing strategy. 

What Are Amazon Branded Keywords?

A branded keyword is any keyword that contains your brand name, either on its own or as an adjective for a product you sell. 

Any pay-per-click strategy relies on placing bids on certain keywords. When a potential customer enters that keyword into a search, your ad will appear at the top of the Amazon search results, along with the organic listings below. Choosing the right keywords is an essential complement to any successful PPC campaign, and the same is true for Amazon PPC. 

Some marketers will recommend a broad match brand bidding strategy that helps you target a specific audience looking for your particular products. However, broad match strategies run into several challenges, including:

• Your least profitable products rank higher than your more profitable products
• Newly launched products take several weeks or months to start appearing in search rankings
• Competitors with similar products can leverage your brand name and steal away potential customers

By targeting branded keywords in your PPC campaigns on Amazon, you can solve these problems and boost sales.

The Benefits of Bidding on Branded Keywords

Many inexperienced marketers are reluctant to consider a branded keywords strategy, incorrectly assuming that you’re spending additional money on clicks you’ll receive from your organic search results. 

However, making space in your digital marketing budget for branded keywords offers exceptional ROI. If you find yourself running into challenges during your traditional Amazon PPC campaign, investing in branded keywords can help overcome these concerns, increasing your search volume and customer loyalty.

Improve Customer Retention

Many sellers work under the misconception that if a customer has previously bought your product, they’ll buy it again when looking for a similar item. However, a 2019 Nielsen study shows that 40% of customers love trying out new items, and only a fraction considers themselves brand loyal. 

Adding branded keywords keeps your brand in shoppers’ minds, making it more likely that they will stay loyal and continue to buy your products. 

Avoid Competitor Ad Placements

While Amazon has policies to prevent competitors from sponsoring your branded keywords, it still happens, and it will have an impact on your bottom line.

Consumers are notoriously bad at spotting ads. A 2019 survey by Varn found that 60% of customers can’t distinguish between organic and paid search results, despite search engines and sites like Amazon clearly labeling the two. If consumers can’t identify ads, competitors who use your brand for their sponsored ads will decrease the visibility of both your PPC and organic search rankings. 

While not a proactive use of branded bidding, using branded keywords helps protect your products from predatory advertising from competitors. Amazon’s algorithm prioritizes showing products with branded terms if the brand itself is selling them. Implementing branded keywords will help reduce competitors stealing away your leads and, in some cases, eliminate it entirely.

Upsell Your Less Popular Products

You probably have certain products that sell well but don’t have large profit margins and certain products that are more profitable but less popular. With a smart branded keyword strategy, you can bid on your brand name and your most profitable products, increasing their visibility alongside organic traffic on your more popular products. 

Doing so makes your less popular (but more profitable) products appear above your less profitable offerings, encouraging customers to buy the more profitable products instead of your best-sellers. 

See Incremental Growth

Most products see diminishing returns from most PPC and SEO strategies. Once you’ve created a best-selling product in your niche by following best practices for Amazon listings, it’s difficult to encourage further sales. However, branded keyword bidding uses a combination of factors to incrementally increase sales of all your products over several months, including:

• Display more branded products.
• Customers often buy multiple products at once.
• Increase your brand’s authority with Amazon.

With branded keywords, your products reach a wider audience, and even tangential searches will often result in customers buying your products. 

Branded Keyword Bidding Best Practices

As with any digital marketing strategy, how you implement branded keywords is as important as deciding to do so. Here are some best practices to help you get the best results from your branded keyword PPC campaign. 

Find the Right Percentage of Ad Spend

Bidding on branded keywords should only make a portion of your total PPC budget, as having a mix of targeting strategies often does better than focusing on a single channel. Start with a higher budget percentage (30% to 40%) for branded keywords early in the campaign and correlate this amount as your brand builds authority with Amazon’s algorithm. 

Understand the Importance of Ranking

As with search engines, if you’re not in the prime spot on an Amazon search, you’re wasting your time. A Jungle Scout survey shows that 73% of shoppers click on the first listing they get, and only 5% get to the third. If you’re not in this top fold, you will only get a tiny fraction of potential sales.

Branded keywords are excellent at maintaining your top position, protecting your ranking from competitors, and even generating incremental sales increases, making them a worthwhile addition to any digital marketing strategy.

Leave Branded Keywords to the Pros

Developing a good branded keywords strategy requires expertise and time. At Click Fluency, we love helping companies take their digital marketing to the next level. Whether you need assistance with Amazon description HTML rules or want to implement brand bidding, schedule your free consultation to discover what we can do for you!