What is PPC?

The Benefits of Amazon PPC

Automatic PPC Campaigns

Manual PPC Campaigns

Negative Keywords

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Amazon PPC Campaign

Common Mistakes

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter how many Ads you run during the holiday season, it’s just the CONVERSIONS that matters in the end.

From an Amazon sellers’ outlook, this season is about high impressions and conversions that are to be grabbed for a Successful Holiday Marketing Campaign.

To achieve that, it’s time to talk Q4.

Americans spend billions of dollars on Amazon during the holiday season for buying gifts, decorations, and food. Of course, you can’t grab billions in a single campaign, but a million would still sound real.

A well-planned Holiday Sales Strategy is all about allocating the right amount of budget in the right way. The 2 rights in the prior sentence count a lot since understanding where your marketing dollars are going is more than important.

In Amazon, there is a fine line between a fool and an expert; a fool learns from his own advertisement mistakes, while an expert learns from the mistakes of others and use the past patterns to make future decisions.

People don’t read ads, they read what interests them. To check their interest, it is extremely important to look at the past trends of the holiday season in order to create a successful Amazon strategy for the holiday season.

LAST YEAR HOLIDAY TRENDS

Past patterns are substantial for making decisions. You should have an idea about the timeline you should run Ads and the products that can bring you good results on Amazon.

Conversion Rates mainly increase during the first 2 weeks of December, with a little decline after that. So if you haven’t set up your marketing campaign yet, now is your ideal opportunity.

If you sell in the category of Toys and Games, the margins are very high since sales and conversions are likely to go up in December. Well, it does decline after the 3^rd week.

The clothing and beauty industry normally booms in the month of October especially during the Halloween fashion craze, and it does show an uptick during the last week of December. If you sell stuff related to winter clothes and jackets, then this season is best for your marketing campaigns.

With black Friday and Christmas joining the shopping industry, home and kitchen items go on a peak in November till the month of January. If you sell in this category, you still have much time to design your PPC Campaigns.

These trends will tell you much about the productive timelines, but your own historical data is still the first thing you should see when designing your holiday sales strategy.

Moving swiftly onto the next step:

How to make the most of your Holiday Advertising Budget?

The first step is to make sure about the basic fundamentals.

From your inventory to other systems and processes, make sure that you have everything ready before you begin spending your hard-earned dollars.

Ask yourself this question; are your listings retail ready?

If they aren’t, get it optimized in the first place.

Hiring an agency for your Amazon PPC advertising makes sense as long as your product pages are primed (Amazon retail ready), otherwise, you won’t get the hits and sales despite the traffic on your listings. That traffic will not earn you anything except a bunch of impressions for nothing.

The most essential components of ‘retail ready’ are your reviews, product description, bullet points, and off course your product images. You need to get all of these optimized before even setting up a budget.

• Shift your focus from Product Ads to the Brand Ads

This may not sound convincing but sponsored brand ads work greatly in the ending months of the year. You should definitely shift a reasonable budget for these ads since this feature is more efficient in converting leads on certain times of the year.

The best thing about the Amazon Sponsored Ad is that it automatically displays the most relevant ASINs to your store based on the customers’ searches. Which in turn increasing your chances of getting swift sales.

• Use the Dynamic Ad Feature to retarget your Black Friday shoppers

As I mentioned earlier, retargeting your old shoppers is definitely a great way to earn quick conversions.

• Create your Priorities

You should decide the product that makes sense to advertise, provided that it should have decent reviews followed by good images and maybe a smooth sales history, which can earn you a reasonable CTR & CR.

Both Amazon search and display Ads are ideal in this case since they direct customers to the product page as soon as it gets a click.

• Run Keyword Focused Campaigns

The best holiday sales strategy would be to target customers via their searches since they add up the relevancy factor in your advertising campaigns.

However, you surely won’t like to show up your Ad to the irrelevant audience who are most likely not to make a purchase and thereby causing your Ad spend to spike. The best approach in this campaign is to be as precise as possible especially during the Holiday Advertising on Amazon because you should look to show your Ad to that audience with a 70% to 80% chance of buying your product.

Showing your Ad to a limited audience is indeed better than showing it to the larger and less relevant audience.

• Don’t miss out on the display Ads

It can be a great alternative to the search ads, but running both of them simultaneously does make sense to a certain extent.

In simpler terms, Display Ads target people who looked at your product but didn’t make a purchase. The ad retargets them on external sites and mobile devices which makes it an extremely invaluable tool for earning good conversions.

The customer will receive a notification like “You still interested in buying that headphone you were searching last week?”

What else can be a better way to retarget customers based on their clicks?

It cannot be totally wrong to say that display ad is great for gaining impressions while search ads for the clicks, but they combined can convert a great number of high intent shoppers.

• Jump on the Holiday Lightning deals

You need to be a prime seller with a 3+ rating to participate in the lightning deal along with a high volume SKUs. Otherwise, it is wiser to stick to the search and display ads.

When designing an amazon strategy for the holiday season, you surely can’t keep the lightening deals out the game. You have already planned to run deal ads, it’s time to make a proper strategy.

This area would precisely work on the experiments. There is no fixed target in this particular area of advertisement. You can run ads based on targeting competitors or maybe interest-based targeting; if they don’t work, targeting complementary ASINs and your categories are still a few of the choices you can split test.

Over to you

The holiday season is about to over. To be frank, you really don’t have enough time to look at each and every aspect of Q4. But, if you can just focus on these 6 points, I am sure you can come out with an effective holiday sales strategy. Make sure your listings are equipped with engaging content and A+, your inventory is stocked, Images are up to the mark, and reviews are managed before you start spending your hard-earned dollars to your Amazon PPC Campaigns.

Good Luck With Your Holiday Advertising Budget!

In case you don’t plan to outsource your Amazon PPC Campaigns, you need to read this guide to achieve the best out of Amazon searches: Amazon Listing Optimization Guide 2022

You see commercials on TV that you didn’t ask for. But they still popped up while you were watching something else. This is same for Facebook Ads.

Amazon PPC is different.

Here, people expect the message you put in front of the people. In short, Amazon Sponsored Products Ads are not even close to interruption marketing because it shows Ad to people that are most relevant to their search query.

People read what interests them. Similarly in Amazon, they click on a thing that interests them.

Whether it be an Ad or a normal listing popping up against a search query, it all depends upon your audience’s interest and off course your pricing, features, and reviews.

In fact, what really convinces your viewer in clicking your Ad is your content and pricings in Amazon.

Sponsored products are by far the most popular advertising campaign in Amazon that is mostly to get a decent return on investment. But, there are many Amazon sponsored product mistakes done by sellers which prevents them from achieving a higher CR and low ACoS.

I am here to highlight those pitfalls that should be avoided to reach more customers, drive more traffic, and make more sales.

Poor Keyword Selection

Keyword research is an instrumental component of Amazon sponsored products. A poor selection of keywords will adversely affect the advertising campaign and will eventually result in higher ACoS and low sales.

Misleading Amazon with the wrong data is something you should avoid otherwise it may result in permanent banishment. Many sellers use this strategy to gain traffic just to get the clicks; this is what they do wrong.

Like if you’re bidding on the keyword ‘Red trouser’ but are not actually selling the red one, you will get clicks but not the purchases which are going to hurt your conversions.

Therefore; it is vital to bid on the keywords that are the most relevant to your product.

Entering an Over-Saturated Niche

This happens when the person running the Ad hasn’t performed proper product research. Picking up a niche blindly by imagining results isn’t going to work or at least won’t do wonders for you.

If a niche already has well-established competitors, avoid attacking that region especially when you’re running from scratch.  Because in these areas, it would be very difficult to go head to head with the sellers who are making millions out of it.

Similarly, it is not wise to enter into a niche where it is hard to find a unique selling point.

Not having an ACoS goal

Running any campaign without doing enough calculation isn’t worth the risk. Especially when you’re carrying out PPC operations for a brand, you should have a clear objective in your mind.

You should have an idea about the max ad cost per sale (ACoS) you’re willing to accept for a certain campaign.

There are 2 things you might be looking for your sponsored products – Maximizing profit or Maximizing Sales.

So that’s the basics.

The best PPC Strategist would first focus on maximizing sales when launching the product in the market. This is the time where you should not worry about your profit margin instead you should focus on getting clicks and sales. This will establish your organic rankings because the Amazon Ranking Algorithm gives sales history a high priority when ranking a product on Amazon. In this phase where you’re mainly focused on sales, a breakeven ACoS is all you need to achieve.

Once you start getting ranked for potential keywords, it’s time to switch your goal to maximizing profit. In this phase, your primary focus should be your target ACoS.

Neglecting the need for Monitoring Campaigns

Many sellers commit this mistake of neglecting the need for monitoring their campaigns out of laziness or due to time. After running the campaign, they leave the campaign on its own without making the micro-adjustments. This is what you shouldn’t do.

Sometimes you don’t get results right away at the start of the campaign while sometimes you do. When running an Amazon PPC Campaign, you need to give it constant attention by monitoring the key metrics CPC, CR, and ACoS.

In Sponsored Products Ads, you have to use the performance data to adjust your bids that could speed up the results. Because this data is going to help you in making timely decisions that would avoid the risk of campaign failure.

This is what can happen due to ‘not monitoring your campaigns’, especially with your bidding.

Bidding: –

Let’s say:

You set a specific bid for certain keywords and started your campaign. For overtime, you didn’t bother to come back and see the results.

This will prevent you from knowing whether the change has helped you or not, and this can seriously cause your ACoS to skyrocket which you would never know.

If this is something that challenges you, hire an expert or a PPC Marketing Agency that can help you with your PPC Campaigns.

Not analyzing your conversion rate

Your conversion rate is very important to you as well as to Amazon. Because, like you, Amazon tends to make money.

When you make a sale, Amazon gets its share. This is a win-win situation for Amazon.

So how does conversion rate is related to sponsored products?

You already know that conversion rate is an important component of the A9 Amazon Ranking Algorithm and listing optimization, the case is mostly the same in Amazon PPC.

For example, you and your competitor are bidding for the same keyword, this is where conversion rate would come to your rescue as it would decide who wins the specific keyword.

Since Amazon doesn’t provide sellers with the accurate Conversion Rate, I advise sellers to calculate it by simply dividing your total order items by your sessions – these numbers can be found on Amazon business reports.

A minimum of 3% conversion rate is regarded as good, anything more than that is amazing.

To cut it short, Amazon highly rates conversion rate when determining whether you should win the bidding auction.

Find the average conversion rate (CR) of the keyword and rank your conversion rate (CR) against it.

If the CR of your product is much lower than average, it’s better to pause that keyword.

Not harvesting the negative keywords

Amazon Advertising platform has this feature named ‘Negative Keywords’. This option is primarily given to filter out those keywords that you do not want to show your Ad.

The option for Negative keyword is something you shouldn’t leave empty in Amazon. Without a doubt, they can give you an additional competitive advantage by reducing your ad cost.

For say, you are selling sunglasses and are bidding on the keyword ‘glasses’, it would appear on many irrelevant search queries like a wine glass. And if this user clicks on your listing accidentally clicks on your Ad, this is going to cost you and will eventually result in the increase of your ad spend.

Therefore; Sellers should add or subtract negative keywords to avoid paying for unrelated clicks and prevent a higher CPC.

Overusing automatic campaigns

The best Amazon Advertising Strategy would always avoid overusing and over utilizing automatic campaigns. The main aim of automatic campaigns has always been the same as that is to gather data and keyword information which can be plugged into manual campaigns later on to boost efficiency.

This way sellers are most likely to find out the potential keywords that are bringing decent results along with the ones that aren’t- which should be put on the negative keywords list.

Using a combination of both automatic and manual campaigns when running Amazon Sponsored products Ad for a new product is the way forward to a successful campaign.

Not Structuring Your Campaigns Properly

This is one of the most common mistakes committed not just by the sellers, but even I have seen marketing experts doing that.

Let’ say, you own a fashion brand and own shoes, shirts, tees, trousers, jeans, and watches. What sellers do is they incorporate all of the products in one campaign which stops them from achieving the ideal ACoS and CR.

You should not lump disparate products in one campaign. Different Ad Campaign for each meaning different campaign for shoes, different for shirts, and different for tees.

If you have been incorporating all of your keywords in your listing, this is the time to stop and manage your campaigns effectively for better results.

Too Many Keywords

Most SEO beginners choose keywords for their campaigns that are too descriptive. Moreover, they incorporate too many keywords into one campaign which adversely affects the performance of their ads.

The basics of Amazon Advertising suggests that you should choose keywords that are 2-3 keywords long for your broad match campaigns.

If you’re selling red shirts, avoid bidding for shirts as that will open a whole new category of shirts including brown shirts black shirts, Christmas shirts, etc – none of which would be relevant to what you sell.

Moreover, you shouldn’t bid for very broad terms like ‘ Set of 10 party Shirts” as that will bring less traffic and will results ‘.

Not Giving Importance to the Headline and Copy Writing

There is a widely known myth that says if you succeed in showing your ad to the right people, they will buy it.

You need to come out of this idea. At least, this doesn’t happen on Amazon.

Of course, it’s an achievement but it’s like the half job done; there is more to it.

Headlines and content are the other words for a sales pitch. The more sound and engaging it is, the more chances of getting a good and timely response.

This is an important component of Amazon Sponsored products ads as they prompt customers to instantly make a purchase.

As a seller, you will realize the need for headline and copywriting in phases where your product would be getting the clicks from the right audience, but not the conversions.

The headline of your product should be fully in accordance with the product ranking algorithm.

Key Takeaways

Amazon Advertising Platform is a great opportunity for any seller to outsmart their competitors. The goal of the campaign can only be achieved if these mistakes are avoided. Here are the key takeaways of this blog post:

• A poor selection of keywords reflects a poor Amazon Advertising Strategy. Sellers who deliberately enter the wrong keywords to gain clicks are more likely to end up in permanent banishment.
• If you’re running from the scratch, over-saturated areas aren’t the ones you should be targeting.
• Not having a specified ACoS goal isn’t worth the risk.
• Monitoring key metrics in a campaign especially bidding cost and CPC are portentous.
• In areas, where you and your competitor are bidding the same amount on the same keywords, the conversion rate plays a key role in deciding the winner. The listing with a higher CR is more likely to win the keyword.
• Not utilizing the negative keyword feature can result in a higher Ad Spent and lower profit margins. Sellers should subtract those keywords that are irrelevant to their sponsored products.
• Automatic PPC campaigns are significant in getting the data and keyword information but overusing it may not give you ideal results.
• If you’re selling different products, don’t incorporate all of the related keywords into a single campaign.
• Too descriptive keywords will bring you less traffic and sales.
• Before running Amazon Sponsored Products Ads, it is important to modify your listing title and copy that could guarantee a high conversion rate (CR).

With Amazon Sponsored Products Ads, sellers can increase the visibility and traceability of their products while getting quick sales. To make the most of your ads, avoid these pitfalls or hire a team of Amazon Marketing Experts who can help you reach more customers, drive more traffic, and make more sales.