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Commerce & Sales Channels

Top 6 Tips for Amazon Advertising

Commerce & Sales Channels
June 18, 2021
11 min read
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Six ecommerce and Amazon agencies give their most valuable advice for Amazon sellers looking to improve their advertising strategy.

We called on six top ecommerce and Amazon agencies to give their number one tip for Amazon sellers to improve their ad strategy. The diversity of these tips reflects the complexity of advertising on Amazon and the importance of finding an agency that aligns with your goals for your business. Browse through these tips to take your Amazon advertising strategy to the next level.

1. Tanner Rankin – Source Approach

As a top-rated Amazon Consultant, the first thing I tell clients is that 100% of your Amazon success comes from 50% of your ON Amazon efforts and 50% of your OFF Amazon efforts.  It’s no secret that Amazon likes it when you send traffic from OFF of Amazon onto Amazon specifically for your products.  Amazon sellers Sales, SEO and PPC benefit significantly from this.  

That said, the number one OFF Amazon tactic to drive Amazon sales that helps brands both on Amazon and in Google is leveraging Amazon Influencers.  Amazon has had its own influencer program called the Amazon Associates Program going all the way back to 1996 and brands have been leveraging Amazon Influencers ever since.  

There are Amazon Influencers for brands of all sizes and budgets.  Amazon Sellers will want to focus on getting included on blog content like:  “The 10 Best Tents For Camping” or YouTube videos like “Fall Fashion Must Have’s” along with appearing on Amazon Influencers storefronts and idealists.  

What’s more, Amazon has launched their response to the $4 billion live Influencer industry explosion in China with Amazon Live.  Brands can appear on QVC like live streams where their products are demoed and recommended by top Amazon Influencers.

Tools like Referazon can help brands quickly find Amazon Influencers and easily manage campaigns.

2. Nuanced Media

Early on in your Amazon career, you may have been told a magic number to hit or stay below when it comes to your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS). In reality, ACoS is an incomplete measurement of marketing spend, and there is no one-size-fits-all percentage that all sellers need to target. Amazon is a maturing market, especially as a search engine and advertising platform, so it’s important to supplement the data they provide with other accepted marketing metrics to get a full picture of your unit economics.

Purely focusing on ACoS causes many sellers to be timid in their paid advertising campaigns because to move up in the rankings for organic (unpaid) search terms, you have to make sales — and to make sales you have to spend advertising dollars. ACoS does not take into account organic sales, impressions, or SEO rankings. All of these factors determine your total landed cost per sale, and if your paid ads are driving top-line revenue, it’s ok to let your ACoS creep up above that magic number if it makes sense in terms of overall sales and bottom-line profitability.

At Nuanced Media we look at the full picture to help our clients get their Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS) down before we begin to refine and focus on return on investment. A Nuanced Amazon marketing campaign sees the bigger picture, acts with purpose, and measures results. 

3. Bellavix

PPRS

The Pyramid Product Ranking Strategy (PPRS) is a strategy used to improve the number of keywords Amazon indexes on a product. Improving your product ranking for high volume, relevant keywords is key to growing sales. PPRS involves keyword research and segmenting these keywords based on search volume. Identify a root keyword that you’d like to rank that has high search volume. Once you have the root keyword you are targeting, identify long-tailed keywords with lower search volume that contain the root keyword. Start by optimizing your listing to include aspects of the lower volume keywords you are targeting. Once updated, create an advertising campaign targeting those keywords. The purpose of the campaigns is not profitability, but detailed page views (Clicks), unit session percentage (Conversion Rate), and sales. 

Example;

Root Keyword: Bluetooth Speaker

Pyramid Level 1: Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker for Shower

Update your listing to include Waterproof and shower. Once updated, launch an ad campaign focused on long-tailed variations of Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker for Shower. In this example, we are trying to rank for Bluetooth Speaker. As you improve ranking for the lower volume keywords, your overall ranking will improve on the high-volume root keyword. 

This structure aims to teach Amazon’s search algorithm that your product will convert well for these keywords. As sales improve for the low-volume keywords, you’ll start to see organic ranking improve. You can tweak the listing and campaigns to shift focus from the lower volume keywords to the higher volume keywords as ranking improves.

Will Haire runs BellaVix, a full-service Amazon agency out of Raleigh, North Carolina. BellaVix helps brands establish a leading presence in the world’s largest marketplace.

Will has worked with eCommerce businesses in leading the strategic planning, implementation, and tactical execution of marketing strategies for products across all Amazon business segments and other third-party marketplaces (Walmart, eBay, etc.).

His portfolio includes companies like Think, Leesa Mattress, Derma E, and Outward Hound, with responsibilities for channel growth strategies and achieving revenue and margin goals.

4. Elemerce

Amazon’s algorithm is always evolving, your competitors are getting stronger, and you may have noticed that your ad strategy has abruptly stopped working. To help you solve these issues, we’d like to share what we’ve learned at Elemerce through the Search Term Isolation technique, which focuses all of your investment on converting search terms and excludes terms that don’t work. Add to the complexity that most products are featured in at least 3 different campaigns.

  • Auto campaign – You can use it as a safety net for keyword harvesting and/or as an anchor between your listing and Amazon because it will usually tell you how Amazon sees your product. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t be able to see the current segmentation, so only searches for the products that match yours are visible. That’s why this strategy works. You can add as targets all keywords that converted and remove any that didn’t. Right now, this can be achieved through advanced bidding. 
  • Manual campaign(s) – You’ll need multiple campaigns if you really want to take your business to the next level, and manual campaigns are one of them. But, for now, let’s focus on Search Term Isolation. With Search Isolation, we pay attention to emphasizing and showcasing the best features of your product and customize strategies based on your business needs and budgets.
  • Sponsored Brands campaign(s) – Registered brands will see how well these campaigns perform. However, should they be limited to the queries that perform in Sponsored Products or should you leave them untamed?

Now that we went through campaign types, let’s explain how the strategy yields best results. You need to pull all data from multiple campaigns advertising an ASIN and merge them together to identify what is worth keeping on the account – while adding them as negative terms in multiple places. That way, you would guide the search term through multiple campaigns in order to increase effectiveness.

Want to learn more about Search Term Isolation? Click here to read Elemerce’s full post

5. Awesome Dynamic

Optimize Your Product Listing First

Don’t waste your advertising dollars driving customers to a lack-luster listing. 

Take the time to identify top ranking keywords. Then incorporate those valuable keywords into your title, bullet points and description. Any remaining keywords can be added into your PPC keyword bank later. Also, remember when writing it’s important to draft concise, strategic listing copy that further explains how your product is used, while highlighting important facts and details. 

Next, focus on your images. Fill all available image slots with product images, lifestyle shots and infographics to further show the use and benefits of your product. Shopping online has been a huge benefit for most consumers and businesses, but there is one hurdle that can hold back a sale – customers can’t physically touch your product. You need to use your images to show them why they need your product.

After you’ve fine-tuned your listing, you are now ready to drive traffic to your more-appealing, higher-ranking product listing. 

Additionally, Amazon’s strategy when it comes to ads is to make sure they are relevant for the customer. Typically, this is why ads perform better when relevant keywords are also incorporated into the product listing. 

If you’re looking for more information about optimizing your listing before advertising, we’ve got you covered. Learn more about how Amazon product listing and Amazon advertising optimization work together to help you achieve better results from our friends at Awesome Dynamic Tech Solutions

6. Hawke Media

Amazon advertising can be extremely lucrative as the eCommerce behemoth raked in a reported $108.52 billion in earnings for Q1 2021. The platform is a boon for eCommerce merchants as it touts some 4,000 items sold per minute.

Assuming you’ve secured the “buy box”–the “buy now” or “add to cart” button at the top of most product pages reserved for professional seller accounts who are fulfilled by Amazon–it’s time to start publishing ads to your listings.

As an Amazon seller it’s easy to overlook correct attribution as a function of advertising, especially when you’re advertising off-site, which can throw off a number of critical activities like projection, scaling, and resource allocation.

In Amazon’s own words, “Amazon Attribution is an advertising and analytics measurement solution that gives marketers insight into how their non-Amazon marketing channels across search, social, video, display, and email impact shopping activity and sales performance on Amazon.”

Despite the type of account you have, sellers and vendors will need to sign up for a separate attribution account.

Vendor Central Registration:
https://www.amazon.com/forms/3635f20b-f743-4f6a-99a1-4150eb5b4d00?ref_=a20m_us_p_attr_gs_sgnup

Seller Central Registration:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/attribution

Once you have access to the attribution tool, you can begin setting up tracking URLs for different SKUs.

Amazon Attribution also works with over 70 publishers to help sellers and vendors track their advertising campaign effectiveness outside of the platform. Advertisers can specify the items, channels, and publishers to create unique tracking templates that allow you to gain deeper insight into performance statistics.

Using Amazon Attribution, sellers and vendors can accurately make business decisions based on performance data gleaned from campaigns that have been properly configured.

Bonus Tip: Content That Sells

Amazon Brand Registered Sellers have the option to add enhanced content (or A+ Content) to their listing that helps tell the complete story of their product and its solution while establishing trust with potential customers. Sellers can add up to seven modules in their A+ Content and should consider adding product descriptions and comparisons in multiple formats to communicate ideas more clearly. Including lifestyle shots, infographics, PowerPoint slides, and warranty information will help diversify A+ Content and improve conversion rates.

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