Amazon is a powerhouse; not only can you buy virtually anything you need or want - from clothes and furniture to tools and groceries - you can use this platform to supercharge your brand’s advertising efforts. Do you have an Amazon advertising strategy? Here’s why you should - and how to get started.
Why You Need an Amazon Advertising Strategy
Amazon’s ad revenue grew an astonishing 250% in the third quarter of 2018 and is poised to chip away at Google and Facebook’s lead in this space. Consider that:
- 44% of consumers start their online shopping searches with Amazon
- 40% of Americans buy one or more Amazon products a month
This is a significant audience that you could be reaching.
How to Start Advertising on Amazon in 5 steps
- Establish Your Goals. This is the starting point for any advertising initiative: what do you want to achieve? Build brand awareness? Drive sales? Maximize advertising budgets - and returns? This will allow you to focus on the metrics that most precisely align with your goals so you can measure success.
- Select the Right Products. Which products are most popular? Which will give you the best traction and convert clicks into purchases? Stock these, price them competitively, and advertise them on Amazon.
- Don’t Forget Your Product Details! Your Amazon ad draws people in - but it’s your product detail page that makes conversion magic happen. Develop clear, concise descriptions with accurate titles and details, relevant information, and clear high-quality images.
- Leverage Amazon Sponsored Ads. This pay-per-click (PPC) model allows you to use keyword-targeted display ads for individual products. You can rely on automatic keyword targeting, which uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant keywords, or go with:
- Broad keywords: these include words before and after the target word: such as “black running shoes” or “running shoes for women.” Great for generating maximum traffic.
- Exact keywords: here, the search must contain the exact keyword in order for your ad to display. If your ad targets “running shoes,” it won’t show up for a search for “black running shoes.” Often, it’s best to go with a broad keyword.
Amazon Sponsored Ads also enable you to:
- Target your audience more effectively and efficiently. For example, you can flag keywords with low conversion rates as negative. Amazon will stop showing them to people who search for these phrases. This saves you money.
- Bid. The Bid+ feature allows you to increase the chances that your ad will appear at the top of the search results by up to 50%.
- Use Sponsored Brand Campaigns. Here, you can promote keyword targeted ads of multiple products at the side, bottom, or top of search results. You can use branded product keywords, complimentary product keywords, and automatically targeted keywords. Feature your top three products.
- Use Amazon Product Display Ads and Video Ads. These are PPC ads that display on product detail, customer review, and offer listing pages, as well as below search results to cross sell or upsell. You can also use them in follow-up emails (e.g. abandoned cart and recommendation emails).
Consumers love video! Leverage their interest with Amazon Video Ads. These can be placed on Amazon.com, Amazon-owned sites, such as IMDb, devices like Fire TV, and other properties.
A PPC management agency can help you put these steps into place so you can begin realizing potent results. If you do not already have an Amazon advertising strategy, now is the time to start. Contact THAT Agency today to get started, and be sure to download our free Google Data Studio template to keep track of all your digital marketing efforts:
