How to boost sales on Amazon with Amazon Ads?

To know is to rule

Amazon has always been open about this: the company’s goal is to serve their customers (a.k.a. our buyers) - and to help them find products they would buy. Its key search algorithm, the A10 is built with this aim in mind. A10 is geared to look for signs of whether this outcome is likely or a given product listing.

So if we help it - it should play in our hands. Let's see how we can do that effectively.

What helps and what slogs the sales on Amazon

Like a good house needs a strong foundation - an effective Amazon Ads PPC campaign requires a solid product listing.

So, what should an Amazon Seller do to help A10 Algorithm see his/her product as worthy of a higher search results position?

To begin with, there are 4 broad areas to work on:

• Product quality. No amount of marketing or spending (including on Amazon PPC) will help if the product sucks. Or if it looks poor compared to the competitors
• Quality product page Note the word “looks” in the above point. It’s not just about the product quality, but also about how well you present it to the market (collectively known as Amazon SEO)
• Plenty of product reviews & good stars. Every seller should work closely with their customers to get more reviews. And deal with bad reviews as soon as they come up
• Sufficient stock. A10 will be cutting your impressions down if it thinks you are about to run out of stock in less than a week. So have sufficient inventory, and don’t let Amazon think otherwise.

Now, if all above are in order - your product is ready for some serious Amazon marketing!

Every product sold on Amazon has a dynamic value called “Best Seller Rank” (BSR). Many Amazon Sellers use this number as a gauge to see how well the A10 ranks the product in general.

This sales-based score is a PART of calculation the A10 performs when determining where to put your product for any given customer query.

The OTHER PART is a keyword rank, that is specific for any given customer query.

This is important, cause this means two things for you as a Seller:

• The more sales you leverage on Amazon.com regardless of the source - the higher up your product will appear both in paid and organic search results
• You can (and should) select popular search terms and hone your product’s keyword ranking for each one of them. Make sure it’s on your listing somewhere. And run the PPC to boost this ranking.

Enter the Amazon PPC

Currently, the Amazon Seller Central offers FBA seller with a registered brand 3 very different means of advertising:

1. Display Ads
2. Brand ads
3. Sponsored Ads

Each of them is a unique tool used for a specific marketing purpose (and pretty much useless for other ones). Some just make extra sales. Some promote sales via specified keywords.

Let's see how they can help boost your sales (from least to most significant)

Amazon Display Ads

These are basically advertising banners (or small-window videos) of your product, not dissimilar to Google Display Network ads.

When using this tool, you have to rely on Amazon algorithms to do some audience picking for you. There are two options to regard:

• Option One - is to target specific competing products and show your ads near them on the product detail page. This can be a really effective ad if you already know beforehand (e.g. via Search Term Report) what competing/ complimentary products bring you extra sales.
• Option Two - is to let Amazon pick some external websites to display your ads/videos on, based on your product description and category. Arguably this is an excellent way to create brand awareness, but less effective otherwise (just like the GDN ads)

Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads

The coolest thing about Brand Ads is that it’s the first thing a customer sees after entering a search query.

Come up with a creative punch-line, add your brand logo, 3 top products - and you are good to go. Just consider that:

• Brand Ads tend to convert at 2-4 times the cost of Sponsored Ads campaign (for the same set of keywords)
• They are good at improving your brand awareness
• One thing Brand Ads are good at is selling higher-end exclusive items with a higher-than-average price tag. The reason is simple: in Brand Ads, there is no price tag shown. If a product is good and has a well-built listing - some people will buy it regardless of the price tag.

Amazon Sponsored Products Ads

This is THE tool to propagate your sales on Amazon.com.

With enough money, a solid Sponsored Ads campaign is a mechanism to exchange some marketing budget for profitable sales. As simple as that.

The “exchange rate” depends heavily on the selection of keywords that you want to show your ads on, however. Remember the part where A10 determines where to put your product on the Search Query results for a specific query? This is exactly that.

By adding the target keywords to the PPC, you are boosting the final score A10 assigns to your product when processing customer queries. And the higher your bid is (for a specific keyword) - the higher up it will be shown.

Finding the top-performing keywords is a difficult task.

It is likely to take many attempts to get things right. Of course, you can use tools like Profit Whales that can generate you rick and structured keyword Amazon Campaigns (including major negative search terms) to get a head start.

But even so, some optimization will be required in the future to single out THE best-performing keywords and assign them the most effective bids. But when done right - you can see sales (depending on your category) within the golden corridor of 10-30% ACoS.

Will the PPC boost in sales last as long as I keep throwing money at it?

Not necessarily.

There is more to the effect of a good PPC than just extra sales with a marginal profit. With a well-built PPC campaign, you can achieve a long-lasting effect that pushes your product listing to the next tier of sales volume.

This is achieved via something referred to as a “sales flywheel”.

Basically, this is an inbuilt A10 feature that upgrades your BSR if you manage to maintain a new (higher) sales volume consistently over 20-30 days.

With a newly achieved higher BSR, your keyword ratings (PPC and organic) will get boost all across the board. Which will put your product in a better position to generate even more sales, and… well, you get the idea. Go ahead and give yours a spin!

Ihor Dubovetskyi, CEO at Profit Whales
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