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With Amazon advertising, it’s no longer a matter of whether or not you’re using it. It’s really a question of how much your pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend is going to be!

That’s why increasing numbers of ecommerce sellers are reaching out to Amazon agencies for help.

In the battle for customer attention and brand awareness, a top Amazon marketing agency is able to take advantage of cutting edge PPC strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

Creating an Amazon PPC campaign might look pretty straightforward. Because of that you could be wondering why you should pay an agency when you can do it on your own.

The main reason is that in almost every case, once you’ve added up the (increased) sales and subtracted the advertising costs, it saves you money to hire an Amazon agency rather than managing the ad campaigns on your own.

Why Hire an Amazon Agency?

On the surface, Amazon PPC campaigns may appear simple, but if you look a little deeper, a successful campaign can actually be very complex. For starters, how should you balance sponsored product, sponsored brand, and sponsored display ads in your Amazon PPC campaign?

How about audience targeting, keyword research, bidding strategies, search engine optimization (SEO), competitive analysis, and campaign performance tracking?

This post details six aspects of ecommerce where reaching out to an Amazon agency can mean the difference between a successful online business, and one that simply didn’t work out.

1. Advanced Keyword Research is More Important Than Ever

If you want to get your products in front of people most likely to buy, keyword research is NOT something to take for granted.

With Amazon PPC advertising, you can reach an audience of over 310 million customers worldwide. Brands and sellers bid for Amazon ads to get their products in front of potential buyers, earn more money, and grow their business.

The way that Amazon sellers reach those buyers is through keywords that match customers’ search queries.

Everyone has spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to properly phrase an internet search to get the result they’re looking for. As sellers, it’s often difficult to make sure that you’re using the best possible keyword to match your product with a buyer.

When you use irrelevant keywords in your campaign, it can decimate your campaign budget and your return on ad spend (RoAS) will suffer.

With Amazon’s marketplace growing in complexity every single day, experienced ecommerce sellers compare it to moving from the minor leagues to the majors. The skills necessary to succeed have multiplied exponentially. 

How an Amazon Agency Can Help

Sure, Amazon agency pros have many years of experience developing search term strategies, but it’s much more than that. Amazon marketing services spend an enormous amount of time in ongoing, high-level, ultra-contemporary keyword training. More importantly, they’re constantly learning about the latest updates to the Amazon ecosystem. 

That’s the kind of background that allows an Amazon agency to anticipate trends, not hurriedly react to them after the fact. 

While an Amazon advertising agency may use research tools, they also develop complex keyword targeting strategies that are informed by their professional experience, and shifting trends in multiple Amazon marketplaces.

To an untrained eye, a list of keywords doesn’t answer a lot of questions. To a trained specialist, it’s a tool they can use to drive better sales and conversions.

2. Precise Ad Targeting Leads to Higher Conversion Rates

Targeting methods determine where your ads can show and who can see them.

Your ad targeting strategy is essential to maximizing your ad investment and conversions. If you want to avoid throwing away your ad dollars on irrelevant audiences, you need a calculated and flexible targeting strategy.

Amazon offers multiple options to help you reach relevant audiences. Should you use an automatic campaign or a manual campaign? If you choose an automatic campaign, Amazon will automatically decide where your ads are shown and who sees them.

With a manual campaign, you’re in the driver’s seat. You choose how you want to target your ads and how much you want to spend. Depending on your selected ad type, you can decide how to target your ad with options that include keyword, product, category, and audience targeting.

Amazon Has Become a High Stakes Race

Over the last few years, selling on Amazon has gone from a fun race around the block on single speed bikes, to something that feels a lot like Formula One. The question is, do you still feel comfortable behind the wheel? 

If you choose keyword targeting (most common), you’ll also need to determine which match type you want to use so that Amazon can match your chosen keyword to shoppers’ search terms. 

With broad match, the search term contains all the keyword terms in any order. If it’s a phrase match, the ad may appear if the search term contains the exact phrase or sequence of words in your keyword term. With exact match, the search term must exactly match the keyword or sequence of words. 

Lastly, when using a negative match option, your ad will NOT appear for search terms that contain these words. 

The right targeting option for you and your specific campaign depends on a mix of factors, including the product you are trying to sell, the ad type you’re using, and your larger Amazon marketing goals.

Without a clear understanding of how and when to apply these settings, you may end up paying dollars for the same traffic that your competitors are paying pennies for.

How an Amazon Agency Can Help

Experienced Amazon PPC pros are skilled at demystifying Amazon’s targeting settings and crafting the best strategy to meet your advertising goals. Canopy’s PPC experts are able to quickly determine the best targeting strategy for your campaign at different times and across different scenarios.

By tapping into their range of experience, Canopy can analyze your campaigns and sales data then make regular, precise adjustments aimed at lowering your ad cost and increasing your RoAS.

3. Effective Ad Campaigns Require Advanced Methodologies

If you can’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. This is true of any marketing campaign, and Amazon PPC is no exception. Without tracking your key performance metrics and overall results, it’s impossible to know if your campaign is running smoothly or if you’re just wasting ad dollars.

You should be able to track your sales and where they come from, as well as metrics like target ACoS (advertising cost of sale), conversions, impressions, and cost-per-click.

Of course, it doesn’t end at just recording these numbers in a spreadsheet. You’ll also need to understand and optimize these metrics to boost your digital marketing effectiveness and overall business growth.

Using this in-depth analysis, you can understand which ad placements and keywords bring you the most conversions and sales, then adjust your campaigns accordingly.

Over the last few years, advances in machine learning and data modeling have skyrocketed the possibilities available to ecommerce strategists. 

Are you in a place to put these recent advances to work for your Amazon business? 

How an Amazon Agency Can Help

The best Amazon agencies have the technical, professional, and analytical skills required to manage and track your campaigns to measure their success and profitability.Talented Amazon management agencies are able to track and report on critical metrics, including sales, ad spend, profitability, and RoAS.

Canopy Management takes it a step further and uses proprietary data strategies to provide detailed reporting and expert recommendations for campaign improvements to optimize ad spend and PPC campaign strategy.

4. Know Your Enemy – Competitive Analysis is An Art Form

Amazon is a competitive marketplace with tens of thousands of merchants selling products like yours. That means there’s a pretty good chance that your ad campaigns are facing stiff competition to get products in front of Amazon shoppers.

In such a crowded market, competitive analysis isn’t just a nice-to-have addition to your strategic plan. It’s essential to your business’s survival.

Competitive analysis reveals critical information that you need to know in order to run effective ad campaigns. That includes intel on the following:

• Successful Amazon PPC strategies employed by top-performing marketers in your niche
• Paid and organic keywords that are driving engagement and traffic to competing listings
• High-performing and underutilized keywords that your competitors are not ranking for
• Real-time updates on competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies
• Competitors’ prices and product reviews

The goal of competitive analysis is to show you what the competition is doing right so that you can do it better.

You know your Amazon business, but do you REALLY know your competitors? 

How an Amazon Agency Can Help

There are obvious benefits of performing a detailed competitor analysis, but there’s also one big drawback…

Competitive analysis is tedious and time-consuming, especially if you’re in a particularly competitive niche.

If you know what you’re doing and have access to the right tools, you can leverage a wide range of sophisticated analytics and data-driven strategies to spy on your competitors. That’s exactly what an Amazon PPC specialist is trained to do.

If you haven’t performed a comprehensive competitive analysis (or if you don’t have the time to do so), an Amazon agency can help. Usually, this process will be the first step toward developing a complete PPC advertising strategy for your business.

5.  Knowing the Amazon Industry Inside and Out Allows for Quick Pivots

Successful Amazon marketers stay up to date with the latest trends in their niche by attending workshops and conferences, monitoring sales trends across accounts, reading online news and journal articles, and generally immersing themselves in the industry.

As anyone who’s ever tried their hand at selling on Amazon knows, the competitive landscape on this ecommerce platform is growing quickly, and there’s always the threat of some new change or algorithmic update to keep Amazon sellers up at night.

Other than Amazon’s internal updates, you also need to keep a close eye on seasonality and trends to help you predict sudden spikes and dips in sales. By not tracking the trends in your niche, you may miss out on an opportunity to drive more sales or you may end up making a costly advertising mistake.

Selling on Amazon probably isn’t the only thing on your plate. It shouldn’t have to be. 

How an Amazon Agency Can Help

If you’re not spending every day immersed in the Amazon advertising community, it’s easy to fall behind the curve.

That’s why it pays to hire an Amazon PPC management specialist; someone who spends every hour of every day monitoring metrics across many different accounts, networking with other professionals, and keeping up with industry content.

An expert Amazon PPC strategy can help your business in a number of ways:

• Create better and more effective advertising campaigns based on industry trends
• Research and track Amazon SEO best practices
• Spot upcoming opportunities to capitalize on new beta offerings and updates
• Mitigate risk from changes to the market or to Amazon’s algorithm that may hurt your business
• Regularly adjust your advertising strategy to match changes in seasonality, trends, and Amazon events (e.g. Black Friday or Cyber Day!)

6. Ultimately, Selling on Amazon Becomes a Race Against Time

PPC campaigns require close, consistent attention. Without that attention, you’ll notice either your sales start to dip or your ACoS starts to creep up on you.

If you want to save time and maximize your return on ad spend, make sure to look for an Amazon agency that takes an individualized approach to managing your campaigns.

Sure, you could use a tool to save you time. But the truth is that if you want the most from your ad campaigns, it takes time and expertise. That’s why most Amazon businesses, once they start turning a profit, end up calling a pro to handle their PPC campaigns.

When Should You Consider Hiring an Amazon PPC Agency for Your Business?

For the last few years, Amazon has increasingly become a “pay-to-play” marketplace. If you want eyes on your products, you need to spend ad dollars to reach your ideal customers.

As Amazon expands, highly-visible ad placements are increasingly dominated by sponsored ads. Where there used to be organic opportunities to reach your target audience, those spaces are now reserved for brands willing to pay for the exposure (and possible sales).

Because the space has become so competitive, PPC campaigns that are not backed by a well-rounded strategy will fail. You may end up draining your budget before you make your money back in sales.

Hiring an Amazon agency isn’t just about saving a few bucks on your ad campaigns. It’s about maximizing performance from every penny you spend in order to drive your business forward.

At Canopy Management, we don’t just plug you into an automated process, we analyze every aspect of your business and identify opportunities for growth and long-term success.

With our team of Amazon insiders and experts at your side, we’ll balance data-driven decisions and human-powered insights to help you maximize profit so you’re free to do more with your Amazon business.

How Canopy Management Can Help

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon and Walmart sellers. Our team consists of former Amazonians, multi-million dollar sellers, and award-winning experts.

When you consider the many ways that Canopy can help you grow your business, you’ll see why selling on Amazon is much easier “under the Canopy.”

• Strategic Growth Planning
• Listing Copywriting Optimization
• Listing Photography
• Product Videography
• Advertising Management
• Customer Service
• Demand Side Platform (Amazon DSP)
• Amazon Posts
• Full Service Management
• Amazon Review Aggregation