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8 Tips for Effective Amazon Advertising Management

  • May 6, 2021
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  • CANOPY Management
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There’s no doubt that Amazon advertising has the potential to help marketers reach more buyers and increase sales. However, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend. You won’t achieve valuable results without effective PPC management. 

Effective Amazon PPC management aims to help businesses maximize their budget, boost sales, and achieve a positive ROI. 

Managing PPC campaigns isn’t a straightforward or set-and-forget or type of task. You need a certain skill level, knowledge, and expertise to drive your products to the top. From setting campaign goals to finding profitable keywords to split testing, there’s a lot you need to know.

This article will discuss tips for effective Amazon advertising management. You’ll learn how to plan, optimize and get your Amazon PPC campaigns up and running in no time. 

Let’s get to it. 

Tip 1: Define Your Marketing or Advertising Goals

Planning and setting your campaign goals is critical for effective Amazon PPC management. Your PPC campaign cannot thrive without it. 

Achieving success largely depends on how well you’ve articulated your goals or plan to achieve them. Your advertising goals will determine your campaign strategy, PPC campaign type, and metrics for measuring success. 

For example, if you are looking to drive brand awareness to your new products or reach new customers, here’s what your campaign objective may look like:

The metrics for measuring success for this campaign will be impressions, brand recall, click-through rate, etc. The metrics are entirely different from marketers who want to increase conversions or drive sales over the top.

For marketers who want to boost conversions or sales, their campaign goals may be to:

If you are running campaigns like this, then you should be measuring:

Whether your goal is to increase customer engagement or boost sales,  you need to 

Crafting an Amazon PPC strategy and realistic goals requires some level of skills and experience. And that’s where Amazon PPC managers come into the mix. They harness tools, metrics, and data from multiple sources to develop strategies that help you achieve maximum results with minimal cost.

Tip 2:  Find Keywords that Drive Conversions

Whether you’re looking to drive brand awareness, product consideration, or purchases, using the right keywords enables your customers to find you. Otherwise, you will waste ad dollars, and your product will occupy Amazon shelves without sales. 

Keywords are words, phrases, or search terms that Amazon uses to target your ads to relevant shopping queries. Suppose you are using “handbag” as one of your target keywords.  It means your ad will appear in customer search results and detail pages when they use that search term to browse for products. 

Although Amazon advertising lets you target specific keywords via manual or automatic target options, you need relevant keywords to boost your brand visibility. 

You might be wondering how to discover keywords that are relevant to your products or niche. The good news is that there are tons of keyword research tools out there, including Google Keyword Planner. 

However, using basic keyword research tools may not provide enough data to fuel your PPC campaigns. 

Remember, you also need to know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or search terms that drive their brand sales. Plus, you need to see the bid amounts for competitive keywords. 

There’s no way you’re going to get such in-depth data from basic keyword tools. 

Amazon PPC managers go far, above, and beyond to help you find thousands of high converting and low competition keywords that can drive value for your business. They also have advanced tools that provide deep insights on keyword rankings, competitive bids, search volume, impressions, and more. 

Tip 3:  Leverage Negative Keywords to Minimize Wasted Ad Spend

While it is critical to use relevant keywords to show your product in search results, you need to ensure your ads don’t appear for irrelevant and unprofitable search terms. 

Here’s why you should take this seriously. Without negative keywords, you will 

Using negative keywords will help you exclude specific search terms and focus on the keywords that matter to your brand. Amazon saves you cost by excluding your ad for customers who use negative search terms.

There are three types of negative keywords you should know. 

Negative Broad match

Your ad will not show if the search term has all negative keywords in any order. For example, if your negative keyword is “Winter Gloves,” then your ad will not appear for search terms such as: 

Negative Phrase Match

Your ad will not appear when the customer uses an exact phrase or words placed in the same order. Using the earlier example, it means your ad will not appear for winter gloves or black winter gloves. However, it will appear for the phrase “gloves for winter.”

Negative Exact Match

Here, your ads will not appear if a customer types the exact keyword or close variations. For the above example, your ad will not be shown for “blue winter gloves. And that’s because it has an additional word, “blue.”

You can use negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level. At the campaign level, Amazon will not display ads from any ad group. But at the ad-group level, Amazon will not show the ads from that group. 

Amazon PPC managers use sophisticated tools to find low-converting and unprofitable keywords that may hurt your campaign. They leverage negative keywords to optimize your PPC, drive quality traffic, and increase your ROI.

Tip 4:  Target the Right Audience 

Targeting is an age-long marketing concept and effective PPC strategy that lets you reach customers who meet a set of criteria. However, running an Amazon PPC campaign without a proper targeting strategy is a recipe for failure. You will end up wasting marketing resources, time, and money reaching out to customers who won’t buy. 

Amazon provides multiple targeting options to enable you to showcase your brand to the right audience. With product and keyword targeting options, marketers can control scenarios where their ads are shown and who sees them. 

Although you can add multiple ad groups to your campaign, you can’t use more than one targeting type per ad group.  So it’s vital to get it right, else you will waste your ad spend. 

Keyword Targeting 

This targeting option allows Amazon sellers to choose keywords to display their products in shopper searches or product detail pages. When you target specific keywords, Amazon serves your ad to customers using similar search terms. 

You should only use this option if you know popular keywords that shoppers use to search for similar products like yours. With a useful keyword targeting strategy, you can target profitable keywords, boost visibility, ad clicks, and sales.

Product Targeting

Amazon product targeting allows marketers to engage customers who are shopping for similar products or categories. When you select this targeting strategy, Amazon serves your ads to customers searching products or categories or browsing detail pages. 

 From your campaign settings, marketers can target:

To further refine your product targeting, Amazon lets you target

If you want to showcase your brand even in your competitors’ territory or target a wide range of products and categories, this option is a perfect fit. Marketers can reach a broader market, segment their market, boost brand awareness and increase sales.

Tip 5. Create Compelling Ad Copy to Boost Click-through Rates

Creating a compelling ad copy is critical to your Amazon PPC campaign success. Your ad is the first piece of your content that shoppers see. So it should grab their attention, entice them to click your ads, visit your product page and buy products.  

If you want to craft persuasive ads, here are some guidelines you should follow.

Your ad title and description should be clear, accurate, and descriptive. It should provide shoppers with relevant information they need before engaging your ad or making purchase decisions. 

Make sure to write your product title and description in the Amazon site’s primary language where your ad is displayed.  You certainly don’t want potential customers to miss out on the message in your ad. 

The images in your ads should be high-quality and should meet the resolution, file type restrictions, and sizes specified for placement. 

Amazon prohibits marketers from using  low-quality images such as 

It doesn’t end there. Your call to action is a critical part of your ad. That’s the portion of your ad that prompts shoppers to take the desired action. 

Using a clear and direct CTA will help to improve ad performance. And that’s because it prepares the customer for the landing page experience.

Tip 6: Optimize Your Bids to Boost Conversions

Amazon PPC revolves around an auction system where sellers bid on competitive keywords to boost brand visibility for those search terms. For a competitive platform with millions of sellers vying for the top spot, you need a smart bidding strategy to rank for profitable keywords. 

Your bid represents the highest amount of money that you will pay for an ad click. Any seller who bids highest wins the auction for that keyword and gets the top spot. 

While running your PPC campaign, you can’t just place your bid and go to sleep. Some keywords may be performing better than others. So you may need to increase your bid for some keywords and reduce your bid for underperforming ones.

Amazon supports multiple Amazon bidding strategies, including:

Each strategy has its pros and cons and caters to different needs. In most cases, sellers are caught between increasing their budget to rank higher and managing their campaign budgets.  Achieving the right balance requires an advanced and unique blend of PPC management skills and experience. 

That’s why you PPC to management agencies to help you deliver maximum results. PPC managers harness data from multiple Amazon markets to…

Tip 7: Split Testing to Optimize Your Campaign 

Split testing is an effective PPC management activity that helps you test every aspect of your campaign to see what’s driving success or not working. The general rule of thumb is to amplify the strategies that deliver more results and eliminate the campaign ad elements that are not driving success.  

You can test and compare different ad groups or campaigns to see which is increasing conversions. At the micro-level, testing ad elements like headlines, description images, colors and call-to-action (CTA), etc., can help you improve your advertising ROI.

Split testing provides valuable insights into your ad copy, CTA placements, advertising effectiveness, and more. The main goal of A/B testing is to build an effective and well-optimized PPC campaign that delivers significant results and maximum ROI. 

There’s no doubt that split testing is critical for effective PPC management. However, testing different campaign elements can be challenging and time-consuming. PPC management agencies know the inside out of Amazon advertising, so they can conduct comprehensive split testing, optimize your campaigns and help you get the best out of your Amazon PPC efforts.

Tip 8: Measure Your Results 

No matter how brilliant your advertising strategies appear, you will never know how effective they are until you measure your performance. With real-time campaign insights, you can view your ad performance and optimize them to align with your advertising goals. 

Tracking performance at the micro-level will also help you determine which campaigns or ad groups are doing well. You can use this data to improve your future PPC campaign management strategy, improve product ranking and increase conversions.

Amazon has tons of metrics that help marketers track success, including

Other key metrics you should look out for include:

It’s not enough to know what these metrics mean. What counts is how you interpret or use those metrics to your advantage. 

PPC managers help keep track of your metrics and provide deep and real-time insights into business performance. They also recommend cost-effective tactics to help you save money, drive sales and boost Amazon profits.

Conclusion

There you have it. Effective PPC management is critical for achieving business success. And this article has everything you need to know about effective Amazon advertising management.

PPC campaign management is not an easy task. However, understanding the tips we have mentioned above will make it easier and set you up for success. 

Here’s what you need to know. 

Effective Amazon PPC management requires much more than consistent efforts. You need a well-executed strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the ever-crowded Amazon marketplace. 

CANOPY Management monitors, tests, and optimizes every aspect of your PPC campaigns. Their team of experts will analyze your business and recommend effective strategies to boost sales. 

It doesn’t end there.

CANOPY Management leverages industry expertise and experience across multiple Amazon markets to help you drive sales, scale your business and gain market share.  With a unique blend of  PPC optimization, management, and analytics, they can move your business to the next level. 

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