If you’ve been caught up wondering yourself, “How does the Amazon PPC work?” This article will not only provide solutions, but we’ve built a complete Amazon PPC guide to take you from being completely clueless to a specialist under no time.
That we have already wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars testing Amazon PPC campaigns, making all the mistakes, and you’ll never have to.
Whether you’re beginning to learn how Amazon PPC promotions can be improved or just searching for a recommendation from a top Amazon PPC provider, you’re in the right spot!
What is Amazon PPC?
When it comes to selling on Amazon, FBA Sellers must realize that it’s not merely about being at the top of the market, but being at the top of the search results of your category.
Amazon Pay Per Click (or Amazon PPC) is the marketing technique used to promote their products on Amazon.com by Amazon FBA sellers. This advertising platform, by paying for advertising space on Amazon, facilitates 3rd party sellers to fuel their traffic and sales.
Amazon’s complex algorithm uses an auction-style system that allows Amazon FBA sellers to bid on a keyword. Sellers are then charged the price of their bid, but only when customers click on their ads referring to the term “Pay Per Click”.
Amazon ads are crucial to your ranking, with 60% – 80% of sales coming from the very first page of any category.
To be very honest here, your ranking status will ultimately determine the volume of your sales.
Amazon Sponsored Ad Types
Ok, we know you must be thinking: Is this the only way I can advertise my products on Amazon?
Well, the simple answer is No.
Here are some of the common types of advertisement on Amazon.
1. Sponsored Products
Here’s an example of Sponsored Products:
Sponsored Products directly drives customers to your specific products. Typically, they appear above or below the search results page and on other product details pages and are marked by labels “Sponsored”.
*Here’s the interesting part: Sponsored Ads are **keywords directed**.*All you need to do is select your advertising products and keywords or allow Amazon to target your ads automatically. Depending on their performance, you control your bids and budgets and how much you want to spend on your ads.
These advertisements work best for customers in the decision-making process and normally cost about 0.2c per click.
2. Headline Search Ads
If you’re looking to promote your brand on Amazon, this is the service to choose from.
They appear as a banner with the “Sponsored By” label above the result listings on the website and the mobile app, making them another valuable brand tool. Headline Search Ads ‘purpose is to promote brands and brand owners’ product portfolio.
These ads feature a custom headline, brand logo, and a collection of products within the ad creative.
And here’s the best part about these advertisements: There are no monthly fees;
You only pay when an Amazon shopper clicks on your ad, which will take you to the details page of the list of your offer. The cost of each click is 0.10c with a minimum budget for the $100 campaign.
Similar to the sponsored ads, these ads are addressed by keywords and links for customers and shoppers to the landing pages and product details of your brand.
Who is Eligible?
Here are some of the eligibility requirements for Amazon Pay Per Click Advertisements.
- Account: you must have an active professional seller account
- Shipping: you must be willing to ship across all U.S. states
- Product categories: one or more eligible categories must be covered by your brand or products.
- Condition of products: the items listed must be fresh. Used products or refurbished products are not qualified for advertising.
- The Buy Box must be available for the products you promote with Sponsored Products.
- The seller must be enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry in order to advertise with Sponsored Products.
Should I Advertise on Amazon PPC?
Let’s be honest here, this is a question you have been pondering for quite a lot of time.
Well, to put your mind at ease, here’s a fact for you:
70% of Americans who shop online search for the desired product on Amazon first than any other platform. 38% of these Americans do not want to waste their time and buy the first relevant product they see.
If you want to have a higher rank on the Amazon website for your product, then the Amazon PPC is one of the best platforms to promote items in the marketplace. It makes your product visible on the home page of Amazon, which could otherwise have appeared well below its competitors.
Want to know the best part?
Your product can still be at the top of a keyword search and pay nothing. Amazon charges on each click on your ads, not impressions.
Boom! It falls on you like a ton of bricks. This means that your brand and product can still receive enough advertising without any fees.
How to Make the Most of Your Amazon Ad? – Tried & Tested Tips
By now, you must have established the fact that your products can be immensely successful if you promote them on Amazon Advertisements.
But hang on a minute. Your product advertisements may not turn out to be as successful if you do not put an impression on the customer.
If you are not developing a convincing campaign for your product and are not generating an audience, Amazon is more likely to demote your product advertisement because it does not convert to sales.
So without delaying anything, let’s tell you how to make your ad campaign successful.
1. Test and Retest Your Ad Text
Okay, what makes the idea special, convincing, and most importantly, artistic?
We understand that this is a million-dollar question. And quite frankly, it’s not rocket science. However, there are some factors that will improve the performance of your ads.
- Always Target the Right Customer. Showing your advertisement to people who are actually looking for what you are offering is bound to produce positive outcomes.
- Grab the Attention of your Customers. You can draw a person’s attention to the ad by using a combination of different creative techniques, from a headline, ad copy, images, colors to a call to action.
- Create Efficient Content. There are pros and cons to different writing styles. But, in the world of marketing, the ideal way of communicating your idea to the customer is providing the most amount of information in the least amount of words.
- Tell Your Story Clearly. A good advertisement provides clear and concise information about the offer. For example, the most successful Amazon ads use descriptive images to tell most of the story.
- And, to a very specific audience segment, a Good Ad is Relevant. This means that they are related to their needs and wants, but also that they are likely to respond well and identify with creative elements.
Let me give you an example: If you sell a football on Amazon, your most likely target audience might be athletes, sports enthusiasts or related entities. Keeping that in mind, it would seem unprofessional to create an unathletic football ad and will turn out to be disastrous for your brand
News Flash: According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B sellers surveyed say they are creating more content in 2019 than they did in 2016.
The key to a successful Ad story is by hit and trial. So, you shouldn’t be afraid to fail in your Amazon Ad campaign.
Always keep testing to get the right recipe.
Target the Right Keywords
Amazon will generate your keywords based on your product listing and commonly used search terms when you run an automatic campaign–so you don’t have to do anything.
You need to generate the keywords yourself if you run a manual campaign.
There are two main ways to find keywords that can be included in a manual campaign: If you run an automatic campaign for the same product, go through the report search term and find the keywords that generated sales; or use a third-party keyword tool to find relevant keywords for your product.
Some of the recommended Keyword Tools are:
- Jungle Scout
- Sellics
- MerchantWords
There are three types of keywords that you can bid on in Sponsored Ads: broad, phrase, and accurate.
Broad keywords can include words before and after the keyword of the target. For example, in case you sell a wooden table, “Black Wooden Table.” Targeting these keywords attracts the highest traffic volume.
Phrase Keywords focus on the sequence of words used on the changing context of a query. Look at this example: you are selling a rugby ball by bidding on the keyword “American football.” Mentioning the keyword “football,” however, will indicate that you sell football, not American football, necessarily.
Exact keywords are the most restrictive type of targeted keyword — the shopper’s search query must include the exact keyword for your ad to appear, and no words can come before or after the keyword.
Each of these types of matches has advantages and disadvantages, and in the right circumstances can work well.
For example, a Broad match to find new keywords is useful; Matching phrases can help reduce ad spending while remaining open to minor variations; Exact match works well with higher bids to target very relevant keywords.
To find out which one performs better for each keyword, it is worth testing all three match types. When deciding which PPC ads to display, Amazon includes a lot of factors, so the results may be surprising.
Take Care of Negative Keywords
Targeting popular keywords is a reliable PPC technique to expose relevant customers to your product, but removing keywords by negative keywords is just as important.
Negative Keywords are words or phrases that prevent your ad from appearing on the Amazon SERP (Search Engine Results Page) when they are in the search query of the customer. In other words, if you don’t want your ad to show, you’d use the Negative Keyword to tell Amazon.
Say you sold Laptop Chargers on Amazon and bid for the keyword phrase “Chargers.” If someone searched for “Mobile Chargers” because Amazon thinks these keywords are more similar than they really are, your ad for laptop charger could appear without negative keywords.
They may even click on your ad, realize they didn’t want it, and leave immediately. Amazon will still charge you for all these clicks, but you don’t have to show any sales for them.
Thanks to Amazon Advertising’s statistical validity, identifying which search terms cause your campaign’s downfall is pretty easy. Using this data, we found ways to build a support system around your campaigns to avoid further chaos from these terms.
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Select the Right PPC Campaign Type
Before we go ahead, we would like you to stop you right here and request you to be absolutely sure what you want to advertise to your customers.
Amazon provides a variety of Ad solutions that allow you to find, attract and engage Amazon customers at every stage of their purchase decision-making journey. These Advertisements include Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Product Display Ads.
As the name mentions, the objective of the Sponsored Brands Campaign is to promote your products along with your brand. Sponsored brands are available only to traders who have subscribed to Brand Registry, such as vendors and private label sellers.
By contrast, Sponsored Products are ads that are mostly set up without a registered trademark by third-party sellers.
If your brand or product is new, you should focus on building awareness and reach out to the intended shoppers.
It’s important to understand the difference between PPC and PPM. PPM or Pay-Per-Impression advertising is where you pay for the impressions you get, not the clicks. Display Ads, Video Ads, and Custom Ads are examples of PPM tools on Amazon, where you’re charged for every 1,000 impressions.
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Define Your PPC Goals
What do you want your ads to accomplish? To rapidly increase the volume of sales? Cost-efficient acquisition of customers? Okay, all of this?
As nice as an all-round success would look, it’s better to focus on one of these two to get better results.
Let’s go through each one of them quickly:
- Rapid Increase in Sales Volume: If you want to quickly push volume, efficiency will be sacrificed. If you increase your bids by 150%, you don’t know if you’re going to get an equal benefit due to the decreasing returns that drive your Average Cost of Sales (ACOS) up.
- Improving the Efficiency of Campaigns: By efficiency, we are referring to the cost of Amazon Advertisements. If you invest low in Amazon Ads, you are more likely to get a healthy return.
You need time in order to increase volume and efficiency. This is the long-term strategy for which you want to shoot and what should be your focus once you’re up and running.
You need time to tweak and identify the keywords you want to bid on and how much you need to pay for them to make sure you’re profitable. Even if you find the right offers for your keywords, they are a moving target as the competitive landscape is constantly changing and requires updating offers to stay ahead of the competition, seasonality, etc.
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Best Training Course – Sean Smith PPC Course
You have been following advice from various Amazon PPC experts but haven’t been able to improve on your sales?
Trust me, we have all been there.
But you know what? Let’s try something new.
Why not take a proper course and acquire knowledge about Amazon PPC advertisements in a systematic way?
Sean Smith, the founder of Jungle Hustle, is one of the most popular Amazon PPC and Sponsored Ads expert. He is an experienced consultant who trains his clients into improving their sales through smart and efficient marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let me guess, your mind is juggling with a series of questions. Let us start by answering a few.
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What Does it Cost?
Amazon’s PPC is always up to the highest bidder. Each seller submits the maximum amount that they are willing to pay per click on their ad. The highest bidder wins the highest ad position but pays only $0.01 more than the following bid.
Amazon will never charge you more than your maximum bid, although sellers should never bid more than they’re willing to pay for a click. At the end of the month, Amazon adds up all of your costs and it withdraws the sum from your total ad threshold.
The total cost remains under your control-meaning you choose how much you want to spend for a click at any time.
The minimum daily budget for ad spending is $1.00, but Amazon recommends a minimum of $10.00 to ensure that your campaigns are shown throughout the day.
The amount you enter is the average daily amount you’re willing to spend over a calendar month if you’re sponsoring a product. For example, if this is $100 a day, you could accumulate clicks of up to $3,100 a month (assuming 31 days).
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Where do Amazon PPC Ads Appear?
Sponsored Products displays ads across Amazon in a variety of locations to make finding your products easier for shoppers. Ads can appear in placements for desktops, tablets, and mobile browsers and apps.
One of the greatest highlights of sponsored products is that the ads are placed within the shopper’s search results enabling high product discovery.
Whenever a sponsored product campaign is initiated, these are the following locations that ads may appear depending on the bid and budget to which the ads are allocated:
- Top of the Search Page
- Bottom of the Search Page
- Middle of the Search Page
- Product Details Page
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Does Amazon PPC Improve Organic Rankings?
We know that “search” is the primary way customers search for Amazon products. By entering keywords that match search terms for a listed ASIN, shoppers will browse for items.
Besides factors such as price, availability, selection, and history of sales, well-selected search terms will increase the visibility and sales of a product.
General, best-selling products tend to be listed at the beginning of the list of results. As the number of sales increases for a product, so does the placement of the product.
Here’s an idea for you: By providing the opportunity for third-party sellers to promote their brand and their products, Amazon has ensured that the best brands have all the right features and tools to promote their product and the customers get the best product in the market.
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How Would I Know if PPC is Working for My Product or not?
Here’s the interesting part about Sponsored Ads:
Sponsored Ads offers a reporting tool that displays clicks, spending, sales, and advertising sales costs (ACoS) of your ads to measure the performance of your ads.
You can use it to measure, analyze and choose the best keywords and a result-oriented marketing strategy for your products to help you grow your business with a high return on your investments.
Outsourcing Your Amazon PPC Campaign
Okay, we are going to take a wild guess. You must be thinking, “All of this is so complicated!! How am I going to do all of this and manage the business at the same time?!”, “I won’t be left with time to myself!!”
We totally agree with you. Advertising your brands and products on Amazon PPC Campaigns can be a little tedious.
The solution here is to hire professionals to promote your products on Amazon.
The online freelance marketplaces are filled with experienced agencies and individuals that are willing to take over your Amazon PPC Campaigns. Not only will they significantly reduce your efforts, but they will also use their expertise to effectively improve the performance of advertisements.
While you can always search for online information to learn more about the marketplace, it will take a lot of your time. If you’re new to the business and you don’t have time to learn from scratch, it’s highly recommended that you hire an Amazon agency to help set up your business.
If you decide to hire an Amazon Agency to help manage your business, you should be willing to spend money on advertising, promotions, graphics, and other services the agency provides. If not, they can do nothing for you.
How to Find the Right Amazon PPC Management Agency?
Advertising is time-consuming work that requires both knowledge and commitment. If you don’t have time on your hands and don’t know how to make it work, consider hiring someone specializing in Amazon advertising.
Be sure to ask about their techniques and plans to optimize your page when looking for someone to help optimize your product page. They should be able to take into account the full customer experience, including mobile optimization, and not just focus on schemes and strategies for indexing keywords.
Make sure they are aware of Amazon’s policies and are willing to comply with them when finding someone to outsource to. This is very important because Amazon’s violation of service terms may put your account at risk of suspension.
Also, keep yourself certain that the person you hire also has real experience with Amazon Sponsored Products. Watch out for agencies specializing in other PPC advertising types claiming to be experts on the Amazon advertising market.
Be sure to find someone with Amazon advertising who actually has a track record of successful results.
Beware: Avoid those offering a quick track to Amazon’s success.
While it may be possible to succeed overnight a few years ago, things are not as simple now. You need a carefully thought-out strategy, intelligent marketing, and a considerable amount of time to be successful.
Top Agencies to Maximize PPC Profits
Hiring an Amazon PPC Advertising expert will definitely boost up the performance of your Amazon ads.
But the million-dollar question is, which agency should you choose.
Here are some of the best Amazon PPC experts available in the market:
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PPC Alpha
PPC Alpha is probably one of the most famous Amazon PPC expert agencies in the online market. With a variety of clients earning millions of dollars selling products on Amazon, PPC Alpha is probably the most experienced agency in the market.
PPC Alpha believes that the status, effectiveness, and progress of your Amazon PPC campaigns should be consistently updated. Consequently, the entire team focuses on building ad campaigns on a variety of objective data including ACoS.
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JumpFly
JumpFly is a PPC management agency based outside Chicago in Elgin, IL. JumpFly designs, implements and manages Amazon PPC advertisement management for small and medium-sized enterprises.
JumpFly was founded in 1998 and now has a team of around 60 employees and two decades of experience in the paid search sector.
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Viral Launch
Viral launch does an amazing job it comes to Amazon PPC Management. They specialise in adapting a holistic approach to deliver organic and PPC results.
You can check them out for more details.
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Ignite By SellerLabs
Ignite is a tool that can help you get smart suggestions for bids and keywords that can help increase your profit and decrease the percentages of ACoS. It also provides a historical data-based PPC strategy to allow you to spend less time managing campaigns and more time optimizing them for profit.
Sellerlabs provide Ignite for their Ignite product as a free trial period of 30 days. Its minimum price for five campaigns is $49 a month, and the maximum price for 100 campaigns is $499 a month.
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Sellics PPC Manager
Scope by Sellics has been one of Amazon’s prominent PPC software management tools and also the best approach to optimize your Amazon PPC profits. An Amazon PPC tool allows users to assess, improve and monitor the efficiency of all Amazon ads using user-friendly, easy-to-read, useful charts.
Scope’s key features include automated keyword changes, the ability to pause keywords in ad campaigns, and the ability in campaigns to set search terms to negative.
Amazon PPC Campaign Automation Software
Some of us are not inclined towards outsourcing our brand advertisements to third party agencies.
Guess what? Amazon has developed an automatic PPC campaign manager to facilitate its sellers. Automatic Campaigns is where Amazon decides when to display your product ad based on the keywords identified from your product listing title, description, and other sections.
Amazon Automatic Campaigns are easy to set up and don’t require much keyword optimizations. But what’s the catch?
The product ad’s page rank is not optimized based on the keyword’s relevance and profitability. Because you have no bid control, you bid the same for high keyword conversion, low keyword conversion, and non-conversion keywords.
Final Thoughts
Fact: Amazon PPC Campaigns increase 10-20% of your average sales.
If you have been struggling with your Amazon sales, don’t worry, you are not alone. Follow the tips mentioned above and you’ll see rapid improvements in your sales.
Here’s something to keep in mind: The more effort and resources you put in with Amazon ads, the more you get back.
Need any help optimizing your Amazon PPC Campaign? Contact us in the comment section below!
