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Are your Amazon ads falling flat? When you optimize your Amazon ads, you can scale your business and enjoy a significant boost in brand exposure and sales. Optimizing your ads takes planning with solid campaign strategies and high-performing keywords.
Merch Jar simplifies the whole ad management process with Smart Bids. Smart Bids is Merch Jar’s answer to round-the-clock automatic bid adjustments. With this feature, Amazon sellers can continuously achieve their target ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale). It automatically increases and decreases bids based on your budget and keyword performance.
Today, we’re going to dive into the ins and outs of Amazon Ads. We’ll cover the different types of ads available and, importantly, how to optimize your Amazon ads.
Amazon Ads is Amazon’s PPC (pay-per-click) solution that enables Amazon sellers to promote their products and brands through a variety of ad types. These ads include keywords, which can be set either manually or automatically.
keywords are the terms people search for when shopping on Amazon. Sellers bid on keywords for their ads, and the highest, most relevant ads are placed in prominent places across Amazon, whether in search results or the Amazon homepage.
Amazon Ads can help sellers meet different objectives, such as increased conversions, brand awareness, and product visibility. Sellers using Amazon Ads generally enjoy a greater click-through rate as their products are displayed in front of a more targeted audience.
Amazon-sponsored product ads are the most common PPC ads on Amazon. Businesses effectively pay for their products to be displayed higher up in search results, thus encouraging more clicks through greater visibility.
Look at the example below. The sponsored products in the image are the ones at the top and labeled as ‘Sponsored’.
Sponsored brand ads give brands a whole section dedicated to promoted products. The brand name and logo are more prominent than with sponsored products. This means consumers get more used to seeing and recognizing the logo, name, and brand colors.
Take a look at the image below for an example of sponsored brand ads. You’ll see there are two brands; Swell and Orca. Both clearly display the company logo along with a selection of the brands’ products relevant to the search term.
Sponsored display ads with Amazon can be displayed anywhere across Amazon’s network, including product pages and affiliate websites. They’re a diverse advertisement solution that can generate excellent results and ROI.
In the example below, you’ll see the sponsored display ads outlined in red. You’ll also notice that they’re shown within a product listing, meaning they’re offering the consumer an alternative or additional purchasing option.
Now we know the three types of Amazon ads; we’re going to explore how to optimize your Amazon ads to maximize your campaign’s success.
More sales are generally the ultimate goal of all Amazon businesses. However, increased brand awareness, for example, can help make generating future sales significantly easier. This is a good goal for those just starting out and wanting to get their name out there.
Other goals you might consider are:
You can’t optimize your Amazon ads properly without monitoring your campaigns and analyzing your data. Analyzing your data regularly will show you areas where you can improve your campaigns, product listings, and keywords.
Your Amazon Ads dashboard comes with useful metrics for monitoring your campaign’s performance. These include click-through rate, return on ad spend, and conversion rate. These metrics can give you valuable insights into your ads and consumer behavior.
If, for example, you have a high ad click-through but a low conversion rate, knowing this can help you pinpoint where you’re going wrong. Perhaps your ad titles aren’t accurate enough, or your product descriptions not appealing enough, allowing you to make changes to increase conversions.
Images and videos mean a lot on Amazon, especially if you’re paying for ads. To create stellar Amazon Ads, images and videos should be high quality and have a high resolution. Not only do high-quality images and videos look professional, but they also showcase details of the product that buyers might not see in low-quality ones.
Videos for ads should be at least 15 FPS and have audio of 44KHz. Photos also have their own set of rules. For instance, they mustn’t be crowded, include more than one product image, or have any brand logos. They also mustn’t be smudged or pixilated.
Use this opportunity to show off your product from multiple angles. You can also show it being used or include text that describes its top features or how to use it.
Keywords are the key ingredient to getting impressions. They’re the deciding factor as to who Amazon shows your ads to. If you’re not getting many impressions, this is a strong indication that you’ve chosen irrelevant keywords. This means that the keywords in your ads don’t match search intents.
Use a tool like Keyword Tool to identify high-converting, relevant keywords for your Amazon Ads. The screenshot below shows this tool in action. You’ll see the keyword “smartwatch” has a high search volume on Amazon but also has high competition. Your ideal keywords would have a high search volume combined with low competition.
Running your campaigns manually gives you greater control but takes considerably more time than automatic campaigns. It can also take a fair bit of knowledge to optimize your campaigns. If you’ve not got much experience with PPC campaigns, it’s advisable to take advantage of automation opportunities.
Amazon offers automatic targeting for sellers to make the process easier and quicker. With this solution, Amazon picks your keywords, matching them with relevant customers, products, and shopping queries to maximize your ads’ success. Use automatic campaigns, along with your data, to test keywords and identify negative ones.
Another option for ad automation is using an Amazon ad management automation software like Merch Jar. Merch Jar offers advertising on autopilot, automatically targeting high-performing keywords and adjusting your bids with Smart Bids. Additionally, Merch Jar can help you identify keywords that aren’t working for you, and it pauses them when they’re underperforming.
Amazon ads have huge potential to turbo-boost your sales and brand exposure. Choose which type of ad is right for your campaign based on your budget and goals. Follow the tips above to optimize your ads and generate a high ROI.
Use Merch Jar to simplify the running of your Amazon Ads campaigns. With Merch Jar, you can automatically target the right keywords for your ads and eliminate the poor-performing ones. Give it a try for free today, and watch your campaigns excel.
