8 Best Amazon PPC Strategies For Sales Momentum
By one estimate, 6 out of 10 Amazon sellers struggle with increasing their sales. These struggling sellers resort to Amazon PPC without any prior planning and end up exhausting their budget and re-treating the PPC market without a sizeable return on investment. While creating and launching Amazon PPC is easy, the real challenge lies in PPC optimization. Most Amazon sellers make huge mistakes that end up costing them half of their PPC budget.
You need to know that Amazon PPC boosts your sales and improves your product visibility. Even if you are not making any sales through your PPC campaigns, don’t worry. At least, you are improving your product visibility. However, if you continue to face lower sales volumes, you need to revamp your Amazon PPC strategy.
8 Amazon PPC Strategies for Advanced Sellers
Even with the right product and an excellent listing copy, you still need Amazon PPC to boost your sales. Since most Amazon sellers fail at this point, we have created a list of best Amazon PPC practices to help you get the most out of your ad campaigns.
1. Start With Long-Tail Keywords
Instead of making giant leaps, you should start slow and gradually make your way to the top. This sentence holds a lot of value in Amazon PPC marketing because you can’t compete against well-established sellers from the get-go. The best way to start your PPC campaigns is by targeting long-tail and gradually moving up the pecking order. After you have succeeded in ranking your listing on long-tail keywords, you can then proceed to more generic short-tail keywords. If you start targeting short-tail keywords from the beginning, you will spend tremendous amounts of money with little to no possible return on investment.
Moreover, an inaccurate Amazon PPC strategy can adversely affect your revenue and might damage your organic sales. It would be best if you kept in mind that Amazon has well over 2 million-seller on its platform, and the chances for your newly created account or listing to rank against a well-established seller is very low. You might be paying more than other sellers on your keyword bids, and your product won’t even rank against your keywords because you don’t have enough reviews to compete. Lastly, long-tail keywords have high purchase intent, and you will face minor resistance targeting these phrases.
2. Optimizing Amazon PPC
I have formulated this strategy to help you optimize your organic ranking through Amazon PPC. Yes, you can improve your organic ranking on Amazon SERPs through PPC because Amazon promotes product listings that have high positive reviews. To make this strategy successful, you need to create 3 different ad campaigns with budgets that significantly vary across them.
After you have created these 3 campaigns, your budget will depend on your keywords and the number of sales each phrase generates for your product. So, your first step should be gathering your list of keywords and then follow my below-mentioned PPC campaign strategy.
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Listing Beyond Page Five
After you have your list of keywords in front of you, start analyzing which keywords are converting and note them on a separate excel sheet. Out of these keywords, check which ones rank beyond page 5 on Amazon search results. Target these keywords in a particular campaign and fix a moderate budget for it. The reason behind allotting a reasonable budget on page 5 keywords is because these phrases are converting despite the fact they rank so low, which means that customers can’t find anything worth buying relative to this keyword. Fixing a moderate budget for this campaign will improve your organic ranking as you start generating sales and gain positive reviews.
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Listing Between Page Two to Five
Similarly, for keywords ranked between page two to five, you need to have a moderate strategy that focuses on top-performing keywords. You need to consistently monitor and alter this campaign depending on the top-performing keywords to maximize sales and reduce ad expense. When you start getting conversions, Amazon will automatically rank your listing higher than your competitors.
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Listing On Page One and Two
Finally, listings on pages one and two need a more aggressive bidding strategy, because you are only a few steps away from the prime position. It would be best if you were as aggressive as possible to improve your brand visibility for keywords ranking on these pages because the competition will be very high.
Moreover, you should also use variations of your top-performing keywords ranking on pages one and two to capture these keywords’ maximum share. Remember, not all Amazon customers type exact keywords, so slight variations will also improve your brand visibility if not cash into sales.
3. Monitor Your Ad Placements
Amazon has introduced several features to its PPC campaigns that benefit sellers and help them optimize their campaigns. However, most sellers don’t know how to evaluate their ad performance, and they end up allotting their budget to wrong ad placements. Typically, your Amazon PPC campaign will show your product ads either on top of the search results, middle or at the bottom. In your Amazon PPC campaign section, you can view which ad placement has high profitability and impressive sales. After you have shortlisted the ad placement with the highest sales, you can optimize your budget accordingly and assign more budget to profitable ad placements.
4. Group Variations for Better Results
If your product has multiple variations, Amazon will list them as child ASINs. Creating a different campaign for each variation of your product can quickly eat into your budget and cause product cannibalism. To avoid competition between your listings of the same product, you should group variations into a single package
For example, if you are selling different ice cream flavors on Amazon, you can bundle them under one package at a higher price. Bundling your products has the following benefits.
- Your average order value increases
- Customers love package deals.
- Brand visibility is enhanced.
- Your PPC budget stays focused on one product rather than spreading across its variations.
- It eliminates product cannibalism.
5. Amazon PPC for Your Top Child ASIN
If you don’t have the capacity to create a single profitable package out of different variations of your product, you can focus on your top-performing child ASIN. Although you will miss out on the perks of package deals and increase average order value, it will prove to be lighter on your pocket. Again, use your top-performing keywords and follow the budget allocation strategy mentioned above for phrases that rank on different pages.
Don’t worry about other variants of your product. Once you start generating traffic, sales will trickle down to other options as well. Alternatively, you have the liberty to create different ad campaigns for different variations of your product, but it becomes costly over time. Moreover, your listings might get into a competition with each other if your keyword selections are a close match.
6. Target TOFU Keywords
As delicious as the word TOFU might sound, these keywords aren’t edible. TOFU actually stands for Top of The Funnel. Basically, these are keywords your potential customers search when they have no idea what they are looking for. Such customers are looking for a solution to their problem rather than a specific product. If you sell turmeric powder on Amazon, you can target keywords that represent the problems customers face that resort them to using turmeric powder. For example, “natural weight-loss products.”
Using TOFU keywords is the best way to get the most out of your Amazon PPC campaigns because customers who are looking for a solution to their problems have a high buying intention. These customers won’t spend time scouring through Amazon if your product shows up against their searches.
Although targeting TOFU keywords might be expensive for some Amazon sellers, its return is far greater than its cost. Lastly, targeting TOFU keywords increases your brand visibility and credibility. When customers see your product on top of their search against their problem, they can relate your product as the best remedy for their difficulty.
7. Group Similar Priced Products in the Same Ad
The best way to efficiently maximize your revenue is by grouping similar priced products in the same ad campaign. Assuming that you sell products A, B, and C for $15, $20, and $70, respectively, grouping them under the same ad campaign can reduce your Advertising Cost of Sales. Since you will be spending a fixed budget of $5 on this ad campaign, your Advertising Cost of Sales for each product will be:
- Product A: 33.3%
- Product B: 25%
- Product C: 7.14%
The total Advertising Cost of Sales for this campaign will be 21.813%. However, if you take out product C from this campaign and make another ad for it, your results will drastically improve, and your cost won’t matter compared to your sales. Product C will receive an individual advertisement budget, undivided impressions, and its sales will balance out the cost for products A and B. The same strategy works remarkably well for Child ASINs. If you have different product variations, focus on advertising your highest-priced variant, and sales will eventually trickle down to other options.
8. Design ad Campaigns According To Your Product
Most Amazon sellers tend to design their ad campaigns based on their keyword performance, and this is a generalized practice. However, some products require excessive clicks to make a sale. In this case, it’s best to design your campaigns according to your product. This ensures that your ACoS isn’t affected, and the clicks and impressions are divided among lesser performing products. For instance, if you have an ad campaign with 5 products, out of which 2 have 50% ACoS and the other 2 have 30% ACoS, it would be best to remove high ACoS products from this campaign. This way, your efficient products don’t have to sacrifice their clicks and impressions.
The Bottom Line
Amazon is the most visited eCommerce store, and it’s responsible for 45% of eCommerce sales in the USA. However, ranking your listing on this platform is not as challenging as you might think. If you follow the strategies mentioned above, you can quickly rank your product on the top because Amazon’s immense traffic has a buyer for every product put for sale. Moreover, you don’t need to worry about exhausting your earnings while pursuing Amazon PPC campaigns. By bundling your product and adding them to a single ad campaign, you can divide your ad spend among different products and advertise at the cost of a single product. Lastly, your Amazon organic rankings will significantly improve if you follow my PPC strategies, because your average order value will boost through my tactics.
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