While Amazon FBA advertising may make even the newbie or the seasoned seller wary, it’s still one of the best ways to gain visibility on the world’s largest online marketplace.
Investing in Amazon FBA advertising sounds like it might be time-consuming, costly, and difficult. While in reality, Amazon makes it fairly easy for any seller, with any budget, to start enjoying the benefits of using Ads to drive up business. Let’s take a look at the Basics of Amazon FBA advertising to help you get comfortable with your first Campaign!
You Get What You Pay for in Amazon FBA Advertising
One of the biggest factors that frighten new sellers away from advertising with Amazon is the cost. Often, sellers don’t know what to expect or what to budget and are inundated with negative stories of Amazon ads gone wrong. But, there’s good news; when Advertising with Amazon FBA Advertising you only pay for what you use. What does this mean?
Amazon uses an advertising system called ‘Pay per Click” (PPC). Sellers only pay the ad fee when a potential customer clicks on their Amazon listing. If no one clicks then there’s no cost. As your ad is representative of your product and your Amazon listing is professional, you should be able to get a sale out of a significant number of your clicks.
Another way that Amazon helps you manage your budget is by allowing you to set time and budget limits for any campaign you run. This helps you ensure you aren’t overspending and it also allows you to tweak your campaigns often. PPC ranges in price from $0.25 and up depending on where you’re setting up your campaign.
What You Need to Know Before Setting up your Amazon Campaigns
The first thing you should do as a seller is register your Amazon Seller Central account for Amazon FBA advertising. You’ll have to choose the markets you want to sell in and let amazon know you’ll be setting up the campaigns.
Next, you’ll have to choose the keywords and or other product ASINs you feel your product is relevant to compete for impressions and clicks. It’s a wise idea to start your first campaign with a manual campaign set up, to gather as much data for a couple of weeks. You’ll have to do more research into campaign structure and options.
Keep in mind there’s a limit of 1000 keywords for an Amazon FBA advertising campaign, but in practice, you will want to limit your keywords. Some PPC experts suggest having no more than 10 keywords or 10 ASINs per campaign. You’ll have to do some research to see what’s best for your category, niche, and brand. There are only so many effective keywords for a single product and if you set up your campaign with 1000 keywords you could end up paying for irrelevant clicks, and have very few impressions.
You’ll also want to make sure that some of your keywords are phrases, as these can be more effective in funneling potential customers. For instance, if you simply use the keyword ‘mug’ to sell your travel mug, you may end up with your ad appearing to (and being clicked on by) people looking for a coffee mug when you are specifically selling a travel mug. A phrase like ‘lightweight travel mug” is more accurate and will ensure your ad is only clicked by relevant potential buyers. Strategies like this can potentially save you a lot of money.
Once you’ve gathered enough data in your initial campaigns you can start to use the negative feature or remove search terms irrelevant to your product. Negative keywords are keywords that may have something slightly in common with your product, but you know they will not be effective in attracting the right customers. An example is if you are selling a large barrel curling iron, yet hot curling rollers come up in your search terms. You may want to negative exact this search term as it is not exactly relevant for your product.
Interestingly enough, Amazon recently added a feature where not only can you negative exact keywords, but now you can also use negative phrases to remove irrelevant keywords. This is another way you can help protect your budget and ensure you aren’t wasting money.
Different Types of Advertising for Different Phases Growth
There are three main types of Ad campaigns on Amazon; Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Each focuses on a different phase of your Amazon FBA growth as a seller.
Let’s start with Sponsored Products as it is the most accessible level of Advertising and probably the one you are most familiar with. These are the ads that pop up with search results whenever a customer searches for a specific product through Amazon. They are great for visibility and they have a very high success rate when it comes to attracting buyers.
Sponsored Brands work in a similar way, but they focus on brand growth and awareness. There are three types of these ads. The Product Collection ads feature your brand name, logo, slogan, and up to three products from a single Brand. Store Spotlight Ads are almost the same, but they drive traffic to your Amazon storefront instead of a product detail page.
Finally, you can also opt for the Sponsored Brand video option, which allows you to upload a full video ad that Amazon autoplays for potential customers that look up your keywords. Sponsored Brand ads are perfect for sellers who are working hard to develop their brand awareness. In some cases, video ads offer lower costs as not every seller has access to this great feature, meaningless competitive pricing.
The third type of campaign is called an Amazon Sponsored Display. This type of ad targets potential customers on sites other than Amazon. Amazon has a very robust network of external sites to market on including; IMDB, Prime Video, and Twitch.
Using Sponsored Display ads provides you access to buyers that you would never normally receive with the other two types of campaigns. These ads are highly targeted and target users’ that are thinking about buying based on other online activities. This type of ad is often used for more mature sellers as they are at the higher end of the cost spectrum. Also, it’s important to note that these ads are Pay Per Impression, rather than Pay Per Click.
Get your Ads up and Running and Remember to Monitor your Campaigns
Once you’ve chosen the type of ad campaigns you want to run and have set up your targeted keywords, make sure that you check how campaigns are doing and be prepared to optimize them regularly. Your Amazon FBA advertising campaigns, like your listings, should always be a work in progress that you can constantly improve upon for best-case results.
Have you started your first Amazon FBA Advertising campaign? How’s it going? Comment below.
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