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At Bobsled Marketing, we pride ourselves on our obsession with data, which helps us craft effective Amazon Sponsored Product Ads campaigns. Why bother with paid advertising?
You’re already putting a lot of thought into creating wonderful product pages that appeal to your customers. But there’s only so much that great content and organic outreach can do these days.
DON'T FORGET THAT AMAZON IS JUST BASICALLY A SEARCH ENGINE
WITH PRODUCTS ON IT
And just like any other search engine, Amazon sells greater visibility to the highest bidder, regardless of how effective one’s keywords might be. Without paid advertising, you’re reaching a much smaller audience on Amazon.
Utilizing the power of PPC and implementing Amazon Sponsored Product Ads are sure-fire ways to boost your discoverability and to build your brand. Besides simply generating more revenue and increasing your ROI, paid advertising has been shown to boost organic (non-paid) Amazon rankings and sales, which have a greater long-term impact on your brand’s success.
Our PPC Manager Brent Zahradnik was kind enough to tell us why PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Campaigns can have such an impact on your ROI.
1. PPC is more effective than bulk product giveaways.
Amazon sellers often use giveaways to receive more reviews for new products or create more interest in their brand. Even if your giveaway does result in great reviews, you won’t learn how potential customers would look for your product. You’ll have no idea about the quality of your product pages and whether or not they need adjusting.
According to Brent, “If you’re going to be literally giving things away, best to do it with a chance of getting a sale at full price and learning something from the keywords you used to make those sales.” When you look at Amazon PPC as a source of revenue and information, it’s one of the most cost-effective strategies you can use.
2. Sponsored product ads can be some of your best keyword research tools.
Amazon doesn’t publish keyword search data in the same manner that Google does with their Keyword Planner, but they do provide keyword impression, click and bidding data for PPC campaigns. You can leverage this keyword research to improve not only your campaigns, but also your product titles, descriptions, and back-end keyword metadata.
Unoptimized PPC Campaigns cost you money.
Request a consultation with us and see how we can fix that for you.
3. With an effective PPC campaign, you’ll learn a lot about your target audience.
You can choose to run Automatic campaigns or Manual campaigns. Amazon generates Search Term Reports for both.
Automatic campaigns are based on your existing product page content. As a result, you’ll find out which keywords actually get impressions (how many times they’re viewed) and convert into sales. With Manual campaigns, you can select up to 1,000 specific keywords to target per ad group. Once your campaign is underway, you can use the reports to see which keywords to pause or optimize.
4. Most importantly, paid advertising is easier to measure than other more opaque optimization tactics.
You can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, and whether the time and cost of your efforts has a positive ROI. That is, if you aren’t wasting your money by implementing a less-than-stellar PPC strategy.
“YES, I GET IT. PPC IS IMPORTANT.” Now what?
Our in-house analysis has shown that many brands are paying too much for Amazon PPC and receiving mediocre or even terrible results. The nature of PPC makes this an all-too-easy trap to fall into. You “only” pay when you get impressions on your keywords and people click on your ad. However, if these clicks do not convert into sales, then you are paying for… well, nothing.
As a business owner, you’re probably tempted to try to optimize your PPC program yourself or do it in-house without outside help. But a fully-realized PPC campaign is something that must be cultivated, like a garden.
4 SIGNS YOUR PPC NEEDS SOME TLC
You don’t have to be bleeding money to know if your PPC campaign is not reaching its potential. To know if your PPC program is slow-performing and poorly-targeted, check your PPC program for these flagging vital signs:
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Low conversion rates
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Low impressions and CTR across the board
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High impressions but short sessions
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High ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales, or the percent of attributed sales spent on advertising) relative to your gross margin
HOW TO GET A PPC "GREEN THUMB"
Our PPC guru Brent gives some great tips in this short video about getting started in the PPC world. To improve your Amazon PPC results, you must be able to:
- Keep track of the right metrics, such as your CTR (click-through rate), spend (your campaign cost), sales, and conversion rate.
- Constantly test every aspect of your campaigns, including your keywords and the type of targeting you use. One little thing can affect your metrics dramatically, and in order for you to run effective tests, you must change one variable at a time. Considering how many elements of an actual ad there are, this can be a daunting task.
- Use negative keywords to your advantage. There are words you don’t want associated with your campaign, such as “women’s coats” if you sell “men’s coats” only.
- Improve ads that are doing well or replicate the results with other ad campaigns.
As you can see, running a successful PPC program is a job in itself, with lots of trimming, nurturing, and knowing when to feed it.
Have you lost hours on managing your ads, instead of focusing on growing your brand’s sales on Amazon?
An effective PPC campaign takes constant monitoring and continual tweaking of ads and keywords that aren’t working. All of this fine-tuning costs you time and can cause undue frustration, but PPC is one of the things that we here at Bobsled Marketing do best.
With our data-driven strategies and our experience with successful Amazon PPC campaigns, our team here at Bobsled will help you skip the learning curve and improve the ROI for your product listings. We’ll help you build your Amazon Sponsored Products from scratch or optimize your existing “Parent” product listings.
