Even though we'll be describing five unique types of Amazon advertisements that all have different best practices, here are seven general tips for shaping a successful Amazon advertising strategy:
1. Determine your goals.
Whether you want to drive more sales or boost brand awareness, Amazon allows you to align your targets with your goals. For instance, you can deem your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) as your metric of success if you're focusing on driving more sales.
Alternatively, you can deem impressions as your metric of success if you're focusing on boosting brand awareness.
Fortunately, Amazon divides its product page up into "Objectives" if it's easiest for you to figure out which Amazon ad product works best for you depending on your goals. For instance, video ads, display ads, audio ads, and custom advertising solutions are recommended if your goal is to grow brand awareness.
By working backwards from your goals, you'll ensure the strategy you implement on Amazon is best-suited for your business needs.
2. Choose the right products to advertise.
Advertising your most popular products gives you the best chance to convert clicks into purchases. You should also make sure these products are in stock and priced competitively.
Alternatively, perhaps you have a new product or service for which you'd like to increase awareness. When choosing the right products or services to advertise, you'll want to keep your goals in-mind, and also ensure you've done your research to determine whether Amazon is the right platform to showcase your products in the first place.
3. Craft clear, concise, and compelling product detail pages.
Amazon ads can entice shoppers to visit your product detail pages, but the product detail page is what will ultimately turn those shoppers into customers. To craft a persuasive product detail page, consider including accurate and descriptive titles, high-quality images, and relevant and useful product information.
4. Choose where you want to place your ads.
Amazon offers a variety of products within its full advertising suite — for instance, you can create voice ads to display across Alexa-enabled devices, video ads to stream across Fire TV or Amazon-exclusive sites like IMBD, or display ads to attract Amazon users to your brand.
Once you've determined whether voice, video, or search is right for you, you'll want to investigate various options, including sponsored brand ads versus sponsored product ads (which we'll discuss in the next step).
Keep in mind, there are tons of opportunities to place your ads on various devices or sites with Amazon, so consider getting creative. Perhaps an audio advertisement that plays on Alexa-enabed devices is best-suited for your business, or maybe you'll find the highest ROI with Amazon DSP, which allows you to reach Amazon audiences on both Amazon-owned and third-party sites and apps.
5. Test out sponsored brands versus sponsored products.
To explore the differences between sponsored brands versus sponsored products, let's consider the following example.
When I search "baby food" on Amazon, the first sponsored placement I see is Gerber's sponsored brand post, which highlights a few different Gerber products to increase brand awareness and drive sales. However, consider what happens when I click on an individual Gerber baby food product. In the bottom right of the product screen right below the "Buy Now" button, I see a Happy Family Organics advertisement for an individual product — Stage 4 Fiber & Protein baby food pouches.
This is the difference between a sponsored brand versus a sponsored product post. Simply put, a sponsored brand post can display a few of your products or services, and is ultimately best-suited for companies aiming to increase brand awareness around an entire product line.
Alternatively, a sponsored product post is a cost-per-click (CPC) ad that promotes individual product listings on Amazon. If you're hoping to drive sales to a specific product or you'd like to target a niche audience (for instance, anyone who's already clicked on a competitor's product), this might be the better option for you.
6. Use category-specific targeting.
Amazon offers advanced targeting functionality to help you display your products alongside top-rated products, or even alongside tangentially-related products — for instance, if you sell K-cups for a keurig, you might serve your ad to Amazon users who've searched for "keurig".
By using Product Attribute Targeting, you're able to show ads to shoppers who've shown interest in other products within your industry. This advanced targeting capability helps you maximize effectiveness of your ads. Plus, it allows you to increase brand recognition with a high-intent audience.
For instance, when I search for basketballs on Amazon and click on a Wilson product, I can scroll down and see a section labelled "Sponsored products related to this item"
Avid basketball players are likely more inclined to take a look at knee braces or sports cones, making this an effective ad placement. Even if shoppers arent' in the
even if I'm not in the market right now, I'll ideally keep these brands in-mind for the future.
7. Take advantage of negative keywords to reduce wasted spend.
It's important you avoid wasting ad spend by including negative keywords — or which keywords you don't want to appear for — to avoid serving your ad to people who won't convert.
Consider, for instance, the difference between a search for "granola bars" and a search for "KIND granola bars". You don't want to appear in a search for "KIND granola bars", when the user is clearly determined to find a specific granola brand.
For this reason, you might want to include brands like "KIND" or "Chewy" in your negative keywords list, so your ad can be served to users with a more general interest in perusing various granola brand products.
You'll also want to include negative keywords if they don't relate to your product to avoid wasting your ad spend towards people who aren't interested in your product. For instance, if your product isn't gluten-free, you'll want "gluten free" on your negative keywords list.
Additionally, you might consider getting more specific to target your ads at a smaller, more high-intent group of people. Rather than simply targeting "granola bar", you might try targeting "low-sugar granola bar", for instance.
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