Amazon Advertising Guide for Seller Central & Vendor Central
What I’m about to share is one of my biggest trade secrets. It reveals how I setup advertising. Highly segmented strategies, that produce results. First of all, advertise every product, 24/7. Every product deserves its own bidding strategy, but advertising can always be profitable. Exceptions of course if you’re in beauty – PPC bids there are astronomical. Apply this strategy and you will have control over your Amazon advertising destiny. At MyAmazonGuy we’ve even applied this strategy in foreign languages we don’t speak, with great results. Google translate works. Techniques matter more than language barriers. We recently launched a client in Europe across 6 languages with the below techniques and they are already performing at a 10:1 return. (Returns are easier in Europe than USA)
Ad Segmentation for Sponsored Ads:
We build four campaigns as follows. Each with its own strategy and segmentation.
- Auto Campaign
- Keywords chosen by Amazon, good for keyword discovery in case manual campaign misses opportunity, medium spend
- Brand terms are negated
- Brand Campaign
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- Brand terms are only used on this campaign
- Defensive advertising, not incremental sales, low spend. Protects us from competitors advertising on our brand. (Competitors would have to outbid us on our own products to win the bid.)
- Competitor Campaign
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- Competitor brand names are only used on this campaign
- Often very small spend, high results, low impression counts, incremental sales
- Set up to target competitor’s brand keywords in order to gain market share.
- Manual Campaign
- Highly segmented ad groups, will have most benefit, most spend, most sales.
- Keywords are all manually chosen.
Keyword Strategies:
We have added the same keywords in the following three formats below, essentially A/B/C testing the keywords for strength. A keyword could perform better in any one of the below formats, and we adjust bids ongoing accordingly.
- Broad Match
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- Generically targets the keyword, can have other words in search result mixed, has most impressions
- Phrase Match
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- Must contain the phrase, can have other words in search result
- Exact Match
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- Is exact match, and only targets when precise letter for letter keyword is used. Least amount of impressions, but most controlled and targeted format.
Bidding Strategies:
Each Amazon advertising setup uses a unique bidding strategy. In the case of many brands we choose to apply a growth bidding strategy. Where we put in high bids to test the market, and see what happens due to the competitive nature of your category. If results are poor we will pull back within 2-4 weeks. Our target is to get ads to be performing within 90 days. Advertising in competitive categories can have a ACoS of 30-80%. Advertising in less competitive categories such as home goods, can maintain a 15-25% ACoS.
Bonus round – Create a Facebook meme, and send traffic to Amazon.
You don’t have to a masterful creative designer to make an ad that works. I built this in 3 mins, launched it in 5, spend $50 and made 30 unit sales, and got 900 engagements. Showing up is half the battle. I even put in Pickle Rick for Rick & Morty, which is totally off brand for www.momstir.com, one of the brands I own. It still worked. Because it got people’s attention. I abuse my own brands quite a bit for testing purposes. It’s all about targeting, low bids, right message, and push them to Amazon using an SEO super url. An SEO super url is keywords in the UTF of the coding of the URL. It makes your product rank for those keywords when you get sales when someone clicks the url because it signals to the search engine that someone sought those terms out to make their purchase.
