Whether you sell online on Amazon or any other marketplace, advertising significantly boosts your business. The competition between the sellers is massive, and Amazon PPC campaigns are the key to success. If you take Amazon PPC seriously, you can increase sales and brand awareness, enhance your brand image, and compete with your rivals.
Most sellers understand the importance and power of PPC but need to know when it comes to forming their Amazon ads strategy. An effective Amazon ads strategy must be well-planned and tested out. It is much more than creating and launching your campaign.
The charges of Amazon PPC are modest, but proper optimization and bidding strategy are necessary for it to become very costly.
In Ecommphics’ latest blog, we will explore the mistakes sellers and advertisers make and how sellers can avoid those major Amazon PPC mistakes.
Which Mistakes Do Sellers and Businesses Make in Amazon PPC Campaigns?
Let’s look at some mistakes made by sellers and businesses in their Amazon PPC campaigns.
- Mixing Amazon SEO With Google SEO
Amazon and Google’s search engine optimization algorithms and techniques differ regarding deciding which products or ads to rank. Several sellers think the strategies that bring them results on Google will also work on Amazon. Sellers must understand that implementing the same SEO techniques will not give them good results on both platforms.
Firstly, you must understand the differences between the two platforms and their algorithms. Sellers must focus only on how Amazon’s A10 algorithm works and do keyword research to discover its customers’ search terms. Understand the duration the potential audience uses to search and decide your product category on the platform. Afterward, you can create your list of primary keywords you will target.
- Ignoring the Importance of Structuring and Organizing Your Campaigns
Your Amazon PPC campaign’s structure makes a lot of difference. Suppose you want to analyze and measure the well-performing campaigns and underperforming keywords.
If your campaign structure is good, you can easily understand the advertising reports and the reasons behind your campaign’s success and failure. Therefore, you must only group some products under the same campaign.
While you group them, variations of the same product must be in the same campaign, but some sellers make a blunder and separate them. The improper structure mixes up all campaigns, making it difficult to understand which products generated clicks and which generated high sales.
Before structuring your Amazon PPC campaigns, decide their number and consider the products that need maximum budget coverage. Evaluate budget diversity, kinds of campaign strategies, ASIN targeting, and Keywords.
The following is a suggested structure for your Sponsored Product campaign.
{Ad Type} – {Campaign Type} – {Targeting Type} – {Product} – {Strategy}
- Failing to Optimize the External Factors for Amazon PPC
Apart from Amazon PPC optimization, well-optimized listings will also make your campaigns successful. When a customer clicks your ad, the first thing they see is your listing, and if it doesn’t grab their attention or provide information, they will leave without buying anything.
Optimized listings include product descriptions, titles, bullet points, A+ content, product images, and videos. Sellers advertise products without good reviews, ratings, or low inventory. Ignoring inventory levels is wrong because Amazon does not show ads for products with low inventory levels.
- Poor Keyword Research for Negative Keywords
Sellers perform Amazon keyword research to find high-volume and top-converting keywords they will target for their ads. But they never find keywords that their ads must avoid targeting, i.e., negative keyword targeting. Being a seller, you want your ad to appear for certain keywords. Amazon copywriting services. Therefore, your ad budget will only be exhausted when your ads appear for some other keywords, such as those that bring traffic and clicks instead of conversions.
Sometimes, sellers add negative keywords, leading to wasted ad spending. They must also remember to view Amazon’s Customer Search Terms Report, which gives sellers insights into the keywords bringing in sales. Though the reports only provide data at an ad group level, sellers need to realize the difficulty of extracting useful information they get from it.
- Tracking the Wrong Metrics
Creating and launching your campaign and then forgetting to check its performance is a mistake many sellers make. You can measure your ad performance with the help of metrics such as clicks, impressions, conversions, CTR, ACoS, RoAS, TACOS, and CPC.
Your selling stage and size of operations will decide which of these metrics will benefit you. You can only check specific metrics because your advertising account will provide much data and information. As a result, you can understand the well-performing products and which areas need your attention.
- Unaware of Where to Use the Bidding Strategies
Amazon has three bidding strategies- Dynamic Bidding (Down Only), Dynamic Bidding (Up and Down), and Fixed Bids. Your ad budget will be exhausted if you fail to understand their differences. In Dynamic Bidding (Up and Down), Amazon increases your bid up to 100% if there are high chances of conversion and reduces your bid if they are low.
You can choose this strategy when you have volatile bids; you change frequently due to the market and your bid flexibility. Dynamic Bidding (Down Only) means Amazon lowers your bids up to 100% when there are fewer chances of conversion to reduce your overall ad costs. New sellers must choose this strategy over the others to be safe and avoid cost. In the case of Fixed Bids, the bids you select are set as default, which does not affect the number of conversions, irrespective of the adjustments.
- Changing your Campaigns Too Quickly
Amazon PPC is a process that takes some time to gain momentum and gather data that sellers can use to check performance. Mostly, sellers expect quick results and never give their campaigns enough time after making new changes.
You must keep track of your ad performance but never make changes daily. Plan your structural and campaign changes. If sellers adjust bids or remove keywords every week, the platform needs more time or data to collect. Hence, you can never properly analyze your ads’ performance.
How Sellers Can Avoid Major Amazon PPC Campaigns Mistakes?
Sellers can avoid these major Amazon PPC mistakes and maximize their profits.
- Clearly Define Campaign Goals
Amazon provides great opportunities for sellers to boost their sales, but sellers with clearly defined campaign goals will win. You can define your goals by reviewing the important ad metrics such as Amazon ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale), TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sale), ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), and conversions.
First, consider your business goals and then decide what action you will take regarding advertising. Your Amazon PPC strategy must align with your business goals. If you want to strengthen your brand image and increase your brand awareness, deploy Sponsored Brand ads with a trajectory focusing on getting a certain amount of advertising impressions and visits.
Once you plan out things in advance, you can allocate the right ad budget and achieve your goals with your ads.
- Review Poor Performing Keywords Before Removing Them
When sellers review the performance of keywords, they eliminate the poor-performing ones. However, this can be a mistake sometimes. You must understand why those specific keywords underperformed. This can be because of the season or choice of bid at a particular time.
You can give the keywords their due weightage after analyzing their performance over a longer time. If there are spikes in keyword performance during certain times and drops during others, don’t eliminate them. You can reduce their bid instead of removing them because they have the potential to bring sales.
- Use the Accurate Keyword Match Types
Amazon PPC has three kinds of keyword matches – exact, broad, and phrase match types. All these keyword match types have different purposes. Sellers must understand the difference between them to use the correct match type.
A broad match is used for targeting your ads to a wide audience, an exact match for attracting limited, high-converting traffic, and a phrase match has aspects of the other two match types.
Avoid wasting money, attracting and targeting the right audience by educating yourself on the three keyword match types.
- Take Benefit of Amazon Attribution
Sellers that register themselves on Amazon Brand Registry get several tools and resources. They can use them to boost promotion. Another tool, Amazon Attribution, helps track metrics for your off-Amazon promotions on various platforms.
Amazon Attribution is an analytical and tracking tool that will give brand insights regarding well-performing and poor ad strategies. You can make changes accordingly and improve your ROAS and overall sales.
- Invest in Amazon PPC Automation Software
Amazon PPC optimization and automation software and tools are a significant part of effective campaign management. Several sellers sell the services of Amazon PPC management software because they cost well. Sellers must admit that such tools are necessary for advertising, and paying for them is justified because the results are amazing.
You can optimize your ad budget with these tools and save time. Define the rule criteria so you can run it once the campaign meets the requirements and takes essential steps. You can increase and decrease the bids and select those days of the week when you want to run your campaign.
- Use Geo Targeting Options
Amazon PPC provides its sellers with geotargeting or location-targeting options for ads. Why should you target a large group with low chances of conversion when targeting a small geographical region with an audience that will purchase and vice versa?
If sellers use Sponsored Display ads and Sponsored Brands, they must target shoppers according to geographic region for specific placements.
Conclusion
Amazon PPC is an entire process that needs optimization at every step. Sellers of all stages – beginner, intermediate, established, must use PPC to promote their Amazon business. It is an amazing strategy for sellers to win the competition and boost their sales.
However, the whole advertising process requires paying attention and being cautious. However, if you are a busy seller or need help understanding the entire process, Ecommphics is here to facilitate you. Our Amazon PPC optimization services will drive traffic to your listings so you can be ahead of the game.
Contact us today, and we will set up a proper advertising campaign for you since we stay updated with the latest updates and features.
