Do you have any questions about advertising on Amazon? Our Amazon advertising guide for sellers is here to assist. Whether you are a big brand or small business, Amazon advertising should be part of your product business strategy if you want to increase sales and build brand awareness. We all know Amazon is a well-known ecommerce retailer, but what does Amazon say about its shoppers?
Their statistics show that 310 million customers shop on Amazon worldwide. Customers complete 28% of their Amazon purchases in three minutes or less, and 50% of all purchases finish in less than 15 minutes. With the speed and power of the Amazon marketplace, you can't afford to miss our ultimate guide to Amazon advertising that will attract customers to your business.
Types of Amazon PPC Ads
There are three types of Amazon PPC advertisements: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Displays. With Pay-Per-Click (PPC), you pay Amazon every time a customer clicks on your advertisement, whether they purchase a product or not. The amount you pay depends on the advertising type, targeted keywords, and the competitiveness of your niche.
Sponsored Products are the oldest and most popular format. Sellers’ advertising spending shifted towards sponsored brands and sponsored displays throughout the years because they showed an increased return on ad spend (RoAS) and improved conversion rates. Amazon advertising offers third-party sellers a user-friendly platform to set up multiple PPC advertising campaigns within minutes.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored products are the starting point for all sellers. These ads appear at the top of the Amazon search result page, throughout the organic results, and on competing product listing pages. Sponsored Products are a quick way to advertise to new customers, as they are already on Amazon and eager to make a purchase. You don’t have to be on the brand registry to use them; just do good keyword research, set up your campaign, and launch it.
Sponsored Brands Ads
These were previously known as Amazon Headline Search Ads and are available to sellers enrolled in the Brand Registry program. They appear above Sponsored Product advertisements in the Amazon search results and funnel traffic to a dedicated brand-centric Amazon landing page.
As banner advertisements, they feature a logo, custom tagline, and thumbnails for up to three products, thereby increasing brand awareness. There are three types of Sponsored Brand advertisements: Product Collection, Store Spotlight, and Video.
Sponsored Display Advertising
These types of ads reach customers on third-party websites and apps, allowing you to advertise to and retarget customers. Instead of targeting keywords or competitor’s products as you would with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display targets customers based on shopping behaviors, interests, and whether they previously viewed your product’s detail page. With Sponsored Display ads, customers are reminded about a product and brand even when they navigate away from a specific Amazon listing. Sponsored Display ads are only available to brand-registered sellers or Vendors.
Amazon Sponsored Ads and Targeting
Within the sponsored Amazon advertising group—Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display—there are two types of Amazon targeting: automatic-targeting ads and manual-targeting ads. When your listing is optimized, consider running an automatic and manual targeting campaign.
Automatic-targeting ads
With automatic-targeting ads, Amazon decides which keywords to target based on the type of product sold. When you are unsure which keywords to target, this presents an opportunity to learn from Amazon and find out if the keywords convert into sales. There is, however, a lack of optimization options with automatic-targeting ads.
Manual-targeting ads
With manual-targeting advertisements, sellers choose the keywords or products to target and set custom bids for each. Keyword search specifies exact match, phrase match, or broad match.
An exact match requires customers to enter keywords exactly as written before they can see your advertisement. Phrase match targets the keyword phrase in the order in which it is entered but may include other words before or after. Broad-match keywords can appear in any order in a search query and may include additional words.
There are two subtypes of manual targeting advertising campaigns: keyword targeting and product targeting. In keyword targeting, you choose the keywords. With product targeting, a competitor’s listings are targeted instead of keywords. Keyword and product targeting campaigns can be run simultaneously but must be set up independently.
Amazon Advertising Guidelines
There are different requirements for each of the three sponsored Amazon ads. The Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ads require you to be a Registered Vendor or enrolled in the Brand Registry. For Sponsored Products ads, you don’t need to be brand registered but must have a professional Amazon seller account or be a Registered Vendor, and your product must be Buy Box eligible.
- Registered Vendor. The Amazon Vendor program is invite-only, and Amazon will contact you if they want you to join as a potential vendor.
- Professional Amazon seller account. When you want to start selling on Amazon, there are two types of selling plans: Individual and Professional.
- Brand Registry. The Amazon Brand Registry offers a group of tools designed to help sellers build and protect their brands.
- Buy Box. The Amazon advertising Buy Box is the box on a product detail page where customers add items to their shopping carts. You must fulfill performance-based requirements to be eligible to compete for your product's placement in the Buy Box.
How to Advertise on Amazon Successfully
To sell successfully on Amazon, test different strategies to find those that work best for your business and products. You don’t need a big budget—just a clear advertising strategy to boost your advertising spend return on investment (ROI), create brand awareness, and bring in more sales. What should you consider doing to run successful sponsored Amazon ads?
- Define your target audience: they are the core of your keyword and product placement strategy.
- Refine your keyword research strategy, and consider using long-tail keywords. Also, remember to exclude keywords that are not a good match for your product.
- Use Sponsored Brands to create awareness of your brand.
- Analyze your product profitability level.
- Use the Amazon advertising reports to monitor, analyze, and adjust your advertisements.
- Create a dynamic landing page with a call-to-action (CTA) and different types of content.
WSI Can Help With Creating Amazon Advertising Strategies
We don’t believe in cookie-cutter digital marketing strategies at WSI, which is why we won over 160 Web Marketing Association Awards for industry-leading website projects. WSI started helping businesses over 25 years ago and today has offices worldwide. We can leverage our global experience to help you deliver local results—call WSI today if you have any more questions after reading our Amazon advertising guide.
