Amazon Marketing Services

What are Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and why are they essential?

It’s fair to say Amazon has firmly cemented its position in the eCommerce industry as a prime leader, especially given its monumental growth since its 1997 launch. Since then, Amazon has only seen more sales, an increase of 18,233% to be precise, which has effectively made it the world’s most trusted eCommerce site.

According to a notable Walker Sands Future of Retail Research report, approximately 84% of US and UK customers purchased from Amazon in 2017 and half of them were Amazon Prime Users. To give you a better idea of the sheer scale of the users relying on Amazon to fulfil their needs, both countries’ population ranges in the millions – an estimated 67.7 million in the UK, and an estimated 341 million in the US.

Given Amazon’s extensive growth in sales and more and more people wanting to sell products on Amazon, as well as the widespread Amazon Prime selection available, the platform has become the ultimate virtual marketplace for Amazon sellers to reach their target buyers.

At a time like this, if your brand and product display ads, for example, do not offer a complete list of goods on the platform, you are pretty much waving goodbye to potentially reaching over 2 billion buyers. We’ll allow a moment to let that sink in…

Beyond providing your products on the platform via Amazon ads, for instance, you need to invest a great deal of time and money into Amazon marketing services. No matter how great your free or sponsored display ads are, following them up with Amazon marketing services (AMS) is an absolute must in order to stay competitive.

The Importance of an Amazon Marketing Service and Strategy

Marketing on Amazon revolves around many different kinds of advertisements – e.g. headline search ads, sponsored product ads, Amazon product display ads, sponsored brand ads, and other kinds of Amazon ads and sponsored ads. Sellers with a registered Seller Central Account on Seller Central are already using many of these ad types to their advantage, especially those having familiarity with running ads on other promotional networks like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the like.

However, when you work with an Amazon advertising specialist or agency, you can build highly persuasive and enticing ads through a full-fledged ad campaign which helps you pop up high on Amazon search pages – all these are charged according to the PPC (pay per click) model, as you may already know. In fact, putting together the right Amazon PPC campaigns can often give you a serious edge over other sellers.

Plus, working with an Amazon agency gives you a chance to increase brand awareness which will, naturally, improve your search engine results.

Understanding the importance of Amazon Advertising & Marketing Campaigns

No matter which marketing and advertising strategy you end up choosing, investing in consistent marketing efforts on Amazon is downright necessary. It helps make your brand more successful, improving brand visibility, brand logo, and brand ads in the process, ultimately, helping you reach a greater number of potential customers.

Even if you’re running one of those well-recognised sponsored brands or sponsored products on Amazon, for example, which is receiving a lot of traffic, you’ll still need to engage in consistent marketing on Amazon which has a variety of positive impacts on your overall brand strength, bringing with it countless benefits. Moreover, with so many brands competing, you’d want to have everything possible in your arsenal to overcome the competition.

Top 3 Tips to Strengthen Your Marketing on Amazon

If you’re sitting around wondering why your headline search ads, for example, or your sponsored product ads are not doing as well as you had hoped, chances are you haven’t devised a well-thought-out marketing approach for your ad campaigns.

You see, in order to optimise your brand’s overall marketing strategies, you need to set some time aside to come up with a discreet plan while working with a purposeful and forward-thinking Amazon marketing services (AMS) agency.

For now, here are a few select tips which you can apply to take your marketing to the next level:

Organise your Amazon Ad campaigns

With structured AMS ad campaigns, you can save yourself from the risk of wasting your budget on, for example, irrelevant keywords, and instead, focus more on relevant keywords, identify top converting keywords, doing better keyword research and learning how to identify target keywords. Or, the risk of disassembling your Amazon sponsored brand ads (or otherwise) by practising similar keywords for multiple ad groups.

This is one of the most purposeful and future-proof ad marketing strategies you could focus on to help your business grow.

Compete more aggressively with your competitors

Customers buying on Amazon tend to be more familiar with a brand name, rather than a brand type, so much so that they will mention it in the Amazon Search Bar. For example, a buyer may want to purchase a quality tracksuit – rather than writing “tracksuits men’s” in the Search Bar, he/she will write “Nike tracksuits”.

Therefore, it makes sense to work with an Amazon marketing agency which can help you rank for quality keywords where your mention comes before any of your competitors, thus, enhancing your brand’s appearance and visibility to all target audiences.

Create an effective message

Buyers who have had a ‘worth the money’ experience in the past will always return to your brand. But besides consumers’ experiences, there are other tricks you can pull out of your hat to improve on the unique selling points and influence your target audience’s thought process to better grab (and retain) their attention.

You should also work with an agency specialising in advertising and marketing on the Amazon marketplace as they can help you tailor the right kind of messaging to create a sense of urgency and a desire to purchase.

Why you should run Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads

Amazon sponsored products ads are a kind of Amazon advertising, allowing Amazon Brand Registry sellers to promote their brand and collection of products. It’s a fantastic way to get your Amazon sponsored brands in front of the desired target audience.

Sponsored product ads come with three options:

Product collections ads. Through your brand logo, a custom headline or ad headline, and three or more products, you can effectively drive more traffic to any one of your product pages, custom landing page, or virtual brand stand (storefront).

Store spotlight ads. These too can be used to drive more traffic to your storefront through a custom headline, brand logo, and three or more product categories/subpages. Expect greater visibility for your headline search ads too.

Video ads. Amazon video ads use a short video ad to promote an individual product, driving more traffic to that product’s detail page, thus, helping you increase sales.

All in all, sponsored ads are a great way to create delightful shopping experiences while also allowing you to drive denser traffic to the desired product page.

How to optimise your Amazon Ad Campaigns?

Here are some key ways to improve and optimise your PPC (pay per click) ads:

Review your target ACoS

The Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is a metric for comparing how much you should spend on PPC ads against the amount which represents sales. You divide your ad spend by ad revenue and then multiply the product by 100 to determine this figure.

If you go to your Amazon Seller Central dashboard, click ‘Advertising’ and then ‘Campaign Manager’, you can locate the ACOS column right after the Sales column.

So, what’s a good ACoS for established products? Well, the figure shouldn’t be higher than your target or projected profit. For low-converting products, the ACoS may range between 15% and 30%. For newly launched products that require more visibility, the ACoS can be 40% or higher.

Invest ad spend in high-performing products

No point in blowing away your advertising spend on products that don’t generate sales because that means they will not pop up on the search results page either.

While there are third party apps that may help you identify products getting clicks but not converting or those not popping up in search results, it’s always better to work with an Amazon advertising & marketing agency who can help you properly assess advertising cost for multiple products, optimise your Amazon store, convert products that are getting clicks and, of course, do everything possible to make you pop up high in the search results pages.

Plus, you’ll have a dedicated campaign manager to oversee everything from your CPC (cost per click) costs and advertising costs to your Amazon display ads, product listings, PPC ads, and generally enhance your advertising efforts in many ways.

For now, what you want to do is audit display ads and product ads groups, slowly getting rid of items which have a high ACoS. Alternatively, you can lower bids for the high ACoS items. However, do find out some of the possible causes behind the low performance, such as no Buy Box, non-optimised audio ads, lack of custom ads and a custom landing page, not enough ad impressions, an uninteresting ad copy, poor product visibility, or not using the right ad formats, for example.

You’d also want to promote the low-performing items on your top performers’ pages. What this means is you must set the product detail pages of your best-sellers to display ads which feature the rest of your products that aren’t selling that well right now, or not popping as high on Amazon’s search engine as you want. It’s a great strategy for keeping your loyal buyers buying from within your brand’s product pages only.

Strategically choose your keywords

A smart and well-planned keyword strategy should include the following and should also be a part of the advertising solutions offered by your Amazon marketing services provider:

Long-tail keywords – Longer phrases or terms tend to have fewer competitors and also there’s a higher chance of finding a more targeted audience. So, for example, the long-tail keyword “men’s tracksuit black colour large” might potentially lead to higher conversions among Amazon shoppers than more generic keywords or search terms like “men’s tracksuit” or “black tracksuit”. Remember, a well-optimised product listing should always contain generic terms, but more importantly, lots of long-tail terms to find more targeted audiences.

Customers click more on specific terms as opposed to generic terms, as nobody shops on Amazon for general purposes, but rather to find a very specific item!

Increase bids on high-performing keywords, put the underperforming ones on hold – Similar to what we discussed in the previous point (about where to invest ad spend), you should raise bids on keywords that have an ACoS lower than your target/break-even ACoS – this will boost sales across possibly all ad types, giving you a better range of targeting options. In the meantime, you’d also want to seize the bids on keywords which are registering a higher ACoS than your target or break-even ACoS.

Sell variants of a product under a single ad group with a single search term – It’s always a good idea to package variations of a single item under a single ad group. This will help you avoid the often fierce competition of ad groups having similar keywords. For instance, you can put up your ‘black and white tracksuits for men’ under the same Amazon stores, selling them together and not separately under different product listings.

Research effective keywords on your competitors’ pages – It’s always wise to study and research how your competitors on Vendor Central or Seller Central are creating unique stores with their choice of keywords. This may give you ideas about using keywords you may not have considered or explored otherwise.

Amazon’s Brand Analytics is a good tool to conduct some competitor keyword analysis.

Adjust the bidding strategy according to your product’s page ranking – Analyse your page ranking and position on the search results pages based on the keywords in them and then set the bid according to where they are currently appearing on Amazon search or headline search, for example.

To get a little more specific:

1^st and 2^nd pages – Bid higher than your competitors in order to boost your product’s visibility. Additionally, set the keyword match type to “Phrase Match”. This ensures your ad appears in other variations of the target keyword or phrase.

2^nd to 5^th pages – It’s a good idea to bid less aggressively for product keywords on these pages. However, continue noting the key terms for your product pages which appeared in the first few Amazon search results pages. You may need to tweak them wherever necessary.

Beyond the 5^th page – It might make sense to not bid on product pages keywords appearing on the 6^th page (and higher) of Amazon’s search results. This way, you can divert your funds toward the higher-performing keywords only.

Identify the unwanted search queries

You should always start out on Amazon with a specific target market in mind and do everything possible to cut down ad costs from unintended clicks.

So, for this purpose, your ads should appear only in a headline search that’s related to your product.

How do we do this? By adding negative keywords to our campaign. For example, if your product line has only boxing gloves, you can maybe add “dishwashing gloves” or “weightlifting gloves” as your negative keywords. Also consider using these as your negative keywords:

Non-converting keywords having a high ad spend
Non-converting keywords having a low CTR (clickthrough rate)
Non-converting keywords having a high CTR

Choose an appropriate bid strategy for your ad placements

Amazon offers the option to bid for ads placement in a page in three key ways:

Dynamic bids (up and down) – Amazon will raise your bid value by as much as 100% in real time if the bid has a high conversion potential. This applies to ‘top of the page’ big placements only. The bid for ads in other locations on the page can increase by 50%.
Dynamic bids (down only) – Amazon will lower your ad placement’s bid value in real time if it determines that the ad will likely not earn a sale.
Fixed bids – Amazon will make no adjustments whatsoever to your bid.

Now, you might choose from any of the above three placements – e.g. the top or first row of Amazon search results page, other areas within the search results page, such as the middle or bottom, or in the product details page and even pages not pertaining to search results at all (the add-to-cart page, for example).

The ‘Placement Report’ will let you understand which of the three positions or locations is ideal for the highest exposure to AMS headline ads and other kinds of ads, as well as their respective chances of conversion.

Use a specific naming system for your campaigns and use that consistently throughout

It can be very easy to forget what your ad campaign is for – especially when you have several campaigns running concurrently – if you label or name it something like “My Campaign” or “Campaign 01”. You have to be more specific in order to easily identify the product(s) involved in that specific campaign and, of course, the underlying purpose of the campaign.

Use this structure instead:

“Product identifier| campaign title| projected ACOS| additional identifier”

Campaign title, refers to the campaign’s main goal (like “keyword enhancement” for your existing and established line or “keyword research” for a new line), while the additional identifier refers to the ad type, whether that be Sponsored Display (SD), Sponsored Product (SP), or whichever one you have chosen. The other two are self-explanatory.

Let’s say you’re running a sponsored display ad campaign for new running shoes. The naming system or structure would look like:

“RunningShoes_KWResearch_30%_SD”

Full-Service Amazon Account Management at your fingertips

Whether you’re a new seller or an established one, you need the latest market insight and expertise by your side to help drive up sales and keep them consistent.

Aside from our expertise in ad placement and helping sellers sell more ad units per sales period, we also offer comprehensive Amazon account management services as a managed service option.

With full-service account management services, you can scale and protect your brand more effectively. In addition, you will have:

A dedicated Success Manager to help and strategically grow your brand on Amazon.
Full account management means you get a bespoke solution to help drive up sales and develop your brand on a global scale.
No more worrying about dealing with risks of account suspensions.
Take the stress off your hands, allowing you to focus on other aspects of selling on Amazon, by managing everything from creating product listings and managing inventory to optimising product pages, order & shipment management, and more.

The most successful sellers on Amazon almost always have an account management team in their corner, as the benefits speak for themselves, really:

Consultation with Amazon account management experts who have well over a decade of experience.
Easy-to-use and understand tools which help you gain better knowledge and insight on the Amazon marketplace and also let you develop skills to be more competitive as a seller.
Have a proactive team advising you on your next move, ensuring that you’re always a few steps ahead of your competitors.

In conclusion, a full-service Amazon account management team can be a highly cost-effective and intelligent way to boost sales, profit, and brand visibility. Our team can take your Amazon business or brand to the next level by increasing visibility, optimising listings, improving customer service, and much more.

Let us know when you’re up for a free initial consultation.