How to Make Your Amazon Sponsored Products Ads Successful

According to data reported by eMarketer, advertisers love Amazon Sponsored Products ads. In fact, Sponsored Products ads are by far the most highly sought out advertising tool Amazon offers, with 72.5% of advertisers’ ad spend going to Sponsored Products, compared to just 3.3% spent on Sponsored Display and 24.1% spent on the Sponsored Brands option. 

So what’s made advertisers invest so heavily in Sponsored Products? Simply put, they’re the easiest, most effective way to grow revenue and drive new audiences to a sellers’ Amazon page. 

What are Amazon Sponsored Products ads, and why do they matter?

Amazon Sponsored Products are ads that appear alongside organic search results for products related to that search in addition to almost every other spot on the website. So, if a shopper is searching for a new record player in Amazon’s search bar, alongside the organically ranked sellers, a few Sponsored Products ads for record players might turn up in multiple places, including the top of the list of results with a small indicator that the message is sponsored alongside the ad copy. 

Amazon Sponsored Products are a boon for Amazon sellers looking to reach new audiences in an incredibly cluttered Amazon landscape. In fact, that’s probably why they’re the most popular type of ad in Amazon’s PPC (pay-per-click) arsenal. And because they appear on almost every page of Amazon, including search results, product detail pages, and even competitors’ pages, Amazon Sponsored Products are the easiest way for sellers to grow revenue by driving new traffic to Amazon pages.  

And while Amazon makes it fairly easy to set up a Sponsored Products campaign, not all sponsored brands on Amazon execute their paid campaigns in a way that both boosts their items to the top of search results and show, specifically, the best a sponsored brand has to offer.

Amazon has recently shared some stats that demonstrate the value of Sponsored Products:

• ASINs saw an average weekly +40% lift in units ordered within the first year after launching a Sponsored Products campaign
• Adding 3 or more bullet points to your product page and advertising with Sponsored Products can help you increase impressions by 55x
• ASINs saw an average weekly +54% lift in glance views within the first year after launching a Sponsored Products campaign
• Adding A+ content to your detail page and advertising with Sponsored Products can help generate up to 93x more unit sales

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Here’s how to make your Amazon Sponsored Products ads a success 

Know which type of campaign you want. One of the last steps in designing your Amazon Sponsored Products campaign is choosing whether or not you’d like to run an automatic or manual targeting campaign. Understanding the differences (and use cases) of each could make all the difference to the overall success of your campaign. 

On one hand, an automatically targeted campaign is great for those just starting out with PPC (pay-per-click) Amazon advertising, since it’s both easy to set up and allows advertisers to avoid the complicated process of figuring out their keyword bids. Plus, Amazon provides detailed data around which ads are doing well, which simplifies future bidding. 

But for those with a bit more experience in PPC advertising, manually bidding on keywords allows for much more exact targeting and also saves money in that it allows the option to decrease bids for underperforming keywords. Plus, manual bidding leaves much more room for experimenting with different keyword options. 

Get specific. Amazon is incredibly popular for several reasons, but right at the top of those has to be the efficiency of its search algorithm. And just because Sponsored Products ads are paid doesn’t mean they can be irrelevant.

Proving to Amazon’s algorithm that your Sponsored Products ads are relevant is just as important in advertising campaigns as it is in organic SEO. Make sure that your keywords show up throughout the ad: from product descriptions to ad copy in a way that feels both natural and useful to searchers who are looking for a product just like yours. 

Strategically use negatives. Sometimes, making sure your product doesn’t show up in the wrong search is just as important as ensuring it shows up in the right one. While choosing keywords to bid on, also take the time to figure out which terms you’d like to exclude.

Negative targets enable sellers to remove unwanted search terms from ad campaigns. For example, a sporting goods retailer probably doesn’t want their Sponsored Products ad for snowshoes showing up in response to a search for winter boots. Negative targets can include negative keywords (like “boots”) or they can exclude impressions on certain pages. 

Think granularly. It can be tempting to make your Amazon Sponsored Products ads as wide-ranging as possible in an attempt to cast the most nets. But it’s the campaigns that stay as hyper-specific as possible that tend to see the best result. Make sure you’re setting up separate campaigns for each product, along with creating unique sets of associated keywords for each. Skai’s Vice President of eCommerce, Nich Weinheimer, clarifies why this granular approach works best:

“You sell iPhone X cases in multiple colors and styles,” Weinheimer explains. “With auto-targeted ads, grouping each of those variations into one campaign would result in Amazon indexing each product detail page for each variation—features, colors, styles, etc.—to seed the whole campaign. In your manual campaign, you may have separate campaigns for pink leather iPhone X case and black plastic iPhone X case. This kind of structure gives you the granularity to filter out particular colors/queries at a specific product level by not including them in your bids, or by specifying them as negative keywords.”

Increase sales, grow market share and & drive ROI on Amazon

As the leader in retail media, brands must get their Amazon advertising strategy right. Skai helps you realize your brand’s growth potential, how to stand out in a crowded market, capture demand and drive sales on Amazon. Unlock data intelligence and grow your share of voice through Skai’s advanced optimization, analytics & automation solutions.

Find out why the world’s best brands rely on Skai to run their Sponsored Products ads across Amazon and other retailers. Request a quick demo to learn more.

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