Is Pay Per Click Amazon advertising worth the investments?

Those merchants who want to boost their online sales can benefit from using Amazon PPC advertising campaign. This Amazon program is correctly created and managed to provide online merchants with all opportunities to make more deals and increase your organic rankings.

In this article, we will discuss the PPC optimization tactics that you can use to boost your profits as much as possible for your product's category. 

How does Amazon paid search work?

Starting from the very beginning let us discuss what Amazon’s paid search is. 

Amazon receives millions of searches every month. Most of them are purchase-ready shoppers who come to Amazon with the one clear intend to buy what they need. They just type their wish in Amazon search box, and search system provides them with the most relevant to their query products that it deems most likely to satisfy user’s desire. These result can be regarded as organic. However, there are also paid search results that shoppers can see on the right column or below the organic results. These sponsored Amazon products have all chances to become well-purchased as they are visible to a targeted audience who has the intention to buy them. 

According to this campaign, you have to pay per each user’s click on your ad. Pretty much the same as in Google. The cost per click may differ from one market niche to another. However, if you have a smart approach to running your Amazon pay-per-click campaign, you will get a high return on investments. 

To make everything accurately, you need to develop your advertising strategy and go through all hardships before starting to advertise. 

As a rule, a winning optimization campaign should consist of the following stages:

• make a market research to find targeted search terms that convert to sales;
• narrow down the list of your search terms, eliminating all non-converting keywords;
• increase bids for search terms that convert well.

Essential Amazon advertising metrics

Advertising cost of sales - the percent of attributed sales spent on advertising. You can calculate advertising cost of sales by dividing total ad spend by associated sales. 

Attributed sales - the total number of product sales that have been generated within one week of clicks on your ads in search. You can check your individual sales totals for advertised products and other stuff in the Campaign Performance report.  

Impressions - this metric shows how much times your ads were displayed on Amazon search. All user clicks for the last period may be adjusted due to click invalidation. 

Clicks - the number of times your ads were clicked. It is quite challenging to remove invalid clicks from your advertising report. 

Step by step guide how to create Amazon PPC campaign

• Prepare your listing

The first thing you need to do before launching Amazon pay-per-click advertising campaign is optimized your listing according to basic Amazon requirements. It does not make sense to generate traffic on a low-quality creepy looking listing. That is why you should work on each aspect of your listing, completing all fields and enriching them with targeted search terms. Make sure you pull all the relevant search terms that you will be targeting somewhere on your listing (in title, bullet points, product description, etc.)

You should pay particular attention to the quality of your images. Ask a professional photographer to take photos of your stuff and design them following Amazon guidelines (white background, 85% of the image is devoted to the product, high resolution, an ability to zoom). Moreover, you should craft great product descriptions were to make an accent on your product’s benefits and primary features. And finally, you need to get some positive reviews. Reviews serve as the significant ranking factor on Amazon helping shoppers to make their buying decisions. It is so-called “trust factor” on Amazon that can directly affect your products conversion rate. 

• Select the right kind of ads

There are two types of advertising on Amazon - one that sends visitors to your website (Amazon Product Ads); and one that sends them to your product within Amazon (Amazon Sponsored Products). 

If you would like to make your products visible on Amazon, it is reasonable to use Amazon Sponsored Products ad. In this post, we will talk only about this kind of Amazon advertising. 

According to this advertising campaign, you can highlight your products in Amazon’s internal search results for search terms your stuff might not be ranking for. However, if you already have high organic ranks for all these words, you will get twice the exposure. 

If you are new to Amazon platform, Amazon Sponsored Products campaign will provide you with a significant boost, showing your products in front of your potential customers. Besides, it can help you to boost your organic rank on Amazon SERP, attracting more and more targeted traffic to your product pages. 

• Create your advertising campaign

Now you know how Amazon Sponsored Products advertising campaign works, so it is time to create your first campaign on Amazon. In this section, I will explain how to do it easily and quickly.  

To set up your advertising campaign, you need to go to Amazon Seller Central and select the Campaign Manager option. Here you will find a button “Create Campaign.” You should click on it to get started. Here you should create the name of your ad campaign and set a daily budget you can afford. You need to pay particular attention to the name of your campaign because later when you will have several campaigns in one account, you can get messed with it. 

As a rule, your conversions on products start at a low. However, with the flow of time, this rate is rising. When that happens, your cost per click will become lower than at the beginning. That is why it is a very little downside to setting it instantly high. 

• Choose a targeting type

There are two types of targeting in Amazon advertising campaign - automatic and manual. I recommend you to use manual targeting as it provides a full control under your advertising campaign and gives you an opportunity to target the keywords you think relevant to your business. 

Automatic targeting also makes sense if you do not want to invest your time and efforts in your Amazon advertising. In this case, you can entirely rely on Amazon research system. It can be a cool way to find new keyword suggestions without implementing any additional tools. Here you can see some search terms that you never even thought to target.