3 simple steps to create successful amazon ad campaigns

Introduction
As we are all aware to compete against top brands on Amazon you need to run sponsored ads, but how can your brand stand any chance against these power sellers who have been selling on Amazon for years?

Well, getting your product onto page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERP) is a must, but how can this be achieved without overspending? This seems to be the million-dollar question we get asked constantly.

Running successful ad campaigns can be a very straight forward process if you start in the correct way. We find that lots of sellers dump hundreds of keywords in hoping to increase conversion rate and boost sales. If you have time to process the data and money to spend then this approach will cost you money, time and with no guarantee of improving conversion rate. We recommend adopting more of an analytical approach.

Below is our 3-step strategy on how to run successful ad campaigns on Amazon

Step 1.
Firstly, you need to research your competitors.

Key questions to ask are:

  1. Who are the top sellers within your segment?
  2. How does their listing content compare to yours (titles, product featured bullet points and descriptions)?
  3. Do these competitors run offline ad’s? (use google to find this out)

What are you looking for when analysing your competitor’s detailed pages?
He is a little background, the words that you use within your detail page help to index your keywords within your ad campaigns e.g. if you add a keyword to your campaign and it is not included on your detail page then the keyword would not be indexed correctly, resulting in no conversion, wasted time and resources.

Titles and other attributes need to be indexed correctly, so knowing this fact gives you a good insight on what your competitors are using within their ad campaigns by simply observing their detailed pages (Product listings).

You will notice trends developing and should observe your competitors listings using similar phrases and terms. Adopting these same terms into your detail pages whilst keeping your brand message clear to your customers.

To trial this create what we will call ad Campaign 1. When inputting the keywords make sure you set these to ‘Exact’

Now you have a clear idea of what your competitors are doing and how their detailed pages can reveal key insights to specific keywords used.

The next stage is to gain some more keywords that you can use to test, but of course without overspending.

Step 2.
Selecting the correct keywords
Moving forward you are going to need a good strategy to run some tests to see if you can use different keywords and improve your sales conversion. To do this you would need to set up a 2nd campaign we will call this Campaign 2 ‘Test’

Below is a shortlist of tools that can be used to help find out high converting keywords, some are paid, and others are free.

  1. Google’s Keyword Planner (Free)
  2. Keywords everywhere (Free)
  3. Amzscout Pro (Paid)
  4. Jungle scout (Paid)

For the purpose of this exercise we will use Keywords Everywhere, this is a free Google Chrome extension and turns your google chrome browser into a powerful keyword research tool. You simply can type a keyword/search-term into to google and you would be shown the volume and CPC of that specific keyword and it also provides a list of keywords that are closely related.

The example below when searching for word batteries. Note, that you can change the setting to a specific region to add more specificity and localise your results.

Once you have ascertained which keywords you want to test, you can then add these keywords to your ad campaign 2 ‘Test’ setting them to ‘Broad’. Be mindful not to overload this campaign with too many keywords as you will need to keep a close eye on the conversion rates and quite simply the more words inputted the longer it may take to review them. Be mindful of the CPC for each word used as some of these can get very expensive so would not recommend you using these types of keywords.

So, now you have two ad campaigns set up, you should now leave these to index and run, 1 week to index to Amazon’s main catalogue and 4 weeks to gain relevant data to analyse (This time frame is sale volume dependant, so make sure you are keeping a close eye on your campaigns).

Step 3.
How to review your ad campaigns
This is by far the most important step as this is when it starts to physically cost your business money.

After your campaigns have had time to gain some momentum and produce some data you will need to review these and, in some cases, make some quick decisions if specific keywords are not converting well. The quickest and easiest way to react to a poor converting keyword is to simply to pause them. Good converting keywords would obviously be kept, but with the focus of these to reduce the CPC.

We have created two ad campaigns, and this is how we are going to treat them:

  • Campaign 1 Exact (main good converting keywords)
  • Campaign 2 Test (Your experimental keywords)

Campaign 2 Test was set to a broad search thus should give you a lot of data on how your customers have been finding your products. But how do you find this information out?

Each month you will need to download your advertising report from Amazon to review. Inside these reports lies the insights on what customers search-terms used when searching for your products as well as other valuable data.

The main idea here is to find out the top converting keywords that have resulted in the most sales for the least CPC spend. Once you have this data you will need to then transfer these to your main Campaign 1 Exact and remove these from your Campaign 2 Test by archiving them.

Within the ad reports you will also see a ‘Customer Search-Terms’ column, again use the top converting search-terms and add these words/phrases to your Campaign 2 Test, setting them to either ‘Broad’ or ‘Phrase Match’ depending if it’s a Phrase or an individual keyword.

When adding your top converting keywords to your Campaign 1 Exact set the CPC to the lowest suggested by Amazon, this should help you reduce the average CPC. After a couple of days of these changes review how well these CPC reductions are converting, you may find you would have to increase the CPC a little to compete with your competitors. You can see if this is required by going to the main Amazon buyers’ www.amazon.co.uk site, type your keyword into SERP to check your position if you still occupying the same spot no need to increase your CPC. Please note, that these will need a 48hrs to index correctly so you are not able to view these changes instantly.

Things to look out for when making changes

  • Changes to your detailed page is a required step in making your campaigns successful, but any changes you make will take time, index correct and thus can have a negative effect if you do not time this correctly. We would recommend mapping your top-selling months and working around these in a periodisation type fashion aiming to get everything optimised ahead of time, maximising your sales potential.

Using these 3 easy steps will potentially change your …

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