Guide to Amazon PPC for Successful Sellers

Learn how to leverage Amazon PPC advertising to boost your sales and revenue. This comprehensive guide covers campaign setup, budgeting, keyword selection, ad copywriting, and result monitoring. Start promoting your products effectively on Amazon today!

Isiah Kurz

November 29, 2023

As an Amazon seller, you might have come across the term PPC or Pay-Per-Click. Amazon PPC is an advertising method that helps you promote your products to potential customers and increase your visibility on Amazon search results.

A snapshot of Amazon seller advertising KPIs.

Launching a PPC campaign on Amazon can be overwhelming, especially if you are new to it. Use this comprehensive guide to help you navigate and leverage Amazon PPC to boost your sales and revenue.

Understanding Amazon PPC

Amazon PPC is a bidding system where you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. You can choose from three types of Amazon PPC ads: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Sponsored Products and Brands appear on the top, bottom, or middle of the search results page, while Sponsored Display appears on product detail pages and other locations on Amazon.

To get started with Amazon PPC, you need a Seller Central account and products to advertise. Note: Registered brands have more features (such as Enhanced Brand content) compared to businesses that do not have a registered brand.

After creating an Amazon Advertising account:

Choose a campaign type: This refers to the three types of Amazon PPC ads we mentioned above.
Set your budget and bidding strategy: Your budget is the maximum amount of money you're willing to spend on your campaign per day. Your bidding strategy is how you determine how much you're willing to pay for each click on your ad.
Create your ad groups: Ad groups are groups of keywords that are related to each other. You'll create ad groups for each product or group of products that you want to promote.
Select your keywords: Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for products on Amazon. We’ll touch on selecting keywords that are relevant to your products and that people are likely to search for your goods below.
Write your ad copy: Your ad copy is the text that will appear in your ads. You'll want to write ad copy that is clear, concise, and persuasive.
Monitor your results: An Amazon data analytics tool like Junglytics can shine a light on what’s working and what needs improvement. This clues you in on how to best allocate your advertising investments.
Optimize your campaigns: Based on your results, you'll need to make adjustments to your campaigns to improve their performance. This may involve changing your keywords, bids, or ad copy.

Conducting Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential step in creating a successful Amazon PPC campaign. You need to identify high-traffic keywords that customers are searching for and include those keywords in your product titles, descriptions, and backend keywords.

You can use free and paid tools like Amazon's Keyword Tool, Google Keyword Planner, and Helium 10 to find relevant keywords for your products.

Creating a Compelling Ad Campaign

Your Amazon PPC ad campaign should be based on your business goals, budget, and target audience. You can create a manual or automatic campaign and choose relevant keywords, bids, and ad placements. This will look different for each business and potentially for each product.

For example, a new product might benefit from additional ad spend (even at a short-term loss for profit) while a more mature product—that already has traction—won’t need that same heavy investment.

A stacked bar graph showing advertising spend for several product lines.

Additionally, you should also create eye-catching ad copy and images that stand out from the competition and highlight your product's unique features, benefits, and value proposition. It's essential to monitor and optimize your Amazon PPC campaign regularly to ensure maximum ROI.

Analyzing and Optimizing Your Campaign

Amazon provides several metrics to measure the performance of your PPC campaign, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, ACoS (advertising cost of sale), and ROI (return on investment). You should analyze these metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign and identify areas for improvement. You can add negative keywords, adjust your bids, and target specific audiences to optimize your campaign and reduce your ACoS.

Advertising cost of sale shown by product line.

There are a few places where Amazon’s analytics falls short. For instance, TACoS (total advertising cost of sales) is not available on the platform.

A Junglytics dashboard showing the total advertising cost of sale for several product lines.

TACoS takes into account both ad revenue and organic revenue. This makes TACoS a more accurate measure of how much advertising is contributing to overall sales and profitability.

A comparison of ad conversion rates between a pink and blue product variation.

Another limitation of Amazon Seller Central is that the platform doesn’t provide KPIs (key performance indicators) specific to product variations. Sellers wanting to know specifics—such as if the pink version performs better in ads than the blue version—must adopt a third-party data analytics solution like Junglytics to reach this level of granularity.

Scaling Your PPC Campaign

Once you master the basics of Amazon PPC, you can scale your campaign to reach new customers, expand your product line, and increase your sales revenue. You can use advanced strategies like retargeting, split testing, and automation to optimize your campaign further and achieve your business objectives.

Here’s a closer look:

Scaling your Amazon PPC campaign: Mastering the fundamentals of Amazon PPC is the first step towards building a successful advertising strategy. However, to truly maximize your results and achieve significant growth, it's essential to venture beyond the basics and explore advanced strategies. These sophisticated techniques can help you reach a wider audience, expand your product offerings, and ultimately boost your sales revenue.
Retargeting: A powerful tool in the PPC arsenal, retargeting allows you to recapture the attention of potential customers who have previously interacted with your brand. By displaying targeted ads to these individuals as they browse the web or social media, you can rekindle their interest and encourage them to return to your Amazon listings.
Split testing: The process of experimenting with different ad variations, is a valuable tool for optimizing your campaign performance. By comparing the effectiveness of alternative ad copy, images, and bidding strategies, you can identify the elements that resonate most strongly with your target audience, leading to improved click-through rates and conversions.
Streamlining campaign management with automation: Automation can revolutionize your PPC management, freeing up your time and resources while ensuring that your campaigns are constantly adapting to changing market conditions. Automated tools can handle tasks such as bid optimization, keyword targeting, and campaign reporting, allowing you to focus on strategic decision-making.
Experimentation: The dynamic nature of the Amazon marketplace demands a willingness to test and experiment with different approaches. Don't be afraid to try new strategies, analyze results, and make adjustments as needed. By embracing a growth mindset and continuously refining your approach, you can uncover the most effective PPC strategies for your unique products and audience.

In any case, it's crucial to test and experiment with different approaches to find what works best for your products and audience.

Mastering Amazon PPC: Boost Your Business and Outshine the Competition

Amazon PPC is a powerful tool that can help you grow your business on Amazon and stand out in a crowded marketplace. By understanding the basics of Amazon PPC, conducting keyword research, creating a compelling ad campaign, analyzing and optimizing your campaign, and scaling your PPC campaign, you can achieve your sales and revenue targets and stay ahead of the competition

Remember, success with Amazon PPC requires patience, persistence, and continuous learning, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

‍For more great tips for Amazon sellers, agencies, and businesses, check out our blog. Or request a demo of Junglytics to see what customizable Amazon data analytics can do for you!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isiah Kurz

Isiah is an experienced content writer with more than a decade of experience in journalism, public relations, and marketing.

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