When you are launching your first product on Amazon or are already selling on Amazon then you need to have a good PPC strategy. In this post we are going to talk about how to grow sales with Amazon PPC.
Table of contents
- How to get organic sales on Amazon?
- How to grow sales with Amazon PPC?
- How to create Amazon PPC campaigns?
- What type of ads can you create on Amazon?
- Amazon PPC strategy for private label sellers?
- How to launch Amazon PPC?
- How to grow sales with Amazon PPC tips
- How to grow sales with Amazon PPC FAQ
What is Amazon PPC?
Amazon PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is part of Amazon advertising. With Amazon PPC businesses selling on Amazon can target their products with specific keywords and create other types of ads on Amazon platform.
Why is Amazon PPC important?
We haven’t met a seller who has been successful selling on Amazon without doing any PPC. You need to do Amazon PPC to be a successful Amazon seller. PPC used to be less important years ago but not today because the market has gotten more competitive. A lot of sellers need to step up their game if they want to be successful.
How to get organic sales on Amazon?
You can get more organic sales on Amazon if your listing is fully optimized (images, copywriting and keywords). But not only with that. You also need to do Amazon PPC to get more organic sales. These two things work together hand in hand. The better you do your PPC the more organic sales you get. This also depends on the level of competition on the market. Not all markets/niches work the same.
Another thing that really affects organic ranking and getting organic sales is pricing. If you have set your price too high then your ranking on Amazon might decrease with your organic sales. You need to find the right pricing point for your product.
So as you see already, to successfully grow sales with Amazon PPC you need to do a lot of things right before that. Before we dive into how to grow sales with Amazon PPC let’s talk about some of the things you should know before that.
How much does Amazon PPC cost?
Amazon PPC cost varies for each seller. Depending on how many ads they are running and how competitive the market is. In some categories the cost per click could be even $6 or more to be in the top positions on Amazon. If you are targeting long tail keywords you can get clicks for $0.30 as well. It all depends on your strategy and goals you are trying to achieve.
How much should you spend on Amazon ads?
A good rule of thumb is to spend on Amazon PPC between 10%-15% of your sales. This also depends on your product profit margin. If your profit margin is 35% and you spend 15% on ads then your net profit from selling on Amazon is 20%.
If you sell a product that’s doing $30.000 a month. You could spend 10% on ads $3000 per month, $100 a day and still make 20% net profit. These numbers vary according to your profit margin, level of competition and click cost.
How to grow sales with Amazon PPC?
We are going to lay out some of the important things you can implement today and grow your sales on Amazon with PPC. We have spent nearly $200.000 with this brand on PPC on Amazon (image below). We have actually spent a lot more because we have built a total of four brands on Amazon and spent nearly $500.000 on Amazon PPC.
We have made some mistakes but have also done a lot of things the right way. Here are the key things that we have learned:
- You can’t sell a bad product with good PPC.
- You can sell a good product with bad PPC.
- Everything improves in time.
- Sometimes it’s easier to raise your product price than trying to optimise your campaigns.
- If you have a bad offer, high price, low rating, very competitive niche or all these things at the same time then it’s very difficult to sell your product even if you are an Amazon PPC superstar.
On the other hand if you have a very good offer, very good price and not a very competitive niche then you can sell your product with an average or even bad PPC management.
If you launch your PPC campaigns then you need to understand that first you need to spend money to get data. After your campaigns have run for some time you can close the losers and keep the winning campaigns.
Sometimes it’s easier to raise your price a bit than lowering your bids or decreasing budgets to get better profitability. It all depends on the product and the category.
How to create Amazon PPC campaigns?
To create Amazon PPC campaigns you need to log in to your Amazon account and select Advertising – Campaign manager.
Once you are there you will see your main PPC dashboard where you’ll see all your campaigns and performance history. You can filter the information you want to see. For example cost per click, impressions, clicks, ROAS and more.
To create a new campaign on Amazon simply click on the create campaign button.
As you can see there are a lot of options to choose from. The main one that everyone uses is Sponsored products but there are also Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns. Let’s talk about Amazon campaigns in detail.
What type of ads can you create on Amazon?
There are a lot of ways to advertise on the Amazon platform and we’ll break it down for you. Most of the people who start selling on Amazon focus on Sponsored products because it’s the best way to advertise on Amazon when you are launching your brand. You can get more information about advertising on Amazon here.
Sponsored Products
These self-service, cost-per-click ads for individual product listings appear in shopping results and on product detail pages. (Amazon)
Sponsored Brands
These self-service, cost-per-click ads for brands appear in shopping results and feature a custom headline, brand logo, and multiple products. (Amazon)
Sponsored Display
These self-service display ads use automatically generated ad creatives and are targeted to audiences that are created based on relevant Amazon shopping interests. (Amazon)
Stores
These free, multi-page brand destinations on Amazon feature your product portfolio and help tell your brand story. (Amazon)
Audio Ads
These ads play on the free tier of Amazon Music across Alexa-enabled devices, including Echo and Fire TV, as well as on mobile and desktop. (Amazon)
Video Ads
Streaming TV ads appear on connected TVs, publisher channels and networks, IMDb, and IMDb TV. Out-stream video ads appear outside of video content, both on and off Amazon. (Amazon)
Custom Advertising
These tailor-made advertising experiences are created together with Amazon Ads account executives. (Amazon)
Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows you to programmatically buy ads to reach new and existing audiences on and off Amazon. (Amazon)
Amazon Attribution
This product measures how non-Amazon ads media drive results on Amazon.
Amazon PPC strategy for private label sellers
When you are launching your product on Amazon then you need to have a strategy for that. You need to figure out the best strategy for Amazon PPC for your business because not all products can have the same strategy. Below we will talk about the fundamentals you need to know that help you create your Amazon PPC strategy.
- How much stock do you have?
- How long is your lead time?
- What’s your budget for Amazon PPC?
- How long can you keep on your PPC before turning any profit?
- How many units do you expect to sell in one, two, three months and more?
How much stock do you have?
This is really important to know because if you have a small stock and long lead time then it’s better to start with a lower budget for your PPC because you don’t want to go out of stock once you have launched your product.
How long is your lead time?
You need to be sure that your new batch of products arrives on time when your sales takes off on Amazon. For example if you have 1000 units in stock and your lead time is 3 months then you could sell 10 units a day for 100 days.
You also need to leave some room for unexpected delays. It’s always safer to decrease your predictions a bit. For example selling 7 units a day for 142 days. Then you can be sure that you will not go out of stock before your new products arrive.
What is your budget for Amazon PPC?
When we launch products on Amazon we usually have a $100/per day budget but you can also start with lower budgets. This also depends on how competitive your category is. If your category is not that competitive you could have a $30/day budget and get 60 clicks a day if the click price is $0.50.
How long can you keep on your PPC before turning any profit?
If you have zero reviews and start your ads on Amazon then they are not performing as good as they would if your product had 10 reviews. So keeping that in mind, you need to run your ads for some time until they are profitable. This depends a lot on the product you are selling and how competitive the category is and how good your offer is.
How many units do you expect to sell in one, two, three months and more?
We already covered this a bit, but you need to have a plan how many units you plan to sell in the upcoming months.You also need to be ready if you don’t sell as much or if you sell more than you predicted.
How to launch Amazon PPC?
We have already talked about how to create Amazon PPC campaigns a bit but now let’s go into the details and talk about following things:
- What type of Amazon PPC campaigns should you launch?
- How to choose the best keywords for Amazon PPC?
- How to do Amazon PPC keyword research?
- Best strategy for Amazon PPC
What type of Amazon PPC campaigns should you launch?
When you are launching your product on Amazon or selling a successful product on Amazon already then it’s important that you test different types of campaigns and keywords all the time. These are the campaigns types you should test:
- Exact match campaigns
- Broad match campaigns
- Phrase match campaigns
- Automatic campaigns
- Product targeting campaigns
- Category targeting campaigns
What are exact match campaigns?
The search term must exactly match the keyword or sequence of words in order for the ad to show, and will also match close variations of the exact term. Exact match is the most restrictive match type, but can be more relevant to a search. Exact match also includes the plural form of the keyword. (Amazon)
What are broad match campaigns?
This match type offers your ad broad exposure to customer shopping queries. A shopping query can contain the keyword terms in any order. It may include singulars, plurals, variations, synonyms, and related terms as determined by the meaning of the keyword and the context of the advertised products. The keyword itself may not be contained in the customer shopping query. For example, the keyword “sneakers” may match customer shopping queries such as “canvas sneakers,” “sneaker,” “basketball shoes,” “athletic shoes,” “cleats,” “trainers,” or “foam runners.” (Amazon)
What are Amazon phrase match campaigns?
The search term must contain the exact phrase or sequence of words. It’s more restrictive than broad match and will generally result in more relevant placements for your ad. Phrase match also includes the plural form of the keyword. (Amazon)
What is an Amazon automatic advertising campaign?
Amazon automatic targeting campaigns automatically target products and keywords that are relevant to your product. (Amazon)
What are Amazon product targeting campaigns?
Product targeting allows you to choose specific products, categories, brands, or other product features that are relevant to the product in your ad. (Amazon)
What are Amazon category targeting campaigns?
With category targeting campaigns you can choose where you want your product to be shown. For example women running shoes or camping chairs.
These are the match types with what you could start when launching your Amazon PPC campaigns. Usually people start with exact, automatic, phrase match and product targeting campaigns. This will depend on the niche and competition as I have already mentioned multiple times.
How to choose the best keywords for Amazon PPC?
In every niche there are top 1-3 keywords that bring most of the search volume – almost 70% or more. When you are starting out and have a large budget then you could start targeting these bigger keywords as well. But if you have a smaller budget then it’s always good to target long tail keywords that have much less competition, are more specific and much cheaper. You could also do both: target the top keywords and long tail keywords at the same time. It all depends on your budget.
How to do Amazon PPC keyword research?
Now that you know that you need to target smaller keywords, you need to find them. Helium10 is a great tool that helps you find a lot of smaller keywords that have much less competition. You could use their tool Magnet to find smaller keywords as we did below.
I used a random search term just to show how you can sort keywords by competition, search volume and competing products. This way you could easily find the keywords that have the least amount of competition.
Another way to do this is by taking your main competitor listing and using Cerebo to find the keywords that are relevant to their listing. For example as I am doing below for vitamin C. It’s probably super competitive but let’s see what we can find.
As you can see from below then there are still keywords that are not that competitive in that niche. Some of these keywords are quite broad but you could still target these and set very low bids like $0.20. You can also see some Spanish keywords that you could target. This is really a great opportunity because there are a lot of Spanish speakers in the USA.
You could also set different filters as I did above. For example I only want to see keywords that have at least 4 words, search volume minimum of 500, rank between 1-300 (the product I used for Cerebo) and search term needs to have a word C in it. This way Cerebo eliminates a lot of broad keywords and should only show us keywords where C is used as well. With this filter you should find some really good buying intent keywords. When people are using long tail keywords then they usually have a bigger buying intent compared to two word search terms. Let’s see what we found below.
As you can see I found quite few good long tail keywords that are not that competitive. You could do the same research for all your main competitors and write down all the keywords that are good. Then launch your campaigns with these keywords and I am quite sure that some of these new campaigns start bringing you sales with very low PPC cost.
Best strategy for Amazon PPC
The best strategy for your Amazon PPC is consistently doing keyword research for new keywords and optimizing your campaigns after every week or two. It’s also important that you test different campaigns all the time with new keywords. For example if you find a new good keyword then create campaigns for that keyword with every match type and see if they all work.
How to grow sales with Amazon PPC tips
Below you’ll find some things that you can implement right now that should give you a nice boost in sales.
- Create product targeting campaigns and target products that have lower rating than yours
- Create product targeting campaigns and target higher priced products than yours
- Create automatic targeting campaigns with low bid $0.20
- Create category targeting campaigns with low bid $0.20
- Create 20 product targeting campaigns where there is a maximum of 5 products in one campaign and set a very low bids. If you don’t get clicks then increase the bids.
- Create exact, phrase and board match campaigns. Add a maximum of 5 keywords in each campaign.
- If your campaign is performing well then increase your daily budget to make sure that it doesn’t go out of budget.
How to optimize ppc campaigns on amazon?
You should check back to your PPC once in every week or two if your campaigns have some good history on Amazon. If you have just launched your campaigns then we’d recommend you to check your Amazon PPC campaigns daily to make sure that you are not burning money on wrong keywords.
How to grow sales with Amazon PPC FAQ
Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about advertising on Amazon.
What is ACoS?
Amazon advertising cost of sales (ACOS) is a metric used to measure Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. It compares the amount spent on PPC campaigns to the amount earned, and it helps determine if your brand generated campaigns that were cost-efficient. Amazon ACOS helps measure the performance of Sponsored Products ads on Amazon. (Amazon)
What is Amazon TACoS?
TACoS means total advertising cost of sales. For example if your ad spend on Amazon is $1000 and your monthly sales is $10.000 then your TACoS is 10%.
When to launch Amazon PPC campaigns?
You should launch your Amazon PPC campaigns when you are launching your product on Amazon.
What if my product is not profitable with Amazon PPC?
If you are not making profit with your product then you need to recheck your listing, offer and competition. Many things could affect the sales. We have written a separate post about how to grow sales on Amazon which you can read here.
Best Amazon keyword research tool?
We are using the Helium10 keyword research tool to find the best keywords for Amazon. You can get it here with a discounted price.
How to do product research on Amazon?
If you don’t have a product yet to sell on Amazon then we have written a full post about how to do product research on Amazon here.
Best product research tool for Amazon FBA?
One of the best product research tools for Amazon is Helium10. We have written a full Helium10 google chrome extension review here.
How to sell on Amazon?
There are many things you need to know beforehand if you are thinking about starting an Amazon FBA business. We have written a full post about how to start an Amazon FBA business which you can read here.
How to grow sales with Amazon PPC conclusion?
As you can see there are many things you can do with Amazon PPC. There are lots of different campaign types and ways to promote your products on Amazon. If you have any questions about how to grow your sales on Amazon with PPC then feel free to send us a message or leave a comment below.
