Top 6 Amazon advertising strategies for Sellers

Sponsoring products on Amazon is more and more crucial. In some categories, the share of sponsored ads placements can exceed 40% of Amazon pages.

With the wrong advertising strategy in place, brands and sellers can miss big opportunities and even hurt their listings organic rank. For example, when a brand stops bidding on a given keyword, the cost of impressions can go down because of lower competition. So new competitors can put in place cheaper PPC ranking campaigns that can lead to improving the ranking of their products.

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Best Practices for Amazon Ads Strategy

Here is a shortlist of the most common different Amazon advertising strategies that are used by medium and big sellers:

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Brand protection

Amazon Sponsored Products: Targeting in exact and phrase branded keywords. All search terms that are captured in branded campaigns should be excluded from all other campaigns. Products from the same brand should be targeted to protect the product listing page and improve cross-selling.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: This should be used with the same targeting logic as before.

Amazon Sponsored Display: Retargeting should be activated on users that visited the brand product pages and didn’t convert.

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Competitor attack

Amazon Sponsored Products: Targeting competitor’s brand names and ASINs.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: Using adapted headlines and images or videos to inline the main difference with the competitor that is targeted.

Amazon Sponsored Display: Retargeting users that have been on the competitor product page through sponsored display product targeting.

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Ranking boos

Amazon Sponsored Products: Targeting a shortlist of keywords using exact matching. High bids should be used here and high ACOS has to be expected. These strategies require using a keyword tracking tool for the ASINs included in the strategy.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: Not recommended here

Amazon Sponsored Display: Not recommended here

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Profitability improvement

Amazon Sponsored Products: Main keywords should be managed separately from the long tail. The main reason is that bids can be optimized per keyword for the main ones because of data volumes and the long tail would be managed as a grouped bid. The main keywords should be managed with an exact match type, the long tail can be managed with a broad match type. The main keywords should be negated from the long tail campaign or ad group.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: Not recommended here

Amazon Sponsored Display: Not recommended here

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Bestsellers badge protection

Amazon Sponsored Products: All high volume keywords with bestseller badge should be in a single keyword campaign or ad group using exact match type. Unlike the previous strategy, the goal is maintaining the badge and as soon as the badge is lost, bids should be increased. The target shouldn’t be the ACOS but badge protection and this might have a cost sometimes.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: Target the same high volume keywords as before.

Amazon Sponsored Display: Not recommended here

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Product launch

Amazon Sponsored Products: Using the list of the main keywords that were used for product listing preparation in exact match type campaigns. High bids should be used until seeing the product ranked on the first two pages in sponsored placements. A high ACOS should be expected. The strategy should be started as soon as the product has a couple of reviews.

Amazon Sponsored Brand: Not recommended here

Amazon Sponsored Display: Not recommended here

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Conclusion

There are dozens of advertising strategies that can be used. The best ones are those with a complexity that is adapted to the tools and the size of the business. A seller for example that is generating less than 500k a year and managing manually shouldn’t put in place the same complex strategies as a 7 digits seller using tools and PPC experts to manage them. There is no BEST strategy, each category, brand size, and period of the year can have a couple of adapted strategies. Unfortunately, with no A/B Testing framework available on the Amazon platform, it is hard to assess precisely what is the best strategy for every situation.

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