Increase Product Exposure and Sales with Amazon’s Sponsored Ads

Advertising online is a great way of bringing your products or services closer to your customers, but finding the ideal platform largely depends on the nature of your business and the niche market you want to reach.

On one hand, there’s Google AdWords that’s designed for driving traffic to websites, while on the other hand is Sponsored Product Ads, which is fast gaining popularity among online sellers on Amazon, as it makes their products easily findable and consequently increases their sales.

With hundreds of millions of products sold on the Amazon marketplace, getting your product in front of the right customers could sound like a daunting challenge in an ever busier marketplace.

Promoting your products with Sponsored Product Ads, Amazon’s own pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tool, increases the likelihood of your product landing at the top of the search results and on product detail pages.

Google Adwords vs Sponsored Product Ads

Sponsored Ads works pretty much like Google AdWords. You set up a campaign, create several ad groups, and bid on keywords that will earn more clicks on your ads.

However, Sponsored Ads is designed to increase the sales of a product, while the second is basically focused on getting people to your website.

Here are some of their key differences:

• Google’s PPC ads appear on its search engine results page, while ads under Amazon’s Sponsored Ads show up within the Amazon marketplace.
• Google only displays text ads, while Sponsored Ads features an image along with the product description.
• Sponsored Ads guarantees higher conversion rates because people who see it are ready to shop, which is not always the case on Google.
• An Amazon sponsored ad only appears if the seller has the Buy Box option.
• AdWords allows up to 20,000 keywords per ad group, while Sponsored Ads is limited to 1,000 keywords. In reality, though, the maximum number of keywords you will most likely need per ad group is 20 or even less.

Both advertising platforms allow users to set their campaigns either to automatic or manual, but going automatic in Sponsored Product Ads is extremely beneficial as it allows Amazon to target relevant keywords for your ads based on the information in your product listing.

“The key is to assign your bestsellers to auto campaign at first for keyword collection for a month or so, and then go for manual campaigns. We’ve been using sponsored products and sales have clearly increased from what they were earlier,” ASG, an Amazon third-party seller, on the Amazon Seller Forums.

By utilizing big data, Amazon is able to stay attuned to the frequently searched terms on its site, as well as the shopping habits of its more than 300 million customers, thus helping third-party sellers on its platform enhance their sales and marketing tactics.

Because of that, it has beat Google and, in fact, become the top destination for product search.

According to the NPR/Marist poll, 49% of online shoppers visit Amazon first when searching for products, while only 39% start with Google or other search engines.

Building a successful ad campaign

The key here is don’t expect instant results.

That’s the advice of online sellers, who have had successful ad campaigns with Sponsored Product Ads, to anyone using it for the first time.

As mentioned earlier, you’ll want to start off with an automatic campaign and assess the keywords which Amazon generates for your ad groups, to see which ones are working for your product.

Software technology company, ExportX, was among the first to use Amazon Sponsored Ads to sell manufactured products around the world.

Describing the platform as an important tool for launching new products, ExportX CEO Paul Grey said:

“We have the ability to advertise in non-English-speaking countries without having to determine all the keywords for that region. For example, we can use automatic targeting for a German campaign without the need for a German-speaking marketer…With Sponsored Products, we can surface new products in search results to gauge shoppers’ interest.” Paul Grey, CEO, ExportX

However, that’s not to say manual campaigns aren’t helpful as they give you more control over your budget and cost per click (CPC). Just be sure to constantly monitor the performance of your keywords to ensure they’re converting into sales.

Adjust your bids when necessary and remove keywords that aren’t getting any impressions.

Negative keywords are just as important as relevant keywords.

Setting up negative keywords, or phrases that aren’t related to the item you’re advertising, prevents your ads from showing for search queries which contain them, and in the process reduces your CPC.

Have you tried using Amazon’s Sponsored Product Ads and, if so, how did it affect your conversion rate? Let us know in the comments below or over on our Facebook Group.

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