PPC on Amazon – This is how it works!

Want to sell products on Amazon but don’t know how to spotlight them? With Amazon PPC ads, you can greatly increase the visibility of your product ads and skyrocket your sales. We have summarized everything you need to know about Amazon PPC for you in this article.

You’ll learn in this post:

• What Amazon PPC is
• What advantages Amazon PPC ads offer you
• What are the types of PPC ads
• Valuable tips for optimizing your Amazon PPC campaign

What is Amazon PPC?

Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) is a paid advertising option on Amazon that sellers can use to increase their click-through and conversion rates. With PPC advertising, you only pay for the ads that are actually clicked on by potential buyers. Each click costs you a predefined price.

With a well-planned Amazon PPC campaign, you can improve the organic ranking of your products, increase the visibility of your products and boost your sales in no time.

PPC ads help your products get the promising chance to reach the top position of Amazon SERPs.

These are the advantages of PPC ads

• low cost

The cost factor is an obvious advantage of Amazon PPC, as you really only have to pay for ads that have also generated customer interest.

• improved product ranking

The next big advantage of PPC advertising on Amazon is the greatly increased ranking factor. Your product will automatically appear at the top of the search results, greatly increasing the likelihood of click-throughs and sales. Learn more about Amazon SEO.

• more product reviews

Additional visitors to your product pages not only lead to increased sales, but also attract positive product reviews over time. This is also an important factor for your products to improve their placement in Amazon search result ranking.

• individual definition of keywords

Another key advantage of PPC marketing compared to other marketing strategies is the ability to independently define keywords to search for your product. With this advertising method, you bid on as many keywords as you like and can thus increase your product reach like with hardly any other advertising campaign. For example, you are free to set competitor brands as your keyword. This is how you get the attention of customers who are actually looking for a competitor’s product.

These three types of Amazon PPC ads exist

If you decide to run PPC ads on Amazon, you have a choice of three categories:

• Sponsored Products Ads

  Amazon Sponsored Product Ads are ads that sellers can run on Amazon to promote their products and increase visibility. The ads appear in different areas on Amazon, for example in search results and on product pages.

  An important decision when using Sponsored Product Ads is choosing the right bidding strategy. There are several ways sellers can set their bids:

  • Manual bid: With this strategy, sellers set themselves how much they want to pay for a click on their ad. This strategy requires a good understanding of the target audience and competitive landscape, and gives sellers greater control over their bids.
  • Automatic bid: In this strategy, Amazon automatically selects the bid for the ad based on various factors such as the competitive landscape and the ad’s historical performance. This strategy is easier to use and requires less manual involvement, but can result in sellers having less control over their bids.
  • Maximum cost per click (CPC): With this strategy, sellers set a fixed maximum amount they want to pay for a click on their ad. Amazon then automatically selects the bid to run the ad as many times as possible within the set budget. This strategy gives sellers greater control over their spend, but may result in the ad being served less often.

• Sponsored Brand Ads

  In this keyword-based ad, several of your brand’s products are displayed above the actual results. It is also possible to display them on the side of the filter bar, below the search results and on the product pages. Your products will also be found in search queries with related keywords.

• Sponsored Display Ads

  This is the only Amazon ad format that is not keyword driven. The selection of your products is based on the interests of the buyer or when he looks at similar products. They are mainly displayed on the product detail page under the shopping cart icon. However, the use of Sponsored Display Ads is only available to vendors. (As a Vendor, you sell your goods to Amazon and Amazon sells them on its own behalf).

We can gladly support you as an Amazon PPC agency.

How to optimize your Amazon PPC ads

Placing PPC ads in itself is relatively simple and will cost you little time. Nevertheless, there are a few things you should keep in mind to really achieve the desired success with your advertising campaign.

By optimizing a few settings, you can get the most out of your ads and increase the visibility, as well as sales rate of your products immensely.

We have therefore put together a few important tips for you, with which you can optimize your PPC campaign.

• Optimize your campaign structure

A well thought-out structuring of your PPC campaign is essential for its success. The campaign structure always follows the following pattern:

• Campaign
• Ad group
• Keywords/Products

First, you open a campaign and set an individual daily budget. Next, divide your campaign into several ad groups and set a default bid for keywords. In the last step you select your products and the respective keywords.

You also have the choice between automatic and manually switched PPC campaigns. While you can define the keywords yourself in manual campaigns, Amazon takes over this step in automatic campaigns.

• The advantage of the automated campaign is that you save yourself the time-consuming keyword research. On the other hand, with manually controlled campaigns, you can target a precise group much better.

Another setting you can make now is to choose from three match types for your keywords.

You have the choice between

• largely/broadly
• Phrase/word group
• exact

Just as important as an in-depth keyword research is the consideration of whether your product should only be found with a specific search term or whether largely similar searches should also lead to your ad.

• Conduct a high quality keyword research

Use external programs to determine the best keywords for your products. There are several tools on the market that will make your search much easier and provide you with professionally determined keywords.

It’s also important to check out the Amazon Search Term Report to see which of your set keywords actually drew visitors to your product page. You can also identify the keywords that did not bring success through the Amazon report and banish them from your list. You even have the option to specify negative keywords, i.e. those search terms that should definitely not lead to your ad.

• Adjust your CPC bids

Setting cost-per-click bids requires some business acumen and experience. You will get more clicks and optimally have higher sales if you set your bids high. But you also have higher costs for your campaigns. We recommend that you enter with comparatively high bids for new products that have yet to make a name for themselves on the Amazon marketplace. This way you can provide a quick start for your product.

You should also adjust your bids regularly to align your costs and your target revenue.

• Optimize your product pages

Of course, besides optimizing your PPC campaigns, you must not neglect all the other SEO relevant factors. It is especially important that your product detail pages are perfectly designed. Amazon product images Your product details must be convincing at first sight and your customers must be rewarded for their click with a clear and appealing presentation of all product information.

• Use Amazon data as feedback

As already mentioned in the Amazon Keyword Research topic, Amazon provides a lot of important analytics data for its sellers. Use this data for your success and the optimization of your campaigns. Check the Search Term Report in Seller Central regularly for click-through and conversion rates, as well as cost of sales and order numbers.

Conclusion

The right control and attitude of your campaigns is crucial for your success. Clearly, the more time and money you can invest in your PPC campaigns, the faster your sales and product rankings will increase.

In some cases, an Amazon PPC campaign can also serve only to realize a profit- and popularity-boosting product launch.

In any case, this type of advertising can be adapted to almost any budget and allows even newcomers to the Amazon marketplace a place in the front row. But since Amazon PPC is a very complex topic, agencies can help. In our podcast, we explain the most common agency pricing models.

Über den Autor

Jonas Zeppenfeld

Jonas ist Geschäftsführer von Dype. Hier auf dem Dype Blog und im Snackable Marketing Podcast teilt er regelmäßig spannende Insights für Amazon Seller & Vendoren. In den Podcast werden dazu regelmäßig Branchenexperten eingeladen.

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