First time launching an Amazon PPC campaign? This guide will help you out.

Amazon Pay-Per-Click (PPC) helps sellers and vendors to increase the visibility of their products in the online selling platform by buying them.

With thousands of vendors leveraging their own Amazon PPC campaign, it is tough to compete with the established ones, unless you have a strategy in place.

What is Amazon PPC?

Amazon PPC is the biggest type of Amazon advertising program where you pay to have someone click on your ad in order to try and capture the sale.

You make a bid on how much you are willing to pay for your product to show up if a shopper types in a search term.

If your product ad is displayed and then it is clicked, you pay Amazon for this service.

There are three available formats for Amazon PPC.

1. Sponsored Products. These are ads that are keyword-targeted that allow sellers or advertisers to promote specific products based on keywords and ASINs.
2. Sponsored Brands. These are ads that let brands put up an advertisement on Amazon complete with their logo, headline, and three of their products. It also lets customers get directed to their page in Amazon when they click on it.
3. Product Display Ads. These are ads that direct customers directly to the product detail page of an item on Amazon. This is for vendors only and uses interest and customer targeting to provide relevant advertisements to customers who are more likely to purchase their items.

Where does the Amazon ad appear?

Where does Amazon Advertising appear on the site? Here’s where you will be able to spot them.

Sponsored Products

They will usually appear on the search page as well as the product detail page. It is also possible to find them on External Websites too.

Sponsored Brands

This advertisement will usually appear on the search results page. You will get four ad placements with one located on the top fold, and the three will be placed below the fold.

Product Display

This one is usually located at the bottom of the “Add to Cart” button on the Amazon product detail page. It can also be located on the right side of the search results or you can check it at the bottom of the page for search results.

Amazon vendors have access to these three types of advertisements, while sellers will need to come up with a professional selling plan in order to access the Sponsored Products type of advertisement. Sellers who have Brand Registry will be able to use Sponsored Brands.

Amazon PPC for organic ranking

Amazon PPC sales does have a positive impact on your product’s organic ranking.

The more sales you are able to generate through your PPC ad, the better the item’s organic ranking is as Amazon starts to associate your product for the converting keyword terms.

This is useful especially for products that are newly listed. Since they do not have any sales history yet, using PPC can help make them visible for customers to know that they are available on your page.

How much to spend on PPC?

If you are launching a new product and using a PPC campaign to gain initial sales and reviews, expect to spend between 50-100% ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales).

This means if you sell $200, but it costs $100 to make the $200, the ACoS on the item is 50%.

This is expected as you push your product into the market. With little to no reviews, the conversions are lower, cost is higher.

As your product becomes established, the ACoS should technically go down.

If you are reselling a national brand, the ACoS should be very low. Max 10% ACoS because the brand recognition will make the conversions very easy.

Set a daily budget

Sellers are required to set a daily budget to run their ad. You can compute your maximum daily budget expenditure by multiplying your daily budget with the number of days left for the month.

Allocating a budget for each campaign gives you control to reach the following goals:

• Balanced spending across all of your running ads.
• Selective allocation of budget on items that are giving you profits.
• Can be used as a cost airbag, but it is not important when optimizing your campaign.

Fixed Daily Account Budget Cap 

You can also set a fixed daily budget for your advertising account in Amazon Seller Central. This fixed budget will determine how much you are going to spend for your day to day advertising for a Sponsored Product.

As the name suggests, the rate here is fixed unlike the previous one. What this means is that your spending will not go beyond what is indicated here.

Tips for Determining Your Budget for PPC Campaign

Determining the best budget for your Amazon PPC campaign is going to be tricky, not unless you apply the following tips.

• Analyze your PPC budget. There are three basic parts of your budget and these are:
• Cost. This covers your expenses for running your business such as payment for storage, employees, and getting your goods.
• Revenue. This refers to the money that you are earning from the products you have sold.
• Profit margin. This talks about the money between the cost of the product

You can take advantage of the Amazon FBA calculator to determine your profit margin. This is an easy tool to use since you only have to type in the amount in the fields and it will automatically provide you with a report.

The FBA calculator will even give you insights on how competitive an item is in the market and in its category, including the revenues or profits you are making out of it when coming up with a budget.

• The temperature of the product and industry is included.  To get a feel for the industry and your product’s current standing in the market, let’s say that you have earned $1,000 from your items last week. Around 25% of your earnings or $250 were due to the money you put into your PPC campaign. Since you are anticipating earning around $250 for your products, you put in 25% of your money, which is at $62.50, towards Advertising Cost of Services or ACoS. This means that putting up 25% for the ACoS has garnered you 25% in terms of sales.

Of course, there are a few exceptions here and these are:

• Competitive Category. There are products that fall under the competitive category wherein they will be more in demand. This may force you to increase the amount of your PPC cost in order to gain more visibility and sales.
• Unique Identifiers. It is important that you reduce your target keywords in such a way that it narrows down to the product that you are offering. This will help you set yourself apart from the competition, thus increasing awareness of your brand.
• Analyze PPC reports. Aside from figuring out how to launch an Amazon Advertising Campaign, it is also important to determine what worked for you and what didn’t. In order for you to figure this out, you should check your reports from Amazon PPC. Go through your reports each month so you will be able to see which areas you need to focus on and which ones you can keep on doing. There are several factors that may affect your campaign such as changing seasons, social media, and brand visibility just to name a few.

How to Set up Your Amazon PPC Campaign

Setting up your Amazon PPC campaign shouldn’t be difficult especially when you use this Amazon PPC guide. Here are the steps that you will need to follow.

Step 1: Log in to your account in the Amazon Seller Central. Hover your mouse over the tab that says Advertising then from the list, select Campaign Manager.

Step 2: On the Campaign Manager page, you will need to set up your budget and duration for your campaign. However, there are a few pointers to consider:

• It is possible to create several ad groups under a single campaign which means that it is better that you use a broad name for your campaign than be more detailed in sub ads.
• Determine what your monthly budget is first before deciding how much to spend and how long you want the ad to run.
• Always pick a beginning and end date when running an Amazon Advertising. This will prevent you from over-budgeting.
• When you choose “Automated Targeting”, Amazon will be the one to generate keywords to use for your campaign based on the product that is listed. On the other hand, “Manual Targeting” lets you choose keywords based on your preferences.

Once you have placed all the necessary information, you can proceed to the next page.

Step 3: You will be asked to provide a name for the groups of ads that you want to run. Like it was mentioned before, it is possible to run several ad groups under a single campaign.

Step 4: Choose a product that you want to include in the Amazon PPC campaign.

Step 5: Decide how much you want to spend on each keyword. Take note that by figuring out how much your budget is for the PPC campaign and the keyword bid, you will be able to figure out how many clicks per day your ad will get. A good example here is when your budget is at $10 and each bid is set at $1, you will only get 10 clicks per day.

Step 6: Choose the keywords that you want to use. This is one of the most important parts of running a campaign, but if this is your first time, you can stick with the suggestions that Amazon is providing. On the other hand, if you already have a specific set of keywords to use, select “Provide your own keywords” then input one keyword at a time. You can decide whether to match the keyword with the broad, phrase, or exact.

Step 7: After you are done with the search keywords, press “Save and Finish”.

Step 8: You will be taken back to the Campaign Manager page where you should receive a message that says, “Success”.

NOTE: The ad will take an hour before it starts to appear on Amazon.

Setting up Keywords in Amazon Campaign Manager

When setting up keywords, you will need to consider whether they will be matched to the broad, phrase, or exact keywords.

This may be confusing at the start, but it is important that you match your keywords to the right category. Here’s what they mean:

Broad Match

As the name suggests, this type of match lets the advertising platform, like Amazon and Google, display your ad to people in a broad manner.

Basically, your keyword will be matched with not only its exact meaning but others that are related to it as well. This will include synonyms, variations, and even misspelled words.

If you choose broad, you will be able to reach a wider audience. It can also give you insight as to what keywords customers are using. However, there is also the danger that those who will be clicking on your ad will not buy your product.

Phrase Match

In phrase matches, you will be able to narrow your keywords by selecting significant phrases. The main feature of this type of match is that you will be able to choose the word “ordering”.

This will help remove any words that have been inserted in between by customers when searching for a specific product. Running this search will still yield results that have a word before or after your keyword phrase.

One advantage of this type of match is that you will be able to eliminate those who aren’t specifically looking for the product that you are offering.

Using this match type will make it easier for you to determine what phrases your target customers prefer when searching for an item similar to yours.

Exact Match

In an exact match, you will be narrowing the search term further. This will be a great way to target customers that are looking specifically for the product that you are offering.

Search results will include the close variants for your search term including misspellings. Although it is tough to find a specific or exact keyword to match your product, once you do, it will be easier to generate plenty of leads to your site.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

Part of the Amazon advertising campaign strategy that you should practice is to optimize your campaign from time to time. Give your campaign at least two weeks before optimizing it.

Here’s what you need to know about optimizing your campaign.

Create a Structured Campaign

The best Amazon PPC strategy to utilize here is to build individual campaigns for your primary products. From there, build detailed ads that are related to the product itself. Choose keywords that are related to each ad under separate campaigns to be able to target the right kind of customers.

Build a Catchy Ad

Your Amazon Advertising must be catchy in order to attract customers. Any texts that you will put on your ad should be clear and concise, creative, and unique at the same time. Keep in mind that this is your product’s time to shine hence you need to put out all of your creative juices for this one. Use the right wording such as “Hurry Up!” or even “Urgent” if you are launching a sale.

Precision is Key 

Aside from being creative with your advertisement, another Amazon PPC strategy that you should utilize is precision. It is important that you are able to highlight the key features of your product. It might be hard to put all the essential keywords in the title, but choose those that are really relevant to the item that you are selling.

Add Keywords to the Title

Keywords play an important role in any Amazon PPC Campaign since these words are the search terms that customers will be using. Placing them on the title of your product can make it easier for customers to find you.

Use High-quality Picture 

Do not forget to put a high-quality picture of your product in your advertisement.

This will make it more visually interesting for customers who are in need of the item that you are offering. You can upload around 7 to 9 images to your campaign so make the most out of it.

Make Enhanced Bids for Your Ad Groups 

Creating group bids gives you the option for default bids for the entire keywords that you have used in your ad groups.

Although there is an option where you can manually input the bids that you want, see to it that you have placed a strong bid for the entire group.

Play with Your Ads

Sponsored ads are actually the ones that deliver the biggest ROI, but landing the right one won’t be easy. It is best that you play around with your ads until you find the right Amazon PPC strategy.

Tips for Running a Successful Amazon Ppc Campaign

It takes time and patience to get your Amazon PPC campaign correctly. That said, consider these tips for your Amazon advertising campaign strategy on how to run yours successfully.

Optimize the product details page. Optimizing the details on your product page and using the right SEO keywords will make your bids more effective.

Setup campaigns the right way. Create a campaign for each group of products then use ad groups under each campaign for keyword matching. If you are going to choose Automatic Campaign, a single Ad group is all you need.

Add variations to your Ad groups. If your products vary in size, design, and color, putting them under the same ad group is ideal. This way, Amazon will run the most popular option then, if the customer prefers a different variation, they will simply be shown that product’s page.

Run both Automatic and Manual campaigns. Automatic campaigns are helpful in getting insight from your competitors, but it is important that you also run a manual campaign too. Another important aspect of automatic campaigns is that your products can appear under your competitors’ page listed as Sponsored products related to this item.

Add high converting terms from your automatic campaign to manual campaign. If you noticed any search terms in your Automatic campaign generating more leads for you, you can add them to your Manual campaign.

Put your bids and budgets for manual campaigns higher than automatic. This will help you choose which targeted keywords will receive the most bids compared to the broad search that is common in Automatic campaigns. This way, you will be spending more for the visibility of correct keywords that have high chances of generating additional sales on your part.

Avoid overusing negative or exact matches. Using keywords that are generating sales from automatic to manual is all well and good, but using negative matches to your Automatic campaign is not recommended. However, using negative keywords too much can be a hindrance to your product especially when you want it to rank high on Amazon. You might want to reserve your negative exact match or phrase in your Campaign or Ad group for search words that are completely unrelated to your product or are not yielding high sales.

Set maximum daily budgets. Amazon will simply use your maximum daily budget to run your ads before it stops. If you have enough inventory in place, you can set your daily budget at the maximum if your ACoS is low. Remember to set your target Amazon ACoS before you set your maximum daily budget, campaigns are more effective when you know your ACoS goals.

Running your Amazon campaigns the right way can help increase your sales significantly. If this is your first time to do an Amazon PPC campaign, it would be better to use this guide to help you figure out what type of campaign you are going to run, how to match keywords, and setting your budget as well.

It may be tough at the start, but once you come up with a strategy that combines both manual and automatic campaigns, and keeping tabs on the results, it won’t be long before you see more sales being generated because of these ads.

Just make sure that your ads are running correctly and that all information in your product listing pages is accurate and to the point so that Amazon will be able to display them accordingly.