Top 10 Advanced Amazon Advertising Tips To Increase Sales

This guest article features ten expert Amazon advertising tips from Arishekar N, Head of Marketing & Growth at SellerApp.

Amazon is a marketplace crowded by buyers and sellers. The competition is huge. With Amazon being a customer-centric marketplace, sellers need to take certain measures to boost their product discoverability and sales.

If you are a new seller, you might find it hard to gain more sales due to low visibility. Listing your product is one thing, getting visibility to win sales is another. Amazon advertising is one of the best ways to kick start your product sales.

The number of sellers and brands leveraging Amazon PPC (Pay per click) is growing significantly year over year. In this article, let’s take a look at ten Amazon advertising tips to get more sales.

10 Amazon Advertising Hacks for Sellers

1) Start with Automatic Targeting

With advertising platforms, you need to have huge control over the optimization process. This helps you keep a track of your ad spend and give room to experiment with strategies. Keyword research for Amazon PPC campaigns helps you with that.

Use automatic campaigns to find the relevant search terms used by your customers to find your product.
Keep your budget at a minimum to prevent wasting money. Allow Amazon to find relevant keywords for your listings. It may take up to two weeks to gather data to see how effectively the campaigns are performing.

2) Optimize Manual Campaigns

Find high-converting (long-tail) keywords from your automatic campaigns, and target them in your manual campaigns. With manual campaigns, you can handpick the keywords that you want to bid on. Therefore, you have granular control over your ad spend. Depending on your target ACoS, you can maximize your sales with precise targeting.

3) Structure Your Ad Campaigns

You need to have a consistent structure for your Amazon ad campaigns. If not, it could lead to repeat ads and waste your money. You can structure your ad campaigns based on your goals. However, you can try creating a campaign structure based on:

The brand
The product category
The top competitors or best sellers (Basically, top sellers who drive most sales.)

4) Create Different Ad Groups for Keywords with Different Specificity

This is important for brands and sellers with a vast portfolio of products. You will easily lose track of the keywords that are a part of your ad campaigns. So, you need to create different ad groups for keywords with different functionality to eliminate wasteful ad spend.

Let’s say, you are selling shoes on Amazon. Then, you need to create different ad groups for keywords because:

For all men’s shoes, "men’s shoes" is relevant.
For certain products, "men’s hiking shoes" would be relevant.
For another set of products, "men’s running shoes" would be relevant.

While there is no one-size-fits-all answer for ad grouping, you need to customize them based on the keywords’ practicality and target audience.

5) Amazon Sponsored Brands to Reach New Customers

Amazon Sponsored Brands should be a part of your top-of-funnel advertising activities. Pair them with category and brand-related keywords to increase your customer reach. With Sponsored Brands, you can direct the customer to a product listing or a brand store. This enables customers to learn more about your product offerings. You may not be able to generate sales right away, but increasing your brand awareness will gain more sales over time.

6) Leverage the Power of Data

With multi-channel selling growing everywhere, data is your go-to option to get actionable insights to thrive in the competitive eCommerce landscape. Though Amazon might be providing all the relevant data to optimize your campaigns, the data available on the platform is hard to understand most of the time. So you need to find the right analytics solutions to create a synergy between the market, competition, and performance.

7) Optimize Your Campaigns Regularly and Effectively

Everyone knows it, but here, I want to mention an important point about PPC optimization. At times, Amazon sellers optimize their PPC campaigns with a different set of keywords from the ones that are in the listings. You will lose potential sales and organic ranking. Therefore, optimize your PPC campaigns with relevant keywords and target a similar set of keywords in your product listings too.

Pro Tip: Audit your Amazon PPC campaigns at least once in a fortnight to optimize for maximum efficiency.

Running automated campaigns can be time-consuming and manual campaigns can drain your money without proper optimization. You need to filter the keywords based on ad groups and campaigns to see if they are working properly.

With SellerApp PPC Analyzer, you can automate your campaign management process. Once you set up a target ACoS, SellerApp’s algorithm will do the rest of the work. You can optimize your ad campaigns based on high-performing and low-performing keywords. Also, the PPC analyzer highlights your campaigns’ performance with critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in the form of graphs and tables to make you understand better.

The best part? It’s easy to navigate, and you’ll get accurate results within no time.

Screenshot of SellerApp Campaign Manager

8) Use Negative Keywords to Your Advantage

Amazon PPC campaigns aren’t always shown for the exact search terms. So, you need to ensure that you’re not ranking for irrelevant search terms.

For instance, if you are selling a laptop on Amazon, you might not want to rank for "desktop PC."

When you are deciding your negative keywords, filter the keywords that have a large volume of clicks, but low conversions. You don’t want to pay for a click that doesn’t actually convert into a sale.
To boost your product sales, you need to ensure that your ads appear at the top of the competitive search results. Leverage negative keywords and keyword match types that align with customer searches to fine-tune your PPC campaigns.
Amazon Sponsored Brands and Amazon Sponsored Products offer a variety of keywords on all three match types: exact, broad, and phrase types. Bid higher for high-impact, high-traffic keywords, and set lower bids for broad keywords to gain more sales.
Harvest negative keywords to reduce wasted spend from irrelevant clicks without reducing conversions and discoverability from potential customers.

9) Bid on Competitors’ Brands and on Your Own

Bidding on your competitors’ branded keywords is essential if you want to capture their market share. However, one of the most common questions I heard from sellers was: "I am ranking high in the search results for my brand keywords, is it still necessary to advertise for my own brand keywords?"

Yes, it is! Because:

Amazon is a long-term play, and you don’t want your competitors to steal your loyal customers.
Brand bidding makes it easy for you to kick start your new product sales.

10) Stop Running Campaigns for Slow Selling Products

Your success on Amazon largely depends on picking the right products, and it is equally important to identify the ones that aren’t selling well. Any product that doesn’t offer a good return on your investment needs to be eliminated. Monitor your advertising reports in Seller Central to find the products that aren’t driving enough revenue.

Your time and money are valuable. So, spend them wisely on optimizing the right product which drives high profitability.

Bonus Tip: Increase sales with external traffic

Driving external traffic to your Amazon product listing is a strategy you need to use alongside your PPC campaigns. The main advantage is that you can increase your sales momentum quickly. Apart from this, external traffic helps you boost your organic ranking.

Amazon keeps a track of the external traffic to your listings. External traffic can be in the form of paid ads, emails, posts, and social media. Many sellers say that Amazon uses this information to determine the demand for a product. This makes external traffic a powerful way to grow your business with greater stability. Why? Because you’ll be able to build a loyal customer base by creating a customer list off Amazon. This way you won’t risk violating Amazon terms of service.

Keep reading: 6 Mistakes to Avoid with Your Amazon PPC Advertising

Final Thoughts

As a seller, you need to identify the goal to decide on the advertising strategy. Along with that, the customer journey is extremely important to optimize your sales funnel. The best part of Amazon advertising campaigns is that you can use them to target customers at different levels of your sales funnel. Use these advanced Amazon advertising tips to put your customer first and hone in on their purchasing intent.