Amazon advertising works well; if someone’s looking for something on Amazon, they’re a warm target. They already want the product, or at least, they say they do. But Amazon advertising can also be very competitive, so you want to get it right and not waste money on ads that aren’t working.
All Amazon advertising is pay per click – you pay when someone clicks on your ad, whether they actually buy the product or not. So watch out, if you have lots of clicks but no one ways, you can spend a substantial amount of money that you won’t get back.
So the best way to start is to take some time away from your individual products and think about your advertising strategy. You’ll need to start out by considering your goals.
Maybe you just have one product and you want to launch it and get it up and running. That’s pretty easy as a strategy, because your business is still pretty simple.
But as you go on, you’ll want to think about your goals for your brand or your business. Of course, those might change over time. For instance, you might have identified a few products that are not doing too well, and want to see if you can give them a boost. Or you might want to grow your profits by promoting the products that deliver you the highest profit on sales.
You might also prioritize your brand, rather than individual products. If you have a specific niche, this might be a much better way forward than promoting individual products. On the other hand if your products have little in common, then it’s probably best to stick to thinking about each product.
This will affect your choice of which kind of advertising you want to use.
Sponsored products is the main kind of advertising on Amazon, and if you’re launching a new product it’s where you’re going to want to start. It promotes a single product, and you can target particular keywords, but you can also target another ASIN so your ad will pop up on pages for a similar (or complementary) product. So for instance if you sold baby romper suits you might want to target ASINs for cots or baby food, because you know that customer has a baby.
But Amazon also offer sponsored brand advertising, if you’re in the Brand Registry program. These ads will show your brand, and three of your products. So it’s great if you have a range of complementary products, like tableware and cookware, or if you have an economy product and a higher specification product in the same range.
With brand advertising you can also direct customers to your Amazon Storefront, where they won’t see any competing sellers, and that’s a big advantage.
Finally, Amazon offers sponsored display advertising as another option for Brand Registered sellers. These look similar to sponsored brand advertising, but target customers based on their behavior rather than on keywords. If they’ve been looking at certain categories, you can target them to show what you’ve got. These ads can also display on websites other than Amazon, so they’ve got a great reach.
You’ll probably want a mix of those three, but the mix could be very different depending on your brand and products.
The next step is to determine your budget. There is no magic figure! The best way to start if you are relatively new is to set a daily amount that you know you can easily pay without selling a lot in the first few weeks. Once you’re more experienced, you’ll know what’s working and you can experiment with a bit more or a bit less. You might also decide to spent more at certain periods of high demand, for instance the holiday season.
Finally, you need to choose the products where you want to spend the most. These might be:
• higher priced items
• your products with the highest conversion rate
• products that aren’t getting the traffic they deserve
• new product launches
• products whose sales growth is beginning to tail off
• your best-sellers, if you just want to grow real fast.
And finally, remember to keep testing and keep monitoring your results. Once you have a strategy, it’s easy to refine your ad spend as you go; it’s all the little tweaks that will really get your business motoring.
