Amazon Sellers find setting up and maintaining AdWord campaigns time consuming and expensive.  Here are some tips to achieve successful sponsored keyword campaigns.

Amazon has various ways to advertise on their platforms: FireTV and Amazon.com and its EU equivalents to name a few.  Amazon’s sponsored ads for Amazon Sellers is a major advertising force, helping sellers to achieve greater sales above and beyond their competitors.

While we recommend a wider advertising programme that includes platforms such as Facebook and Google Ads, Amazon Sponsored Product Ads will generate significant awareness of your products if you are just getting started or want to limit your advertising budget.

Campaign Types

There are two main campaign types from which you can choose: ‘Automatic’ and ‘Manual’ from your Sellers Central Account.

Automatic campaigns are far easier to setup and manage and is a good place to start if you are just starting your advertising programme.  With your automatic PPC campaign, Amazon will run your ads for you, choose the best search terms to match your products, and in turn, takes less work for you the seller.  An important advantage is that Amazon will do your keyword research.  All you have to do is select the product(s) you want to advertise, set a budget, and Amazon will do the rest.

Manual campaigns, if created properly, typically yield more sales at a lower cost than your automatic campaign.  However, manual campaigns require keyword research, understanding of your target market(s) and how to select and use Amazon’s 3 match types for keywords (broad, phrase, exact).  We also recommend using negative keyword in your manual campaigns.  They can help to exclude unwanted customer search terms.  Negative keywords can also stop unwanted costs accruing.

Quick Guide to Setting up Your Ad Campaigns:

Step 1:   Set up your ‘exact ad’ group

Step 2:   Go to Sonar to generate your top 25-50 keywords, and add them to your new ‘exact ad’ group

Step 3:   Set your budget for ‘exact ads’

Step 4:   Add the same keywords from your ‘exact ad’ group to your new ‘broad ad’ group

Step 5:   Set your budget for ‘broad ads’

Step 6:   Important: make sure you add all your ‘exact ad’ keywords to ‘negative exact’ in your newly created ‘broad ad’ group

Step 7: Create a new ‘automatic campaign’ and use Amazon’s ‘suggest bid’.  (You can change this later depending on how aggressive you want to be with advertising.)

Step 8: Important: Make sure you add the keywords from your ‘broad ad’ group as ‘negative phrase; to your newly created ‘automatic campaign’.

Once you get your exact, broad and automatic campaigns set-up, we suggest you closely monitor your ads for the first couple of weeks.  If you have noticed, we have not used ‘phrase ads’.  You simply do not need them as part of this advertising programme.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have questions on our management programmes for Amazon Sellers in the US, Canada, UK and EU.

For questions or help with your Amazon selling and advertising, get in touch with E-commerce Direct at info@e-commercedirect.com or call our UK office +44 (0) 2381 920 246, or if you are based in the US, call toll free ++1 (888) 567-0464.