Advanced Amazon PPC Strategies For Explosive Sales: Seller Guide

Six out of ten Amazon merchants, it is a well-known fact, struggle with the complexities of Amazon Sponsored Products Campaigns. Although launching a campaign is easy, the true difficulty is in perfecting and maximizing it with every change to improve exposure, efficiency, and general platform performance.

Many times, retailers unintentionally raise their ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) by making common PPC blunders, therefore wasting their money without getting any returns. Ad campaigns have full potential only if you use certain Amazon PPC techniques, even if you have a great product and a perfect listing copy.

We offer the best Amazon Advertising Strategy Guide for 2024 to help demystify the craft of Amazon advertising. These ideas are meant to increase brand awareness as well as generate worthwhile traffic and sales to your listings. Thus, let’s explore a thorough tutorial revealing the secrets to maximizing your Amazon PPC campaigns for success right now without delay!

Tip 1: Start at the Bottom and Work Your Way Up with Keywords

This sentence holds good for Amazon Sponsored Products as well. Whether you are launching a new product on Amazon or are just starting as a seller, you should ideally launch your PPC journey with long-tail keywords. Only after you have attained a certain level of mastery and success with these long-tail keywords, you should move up in the pecking order and go after the generic, most-searched keywords.

The reason why this PPC strategy works is that as a new seller, you will have a tough time competing with well-established players in the market. If you target the highly searched keywords right at the beginning – keywords that usually come with high competition and CPC, you will end up spending a lot of money without getting any exposure for your brands, let alone traffic and conversions.

Even if your listings get the ad impressions, the likelihood of getting sales will be low since your competitors have a much better position and reputation in the market, for those generic keywords.

Therefore, the plan here is quite simple: go after the long-tail keywords right initially, as you will face little resistance in getting ranked for those phrases. With little competition and a high intent of purchase, you can land sales rather easily and boost your sales history. Once consumers start to become more aware of your brand, and the product starts to achieve a superior rank in the Amazon SERP, you can start targeting the next-level keywords and gradually make your way up.

Starting Point: Long-Tail Keywords

For example, if you are selling a chopping board, then you can start your campaigns with a very specific query like ‘handmade wooden chopping board’ or ‘brown resin wooden cutting board’ and so on.

Next-Level Keywords

After you land initial sales on the back of these queries, target the next set of generic keywords in the order. In this case, it may be something along the lines of ‘wooden chopping board,’ ‘wooden cutting board,’ ‘vegetable cutting board,’ et cetera. With every step of the way, you improve your product’s visibility in the search results and associate your item with more popular queries. In other words, Amazon’s algorithms learn to rank your product whenever someone searches for any of these keywords.

The Final Leg: Generic, Most-Searched Queries

In the final phase, go after the most generic, popular keywords. Building on our same example, you can target ‘vegetable cutter,’ ‘wooden cutting board,’ and so on. For better results, you can work with multiple campaigns at the same level and experiment with different match types to see which ones are working the best for you.

Pro Tip: The keywords you target in every step must be relevant to your product. Otherwise, you may end up paying for ads that will not bring you any conversions whatsoever.

Tip 2: Rank Optimization Through Amazon PPC

We formulated this strategy in an attempt to improve the rank and position of your product listing within the Amazon SERP, for a given keyword. The idea here is to have three distinct sets of ad campaigns, with bids and budgets varying significantly across each of these sets.

The bids and budget assigned for a keyword depend on the search rank of the listing in the Amazon search results for that search query.

The first thing you need to do here is to track all the top keywords for your listing and see where they are ranking on Amazon. Analyze the page rank and position of your listing and then implement the following plan:

Beyond Page Five

If the listing is ranking beyond page five or six on Amazon, then it is recommended that you focus only on a handful of keywords that are converting well, rather than all the keywords that are ranking there. This way, you preserve your funds and concentrate on the phrases that are ranking in sales but are quite far behind in the search results. The bid here needs to be rather modest.

Page Two-Five

Similarly, for those keywords ranked on the third, fourth, and fifth pages, you can follow a more moderate strategy that focuses on top-performing keywords as usual. You need to keep bidding consistently over time and see which keywords are getting the most sales. Then, optimize your advertising campaigns accordingly with these keywords. Amazon will automatically enhance the organic ranking of your listing for these queries as they begin to generate conversions.

Page One and Two

Lastly, for keywords that are ranking on pages one and two, you need to proceed with an aggressive stance. Since you are just a few spots shy of the prime positions, you want to be as aggressive as possible with your bidding so that you can win those positions and improve your product’s visibility.

Over here, you should also focus on the variations of these queries so that you can boost sales for them as well. Create a secondary campaign solely for this purpose and set the match type to phrase to cover as many variations as possible.

Pro Tip: While optimizing the campaigns, pay attention to keywords that are not bringing in any sales but are costing ad clicks. Mark them down as negative keywords so that you avoid paying for these advertisements. Negative keywords are essential in Amazon PPC management and should not be undermined.

Tip 3: Adjust Your Bids by Ad Placements

Earlier this year, Amazon introduced a set of features meant to enhance the way sellers bid in PPC auctions. This PPC strategy allows you to optimize your campaigns with much more finesse and gives you more control over where you want your ads to appear and how much you are willing to pay for them.

This strategy deals mainly with adjusting your bids based on placements.

As you know, your ads with Amazon PPC will appear in either of the three places.

• Top of the search results on page one,
• Within the rest of the search results (middle, bottom, and on the second page of Amazon SERP and beyond)
• And, in the product details page and other positions off search results like the add-to-cart page and so on.

For every campaign that you run on Amazon, you can view the placement report and see which of the three positions brought you the most exposure and conversions. Based on this insight, you can set the placement bidding multiplier for each placement between 0% and 900% to further improve your odds of landing conversions and increase brand awareness.

Tip 4: Group Variations Together for Improved Visibility and Brand Awareness

If your product has multiple variations, they will most likely be listed as child ASINs. In such a scenario, running an ad campaign for each of them individually may not be feasible as it will eat into your budget, and more importantly, your variations may end up competing among themselves for the ads. In a way, this is product cannibalization, and as such, you could avoid it when it comes to PPC campaigns.

Therefore, an excellent strategy to tackle this problem is to group individual variations into one single package and then sell it on Amazon under a unique ASIN.

For example, if you are selling four different flavors of beef jerky at $15 apiece, it is better to combine them and sell it under one single pack of four for, let’s say $50. This way, they achieve the following:

• Your average order value increases
• Since people love packaged deals, they become more aware of your brand in the market
• Your brand visibility in the market enhances
• Your PPC budget stays focused on only one product, rather than the individual variations

Tip 5: Run Campaigns for Your Top Child ASIN

If you don’t have the bandwidth to create a combined package for your variations or run individual campaigns for all the variations, then you can run a PPC campaign only for the top-performing variation. Again, this PPC strategy works well provided the variations are listed as child ASINs.

Over here, you may miss out on increasing your average order value and other perks that come with grouping products, but it will still be easier on your pocket and fairly more efficient.

The sales will eventually trickle down into the other options. It is because when customers visit your ads, they will also see the other variants available for the product in the same listing. Depending on their preference, they may opt for a different variation. Hence, the sale you consequently get here will be from an ad that was originally shown for your top-selling variant.

Sounds a bit confusing? Let’s break it down. Taking our previous example of beef jerky, let’s say that you are selling four different flavors – barbeque, teriyaki, cajun, and black pepper, as separate child ASINs but in the ‘same’ listing. Of these four, black pepper is your bestseller.

• If you run PPC ads for all four flavors in the same ad group, they will end up competing among themselves for ad placements, since only one of the four variants is likely to win the ad spot. This will most likely lead to wasted ad spending and an increased ACoS for your entire ad campaign, thus lowering your ad’s efficiency.
• On the other hand, if you focus your efforts only on the black pepper variation and run dedicated ad campaigns only for that flavor, your listing will get more traffic on Amazon.

Tip 6: Target Alternative/Indirect Keywords

One of the lesser-known ways to position your product well on Amazon lies in the way you present it to the audience. If you can highlight the features and benefits of your product vividly in your description in a way that is compelling, creative, and engaging, then you stand to gain significantly from it.

But more than that, you will also have an edge if you target the not-so-direct, alternative keywords in your PPC advertisements. This is because, at times, people visit Amazon searching for solutions rather than looking for products. In other words, they are not sure what they need until and unless they see the product for themselves.

Therefore, as a seller, what you can do here is identify the solutions your products address and target the same through Amazon Sponsored Products. For instance, assume that you sell mushroom coffee on Amazon. Now, in addition to targeting all of its popular keyword variations and the long-tail search queries in your ads, you should also go after the other alternative words such as ‘natural weight loss remedy,’ ‘healthy caffeine alternatives,’ ‘natural metabolism booster’ and so on.

Tip 7: Put Similarly-Priced Products in the Same Ad Group

Assume that you have three similar products on Amazon listed as separate ASINs – A, B, and C. These products are priced respectively at $10, $15, and $50.

Let’s say that you start the Sponsored Products campaign with all three products grouped in the same ad group. You are spending $5 every day to land a sale for each product (again, just a hypothetical example). In this case, your ACoS will be as follows:

• Product A: 50%
• Product B: 33.3%
• Product C: 10%

As you can see here, product C has the lowest ACoS among the three. However, the overall ACoS of the ad group works out to be around 31%, owing to the high advertising cost of sales for products A and B.

Now, consider a scenario where you group A and B in the same ad group, with C in another. In this case, the ACoS for product C will not be impacted or rather, brought down by that of the other two items. Its impressions will also not suffer since it has a separate budget. It will also give you better control over your advertising budget and hence, you can devise your plans accordingly.

Tip 8: Structure Ad Campaigns Based on Product Performance

Often, we create ad campaigns based on the performance of keywords. If we see a keyword that is converting very well in an auto campaign, we move it to manual and set match types for better control over bids and daily budget. While this has proven to be an excellent strategy to improve your products’ rank of Amazon, it can be a bit tricky to control the overall ACoS, mainly because some products may require more clicks than others to make a sale.

So, instead of creating ad campaigns based on keywords, consider creating them based on the performance of a product.

Let’s say you have an ad group with five products of which, two have an ACoS of 50% while the rest are averaging at around 20%. The two products with high ACoS are responsible for increasing the overall ACoS of the campaign. Hence, a good way to approach this would be to take those two products and put them in a different campaign.

With this, the first thing you will achieve here is to reduce the overall ACoS of your first campaign. Secondly, it will become easy for you to work on reducing your ad spending and improving the performance of your PPC campaigns.

Lastly, Amazon’s A9 algorithm analyzes metrics like click-through rate, conversion rates, et cetera, to determine where to rank a product. Now, if all of these products are placed in the same campaign, the results are going to look like an average of their performance. But, if you structure them based on the performance of the product, the whole outlook changes.

Tip 9: Target Your Products Through Product Targeting Ads

This advanced Amazon PPC strategy is a pretty ingenious way to get exposure for your products on Amazon. We have all heard of this beta feature called Product Targeting ads. In case you are not aware of it, this option allows you to target customers by specific products and categories. Think Product Display Ads but with more control. You can target specific ASINs and your ads will be displayed on their product pages.

Now, here is how you can use this to your advantage:

• Assuming that you have multiple ASINs, pick those products that are struggling to get sales, or have poor visibility within the Amazon search results.
• Create product targeting ads for those underperforming products. Target your top ASINs – the products that are bringing you the highest traffic and conversions. Now, the ads for your low-sales products will be displayed on the pages of your top-performing ASINs.

Tip 10: Target the Products that Show up in Google Ads

This strategy is an extension of the previous one. In addition to targeting your products through product targeting, you should also use this method to get prime real estate in your top competitors’ listings; listings that show up on Google Ads, and Facebook ads, and are promoted by influencers on Instagram, YouTube, et cetera.

What you are doing here is capitalizing on the visibility of your competitors. They have already done the heavy legwork to bring their listings a lot of exposure. People are aware of their brand in the market. Now, all you have to do is place your products’ ads on those pages and piggyback on their sales.

Final Thoughts

Phew! That was a lot of information to process, but thankfully, you now have a detailed guide to help you with your advanced Amazon PPC strategies for 2024. As you can see, there is a lot of trial and error here but with some serious effort, you will be well on your way to reaching the top of Amazon search results and making fabulous sales!