What is Amazon PPC advertising?      

PPC ad is a model of internet advertising created to attract and drive traffic to the landing page; advertisers pay a fee for each click they get to a publisher.

There are three types of PPC ad campaigns on Amazon, and each type has a different purpose and structure:

• Sponsored Products (SP) is a type of advertising that promotes single products on Amazon search result pages and product detail pages. SP has a high conversion rate. Sellers can make manual or automatic SP campaigns.

• Sponsored Brands (SB) is a type of advertising that can include up to three brand products in one ad or a video of one product (Sponsored Brands Video). SB appears across the Amazon search result page.

• Sponsored Display (SD) is a type of advertising that displays one product in the ad and reaches the relevant audience on various Amazon and external website pages.

To have a detailed overview of ad campaigns performance, collect data and monitor vital metrics, Amazon created the Amazon Ad Console so that sellers can have all the important information about ads in one place.

Each specific ad type has certain similarities and differences with other PPC ads. That’s why it’s essential to understand their purpose and peculiarities. So let’s find out the vital points you need to know before promoting your products on Amazon.

PPC Ads’ Purposes

Amazon PPC advertising is a highly effective marketing tool to reach potential customers on and off Amazon.

Amazon beginners often prefer to launch all advertising types as they need to maximize the reached audience they plan to introduce their products to. However, not every budget allows having many PPC campaigns, so advertisers can choose an affordable strategy for the main aim right now.

Sponsored Products are the most popular ads on Amazon. Their work is to increase the product’s conversion rate and discoverability. Because SP ads show up on so many pages on Amazon, it’s hard to miss them, and because one of the placements is at the top of the search result page, they integrate into the organic results. SP boosts sales and attracts traffic to the product detail page.

Sponsored Brands are the ads made to develop brand awareness. SB ad promotes custom headline, logo, and brand products, including their images or a product in case of video advertising. It also improves the brand’s profitability. SB video is a great tool to feature the product in a lifestyle situation to display its functions or/and where and when it can be used. This function enhances the ad viewers’ interest in the product as well.

Sponsored Display ads reach the most relevant customers because of their targeting type. Customers that viewed your listing in the last 30 days, similar products, or categories are reminded or informed about your product on different Amazon pages or third-party websites and apps.

Another big advantage of PPC advertising is that it increases organic ranking on Amazon.

When the purposes of the ad types are more or less clear, there is still a lot to learn about the campaign’s structure.

The Targeting Differences    

PPC ads don’t have the same kinds of targeting. The way you target your ad can determine the audience you reach and where you reach it.

For instance, Sponsored Product campaigns are divided into automatic and manual targeting campaigns. With automatic targeting, Amazon chooses keywords and bids instead of the seller. It’s incredibly useful for keywords experiments, especially for sellers that just started advertising on Amazon. Amazon harvests relevant keywords and collects important data that sellers can use later in the manual campaigns. However, there is a lack of control over keywords and bids what can be wasteful in terms of budget.

On the other hand, there are manual campaigns. Those campaigns give much more control to the sellers. They can choose the keywords and adjust bids. Nevertheless, because advertisers need to know which keywords perform the best and which ones are the “main” keywords that drive the most traffic, it’s essential to collect your data first. That’s why the recommendation is to launch automatic campaigns first, see which keywords have the best results, and then start manual campaigns.

Sponsored Brand campaigns are keyword  and product targeted. If you want to target your ads to the search terms the customers look for the products, this type of targeting is right for you. If you want to target your ads to products similar to yours, categories, and brands―this is the right choice. 

Sponsored Display campaigns have three targeting types: product targeting, views remarketing, and audience interests. While product targeting is similar to the one in SB, views remarketing and audience interests are new in our article. Views remarketing helps reach customers who viewed your product detail page or similar product in the last 30 days but didn’t purchase it. Audience interests target the customers that looked for or visited product pages of a specific interest segment over the previous 90 days.

Amazon FBA Keyword Research    

Keyword targeting deserves special attention because of its intricate structure. Keywords are also the core of many ad campaigns. Without it, the whole construction wouldn’t exist. Before advertisers target keywords to their ads, they need to find keywords first. To be precise, to harvest them.

Keyword Research is extremely time-consuming. Sellers can leave this work to the paid keyword research tools or do it themselves. Either way, advertisers need to remember that they need medium competition keywords with high search volume―those won’t waste all your budget but maximize the driven traffic.

The easiest way to start keyword research is to type in the name or type of your product in the Amazon search bar, and it will show many combinations of how customers look for a product similar to yours.

Keyword targeting in PPC advertising is possible only in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.

Amazon FBA Listing Optimization    

PPC advertising has a significant influence on the sales and profit of the seller. Nevertheless, before you start advertising, it’s crucial to ensure that your listing is fully optimized.

The optimization includes:

• adding backend keywords (which buyers don’t see, but Amazon does) and frontend keywords to the product title, bullet points, and description
• uploading high-quality image that meets all Amazon requirement
• providing relevant information of the product
• taking care of product reviews (the base of it is to make sure that customers have the best experience)
• answering the customers’ questions in the Question & Answer section

The mentioned optimizations are important for customer satisfaction and Amazon Algorithm recognition.

Conclusion

All in all, Amazon PPC Advertising isn’t only about product discoverability or brand awareness. It’s also about reminding customers who were already interested once in the product or a similar one about your product when they search through Amazon or third-party websites. Also, PPC ads are about reaching new audiences and increasing profitability.

The most important thing to remember is that a poor PPC structure can waste your budget, but the right one can boost your profit. So, don’t be scared to invest in PPC advertising to see the new horizons of Amazon possibilities.