8 Tips to Build a Competitive Amazon Campaign—A Definitive Guide

Amazon has grown exponentially over the years since its conception in 1994. Now with 9.7 million sellers and an average of 197 million customers every month, it's safe to say Amazon's growth will remain unstoppable. For this reason, along with the convenience online shopping brings, many people choose to shop on Amazon.

Being an Amazon seller is a low-risk, high-return venture, but you have to play your cards right. Although every business has a trial-and-error phase, you wouldn't want to lose a lot of time, money, and effort in correcting your mistakes. 

One way for you to grow on Amazon is through marketing campaigns. These campaigns, when done correctly, can reach your target audience and even have them buy your products. However, the problem with most Amazon sellers is they don't know how to run these campaigns properly. Granted, these aren't easy to learn—you have to put in the time and effort to understand them thoroughly.

This article talks about the eight most important things you need to know about running an Amazon marketing campaign correctly. Check them out. 

1. Make sure to optimize your listings properly

Sounds too basic?

And yet sellers sometimes overlook this aspect of running an Amazon marketing strategy correctly. If you're new to running Amazon campaigns, the whole concept relies heavily on product page listings. Your listings should have all the right keywords you want to rank for, as well as descriptions, images, and videos.

The visuals should adhere to Amazon's guidelines, and your reports should be on point. To save time and ensure that everything you've included in your listings is complete and accurate, you can update them with a product database tool.

PIM software such as Plytix can act as a central source of truth for your product information. Here, you can optimize content to support Amazon's A10 algorithm.

Some sellers don't spend much time completing or optimizing their listings because they don't think it's necessary. However, this is the easiest strategy you can do to give your listings a marketing boost. In addition, you can eventually use this as a stepping stone to properly run your campaigns on the platform. 

2. Use sponsored brands to make the brand more visible

Amazon sellers who are not familiar with the different types of advertisements on Amazon may confuse one with the other. You can see three types of ads on the platform: sponsored product, product display ad, and sponsored brand.

If you're a relatively new brand yet somewhat recognizable to consumers, the best ad type you can use is sponsored brands. Say, for example, you ran an Amazon PPC campaign for the keyword “earphones.” The user will use this keyword to look for earphones on Amazon. Since you've targeted this keyword for a sponsored brand post, your product ad will show up on the top portion of the page as a banner, with your logo, headline, and selected products featured in it.  

Doing this does not just boost a product performance on individual listings but you're also putting the spotlight on your brand. Making your brand more visible will translate to higher brand awareness among your target customers. 

3. Run both manual and automated marketing campaigns

While automated ads are easier to set up, especially if it's your first time to run a campaign, you should also run a manual campaign from time to time. 

Automated ads provide much information when you're sourcing keywords that you can target manually. On the other hand, manual campaigns let you define which specific keywords you want to target and place bids for. Since you're in charge of determining the bid per keyword, you can maximize targeting those with higher conversion rates. Most beginners or those who don't have experience running Amazon ads are afraid to do manual campaigns, which is understandable.

To ease you into it, run automated ads first with the general keywords you want to target. See which ones are converting, and use them to run your manual campaigns next. This way, you're using automated campaigns to explore the right keywords while the manual ones maximize their reach and conversion.

4. Optimize your bids

Keyword bidding is not a simple thing to do. First, you have to make the right decisions as to which type of bids you should make. Although ad group default bids help target related keywords, these may hurt you in the long run because there's no guarantee that every keyword you've targeted will work.

As with automated ad campaigns, you may run ad group default bids first and gather data on which keywords are highly converting. Applying this strategy will be helpful if you're working on a tight budget. Just set bids with budget per click.

Automating your bids can save you a lot of time and effort in monitoring the values now and then. However, you need to keep a close eye on your bids and their conversion rates and adjust them accordingly. You'll lose money if you don’t monitor these numbers and keep bidding on low-performing keywords.

5. Use negative keywords sparingly

Since we're on the topic of using keywords, you should also know how you can bid on negative keywords, which are helpful in eliminating wasteful ad spend. 

Let’s take the keyword “headphones,” for example.

If you're selling $10 to $20 headphones, you wouldn't want to target higher-priced headphones such as “Bose headphones.” The user already knows they want to look for headphones from Bose, not from any other brand. Paying for search rankings you're not targeting just because you didn't add negative keywords to your campaigns is an example of useless ad spending. So if you want to target a specific keyword, make sure you add negative keywords in your campaigns. 

However, you should balance out the use of negative keywords. Although adding these to your campaigns may be helpful, using too much of it may affect your searchability. Instead, use these negative phrases and match exactly with the ad group that has terms with low-yield sales. You can also apply this to keywords that are unrelated to your products. 

6. Keep your advertising cost of sales flexible

Advertising cost of sales or ACoS is the ratio of the cost you've spent for advertising and the generated revenue from that amount.

Simply put, it's a measure of your ROI for your ads. 

Naturally, you want to maintain your ACoS at a low level. However, the value will depend on your campaign goals. Your campaigns should also differ on some days and events, such as when you're launching a new Amazon product.

When setting your AcoS goals, the value should be lower for your most popular or best-selling products. Since they are bestsellers, you don’t need to advertise them aggressively. Instead, focus more on newly launched or low-performing products.

7. Budget your daily ad spend wisely

Other pay-per-click algorithms like Google penalize or reward users who bid too low or too high in keywords. On Amazon, this is not the case. They won't reward or penalize you whatever your bid prices are; however if you can maximize your daily ad spend, do so. Make sure you have enough products in your inventory if you've boosted ads for them. Driving traffic toward your listings won't be a problem as long as you have the supply and you keep your ad spend within your budget. 

8. Set up your campaigns correctly

After taking these steps and ensuring everything's set up, you should see to it that your campaigns are running correctly. You can start by grouping products that share similar keywords and running an ad groups campaign to target different keywords. You can choose to target them in three ways: broad, phrase, and exact.

If you're running an automatic campaign, create an ad group for the products that share the exact keywords. Don't forget to add 'Fulfilled by Merchant' and 'Fulfillment by Amazon' on product listings so that your campaigns will still run regardless of which ecommerce fulfillment option is available.

You may need some help getting all of these campaigns up, especially if it's your first time. Although you could read up and watch tutorials online, it would take a lot of time and effort. Besides, even if you could learn how to do it, you might mess up a couple of points. For this reason, you should work with a reputable Amazon account manager. They know how to run these campaigns, and they can give you advice on how you can maximize your campaigns and protect your brand on Amazon. They will also tailor their services based on what you need.

Final thoughts

Selling on Amazon might be the way you can grow your business.

However, since all transactions made on the platform are online, you have to master first how you can make a competitive Amazon marketing campaign. 

Building an effective campaign with quality product information can significantly boost your Amazon sales. You can do this by following the eight tips listed above. Make sure you do these properly so that you’ll get the results you're looking for. Start your campaigns now and see how much traffic and sales you're going to get!