In 2021, Amazon’s global ad revenue reached 31 billion U.S dollars. That’s the amount of money specifically being spent on Amazon’s advertising platform, Amazon Ads. 

Amazon’s advertising power is growing and it is predicted that, by 2023, Amazon ad revenues will account for 14.6% of the market. 

Amazon Advertising (or Amazon PPC) is a great platform if you’re an ecommerce business and you want more customers to see your product listing. You can learn more about what Amazon PPC is and how it can help your business by reading our guide.  

In this guide, we’ll have a look at how you can optimise your Amazon advertising campaigns to get the most from them. 

What are Amazon ads? 

Amazon Ads are the ads that appear on Amazon’s results pages when you search for a product. Amazon’s ads are usually denoted with the word sponsored. They are also known as sponsored ads and are paid mainly to third party sellers. You can see an example of a sponsored ad in the image below. 

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The amount you pay on Amazon for each click will be based on your bid for that particular keyword. There will be a number of sellers bidding on the same keywords so they can build visibility and generate more sales. The amount of competition for your keywords will have an impact on the amount you will need to pay. 

Amazon Advertising works in the same way as Google Advertising  - a bidding system that works like an auction. The seller who bids the most on a keyword will be pushed to position one at the top of the first page of the search results. 

Amazon Ads are shown all over the platform and will often appear on detailed product pages as well as the search results for a particular product. This means that when a customer searches for a related keyword to your products, your products are more likely to show. 

How to optimise your Amazon PPC campaigns 

As with any digital marketing campaign or strategy, it's important for it to be correctly optimised so you can get the best return on your investment and generate a good number of sales. 

There are thousands of sellers in the market so it can be difficult to know where to start to make your products stand out from the crowd. Here are some Amazon PPC ads tricks and tips to help you optimise your campaigns to get the most from them. 

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1. Set up a structured ad campaign 

If you have already used Google Ads, you should already know how to structure your ad campaigns properly. You can use this knowledge to set up ad groups and campaigns on Amazon. 

We recommend creating individual campaigns for every primary product category and then, under each campaign, create a specific ad group. 

So, your campaigns might be as follows: 

• Women’s shoes 
• Women’s clothing 
• Women’s sunglasses 

Under each campaign, you will need to create ad groups to reflect specific categories within them. For example, under women’s shoes, you might have ad groups for women’s trainers, women’s slippers, women’s court shoes. Then you’ll need to conduct keyword research to find the words customers are using to find each of those products. 

A proper account structure ensures that your ads are related but it can also help to save money and increase the ROI of your campaigns. There are other ways to structure your campaigns too. The campaign structure should just provide a set of characteristics that follow one or more of the patterns below: 

• Product category (women’s shoes, cameras, handbags) 
• Brand (Nike, Adidas, Puma) 
• Top sellers (your products that pull in the most sales) 

It's important to be consistent with the method you choose. If you change the structure, it could lead to repeat ads. For example, creating one campaign by brand and another by category, might result in the same products appearing in multiple campaigns. 

2. Optimise listings to ensure ads are shown for all relevant search queries 

Just like Google, Amazon likes to know that the ads being shown on the site are the most relevant to their customers. This means that your ads will only be shown for relevant keywords when you have included the keywords in the product listing text too (title, attributes, product description). 

3. Get rid of unwanted search queries to reduce costs 

Amazon Ads are not always shown for the exact search terms that you bid on. The search queries can vary from the keywords you have entered according to the match type you set for your ads. 

To prevent wasting your budget, you have two options: 

1. Set keyword match types 
2. Set negative keywords 

Let’s have a look at keyword match types first. There are three match types:

• Broad match - entering broad match keywords means that a sponsored product ad will be displayed if the search query contains all of the word that are part of a keyword. The order of the words doesn’t matter and can also include spelling variations, misspellings and synonyms. 
• Phrase match - this means your ad will appear when the search query includes the keywords entered in the order you provide them in. Close variations are also considered to be matches. 
• Exact match - your ad can only appear when a search query matches exactly the keyword you provide. Plural and singular forms will also be considered an exact match. 

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Negative keywords 

As with Google Ads, when you run Amazon Ads, you can add negative keywords to your campaigns. This means that your ads will not appear for queries containing those keywords. You can choose from two negative keyword matches: 

• Negative exact match - your sponsored product ad will only be excluded if the search query is an exact match for the negative keyword you choose. 
• Negative phrase match - your ads will be excluded if the search query contains your negative keyword as part of the phrase or in its entirety. 

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4. Create a great ad 

The way your ad looks and the way it reads can have an impact on your campaign so it’s important to create an ad that’s as attractive as possible nad makes your audience want to engage with it. 

A good ad should be: 

• Accurate and free of mistakes 
• Clear on what the product is 
• Creative and unique 

When it comes to the text of the ad, you need to stand out from the rest of the ads out there. You’re competing with a huge number of other brands so creating an ad that stands out is essential. You should also let customers know if you’re running a sale or a promotion then make sure they know and use words to create urgency. 

5. Use high quality images

High quality images will help to make your ad more attractive. This also goes for the product listing you’re advertising too. Customers are more likely to engage with and buy from a brand that uses high quality images clearly displaying the product they’re buying than from a brand that includes no images or very low quality images. 

You have the option to upload seven to nine images for each product listing so make the most of the space to help increase sales. 

6. Track spend based on product performance 

For many brands, there will be different products in an ad group that share the same keywords. Over time, as you run your campaigns, you’ll be able to see which products are your best sellers within your ad groups. 

One of the best ways to optimise your Amazon Ads is to target the maximum number of sales within an ad group. You can do this by removing products with poor performance from your ad groups. This will allow you to concentrate on impressions and clicks for those products you can convert clicks into purchases and avoid wasting budget on products that offer low conversion rates. 

7. Test ads to learn more about what works and what doesn’t 

As with any digital marketing strategy, it can take time to tweak your campaigns to learn more about what works well and what doesn’t. Amazon Ads are the same. It can take time to gather results to learn more about which products and ads are driving the best ROI. 

Play around with different ad groups to find out more about what works for your brand in terms of generating sales. Once you find a winning formula, you can roll it out across all of your ad groups to get the best ROI. 

If you’d like to know more or would like monthly digital marketing insights delivered to your inbox, please sign up to our newsletter. 

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