In our book, Amazon marketing is any marketing initiative that drives sales on any of your Amazon stores around the world. These initiatives can be on Amazon, on an Amazon-owned store, or off Amazon entirely.
Emplicit looks at the entire picture when evaluating your Amazon sales, meaning we want to increase them as a percentage of your total sales, such as sales from your ecommerce website.
Running paid ads can get you in the coveted top eight ‘slots’ on Amazon’s search results page. That way, your competition doesn’t even have the chance to scroll through your competitors’ listings. The higher you rank, the more your Amazon ROI will improve.
The three on-Amazon channels typically perform the heavy lifting for any seller’s ecommerce campaign. They’re our starting point for all our Amazon sellers. We like to establish solid ROIs on a combination of these channels before expanding our clients’ Amazon marketing activities:
PPC ads for individual products on shopping results and product detail pages to shoppers actively searching or viewing similar products.
PPC ‘headline’ ads appear in shopping results based on keywords and feature a custom headline, image, logo, and 3 products.
Display ads in a range of locations targeted based on audience shopping interests and behavior. Use different ad creative based on location.
In addition to supporting on-Amazon Sponsored Display Ads, Amazon’s demand side platform (DSP) offers access to a vast range of additional Amazon-owned and non-owned channels, including:
Amazon Music: Audio ads on the popular music streaming service via Alexa-enabled devices included for Prime customers.
Over-The-Top (OTT): Video ads on popular Amazon video streaming apps, streaming devices, smart TVs, and gaming consoles.
Other Amazon-Owned Web Properties: Websites such as IMDB, Twitch, Woot, and Zappos.
Third-Party Websites: Like any DSP, you can run ‘programmatic’ display ads to target websites related to your category or popular websites to reach the masses with first-party data on purchases and preferences.
Gone are the days when a well-built Amazon-only campaign would boost sales on its own.
It would be best to incorporate off-Amazon channels such as Google Shopping Ads, Google Search, and social media. Through Amazon’s DSP, Emplicit retargets consumers who viewed your Amazon listings but didn’t convert and other customers with relevant purchase and browsing behavior.
Consumers know Prime offers rapid and free delivery for products on Amazon. Since it’s on Amazon, the price will be about the lowest consumers can find. As a result, using other off-Amazon channels allows us to find prospective customers searching for products and are more likely to convert after seeing your product sold on Amazon.
Emplicit is careful not to cannibalize your DTC sales while including Amazon-specific searches and testing destinations for channels like Google Shopping because we care about the big picture.
Tracking ROI for Amazon activity and other Amazon channels via Amazon’s DSP is automatic, but tracking off-Amazon activity is more challenging.
Emplicit utilizes Amazon Attribution, a relatively new tool for brand-registered sellers to measure their off-Amazon marketing efforts. This tool helps us decide which off-Amazon campaigns should drive your customers to Amazon and which should drive them to your ecommerce website.
Being a successful Amazon seller means knowing what your customers care about and what motivates them. We help you learn these by studying their:
Amazon PPC ads have relatively few levers compared to Google PPC ads, which are essentially just keywords and bids. However, things can still get complex.
Adding, tweaking, and removing keywords never ends. It’s how we continue climbing your listing(s) up the ranks. We also monitor product performance. You’ll know if we think you should dial up or down on a particular product or stop marketing it altogether.
But the ongoing optimization doesn’t stop there. We pay close attention to bid strategies (manually managed fixed, down-only automated, and up-and-down automated bids) and daily limits to track demand so we can adjust bids to maximize traffic and increase conversions.
Your campaigns will receive daily attention. Formal monthly reporting will tell you about the optimizing decisions we make on the go every month. These reports will also include sales reports. ACoS and TACoS are two of our KPIs, but the most important we look at is ROI using CoG/margin data because our goal is to maximize your profitability.
