Photo: Getty Images/Adrian Hancu
When you hear the word “Amazon,” you may automatically think “success.” With such a strong word association, you may also think that using an Amazon marketing campaign guarantees reaching your desired goals. However, every company and product is different. You still need to put a lot of thought into your Amazon marketing campaign before you see the results you want.
While there are various types of marketing campaigns you can use through Amazon, it helps to know the popular ones to try that may give your campaign the boost it needs to get started.
Sponsored Product Advertisements
If you are a regular Amazon shopper, you’ve likely noticed that sponsored products often appear at the top of the page when you search for specific items. These products are paid advertisements Amazon promotes by using keyword targeting, and they appear in the search results.
Sponsored product ads do well when you have a high-quality product, good reviews, and professional-quality photos. These elements have been proven to deliver high ROI and to improve shoppers’ perceptions of your product.
A disadvantage of using Amazon’s sponsored product ads, according to Born2Invest, is you can only use broad keywords. You can’t use specific keywords to help shoppers find your product. Whether or not shoppers come across your product in their search results depends on the broad keywords they use. This can be particularly challenging if yours is one of many sponsored product ads in similar categories.
Display Ads
You can work around the keyword issue by using product display ads, which allow you to pick where you want your products displayed. For example, if your product is a laptop charger, you can have it displayed on the detail page of a high-quality laptop.
Instead of choosing keywords, when you’re creating your display ad, you search and select products that are relevant or somehow related to the product in the display ad. A particular advantage of this setup is you can directly target products your competition also sells on Amazon. This means your product can display on the detail page of your competitor’s item. It helps to know the ASINs or UPCs of your competitor’s product so you can easily search for them when choosing relevant products.
Another perk of display ads is you receive a report for the campaign. You’ll also get a good ROI. However, as Born2Invest points out, it’s more challenging to identify which products the ROI comes from and which products are underperforming.
Keep in mind, however, that the ROI for display ads, although decent, typically falls short compared to that of sponsored products and headline search ads.
Headline Search Ads
You may recognize these as the products that appear in banner form above search results. You can use headline search ads to direct shoppers to any Amazon page. These ads typically run for 48 hours, making them ideal for campaigns with time constraints.
The biggest concern for headline search ads is DPV (detail page view). If shoppers are directed to the right page after selecting your ad, Born2Invest says yours DPV click ratio will be one or above. If your DPV drops below 100, shoppers are likely finding your page irrelevant to what they are looking for. You want to keep shoppers engaged and interested in your products so direct them to a page they’re going to consider important or useful.
As is the case with any campaign, you want to test out the various Amazon campaign types to see what works best for your product. You may find that one type works great for a while, but then starts to dwindle, meaning you should shake things up and try out a different type. Either way, knowledge is power, so now that you know about the three most popular ways to advertise on Amazon, it’s time to get to work.
