Amazon advertising offers endless opportunities, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Every market, niche, and product is unique. To succeed, you need to apply universal best practices that help you reach customers with maximum efficiency. Segmenting campaigns, conducting thorough keyword and market research, and using data-driven strategies are essential to optimizing performance. By following these steps, you can effectively navigate the complexities of Amazon advertising and position your products for success.
Optimize Your Campaigns With Strategic Segmentation
Strategic campaign segmentation by product, targeting types, and objectives is a pivotal step in your advertising journey. This offers a strategic overview and organization of your account and lays the groundwork for future optimization and expansion. Remember, a well-planned strategy is half the battle won. Check out this guide if you are starting with advertising.
The first thing to do is decide if you will be doing single- or multi-product campaigns by grouping them by similarities or variations. A good practice is having single-product campaigns, as they allow for more straightforward navigation and tracking of investments in advertising by product. This means you always go for top-selling products or variations under one parent.
Targeting type segmentation is multi-level: by match type and branded vs. non-branded. Match types for keywords are broad, phrase, and exact, while match types for products are category, exact, and expanded product targeting. That can be segmented further into brand defense, non-brand category penetration, and competitor attack strategies.
Last, segmenting campaigns by objective means categorizing them by what you want to achieve with them: direct sales (profitability), brand awareness, conquesting, ranking, and defensive. These objectives are interlinked with previous segmentation categories, and all work together to craft the proper campaign structure for your needs.
On the image below, you can see how we use campaign names and portfolios and make them work together, so we have full control over our strategies and campaigns types. Most of the campaigns are featuring one product, some have different naming convention to separate new strategies we are implementing, and all single-product campaigns use product name and ASIN, for easier search and reporting.
Conduct Thorough Keyword and Market Research Before Launching Campaigns
Proper research and use of tools is mandatory as it gives you an overview of your niche and competitors. It helps identify the highest volume of broad keywords, underutilized relevant keywords, or long-tail keywords with lower search volume but high purchase intent. The same goes for competitors; it gives you insight into prices, reviews, and ratings, which you can use to craft conquesting strategies, like targeting products with lower ratings or higher prices. Or if you are bold enough to go after top competitors.
Go to Amazon.com and utillize tools like Helium10 or DataDive to dig into your niche and competitors. Analyze their performance and keywords that will help guide your way through Amazon and taking the piece of the market.
Sponsored Product automatic campaigns are a good starting point for letting the Amazon A9 algorithm show your product in front of customers’ eyes for relevant terms and products. Still, in addition to this campaign type, good practice is to start with broader targeting and build your performance campaigns with the exact type to drive sales and increase market share.
For keyword campaigns, starting with broad and phrase matches, and for product campaigns, starting with category and expanded product targeting are good options if you don’t mind running at higher ACOS for the first month or two. It will come down with time; awareness, and the long-term audiences you build with them are priceless.
Optimize Regularly With Bid Adjustments and Keyword Harvesting
Once your campaigns are set up, regular weekly optimizations are crucial for long-term success. Start by checking and adjusting your bids one to two times per week to ensure your campaigns stay competitive and efficient. Analyze which keywords and products are performing well and increase bids on top-performing ones while reducing bids on underperforming terms. This fine-tuning helps control your advertising spend and maximizes return on investment. You can do this in the “Targeting tab’ in the advertising console, or in any third-party software you want to use. Check out this article, you can find some applicable tips for you too!
In addition to bid adjustments, you should also engage in keyword harvesting. This involves identifying new, high-performing keywords from your automatic, broad, phrase, and category targeting campaigns and adding them to exact match campaigns to drive more precise targeting. As you discover successful keywords, refine your targeting by negating those same terms in your research campaigns to make space for new keyword opportunities to harvest.
Lastly, negative targeting should be incorporated by excluding irrelevant terms or products with high click rates but no conversions. Focusing your budget on keywords that are more likely to generate sales will significantly improve your campaign efficiency. You can do that by analyzing Search Term Report in section called ‘Sponsored ads Reports’ in your advertising console.
Data-Driven Decisions and Effective Budget Management
Once your campaigns are live, it’s essential to let them run for at least a week before making any optimizations. This initial period allows you to gather valuable data and make informed decisions based on actual performance. Data-driven decisions are key to understanding which targeting strategies and ad types are working best for your specific goals.
Regularly monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) to identify patterns and areas for improvement. Testing is a crucial part of this process—what works for one campaign may not work for another. Keep experimenting with different targeting types, keyword match types, and ad formats until you find the right combination for your product.
Budget management is equally important. Check your campaign budgets frequently to ensure they run throughout the day. If you notice certain campaigns are underperforming, consider reallocating the budget to top-performing campaigns to maximize results. Branded campaigns typically yield better sales and lower advertising cost of sales (ACOS), but don’t overlook non-branded campaigns. For these, track secondary KPIs like impressions, new-to-brand sales, and new-to-brand orders to ensure you’re building long-term brand awareness and attracting new customers.
There is the tab in your advertising console named “Budget’ where you can get the overview of your Sponsored product campaigns and if they are staying within budgets.
Leverage a Full Mix of Amazon Campaign Types for Maximum Impact
We have different campaign types at our disposal: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Displays, and, recently, sponsored TV campaigns nested under the advertising console.
Each type has its specifics, and they should all work together with their campaign goals—aiming for the final advertising goal of supporting the account’s growth. Use Sponsored Products to show your products on the search results page or below the fold on competitors’ pages or your own pages to defend ad placements. Sponsored Brands are a great way to get creative and showcase your brand values through videos, lifestyle images, and catchy headlines. They appear at the top or middle of search results pages and take prominent places to catch customers’ attention. Sponsored Display ads show on various placements across Amazon, can also use images or videos, and, most importantly, on product detail pages, they most often show above the fold. Hence, those play an essential role in competitor attack strategies.
Not long ago, Amazon introduced Sponsored TV campaigns inside the ads console. This is a self-service advertising solution for advertisers, and it is an excellent opportunity to reach customers on streaming services like Freevee and Twitch. It works best for brand awareness.
Read here more about the importance of the full funnel marketing on Amazon and how to implement it!
Bonus Tip: Maximize Performance by Adjusting Bids for Ad Placements
Remember to adjust campaigns’ bids by placements. Often underutilized, this option gives you control over which placements you show up the most. For Sponsored Products, we have top of the search, rest of the search, and product pages. For Sponsored Brands, we can either increase or decrease bids for ‘placements not at the top of the search’. All of this can be found in each campaign’s settings and adjusted based on the data gathered.
You can also mix-match these with your own specific strategies. For example, if you conduct conquesting campaigns and attack competitors’ product detail pages, you can increase bid percentage for product placements. On the other hand, for Sponsored Brands Product Collection or Store Spotlight ads, you can decrease bids for ‘placements not at the top of search’ and make sure all your ad dollars are going to top of search and building brand awareness.
You can find these options on the image above, when you go to any Sponsored Product campaign and go to tab ‘Placement’. There is also similar option for Sponsored Brand campaigns, where you can adjust placements in the similar manner.
Conclusion
Start by defining clear goals and build your campaigns with a strategic approach to ensure long-term success. By following this guide and thoroughly understanding your products, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your advertising efforts, drive sales, and maximize ROI. Remember, success in Amazon advertising is an ongoing process of refinement, testing, and learning. If you’re still facing challenges or want to take your campaigns to the next level, our team of experts is here to help you craft tailored strategies that align with your business goals. Don’t hesitate to reach out—we’re ready to assist you in achieving exceptional results!
If you have additional questions or want us to help you on your Amazon journey, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the BellaVix Team.
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