Amazon Sponsored Ads allows you to promote your products so they appear in various positions across Amazon’s search, based on conversion and bid. There are 2 options available with Sponsored Ads,
- Automatic – this is where Amazon decides where to display your products based on the content on your product page and the customer’s search term.
- Manual – this is where you decide which keywords you want to bid on.
More often than not, Manual Ads is the prefered targeting option as the ACoS is generally better and easier to manage. Plus, Manual Ads are far more targeted, due to the fact you choose the keywords to target. Although, we have seen both Manual and Automatic to work well, depending on the client and product.
As an Amazon specialist agency, we have developed our own process-driven approach to handle all Amazon Advertising, and we apply the standard rule to start with Automated Campaigns. This allows us to harvest keywords that convert to then create Manual Targeted Ads with, and this also gives us a list of negative keywords we can add to campaigns to avoid overspend and wastage.
We have noticed recently, that Amazon has started telling us how it targets Automatic Ads. Although, we are not seeing this in all accounts so this must be a gradual roll out.
- Close Match – shows your products when a search query is closely related to your product,
- Loose Match – shows your products when a search query is loosely related to your product,
- Substitute Match – shows your products to the shoppers who viewed the detailed page of products that are similar to you,
- Complements Match – shows your products to the shoppers who viewed the detailed page of products that complement your product.
These options are great and now means we can create campaigns targeting exact queries, or competing/complementary products you’d like to target.
- Close Match – focuses on conversion
- Loose Match – focuses on increasing brand awareness
- Substitute Match – focuses on targeting customers who are aware of your competing products
- Complements Match – focuses on upsell
In the above example of a Spanish Amazon Account, we can see the close match has generated profitable sales at a low ACoS, in comparison to the loose match. As a result of this, the next step would be to create a separate ad group, targeting just close match Automatic Ads with a higher budget so we can ensure increased sales from profitable keywords.
We would still keep a loose match campaign, alongside others to generate additional sales but with a limited budget to ensure no silly overspend.
Amazon has been stepping up its advertising platform since a change earlier this year, and it is changing pretty quickly. Often it can be hard to keep up with all the changes, however, we provide managed Amazon Advertising services, to help with this, at an affordable monthly cost and unlike larger agencies, we don’t hold you in contracts.
To discuss your Amazon advertising growth schedule a call today
