There are more than 500 million products on Amazon.com. Sellers can have a great product, that is properly set up, priced correctly, and full of rich details on the product page and still struggle with converting sales. With the fierce competition among thousands of sellers, getting your product in front of the customer and clicked on is--truly--half the battle. Ensuring your product is in the first few pages of search results by leveraging keywords is important, and can be a particular challenge for new products not meeting sales rank or brands that are not as well-known.
To combat this problem, sellers can take advantage of Amazon Advertising. In the past, you may have heard of Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), Amazon Media Group (AMG), and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), but as of September 5, 2018, Amazon announced a unified platform, “To build a comprehensive portfolio of advertising products and tools, innovating on behalf of advertisers to meet their varied needs, while helping our customers discover new brands and products.”
What is Amazon Advertising?
Amazon Advertising encompasses sponsored ads, display ads, video ads and brand stores. Sponsored ads include Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (which were previously known as Headline Search Ads). These are of particular interest to sellers and vendors.
These types of ads increase discoverability and let you reach customers as they search and discover. Once set up, the ads appear on search results pages and product pages, when relevant, and direct customers to your brand store and products. Setting these up requires them to be tied to keywords, which you bid on.
A Sponsored Brand ad is a large banner ad that links to a brand store or landing page. A Sponsored Product ad clicks through directly to a product. Setting up both of these types of ads requires you to select the products you want to focus on, set a budget, and choose the keywords you want to target. Once the ads are set up, you pay only for performance in terms of cost per click. You are also able to monitor your performance and see suggestions for potential new keywords and bids.
To see examples and explore your options, visit Amazon Advertising.
What are the benefits?
Because these types of ads feature so prominently in search real estate and are very targeted, they can be highly successful in determining which sellers or vendors convert from their listings. Despite coming at a cost and requiring administrative time to manage, you will miss out to competitors by not making an investment.
1. Traffic boost: Increased traffic to your products or brand is the main benefit of running ads. Appearing high in search results ensures you have access to the highest volume of customers.
2. Awareness: Even without making a sale or receiving a click, customers see your products and brand, allowing you to create brand awareness by repeatedly appearing in search results.
3. Conversion: Increased traffic, views, and awareness all results in increased conversion. Of course, your pages and products should be fully optimized for the best customer experience and highest levels of conversion.
4. Sales rankings: Once a product starts converting, it will organically move up the ranking in search. The more brand awareness and conversion of products, the better your performance in search ranking. Search ranking algorithms are affected most by sales performance, so by increasing performance, your products will naturally become more visible.
5. Beat the competition: When you factor in all of these benefits, they add up to an edge over your competition. Running ads and driving traffic could determine your success or failure and the amount of market share you receive, even if you are a smaller brand competing against a larger or more well-known brand.
Because the competition on Amazon is fierce, it’s important you investigate and use every lever available to influence sales. When managed well, Amazon Advertising is an easy and surefire way to increase visibility, ranking, and ultimately, sales.
Learn more about Amazon Advertising, including FAQs and information about signing up. For help setting up and managing sponsored ads, contact eCommerce Nurse.
