With Amazon getting more and more competitive each year and the number of brands selling on Amazon increasing, it can become more difficult to stand out from the crowd and get your brand and your products in front of potential customers. While it’s important to employ different tactics to increase customer loyalty and get repeat purchases which is cost effective in the long-term, it’s also important to take full advantage of the high traffic of customers that Amazon has every day to win new customers that can then become loyal customers.
An important part of your strategy to obtain new customers will be PPC advertising. Advertising remains crucial for both new and established sellers and vendors on Amazon to remain competitive and to have continued growth. Below we look at the numerous ways you can use PPC to earn sales from new customers.
Unbranded Keywords
While it’s important to have some of your ad spend being spent on branded keywords (that’s keywords that include your brand name) as a means of preventing competitors from showing when a customer searches for your brand, this is going to do little for gaining new customers. According to research, approximately 78% of searches on Amazon.com are unbranded, therefore, you’ll want to ensure that you contribute a large percentage of your ads budget to unbranded targeting to increase your presence on Amazon and gain those valable, new-to-brand customers.
The first important step is keyword research to pick out those keywords that you will be targeting in your campaigns. Using a keyword research software tool such as Helium10 will provide metrics such as monthly search volume which will help you identify how many people search for that keyword. It will be important to include relevant keywords with a high search volume in your new unbranded ad campaigns as keywords with a high search volume will give you the best chance of gaining sales from new customers.
Something else you can do is run an auto campaign to use Amazon’s algorithm to help you spot keywords that can generate sales and at an acceptable ACoS/ROAS to add to your manual campaign.
Competitor Targeting
As well as unbranded targeting, targeting your competitors is going to be effective for increasing brand awareness, stealing sales from those competitors and gaining new customers for your brand. The two ways to do this are by targeting competitor keywords and the other is by targeting competitor ASINs/products (also known as PAT targeting).
Competitor keywords are any keywords that feature the name of your competitors. Doing this means that your ad for your product(s) will appear in search results as an option for the customer even when they are searching for another brand. This will be especially beneficial when you have a lot of reviews with a good rating on the product listing and you are also competitively priced versus the brand(s) you are targeting or if you are running a promotion on the product. Before creating a campaign to target competitor keywords it would be beneficial to create a list of the competitors that you want to target. It’s important to do some research on Amazon to ensure you include all the top brands on Amazon. It’s also a good idea to include any competitors in your campaign even if they don’t sell on Amazon as there’s still a good chance that people may go onto Amazon and search for them, especially if they are a well known brand in your industry.
The other method of competitor targeting to win over new customers to your brand is targeting their ASINs/products. This means that in the campaign you will be targeting ASINs rather than keywords. Therefore, your ads will show to customers when they are on the product detail pages of the ASINs you are targeting whereas with the competitor keywords, the ads show in the search results. This approach means you are targeting potential new customers on numerous pages when they are looking at competitors. Like competitor keywords, it’s important to do research before setting the campaign up to identify the relevant ASINs that will have high traffic. Looking at the Bestsellers rank for your product’s category on Amazon is usually a good place to start as well as looking at which products show first organically in search results for top unbranded keywords.
Bidding & Budget Strategies
A vital part of using PPC on Amazon to target new customers is ensuring that your PPC budgets and your bidding on keywords and ASIN targets are competitive. This means having enough budgets to allow your campaigns to remain active for the entire day and not run out of budget during the day. For keyword bids, it means having a high enough bid to be competitive to get enough impressions to drive sales. While keyword bids aren’t the only factor Amazon considers when choosing which products feature top of search for sponsored results, it is one consideration and therefore something you need to consider. A good starting place is to ensure keyword bids meet Amazon’s suggested bid when adding the keywords and you can then adjust once you have some data.
In Campaign settings you can change your bidding strategy. If you want to be more aggressive in using the campaign to target new customers you can make changes here. For example, you could select ‘Dynamic bids - up and down’ so Amazon will automatically increase bids on keywords at times they identify where ads are more likely to convert. You can also increase your bids by placement. If you are looking to be more proactive in getting new customers and less focused on ACoS or already performing at a healthy ACoS, it would be a good idea to increase bids for top of search to get more ads in the premium placement and therefore get in front of more potential new customers.
Add a Budget Rule if you aren’t limited by budget or are able to increase the budget and want to be more aggressive in using the campaign to acquire new customers. You can do this for specific events such as Prime Day, Black Friday or seasonal events such as Mother or Father’s Day or you can schedule budget changes based on performance, for example, if ROAS or ACoS reaches a certain threshold that you enter, then you can increase your budget by a set percentage.
Sponsored Brand & Sponsored Brand Video
Outside of Sponsored Products ads, Sponsored Brands ads are something you should look at implementing into your Amazon advertising strategy if you are heavily focused on gaining new customers. Sponsored Brands ads require you to use lifestyle images or videos in your ad to showcase your product(s). This means you can be more creative with how you showcase your products to potential customers compared to Sponsored Products ads. Using a video in your Sponsored Brands ad or doing a Sponsored Brand Video campaign means your ad can be more informative for customers as well.
As Sponsored Brands ads are about driving traffic to your brand store as well as showcasing some of your products, they are a great chance to show your entire range of products as well as educating customers on your brand. Another big benefit to Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands videos when it comes to using advertising to acquire new customers is that New to Brand metrics are provided with these ad types whereas they aren’t provided with Sponsored Products ads. Amazon defines new to brand orders as ‘The number of first-time orders for products within the brand over a one-year period.’ This means you can track how many orders from the campaign were new to brand and what percentage of the orders were from first time customers in the past year.
Sponsored Display Ads
Sponsored Display (SD) ads are more upper funnel than Sponsored Products and Brands ads. This means they are more about increasing brand awareness. SD ads are the only of the Amazon sponsored ad types that can appear off Amazon as well as on Amazon. This means they can be beneficial for targeting potential customers who weren’t necessarily already on Amazon and thinking about purchasing.
You can also retarget people who viewed your product on Amazon previously but didn’t purchase and SD ads are another way to target your competitor’s product pages on Amazon so there are different ways to use SD ads to get new customers for your brand on Amazon. SD ads are also the only sponsored ad type where you can use CPM (cost per thousand impressions) bidding rather than CPC (cost per click). This means you pay for every thousand impressions rather than everytime someone clicks the ad. This bidding strategy allows you to get more impressions and get in front of more people who could be new customers.
There are a number of ways to use Amazon advertising to your benefit to drive new customer acquisition. While using Amazon PPC with the primary objective of acquiring new customers may initially reduce your ROAS and increase ACoS as you increase awareness and test different methods for targeting new customers, ROAS and ACoS shouldn’t be the key indicators for success when focusing on new customer acquisition but rather your focus should be on the new to brand metrics discussed and what percentage of your sales are coming from unbranded keywords versus branded keywords. This will help in the long term with improving ROAS and ACoS as you have done the groundwork in gaining new customers that eventually become loyal, repeat purchasers. Using everything discussed throughout this article will make sure you have a full funnel approach to targeting potential new customers at all stages of the Amazon sales funnel from making them aware of your brand and products to telling them your brand story and showcasing your product range to ensuring your product is front and centre of search results when the customer is ready to make a purchase.
