Selling on Amazon is a business like any other. The first step is opening up your shop, setting prices, and figuring out how to balance a healthy profit margin. The next is, of course, to start advertising and growing your store step by step.
There are a plethora of tools on the market that allow you to do that. When it comes to promoting products on Amazon, one of the best ways to do it is to utilize Amazon’s own sponsored products sections. This is an auction-based bidding system, and sellers can compete to have their products featured.
This system is becoming increasingly popular and can genuinely do a lot for you and the business you’re operating. In the remainder of this article, we’ll talk about some tips that can help you make sure that you’ve spent the money wisely and that your campaign will not fail. But first, let’s cover the basics.
When Should You Start Running Paid Listings
The opportunity to grow your store through paid listing can be enticing, especially if you consider that it can rake in massive results in a short period. However, just putting blind faith in it and leaping wouldn’t be advisable for anyone.
The best thing to do is start once your business is on order. All of your listings should be optimized and improved upon. Make sure your shop is top-notch as is, and only then should you consider putting money into sponsored products. Here’s what you should do:
1. Consistency and Grouping
When it comes to paid listings, there’s an innate structure you can usually follow. There’s an option to group the products by category, brand, and top-sellers. Whichever one of these you happen to choose, you must remain consistent and utilize the same structure for your other campaigns. In addition, each category comes with its own set of keywords, so one thing to keep in mind is only to put listings that are suitable for every category.
Every product placed in a particular group must be easily found through the keyword assigned for it. This truly is a simple tip and the starting point for running a successful campaign. No matter the quality of the products you’re shipping out, if the listings and structures aren’t consistent, the chances of failure are much more significant.
2. Optimize the Title
While this is akin to the first tip we gave, it’s equally essential to deserve its segment. After all, a title is the first thing your customers will see and is one of the things that will either draw them to your shop or drive them away from it. When optimizing your titles, you’ll need to think keywords, keywords, keywords. Get as many as you can in, but make sure they are relevant. The last thing you want is to end up with a Wish-like word soup that makes no sense to anyone.
To hammer this point home, let us give you an example. Let’s say you’re selling cotton blankets. Don’t just put “cotton blanket” as your title. Instead, opt for both a more appealing title and one that contains more keywords. “ultra-soft 100% pure cotton, baby pink lounge blanket”. If you do this, your product will come up in relevant queries for every keyword. And your chances are better if you have seven rather than 2.
3. Reduce Cost by Eliminating Unwanted Queries
Sometimes your product can shop up in entirely unrelated queries due to strange keywords mashups. This can result in a significant cost increase, but there are ways to prevent this from happening. Amazon allows its sellers to set up match types and negative keywords.
There are three different match types to choose from, the broad that displays your product if all the keywords are included, the phrase that shows effects if the keywords are in proper succession or are a close enough match, and finally, there’s the exact that displays the product is the match in keywords are, well exact.
The difference between the broad and the exact is that keywords don’t matter in the board match type. Amazon also allows you to set up negative keywords. There are two options here the negative exact and the negative phrase.
4. Track How Much You’ve Spent and Define the Average Cost of Sale
Essentially what you’ll have to do once your campaign has been up for a while and see which products are performing poorly and which are a tremendous success. Do this per category by weening out poorly performing products one by one.
However, suppose you’re confident about a specific product that might not be serving the best at the moment. In that case, there is also the option of re-optimizing the listing and seeing if it will do better. But, if it’s an immediate improvement in profit that you’re looking for, ditch the bad ones.
In addition, what you’ll also need to do is define the average cost of sale. This can differ based on the general aim of the current campaign. If you’re looking for profit, the number should be anywhere between 5% and 15%. But, what you’re after is improving a product’s organic visibility; you might be ok putting in a bit more money into it.
5. Bid More on New Keywords
When adding a new keyword, it’s important to note that it might not have as much traction as the ones already in place. This means that they don’t have the required click history that would show Amazon they’re worth taking into consideration regarding ads.
To get the ball rolling and get some traction, you must start to bid with a higher initial price. So at first, add a higher bid price. Usually, about 0.75 $ can do the trick, but this varies according to category. Once it gains some traction, it’s also possible to lower the bidding price to achieve optimally. While this may seem counterintuitive at first, it will help when trying to kickstart a new keyword.
Final Thoughts
Just like any other e-commerce business, starting with sponsored products can turn out to be a flop or a success. While neither of these tips can positively guarantee your success, they surely can add to it and make it more likely.
So before deciding to start with sponsored products, make sure to do your research and do it the right way. Going into it blindly will do you no favors.
