Amazon has released a powerful and amazing self-service advertising service through Amazon Marketing Services. It allows you to create an ad that will be presented at the top of results from a search on Amazon.com. Imagine tens of millions of searches across Amazon. If you are selling a new cheese you want to promote and someone searches for “Swiss Cheese” your ad can show up letting people find your product. They click on the ad and it goes to your Brand Store or a search page of your cheeses, and they buy your amazing new Swiss cheese. Here are ten Pro Tips to help you get started with Amazon Sponsored Search ads.
1) Don’t expect miracles unless you have something miraculous: Don’t expect slow moving products with low national demand to benefit greatly from this type of advertising. Do expect this advertising tool to work wonders when you have a unique story or benefit
2) Do all the basics right: Great copy, great images, and a have reviews in place. Once people click into your detail page they will want to be convinced of your product unique benefits, and how it has impacted the lives of previous purchasers.
3) Make sure your Brand Store rocks: Develop a great hero image, use video or highlight a specific product. Use the merchandising widgets to create groupings of products with similar tag lines to your advertising.
4) Tune your logo: You will put a logo on your advertisement that will show up as a 150 X 150 pixel image on a phone. Make sure that it is compelling and fits your ad campaign.
5) Make your ad relevant: Develop an advertising phrase that resonates with the customer that will click on the keywords that you have chosen for the ad.
6) Research your keywords: Check suggested phrases that pop up when searching in Amazon.com categories. Re-use Google search terms with successful results. Other tools such as Amazon Retail Analytics Premium are great for definitive research. Use suggested keywords. Bid high on keywords to start so you can measure performance, then tune the costs later. Its all adjustable in the ad.
7) Monitor your ad: Test Keywords and monitor them daily at first to watch for failures, or large costs.
8) Be an advertising scientist: Test first with $100 and try it before you do big spends. Expect some failure and learn from it to optimize your ads. Test your Logo. Test your Advertising tag line. Compare performance between ads and let the data tell you which one to invest in.
9) Change is the only constant: Recognize that you are in an environment that changes all the time. What you know now may no longer be relevant or correct as Amazon advertising evolves. Amazon has big plans for search ads and will be adding new features.
10) Watch the metrics: Understand what they are. Impressions, detail page views, and click throughs all have different, very important meanings. Your goal is an efficient spend versus return.
Creating Amazon sponsored search ads can be easy. Doing effective sponsored search advertising involves planning, coordination, testing and measurement of success. If it all seems daunting, consider reaching out to someone to help navigate you through the process a few times.
Join the Amazon Marketing Services User Group on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6693102 to get peer help and the occasional response from the AMS team.