In the last couple of years, Amazon has taken the center-stage by outpacing giants like Google & Apple, to become the world’s most valuable brand at $315.5 billion.
As e-commerce sellers and brands shift their attention to marketing on the world’s biggest e-commerce platform, Amazon advertising continues to take over market share from Google. According to a survey by Jumpshot, Amazon surpassed Google for the number of product searches from 2015 to 2018.
This means it’s no longer possible for brands to ignore the potential of Amazon as an advertising platform. Since its advent, Amazon Advertising has been providing manual and automatic targeting for sponsored product ads.
Now, advertisers on Amazon have more reasons to cheer. Amazon has introduced several updates and tweaks to its advertising platform for effective reach of your ads.
Use this post to figure out how to leverage these changes for improved audience reach on Amazon.
Before we dive into the latest updates, let’s do a quick review of the existing Ad Inventories –
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Sponsored Products
These are the standard product ads. Individual products are triggered based on the keywords used by shoppers. When shoppers click on the ads, it leads to the product listing page.
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Sponsored Brands
This is the premium ad inventory. Here, sponsored brands are displayed based on search keywords.
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Product Display Ads (PDAs)
Unlike the above two categories, PDAs are not keyword triggered. Instead, it appears based on the category of the product.
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Display Ads
These ads are classified into three categories – display, video, and custom. They are similar to the standard display ad inventory, with just variations in the format. This ad is available to all, and not just sellers on Amazon.
So, what has changed?
Between the year 2018 and 2019, Amazon has made several vital changes to its ad platform. Check the image below that lists the key changes to the platform in an easy-to-read timeline format.
Key Updates Rolled in 2018 – 19
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Automated Bidding for Higher Flexibility
Amazon has improved its automated bidding capability by adding product targeting adjustments and adding keywords. Additionally, it also allows optimization of bidding based on conversion rates.
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Flexible Campaign Budgets
Amazon has introduced “portfolios” that are the equivalent of shared budgets on Google Ads. Portfolios make it easy for advertisers to split budgets across multiple campaigns.
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Increase in Inventory for Sponsored Brands
Amazon has increased the space available for sponsored brands. This balances the space available for organic listing and paid ads, pushing marketers to compete for this category of ads.
How to revise Amazon Advertising Strategies for 2019?
1. Run Automatic Campaigns as well as Manual Ones
Think of it like diversifying stocks to get the best deal. While manual campaigns give more control over ad groups and negative keywords, automatic campaigns help advertisers make the best use of Amazon’s algorithms.
One huge benefit of automatic campaigns is that it shows the list of keywords that Amazon shoppers are using to search for similar products.
2. Allocating Budgets
Though Amazon has been pushing for Sponsored Brands with its recent changes, Sponsored Products are still relevant. While different brands will have varying needs, here’s a general thumb rule to split Amazon Advertising budgets:
- Sponsored products – 50%
- Sponsored brands – 40%
- Product display ads – 10%
3. Optimization of the Store Page
Before these changes were made, there wasn’t much of a difference in performance between product listing pages and store pages. However, the recent changes are clearly in favour of store pages. Optimized store pages offer better results for advertisers.
4. Dynamic Bidding
Amazon added this feature for Sponsored products this year. This feature allows advertisers to either bid down or bid up and down. Advertisers with generous Amazon Advertising budgets can experiment with this new feature. On the other hand, advertisers with a limited budget can use only the bid down function.
The Key Takeaways
All these recent updates in Amazon Advertising rolled in the first half of 2019 empowers advertisers. Advertisers can now use the massive data available in their hands to find more about user preferences, keywords used, and the products they are likely to buy.
Features like budget caps help to limit campaign costs. Advertisers can try testing one variable at a time, wait for a few days to see the results. Adopting A/B testing helps to get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t work, helping advertisers optimize their campaigns.
Leverage these new features to restructure your Amazon Advertising campaigns and enjoy better results.
