Amazon PPC is a perfect solution to get more buyers to see your products, but brands make several costly mistakes when they aren’t experienced with PPC
Here are seven common mistakes that sellers make using Sponsored Products ads as well as our suggestions for how you can avoid them.
1. Deploying an Unnecessarily Broad Campaign Strategy
To achieve better sales conversions, you need to keep fine-tuning your campaign strategy daily. Don’t target an audience group that’s too broad– you’re better off burning money with that approach. To make such performance-oriented decisions, you’ll need to monitor every aspect of your ad strategy. A lot of Amazon sellers face knowledge, budget, or time restraints, which forces them to sacrifice efficiency and volume in the long run.
Auto targeting PPC campaigns are ideal for ‘keyword harvesting’ purposes. It helps you find out which keywords will help your ads get displayed to relevant users, thus increasing conversions and clicks.
Manual targeting PPC campaigns are ideal for targeting effective keywords via aggressive bidding strategies.
We recommend starting things off with an auto-targeting campaign and following it up with a manual keyword targeting campaign that will help you achieve the perfect balance between volume and efficiency.
2.Improper Management of Inventory Levels
Your sales conversions determine everything on Amazon.
Your campaign effectiveness and organic rankings are heavily dependent on your inventory management practices.
If your product inventory runs out completely, that temporarily stops all your sales until your inventory has been replenished. Your competitors might use this as an opportunity to regain their market share and sales.
3. Not Scaling Up Your Profitable Campaigns
Although convincing stakeholders to raise ad budgets can be challenging, it’s crucial to scale up your best-performing campaigns to increase profits if you find an opportunity to do so.
I’ve worked with several clients in the past who would stick to their pre-determined ad budgets and not scale up, even when there was ample evidence that they could profit more with increased ad spending.
We’re honest with our clients and advise them to raise their ad spending when we see an opportunity since it helps them enjoy more Amazon sales conversions.
4. Using Only Bid Adjustment for Controlling ACOS
Many times, we see our clients using only bid amounts and daily campaign ad budgets as the primary method for controlling ACOS.
Although it’s essential to monitor your ad spending by making regular adjustments to your budgets and bids, ensure that they’re all being done strategically after analyzing your campaign performance.
In case some of your best-performing keywords require higher bid amounts than what you’re normally willing to spend, consider cutting back on the keywords that aren’t performing well. This way, you can increase ad spending on keywords that convert more for your products. You can also use portfolios to adjust your budget if necessary.
This enables you to increase the efficiency of your ad spending campaigns while simultaneously limiting the amount you spend on your portfolio since your campaign ad budget will be overridden by the portfolio budget.
5.Keyword Mistakes
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Not Performing Comprehensive Keyword Research
It can be quite challenging to find the right keywords that maximize your chances of sales conversions on Amazon.
Although targeting many keywords may dilute your results and budget, not devoting enough time to keyword research might cause you to lose out on a lot of sales.
Amazon ad campaigns allow you to test and learn the funnel keywords that are effective in maximizing sales conversions. We recommend testing between 50 – 500 keywords in every ad group before you finalize them.
Additionally, make sure to test in multiple match types as well. Do not make the mistake of assuming that broad or exact is always better.
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Picking Only High-Volume Expensive Keywords
Not all expensive keywords are effective ones – that’s Digital Marketing 101. If a keyword has 20 clicks and 0 conversions, consider pausing it for a while. You can also select another match type (exact, phrase, broad) to check whether you can improve your campaign’s performance by doing so. Evaluate keyword performance by placing high bids on a temporary basis for gathering data. Once you’ve collected enough information, lower your bids as required, based on the keyword performance.
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Picking Low-Volume Keywords
During your SEO research, you’ll come across thousands of keywords. You might accidentally wind up using some of these ineffective keywords in your campaigns. Even if each click only gets 3 clicks per month, having multiple low-volume keywords in your arsenal could drive up your marketing costs exponentially without getting you any meaningful conversions. Additionally, your products might even be ranking on the first page for these low-volume keywords, which makes targeting them a waste of time and money.
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Not Choosing Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are detailed phrases with a length of 3 – 5 words. They can help you distinguish your products from the competition. You can use Amazon search to find the best long-tail SEO keywords. Simply type in your primary keywords in the search bar and you’ll be shown a list containing commonly used long-tail keywords. Ensure you change the long-tail keywords used in your campaign from time to time since they’re known to change frequently based on the latest customer trends.
6. Lack of Attention to Headlines and Copywriting
There’s a famous myth in digital marketing that displaying your ad to the target audience is all that’s needed for a successful sales conversion.
But that’s not true at all.
While it is important to get your ad out there in front of interested customers, there’s still a lot of stuff you need to navigate.
Your product’s headline and listing content are your sales pitch to your audience. By making it more engaging, you’ll be able to improve your chances of obtaining a timely and effective response.
For instance, Amazon Sponsored product ads prompt users to purchase instantly, thus driving up sales conversions.
There are many phrases where your product might be able to score a good number of clicks from the target audience without proportionate sales conversions. If that’s happening to you, it’s time to boost your copywriting and headline game.
Your product headlines need to target the product ranking algorithm to maximize results as well.
7. Poor Knowledge of the Metrics
Improper analysis, knowledge, and usage of your campaign metrics may make it impossible for you to improve and develop your ad campaigns. It could affect your campaign performance adversely and decrease sales conversions.
Sellers need to examine their keywords and relevant conversion metric consistently for understanding the impact and results that their ad spending is generating.
Impressions
Ad impressions can help you determine how many times your ads are displayed whenever shoppers enter specific search terms. While impressions do not show how successful your campaigns are, they can provide assurance that your campaign is headed in the right direction.
Cost-per-click (CPC)
You can use this metric for measuring how much you paid for each click that your ads generated. The highest bidder is the one who gets the ad positions they want.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate refers to the number of ad clicks divided by the total impression count. It helps you determine the effectiveness of your campaign and the keywords being used.
Conversion rate (CR)
This metric calculates the number of customers who have purchased your product. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sales conversions by the number of ad clicks.
Advertising cost of sale ACOS
This metric helps determine advertising efficiency. It is obtained by dividing ad spending by total sales and provides an accurate description of your ad performance. ACOS can be calculated by dividing ad spending by total ad sales, multiplied by 100 to arrive at the percentage.