PPC (pay per click) on Amazon feels like a black box that takes your time and money. But is it working for you?
With the pandemic keeping people home and introducing e-commerce as a new way of shopping for EVERYTHING, there has been an incredible growth in online sales. Companies must stand out in the crowd in order to boost their rankings on Amazon. If you haven’t started your PPC marketing, it’s certainly time to get in gear.
Amazon is the place where brands are discovered and defined. More consumers in the US come to Amazon for market research than google. That’s a big deal! If consumers can’t find you because you’re not advertising, you are limiting your brand’s reach, visibility, and conversions. Let’s get cracking on how you can up your PPC game.
What is PPC?
Pay Per Click advertising is a way to get your product seen by a potential customer on an e-commerce page. You create an ad featuring your product and you bid for a spot on a webpage where a customer is searching. If the consumer clicks on the ad, you will immediately pay the bid amount (generally between $.50 and $1.50 per click on Amazon) and the customer will be taken to your listing or webpage.
Let’s check out the three Amazon PPC ad types.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Product ads are the most common type of Amazon PPC ad to gain some momentum. It can also be the most affordable. SP ads display on the search results page on Amazon after someone has typed a specific term in the Amazon search bar. Sponsored products can be identified in the organic search results because they will have a “Sponsored” notification in them. (All Amazon PPC ads will have this notification)
There are organic search results that Amazon promotes to the front page. These promotions are based on the keywords within a listing that best relate to the terms that a consumer has typed in the search bar on amazon. However, while everyone wants to be at the very “Top of the search” position, you will always see one to several sponsored ads that put you at the top of the list before organic results are shown. Customers most commonly click on these sponsored listings first when considering purchases.
Other Sponsored Products are filtered in with organic search results through the remainder of the page listings (referred to as “Rest of Search” positions).
Sponsored Product ads can also show up on competitor’s listing at the bottom ribbon of a detail product page and will usually be labeled “Products related to this item,” or “Customers also bought” – these are Product Target ads, a specific kind of Sponsored Product ad.
Sponsored Brands
Don’t you wish you had filed that trademark about a year ago? Trademarks are required to be approved for Brand Registry on Amazon. Once you have that nicely submitted to the Brand team, you’ll be able to use Sponsored Brand Ads as banners across the top of the screen right under the search bar. These include your brand logo and several of your branded products that you want people to see.
There are many other placements for Sponsored Brand ads, but this one is primo, big time, unmistakable after a search.
Sponsored Display
Benefits for Brand Registered sellers include Sponsored Display ads, which are a more like what you would see on a normal website run by google adwords. They often appear below the buy-box (a great way to directly target your competitors) and on Amazon’s affiliate sites – like Google, Facebook, and even Netflix.
So where will your ads show up and what will it cost you when a customer clicks your ad? We could talk for ages about this topic (strategies, best practices, tools, etc.), but you’re too busy managing your business to sit back and read blogs all day, right? See our Blog about Sponsored Ad Placement to learn how it works.
Final Thoughts
Is your interest piqued about Amazon PPC? PPC is clearly an important part of your Amazon sales strategy and this summary is just the tip of the iceberg. Even the most experienced brand owners and PPC managers have trouble keeping up on all the nuances of Amazon advertising. If you haven’t started your campaigns yet, the fun is about to begin!
US 
PT