It’s no secret that 6 out of 10 Amazon sellers struggle with Amazon PPC campaigns due to insufficient knowledge on how to structure and optimize their campaigns.

While creating and launching a campaign is not rocket science, the real trick is to fine-tune it further in each iteration for greater visibility, higher RoAS, and enhanced market performance. This is where most sellers end up making dangerous mistakes that cost them huge amounts of money on advertising without generating a solid return on their investment. Even with good listings and great listing content, you still need a high-end Amazon PPC strategy to get the most out of your ad campaigns.

With that in mind, we've curated this comprehensive 2022 Amazon Advertising Strategy Playbook for all Amazon sellers looking for a one-stop guide to building an Amazon Advertising campaign. These tips will help you increase your brand’s exposure on the Amazon marketplace while gaining traffic and converting your products. So without further ado, let's get started!

Here's what you should learn here:

1. What is Amazon PPC?

2. Types of Sponsored Ads

3. Match Type

4. Negative targeting

5. Tips for Building Highly Optimized PPC Campaigns

What is Amazon PPC?

Amazon pay-per-click is a powerful way to run ads, enabling sellers to buy ad space by searching for terms. Every time a customer clicks on these sponsored ads, Amazon charges a specific amount to sell. In layman's terms, this is an auction-based advertising model.

The purpose of these ads is to drive traffic to specific product detail pages. By leveraging Amazon PPC advertising, sellers can instantly improve their SERP rankings and beat their competitors.

Amazon determines its ad ranking based on a number of determinants, such as CPC, conversion rate, revenue per click, ratings and reviews, and other relevant factors.

Automatic vs Manual Campaigns

Once logged into Amazon's Seller Central account, you can view the option to "Create a New Amazon PPC Campaign". When you click this feature, you can choose between automatic or manual campaigns. Depending on your requirements and budget, you can choose any of them. However, if you are a beginner, we recommend that you take part in an automated PPC campaign. So, what's the difference? Let's review –

automatic campaign

Under automatic campaigns, advertisers can easily choose their budget and let Amazon do all the hard work and automatically identify keywords.

Because of its easy setup, it is a good choice for PPC beginners.

Here, you can also save yourself the trouble of manually entering keyword bids. If you choose an automated campaign, Amazon will source the data for you to deploy into your future campaigns. Amazon monitors "clicks" and "spends," which typically take 2 to 4 days to process. It can take up to 2 to 4 weeks to collect enough data to analyze which activities are doing better.

Automated campaigns ensure that you can experiment without spending a lot of time and effort. They also make sure you add long-tail keywords to campaigns that people are looking for that you may never have guessed.

Manual campaign

Under manual campaigns, advertisers need to hand-pick the keywords they want to bid on to fine-tune where their ad budget is spent.

This is a great option for those who are good at dealing with PPC ads and have the time and tools to set up manual campaigns.

Bidding on keywords manually enables sellers to target keywords more precisely, which has the potential to lead to more sales if you are successful. With manual campaigns, you gain more control over your ad groups, which can lead to enhanced sales and improved ACO. It is also relatively simple to reduce bids or stop low-performing keywords under manual activity.

Amazon makes it easier for sellers by recommending bid amounts next to each keyword you're bidding on. You can also identify relevant keywords from previous campaigns to insert into your manual campaigns.

Types of Sponsored Ads

There are three types of Amazon Sponsored Ads. they are-

1. Sponsored Product Ads

2. Sponsored Brand Advertising

3. Sponsored Display Ads

Sponsored Product Ads

Sponsored Product Ads showcase your products on product detail pages and Amazon SERPs.

Sellers on Amazon keep increasing their ad dollars because it brings in high-end shopper traffic and massive conversion rates.

Like other Amazon PPC advertising options, you have to pay Amazon for Sponsored Product Ads every time a customer clicks on them. This feature gives you full control over your ad budget allocation and keyword bids.

Sponsored product ads appear in the following areas:

on search results

On the right side of the Amazon SERP

at the bottom of the Amazon Serp

product detail page

You can understand which of these ads are these with the label "Sponsored Ads". Sponsored product ads are by far the most popular ad type on Amazon PPC and are part of every step of the customer acquisition journey.

Sponsored Brand Advertising

Sponsored brand ads are often used by top shoppers, and make sure your listing grabs a shopper's attention even before they actually know what they want.

Sponsored Brands ads appear in the following areas on desktop:

Above Amazon search results

on the left side of the search results

Under Amazon SERP

They have the ability to showcase multiple products from your brand at once. This enables you to promote your free listings side by side.

Sponsored Display Ads

Amazon-sponsored display ads are great for increasing impressions, capturing the attention of top shoppers, and retargeting interested shoppers to convert one-time viewers into buyers.

Sponsored Display Ads appear on-

Amazon-affiliated sites such as Netflix, Facebook, etc.

In, you can see them – product detail page, customer review page, top of the offers list.

Sponsored Display is a great option if you have the budget and want to get conversions from your competitors, increase product views, or help get new product launches off the ground at light speed.

type of competition

Amazon keywords include three different categories. Two of them apply to negative keywords and one of them only applies to positive keywords. These categories are:

Exact Match: Refers to an exact match of the search term to a specific keyword added and its plurals. For example, a negative keyword for 'wooden spoon' will prevent your ad from showing on search queries for 'wooden spoon' as well as 'wooden spoon'.

Phrase Match: Refers to a search term similar to a seed term, but applied more broadly than exact match. Here, there are no changes regarding word order, including closing variants. For example, negative keywords like "japanese wooden spoons" and "kitchen wooden spoons" will be included in phrase matches, but "wooden spoons and spoons" will not — nor will variations like "chefs spoons."

Broad match doesn't work for negative keywords, just a positive keyword option.

Note: Phrase Match and Exact Match work the same way but inversely for "negative" and "positive". Positive match keyword bids will show your ad on that search term, while negative exact match keywords will limit your ad from appearing when shoppers use that search query.

What are Negative Keywords in Amazon PPC?

Negative keywords allow you to prevent ads from being shown for search queries you flag as negative – i.e. irrelevance or priority. The trick is figuring out the right search terms to add to your negative keyword list. For example, if you're selling wooden spoons , you don't want to show your ad to viewers looking for compostable spoons and wasteful ad spend.

In other words, advertisers use negative keywords to tell Amazon when you don't want to show your ad.

What is a negative ASIN?

Introducing negative ASINs in Amazon PPC campaigns is a game-changer. Similar to negative keywords, advertisers can block irrelevant listings and make the most of their ad spend when creating automated campaigns.

Adding negative goals is one of the best ways to increase your conversion probability, CTR, and ACOS on Amazon.

Tips for Building Highly Optimized PPC Campaigns

For building the best PPC campaigns, we've listed some of the best strategies for you.

Tip 1: Leverage long-tail keywords

Whether you are about to launch a new product on Amazon or are about to start your business, ideally, you must start your PPC journey with long-tail keywords. Once you gain some level of mastery and profit with these long-tail keywords, you can add the most common and most searched keywords to your campaigns.

If you are new to Amazon PPC, you may have a hard time competing with established players in the industry, so leveraging long-tail keywords is always considered the best option. Some examples of long tail keywords are – " men's black polo t-shirt", "long wooden spoon", "blue satin women's clothing" , etc.

If you start by adding highly searched search terms, those with higher competition and CPC, you will end up losing a lot of your ad budget without giving your brand any exposure, let alone clicks and conversions .

Even if your product gets good ad impressions, your competitors for these generic keywords already have better positions and reputations on the Amazon marketplace, so the chances of them converting enough are low.

So, the strategy you have to follow here is pretty simple: choose long-tail keywords initially because you will have little problems ranking for those search queries. With lower competition and shopper purchase intent, you can easily convert and increase your sales velocity.

For example, if you were selling wooden spoons, then you could start a PPC campaign with a very specific query like "handmade wooden spoons" or "brown resin wooden spoons" and so on.

The search terms you target at each step must be directly related to your product. Otherwise, you could end up losing a lot of money without any conversions.

Tip 2: Optimize with Amazon PPC

We built this strategy to improve the ranking and position of product listings in the Amazon SERPs for a given search term. The goal here is to have three defined sets of campaigns, with different types of bids and budgets set within each set.

The bid and budget allocated for a search term depends on the search level of the product in the Amazon search results for that keyword.

The most important thing you need to do here is to track all the top keywords for your product and determine where it ranks on Amazon. Monitor your product's page rank and position, then implement the following plans:

beyond the fifth page

If the listing is ranking above page 5 or 6 on Amazon, just add some keywords with high conversions, not all the keywords that rank there. That's how you can save money on advertising and focus on search terms that rank in sales, but are way behind in the Amazon SERPs. The bid amount here has to be quite modest.

Page 2 of 5

Likewise, for those search terms that rank on the third, fourth, and fifth pages, you can follow a more robust strategy to address the best keywords. You must bid consistently over time and identify which search terms are sourcing the most conversions. Now, use these search terms to optimize your campaigns accordingly. Amazon will automatically improve a product's organic ranking when those keywords start generating sales.

first and second pages

If your keywords are ranking on page one and two, you need to bid aggressively. Since you're just a few spots away from prime positions, you can easily win those spots and increase your product's discoverability by being a little bit higher than your competitors.

Here you should also take care of these search term variations so that you can increase their sales too. Start a secondary campaign just for this purpose and set the match type to phrase match to cover as many variations as possible.

Tip 3: Negative Goals

While enhancing your campaigns, focus on keywords that aren't driving any sales but cost money. This usually happens when these keywords are not related to your product. These keywords need to be marked as negative, but it takes a long time and effort to finally identify them. If you use SellerApp's advertising tool, then it will automatically suggest to you a list of keywords that need to be marked as negative.

Negative keywords are critical in Amazon PPC and should not be underestimated.

Negative keywords are important to your Amazon PPC campaigns. They reduce wasted spend, improve listing rankings and eliminate keyword cannibalization. The faster you start implementing them, the faster you will achieve your goal of maximizing ad revenue.

Tip 4: Adjust bids by ad placement

Amazon has been pushing for a better UX and recently introduced a slew of features aimed at improving the way sellers bid in PPC auctions.

Yes! It brings a custom rule bidding feature (also available in SellerApp), where sellers can choose to bid in ways that go beyond dynamic bidding and fixed bidding. They can manually add the frequency and intensity of bid changes in that category. This feature is generally available for expert PPC sellers only available in the US Amazon marketplace.

Amazon's ad placement feature lets you fine-tune your ad campaigns and give you more control over where you want your ads to appear and how much you should spend on them.

The strategy mostly involves adjusting bids based on the position.

As we all know, your Amazon PPC ads will appear in any of three places –

Top of the SERPs on the first page

On the rest of the SERP (middle, bottom and second page of the Amazon SERP and beyond)

And, on product detail pages and elsewhere, except in Amazon search results

You can view placement reports for each of your Amazon campaigns and analyze which of the three positions brings you the most exposure and sales. Based on this data, you can add a placement bid multiplier between 0% and 900% to each placement to further increase your chances of conversions and increase brand awareness.

If your campaign is showing the highest sales on product detail pages, a good strategy here is to increase the bid amount on those product pages by adjusting bids. You can pick an arbitrary number, but if the ACO is fairly high, you may want to limit the multiplier to 50%.

Likewise, if an optimal CTR (say 2.57%) is observed when the ad appears at the top of the search results, and if the ACOS is low, then you can aggressively increase the multiplier by 100-200%.

Now, you may have a question: what should be my default bid amount?

Well, the answer to this question is fairly simple, although it requires a little attention and planning.

There are four types of campaign bidding strategies. The last one is only available for the US market.

Dynamic Bids – Drop Only: If your ad doesn't get many conversions, Amazon will automatically lower your bid to 100%.

Dynamic Bidding – Up and Down: If your ad is making good progress, Amazon will increase your bid by up to 100%, while reducing it like dynamic bidding – only if it doesn't lead to conversions. Here, you have to consider two things: For ads at the top of the search results page, the bid could be up 100%. For all other positions, the multiplier is fixed at 50%.

Fixed Bid: Here you pay for what you mentioned and the signing is fixed, i.e. Amazon cannot make any alternations.

Bids for Rule Tickets: Here, the user sets manual conditions based on an "IF/then" rule that triggers bids and keyword modifications when the given conditions are met. Amazon will adjust or adjust bids down to bring conversions up to the ROAS limit.

Now, to calculate your default bid amount using all of the above methods, here's what you need to know: The placement multiplier was originally added to the bid. Next, add dynamic bid increments to arrive at the final amount.

The table below summarizes the calculation for a bid amount of $1.

place	place multiplier	Dynamic Bidding – Up and Down	final amount
top of research	400%	+100%	$0 – $10
product page	100%	+50%	$0 – $3

Tip 5: Try Different Bid Amounts and Match Types

Experiment with race types and bid volumes. The CPC for a specific keyword in an automated campaign will be much cheaper than in the exact match type of a manual campaign.

Likewise, the CPC of broad keywords in the manual will cost you more than automatic campaign keywords, but less expensive than precise keywords. Also, your campaign may provide better results when set to phrase match than exact match.

A profitable Amazon PPC strategy is to create campaigns for the same set of keywords with separate parameters. It can be a campaign with automatic, manual, multiple match types, several types of bid amounts, various times, etc.

Don't forget to run your campaigns at different times of the day to find the most favorable schedule where you can get the most clicks and sales. Once you have it, you can actively bid on ads at that time of day. This process is called daycare. You can also combine this strategy with headline search ads and product display ads curated specifically for your target audience.

The motivation here is to understand which factors drive the most traffic and conversions. You have to articulate the knack to determine the best option for your campaign.

While modifying campaign parameters, you'll need to analyze ACO, orders, keyword performance, ad performance, CTR, and other insights. It will help you understand what works for you and what doesn't. There's a lot of trial and error here, but if you have a strong set of keywords to target, your job will be easier than ever.

Tip 6: Relevance and Performance Metrics

Amazon's ad ranking algorithm (A9) prefers listings that sell higher, higher reviews, and more transparent product copy.

Amazon uses performance and relevance metrics to determine ad ranking.These indicators are

Performance Metrics: Click-through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate, Total Sales

Related metrics: product tiles, product descriptions, keywords, brand names

We always recommend that Amazon sellers optimize their product detail pages with the best images and A+ content before running an ad for the best results. If your product pages are not optimized by Finesse, you will end up with bad reviews for misleading descriptions of your products.

In addition to enhancing your performance and relevant metrics, you can also add your competitor's keywords to a single keyword campaign to drive your competitor's traffic. Keep in mind that using your competitor's keywords will require you to bid higher on them, and sometimes, they may not even get enough sales, but if you want to catch a competitor's slot machine on Amazon Serp, it's worth a shot.

final thoughts

By planning a clear structure for your Amazon PPC campaign, including long-tail keywords, negative targeting, time-slots, and more, you can avoid incurring high advertising costs. Also, you make sure to optimize your campaigns in the best possible way.

In the end, what matters most is how well your campaigns are performing and optimized. Once the budget is set, you should focus on managing and fine-tuning the campaign to achieve your business goals. This is a constant process that, if done correctly, will give you excellent output.

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