Paying for Amazon Sponsored Product Ads but not seeing the results you want? Follow these 3 steps to make sure your money’s maximizing your customer conversion rate.
Let’s start by defining what an Amazon Sponsored Product Ad is.
Simply put, they’re the products that appear at the very top of every Amazon search – you can pay for Amazon to show your product first to any potential customers.
Every search produces sponsored products, but you might never have noticed; the little grey “sponsored” labels on these listings are pretty subtle, so much so that it might appear to potential customers that the product is listed first simply because it’s highly recommended or the best-rated.
Sponsored Product Ads are also PPC (Pay Per Click) and have a minimum budget of $1/day, so are likely to be affordable for all sellers.
Another benefit of Sponsored Product Ads is that the eligibility requirements for third-party sellers to utilise them are very achievable – you just need nationwide shipping, a professional seller account, and for your products to be new (rather than used).
Now you know their benefits, here’s how to optimise your Sponsored Product Ads.
1. Know your ‘match types’
Amazon allows you to attach keywords to your product ad that, when searched by a potential customer, serve as the cue to show your ad to said customer. There are different ‘match type’ options for your selected keywords: broad, phrase, and exact.
You should know which match type is which in order to use them effectively, maximize the targeting efficiency of your ads, and show your products to the people most likely to convert into your customers. Here’s a breakdown of each one:
Broad:
As the name suggests, this is the widest-covering type of keyword match. Search results will display your ads when potential customers search for any form of your keyword. This includes:
- synonymous terms
- the plural version(s)
- acronyms
- abbreviations
- misspellings of your keyword.
Using broad match types might be most useful when just starting out on Amazon, in order to gain the largest possible relevant reach. For example, a search for ‘pool caps’ could deliver your ad for a ‘swimming cap’.
Phrase:
Using the phrase match type will allow your ad to appear in the results of only exact searches, though also allowing additional adjectives, plurals and misspellings within those searches. For example, a search for ‘green swimming cap’ would deliver your ad for ‘swimming cap’.
Exact:
Again, as the name suggests, this is the most restrictive of the match types, to target the most specific of potential customers. Though still allowing plurals and misspellings, only searches for your exact keyword(s) will deliver your ad to the searcher.
Searching for a ‘swimming cap’ would bring up (you guessed it) your ad for a ‘swimming cap’!
2. Know when to restrict
You don’t want to waste money advertising to people who will never qualify as your customers; you wouldn’t pay to show your ad for swimming caps to a person searching Amazon for a wooly hat!
Amazon also allows you to use negative keywords. These are words that, when searched by the potential customer, will prevent your irrelevant ad from showing up in those results.
In the above case, a negative keyword might be ‘wool’; your ad no longer appears for those who don’t want it, and you save money by only targeting likely conversions! This feature also includes, like its positive counterpart, phrase match keywords to further optimize your identified negative keywords.
3. Test the market with automatic targeting
Using manual targeting is the best option for Sponsored Product Ads in order to retain cost-effective control over who sees your ad, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also use the automatic targeting option to your advantage.
Run a minimum budget campaign with automatic targeting to test which keywords are most effective to seek out your products. After a few days of running the test, you should be able to see which search terms find the ad most often. You can then use these keywords in your full, manual, targeting campaigns!
Follow these simple tricks and you’ll be putting your Amazon advertising budget to its best possible use!
If you feel like you need some extra help, take a look at some of our other guides here.