As many consumers are increasingly shifting shopping behaviours to favour marketplaces over brand and retailer websites, businesses must utilise the full features and capabilities of each e-commerce platform to remain competitive in each stage of the customer journey.

Amazon’s presence in digital advertising is becoming more prominent, as the company now has nearly 8% of the digital ad market. Sponsored Products is currently one of the most powerful tools available on Amazon to help sellers grow their sales and brand awareness.

What is Sponsored Products advertising?

Sponsored Products is designed to boost the profitability of Amazon stores by providing the most relevant and compelling product information on Amazon searches and product listings. The goal for Amazon sellers to increase each product’s visibility on Amazon search, which can be achieved by increasing product discoverability and converting more page sessions into purchases.

To boost the chances of success on Amazon, sellers should consider an advertising strategy which is used to drive shoppers to product pages during discoverability processes, and the conversion processes.

Sponsored Products advertising can appear in the right column on search results pages, below search results, and in an advertising placement on detail pages. Multi-device support is available for this advertising, offering access to desktop, mobile, and tablet customers.

Why use Sponsored Products?

The primary goal for Sponsored Products advertising is to display items higher on the Amazon Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for desired search terms which boosts visibility on the marketplace.

Sponsored Products can be used to improve product discovery, boost Buy Box traffic, highlight new offers, increase visibility for promotions and deals, and launch new Amazon ASINs with no pre-existing sales history. 

Automated vs Manual Targeting

Sponsored Products also offers customisation options for campaigns targeting through manual and automatic options. Manual targeting ads are served based on the relevancy of the shopper’s query to the seller’s chosen keywords, therefore, enable sellers to identify the exact keyword searches that ads should be appearing. 

Automatic targeting adverts are served based on the relevancy of search queries to the seller’s product content. With automatic targeting, Amazon sets the merchant’s ads to target all relevant customer searches based on product information.

It is recommended that sellers beginning advertising campaigns should start with automatic settings and use the performance data to alter the targeting strategy or create more aggressive manual campaigns.

Tips for using Sponsored Products

To help sellers get started with Sponsored Products or improve existing campaigns, we have included some quick essentials that should be considered prior to beginning advertising.

1. Selecting optimised keywords

Choosing the correct keywords for each advertising campaign is a vital component influencing the chances of success. Bidding on relevant, high-volume keywords for products can boost a product’s sales rank, organic search engine position, and product sales.

Amazon customers tend to have much higher intent to purchase compared to Google or Facebook users, therefore selecting keywords is essential for increasing conversion rates. Using Amazon’s Search Term Report tool is helpful for tracking the performance of ad terms, as it’s one of the few tools that will provide direct access to search data from Amazon customers.

2. Removing undesired search queries

Searches in Amazon advertising can be varied depending on the match type for each query. To prevent any unnecessary costs from occurring from irrelevant or unwanted search terms, sellers should set keyword match types and set negative keywords.

Amazon currently allows 3 match types for Sponsored Products, including:

-          Broad – ads are displayed if the query includes all words that have been deposited as a keyword. This match type applies for words and also considers spelling variations, misspellings, and synonyms as matches.

-          Phrase – ads appear when a search query uses one or more words in the exact order. Close variations, such as singular and plural variations, are considered as matches.

-          Exact – ads appear when a customer’s query matches exactly the keywords provided by the seller.

Negative keywords are another available option for sellers. Ads will not appear for any queries containing the negative keywords included. This can be segmented into negative exact matches, which are comprised of exact matches for negative keywords with minor variations, or negative phrases that will exclude the product if the query contains the negative keywords as a part of the whole phrase.

3. Creating ad groups

Sets of products and sets of keywords are created for each ad group. Choosing products that contextually match the keywords for each campaign can be a vital factor influencing the success of campaigns. Sellers using this method of segmentation should note that it can impact the profitability of ads, as products will have varying profit margins. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to set an accurate Actual Cost of Sales (ACoS) goal before starting campaigns.

For sellers looking to improve their product performance on Amazon marketplace, Sponsored Products is a powerful tool. Activ8 recommends following all the suggested practices to boost the chances of success and generate customer data that can be adapted for future advertising campaigns.