Amazon Advertising Guide for Sellers

Summary: Do you have products you want to sell on Amazon but don’t know how to do it? Then, try our 2022 Amazon advertising guide for sellers.

Whether you are a big brand or small business, Amazon advertising should be part of your product business strategy if you want to increase sales and build brand awareness. We all know Amazon is a well-known ecommerce retailer, but what does Amazon say about its shoppers?

Their statistics show that 300 million customers shop on Amazon worldwide. Customers complete 28% of their Amazon purchases in three minutes or less, and 50% of all purchases finish in less than 15 minutes. With the speed and power of the Amazon marketplace, you can’t afford to miss our 2022 Amazon Advertising Guide for Sellers to attract more customers to your business.

Types of Amazon PPC Ads

There are three types of Amazon PPC advertisements: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. With Pay-Per-Click (PPC), every time a customer clicks on your advertisement, whether they purchase a product or not, you pay Amazon. The amount you pay depends on the advertising type, targeted keywords, and how competitive your niche is.

Sponsored Products are the oldest and most popular format. Sellers’ advertising spends shifted towards Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display throughout the years because they show increased return on ad spend (RoAS) and improved conversion rates. Amazon advertising offers third-party sellers a user-friendly platform to set up multiple PPC advertising campaigns within minutes.

Sponsored Products: The starting point for all sellers, these ads appear at the top of the Amazon search result page, throughout the organic results, and on competing product listing pages. Sponsored Products are a quick way to advertise to new customers, as they are already on Amazon and eager to make a purchase. You don’t have to be on the brand registry to use it, just do good keyword research, set up your campaign, and launch it.

Sponsored Brands: These were previously known as Amazon Headline Search Ads and are available to sellers enrolled in the Brand Registry program. They appear above Sponsored Product advertisements in the Amazon search results and funnel traffic to a dedicated brand-centric Amazon landing page.

As banner advertisements, they feature a logo, custom tagline, and thumbnails for up to three products, thereby increasing brand awareness. There are three types of Sponsored Brand advertisements: Product Collection, Store Spotlight, and Video.

Sponsored Display: These types of ads reach customers on third-party websites and apps, allowing you to advertise to and retarget customers. Instead of targeting keywords or competitor’s products as you would with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display targets customers based on shopping behaviors, interests, and whether they previously viewed your product’s detail page. With Sponsored Display ads, customers are reminded about a product and brand even when they navigate away from a specific Amazon listing. Sponsored Display ads are only available to brand-registered sellers or Vendors.

Sponsored Ads and Targeting

Within the sponsored Amazon advertising group—Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display—there are two types of Amazon targeting, automatic-targeting ads, and manual-targeting ads. Consider running an automatic and manual targeting campaign when your listing is optimized.

Automatic-targeting ads

With automatic-targeting ads, Amazon decides which keywords to target based on the type of product sold. When you are unsure which keywords to target, this presents an opportunity to learn from Amazon and find out if the keywords convert into sales. There is, however, a lack of optimization options with automatic-targeting ads.

Manual-targeting ads

With manual-targeting advertisements, sellers choose the keywords or products to target and set custom bids for each. Keyword search specifies exact match, phrase match, or broad match.

An exact match requires customers to enter keywords exactly as written before they can see your advertisement. Phrase match targets the keyword phrase in the order in which it is entered, but may include other words before or after. Broad match keywords can appear in any order in a search query and may include additional words.

There are two subtypes of manual targeting advertising campaigns: keyword targeting, and product targeting. In keyword targeting, you choose the keywords. With product targeting, a competitor’s listings are targeted instead of keywords. Keyword and product targeting campaigns can be run simultaneously but must be set up independently.

Requirements for Amazon Sponsored Ads

There are different requirements for each of the three sponsored Amazon ads. The Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ads require you to be a Registered Vendor or enrolled in the Brand Registry. For Sponsored Products ads, you don’t need to be brand registered, but must have a professional Amazon seller account or be a Registered Vendor, and your product must be Buy Box eligible.

• Registered Vendor. The Amazon Vendor program is invite-only, as Amazon will reach out to you if they want you to join the program as a potential vendor.
• Professional Amazon seller account. When you want to start selling on Amazon, there are two types of selling plans, Individual and Professional.
• Brand Registry. The Amazon Brand Registry offers a group of tools designed to help sellers build and protect their brands.
• Buy Box. The Amazon advertising Buy Box is the box on a product detail page where customers add items to their shopping carts. You must fulfill performance-based requirements to be eligible to compete for the Buy Box placement of your product.

Running Successful Sponsored Ads

To sell successfully on Amazon, test different strategies to find those that work best for your business and products. You don’t need a big budget—just a clear advertising strategy to boost your advertising spend return on investment (ROI), create brand awareness, and bring in more sales. What should you consider doing to run successful sponsored Amazon ads?

1. Define your target audience: they are the core of your keyword and product placement strategy.
2. Refine your keyword research strategy and consider using long-tail keywords. Also, don’t forget to exclude keywords that are not a good match for your product.
3. Use Sponsored Brands to create awareness of your brand.
4. Analyze your product profitability level.
5. Use the Amazon advertising reports to monitor, analyze and adjust your advertisements.
6. Create a dynamic landing page with a call-to-action (CTA) and different types of content.

We don’t believe in cookie-cutter digital marketing strategies at WSI, that is why we won over 125 Web Marketing Association Awards for industry-leading website projects. WSI started helping businesses over 25 years ago, and today, we have offices across the world. We can leverage our global experience to help you deliver local results – call WSI today.