Amazon Advertising is the best tool to use if you want to scale or grow your Amazon business. This is because it’s an easy way to do things, but it is also effective, profitable, and a powerful direct marketing channel that Amazon sellers can use.
Luckily, if you want to scale your Amazon ads, there are a couple of simple things you can do to get the job done (if you want to know more about Amazon ads and making them profitable, read here). We will be covering everything you need to know about it right here in this article.
Is It Time For You To Scale?
Before you jump to the deep end, you need to make sure that your business is actually ready to scale. It’s important to remember that Amazon PPC is not a sprint, but a marathon – so you need to take your time and do things properly.
When you scale, you are making an investment. This means that you are going to be putting more expertise, time, and of course, money, into your business. As such, you need to make sure that you are prepared to see it through, and not fall off halfway.
Scaling will mean that there are going to be a number of changes, including the addition of new keywords, budgets, increasing bids, different types of campaigns, and so much more. Sponsored Product Ads might be the basics, but when you scale, everything will change.
This means that you are going to need to do the research before you jump into the deep end, and ensure that this payoff will be worth it.
What You Need To Do Before You Get Started
You’re going to need to do a few things before you begin the process of scaling up. In order to do this, you will need to know three crucial things: your goals, your numbers, and the amount of time and expertise you have to invest.
- Know and Set Goals – know what you want to achieve, and why scaling will achieve those goals.
- Be Aware of Your Numbers – work out the profit margin, the Advertising Cost of Sale, and your True Cost of Sale numbers. Know what you can and can not tolerate.
- How Much Time and Expertise You Can Offer – do you have the time and expertise to really immerse yourself in this? Will you be spending more or less time working on this, or will things not change? Are you going to hire someone to help (like us)?
7 Steps To Scaling On Your Amazon Ads
- Have Product Listings That Are “Ad-Ready”
This is one of the easiest things you can do. For this to be done, you just need to ensure that your product detail page is always ready to be advertised. By doing this, you are keeping the page primed, profitable, and consistently optimized before paid traffic gets directed toward it.
It’s best to make the most out of the money you’re spending with your ads, and this is a great way to do it. If you do this, you are helping yourself to secure the best ad placements, which in turn means that your ads will convert. As a result, you will increase your sales.
Work on frequently tweaking your listing to ensure they remain up-to-date and relevant. It’s always the most relevant ads that will take the big listings and be Amazon’s priority. Only change one thing at a time, so you can monitor which change makes the biggest difference!
Below are some important components to consider for these “ad-ready” product listings:
- Quality products and photos
- 15 or more customer reviews
- Concise description with bullet points
- Catchy title with the keyword and benefit
- 3.5-star rating MINIMUM (we like to see 4 stars or higher)
- Competitive price
- Follow the 80/20 Rule
The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule dictates that 80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the actions. This means that, in scaling and advertising, it’s common for 80% of all paid sales to be the result of 20% of keywords or campaigns.
- Wherever Applicable, Uncap Your Budgets
Don’t panic! The initial goal is always to break even – so you aren’t losing money. However, this also means that you are driving the maximum PPC sales with no cost, or as little as humanly possible while trying to rake in organic sales and rank.
If you’re performing well on a low-budget campaign, it’s okay to uncap the budget for a new campaign, or at least loosen it. This will allow Amazon to have more freedom to push out your ads in order to maximize sales. Just look out for the high ACoS keywords that you can big and optimize as you need to.
- Alter Your Bidding Strategy
You will need to optimize every bid before you make the decision to scale your ad campaigns. Luckily, there’s a simple formula you can follow to do this properly:
- Calculate the revenue you earn with every click (total revenue/number of clicks = your answer)
- Calculate your maximum bid (max bid = earnings per click x target ACoS%)
Implement your new strategy, and give it up to two weeks before changing it again – so you know how well it is performing.
- Keep Testing New Campaigns and Campaign Targeting
Amazon always has new campaigns and targeting options, so you need to explore them all! Change is always happening, and it’s crucial to keep up.
You will need to be systematic in your changes, and monitor them all carefully. Test them by running a campaign for at least two weeks, then figuring out where to go from there.
- ASIN Targeting
This can be done for the three Amazon Ad types – Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Products. The best place to start is with the last – Sponsored Products.
Doing this will give you a good level of control over product visibility. As such, it will be easier for your products to reach the relevant people when they filter results and go through the pages.
On top of this, you can perform Category Targeting with Refinements. This will result in you targeting a whole product category rather than something too specific.
- Make Use of Sponsored Brands Ads
Finally, you should be taking advantage of the Sponsored Brand Ads to make people more aware of your brand. Get your company name, logo, and other important information out there, so people know about you!
There are three Ad Formats to select from here:
- Video Ads – these will send traffic right to the product that is relevant in the listing rather than the store landing page
- Product Collection – you can target three products and the ad sends the traffic right to the Amazon storefront.
- Store Spotlight – allows you to promote your whole store in a single ad, instead of just products. This is a great option if you sell a variety of things on your Amazon storefront.
Final Thoughts
There are seven easy things you can do to scale your ads, which will almost definitely be successful if it’s the right time for you to do so. To recap, the seven steps you can take are as follows:
- Have Product Listings That Are “Ad-Ready”
- Follow the 80/20 Rule
- Wherever Applicable, Uncap Your Budgets
- Alter Your Bidding Strategy
- Keep Testing New Campaigns and Campaign Targeting
- ASIN Targeting
- Make Use of Sponsored Brands Ads
