In today’s world, where competition for online businesses and vendors is skyrocketing, running Amazon ads is a common move. These ads allow you to access more customers, increasing your chances of conversion and sales. However, as convenient as most things are on the Internet, running an Amazon ad campaign is not straightforward.
Thus, Amazon campaign optimization becomes vital to ensure you reach the right customers. However, certain mistakes can impact the reach of your campaigns. This article has listed 9 of the costliest mistakes you may be making.
1. Equating Amazon ads and Facebook ads
Facebook ads are similar to pop-ups: they turn up everywhere regardless of keywords. However, Amazon ads are extremely keyword-centric. Your ads are shown based on what the users search for. Therefore, you need to focus more on choosing the right keywords.
Moreover, since Amazon ads work in an auction-based CPC (cost-per-click) model, you will face severe competition to get your products listed at the top. Furthermore, you also have to think about erratic search patterns of users, where they may not use the exact spelling or term you have picked as keywords. This means that you need to use related keyphrases and specific keywords to rank high.
2. Poor campaign structure
Your marketing budget will go down the drain if you don’t have a well-defined campaign because you won’t scale up in the future. Of course, you can always repeat and cleanse or delete your ads, but that simply wastes the money allocated for the campaign. Furthermore, it also affects the effectiveness of your ads. Ideally, it would be best if you had multiple groups of ads and keywords, each of which can get you effective results.
3. Scattered naming convention
It is easy to skimp on setting a naming convention when starting out with campaigns. While it may seem convenient to name your A/B testing ads as “Test ad” or something equally generic, it can become a headache to track later. Therefore, it is advisable that you follow a systematic naming convention even in the planning stage.
4. Not including misspelled keywords
Who would think misspelled words can even be considered as a keyword? Well, Amazon’s A9 algorithm does. Not only does it consider wrong spellings as a keyword, but it also won’t list your product if your keyword is correctly spelled. So, don’t miss out on customers and add misspelled words and other close variations.
5. Not opting for automatic campaigns
Amazon offers two options: automatic campaigns (where your product listing’s SEO is used for data) and manual campaigns (where you seed the keywords and other data yourself). The latter seems tempting because you get to control the parameters. However, it is ideal to also run an automatic campaign on the side, as it can give you more results. At the very least, you will get effective keywords from the Search Term Report for your manual campaign.
6. Focusing only on the cost of sales
The advertising cost of sales or ACoS is an important parameter that must be checked regularly to learn campaign effectiveness. However, it is not the only metric that decides the value of an ad. You should also consider conversion rate (CR) and click-through rate (CTR), which indicate sales and relevance of your product. It also increases your chances of winning the bid.
7. Mixing keywords
In most cases, mixing relevant keywords is beneficial. However, that’s not the case with brand and non-brand keywords. Never use these two in the same PPC campaign. Instead, have separate campaigns for the two. This can help your track performance and increase the targeted outreach.
8. Not having enough stock
Technical aspects often overshadow other parts of your ad campaigns—the inventory. It is easy to forget to update your stock or count the stock before and during the campaign. This honest mistake, however, can become costly because Amazon stops showing your ads to your targeted audience if there isn’t enough stock. Therefore, make sure to keep an eye on the inventory as your sales increase and replenish them accordingly.
9. Lack of keeping tabs
The “set-it-and-forget-it” approach may work for many things in life, but Amazon PPC campaigns are not one of them. To get the most out of your ads, you need to regularly monitor and optimize them according to the performance and key metrics like CR, CTR, ACoS. This will help you consistently reach the right audience and increase sales.
Conclusion
Making mistakes when running sponsored ads on Amazon is more common than you’d think. Hopefully, you can fix your errors by following the 9 tips mentioned above. These will help your Amazon ad attract the right audience and deliver desired results.
