Top Amazon Advertising Tips for 2021
Updated on June 17, 2021
Amazon has positioned itself as the third-leading digital ad seller in the US. Also, the chain of events in 2020 has helped Amazon carve out additional shares. It’s clear that Amazon is strongly placed to continue its robust growth in its ad business.
Here are some Amazon advertising statistics:
- Amazon is ranked #1 among the top online retailers in the US, in terms of online revenue generated in 2020. (Source: Techcrunch)
- In 2020, Amazon’s ad revenues in the US amounted to 15.73 billion US dollars. By 2023, the company is expected to generate over 30 billion dollars from its advertising activities in the US alone, as consumers dramatically shift to more eCommerce shopping and advertisers pay to get in front of shoppers at their leading destination. (Source: Statista)
- Amazon Video Ads is now a big part of Sponsored Brands on Amazon.
Whether your Amazon business supplements your traditional brick-and-mortar retail locations or comprises 100% of your sales, the right Amazon advertising strategy is essential.
Successful online retailers have avoided this enormous opportunity of advertising on Amazon for decades out of fear that showing too many ads on Amazon’s site might distract visitors from their key objective, because shiny advertisements alone can quench our shopping thirst.
However, brands and sellers are now shifting from the experimenting phase to strategizing PPC and their overall advertising map.
Here’s a list of expert tips for brands & sellers to learn how you can amplify your ads strategy in 2021.
Top Expert Tips for Advertising on Amazon in 2021
1. Use Amazon Sponsoring Campaigns
When selling on Amazon, your competition is increasingly focused on awareness building. Amazon not only boasts a hugely successful online retail platform but also a thriving digital marketplace that is seamlessly integrated with the main retail shopping experience. In the last quarter of 2020, 55% of paid units were sold by third-party sellers. (Source: Statista)
These figures underscore the importance of brand awareness. This means if you don’t adopt a similar strategy, you could easily be missing out on more proactive advertisers.
Amazon’s Sponsoring Campaigns are one of the best ways to strengthen your brand awareness strategy.
Amazon Sponsored Brands should be a part of your top-of-funnel advertising activities. Pair them with category and brand-related keywords to increase your customer reach.
Image Source: Amazon Advertising
The prime real estate on Amazon is surely the ad space at the top of search results. With Amazon Sponsored Brand ads you are able to:
- Customize the position of the ad within the space
- Add a featured image
- Add a video
- Write your own ad
- Market three different products belonging to the same brand
The most significant benefits of using Amazon Sponsored Brands include:
- Higher Visibility
The products advertised as Sponsored Brands have a spot on top of search results, pages, or headers.
Amazon’s prime real estate is reserved for ads and is separated from organically displayed products. It provides excellent visibility for your brand and products.
- Displaying Multiple Items
The ability to display three products simultaneously makes a significant difference. This can boost your sales exponentially.
You have an option to diversify your offer and display a variety of products. If you have several hit products that your customers love, this ad type can be extremely useful.
- Boosting Amazon PDP (Product Details Page) Traffic
Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads are an easy way to increase traffic to your store. Since they are PPC or pay-per-click ads, you can drive traffic directly to product descriptions and their ASINs in-store. This gives the shopper a chance to look at all your featured products and see if they like something.
- Boosting Sales
In the end, sales is all that matters. Given that these ads are placed at the top of each page, it’s only natural that they increase sales. And with an option to display three products at once, you increase the chances of converting a lead into a sale.
2. Leverage Amazon Targeting Campaigns
Image Source: Amazon Advertising
You must focus on creating product and category targeting campaigns.
Within the two campaigns, advertisers can choose when to have their ad displayed, track conversion rates, and make changes to increase sales.
- Target By Product:
To target customers by product, you don’t have to spend time or money on Amazon keyword research and you don’t have to devise an Amazon PPC advertising strategy. You can directly target your primary competitors, thus increasing conversion rates, decreasing advertising cost of sale (ACoS), and decreasing your competitors’ sales velocity.
This will allow you to display your products among the other top search results. Also, you can refine your targeting by star rating, price range, and specific brands.
- Target By Category:
You can target an entire category or subcategory on Amazon. These ads appear on the Amazon product detail page. Also, the ads can be shown on the search results page for a specific category.
To use category targeting, just select the category your product is in, or choose similar categories that would be appropriate for your product.
Here’s a tip: Targeting a vertical simply for its popularity or potential for high traffic will ultimately result in wasted spending. However, category targeting has an additional feature to make the campaign more specific. After you select a category to target, you can refine the targeting based on price range, brand, prime eligibility, and average star rating.
- Targeting Report:
“Targeting Report” provides access to data from targeted categories and products. This is an excellent addition designed to help you identify the best-performing target segment.
Leverage “Targeting Report” to get insights from data, custom-tailor your campaigns, get better results, and lower your ACoS.
Monitoring your ad’s performance on an Amazon analytics platform like DataHawk is vital for success on Amazon.
Here’s a tip: Shopper discovery and branding are two targeting types that can be powerful tools for competitor targeting, depending on your advertising goals.
For instance, targeting competitors’ ASINs, brands, or their best-selling categories will give you more opportunity to display your products on their Amazon product detail pages.
Targeting competitors’ products will help if you’re looking for new shoppers to discover your brand and products. However, it’s then important to bid higher than the competitors.
You can also leverage targeting campaigns to secure your brand’s traffic and keep shoppers away from clicking on a competitor’s ASIN.
Since these targeting methods are more flexible than the traditional manual or automatic targeting for sponsored products, you need to have a focused goal for these ads to measure their performance and the campaign’s success.
3. Focus on Video Marketing
Top Stats on Video Marketing & Ads
- 96% of marketers have placed ad spend on video.
- 88% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI.
- The most common video ads made by marketers are presentations (65%), followed by ads (57%), and explainers (47%). (Source: Hubspot)
Image Source: Amazon Advertising
Even on Amazon, video has been repeatedly proven to be more compelling to users than the more static formats of images and text.
The new video ads format allows retailers to leverage the power of video content within Sponsored Brands in addition to the regular image-based advertisements.
- The video ads are keyword-targeted CPC ads and take customers directly to the respective Amazon PDP.
- The Amazon Video Ads site features guidelines for sellers to make compelling ads.
- Add text to videos to communicate the brand message or product specifications.
- Text should be white and on top of a black bounding box set with 80% of opacity.
- The file formats accepted are .MOV and .MP4.
4. Keep an Eye on Your Competitor
Leverage sponsored ad data on a given set of keywords that matter to you. If you are selling a particular product, it’s essential to know who is bidding the highest on the keywords. Most importantly, this will help you assess if your bids are high enough to rank on page 1 as a sponsored product or not, because it doesn’t make sense to be on page 3 as a sponsored product.
If you’re not on page 1, maybe it’s time to increase your bid. With these kinds of insights using ad data, you can greatly improve your ad strategy.
Additional Tips:
- Use the data to monitor and optimize your bidding according to your inventory headroom as well. This technique is beneficial when running promotions or discounts.
- It is essential to advertise on your branded keywords even if you are ranking higher in search results for them. It’s super important to secure your loyal customer base, and it helps when you launch new products under your brand’s umbrella.
5. Earn Amazon Badges
Amazon offers multiple badges to highlight the top products in every category. Amazon badges help to increase your organic traffic, which boosts your conversion rates, leading to more traffic.
You can use badges as a way to gamify your selling experience, as not many sellers can have “Amazon’s Choice” associated with their product.
These eye-catching badges represent product quality for consumers and tell them that you are serious about running an eCommerce business on Amazon.
There are three main types of badges that we see on a product detail page:
- Amazon’s Choice:
This black ribbon appears in the same place as the “Best Seller” badge, and it seems to have priority over the “Best Seller” ribbon in case your listing is good enough to have both badges at the same time.
This badge is keyword-specific, which means that your listing can rock the “Amazon’s Choice” badge for multiple keywords simultaneously.
- #1 Best Seller:
Items with this badge show up first when someone browses a specific category. The badge changes quite often, and last we checked, you won’t be notified when one of your listings is currently rocking this badge.
- Prime: Products that are under Amazon Prime Services.
Amazon badges highlight products with high sales, which showcases their popularity, positive ratings, and pricing. Getting a badge will surely increase customer conversions and sales on Amazon.
Bonus Tip:
Leverage social media to drive external traffic to your Amazon listings. This is very advantageous as it helps you increase your organic ranking and boosts sales momentum, building a customer base outside of Amazon.
Final Thoughts
As consumers are increasingly opting for eCommerce shopping, advertisers are directing more cash to get on the top rows of the leading destination. And now that Amazon has become a pay-to-play platform, it is imperative to devise a robust Amazon ads strategy.
According to a recent DataHawk study on “Amazon Sponsored Ads Slots vs. Organic Slots,” the proportion of sponsored products and generic products (that is, other featured products) increased in June 2020.
In June 2020, organic ad slots had a 97% share. By August 2020, this dropped to 85%, and in January 2021 it dropped to 77%, which is a stable decrease. Since then, the organic share has been stable and seems to be following the same trend for 2021.
This points to the increasing competition within the Sponsored Ads space on Amazon.
Also, Amazon is slowly becoming a more complex ad platform with multiple initiatives at work to differentiate your ads. For instance, there’s off-Amazon targeting and increased ability to use images and headlines.
The upcoming changes that Amazon is planning to make on its ads platform, are surely going to create more opportunity for Amazon sellers who will learn the art of Amazon ads using data analytics and leverage it to dominate their niche.
Implementing the above mentioned approaches for Amazon Advertising in 2021 will surely help you improve your ACOS, increase sales and build your brand presence on and off Amazon.
