3 opportunities to improve your sponsored ads performance

Updated October 06, 2021

Our advertisers often ask about how to get the best performance out sponsored ads. In addition to knowing what you should do in your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns, it can be helpful to keep in mind what you shouldn’t do. Here we’ve compiled a short list of commonly missed opportunities that we advise our advertisers to target when building sponsored ads campaigns.

Opportunity #1: Avoid underbidding

Sometimes we see underperforming campaigns with low cost-per-click (CPC) bids—for example, below $0.25 USD (though this varies by product category). Starting your campaign with low bids can limit the opportunity to have your ads shown to shoppers. The lower your bid, the less likely you are to win an auction, meaning your ad won’t appear to shoppers.

Though you should never bid a price you’re not willing to pay for a click, keep in mind that setting a high bid doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll pay that price every time. How much you pay is based on your bid and how relevant your ads and keywords are compared to your competitors. Also, you can set your budget in order to control your overall spend.

A competitive bid can help secure an ad placement, which can lead to more impressions, clicks, and in the end, sales of your product.

Opportunity #2: Stay away from these keyword tactics

When creating sponsored ads campaigns, deciding which keywords to target can impact campaign performance. As you select keywords for your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns, we recommend you avoid:

  • Too few keywords. If you have a small number of keywords, your campaign will be limited to only those shopping queries. Add all relevant keywords to your products to target your ads. Then, review keyword reporting metrics to find out which perform best and optimize keyword performance over time.
  • Irrelevant keywords. At Amazon, we start with the customer and work backwards, meaning we prioritize a relevant and helpful shopping experience for our customers. We want to ensure that when a customer browses for products on Amazon, their shopping results meet their expectations and that any ads shown will improve their shopping experience. Adding keywords that aren’t relevant to your products will not help you gain impressions.
  • Copying or uploading keywords from other CPC campaigns. Don’t assume that keywords from other CPC ads will automatically work for your sponsored ads campaigns. Shoppers come to Amazon to browse products and make purchases. Shopping queries often focus on product categories (e.g., “Bluetooth speakers”), brands (e.g., “Bose”), or product characteristics (e.g., “wooden building blocks”). Add keywords to your campaign based on what you might type into Amazon to find the product you are looking for.

Opportunity #3: Don’t be limited by daily budget

Using the minimum daily budget may limit your campaign’s performance. A low daily budget could be spent within a few hours, and you could miss out on reaching shoppers later in the day. You can prevent these missed opportunities by checking on your campaigns toward the end of the day to ensure the daily budget you set has lasted.

Also, take a look at your average CPC and calculate how many clicks your ad may generate on a given day based on your daily budget. For example, if your ad’s average CPC is close to $0.50 and you set an $8 daily budget, you should expect your ad to get close to 16 clicks (8/0.50) on a given day.

For more tips and best practices for sponsored ads, visit our library of educational resources. If you haven’t started with sponsored ads yet, you can get started here.