Advertising your brand on Amazon

Finding growth and success: Optimization tips and best practices

The key to successful advertising is to adjust your campaigns regularly to make sure they’re helping you meet your goals. Here, we offer guidance that will help you get the most out of your campaigns.

Identify and use your top-performing keywords

We recommend that advertisers run a Sponsored Products automatic-targeted campaign early on. With this, Amazon automatically matches your ads to relevant customer search terms—which helps you learn how shoppers find and buy your products.

It’s important to regularly identify the search terms that drive results for you. To do this, look to your search term report (available under ‘Advertising Reports’ in Campaign Manager) to see which terms generate the most impressions, clicks, and sales. Then, use these when either creating or optimizing your Sponsored Products manually-targeted campaign, where you select the keywords or products you want to target. You can also use these top-performing keywords in your Sponsored Brands campaign.

For both ad campaigns, you can feel confident about bidding more competitively on these keywords, since you know that they help increase awareness and sales for you.

Use brand and category keywords

Branded keywords contain your company or brand name. Category keywords relate to your product, but don’t include your company or brand name. A well-rounded advertising strategy includes both—and you should take advantage of both to help maximize your coverage and reach.

Leverage all keyword match types

Use a mix of keyword match types to improve your reach and coverage. Broad match provides the widest traffic exposure, while phrase match and exact match are more restrictive but help drive highly relevant traffic.

With Sponsored Products, you also have the option to add negative keywords to your campaigns. This will help you cut down on irrelevant traffic and optimize your ad spend.

Monitor your performance

Amazon Ads provides you with the tools you need to measure success after your advertising campaign is live. Review your advertising performance on an ongoing basis to make the most out of your investment.

Within Campaign Manager, you’ll find a number of downloadable reports that help you understand your performance to achieve your goals. With Sponsored Products, many advertisers evaluate their Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS) to understand how their spend relates to sales generated by ads. For Sponsored Brands, focusing on impressions or new-to-brand metrics is important for understanding how many potential shoppers discovered your brand. Here are some of the metrics you’ll find:

Impressions: The number of times ads were displayed.
• New-to-brand (NTB) orders: The number of first-time orders for products on Amazon within the brand over a one-year lookback window. For Sponsored Brands only.
• New-to-brand (NTB) sales: The total sales (in local currency) of new-to-brand orders. For Sponsored Brands only.
• Advertising cost of sales (ACOS): The percent of attributed sales spent on advertising within the specified timeframe for a type of campaign due to clicks on your ads.
• Spend: The total click charges for a campaign.
• Sales: The total value of products sold to shoppers within the specified timeframe for a type of campaign due to clicks on your ads.
• Orders: The number of Amazon orders shoppers who submitted an order after clicking on your ads.
• Clicks: The number of times your ads were clicked.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of shoppers who click on your product ad when displayed.
Cost-per-click (CPC): This is the average amount you paid for each click on an ad.

Run campaigns with no end date

Taking an ‘always-on’ approach has two benefits. First, you’ll be able to gain insights about how shoppers are finding and buying your products, so you can optimize your campaigns more easily. Second, you won’t miss an opportunity for your ad to display to relevant shoppers.

Don’t go dark—ensure you have enough budget

Daily budgets are spent as quickly as possible, meaning your budget will not be paced throughout the day. Don’t lose out on the chance to attract more customers to your ads by running out of budget before the day is over. In many cases, a budget of just $10 will help give you the right coverage.

Bid competitively

Setting competitive bids can help you get your ads in front of more shoppers, driving more interest in your brand and products. If you’re not sure how to determine your bid amount, you can find help in Campaign Manager for both your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Learn about how to attract new shoppers for your brand on Amazon now.