Costly Amazon PPC Mistakes to Avoid for Maximum ROI!

Amazon is one of the biggest global marketplaces, receiving about 223.72 million visitors per month. 

This means the competition between sellers to get their products noticed in from of consumers is a big challenge. Therefore, Amazon PPC if done strategically and in a correct manner can help you enhance your sales and build a unique brand image, helping you gain a competitive edge over the rivals in your niche. 

Every seller on Amazon understands the significance of PPC, however, one concept that mostly is not considered properly, is your Amazon ads strategy. It must be planned in a conceptual manner and tested thoroughly. 

The implications of mistakes in Amazon PPC can prove to be very costly at times. 

In this blog, we’re going to explain some common Amazon PPC mistakes made by many sellers and how they can be avoided. 

Top Amazon PPC mistakes

Fail to understand the difference between Google and Amazon Ads Intent: SEO

Amazon and Google both have their distinct search engines with different intent. 

So, the algorithms and techniques are also distinct. Many sellers get confused considering both the platforms are the same. 

Understanding the key difference between the two is very important. 
Amazon Sellers need to focus only on how the Amazon A10 algorithm works and conduct keyword research to discover Amazon’s customer search terms. 

While Google Algorithm works majorly for optimizing websites (in terms of SEO). 

Undermining the Campaign Structure 

A lot of Sellers make the mistake of not segregating their campaigns in a proper way. 

Why maintaining a proper structure is important?

It will help you understand and analyze your reports. Will give you a detailed picture of your campaign’s performance from an overview to broader ways. 

You need to avoid grouping many products together under the same campaign. Create different campaigns for different products. It will help you to keep track of which product is getting good sales. 

Here we recommend a few ideal ways to keep your campaigns in a structured way:

While deciding what and how many campaigns to have, consider the products’ value and how much budget is allotted for maximum coverage. 

See the following PPC structure strategy for Sponsored Product campaigns. 

{Ad Type} – {Campaign Type} – {Targeting Type} – {Product} – {Strategy}

Let’s understand more specifically.

• SP (Sponsored Product) – Automatic – Glass bottles – Dynamic Bidding
• SP – Manual – bamboo sheets – Buyer Keyword or Converting Search Terms

Create a separate campaign for brand keywords, top buyer keywords & Competitor Product Targets

Inadequate negative keyword research

The Amazon Keyword research is done to find potential high-volume keywords that convert and that they want to target in their ads. 

But what gets missed is finding the keywords that their ads should not target i.e. negative keyword targeting. 

As an active seller on Amazon, you would want your ad to always pop up for certain keywords. But when your ads show up for some other keywords like those that generate traffic and clicks but no conversions in return and unrelated products, your ad budget will only bleed in that case. 

Tip: Sellers usually make mistakes of adding the list of negative keywords and this results to waste of ad spending. 

We suggest you keep a consistent check over Amazon’s Customer Search Terms Report which pulls a good insight into keywords that brings good sales. 

External factors that are forgotten to optimize for PPC 

When it comes to PPC Advertising, there are a lot of elements that need to be optimized. Apart from your actual ad optimization the success of your campaigns also depends on how well optimized your product listings are.

When a customer clicks on an ad, the next thing they see is your listing and if that isn’t that attractive and informative, then they will leave without making any purchase. 

Sellers sometimes end up advertising products that do not have enough good product reviews and ratings or those that have less inventory. Inventory levels are one aspect that sellers sometimes tend to overlook, and this act is a hindrance because Amazon will not show ads for products whose inventory levels are running low. 

Tracking the wrong metrics

Creating and launching a campaign and then forgetting to regularly check on its performance is an error that sellers often commit. Your ad performance can be measured with the help of these metrics – Impressions, Clicks, Conversions, CTR, ROAS and CPC. But tracking all these metrics is not beneficial to all sellers. 

Accordingly, you will need to track specific metrics. Avoid the mistake of not going through your ad reports and checking the wrong metrics because your advertising account has a lot of information and data to offer you. 

They can help you better understand what’s performing well and where you need to focus more of your efforts and resources. 

Making Adjustments to campaigns too quickly

Amazon PPC is a process that takes some amount of time to gain momentum and collect data that can be used to access performance. 

Sellers expect very quick results and don’t give their campaigns enough time after applying some new changes. 

It is important to keep track of how your ads are performing but too many changes should be avoided. 

If sellers make the mistake of adjusting bids and removing or adding keywords every week or two, there isn’t enough time for data to collect and you will be left with nothing to analyze your ad performance by. 

How can you avoid Amazon PPC mistakes?

Some of the common mistakes that you can avoid.

Review before eliminating your poor-performing keywords.

While reviewing the performance of keywords, most sellers directly resort to eliminating poor-performing ones. However, you must understand why those keywords are underperforming. 

It could be because of seasonality, or their bid at a particular time. 

Analyze the keywords by their performance over a considerable time. 

In case you notice any spikes in their performance during certain periods and drops during others, it means that it’s not necessary to eliminate them. 

All you need to do is reduce their bids because they have the potential to bring you sales. 

Define a clear campaign goal.

Although every seller wants to leverage the power of PPC on Amazon. While it poses great opportunities for sellers to boost their sales, it also means that you need to have very clear goals defined that completely align with your marketing objective. 

Running an Amazon PPC campaign without a clear idea will need to deploy. 

And, if you want to boost your sales, then will need to launch Amazon Sponsored Product ads and define how many conversions are you looking to make and how much PPC revenue you want to generate. Panning things out in this manner will help you to easily achieve what you want with your ads by allocating the right amount of ad budget as well. 

Use correct keyword match types.

Amazon PPC has three keyword match types – broad, phrase and exact. Each of these is used for different objectives. Sellers need to know exactly what each type does so that they ca use the correct match type according to their advertising goals. 

A broad match is used to target your ads to a larger audience, an exact match is meant to attract a more specific, high-converting traffic and a phrase match is like an adjustment between the other two match types. 

Avoid targeting and attracting the wrong audience, make sure you know the purpose and functionality of every match type, so it helps you to cut down on ad spending. 

Leverage Geo – targeting options.

Amazon PPC provides geotargeting or location targeting options for ads that sellers need to look at carefully. Why target a large number of people with low chances of conversion when you can target a smaller region with an audience that will exactly convert?

 In case you are using Sponsored Display ads, don’t skip out on targeting shoppers according to some geographic for specific placements. 

Conclusion

Amazon PPC gives you a holistic solution to optimize your ads in the Amazon marketplace to reach the maximum audience and enhance your sales. Sellers at all stages need to use PPC to promote their Amazon business. 

It is a great tool for sellers to enhance and gain a competitive edge and get maximum sales.