If you are selling products on Amazon, you have a wide range of paid advertisement avenues available for you to take advantage of. With that said, if you don't have the right approach to maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS), these paid advertisements could end up costing your business more than they offer in returns.
To ensure that you're getting the most out of your Amazon ads as possible, we'll take a look at a few simple yet highly effective ways to increase your ROAS:
Most paid advertisement avenues are built around a bidding system that drives up the price of in-demand search terms. This means that if a large number of sellers are trying to create ads focused on targeting a specific search term on Amazon, then the price charged per ad that targets that term is going to go up. By getting creative and searching for long-tail keywords—keywords that will lead customers to your products without being overly competitive—you can easily lower the cost of your ads and thus increase your ROAS.
When creating an ad campaign through Amazon Web Services (AWS), you have the choice between two primary campaigns: automatic targeting or manual targeting.
Auto-targeting campaigns rely on Amazon algorithms to automatically select keywords for your products. This campaign type can be helpful for Amazon PPC beginners as they get their ad efforts up and running, but it limits the control you have over the search terms targeted—meaning you could be bidding on terms that aren’t actually relevant to your product.
On the other hand, manual targeting gives you full control over your ad campaigns, enabling you to define keyword parameters and set your own bid amount. When building a manual advertising campaign, AWS offers three bidding strategies: broad match bidding, phrase match bidding, and exact match bidding:
To maximize your ROAS and optimize your Amazon advertising strategy, we suggest combining research from auto-targeting campaigns and manual broad match bidding campaigns to identify the keywords that deliver the best results.
Creating a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign means that you will be charged every time someone clicks on your ad regardless of whether or not they end up purchasing your product. Of course, the goal is to generate enough sales that you earn more in profits than you are spending on the campaign. However, this can be difficult to do if the price of your products is low. For example, if you only profit $3 off of selling an inexpensive product and you are paying around $1 per ad click, you will need an unreasonably high conversion rate of 33% just to break even.
One great way to increase your average order value (AOV) without having to raise the prices of your individual products is to bundle products together and advertise the bundle. This allows you to remain competitive with your pricing while still ensuring that your AOV is high enough to justify a PPC campaign. A similar way to increase your AOV is to upsell customers to a more expensive variation of your product by advertising the base product before giving customers the option to upgrade by clicking through the product detail page.
Looking for more quick ways to successfully sell on Amazon? Download our Amazon Marketing Playbook.