Today’s post is the final installment in our Reach Expansion Final Four series. So far, we’ve covered expanding your online advertising efforts with Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But now it’s time to talk about Amazon Product Ads. Unlike the other three platforms we’ve discussed so far this week, Amazon Products Ads will only be of use to you if you fall into an ecommerce bracket, as the name of the service suggests. Amazon can be a great place to expand your product advertising.
Here’s how Product Ads appear on Amazon:
To start, here’s a brief player profile of Amazon Product Ads:
- Ability to reach millions of shoppers online
- Like other PPC advertising, you’re only paying for clicks to your ads
- High level of product targeting to people already searching for your specific products
- Customers still click-through to your website, so they become a part of your customer base
From my experience, setting up an account to advertize on Amazon was fairly simple. Basically, you just need a file with all your product information to upload to Amazon, which is easily obtainable for ecommerce site managers, since this data is already stored in your database. Like uploading campaigns to AdWords or AdCenter, you’ll just need to reformat your data to match Amazon’s provided template, including up to 5 keywords for each product to help Amazon display your ad on their own relevant product pages. Like other PPC advertising, you’ll be assigning bids to your keywords, and you will only incur costs when someone actually clicks on your ad. Sound familiar?
Let’s head into the locker room for a second to think through Amazon a little more. Here are some things to take into account if you’re considering advertising your products on Amazon:
- You’ll want to make sure you have high quality images for all your products. As you can see in my screenshot above, your image will be displayed inline with your competitors.
- As a shopping platform, Amazon is heavily focused on competitive pricing. While you can skirt less than competitive pricing in your search engine ads, there’s no way around it on Amazon. If you’re prices are much higher than other sellers, you won’t reap any benefits from advertising on Amazon.
- Amazon will determine your product categories for you once you upload your product feed. Consider your product placement before uploading. If your product isn’t something commonly sold on Amazon, your ads won’t be able to be placed.
- As a follow-up to my previous bullet, Amazon is great for commonly shopped items. Review Amazon’s onsite product categories and access whether or not your products naturally align with these items.
If you’ve heeded my thinking points above, and have identified Amazon as a good match for your ecommerce products, I think Amazon can be a great place to supplement your current PPC advertising revenue. You’ll most likely see much lower cost-per-clicks on Amazon, and likely have much less competition in terms of number of advertisers, though doesn’t discount the fact that Amazon itself is competing against your products.
For more information about Amazon Product Ads, you can read more here from Amazon.
