These slides were presented at the SEMrush webinar "Taking Amazon Advertising to the Next Level". Video replay and transcript are available at https://www.semrush.com/webinars/taking-amazon-advertising-to-the-next-level/

1. 29th January, 2020

2. Agenda:
● Optimising your keywords,
● Optimising your ACoS,
● Structuring your campaigns for success,
● Organising your campaigns into portfolios,
● Getting the best out of Sponsored Brand
Ads (SBAs) and Sponsored Display Ads
(SDAs)

3. Just a quick intro…..
✔️ Working with Amazon Sellers since 2007.
✔️ Currently working with various Seller & Vendor
Central Amazon Sellers launch, optimise and
increase sales via Amazon Advertising.
Find out more here https://www.daytodayebay.co.uk/

4. Three key types of Amazon
Ads available for Seller
Central and Vendor Central

5. Sponsored Brands Ads
(SBAs)
Formerly known as headline search ads – these
ads are displayed above the search results, at the
footer and on product pages

6. Sponsored Product Ads
(SPAs)
These are displayed at the top of bottom of a
search results page – and on a product pages.

7. Sponsored Display Ads (SDAs)
This ad type targets and is displayed on a set of
products based on your targets.
This enables you to create cross sell or upsell
opportunities on your own product
pages, steal sales from a
competitor or position your
products with complementary items.

8. How do I optimise
Keywords?

9. “Making sure you’re targeting the
right keywords with the right bid is
one of the secrets to success on the
Amazon platform.”

10. 1. Use search term report to
find customer queries vs
conversion

11. ● Use this search term report to identify
irrelevant keywords and add them as
negatives.
● Increase bids for the most converting
keywords so you get continuous sales.

12. Non-converting KW

13. Converting KW with
low ACoS

14. ● Increase bids for keywords with low
numbers of impressions – it would suggest
the win rate is quite low and therefore the
advertiser is only winning a placement
quite low down/hardly ever seen.

15. ● The report also gives you Advertising Cost
of Sale ( ACOS) and Return on Ad Spend
(ROAS) which help you to determine the
profitability of your campaigns.
ACoS = Ad Spend / Sales %
ROAS = Sales / Spend

16. ACoS- Our cost of conversion was 1.3% of
the sales ROAS - For every dollar we spent, it generates
$75 worth of revenue.

17. ● The report also gives you Advertising Cost
of Sale ( ACOS) and Return on Ad Spend
(ROAS) which help you to determine the
profitability of your campaigns.
● Sales are attributed to any purchase within
7 days from a click in seller central and 14
days from click in vendor central

18. External keyword tools such as sonar can
provide valuable ideas for more keywords,
they, however, do not rely on search queries
alone for your products. As a secondary
source, they’re extremely helpful in
expanding the scope of your keyword list.

20. Groups with 20-30 Keywords are
manageable.

21. 2. Analyse the
performance of each
keyword to assess their
strength

22. Weak keywords: Keywords with high spend
and low conversion are best kept as negative
to improve advertising efficiency if the aim is
to reduce cost of conversion (ACoS)

23. Cost-effective keywords: Get a list of low-
cost keywords. You can bid on these strongly
to generate consistent sales.

24. 3.Allocate optimum bid

25. Allocate a higher budget for successful
keywords in manual campaigns. A higher
budget improves your bid’s win rate giving
keywords a better chance to generate
impressions and therefore clicks.

26. Allocate all match types for each keyword
into three groups. Exact match is not always
a good target and the broad one is not a bad
one either. So, your campaign will look like
below

28. 4. Use Negative KW

29. Use Negative keywords to limit the wastage.
Use exact match type just so you don’t stop
additional traffic.

30. How do I optimise my
ACoS?

31. 1. Define target ACoS
Get your profit target for
your sales on Amazon
platforms. Once you have
profit % you can target your
ACOS lower than this.

32. An example:
If we have 43% profit before advertising, 20%
ACoS would give you 23% return.

33. If the ACoS is higher than 23% you are
making a loss on every sale you generate via
advertising.

34. Going beyond 23% cost
may be acceptable to
get initial sales.

35. 2. Lower bids on high ACoS
keywords

36. If your keywords are
generating high ACOS then
reduce CPC bid.

37. 3. Stop advertising

38. If any variations is not
performing well, it is best to
stop advertising. But don’t
make early judgement.
Usually, it is best practice to
allow certain % of the value
of the product to be spent
without sales.

39. Sponsored Brand Ads are known to
have high ACoS

40. New to Brand % tells us what the percentage
of sales from customers who have bought
from the brand in the last 12 months.
If this is higher than 80% with higher cost than
other ads, that’s acceptable.

41. How do I structure my
campaigns for
success?

42. The structure you give in your campaigns will
affect how many ads you can display at one
time as well as how easy it is for you to
manage your keywords and gain insights into
consumer behaviour.

43. Auto campaigns: You can structure this based
on product types, category, top sellers or
seasonal campaigns.

45. Manual campaigns: These are generally the
second phase of advertising. By that time you
know what keywords are performing well and
what is not.

47. A very granular campaign would have one or
a group of similar products, divided into three
groups with BROAD, PHRASE and EXACT
match. In this case, you have full control over
each keyword.

49. It’s best to keep both auto and manual
campaigns working hand in hand. Auto
campaigns may initially create some
additional cost but when negative keywords
are added the wastage is lowered.

50. Please note that Manual KW campaigns does
not appear on product pages but Auto
campaigns does.

51. With advertising, you spend a lot of time
researching keywords & auto campaigns
eliminates this work. You’ll know the best
performing keywords from your search term
report.

52. Organising your
campaigns into
portfolios

53. Relatively new feature “Portfolios” offers a
way to group or categorise your campaigns.
Grouping can be made logical based your
campaign goals. We will take a look at some
goals.

54. Example 1: Event Based
Valentine’s Day - Budget 5,000
SPA, SBA

55. Example 2: Keywords Based
Brand KW - Budget 5,000
SPA, SBA
Example 2a: Keywords Based
Generic KW - Budget 5,000
SPA, SBA

56. Example 3: Defensive
Sponsored Display Ads and Sponsored
Product Target Ads displaying your own
products. These ads are there to mostly keep
your product pages clean from competitors
but also function as cross-selling and upsell
opportunities. Let’s see some examples.

59. Getting the best out
of Sponsored Brand
Ads (SBAs)

60. Amazon Sponsored Brands Ads (formerly
Headline Search Ads) allows sellers to engage
with customers with a prominent positioned
ads.
Amazon has now expanded Sponsored
Brands targeting options and you can target
Keywords, ASINs and categories.

61. Where does my ad appear?

63. Advertise your Store

64. You can choose
home or category
pages
A/ B test with logo
and lifestyle image
Write a
compelling
tagline, AB test
sounds good
idea

65. You can
interchange
products
Increase brand
awareness with
this option.

66. Targeting - Keywords
NEW

67. Amazon may then decrease your bids for other placements
(other than top of the search) based on your observed
conversion rate for those placements.

68. Pick a list of best
performing keywords
from your Sponsored
Product Ads.
Test all three match types
and avoid assuming exact
match works better than
others.

69. Advertise
specific
products. It is
good practice to
choose products
with reviews
Advertising a product range

70. Select minimum
3 products

71. If you add more than 3
products shoppers are directed
to a list of products which is
more than 3 increasing choices

72. Similar process as done
previously with store ads

73. Targeting - Products
NEW

74. Target options:
- Suggested category
- Search category

75. Target options:
- Suggested products
- Search products by ASIN or
Keywords
- Upload a list of ASINs

76. Use metrics like ACoS to measure
performance and there are other
important metrics..

77. New Sponsored Brand Metrics
• % of orders new-to-brand is the percentage of total orders that are
new-to-brand orders.
• % of sales new-to-brand is the percentage of total sales (in the local
currency) that are new-to-brand sales.
• New-to-brand orders is the number of first-time orders for products
within the brand over a one-year look back window.
• New-to-brand sales is the total sales (in the local currency) of new-to-
brand orders.

79. New Sponsored Brand Metrics
• If ACoS is higher than SPAs but if NTB
sales is above 80% that is still good
because your ads are generating
additional sales from customers who
have bought from you before.

80. Getting the best out
of Sponsored Display
Ads

81. How does this work?
• Audiences are automatically created
based on relevant Amazon shopping
activities to help you achieve your
business objectives

82. How does this work?
• Sponsored Display can be helpful to
raise product awareness.

83. Where will my Sponsored Display ads
appear?

86. Engage audiences whose shopping
activities on Amazon demonstrate
interests in product categories related
to your promoted product.
Targeting - Audience

87. • Amazon’s audience targeting functions
like Google’s custom intent audiences
that are made up of people who have
searched for specific things on Google.
• With Amazon’s search-based targeting
we build an audience of people based
on what they searched for on Amazon.

90. Targeting - Products

92. •Target as suggested
•Target search for your competitor
•Enter a list of ASINS
•Target Competing, Complimentary or a
Very close competitor

93. •Load your logo, brand and an
appealing tagline

94. Where will my Ads display?

95. Where will my Ads display?

96. Targeting - Categories

97. Amazon allows to target
only relevant category by
default linked with your
product
And the rest of the ad copy process is
the same as before

98. * Choose
products

99. Sponsored Display Ads - Reports
● High ACoS but additional sales
● No in-depth data reports
Category Target
Product Target
Audience Target

100. Let’s conclude with
Amazon Strategies

104. Any questions?

105. Checkout our full day
Amazon Advertising and SEO
training on April 2020
http://bit.ly/brightonseo101

108. Prabhat Shah
Amazon Training & Consultancy
@daytodayebay
www.daytodayebay.co.uk