Using Amazon Sponsored Products
If you’re looking into paid advertising options to increase your Amazon sales, Amazon Sponsored Products is an obvious choice. We take a look at how the programme works, what it costs, and how to make the most of it.
What is Amazon Sponsored Products?
Amazon Sponsored Products is a paid advertising programme that helps you to promote the products you have for sale on Amazon.co.uk. It’s also available for Amazon’s other European marketplaces.
The ads are displayed in search results alongside other listings, and they may also be shown in a number of other ad placements on Amazon.co.uk including the right hand side of search results and on product detail pages. Amazon matches shoppers’ search terms to keywords that you’ve bid on and you’re charged on a cost-per-click basis so that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
How to set up Amazon Sponsored Products
You can sign up to Amazon Sponsored Products here. To start using Sponsored Products you have to choose which of your products you’re going to advertise, select keywords for them, and then enter a cost-per-click bid. These keywords determine which search results your Sponsored Product ads will appear in.
Only ads for product listings that are already in the Buy Box will be displayed, if an item that you’ve selected isn’t eligible you’ll be notified in the ‘Campaign Manager’ section under the ‘Advertising’ tab within Seller Central.
Pricing
Amazon Sponsored Products are charged on a cost-per-click basis. You set a maximum amount that you’re willing to pay each time a shopper clicks on your ad, and you’re in competition with anyone else that is targeting the same keyword as you, so whoever’s ad has the highest bid will appear. You can set a daily budget, which means that over the course of a month your average daily spend won’t go over that amount.
Your first charge will be when you reach £1, and from then you’ll be charged within four days of the end of each month and every time you reach £50. That credit limit can be increased if you often reach £50 before the end of the month.
The benefits of using Amazon Sponsored Products
Getting your products onto the first page of search results is one of the key reasons to use Sponsored Products, which if you’re targeting the appropriate keywords should increase the number of pageviews and sales. You can use it to promote any products that you have on offer or to increase traffic to new or poor performing products. However, it’s important to test your campaigns, monitor which products it works for and make sure that the money you spend on Sponsored Products is converting to sales.
Manual or automatic campaigns?
When you set up your Sponsored Products you’ll be able to choose between a manually or automatically targeted campaign. Automatic targeting means that Amazon will display your ad based on how relevant a shoppers search terms are to your product page’s content (title, description and bullet points). If you use manual targeting you can pick specific keywords that you want your product to appear in search results for.
If you’re just starting to use Sponsored Products, it’s best to set up automatic campaigns with fairly low bids. You’ll then be able to see reports about the search terms used to find your products, and which of those searches convert into sales. Automatic campaigns will give you search term information that you can apply to a more targeted manual campaign in the future.
An automatic campaign is likely to cost you more because the number of different search results that your product appears in can be a lot higher than if you specifically choose one or two keywords to target. For some of those search result that your ad appears in, your product won’t be as relevant so the cost of a shopper clicking through is less likely to result in a sale.
Which products benefit from Sponsored Products?
At first, you should select a wide range of products to test with Amazon Sponsored Products. It may surprise you which ones work best, and it will save you wasting money in the longer term.
You also need to be aware that your Sponsored Product bid isn’t the only thing that determines where you ad places in search results. Amazon wants ads to show up that are likely to result in a purchase so the sales history for your product will be taken into account - products that convert and have been purchased before are more likely to be shown.
Once you have an idea of the keywords you should be targeting from the results of an automatic campaign, not only can you set up more effective manual campaigns, you can also use them to update your titles and descriptions.
Tracking your Amazon sales
Once you start using Amazon Sponsored Products it’s important that you keep track of whether your sales increase, and which product it’s working for. You can monitor your Amazon sales, and compare them with your other sales channels using Zenstores Insights. You can also use Zenstores Insights to keep an eye on how well each of your products is selling and which are your best customers. Learn more about Zenstores Insights here.
