Virtual Event Replay Hosted by Seller Rocket: Top 5 Advertising Mistakes on Amazon

Advertising has become indispensable to growth as an Amazon seller in recent years. The virtual event was hosted by Kris Weissman from SellerRocket, and included Andrew Laird, Senior Account Manager at Mayan and founder of LASO technologies. Kris and Andrew discussed some common mistakes sellers make when navigating the Amazon advertising landscape.

Prefer to watch instead? Click on the video below!

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Why Advertising and Marketing on Amazon is So Important

In the past three years, ad placements have more than doubled as over 40% of sales are now preceded by an ad click. From occupying less than 1% of this digital advertising market at its beginning, Amazon has witnessed an astounding growth to 12% today — a number that is expected to rise continuously. The platform has essentially become a pay-to-play platform where it is increasingly indispensable to developing strong advertising strategies.

Top Advertising Mistakes on Amazon

When it comes to advertising on Amazon, it can get complicated really quickly. But when you are looking to improve your advertising strategy, a good place to start is by reviewing the below mistakes and see if you're making any of them.

1. Forgetting Negative Keywords

Advertising budget is often wasted when negative keywords are not utilized to their full potential. Negative keywords, or search terms that can be eliminated from your ad campaigns when shoppers search for products, play a huge role in reaching target shoppers by ensuring your product ad matches their specific search.

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2. Ignoring Sponsored Brand & Sponsored Display Ads

Amazon’s brand stores have a highly optimized standard format that are key to creating a unified brand experience. With a registered store, you have complete creative freedom to showcase your brand in the best light possible through product details, brand videos, and designs among others.

Something unique to Amazon is that your sponsored ads are displayed not just to their site, but also to their partners like ESPN and owned entities like Twitch. There are two attribute models for sponsored display ads: CPC — where you pay for every shopper ad click — and CPM — where you pay for a fixed amount of ad views.

3. Not Using All the Tools Amazon Provides 

Amazon provides a host of tools accessible in seller central accounts for you to experiment and take advantage of. Coupons, for example, are an often underutilized tool due to lost profit concerns that can actually improve conversion rates if used strategically.

Another under-appreciated component to advertising is the editorial recommendation. Because editorials are reviewed by either Amazon or a third-party who has done the research on your brand, they are a great way to stand out among competitors and to legitimize the quality of your products. 

Seller Rocket specializes in connecting these publishers to your products, so that your brands can reach completely new audiences across different sites.

4. Not Bidding on Branded Keywords 

When a shopper enters a search on Amazon, more often than not a variety of brands will appear on the first page. The more focused you can make this page on your brand alone, the more trust and confidence you instill within shoppers to purchase your product. However, even if your product ranks number 1 for its category, there are 3-4 preceding sponsored products that will place yours at a much lower spot than your actual rank. Potential traffic and sales are missed when shoppers are distracted by other brands, so it’s a worthy brand defense strategy to bid on your own keywords. By ensuring your brand is prioritized on shopper searches, you also have the opportunity to offer more variety of the same product and respond to different needs.

5. Using a Capped Ad Budget 

Having a strict limit for your auto-campaigns necessitates constantly checking for your budget, and that your campaign shuts down for the day completely once that budget is exceeded. On Amazon especially, running your ads 24/7 is a very important way to ensure you’re reaching the most shoppers. All campaigns on Amazon reset at 12am PST, which means the earlier it is, the more keyword competition there is — this is why you may have a high traffic rate, but also a high CPC and low conversion rate when the day starts. But because many sellers place strict limits on their ad spending, around noon many of these campaigns begin to taper off as they hit their budget caps. This is why Andrew often recommends a no-cap strategy for his clients here at Mayan: so long as ROA targets are met, your ad campaigns will be profitable.

Learn how Mayan can help you grow your Amazon business

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