Advertising on Amazon is an important way to attract customers and increase sales. However, incorrect advertising strategies may lead to waste of resources and reduce advertising effectiveness.

Therefore, how to avoid useless Amazon advertising has become an issue that sellers need to pay attention to and solve.

Today, Zhaodanmao will share with you some suggestions to help sellers avoid placing useless advertisements on Amazon and improve the effectiveness and returns of advertising.

Sixteen advertising suggestions

① Over-control of ACOS

When managing advertising campaigns, sellers must clearly define the goals of each advertising campaign. Some sellers are too concerned about advertising spending, and when they see that ACOS is too high or ROAS is too low, they rush to close ads or reduce ad bids. However, over-controlling ACOS may cause the initial investment to go to waste. Sellers should adjust their advertising strategies according to the operational goals at different stages.

During the new product promotion phase, sellers should focus on increasing exposure and sales, so they should pay more attention to conversion rates. Even if the current advertising expenditure leads to overall losses for the product, advertising investment should not be reduced prematurely. At this stage, do not miss the opportunity to increase sales and ranking.

For mature products, if the supply chain is limited, ranking has reached its limit, or advertising budgets are limited and costs are rising, sellers should set goals to increase profit margins and pay more attention to ACOS. Lowering ACOS is a key goal by adjusting bids, optimizing keywords, and closing advertising campaigns with too high ACOS.

② The advertising budget is very low

In Amazon advertising, frugality is important, but sellers need to allocate their advertising budgets wisely. Some sellers are too tight on their advertising budgets, which can result in low ad clicks, which in turn affects the effectiveness of the ads.

For example, suppose a product advertising campaign shows a 10% conversion rate after long-term data observation, and the cost per click is S1. Theoretically, with a $10 advertising budget per day, the advertising campaign can generate 1 order. However, if the seller reduces the daily budget from $10 to $8 to save budget, then theoretically the ad may not generate an order every day.

Although orders are still likely to be generated from a probability perspective, stable performance is very important in Amazon advertising. Unstable advertising performance may reduce advertising quality, increase advertising costs, and affect product exposure and sales.

③ Low bid (except for leak ads)

Some sellers set lower ad bids in the hope of getting more clicks within a limited budget. However, too low a bid may result in a product not being exposed or only being exposed on irrelevant ASINs, making it difficult to get exposure on keyword search pages. This will have a negative impact on the product's keyword ranking and ad quality.

Nevertheless, there is a strategy called "leaky ads", which involves setting the bid much lower than the recommended value and then placing ads on high-heat short-tail keywords to get the opportunity to get orders at a lower cost. This is usually implemented during a specific time period to seize the opportunity when competitors bid low, thereby gaining exposure and orders.

④ Failure to promptly deny invalid traffic

Especially for novice sellers, when they are running Amazon advertising in the early stage, they often ignore the importance of daily advertising keyword exclusion. This may cause advertising budget to be wasted on ineffective keywords, while effective keywords cannot get enough exposure.

Sellers should analyze advertising reports every day and promptly exclude obviously irrelevant keywords. Every invalid click represents a waste of advertising budget and may damage the seller's profits.

⑤ No periodic analysis of advertising reports

Some sellers neglect the periodic analysis of advertising reports, which may lead to unnecessary waste of advertising budget. Periodic analysis helps to screen out poorly performing keywords and exclude them, as well as find high-performance keywords to optimize the advertising structure. Emphasize the purpose of periodic analysis of advertising: to negate keywords that are relevant but have extremely low conversion rates and extremely high ACOS.

Filter out keywords with high conversion rates and low ACOS, and use them to open separate manual ads (broad, phrase, precise) to further optimize the ad structure.

⑥ The time period for advertising is not the best time period for placing orders

Generally speaking, it is not recommended to place a large number of advertisements or increase the advertising budget during the early morning hours of the corresponding station country. The traffic in the early morning hours is very small and the conversion rate is relatively low. Of course, it is not ruled out that some products are easy to cause impulse purchases by buyers late at night. Amazon advertising will restart the calculation of the budget usage for the day after 12 o'clock in the morning. If the bid and budget are not adjusted in time, it is likely that all the budget will be spent in the early morning hours, which will not only cause waste, but also lead to the situation where there is no budget for exposure during the best order time period, unless additional investment is made.

Therefore, during the early morning hours of the corresponding sites, it is recommended to lower the bid, or shut down some advertising activities, and adopt a "peak-shifting" approach to extend the product exposure time as much as possible.

In addition, you should also pay attention to the best time to place orders for your product. You can focus on placing ads during this time period. The impact of seasons, festivals, and peak and off-peak seasons on the performance of specific keywords is not considered.

For example, when running an Amazon US site, there are many holidays in a year, such as Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc., or some seasonal products. Buyers often search with time node keywords and product keywords. If your product is not related to this, you can deny these keywords in advance to avoid wasting advertising budget. If it is related, you can add keywords with specific time nodes to advertise, which will be more targeted and the conversion rate may be higher. The selected advertising report time period is too long or too short, or the selected time range is not of much reference significance.

We all know that the sample size must be large enough for the data to be meaningful for reference. If you want to conduct a phased advertising analysis, the advertising report must also select a sufficiently long time range, and when analyzing the data of a single keyword, the randomness of the data must also be taken into account. If the data is too small, it is better not to move it to avoid making wrong judgments.

⑦ Treat Amazon like Google

When moving from Google paid ads to Amazon’s paid advertising program, some people mistakenly assume that they can apply the same strategies on both platforms.

While the terminology and overall principles are similar, Amazon ads are structured very differently. One of the most important factors is the match type, which, while labeled the same as Google, actually has a very different definition.

⑧ Not investing in a good campaign structure

The structure of your campaign is crucial to scaling your advertising. Often, people will group a large number of products into a single ad group.

While there is an exception to every rule, as a general rule, keep the number of ASINs in your ad group as small and similar as possible. The biggest mistake is placing many different SKUs in the same ad group, which makes it impossible to match clicks and sales to the right products and to fine-tune costs and performance over time.

9. Do not conduct brand search

For most accounts, we recommend separating brand and non-brand terms into different campaigns.

Separating brand and non-brand keywords provides: More transparency into your ad results. More meaningful numbers to help you develop your strategy and scale your ads.

⑩ Changing and reducing advertising budget too quickly

As with most ad platforms, give your campaign 7-14 days to run before making major changes.

Sellers must also consider that there is a 48-hour reporting delay for most campaigns, and sellers should account for this delay when adjusting their campaigns. It is also widely believed that manual campaigns on Amazon can take up to 30 days to be published.

If the keywords in your campaign are not getting any impressions, you should: Check if the keywords are relevant to your products. Give the campaign a month to optimize and start showing all the keywords in a particular ad group.

⑪ Not managing inventory levels

On Amazon, conversions are everything.

The organic ranking and effectiveness of your campaigns depend largely on how well you manage your inventory.

If a product is completely out of stock, it will stop all potential conversion events, which will give your competitors the opportunity to reclaim sales and market share. When you are out of stock, your ads will automatically stop showing and any improvement in organic search ranking gained through ads will likely be lost. If you find that you are running low on inventory, lower your ad spend to slow sales velocity to prevent running out of stock before restock arrives on Amazon.

⑫ Skipping thorough keyword research

On Amazon, targeting the right number of keywords can be a delicate balance.

You can dilute your budget and results by focusing on too many keywords, but you can also miss out on a ton of sales by only doing cursory keyword research.

⑬ Inability to scale profitable campaigns

While it can be a challenge to convince stakeholders to significantly increase advertising budgets, it’s important to emphasize the benefits of expanding those campaigns that are performing well.

Not testing and retesting new advertising programs

In 2019, Amazon released a slew of new advertising programs and targeting options.

Amazon’s culture is that they release products quickly, and Amazon typically takes that feedback and re-optimizes those programs.

⑭ Not using Amazon resources

Amazon has an advertising blog where they announce new programs.

Provides case studies. Provides tips for optimizing your ads for both Amazon Advertising Services (formerly AMS) and Seller Central.

⑮ Unsure if the list is being converted

Amazon does not have a separate quality score like Google Ads.

However, your listing optimization and conversion history may affect how your ads are served. Poorly optimized listings may not be found to be relevant for all keywords in your campaign, which may affect the number of impressions your ads receive.

If you are selling on Seller Central, it may be more valuable to go into Reports > Business Reports > Detailed Sales and Traffic by Child report and review the ASINs you are advertising before running ads.

Additionally, just by changing the thumbnail, we were able to increase click-through rate (CTR) by over 300%. Amazon is incentivized to show ads that generate clicks because that’s how clicks come, so increasing CTR can help an underperforming ad.

⑯ Use bid adjustments only to control

Another thing to keep in mind when reviewing leads is that bid amounts and overall daily ad budgets are the primary ways to control ACoS or ROAS. While managing spend by adjusting bids and budgets is essential, make sure you’re adjusting strategically.

If your campaigns are structured properly, you can also use portfolios to adjust your budget. Although advertising on Amazon was optional in the past, for most products, advertising is essential for product launch and continued growth on Amazon. A comprehensive understanding of how organic and paid search are intertwined and keeping up to date with the latest developments about Amazon advertising can allow sellers to stand out from the competition in advertising.