The Latest Amazon Advertising Guide [2019]

According to a report by market research firm eMarketer , Amazon has become the third largest advertising platform in the U.S. this year, and by next year, Amazon will account for 10% of the U.S. digital advertising market .

Amazon Advertising has made rapid progress, and its features and services are updated and iterated quickly, with new features constantly emerging. The Amazon Advertising in 2019 is no longer the Amazon Advertising of the past.

In this post, I’ll summarize what changes are coming to Amazon Advertising, which changes are important for sellers, and how to adapt to these changes.

Amazon Advertising Types

Amazon currently has three main advertising formats, namely:

Product promotion ads, also known as SP ads, are keyword-targeted ads . You need to optimize your product listing before placing this ad. The principle is that when a user enters a keyword in the search box, your ad will appear on the user search results page, linking to your product details page.

SP ads are the most commonly used type of ads by Amazon sellers.

Brand promotion ads were previously called headline search ads. They are also keyword-based ads. But they are more advanced. They appear at the top of search results, and sellers can:

• Customize products, titles, images, etc.

• Upload up to three display ASINs

• Link to custom landing page

Unlike the above two categories, product display ads are not keyword-targeted ads, but are ads based on products or product categories that appear under "Add to list" on the product page.

There are three types of Amazon display ads: image, video, and custom. They are all display ads, just in different formats. Display ads are available to all advertisers, not just Amazon sellers.

Amazon has been investing a lot of time into advertising since 2018. Here’s a timeline of all the major changes that happened to Amazon Advertising in 2018-2019.

New features have been added to the backend panel, such as ad traffic, bidding strategies, ad management and reporting, ad analysis and ad optimization tools, etc., which have been updated and improved.

Google has spent 20 years gradually perfecting its automatic bidding function, which has already surpassed some manual bidding ads. Although Amazon is not as good as Google in automatic bidding, its automatic bidding function has improved:

• Added keyword and product promotion strategy adjustments to the function

• Automatically optimize bidding based on conversion rate

• Automatically adjust bids based on user-set parameters

Sellers can use this feature to control a single advertising budget (before this, they had to split the budget among multiple campaigns.)

Most of your advertising budget should be used for SP advertising, followed by SB advertising, and the gap between the two should not be too big.

Different Amazon sellers have different needs and allocate different budgets. But as a rule of thumb, it is recommended to allocate advertising budget like this:

• SP ads: 50%

• SB Advertising: 40%

• Product display ads: 10%

When running product promotion ads, it is best to choose the automatic delivery mode for keyword placement, so that you can find the best performing keywords without having to do it yourself.

However, the smartest approach is to combine automatic and manual advertising for keyword bidding. The specific steps are as follows:

• First, manually select keywords according to best practices.

• Next, run automatic ads to find potential keywords that were missed when manually selecting keywords, discover new keywords, and add them to the manual ad campaign.

• Then, analyze the data you collected and manually adjust keyword bids again.

This may be a bit time-consuming, but the results are very good.

A study by Search Engine Journal, a well-known American technology website, shows that using product detail pages for promotion is no longer effective. Recently, using store homepages for promotion has shown better performance in indicators such as sales cost and RoAS (return on investment). Therefore, you should pay attention to the decoration of your store homepage to improve conversion rate.

The new version of Amazon Advertising has launched a dynamic bidding function, which is divided into two types:

• First, only price reduction is allowed. That is, only the price of keywords with low conversion rates is reduced;

• The second is to allow automatic adjustment of bidding.

For sellers with a large budget, the second strategy is effective. But if your budget is not sufficient, it is recommended to use the first strategy that only allows price reduction.

As mentioned above, Amazon’s new feature Portfolios allows sellers to merge multiple campaigns to set an advertising budget cap. This is better than setting a budget limit on a single campaign.

But you can’t set a daily or monthly cap, which means you need to keep adjusting dates manually. Because of this feature, Portfolios is best suited for managing campaigns on important dates, such as Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, to control ad spending budgets over a period of time.

To date, Amazon’s on-site attribution tools are still relatively immature.

According to some sellers, there seems to be a certain discrepancy between the data and actual results of Amazon’s attribution tool, so it is recommended to use this tool with caution.

For now, it is recommended to use Facebook’s attribution tool first.

The Amazon advertising platform is still very young, so there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Amazon’s default advertising budget spending mode is “accelerated”, so your advertising budget will be spent quickly. For advertisers, this is very “pitfall”. For example, your ad has already used up its budget during the best performing period.

In this case, the only way to solve this problem is to use external tools to control the advertising time. Open www..com and find the tool you want in the comprehensive software on the homepage. Note that some may cause account association, so please choose carefully.

Currently, Amazon’s advertising reports provide data for any period up to 90 days.

In addition, if you still want to download reports, it is recommended that sellers use third-party tools (such as Data Studio, etc.) to create reports themselves.

It is currently not possible to pinpoint exactly which products were sold within a SB campaign.

As mentioned earlier, SB Ads allows sellers to upload up to three products per page for promotion. However, sellers are not able to see the performance of individual products.

In this case, the only way to find out which product is performing well is to run a test and replace the product ASIN in the campaign to see which product has a high conversion rate.

Amazon advertising is developing rapidly, and it continuously updates its features and services by analyzing user data feedback. Therefore, sellers need to get timely information and adapt to changes.