An Amazon Marketing Agency

There are several

Sponsored Products – ​PPC – Auto

​Similar to Google Shopping ads, this analyzes your listing’s content and automatically places the product where the algorithm thinks it will sell, optimizes based on conversion rate.  These appear identically to regular product listings, except that they say “sponsored” underneath them.

Sponsored Products – ​PPC – Manual

​This gives you control over keyword-specific targeting but is also controlled by an invisible quality score determined by Amazon. In other words, you have to optimize your listing’s content for keywords, you have to make sales on those keywords, and then the more sales you make for those keywords, the more often Amazon will show your listing to that keyword’s traffic combined with your maximum bid. There is broad, phrase & exact match, and further control by up/down bidding for certain placements.

​Sponsored Brands – PPC

​This allows you to target specific keywords and display a banner ad across the top of the screen that can show a specific number of products and some text, and points to your Amazon storefront. These are great from a branding perspective because they give you a chance to actually control your creative, and direct the customer’s experience via the storefront. They are manually targeted and also have broad, phrase & exact match. The quality score is less relevant than with sponsored products.

Coupons

​If your coupon offer is compelling enough to get picked up by amazon.com/coupons you will receive a huge spike in traffic. Coupons can be configured in a variety of formats and are good practice because they give you the listing a little badge with the percentage or amount saved on the sale​

​Promotions

​This is where you can promote bundle deals, like “mix and match” – save 10% when you buy 2, BOGOs that kind of thing.

​Third-party advertising

​We also have strategies to boost your page’s rank and velocity by leading nurtured traffic from other sources, like Facebook & Instagram. These nurturing funnels may be part of the strategy if we decide we want to focus more on Amazon than on other sales channels or conduct split tests on their viability.

Prime-exclusive discounts

​As Amazon tries to offer Prime Members more and more value, they have added this feature to advertising, very similar to coupons except that they are more likely to be featured on anything Amazon is doing regarding Prime Day, Prime Coupons pages or other related activities​​

DSP

Amazon’s Demand-Side Program (DSP) is their display advertising platform for Amazon owned platforms and display networks. DSP is currently only available through Amazon for companies willing to spend $35,000. Nuanced Media however, is able to offer your company exclusive access to this powerful platform at a fraction of the cost. DSPgives your company the ability to use programmatic marketing to reach target customers on Amazon sites as well as its apps. It also gives us the ability to reach publishing partners located on commonly used third-party exchanges. Check out our in-depth guide to learn more about Amazon DSP.

Other

​There are other methods like Lightning Deals, Early Reviewer Programs, Affiliate Partnerships etc but the primary components we use are listed here.

What do they cost?

PPC bids vary by product category, search term competitiveness etc. We generally see anywhere between $0.50-3.00 per click. Coupons & promotions only cost as much as your offer does, plus a $0.60 fee Amazon charges for Coupon clips (when users click a checkbox that solidifies that the coupon will be applied to the purchase)

How do they relate to traffic? (i.e. x type of add = this much traffic)

This completely depends on the search term volume, product fit, clickthrough rate, competitiveness of the market, etc. We generally see Sponsored Product ads as the primary drivers early on, Coupon-driven traffic is basically a game that Amazon controls exclusively, other types of ads are helpful in increasing your brand glow and awareness on and off of Amazon. Our goal is generally to get from Growth Mode, where we are primarily driving traffic via ads and have a blended ACoS from 20-30%, to ‘post growth mode’ where blended ACoS would shift to 8-10%, at which point we would try to ensure sales velocity is sustained and dial back our paid ads to focus on optimization over time, improving the ratio steadily.

Amazon doesn’t really fit into traditional funnel categories like web traffic to a website since Amazon controls the environment and keeps pretty rigid control, the funnel for actual sellers is exceedingly small.  It is more of an end-point to a funnel (and a great trend-finder), so most activities that actually happen on Amazon itself are going to be consideration/purchase activities, with outside influences acting as your awareness (trends, publicity, brand recognition)

What activities fall into awareness?

Ad Impressions, storefront visits

What falls into research/consideration?

Product page views/sessions, detail page views/sessions. Amazon doesn’t give you data about add to carts (or wish lists, shopping lists, anything like that), they don’t even give you unique visitors, just “sessions” and that session data is notoriously slow to populate. So you really only know: a session tracked on my listing, someone purchased the product.

What falls into the purchase?

Purchases

What other steps might be added/missing?

The speed with which people make purchase decisions on Amazon makes CRO the most important part of your strategy, and especially for a product that people can be somewhat “obsessive” about details on, journalers, a good listing, a good storefront can make or break the sale.

Amazon is inherently a price-conscious marketplace, but that doesn’t mean that higher-priced competitors can’t do well. Ranking is more so dependent on how well the product does at improving the Amazon customer’s LTV for Amazon, so by that logic a higher priced item is X times more effective at improving LTV than its lower-priced competitors. Of course, a higher price does lower conversion rates, so that type of effect is tempered to a certain degree.

Price is all about the perception of value. In some cases we’ve seen conversion rates go up with the price, if there is higher perceived value, the price has to match the value a customer perceives. A higher price pairs well with content, it means the longer a customer has to deliberate about whether or not they can afford the product, and therefore spends more time viewing content which increases the likelihood of a conversion.