The 8 Culprits of Not-so-Profitable Amazon Advertising

When you’re first getting started with advertising your products on Amazon, you might feel a little intimidated. That’s perfectly normal—after all, paid advertising can seem like you’re wasting money if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you’re looking to have a positive experience with Amazon advertising campaigns, you should be aware of eight common pitfalls that may reduce your ROI.

1. Your Keyword Targeting Is Too Generic

When choosing keywords to target, you need to find a narrow keyword to capture your product. Going too broad may mislead customers, which can hurt the performance of your ads. Instead of using broad keywords, you should use the following methods:

• Use match types. These inform search algorithms how you want keyword searches to match your ads. 
• Target long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords use specific wording that is commonly used by customers who are close to making a purchase.
• Test for the most effective keywords. After compiling a list of potential keywords to target, see which keywords make your ads perform better.

2. Your Listings Aren’t Optimized for Best-Performing Keywords

If your listings aren’t keyword-optimized, it is less likely they will show up in a user’s search result. Even if a customer clicks on your ad, there’s no guarantee it will lead to a conversion.

Make sure your listings maintain their optimizations by using keywords that work. Continuously test your keywords by auditing your listings will help you know what keywords are bringing you traffic.

3. Your Approach Isn’t Diversified Enough

The main source of diversity in an Amazon advertising campaign comes in the form of your keyword’s targeting types: automatic or manual. Automatic targeting campaigns will set keywords for you, targeting ads to all relevant customer searches. Manual targeting allows you to pick which keywords you want to pay for.

Only using automatic targeting may seem easier and more cost-effective, but it may also lead to wasted money. Diversify your campaign with manual targeting to weed out low-performing keywords. This will help you capitalize on high-volume keywords that will get you noticed.

4. You Aren’t Testing Your Keywords

Testing is crucial—keywords won’t always function as well as they did when you first use them. Some keywords that seemed to be poor performers when you first started may prove to be incredibly useful now.

With the help of automatic campaigns, you can continuously test keywords. These campaigns will reveal which of your keywords are the best performers at any given moment, meaning you can update your web copy to stay relevant and high-performing.

5. Your Campaigns Are Disorganized

Campaigns need to be well-coordinated and organized, especially if you’re balancing an entire line of products. Every step you take in establishing a campaign should be intentional.

Group similar products together so they can share the same keywords. Set a daily budget that aligns itself with your campaign duration. This way, your campaign funding won’t prematurely end. 

6. You Aren’t Monitoring for Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are those words and phrases that keep your ad from appearing on an Amazon SERP. Not using negative keywords in your Amazon ad strategy can be costly. For example, let’s say you sell glass mugs. Then, a customer who is looking for ceramic mugs may just type “mugs” into the search box and stumble across your listing. Upon realizing that your mugs aren’t ceramic, they will promptly leave, but Amazon will still charge you for that click.

Create a list of keywords that you don’t want to show up for. This will ensure all of your clicks are from genuinely interested buyers. In the above example, one of your negative keywords could be “ceramic mugs” or “metal mugs.”

7. You’re Letting Competitors Take Your Keywords

There are no “dibs” in keyword competition. Even if you get to a high-performance keyword first, your competitors can, and will, challenge you for it. And they’ll get it if you don’t fight back.

Always look for new keyword opportunities, like long-tail keywords, and manage your keyword bids. If it looks like a keyword bid is costing you more money than you think is worth it, there’s no shame in throwing in the towel. Just find keywords that are rich with ranking potential.

8. You Aren’t Capitalizing on All Ad Spaces

It’s easy to put all of your eggs in one basket, like prioritizing banner ads over sponsored brand videos or other marketing tools. But doing so hurts your chances of being seen.

Take advantage of every type of ad. It may take some trial and error to determine what combination of ads will produce the optimal results, especially if you opt for manual targeting. So experiment with different ads and use more of what works well.

9. How to Fix Your Amazon Advertising

Now that you have a better understanding of why your Amazon ads aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped, let’s talk about actionable solutions.

Start with an audit to diagnose why and how your sales are falling. Audit your campaigns to see whether or not they are helping your listings gain traction. 

If you’re afraid these audits may reveal crucial advertising setbacks, Buy Box Experts can help. We offer a free analysis of your Amazon advertising campaigns to determine what you need to change. If you like what we have to say, then our experts can help you increase your Amazon sales and get your ads to start working for you. If you’re not interested, you still walk away with a solid audit and insights to help you improve the profitability of your Amazon advertising.

Stay up to date on the latest Amazon advertising tips and trends with Buy Box Experts webinars. Our experts are well-versed in everything Amazon and new webinars are released regularly to help you stay on top of your e-commerce game.