Amazon’s marketplace makes nearly the whole world an accessible market for businesses. The problem is, you still have to get their attention, and with so many competing brands on the platform, it’s almost always an uphill battle. The good news is, you can take advantage of the massive amounts of data that Amazon collects about its users, and capitalize on that data by advertising to your target audience, and there is no shortage of options for advertising on the platform.
What Is Amazon Advertising?
There are four different types of advertising available on the Amazon Platform:
Sponsored Display ads are ads placed on and off Amazon.com. On Amazon placements include search results and prominent placements on product detail pages. These ads can target specific audiences based on shopping history or target specific products (both your own and competitors).
Sponsored Product ads promote individual product listings on Amazon with ads that appear in search results and on product pages.
Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) is an advertising tool that empowers you to make the most of Amazon’s customer data, both on and off of Amazon. It’s an all-in-one advertising platform that includes Amazon OTT, video ads, ad placements on IMDB and FireTV, and more.
Sponsored Brand ads are custom banner and video ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products. These ads appear in relevant shopping results and help drive discovery of your brand among customers shopping for products like yours.
How Does Amazon Advertising Work for Audience Targeting?
Amazon is home to a wealth of customer and user data, and when you advertise on the platform, you’re benefiting from that data. Depending on which advertising format you’re using, you’ll be able to target your audience via one or more of the following methods:
Keyword Targeting
With exact match, phrase match, and broad match keywords, you can effectively target users based on their search intent. If they use a relevant search term, your ad can be served up, leading them to your product.
Product Targeting
Have your ads displayed for users who have been browsing similar or related products, enabling you to market to users looking to buy competing or complementary products. By piggy-backing off of a popular, related product, you can dramatically increase visibility for your listings.
Audience Remarketing
Don’t let your potential customers just walk away. Have your ads displayed for users who have visited your product page (or the page of a similar product) to point them back toward your listing.
Interest-Based Targeting
Get your ads in front of users who have browsed certain categories. You can target customers who have browsed your category or any other category that fits your target market. shopping behaviors suggest they may be interested in your product.
Why Use Amazon Advertising?
Amazon is home to a wealth of customer and user data, and when you advertise on the platform, you’re benefiting from that data. Depending on which advertising format you’re using, you’ll be able to target your audience via one or more of the following methods:
Promoting New Products
Advertising on Amazon is an excellent way to introduce your brand loyalists and current market to your new product offerings. They may not ever find out about them otherwise.
Increasing Visibility
With so much competition on the platform, it can be difficult to get noticed by your target market. Advertising helps increase your visibility, and make it more likely that potential customers will see what you have to offer. And with the most prominent placements in Amazon search being paid placements, it’s hard to get noticed without ads.
Cross-Selling
Sometimes, users are willing to buy additional products—provided they find out what’s available. Ads can help get the word out, informing your customers of similar or complementary products they may be interested in. They can even be used to drive traffic to your Amazon Storefront and introduce them to your full catalog.
Increasing Market Share
In a lot of cases, the only way to increase your market share is to specifically target the customers of competitors (especially when you’re competing against larger brands). The right ad strategy can help you capitalize on the visibility of other brands.
Defending Your Listings
Just as it’s important to market to users looking for competing products, you want to defend your listings from the same tactics. By running strategic ad campaigns, you can have Amazon serve your own ads on your own listings, preventing competitors from advertising there.
Advertising vs. SEO
For a lot of digital marketers, advertising and organic take on an adversarial relationship, and many will choose the camp they believe is the smarter investment. On Amazon, though, things are different. Organic and paid work closely together on Amazon. By being relevant organically we can decrease the cost of ads and improve conversion rates, but by strategically targeting with our PPC advertising we can increase relevancy and organic rank. In other words, SEO on Amazon usually isn’t enough, and the most successful campaigns almost always employ both.
Get Started with Amazon Advertising
Get Your Total Amazon AssessmentFAQs
Amazon has doubled down on its advertising business the past few years. Paid placements on the marketplace have increased exponentially and often all “above-the-fold” search results are paid placements. Your competitors are certainly advertising both in search results and on your product pages and, if you are not, your market share will erode over time. If your goals include growing your Amazon business, advertising is a must.
Let our customer-obsessed team handle your advertising account and optimize your amazon strategy to your growth goals.
There are a number of reports available that measure several KPIs useful for tracking progress toward advertising goals. Buy Box Experts uses advanced software to organize and visualize that data and watch trends over time, so you understand what it all means, and how to act on it.
For most brands, we recommend a $5K monthly budget for Sponsored Advertising (for products sold on Amazon). If you are an Amazon seller ready to expand into DSP (or are a non-endemic advertiser whose only option is DSP) we recommend $10K/month to properly leverage the platform.
No. Because Amazon is the number one marketplace in the U.S and attracts a wide variety of consumers, there are ways we can leverage their shopper data for almost any industry, whether or not you sell on Amazon.
Done well, and when coupled with listing conversion rate optimization, effective advertising can dramatically increase traffic and conversions. Beyond that, a lot of performance metrics on the platform depend on advertising, and it’s difficult to succeed in, say, SEO for instance, without a complimentary ad campaign.
