If you sell on Amazon, you are already familiar with the various advertising opportunities available on the platform. Although the vast majority of all sales on Amazon come from organic placements, it is simply not possible to avoid investing in Amazon advertising.
In this blog post, you will receive practical tips and guidance on:
– How to protect and increase awareness of your brand.
– How to increase your sales.
– How to use Amazon Ads to achieve the above.
– Why it makes sense to advertise products where you already rank highly organically.
Competition on Amazon is fierce, so you cannot avoid paying for visibility, strong placements, sales, and branding. In addition to the fact that ads directly contribute to sales, they also increase awareness of your brand while Amazon’s algorithm evaluates clicks and conversions. If you do this correctly, it can actually help improve your organic rankings. We are big fans of this effect, but more on that in another blog post.
But how exactly can you use ads to protect your brand, build awareness, and increase
your chances of selling more?
Option one for increasing awareness and sales
When a customer performs a search on Amazon, they use one or more keywords. Based on this search, Amazon presents the most relevant products to the customer. The product appears either in an organic position or in an ad placement.
Here, you have the first opportunity to raise awareness of your brand and protect it, if you have set up the right ad types, used the relevant keywords, and bid high enough on the click price. If you have done all this right, your brand/products will be displayed as shown below:
In this case, the customer has performed a brand search, but the same applies to a generic search. The customer sees your brand and your product. More importantly, they do not see your competitor’s brand or product.
If the customer searched for your brand, you have protected your brand. If they did not search specifically for your brand, you have instead increased awareness of your brand and either secured a sale now and/or influenced the customer towards a future sale. In this way, you can increase your sales.
If, on the other hand, you have not set up these ad types, selected the right keywords, and set the right bid, your competitors will have the opportunity to display their brand and products – even on a search where the customer has searched for, for example, your brand. This increases the risk that your competitors win the sale instead of you. Conversely, you can choose to bid on your competitors’ brand or keywords – and thereby increase your sales at their expense.
Option two for increasing awareness and sales
The next opportunity arises when the customer decides to click into your or a competitor’s product. Below, you can see the various placements where ads may appear. Here, your competitors can market their products by setting up ads in these locations, either by directly targeting their ads to your product or by selecting relevant keywords, causing Amazon’s algorithm to place the ad on your product.
So what does this mean for you?
As soon as your competitor gets the opportunity to market their product, you are giving the customer a chance to switch their purchase. Naturally, it is likely that the customer will end up buying your product if they have made a brand-specific search. But in cases where the customer has not searched specifically for your product, it is not difficult to sway them.
If your competitor has a better price or their product has more and/or higher ratings than yours, the risk of losing a sale is quite high.
But don’t worry, there is a solution
– And it can also build awareness of your brand and generate additional sales.
Our best advice is to advertise your own brand and products on your own product pages. In other words: when a customer is viewing your product, you should aim to place ads for your brand and products in every available ad position on Amazon.
The advantage of doing this is that you prevent your competitors from showing their products in these positions, thereby influencing the customer and, in the worst-case scenario, stealing your sale. This can also be an effective way to introduce new products, for example.
In addition, you actually gain a unique opportunity to showcase your brand to the customer. As you can see from the numerous ad placements, there is plenty of space to present your brand and products. If you have many products, you can advertise all of them and have only your products on the page, effectively “owning” the page. This increases the chances that they will buy more than just one item from you.
If you do all this, you will:
– Minimise the risk of your competitors displaying their products alongside yours.
– Increase awareness of your brand.
– Drive additional sales, not only by advertising on brand keywords and generic keywords but also by advertising on product pages – whether your own, your competitors’, or both.
Altogether, this can help ensure that it is you who achieves major success on Amazon, rather than your competitors.
Last but not least, you can use this tactic against your competitors, allowing you to both protect yourself and steal sales from them.
On a practical note – how do you set up these ads?
To make it easy for you to get started with this setup, we have created a complete guide on how to do it.
All you need to do is send an email to jv@wemarket-digital.com. You will then receive a pdf describing step by step what you need to do.
It really couldn’t be easier!
