With the holiday season once again upon us, it’s important to implement the most effective strategies in your Amazon advertising campaigns if you want to get the most sales possible. More people than ever are shopping online and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, making the right adjustments to your digital marketing strategy can pay off enormously.
The following Amazon PPC Tips will help you put together a winning strategy for the holidays that will not only help you rake in more sales but also improve your advertising performance in general.
1. Give Your Hottest Campaigns an Extra Push
Now is the time to turn on the afterburners. If you already have a few successful campaigns running that you know get consistent results, and if you don’t anticipate sales for these items dipping during the holiday season, now is the time to up your ad spend.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are poised to be bigger than ever for eCommerce businesses this year. A well-timed and properly managed Amazon PPC campaign could help you rake in sales.
When managing your Amazon PPC, you always want to keep track of your best-performing ad campaigns so that when the time is right, you can turn on the juice in order to take advantage of a bigger ROI. While such techniques are never foolproof, it’s almost always a good idea to up your spend if you know there’s a market for your product. Just keep a close eye on your data and you have a good chance at increasing your profit margins with this strategy alone.
2. Take Advantage of Long-Tail Keywords
One of the most important aspects of running a successful PPC campaign is knowing which keywords to bid on. Keyword research is paramount, otherwise you will more than likely be pouring too much money into your campaigns. Unless you have a massive marketing budget, you don’t want to simply select any basic keyword and throw money at it. This is a recipe for a lackluster campaign.
Long-tail keywords provide ample opportunity to generate consistent sales for your hottest products, because these keywords aren’t being bid on as much, which means with the right copy, you’re bound to get clicks and a solid conversion rate.
When looking for keyword opportunities during the holiday season, don’t forget about negative keywords. While this is an entire topic unto itself, you do want to be aware of the fact that you can often save money and pull in better qualified traffic when these kinds of keywords are properly implemented in your campaigns. Always keep user search intent in mind and adjust your keywords accordingly. This is especially important during the holidays when more people than normal will be online searching for certain products, and they may be more apt to “window shop,” by clicking your misplaced ads, which will drive up your costs.
3. Clean Up Your Ad Campaign Structure
One helpful Amazon PPC tip that you should take into consideration as the holidays approach is to make sure your ads have a clean and coherent structure to them. There’s a good chance that when you first started running campaigns for your store, you simply used whatever came to mind for your ad sets, without really thinking about it.
If you run only a handful of campaigns, there’s nothing wrong with this, but as soon as you start to grow, unorganized campaigns won’t do you any favors. In fact, you could actually be wasting time and money due to confusing and conflicting ad sets that you have a difficult time keeping track of. What’s more, you may even be inclined to create brand new sets for the holidays, which could compound this confusion. If there ever was a time to restructure your campaigns, it’s now.
4. Use Automatic Targeting When Possible
If you are just starting out with Amazin pay-per-click advertising, or if you are just about to launch a Cyber Monday or similar campaign, you may want to consider using automatic targeting. PPC is largely data-dependent, and there are certainly times when you simply don’t have the necessary data with which to work with, to base your campaign on.
In matters like this, Amazon’s automatic targeting comes in handy. With this targeting method, you can sit back and let Amazon do some of the work for you in regards to finding opportunities based on what they think would work for your needs. With automatic targeting, you want to keep your ad spend minimal in the beginning, and increase as you see results. Once you have enough data to work with, you can then expand your campaign or adjust it as needed. An automatic campaign is not only incredibly easy to launch, but can actually be quite effective if you want a quick ROI.
5. Look For Holiday Opportunities
The final tip you want to take into consideration is to look for specific holiday-related opportunities. While this may be niche or industry-specific, there are always certain products and brands that consumers search for more frequently during big sales and the holiday season in general.
Look for keyword opportunities for products that spike around the holidays and build a campaign around them for best results.
There are certain keywords that spike around this time of the year. While that does mean that the competition for those keywords increases as well, if you take the time to find specific holiday opportunities in your niche, you could stand to make great returns with your Amazon ad campaign.
Think about what your target audience is looking for specifically during the holidays and what they might be more apt to search for, and apply those findings to your holiday campaign. Be sure to update your product listings accordingly as well to ad holiday flavor text or additional keyword optimizations into the mix.
Want to Optimize Your Amazon PPC Even Further?
In case you aren’t entirely sure of which direction to go for your holiday campaigns or your Amazon PPC strategy in general, we’re here to help. Here at Genius eCommerce, we are eCommerce PPC experts that manage ads on a wide range of platforms, including Amazon. We know how to craft data-driven campaigns that get our clients the kind of results and ROI they are looking for.
If these Amazon PPC tips helped you but you simply don’t have the time to put everything together before the holidays, don’t worry. Call us up at 888-982-8269 and we can help you put together a killer ad strategy that will have you set and ready to go for the holiday season.
