We here at RepricerExpress love doing these kinds of posts, the ones where we scour the interwebs for the best secrets and tips and hand them over to you, our dear readers. And in this post, we’re going to delve into the sexy world of Amazon PPC. Hang on, ladies and gentlemen, you’re in for a wild ride.
Secret #1: Trim the Fat on Keywords
Not all keywords are created equally and some are weighted more heavily (re: favourably) than others. Your goal is to research what those profitable keywords are, use the 2-6 that are at the top of the list, and lose the rest.
Tip: go to the Campaign Manager tool in Amazon Seller Central and download an advertising report.
Secret #2: Incorporate Keyword Data into Your Campaign
This is closely related to the first secret, but differs in one key way: you’ll be using it specifically in the ‘keywords’ section of your product listing (as opposed to your title or image title).
Look at keywords with high click-through and conversion rates.
Secret #3: Reinvest Your Revenue into More Ads
There are some athletes who bank their income and live off what they get from either endorsement deals or the interest of their earnings. Do something similar with your Amazon PPC ads by taking money generated from revenue to spend on ads, instead of paying for it with your credit card.
All you have to do is change the default setting in your Amazon Seller Central account (it’s under Advertising Settings).
Secret #4: Be a Pro at Tracking Your Progress
If there’s one word you absolutely need to memorize, it’s this: metrics. Because if you don’t regularly track your metrics, you may as well just open your wallet outside on a windy day.
We like three metrics in particular — sales (i.e. your profits from the money spent on your ad campaigns), spend (i.e. the amount of money you’ve spent in a designated time-frame) and Average Cost of Sales (i.e. the percentage of profit you receive on an item based on how much you spent on its ad campaign).
Secret #5: Automate Things (at the Start)
When you’re first getting set up with pay-per-click on Amazon, you’ll find it can be a bit of a tricky world to navigate. For this reason, it makes a lot of sense to work with the built-in automation (for its proven track record, wide use and constant maintenance) than to trial-and-error it yourself.
We’re mainly talking about automatic targeting, which is when you let Amazon pick out the keywords for you. And yes, we know the first couple of tips dealt with how to pick great keywords, but this secret is mostly geared at helping newbies and/or brand new campaigns really succeed.
Secret #6: Leverage Your Sales Rank into More
Much of succeeding on Amazon has to do with leveraging what you’ve got into something more, making it snowball until you’re sitting comfortably at the top. One area you want to focus on is your sales rank, which will help you show up in your sponsored searches AND ‘regular’ searches a lot better.
And once you achieve a decent sales rank, you can start to ease off your PPC campaign (and put money back in your wallet) because of your increased visibility.
Secret #7: Allow Some Room for Flexibility
You never want to create a budget, campaign or plan that’s so ironclad, there’s absolutely no wiggle room. With your PPC campaign, you’ll notice that you’ll have to adjust your budget for it as each item moves up and down its sales ranks. But if you don’t have room in your budget to allow for it? Uh-oh, you’re going to lose the impact of any money you spent so far.
Final Thoughts
Because we’re a tad superstitious and think 7 is a lucky number, we didn’t want to tack on the 8th tip of using RepricerExpress to regularly adjust an item’s price based on what the buyers are asking for. You probably knew we were going to throw that in there, but only because of how awesome and necessary it is to your bottom line. To make things even awesomer, you can start yours off with the first 15 days for free!
