Common Amazon Seller Mistakes: Can Running Amazon Ads Be a Bad Idea?
Over the past few years, Amazon has transformed into a “pay to play” platform, all but requiring brands to spend money on Amazon ads to stay relevant and grow sales on the site. Running ads on Amazon is the main (only?) way to get traffic from Amazon shoppers to your product listing page, especially for new products.
But is it ever a bad idea to run Amazon ads?
The surprising answer is….YES. There are situations where you may not want to spend any substantial amount of money on advertising within Amazon.
But when?
1. Your product listing page is not optimized for Amazon
This is a very common mistake we see in our communications when Amazon brands both big and small. Many brands are in a rush to meet sales goals, often for very good reasons such as cash flow, investor expectations, and any other number of reasons.
However, sending paid traffic to a listing page that is not optimized for Amazon can be a costly mistake. The listing page will not convert at its full potential, which means you will be paying for clicks, but not converting many of those clicks into sales.
To add insult to injury, without an optimized listing, the ad data you get back from running ads on Amazon may not be useful. This is because an optimized listing may convert for many important keywords, while an unoptimized listing may not. You may end up taking the wrong strategy with your advertising, limiting its scope and reach over the long term, while costing you real $’s in the short term.
The Solution: Make sure your listing pages, and brand, are optimized for Amazon shoppers. This includes:
A main photo that is high resolution and gives customers enough information to warrant a click.
Supporting listing images and A+ content that showcase the main product features and answer any common questions customers may have (this will also reduce the return rate).
A band store that acts as a second brand website, where customers can visit to learn more about the brand and to shop the full catalog of available products for that brand.
2. You have zero (or negative) reviews on your product listing page
For better or worse, Amazon shoppers depend on the product review score to make purchasing decisions. This is especially true if there are 2 similar products, one with a stellar review score and one with bad or zero reviews.
Therefore, sending paid traffic to a listing page with no reviews, or net negative reviews, can be a costly mistake.
The Solution: Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on your product’s listing page
Reach out to your existing customers to ask that they make their next purchase on Amazon and that they leave an honest review afterwards.
Sign up for Amazon Vine to generate reviews from Amazon’s top reviewers.
Prevent bad reviews with quality customer service and a listing page that answers common customer questions. NEVER mislead or exaggerate details about your product as this will surely lead to many bad reviews.
3. You don’t have the experience to structure and launch Amazon advertising campaigns correctly
Amazon, over the last few years, has added and removed countless ad products, types, features, and options. This has made Amazon advertising too complicated for a part time person to manage. Amazon campaigns must be structures and managed by an experienced Amazon advertiser.
The most common mistakes I see in Amazon advertising over the past several months are:
Running ads that are very narrow in scope, in order to meet unrealistic short term ACoS or ROAS goals. Brands (and agencies!) will often only advertise for keywords they know will convert, never trying to grow their reach or acquire new customers. This has the result of slowing the brand’s growth over the short and long term. A full funnel ad strategy is essential for capturing high probability sales, while also expanding the reach and consideration of the brands products to a larger target audience.
Starting out too aggressively. The first month or two of advertising a new product is often only a testing phase. We often don’t have useful keyword data, so we have to rely on automatic targeting campaigns and keyword testing campaigns to gain the initial data to build bigger campaigns in the future. It is a bad idea to start with your full budget on day one. It’s better to start slow and build up over several weeks for most small to medium size brands.
Not tracking their ad data and keyword rankings over time. Good quality data and KPIs that align with company goals are vital to tracking success of ad campaigns and making improvements over time. Many agencies and software will overcomplicate this. In most cases, simple KPIs like “Ad spend / Total Revenue”, “Cost per Click”, “Impressions”, “Click Through Rate”, and “Conversion Rate” will suffice as KPIs. It is also important to use the ad data to identify valuable keywords, then use aggressive advertising on those keywords to boost organic keyword ranks.
The Solution: Hire an experienced Amazon advertiser or Advertising Agency
At this time, Amazon advertising is too complicated a task to give to an already busy marketing employee or team. To make it even more difficult, there is no current training, that I am aware of, that can train employees on more than just the basics of Amazon Advertising. Knowledge in this space comes from years of experience working on Amazon advertising, familiarity with the many ad types and options, and previous success with launching brands on Amazon.
Granitsa E-commerce Solutions has helped dozens of brands launch from zero using listing optimization best practices, full-funnel advertising strategies, and deep data analytics. Our clients walk with us side-by-side as we test, learn, and build their keyword and advertising strategies on Amazon. There is no magic black box where your money disappears to, as we keep our clients informed of everything that is happening with weekly video calls to go over data and KPIs. This allows us to make quick adjustments and decisions that work for our clients.
To learn more, visit our site at www.granitsa.com, or send me an email at pneofotistos@granitsa.com.
Petros Neofotistos
Petros lives on the cutting edge of e-commerce marketing and data analytics. He helps clients build strategies to target and retarget customer segments that lead to sales. He can take the overwhelming amount of business data available to brands, find the important information, and apply that information to business and marketing decisions with a tight feedback loop.