It has been ages, since the digital marketing experts have advertized about the unshakeable pair of Google and Facebook. Now, Amazon has penetrated its way into the market with its digital advertising platform’s display and sponsored ads.
With Amazon’s whopping $900B+ market capitalization, it is hard to name what Amazon isn’t doing these days—content and streaming video, grocery delivery, smart home hardware, and home services are all the weapons in its all-packed artillery of “eCommerce”.
Amazon has left no stones unturned when it comes to marketing and advertising, which is why the advertisers are now flocking towards this platform for their product promotion.
Huge Impact of Amazon on the market
The Amazon marketing experts, say that the wide reach of the offerings made by Amazon indicates that it is a key point for both the consumers and marketers, Amazon had over 50% lift in the advertising spend in the previous year (2018). Studies are also featuring that, almost 50-60% of searches are beginning from Amazon. And generally, when the searches begin on e-commerce platforms, they tend to be of a high–intent and high converting searches.
Amazon also assists its users in following ways to ensure more user friendly aspect of their website:
Saved credit card and shipping information reduces lower-funnel, path-to-purchase friction.
Amazon is considered a brand-safe environment, with its primary focus on eCommerce and not user-generated content.
Amazon customers, and in particular Amazon Prime members, are loyal, repeat customers, maintaining that highly valuable user pool.
With all these services being offered, it is of no wonder that, many retail brands are willingly optimizing their media to include Amazon in their side. This is an important time in eCommerce and a huge opportunity for brands to get in front of this high-intent audience.
Sponsored products and sponsored brand ad tips
Both the sponsored products and sponsored brand ads on Amazon use keywords to target its users. Because of this, marketers could bring over keyword learnings and their own skill set as well from other search platforms to get on top of a fresh and valuable new audience on Amazon.
However, since consumer behavior on Amazon and traditional search engines vary, the way to draw maximum success is to stay aware of these differences while advertisers sharpen their keyword strategy, even if they don’t have years of pay-per-click experience under their belt.
The most fundamental difference with Amazon is that, more number of searches on the website are specific to a product (“sunscreen”) or brand (“Covergirl sunscreen”), rather than being informational (“should I be using sunscreen”), navigational (“drugstore”), or loaded with superlatives or modifiers (“best sunscreens 2019”).
So, while “targeting relevant keywords” is a broad umbrella concept, breaking it down more granularly—and amalgamating this concept with the original mindset of Amazon searchers would definitely help the brands achieve maximum return on their Amazon Advertising goals.
For starters, advertisers could try out these tactics to fine-tune their keyword strategy:
Conquest Competitively
What does this means: Targeting keywords of the competitor brands and products.
Advertisers should play offensive with their keywords, and target their competitor brands and products to capture users searching for the competition. They have to be strategic about how they bid on their competitors’ brand versus products. A product that is in direct competition to their products is worth a higher bid, as opposed to an entire brand that has a number of out-of-categories, non-competitive products.
Protect Your Brand
What does this means: Targeting the brand name and product name or some variation of it.
Advertisers should safeguard their brand from competitors and retain loyal consumers. There is a school of thought that says people could win brand terms for free through organic listings. However, dominating Amazon’s search results with the their brand not only plays defense against the competitors who are likely bidding on the advertiser’s brand terms, but also strengthens their brand with an ubiquitous presence.
Test and Harvest
What does this means: Advertisers had to see what works and act accordingly.
Advertisers should use the remainder of their keywords to prospect and build the upper funnel. Targeting complementary product keywords and out-of-category keywords to grab users who are active in other, related purchase cycles.
Once the advertisers start intelligently “targeting relevant keywords,” they have to be vigilant about analyzing their data. They have to scale up their best performers while throttling back their low performers, but while doing so, they have to be mindful of external factors that could change their keyword performance over time, such as seasonality, the release of competing products, sales or promotions on other channels, or positive or negative PR.