As an Amazon FBA seller, you must understand that to succeed goes beyond sourcing for the ideal product to sell on the marketplace. Far more importantly, it has to do with selecting a product targeting strategy that can increase your visibility on the platform. And while the Amazon Sponsored Ads can appear quite simplistic at first look, their other advertising tactics you can employ to market your brand effectively. One of those strategies is product targeting via Sponsored Ads on Amazon. This article explores the top 5 product tactics campaigns you need to employ to succeed as an Amazon seller!
The central idea behind Sponsored Ads on Amazon is giving sellers the chance to trade in spaces they usually wouldn’t have the opportunity to exchange for some payment, of course. The system utilizes a pay-per-click method to make their wares available in certain places, targeting some keywords. Besides this, other forms of targeting offer the seller the opportunity to go after some particular products instead.
Before we proceed, let’s take a moment to ask:
What Exactly is a Product Targeting Campaign?
There are several ways to advertise on Amazon. One of them is the Amazon Sponsored Product advertising, where the seller used the category and ASIN targeting. As a seller on Amazon, when you research certain products, your ad shows up on the product detail page, just below the listing that includes the particular product you’re targeting. It also shows up on some other pages.
Are you familiar with Sponsored Product Ads? Like most Amazon sellers, you will understand that Product Targeting Ads are just about a subcategory under that. The campaign puts you in front of potential customers in a very straightforward manner by delivering your ads to the very audience you had in mind when you created your product. This ultra-targeting is done using ASIN, category, price, review, and brand.
Product TARGETING Vs. Product Page Placements
Let’s begin by outlining how important it is to know and understand the differences between product targeting, product page placements, and ad placements. Imagine that you’re running multiple manual campaigns at the same time:
- Campaign 1: Designed to target only Amazon products.
- Campaign 2: Designed to target keywords.
Interestingly, running both of these campaigns will see you show up on both search and product pages. This means product targeting will help you show up on the search results page, while keyword targeting will help you show up on product pages.
It’s effortless; targeting a keyword will ensure that all the ads that show up on the search results page are all related in one way or another to the targeted keyword. The same principles apply to product targeting. This is possible through the use of ASIN targeting. In this case, you’re not merely aiming for a particular keyword. Instead, you aim for a specific ASIN, and your ad will be shown beside the ASIN both in search pages and product pages. This is beneficial because it can help you bring in the kind of traffic you perhaps wouldn’t have imagined.
Now that you fully understand the concepts of Amazon’s product targeting and keyword ads, let’s deep dive into the top 5 Amazon advertising product targeting campaigns you must have to make it big as an Amazon seller, as recommended by the marketing experts at Zon Hack!
- Product and keyword targeting based on refined categories
- Product and keyword targeting based on suggestions
- Product and keyword targeting based on new products
- Product and keyword targeting based on adjacent categories
- Product and keyword targeting yourself.
Let us examine these tactics individually.
1. Product Targeting Based on Refined Categories
This is a form of product targeting campaign that lets you target every product in any category, subcategory, or subcategory. Its usefulness lies mainly in its ability to capture an insane number of products and also in being able to capture even products you never knew were out yet.
Now here comes the most exciting part: they can actually be refined. Contextually, refining means targeting only products that meet your preferred criteria, with the use of filters.
These are the 3 filters you can apply to your campaign:
- Ratings
- Price
- Brand
The best thing about these refinements is that they allow you to target products in your category that you have a competitive advantage over. Imagine your ad showing up next to a product that has a lower rating or slew of negative reviews; it essentially gives you an edge.
Benefits of Using these Campaign Tactics
Running a category targeting with the added refinements is a great way to have two or more campaigns side-by-side, effectively aiming at products you have an advantage over. This campaign needs very little in the way of tweaking and attention. It will save you valuable time.
2. Product Targeting Based on Suggestions
Yet another effective Amazon Sponsored Product Targeting Campaign. This one is mainly based on suggestions by Amazon itself. Not many people rely on Amazon’s suggestions, but there is a peculiar argument that makes it quite smart to do in this particular situation.
The Amazon algorithm can detect product you may not necessarily be able to find yourself, no matter how long and how far your search. This is especially so because the campaign is not seeking to target the best-selling products or products attracting a high level of daily traffic. The idea is to get sufficient, well-converting but low-traffic products. Amazon will thus show you a long list of products belonging to such a category that you may want to target to add up sales. By doing this, you’ve essentially used Amazon as a research tool. Well done!
Benefits of This Campaign
Perhaps the best place to find products to target, which you may not ordinarily be able to find, is on Amazon’s suggestions page. That is essentially what this campaign offers, bringing you converting products of low traffic that are worth targeting.
3. Product Targeting New Products on Amazon
Take a trip down memory lane to when you arrived on Amazon as a newbie seller. Remember how you would look at your automatic campaigns and all those bleeder ASINs you can’t negative out? Can you remember how you’d spend so much money on them and still not generate much in the way of sales? Remember how you’d click to check it out and discover it’s an established product with plenty of reviews? Well, this is precisely what you’ll be doing in this campaign. This particular product targeting campaign is what you can call “evil.”
New products (that are in direct competition with your products) get launched on the Amazon platform daily. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many would instinctively want to believe. The positive side is that it represents an ample opportunity to target those competitors of yours. For example, if you have 10 reviews, you’re definitely holding a significant advantage over sellers whose products have no reviews at all. As a result of this, you’re poised to make effortless sales on your product.
But then, how do you find them? Easy. Use manual targeting research. For example, Zon Hack is one tool you can use to make quick work of some particular ASIN targeting, find products, and filter results. Another place you can find new products is by browsing through Amazon’s new releases and Amazon Launchpad, which is a program that assists new sellers in finding new products. Alternatively, you can browse through your competitor’s storefront, check out Amazon’s ASINs suggestions, and searching by sorting through the New Arrivals page.
Benefits of This Campaign
The easy wins you can score off products with zero reviews are the most significant benefit you can get from running a campaign like this. Easy targets, easy money, isn’t it?
4. Product Targeting Based on Adjacent Categories
This product targeting ad campaign is somewhat underutilized yet very effective regardless. But before we go into that, let’s find out what adjacent categories are in the first place.
Let’s assume you sell shoes. As a shoe seller, your adjacent categories would be stuff like shoe polish, socks, shoe deodorizer, shoe moisturizer, and so on. Thus, adjacent categories are those categories listing products related to and relevant to the main category being searched for.
There are two ways to go about finding the relevant adjacent categories to your product.
- Pinterest: With Pinterest, you can simply go to your category, then check out the suggested pins below your competitor’s products. This will show you what your target audience is looking for besides your own product.
- Yasiv: This is a visualization tool created by Amazon. It serves to link your product to other products bought by the same people buying from your category.
Benefits of This Campaign
- Lower CPC: More often than not, your adjacent categories will have costs per click that are way lower.
- Brand Awareness: Your product is exposed to many more eyes and potential customers.
- More Sales: By capturing similar demographics, you can get more sales by running this campaign.
5. Product Targeting Your Own Product
This campaign strategy is only applicable to sellers who have more than one product in one category. It is not only effective in helping to upsell your products, but it also helps to safeguard against theft of your detail page real estate.
By bidding against your ASIN, you can piggyback on your already existing high-selling products to upsell a recently launched brand new offering.
It’s not limited to that; when you have your own products showing up below your own product page, you’re effectively preventing at least one more competitor from showing up there. Petty? Yeah, but quite effective too!
Benefits of This Campaign
It’s not a terrible thing to do if you want to protect your own listing. As a matter of fact, it’s a must-do for every Amazon seller. You aren’t merely blocking competitors from stealing sales from under your nose alone; you can also utilize current traffic to upsell older products.
5 Quick Tips to Help Your Advertising on Amazon
Here’s a list of 5 brief tips that can help you get more out of your ads on Amazon.
- Use Sponsored Ads to Create Brand Awareness: According to a survey by Cowen and Co., about 18% of buyers make their purchases through the Sponsored Ads feature. Get in on the act.
- Understand the Flywheel Effect: The flywheel effect is all about using paid ads to generate earned media and generally drive growth. Earned media includes reviews, shares, referrals, etc. Ads drive in traffic, paid traffic brings in organic traffic, organic traffic leads to a higher ranking on the search page.
- Leverage on Product Level Profitability: This is about doing your research to enable you to know which products have low and high-profit potential before setting up an ad campaign. No point wasting money on products that won’t bring in the cash.
- Engage Negative Keyword to Cut Down on Wasteful Advertising Budget: Just like it is in Google Ads, Amazon’s negative keyword use will prevent your ad from showing up in broad searches to block out useless rankings. For example, if you sell only female shoes, you should block out terms like “Male shoes,” “men’s shoes,” etc.
- Explore with Auto Campaigns; Exploit Using Manual Campaigns: While I agree that the idea of setting and forgetting is quite romantic, especially for a busy entrepreneur like you, it’s not always the best option. On auto campaigns, you have limited control, and you can’t do certain things, for example, place bids for individual search queries. The best strategy is to use auto campaigns to generate relevant keywords, then add the generated keywords to your manual campaigns for optimum performance.
Conclusion
With the way Amazon’s ad landscape is structured, you can’t afford to miss out on the top 5 products targeting campaigns examined in this article. Every single strategy has been tested by Zon Hack’s experts and has been proven to be essential and works for different scenarios. Take advantage of them and watch your sales soar.