10 Ways to Reach More Customers With Amazon Advertising
The Amazon Advertising platform is dynamic and constantly changing. The pace of updates and improvements has increased dramatically recently, opening up entire new worlds of capabilities for intercepting your target customers.
For example, the recent developments within Sponsored Display ads now include targeting capabilities that rival Facebook (some might say it is more extensive and effective than what is in Facebook).
So, when you think of Amazon Advertising, broaden your understanding beyond just paying to appear in search results for the most common keywords in your market. Think of Amazon Advertising as a channel with audience-targeting capabilities similar to both of the two largest ad platforms combined (Facebook and Google).
Although there are hundreds of combinations of ways to set up an effective audience-targeting strategy within Amazon, we’ve done our best to group them together within these 10 overarching categories.
Campaign Types
Please don’t confuse this list with the available campaign types that Amazon offers. These 10 consumer targeting strategies overlap multiple ad types, including:
Sponsored Product
Sponsored Brand
Sponsored Display
Lockscreen Ads
Video Ads
[Note: Don’t panic if some of the campaign types listed above aren’t available for your ad account. They vary according to different account types.]
It may help to know the logical order of the 10 targeting options we’re about to consider.
The first 3 are all related to reaching customers already familiar with your brand.
The second grouping is related to intercepting your competitors’ customers.
The seventh and eighth targeting options are keyword-based.
The final two involve broad, prospecting strategies.
Option #1: Branded Searches
One way to reach your customers is to bid on your company name, the names of all the brands within your company’s portfolio, and the names of individual products that your company wants to advertise.
Is this a wasted investment of your ad dollars? Aren’t you paying for clicks and sales that would’ve happened without the ads?
That’s a very good question, and since we asked it ourselves and now hear it consistently from our clients, we’ve written an entire article that addresses it from multiple angles. When you’re finished reading through these 10 targeting options, please hop over and see if your questions about branded searches are answered.
[Spoiler: When set up properly, branded searches are a best practice that we recommend investing a portion of your ad dollars toward.]
Option #2: Cross-Promotion
Option 2 involves targeting one of your own products (either by product name, by ASIN, or both) in a way that presents your other products alongside the one they’re looking for.
Your ads can appear within search results and also on product pages. The point here is to make sure those who search for one of your ASINs are aware of your other products that are closely related to it.
The point isn’t to cannibalize the sale of the first item. On the contrary, it is to encourage them to buy that and a few others along with it!
Another benefit to this strategy is that you buy up the real estate on Amazon, filling the search results and product pages with links to your other ASINs. This keeps other competitors from bumping you down the search results page and it keeps the customer from getting distracted by products from competitors.
Option 2 is an effective, but often-overlooked targeting strategy.
Option #3: Remarketing
The last strategy for targeting customers who are already familiar with your brand is to remarket to people who visit your product pages but don’t complete the purchase. This is a relatively new option available only within the Sponsored Display campaign type.
Remarketing ads appear in a variety of places on Amazon, following customers around who visit your product detail page without completing a purchase.
This targeting strategy is unique because, unlike other Amazon Ad formats, it isn’t limited to the specific terms in their search query. Your ads show up no matter what they’re shopping for on Amazon!
Let me illustrate how powerful this targeting strategy can be.
Imagine that you’re at the grocery store and you pick up a box of cereal to see how many calories are in a serving.
You set it back down on the shelf and continue making your rounds through the store, checking off items on your shopping list.
But with every turn around an aisle, you see an endcap full of the same box of cereal you handled earlier.
You see it again next to the milk, then next to the fresh fruit, and even next to the laundry detergent.
You arrive at the register where another box is sitting alongside the breath mints and bubble gum.
Annoying? Maybe, but it can be effective. And that’s what remarketing on Amazon can be like.
This type of ad will likely take up a smaller part of your budget than the first 2 options, but when the bidding structure is set up properly and the ads are monitored and optimized thoroughly, it can be very effective and should be considered as a part of your Amazon Advertising mix.
Option #4: Competitor Names
Now we enter the second grouping of 3 targeting options that are focused on intercepting your competitors’ customers.
The first way to do this is to bid on their company name, the names of their brands, and the names of their products that are the most closely related to yours.
Let me warn you, this is one of the most expensive ways to run Amazon Ads! Shoppers looking for a particular product are not easily distracted by an unfamiliar brand.
However, sales aren’t always the prime directive for every campaign. If you need to build awareness for a new product, or if you have your eyes set on overtaking a dominant brand, a strategic, long-term approach to bidding on competitor names can prove extraordinarily successful!
Just pay close attention to your ad and fine-tune it until you get the best return while you’re building brand awareness.
Eventually, your ads will get enough sales for Amazon to trust it more. Then, they will serve it up more often and at a lower cost per click. It takes time and finesse to reach this sweet spot, but it will happen.
In our experience, it can take 3 months or more before a competitor-targeted ad builds enough authority to have a healthy ACOS, but often it is worth the initial investment, especially if you’re up against a leading competitor in your market.
Option #5: Competitor ASINs
Bidding on your competitor’s ASINs is another effective strategy within Amazon Advertising. ASIN-based targeting is available within manual Sponsored Product and Sponsored Display campaign types.
The placement of your ad varies between these two campaign types, but both can convert sales, as long as you fine-tune the bidding strategy.
Of all the consumer-targeting methods available within Amazon, ASIN targeting is one of the formats that Amazon serves up very quickly. You’ll get a lot of impressions very quickly, so in order for this strategy to be effective, you need to carefully structure your bidding formula and then monitor the ad hourly for the first couple of days.
If you allow these to run very long, Amazon will spend the entire campaign budget on the top 5-10 ASINs even if they don’t convert any sales. These can be highly effective campaigns and they are great to use when you don’t have time to let other ad formats slowly gain traction (like Sponsored Brand campaigns), but they are high maintenance.
Option #6: Non-Traditional Competitors
Perhaps you’ve heard that Netflix has a broad definition of “competition.” Instead of just focusing on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, or other subscription streaming services, they’ve been known to define the competition as Fortnite and even sleep.
Likewise, when it comes to Amazon Advertising, it would be smart to think beyond the normal list of competitors that typically come up in your market research. Make a list of other categories of products that your customers also purchase.
If your company has defined the personas who are most likely to buy your products, think through what interests they have in common and consider how to intercept those customers when they are searching for those products.
[Note: This can be especially beneficial if you can identify other categories that have less competition for keywords than you have within your sector!]
For example, if you’re in the dietary supplement space (a category with very expensive keywords!), consider bidding on food journals, health-conscious cookbooks, and small appliances known for healthy lifestyles (i.e., pressure cookers, slow cookers, air fryers).
When you identify the leading products that your customers purchase outside of your particular category, bid on their brand names, ASINs, and appropriate categories.
But be careful! Pay close attention to these ads the first couple of days because they can spend too quickly. However, you might just stumble across a winning combination of targeting options that give you an edge and help you achieve exponential growth!
SparkToro is a great tool for learning more about the shared interests that your followers and website visitors have in common. You can even do similar research for your top competitors within SparkToro as well. Rand Fishkin was onto something big when he created this new tool. Check it out! [No, they’re not a sponsor. We’re just a big fan of this tool!]
Option #7: High-Volume Terms
We now move from customers familiar with your brand and your competitors’ brands to our third category of consumer-targeting methods - keyword terms. This section includes phrases your customers use when searching for products like yours without mentioning any brand names in their search query.
First, let’s talk about high-volume terms.
One prominent study from 2020 claims that 78% of product searches on Amazon are non-branded, meaning they don’t include any specific brand or product names.
Here’s a case in point. According to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer tool (as of September 2021), US consumers search for “laptop” an average of 1.1M times per month on Amazon, but there are only 394k searches/month for “Chromebook” and 126k searches/month for “Macbook.”
For many of the most popular searches on Amazon, the non-branded searches have 2-4x the volume of the most popular branded searches in the same category.
This is one of the reasons why Amazon is such a powerful platform for advertising! It’s much easier to convert sales from a generic search where the customer doesn’t communicate any bias than it is to get someone who is looking for a MacBook to consider a Chromebook.
These high-volume generic searches are some of the most expensive clicks to purchase, but the sheer volume alone justifies dedicating some of your energy and budget towards getting at least a few of them to convert for your products.
Use Ahrefs and Amazon Vendor Central’s Search Term Report to identify the high-volume searches that are the most relevant to your market, and then build a robust, long-term strategy around “owning” at least 3-5 of those terms.
It won’t happen overnight, but with the proper ad setup, enough money, time, and an obsession over fine-tuning the ads, you will succeed and the rewards of being trusted by Amazon for high-volume generic terms will be worth all the effort! Those are some of the biggest opportunities for radical growth!
Option #8: Niche Terms
Another tactic that we recommend using to intercept your customers through non-branded search terms is to identify the keyword phrases your customers use which are not as popular as high-volume terms and are therefore not on the radar of your competitors.
You may be able to convert from these more quickly and at a lower cost than the high-volume terms covered in Option #7.
Start with your current list of high-volume search terms and consider other variations of ways customers might look for the same thing. Add a couple of other qualifying words or swap one of the words with a synonym or even a misspelling (some misspellings are caught by Amazon automatically, but not all).
[Note: Phrase and Exact match types are the best formats for niche term campaigns]
Let’s use the bicycle accessories market to illustrate this consumer targeting option.
If you are trying to sell more bicycle bells on Amazon, the high-volume non-branded search terms are “bike bells,” “bicycle bells,” and, if you wanted to go broader, “bike accessories.”
Those 3 examples would fall into the targeting method outlined in Option #7.
But if you want to find some lower-cost, lower-volume terms, you could try bidding on…
Bike bell for kids
Bell for bike
Mountain bike bell
Bike bell for girls
Bike bell for boys
Pink bike bell
bycicle (a common misspelling)
Here are a couple of observations that should rise to the surface when you’re researching and planning your niche terms strategy for bicycle bells:
“Bike” is more commonly searched for in Amazon than “bicycle,” so bid accordingly.
Be careful because Bell is also a brand in the bike accessory space – specifically helmets, so add “helmet” as a negative keyword to avoid wasted, irrelevant bids.
Why bother with calling those two things out in this article? Because thorough research on the front end will keep you from wasting money during the learning phase of your ads! Nuances like this are exposed every time we start promoting a new product.
It is also possible (though not always advisable during the early stages of your campaigns) to consider a strategy that incorporates varieties of keywords with search volume so low, they don’t register in Amazon’s Ad platform and there are no suggested bids to start with.
Search Engine Land reports that within Google, 15% of searches are new, meaning they have never been searched for before. We expect that this is also true with consumer searches within Amazon. So, if you’re feeling lucky, consider testing some obscure variations of search terms, but make sure you give them enough time to have a chance of intercepting customers.
Option #9: Categories
Our last two options both fall into what we call “prospecting.”
When you want to reach customers outside of the 8 targeting methods listed above, category bidding will allow you to intercept them in places your other ads won’t likely appear.
Sponsored Product (manual only) and Sponsored Display campaign types both allow you to bid on categories. This enables your ad to intercept customers looking for a wide variety of ASINs that Amazon identifies as being within that category.
There will likely be many ASINs in a given category that you wouldn’t have on your radar for competitor targeting, but when the ad is set up properly, some will convert, and you can build robust campaigns targeting those ASINs more deliberately.
Here are a few recommendations about managing category ads:
Get familiar with all of the relevant categories for your market and keep current because Amazon keeps rolling out more of them.
Test every relevant category. Often there are many related options. For example, if you’re advertising sewing needles, there’s a category for Needlework Supplies, Embroidery Supplies, Knitting & Crochet Supplies, Sewing Products, and more.
Keep a close eye on category ads because they serve quickly and need to be monitored hourly for the first couple of days.
Use negative keyword targeting for manual Sponsored Product campaigns when you’ve paid for too many clicks without conversions
Option #10: Audience Behavior
One of the most recent developments within Amazon Advertising is the Audiences option within the Sponsored Display campaign type.
This is where you can choose to remarket (Option #3) to those who visited your product pages but didn’t purchase. But it also has a powerful set of options for intercepting customers based on…
Audiences who viewed products similar to yours
Audiences whose lifestyle aligns with your products (Amazon defines this as “Audiences whose shopping and streaming behaviors suggest certain lifestyle preferences and affinities”)
Audiences whose interests align with your market (Amazon defines this as, “Audiences whose shopping activity suggests a durable interest in specific categories”)
Audiences whose life events align with your market (Amazon defines this as, “Audiences with recent activity around life moments such as moving or getting married”)
Audiences who are in-market for your category of products (Amazon defines this as, “Audiences whose recent activity suggests they are likely to buy products in a certain category”)
Some of these have dozens of options within them. This new development opens up a whole new world of possibilities for identifying and intercepting customers in Amazon in a way that is not tied to particular search terms! That’s a game-changer!
It’s the wild west right now and clever, obsessive marketers are finding ways to use these new Audience-targeting options successfully, but you need to structure the ads wisely from the beginning and monitor them closely or you can quickly spend your budget without many conversions.
Conclusion
These ten options for intercepting customers via Amazon Ads are exciting and profitable! But where do you begin? With a limited ad budget, you need to choose the ones that align with your unique market and goals.
We wrote another article that includes a list of 7 questions to ask when determining your Amazon Advertising goals. Please check it out when you’re finished with this one.
If you need help sorting out the best ways to intercept customers and scale your growth within Amazon, an experienced Amazon Advertising Agency like Amplify can step in to conduct market research for your sector which can inform your targeting strategy. Then we can set up your ads with the best campaign types for your needs using proven bidding formulas.
It takes experience and obsession to do Amazon Advertising well. Let us know if this article was helpful, and if you’d like to explore a partnership, with Amplify, please reach out and schedule a call.
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