Amazon Marketing Services (AMS Advanced) with Taylor Benterud – Session 006

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This session Taylor returns and shines a light on the new AAP or Amazon Advertising Platform, what it is and does and how to put it in action for your business. The addition of ‘broad match’ ads to Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) is a great lift for sellers but with it comes the downside as there is no search-term report you don’t know exactly which keywords are converting best. Taylor gives us strategies to waterfall the bids to optimise your spending.

Then Taylor moves onto the introduction of Headlines ads which is in beta for some sellers and is beginning to appear across people’s accounts. Again Amazon gives with one hand but takes with the other as we see the cost per click begin to climb as many new entrants come into the headline ad market.

Amazon Store pages is another innovation and moves us along from the brand pages which were a little clunky to put up and manage and then the Amazon Advertising Platform get the Taylor Treatment with an in-depth run through the platform, the options and a focus on the Amazon Retargeting Ads strategies to use.

• Match Types in Amazon Marketing Services (AMS)

  • Broad match added to AMS so now we have exact, phrase and now broad match which gives greater reach
  • You have no search-term report so you don’t know which keywords convert
  • We’re hoping they eventually have a search term report because it will give us better analysis
  • You need to ‘waterfall’ your bids:
    • Exact should be highest, phrase a little lower and then broad lowest to optimise your ad spend

• Implementing in current campaigns

  • Phrase and exact in the same Amazon Marketing Services campaign with 500 keywords in each (1,000 per campaign)
  • Setup brand in their own campaign to make it easier to manage
  • Don’t recommend adding into your phrase and exact campaigns

• Headline Ads

  • In Beta now for Seller Central
  • Average cost per click is going to go up as everyone will have access and can bid
  • Big difference is you can see the date range – can optimise a little better
  • No extra reports that we know of
  • No search term report as yet
  • Click campaign manager and it’s right next to the sponsored products
  • You can’t ‘apply’ for this – they will just put it into your account if you qualify in Amazon Marketing Services
  • ACoS is going up as more people are bidding for the same keywords
  • Don’t be too worried as there are a lot of newbies who don’t know what they are doing

• Stores – Amazon Store Pages

  • Released 2-3 weeks ago
  • Menu item that says ‘Stores’
  • It’s basically a ‘brand page’ as was – but now a much more modern tool and you can make the ‘store page’ look great
  • Amazon Basics has a very well done ‘store page’
  • You can drive external traffic to your store page as a ‘landing page’ and see external metrics on how well it’s converting
  • If you’re selling over 25 products it’s good to build a page like ‘Amazon Basics’ page – https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=10112675011
  • A lot of our clients have 1-2 products that are flagships and cover 80-90% of their sales
  • You kit out your Amazon Store page using Amazon Marketing Services features to showcase your flagship products with video and a landing page for just the one product
  • This will give a great conversion rate for this product

• Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP)

  • AAP is a different amazon network
  • Retargeting ads
  • Amazon lookalike audiences
  • Upload emails – Amazon hashes them and match those emails to their network and see if they are Amazon shoppers
  • Managebystats email names can be uploaded to Amazon and re-target those emails to bring them back to your product
• Number one way we recommend – is you’ve had an AMG (Amazon Marketing Group) rep, get it touch with them and setup a meeting to get access to AAP
• Dynamic eCommerce retargeting ads and the Look-alike audiences
• Facebook has a network, Google has a display network too
• Amazon owns the Washington Post which will be one of the assets in their network
• Amazon are hooked into loads of media outlets – the AMG reps explain they have access to all of the internet for media display networks – buying ads from all sorts of ad / media networks
• They are using all the standard ads display formats

• What is a look-alike audience?

  • You upload 1,000 emails of customers that have bought your products
  • Amazon then analyses the characteristics of those email users and goes out and finds others with similar characteristics and goes and targets them with your product offers

• Amazon Dynamic Retargeting ads

  • Three layers of re-targeting with this ad method:
    1. Promoted ASINs
       • Anyone that comes to your coffee cup listing that doesn’t buy, you can re-target them all across the web
    2. Brand ASINs
       • eCommerce ad where anyone that has viewed multiple ASAINs in your brand (2 or more products) you can create a campaign to re-target them with ones they have seen
    3. Related ASINs
       • Under you detail page it targets people who view the ‘frequently bought with’ links under you listing and re-targets them
  • The promoted ASINs will have the highest conversions as it’s the bottom of the funnel
  • Segment the emails into groups, if you can split them by a characteristic such as ages, etc. The more you can break it out yourself the better as we don’t know what reporting is available
  • Do not go there to promote on the Amazon FIRE homepage because it is a waste of money
  • CPM advertising model – cost per impression – not as effective as CPC (Cost per Click)
  • Start with promoted ASINs and then move into Look-alike audiences for better targeting
  • Become more sophisticated and move into AAP
  • If you want to manage these ads yourself manually – they won’t let you, you have to go to Amazon or go to an agency (agency is cheaper than Amazon)
  • Amazon reps are commissioned on how much of your money they spend – different to how agencies are incentivised
  • Product Display Ads are not there yet – 20% of total sales on AMS 80% in Headline ads ◦ We’ve tested and it’s growing to 30-35% Product Display Ads now – so it’s growing

Filtering your Search Term Report

• When you pull your search term report and you filter the customer search term column look at only ASINs
• If it has more than 3 orders and at a profitable ACOS rate
• Put it in it’s own campaign and click the ‘auto-targeting’ to find relevant ASINs as this will better optimise your campaign
• This will perform very well usually
• If after 2 weeks and it’s not doing well then you should tweak the bids to better target them
• If still not performing then take the ASIN, copy the campaign and uncheck the auto-target and split-test it