Pt1: Amazon PPC Year In Review (And Changes For 2019)


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Brian Johnson and Liz Adamson join to run through the Amazon PPC end of Q4 and progress on Amazon going into 2019 and migrations to new ad platform tactics

  • Acronym Hell for Sellers this year in PPC as names and platform migrated
  • AAP is now DSP which is now Display Side Platform
  • Product Display Ads moved into Seller Central

Is AMS now the poor cousin and the scorned child?

  • Yes and No
  • Because AMS is so bad at API and Data Feed/Reporting – Seller Central is much easier to use from a reporting standpoint
  • The few additional AMS features are not out-weighing the convenience of Seller Central
  • They keep adding more into Seller Central that it’s more and more convenient

PPC Platform Migration

  • Started migrating after headline search ads moved
  • The AMS platform has a larger inventory of ads space than seller central’s platform so can be advantageous to stay
  • Seen better success with headline search ads on AMS
  • The product display ads will be going away completely on AMS and be replaced by sponsored product new targeting opportunities
  • Will Amazon completely merge AMS and Seller Central – will be interesting to this development
  • Brian is still heavy in AMS currently and not migrated over to Seller Central yet
  • Some accounts running large campaigns in both sides currently
  • AMS seems to get better results currently
  • Don’t want to give up what’s working in AMS at this point
  • Campaign history data is still valuable there
  • And you’re having to teach the algorithm again in the new platform

Amazon PPC Benchmarks

  • Brian has set goals to achieve for sales and profitability for an account
  • Uses Pareto to focus which campaigns, keywords to focus on or abandon
  • Is the objective profitability or sales and this will drive the tactics
  • Using experience to make judgements on keywords for Amazon PPC sponsored ads
  • Sponsored products is where Brian does a lot of testing and research as the feedback is better with search-term level info
  • 70% comes from Sponsored product ads and 25% to Sponsored Brand ads depending on the type of product it is
  • Remainder into Product Display type targeting

Auto-Match Types

  • Brian is not finding like new targeting
  • Just insights onto the close-match / loose-match targeting
  • They were already doing this with campaigns but it just wasn’t visible to Sellers
  • The competition is evolving on these automatic ads
  • The lack of API support in making this available outside Seller Central has been limiting to use software to help automate it
  • Having to do it manually through bulk-operations at this point

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