Pt2: Amazon PPC Year In Review (And Changes For 2019)


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Danny, Brian Johnson and Liz Adamson return for part 2 of the Amazon PPC roundup for the year and predictions or wishlists for Amazon in 2019 and beyond with Storefront Insights and Automation making the grade

Predictions for 2019

  • Still waiting for Amazon to bring out day-parting to help people with budgets
  • Better support on API side for data accuracy would be great
  • Seller Central with sponsored ads and sponsored brand ads and portfolios feature helps agencies now
  • New automatic features for close/loose match as API gets better with better analytics we’ll see better split-testing with these to identify better methods over time
  • Invest in process, team and technology to get more data than is available on Amazon
  • Understanding the difference between bids and positions and different times of day to break down that relationship
  • There’s so much missing and the more info you can get your hands on in a competitive environment the better
  • Finding ways to better leverage the data to enable better decisions to be made

Storefront Insights

  • Seeing more around ‘Store front Insights’ where a lot more data is becoming available and searching through to look for patterns
  • Now we have to have a whole research team to build that competitive edge
  • There is no point in collecting all the data but unless you can analyse the data and do something with it then it’s useless

Advertising like Google

  • See advertising changes continue and get closer to the capabilities of FB and Google in terms of targeting – Amazon looking to close that gap in capability
  • Looking for Amazon to bring in DSP/AAP off-platform re-targeting and re-marketing capabilities to grow for smaller brands and sellers to be able to leverage this marketing
  • They want to grow that platform to generate more revenue for themselves
  • Warning to Sellers to understand how to test these new capabilities without wasting your ad dollars
  • Know your advertising goals and objectives
  • Be aware of when to turn on and off keywords for raising awareness or for increasing sales for products
  • Liz is watching ‘Storefronts’ and the ‘Amazon Attribution’ beta to help track more traffic coming into Amazon from FB and Google ads

Click-fraud on Amazon PPC

  • Improvement on click-fraud
  • Through our regular optimisation maintenance we’re checking for click fraud
  • Not a big concern
  • More concerned about Amazon’s progressive restrictions on sponsored brand ads
  • Amazon do refund this click-fraud problem if there’s proof of unusual activity
  • The rise of black hat this year is a leading indicator that there’ll be more of a market for click fraud in 2019

Content restrictions

  • More restrictions are being used by Amazon (i.e. things like weight-loss claims) for FDA claims in Amazon PPC ads
  • Ads that might be borderline health benefits (i.e. weight loss, hair growth, anxiety) are being targeted
  • Some product pages have been taken down for this
  • Amazon are placing restrictions on how soon you can run ads leading up to events (Halloween, Prime Day, etc)
  • Amazon is focusing Sellers minds on who their target audience is

Automation

  • Automation has grown this year but the expectation is that it’s plug&play and it’s not
  • You can’t remove the Human from the process at this stage
  • There’s too much confidence in just handing over to a bot and it’ll run wonderfully
  • You need to understand and know the process and levers to pull

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