Amazon Ads: the guide to creating adverts on Amazon

Amazon is one of the highest-performing e-commerce sites in the world, with over 300 million clients on their database. The platform registers 8 million unique daily visitors in France alone, with 86% of the population having visited the site at least once (figures: BDM). This ptovides your ads with unparalleled visibility on the web.

Amazon Ads are displayed on the platform itself as well as on a network of partner sites and services. For example, a vendor can showcase its ads on the video streaming service Amazon Prime, reaching its 200 million subscribers and increasing the potential visibility of their products tenfold.

Sponsored Brands is a specific type of advert that allows advertisers to boost their brand awareness, but also to highlight the least popular products from their catalogue, and show how some of their products are used through pictures and videos. In all, it’s a great way to make yourself known among consumers.

Amazon Ads offers several targeting options. Advertisers can choose to target particular keywords, product categories, or even certain consumer demographics (particularly for retargeting), ensuring you can reach the right people at the right moment.

Internet users browsing Amazon typically have a strong intent: to make a purchase. Consequently, using Amazon Ads helps you reach consumers who are quite far along in their buying journey, and looking for products like those you’re offering. This is reflected in the numbers, with the average conversion rate for CPC ads reaching 9.55%, compared to 1.33% on other platforms (Sellzone).

You can choose to entrust your advertising strategy to Amazon. The platform targets keywords and relevant products for you based on the merchandise you’re promoting. These “autopilot” campaigns are not only ideal for novices but also for businesses who want to explore the different parameters offered by the platform before switching to ‘manual’ mode.

Amazon provides access to various indicators and statistics reports to help you better understand the impact of your ad campaigns. A thorough analysis of your campaigns’ performance is curcial for optimising your existing ads, enchancing their impact, and planning future campaigns to achieve even better results.

Log in to your vendor account on Amazon (Seller Central), click on the ‘Ad’ tab, and follow the instructions. Select the type of campaign you want to launch (Products, Brands or Display). Next, if you haven’t already, you should create your Store where your products will be displayed.

Give your campaign a name and follow the steps according to the type of campaign you’re launching. Sponsored Products: products to be promoted, choice between automatic or manual targeting, and budget. Sponsored Brands: at least 3 products to be promoted, a logo, a title, keywords, and budget. Sponsored Display: products, target audience, auctions, and budget. You also need to choose a start and end date.

The targeting of your Amazon Ads campaign can be either automatic or manual. For the former, the algorithm selects the keywords to target on its own – this is a good choice if you’re new to digital advertising. Manual targeting means you need to select the search terms, products, and categories yourself. This option gives you total control over your bidding.

For a campaign with automatic targeting, you can select different types of targeting for each search term: by exact or broad match, by substitutes, or by complements. For a manual campaign, you can choose between targeting by keyword or targeting by product. You can also choose negative keywords, alongside which your ads will not be shown.

You can choose between dynamic ‘downward only’ bids (where the algorithm lowers bids when the conversion potential is low) or ‘upward and downward bids’ (where the algorithm adjusts bids based on the conversion potential of each target). Lastly, there are fixed bids, in which the algorithm applies your parameters directly.

CPC auctions operate based on the daily budget allocated to your campaign. You’ll need to pick a daily spending limit that Amazon cannot exceed. If any budget remains at the end of the day, it can be rolled over to the following days, up to a maximum limit of 25%. Our advice would be to set a monthly budget and then divide it into a daily budget.

Once you’ve launched your campaign, you should always keep an eye on how your ads or ad groups are performing. You can adjust certain parameters based on your results, such as the campaign name, targets, and CPC budget. You can even change the type of ads if you wish to change your strategy… but make sure you give them a chance to work first!