How to crush your competition on Amazon?

The competition on Amazon is fierce! Over a hundred new advertisers and sellers daily join this eCommerce giant’s website. The 2.3 million active sellers on the Amazon platform share the same goal–fight the competition for the first place or the best position.

If you want to be a successful seller, you must get ahead of your competition on Amazon. Beginners in advertising on Amazon looking to grow their business aren't aware of the significant PPC’s impact on advertising. Therefore, organic isn’t enough! Register your brand to have all types and subtypes of campaigns available, allowing you to have a complete structure and successful campaigns. Many Amazon sellers don't use Logo, Headlines, Video, and Custom Images options and often neglect product listing and appearance. Getting the product listing right will determine the success of your products on Amazon.

Product Page and Listing Optimization

Product titles are essential product listing elements and a great way to stand out from your competition on Amazon. The title helps your rank for product-related searches and also helps to increase CTR.

Make sure you optimize your product listing the right way and include all the following attributes - description, product line, color, size, bullet points, and images.

The key to a good listing is to include important keywords at the beginning of the title.

Inventory and Product Rank

You should check the Inventory on a daily level. You need to know your stock and preparedness for the upcoming days. The last thing you want is an Out of Stock status on Amazon Inventory. Not only will you lose potential sales and make customers frustrated because your product is not available for purchase, but your rank would be seriously affected. Use Helium 10 extensions to be sure how well a product is selling compared to similar products within a specific category.

Amazon Sponsored Ads

In case you aren't familiar with all Amazon marketing options, there are three main Ad Formats, and here are a few tips on how to use each Ad format against your competitors:

• Sponsored Products Ads
• Sponsored Brands Ads (Headline Search Ads)
• Sponsored Display Ads

Sponsored Products Ads

If you are a new seller on the Amazon platform, we recommend starting with them, and here is why. This ad type helps customers discover and purchase your product through ads that appear in shopping results and product pages. You also increase visibility and sales by choosing the specific ad type. To protect your products, you can bid on your brand name because some of your competitors are probably bidding on your name. By bidding on your brand's name, you ensure that your loyal customers do not purchase your competitors' products.

Sponsored Brands Ads

Drive awareness and make your brand and product portfolio easily discovered with customizable ads appearing in Amazon shopping results. 

It’s crucial to build brand awareness and connect shoppers to your products.

Sponsored Display Ads

Reach the right audience for your business both on and off Amazon with display campaigns. Help grow your Amazon business. With this type of campaign, you can cover more ad places on Amazon's platform.

Tips for Campaign Optimization

As much as the proper account setting is important, you need to take optimization seriously to win in the long run. Here are the most important things you should have in mind for optimization.

Different Match Types and Negative Keywords

It’s important to understand that there is no perfect match type for your campaign. 

There are three Match types you can choose in campaigns - Exact, Phrase, and Broad. Separating your Match types into Ad Groups will help you better control and optimize their performances, which is more than recommended.

Negative keywords are helpful as well. Keywords that you don't want to trigger the product ads you can put in negative (exact/phrase) keywords. Use this option to optimize your PPC campaigns and cut unnecessary Spend.

Budgets and Bids

The most common question about creating a campaign is what its starting budget and bid should be? Your starting budget should be enough to keep your ads visible for 24h. It’s imperative that campaigns consistently deliver because often status “Out of Budget” can affect your product rank.

The second most effortless way to decide the budget amount is to look at Amazon’s suggested bid feature. That can be very helpful to get an idea of how much your competitors are bidding. Here, you can easily calculate the average campaign budget based on the target numbers of clicks.

The essential thing in the fight against the competition on Amazon is bidding optimization. If we are talking about adding new keywords into PPC campaigns, keep in mind that bids need to be higher because new keywords don’t have any historical data. You can initially start with a higher bid to gain some impressions and clicks. When you begin to drive traffic such as impressions, clicks, spend, and orders, you can adjust the bids based on desired ACoS. You need to be patient, and you need to wait to see the results because of Amazon’s data delay.

To keep your budget under control, you can use advertising settings like budget caps to ensure that you don’t overspend while waiting for some desired results. The daily budget caps control how much all of your active Sponsored Products campaigns can spend per day in total. It doesn’t include budgets for Sponsored Brands nor Sponsored Display campaigns.

Also, adjusting bids by placement is a great way to beat your competition on Amazon and get on top of the page. This feature allows you to set bid multipliers between 0% and 900% only for Sponsored Products. Placements are where your ads may appear across Amazon’s advertising platform.

Why should you adjust your bids by placement?

Every Ad Group and keyword are different and with different data histories. This part of optimization will help you occupy a better position with your Ads.

There are three locations for your ad placement:

• Top of Search
• Product pages
• Rest of Search

Do a deeper analysis of each campaign for different periods and decide how much you will raise your placements. In the beginning, we recommend that for new campaigns, it should be between 30% - 50%.

Conclusions

Always remember that your ultimate goal is to get your product on page one of Amazon search results. It’s essential to get your audience familiar with your brand and products to achieve potential sales. In our experience, the methods and strategies explained above have shown significant progress in many niches. If you’re ready to get your business on a one-way street to eCommerce success and crush your competition on Amazon, see how we can help you make it happen! Start by booking our free Amazon audit and discover more about our Amazon services.

About the author

Katarina Krstic is a PPC specialist at Sellers Alley. She has 4 years of experience in PPC advertising and during that time she had a chance to work on strategies for big clients, managed over 4 millions of keywords on just one ad account, organized and managed campaigns on accounts with high spend and profit. Amazon and Google AdWords certified.