Today we're going to cover all things Amazon advertising. This is an ideal episode if you're yet to run your first ad, if you've started but you're not sure how to get them working for you (or you're not sure how to tell if they are!), or you've been running ads for a while and want some tips on how to optimise them.

This is a great introduction to advertising on Amazon.

Takeaways:

• It's essential to have well-optimized product listings to maximize the effectiveness of your ads.
• There are three primary types of Amazon ads: sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display.
• Using negative keywords can help you save money and improve the performance of your campaigns.
• Regularly monitoring and optimising your ad campaigns is crucial for long-term success.
• Setting a realistic budget for your advertising is key.

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Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started. Hi.

So today's episode is all about Amazon advertising. So I have just run a really great masterclass inside my membership, Amazon made Easy, all about Amazon Ads.

And in that workshop I went through a lot of the information I'm going to share with you today.

But I also gave demos about how to set up ads, how to optimize ads, how to tell if your ads are working, some little tweaks you can make to make them work better for you. All of this.

So if you are an Amazon Made Easy member, this is going to be available in our membership hub for you to re watch as many times as you like. And if you're not already a member, if you join, you will always have access to it. So yeah, just to let you know that that will be available.

And if you'd like, for more information on Amazon Made Easy, just go to vickyweinberg.com forward/membership. But now let's get on and talk about Amazon ads.

So first of all, I want to talk about why I think ads are worth using when it comes to selling your products on Amazon.

I think you've probably got, if you listen to any episodes of this podcast before, or maybe even if you haven't, you've probably got the message that selling on Amazon isn't easy. It's definitely not a case of listing your products, waiting for sales to come in. You have to do something to generate sales.

Now, I'm not saying for a minute that you have to run ads on Amazon. If you're selling there, you absolutely don't. You can do other things to get sales to your product listings.

You can run ads from externally, you can do lots of free things like use your email list, you can use social media, you can use friends and family influencers, whatever it is. There's plenty of different ways you can get traffic to your Amazon listings.

But for the purpose of this episode, I'm just going to be talking about Amazon advertising as one option. But I will say I think it is a good option. A reason being is that when people are on Amazon, they're there to shop.

So automatically they're typing something in the search bar that they're looking for.

And if you sell that product, you come up on page one, hopefully somewhere near the top, you, you know, that really increases your chances of the customer buying your product. Of course you need to have a really well optimized product listing as we spoke about in our episodes.

But let's say you've done all of that work, you're really happy with how your listings look.

Maybe your store, if you have a, if you have a store, this is a really good time to think about running some ads because one of the main benefits of running ads to your listings is that you are going to appear at the top of page one. Because as you probably know, you probably do this yourself. Not everyone is going to scroll, scroll, scroll, really? Amazon search results.

I know when I'm looking for something, yes, I'll scroll to a point, but I'm not going that far. So realistically, if a product doesn't turn up, you know, in the first couple of lines of results, I'm probably not going to see it.

And by advertising on Amazon, you're going to appear at the top of the listing. So they can be a great way to get started. So many people have said to me in the past, oh, I can't even find my own product on Amazon.

You know, I've listed two weeks ago and I can't even find it myself. And that is because however great your product listing is, you're not going to be ranking for anything at the moment.

And we've spoken about ranking before. You can go back and listen to those episodes. So this would be a great way of just kick starting your sales and getting you some visibility.

Of course your organic Amazon SEO is still important because you probably or you might not want to run ads forever. But ads are a really good way of just getting things going. So let's go through some of the basics. Obviously this is a podcast, it's audio.

There's only so much I can show you and tell you about. So going to go through some of the basics about Amazon ads.

And as I say, if you want anything further, you can always join Amazon Made Easy and you can get the full masterclass which is available in that membership. So there are three different types of Amazon ads. So if you went to set up an ad, you'd be given three options.

The first is sponsored products and sponsored products is best for advertising individual products or products.

So you set up a campaign where you say to Amazon, if someone you know, this is a product or products, I want to be shown when someone searches based on the targeting that you set up. And we'll talk about targeting in a moment. There's also sponsored brands.

So this is really good for brand awareness, although you do need to have brand registry in order to set up these ads.

And these are ads that take customers to either a standalone page that you create with a range of your products on there, or a page on your existing Amazon storefront. And these are banner ads that you might see at the top of the search results.

So if you go onto Amazon now, if you're near a computer and you type for something, search for something you know that might be highly searched. Baby, products always good for this.

Chances are at the top of the screen you're going to see a banner and it's going to have an image, a logo, maybe a strap line of text about the brand and two to three products in a row in this nice banner. You might even have a video on there because you can run video ads as well. But that's what a sponsored brands ad looks like. And this is about.

These are great for you if you have a range of products. If you're trying to get more traffic over to your brand store, these can be really, really good.

Because as I say, those are right at the top of the search results.

You do get them further down the page as well, but they you also will always get a sponsored brand if there is one relevant for what you're searching for right at the top of the search as well. And it's very big and very visible. And then there's sponsored display. So sponsored display is good for retargeting.

And these are ads that are actually shown off Amazon. So I'll be really honest, this is not my preferred way of doing Amazon advertising. I like to focus on the advertising that's within Amazon itself.

But sponsored display, if you set those ads up, they will be shown in other places and they are mainly aimed at retargeting customers who perhaps looked at your product or product like yours, but hasn't brought yet. So let's talk a little bit about targeting. So when you set up a Amazon advertising campaign, you're going to be given two options.

You're going to have to decide between setting up what's called an automatic campaign or a manual campaign. And what an automatic campaign means is that you don't define the targeting for that campaign.

And by targeting, I mean you're not giving Amazon input into the products or keywords that you want your product listing to show up for.

And I'm saying listing because I'm going to pretend for the purpose of this podcast that we're setting up a standard advertisement, just going to one product.

Standard sponsors of products campaign, going to one product because that'll be easier for the purposes of this, I'm trying to keep this super simple.

So you're setting up a campaign for your products and Amazon wants to know are you going to tell Amazon what do you want your ad to show up for or are you going to let them decide?

My personal view is that a manual campaign where you are deciding, okay, I want to show up for these keywords or I want to show up on these competitor listings is the way to go. I'm not saying that you should never use automatic campaigns. Some of you might have automatic campaigns running already.

Maybe they're doing really well for you. They can be really good for getting data.

So if you have the budget to spend because one of the downsides of automatic campaigns is because you're not being as targeted, you can end up spending quite a lot of money. So that's one of the downsides.

But if you have a little bit of money to invest and maybe you aren't sure what's, you know, you're not really sure what's relevant.

You perhaps you haven't done any keyword research, you haven't had time to do that, or perhaps you just want to, you know, try some, try something out.

An automatic campaign will give you some data because Amazon will show your product to anyone who goes onto Amazon and search for something that Amazon think are even vaguely related to what your product is.

The thing here to know here is that the better optimized your product listing is, the more relevant the results you get from running an automatic campaign will be. Because if Amazon aren't really sure what your product is, who it's for, they might be showing it for things that are completely irrelevant.

And you know something that always surprises me, but perhaps this is just human nature is lots of people will click on your ad with no intention to buy, you know, because your ad showed up for something completely random, it wasn't what they were looking for, but maybe they're curious. They click on your product anyway. You can end up spending quite a lot of money this way.

So if you are going to try an automatic targeting ad, just make sure that you have the money to spend and also that you are confident that your product listing is really well optimized and that Amazon will have a really good idea about what that product is. So those are the two types of campaign. Then you get the option of bidding on either keywords or competitors products they quit product targeting.

So product targeting means that you give Amazon either a product category. So let's say you sell baby towels. You might say, if anyone is looking at products in the baby tails category, I would like my product to show up.

And when you look on any products on Amazon or most products on Amazon, and you scroll down the product listing, you will see something that says, I think the heading says on like similar products. And these are all sponsored ads. So you might be looking at a product and you might think, this, I like this, but maybe it's not quite what I want.

You scroll down the listing and you'll see some other similar products and you think, oh, that one actually looks a bit better, or that one's a bit cheap, or that's got more reviews or whatever it is. And you click through, well, those are all ads and those products have all paid to be there. And that's something you can do as well. So it might be.

So I was working on this for a client recently, and he sells a particular type of supplement.

So we decided to bid for his product to be shown on the product pages of a couple of books that talked about that particular supplement, not his in particular, but talked about the ingredients and why they were so good for your health. Because obviously someone reading a book on the subject might then want to try a product.

We also looked for products that were similar to his, but either were much more expensive or didn't have very good reviews because his has very good reviews. And we've targeted those as well. And you, what you do is you get the ASIN of that product and you paste them all into your campaign.

And then if somebody is looking at one of those products, your products will hopefully then get shown in that sponsored section further down the listing. And then you can also do keyword targeting as well.

So keyword targeting is when you tell Amazon what keywords or phrases that a customer types into the search bar you want your product to be shown for. And when we're talking about keyword targeting, we also have to think about there's also something called matching as well.

And what this means is Amazon will ask you, so how broad do you want to go with your targeting? So hopefully you're following me here because I hope this isn't getting too complicated. But let's just say, coming back, we used baby towels earlier.

Let's just say you sell baby towels and you're going to use baby towels as one of the keywords in your campaign. Now, there's three types of targeting. So the first is exact match. So exact match means a customer types baby towels into the search bar.

You're targeting baby towels in your campaign. Your ad shows up.

If they type blue baby towels or pink baby towels or baby towels with pictures on baby towels made of bamboo, anything else at all other than baby towels, your ad will not show with phrase targeting as long as they type something that resembles baby towels. So baby towels, towels for baby, blue baby towels, pink baby towels, baby towels with a hood.

Your ad will show because using what's called a phrase match. So that means as long as the words baby tails are in there, your ad will still show.

So this is a great way of identifying long tail keywords and we'll talk about that a bit later. And then the third type is broad match. This is my least favourite because obviously you can probably tell we're getting less and less specific.

So if you're targeting, if you're doing broad match targeting, someone might just type the word towels or maybe they're typing towels for ad for towels for adults. I don't know, maybe they're typing in kitchen towels.

And your product shows because the targeting is so broad that Amazon goes, oh, they're using the word this customer typed towels. And this campaign says towels. So let's show them that. That's maybe a bit of a silly example, but hopefully that illustrates what I mean.

And the problem with this, this sort of really broad targeting is, as you can imagine, this can cost you quite a lot of money. So it's completely up to you when you come to setting up your campaigns or looking at existing campaigns, the type of targeting that you do.

And you can actually do all three or two. So I, for example, like to use a combination of phrase and exact match targeting.

And you can add keywords to your campaigns with, with different matches. So you can add the same keyword, baby towels with broad targeting, phrase targeting and exact targeting, if you want to.

You don't have to, but you have all of those options. And now hopefully you know a bit more about what each of them are. That's really helpful.

And then I also want to mention, while we're talking about targeting, negative targeting. So this is where you can add negative keywords or asins, or we call them products, but you add an asins of the products to your campaigns.

And what this is for is, let's say, let's start with products. Let's say that there's a product and for some reason you would really not want your product to be advertised on that listing.

Maybe it's because that product is a lot cheaper than yours and you think, oh, mine can look expensive compared to that. Maybe it's a product that for some reason doesn't align with your brand values and you think, I don't really want to be associated with them.

Whatever the reason is, it doesn't matter what your reasons are. And you think, oh, I really don't want my, my ad to be shown on this product. You can add that as a negative in your campaign and you won't be.

And the same goes for keywords. So let's say you sell baby towels. Coming back to that example, and let's say your baby towels are all.

Maybe you sell them in a white and a pink and a blue, but you notice that people keep typing purple baby towels in your ads coming up and you might think, oh, that's going to cost me a lot of money. And maybe your campaign's already up and running. You can see it's happening, you can see it's costing you money.

Some reason people are searching for purple baby towels and they're clicking for each or listing anyway.

Maybe to see if you offer purple as an option, you could add purple baby towels as a negative keyword, which means when someone types that, your ad will never be shown. And that's a really good thing to do to, you know, to avoid unnecessary spend.

So while we're talking a little bit about, about targeting, I also think I should probably talk about budgeting. That's something I get asked a lot.

So when you're setting up your campaigns, you're going to choose, or you're going to choose your targeting options, you're going to choose your bid amounts. So bid amounts is how much you are going to bid per keyword. Amazon will always suggest a bid amount to you.

I suggest at the beginning, you just go with whatever they suggest and then in a moment we'll talk about once your campaigns are running, the kind of things you can do and how you can optimize that. Let's say right at the start, Amazon, you know, you, you tell Amazon what you're targeting, they suggest a bid amount. So you put all that in.

There are some other options when you set up the campaign, and we're not going to go into all of those now, one, because it's quite difficult when it, you know, when we're not doing anything visually, but also because I don't want to complicate this for you. So you will see a few other options about increasing your bid types and paying more money for different placements.

But now, if you're listening along with this, because you're setting up your first campaign, leave all those for now. Just leave everything as it is. And we can definitely in the future have an episode where we talk a little bit more depth about this.

But let's keep it super simple. So coming back to the question of budget, you might be thinking, okay, so how much should I spend on my advertising campaign?

And the answer is really, how much can you spend? Or how much do you. How much do you have to spend? Not how much can you spend, because you can spend a lot of money.

As you can imagine, ads can get really expensive, particularly at the beginning where it's a bit of testing, you know, especially if you're running your first ads on Amazon, you might not know and your product's brand new. Maybe you don't know exactly what keywords are going to convert best. Maybe you don't know where the traffic's going to come from.

Maybe you're putting a whole load of keywords into your campaign and, you know, you don't know which one of them is going to be the most relevant. That's another question I get, actually, is how many keywords to use in your campaign? And the answer is, as many as are relevant.

You can start with free keywords you know are super targeted to your products, or one, you could start with 20, knowing that you're probably going to remove some of them as you go. Absolutely. Anything you want to do is fine. But coming back to budget, I would say the absolute minimum to spend really is around five pounds a day.

Amazon does their advertising budgets in days. You could also look at how much you've got in total. So let's say you've got 50 pounds to spend.

You could think, okay, I could trial running ads for 10 days at £5 a day. Or maybe you could get a calculator out and divide that by seven and think, I'm going to run ads for a week.

I would say minimum of pound five a day and minimum of a week to see how your ads perform, ideally two weeks. If you've got that, you can start off a lab with it with a really low budget.

I think if you've got it and you can spend more around the £10amark day, obviously, the more money you spend, the more data you'll get, which will help, you know when it comes to optimizing your campaigns in the future so that you know you hope you're getting a much better return on them. However, if you can't afford it, you can't afford it. And only, you know, only, only budget what you can actually afford to spend.

Remembering as well that Amazon are going to be putting VAT on your ad fees as well. So make sure when you're budgeting what you've got to spend on ads that you factor that in as well, because that's really important.

So we've spoken a little bit about setting up an ad and I always want to mention what you then need to do once your ads are running. So one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make, well, I see a few, I'll go through them very quickly.

Overspending on broad targeting, not using negative keywords, setting campaigns up and completely forgetting about them. That is probably the biggest one. When I am working on a client's advertising campaigns, I am looking at them most days.

I'm not saying for a minute you have to do that, but I would say minimum two to three times a week you should be going in, looking at your campaigns and seeing how they're performing and tweaking and optimizing. So there are some key metrics to keep on top of. So let's run through them quickly.

So you can look at top of search, which basically tells you the percentage of times that someone types in something relevant to your, you know, you're targeting and the percentage of times that you're shown at the top of search results for that. That's really useful to know. It tells you this on a campaign by campaign basis.

So for your, for every advertising campaign you run, it tells you how often that campaign is shown at the top. And it will show you if you go into your campaigns, it will also break that down by keywords or product targeting as well.

You also should keep a look at your click through rate so find out how often people are clicking through your impressions. So how many times is your ad actually being shown? Obviously your orders and sales, your spend as well.

And then to find out how well your ads are performing. There are two metrics you can really track. One is ACOs, which is actual cost of sale and the other is roas. Now roas's return on ad spend.

Easiest way to think about this, because I'm not going to make it super complicated is your acos. You want to be as low as possible. So acos is a percentage and you really want that to be, to be on the lower side.

I can't tell you what to aim for because everyone's going to have their own number based on their own margins. I would say anything below like 30 is good. Anything below 25 is better, I'd like to say, and I'd probably be aiming myself for something below 20%.

ROAS is the opposite in that you want the number to be as high as possible. Anything under one means you're not getting a positive return. It means you're actually losing money. So that's not good.

Again, I can't really give you a, a number to aim for, but I would say anything over 4 for most of my clients I'd be happy with. But the higher the better. And for most of them, you know, we're looking at somewhere between 8 to 12, which is a really good return.

Kind of things that you should be doing is checking your campaigns, as I say, every couple of days, keeping an eye on spend, really quick checks. Are there any keywords or products that you're spending money on but you're not getting any sales? If so, pause them.

Particularly when you're starting running campaigns, you have to be a little bit ruthless. Are there any keywords or products where the ACOs or ROAs aren't working? So the ROAS is really low or the acos is really high? Pause them.

I would also have a look at your search terms, which is something you can look at for each of your active campaigns and this tells you what customers are typing in the search bar that is triggering your ad being shown. So if you're doing exact targeting, this isn't relevant but if you're doing any broader targeting.

So for example, coming back to the towel scenario, maybe you're targeting baby towels and you can look in your search terms and see, oh, actually we've had a thousand impressions for pink baby towels and we've had a very good click through rate and we've had five sales and the roas on that is really good.

I'm not going to throw numbers out here because I'm making this all up obviously then you might think, oh, actually we should add pink baby towels as a, as a term, we should be actually targeting that in our campaign and we should do an exact match on that which will likely be a little bit cheaper. And because we can see that people who are searching for pink baby towels are buying our towels and the return is really good.

On the other side, if you find out that lots of people are searching for purple baby towels, which you don't sell, people are still clicking on it, it's costing you money, but you're not getting anywhere with it, then you would maybe add that as a negative keyword. I'm thinking that this is probably a really good place to wrap up this episode. I definitely don't want to get too complex and complicated here.

I do think this is something that's better to see visually.

But I'm hoping that you've got enough information from this episode, technical as it may be, that if you are thinking of starting some Amazon ads or maybe you've been running ads for a while, you're not sure, you know, you're not really sure if you set them up properly, you're not really sure what you're doing with them now. Hopefully this just gives you a few pointers.

Of course, if you want my help, go vickyweinberg.com you can always book in a call, we can have a chat, we can look at this together and if you're you, you are or you become a member of Amazon Made Easy, then you'll get the you get the full Amazon Ads masterclass so you'll be able to see that like me actually going through how to set up campaigns, how to optimize campaigns, and also you can come along to our bi weekly group calls and we can look at your advertising campaigns live on those calls as well and give you some points and points and hinders, hints and pointers. I'm sure you knew what I meant. If that's something that's useful for you as well.

So you can find out about everything that I've spoken about and picking weinberg.com Hope this was a really useful episode. As always. If you have any feedback, if you have any questions, vickiweinberg.com and looking forward to speaking to you again next week.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalogue and lots of free resources is on my website vickiewinberg. Com.

Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.