Amazon can be…finicky at times. In my opinion the system they use is by no means perfect, but it does work. As a result of this, I’ve learned a couple things that might prove to be valuable to new advertisers.
Name your campaigns strategically
After creating a campaign, regardless of type, you can never delete it and it can never be renamed. This means if you give it a generic name, such as “Toys 1”, your dashboard may become very confusing down the line. What I would suggest doing is adding a string of digits before each title, and then giving an appropriate and logical title.
Since product displays and headline campaigns can only run for a maximum of six months, it only makes sense to group sponsored products with this time frame (Sponsored products can run indefinitely). Depending on what your budget is, you may want to run campaigns by month, or by quarters. Following this logic, you may want to name a campaign for water bottles something like this:
100029 – Water Bottles Jan/Feb 2017
Or
100029 – Water Bottles Q1 2017
Then after these expire, name the next ones along these lines:
100030 – Water Bottles Mar/Apr 2017
Or
10030 – Water Bottles Q2 2017
The numbers don’t matter as much, but when you have many campaigns running at once, it makes it easier to sort through the data if they’re numbered in the order they were created. You may have noticed I did not include much other info such as the type of campaign. This is because the majority of this data is already presented in the table in the dashboard, as seen below.
Create a keyword list
This is easily one of the most important tasks to do, and possibly one of the most boring and cumbersome. Doing this will hopefully save you some cash later down the line. To make it more bearable, get some fellow employees or other people within your company to help with it.
Sit everyone down and either on a word document, white board, piece of paper, anything really, begin listing all the logical keywords for the products in your advertising campaign. Be sure to include typos, common misspellings, brand names, and any regional names.
Also, it’s important to note all of these keywords will be set to a broad match type. What this means is that any variation extended onto the root of the keyword will be included. What this means is if you target the keyword ‘phone case’, all extensions and close variations of that are included when searched for. Keywords such as ‘pink phone case’, ‘phone case for iphone’, etc. More on the types of keywords and their meanings here.
For example, if we are advertising a water proof phone case, the some keywords we should list include:
- Phone case
- Fone case
- Waterproof phone case
- Water proof phone case
- Life proof
- Lifeproof
- Underwater phone case
- Underwater phone
- Under water phone case
- Under water phone
- Water resistant phone case
- Water-resistant phone case
- dry bag
Although ‘phone case’ was already listed and ‘waterproof phone case’ will most likely be picked up, we want to be 100% it is picked up since that is the main product.
Another good idea is to take the keywords listed and see what other listings have mentioned in the title. When I had searched for ‘water proof phone case’ on Amazon, a branded dry bag came up, hence why ‘dry bag’ was added to the list.
Once you think you have all the keywords you can possibly think of, start thinking of keywords that are associated with your product, but are not related to your product. This is a bit more difficult to do, and may require you to wait until some data comes in, but if you already know of some keywords that shouldn’t be associated, list these under ‘negative keywords’.
If you’re advertising ‘memory foam mattresses’, you’ll want to list ‘memory foam’ under your keywords. However, because you’re listing ‘memory foam’ as a broad keyword, people who search for ‘memory foam slippers’ or ‘memory foam pillow’ will be shown your ad. Since these people are not looking for a mattress we want to exclude them from the search. Adding ‘slippers’, ‘pillow’, etc. will do the trick. Now anytime a search for ‘memory foam slippers’ or ‘memory foam pillow’ is made, your ad will not appear.
Check your product detail page
This should go without saying, but if your product detail page is terrible, you’re not going to see many, if any, conversions. Check that your copy is free of grammar and spelling mistakes, your photos are clear, up to date, and in a logical order. Ensure you’ve addressed any negative reviews and attempted to correct the situation and encouraged the buyer to change their rating.
Not sure how to address negative reviews? – Read “Amazon Reviews – Addressing the Negative & Praising the Positive”
Lastly, check to make sure your shipping time states that your product is in stock. This may be one of the biggest turnoffs for a buyer, without scrolling any farther down a page. Seriously, who wants to have a product shipped to them in a month or longer? If that were the case, they’d just buy your widget off AliExpress for the price of a gallon of milk.