Amazon PPC Part 1: Why It's Still Essential for Winning on Amazon

This post is part 1 in a 2-part series on Amazon PPC. Read Part 2 here!

With all of the Amazon advertising options and tactics out there — Amazon DSP, Amazon Attribution, social media pushing to Amazon, etc. — you might be tempted to turn off your PPC ads and call it a day. DON’T!

If you’re a seasoned advertiser (like we are), you should be constantly evaluating your Amazon PPC strategy. PPC is vital for winning on Amazon; without it, your products will most likely never be seen. Your Sponsored Products Ads, Sponsored Brands Ads, and Sponsored Brands Video Ads are a crucial part of your larger Amazon advertising strategy, whether you’re scaling, conquering, or maintaining.

If you want to succeed on Amazon, you need to invest in and maintain a solid PPC strategy, no matter what your goals on the platform are. Here are some strategies that Amazon PPC can help your brand achieve on Amazon!

Boost Organic Ranking Long-Term

Amazon PPC is really the best — and arguably only — way your brand can succeed long-term on Amazon. Even if you have great success on Amazon, you shouldn’t stop running PPC. If you don’t maintain your PPC advertising, you won’t maintain your organic rank.

Because PPC ads help your brand gain visibility and drive traffic to your product detail pages, they also naturally improve your organic ranking by getting more eyes on your products. And, if you’re utilizing the principles of Search Term Isolation, your products are getting in front of the right people who are searching for a product like yours and ultimately purchasing.

Enact Strategies

Amazon has become a pay-to-play platform with the increased competition and ever increasing ad placements in search results. Even if your brand has a solid organic presence on the platform and great brand recognition, all brands must continue utilizing Amazon PPC to prevent your competition from conquesting against your brand name and taking over vital ad placements next to your product. 

There are a variety of strategies to scale your brand, increase your sales even more, and take over your competition. Some common strategies include:

• Keyword takeover: bidding aggressively for increased visibility at the top of search to drive sales and ultimately boost organic rank
• Launch products: paying higher CPCs up front to drive traffic to a new listing and gain sales and reviews before optimizing CPCs and getting ACoS down
• Brand defense: targeting owned branded terms in all aspects (SBA, Sponsored Product, Video, etc.) to ensure branded real estate is not being taken over by your competitors
• Conquest competition: a higher-ACoS strategy targeting competitor branded terms to attempt to sway customers who are actively searching for a competitor
• Competitor ASINs targeting: ASINs owned by competitors that are directly related to your own products
• Complementary ASINs: a high-ACoS strategy targeting ASINs that are complementary to your products (e.g. targeting your boot socks against a pair of boots)
• ASIN retargeting: target customers that visited detail page but did not purchase

Amazon is not the platform to play it safe. Once your brand reaches a solid space where your ads are performing well and you’re consistently hitting revenue goals, it’s time to be more aggressive. You can explore and test new ad types, cast a wider net with more generic broad targeting, and bid more aggressively on high-performing keywords to gain more impression share and more favorable placements.

Prevent Competition from Overtaking

At the bare minimum, brands must be running PPC to protect their brand from the competition from overtaking your positions on the SERP. Your competitors are advertising, so if you want to be a force to be reckoned with in the industry on Amazon, you need to match their advertising efforts.

If you stop advertising, your competitors will be able to capture your organic traffic, which can quickly result in the brand overtaking your organic ranking, and their Sponsored Product Ads will be the first products to appear on the SERP. Even if somehow you maintain a high organic ranking, your competitors who are advertising will likely get the sale due to their Sponsored Product appearing first. And, because they got the sale, they will appear higher in the organic ranking as well — knocking you out of your spot.

Bottom line: if you want to stay relevant and beat out your competitors, you need to run Amazon PPC ads.

Amazon PPC is essential for staying competitive and growing your brand on Amazon. If you're looking to take your campaigns to the next level or tired of managing ads internally, let the Amazon advertising experts at Blue Wheel Media help. We'll strategize, run, and monitor your PPC to maximize your results. Contact us today to get started!