In my experience in Amazon Consulting, the best Amazon Advertising Strategy starts like this:

• Identify buyer intent keywords
• Make your listing as good as it possibly can be using Amazon Listing Optimization
• Make sure the keywords that you are targeting appear on your listing front end or back end.
• Make sure your price is competitive.
• Have a system in place to get Amazon reviews as you’re running ads.
• Consistently drive external traffic to your Amazon product listings.
• Build a buzz off of Amazon about your brand & products

From there, it then gets into the finer points of setting up your campaigns and adjusting them.

Let’s look at each component involved in Amazon Advertising.

Should I Use Keyword Targeting or Product Targeting For Amazon Ads?

• Always have keyword targeting campaigns, whether your goal is to drive awareness or sales.
  • The types of keywords you select will be different to drive awareness vs. building sales, but you will use keyword campaigns nonetheless.
• Use product targeting campaigns to show your ads on well-known or competitor products that are similar to yours if your potential customers are not aware of your brand or if you are attempting to chip away at your competitors’ sales by introducing customers to your product.

What Keyword Match Type Should I Use For My Amazon Ads?

You have 3 and 1/2 choices.

Broad Match:  Amazon will show your ads for customer searches similar to the keyword you’ve entered.

• EXAMPLE: “hose pressure jet attachment” will show your ads for “hose nozzle sprayer for garden”

Modified Broad Match:  Amazon will show your ads for customer searches that contain the keyword you modified and similar to the keyword that you did not modify.

• EXAMPLE: “+mens +shoes” will show your ads for “mens shoes”  “mens sneakers” “mens shoes size 12” “mens nike sneakers”

Phrase Match:  Amazon will show your ads for keywords added on before and after the keyword you’ve entered.

• EXAMPLE:”hose pressure jet attachment” will show your ads for  “garden hose pressure jet attachment wand”

Exact Match:  Amazon will show your ads ONLY when a customer searches for EXACTLY what you’ve entered.

• EXAMPLE:  “hose pressure jet attachment” will show your ads for “hose pressure jet attachment”

That said, you want to use a combination of all of these.

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If You Are Just Getting Started:

• Take the keywords from the keyword research you’ve done and setup an ad group for each.
• After a week or so, view the report to see which keywords from the Broad Match campaign you’ve been converting on.
• Add them as a negative for the broad match campaign and add them to your phrase match and exact match campaigns.

If You Are Good At Keyword Research:  

• Run one ad group with exact match and phrase match keywords in it.
• Then, regularly view your reports to identify new keyword opportunities from the Search Terms

What Is The Difference Between Keywords and Search Terms?

This is the easiest way I’ve found to think about this:

Keywords are topics to make sure you show up for the terms customers type into the Amazon search engine.

Search Terms are the literal EXACT term that the customer typed into the Amazon search engine and you were triggered to show up for that search term by the keyword you selected.

This is because customers don’t use search engines with proper grammar or syntax.

Generally, they’ll type loose approximations in broken sentence structure to try and find what they need.

It gets more convoluted if they are using voice-search.

This is where Amazons’ a9 algorithm comes into play to interpret the “search terms” and tether them to “keywords”.

What Are The Best Keywords For Ads?

The best keywords for Amazon ads are buyer intent keywords.

Think about how you search.

When you want to learn what options there are out there to solve the problem you have or to fulfill your desire, you search for things like:

• Pontoon Boat Accessories
• Pontoon Boat Cover

But if you’ve already figured out what you want and now you want to find the right one for your needs, you search for things like:

• Propane Pontoon Boat Grill With Railing Attachment Mount
• 18 Ft Pontoon Boat Cover Trailerable Blue

Should I Exclude Broad Keywords From My Amazon Advertising Strategy?

No, definitely not.

The most common question I get is “what are the best keywords to sell?” and the answer is buyer intent keywords.

But, if you have a complex product, people aren’t aware that your solution exists or you need to build brand awareness, then less targeted broad, research type keywords are exactly what you need.

A proper Amazon Advertising Campaign should have a mix of both.

Should I Target Competitor Products With My Amazon Advertising Strategy?

Yes, in my experience as an Amazon Seller Consultant, you should allocate at least a small portion of your budget to attempt to capitalize on your competitors’ traction in 2 ways.

1. Create a Product Targeting Sponsored Product Listing Campaign that targets your competitors’ ASIN’s with a low daily budget and a low bid.
2. Create a Keyword Targeting Sponsored Product Listing Campaign that targets your competitors branded keywords.

How Do I Get My Competitors Branded Keywords?

Let’s say you sell a competitor to the Stream Deck by Elgato.

1. Head to Amazon
2. Start typing in “stream deck” but don’t hit enter in the search field
3. Make note of the keywords that show up in the suggested search terms section

These are keywords that your customers use to search for your competitor.

These are the keywords you want to advertise on to try and chip away at their sales and build brand awareness for your own product.

How Can I Find Keywords For Amazon Ads?

I mentioned earlier that Helium 10, Seller Labs or Jungle Scout have tools that will show you what keywords your competitors are indexed for and are running ads on.

You’ll get lists you can export like this:

Those are great, but in the lists that you get, they have buyer intent keywords and research keywords.

But did you know that Amazon itself will give you buyer intent keywords?

Here’s how it works:

Step 1)  Head to Amazon.com and start typing in a keyword that you think customers would use to find your product.

See the drop-down list with those keywords?

Those are buyer intent keywords.

Those are the keywords that Amazon has identified that:

• Get a lot of searches
• Get a lot of sales

Step 2)  Repeat that process for every single keyword you believe people may type in to find a product like yours and then make a list.

Don’t have that much time?

Keyword Tool Dominator makes this quicker & easier.

Here is how it works:

Step 1)  Enter the keyword that you want to discover buyer intent keywords for.

You will get a list like this:

That’s 90 keywords you wouldn’t have thought of in 1 second!

Step 2)  Repeat that process for keywords you believe customers would type in to find and buy your product.

You’re done.

It really is that simple.

How to Structure Amazon Advertising Campaigns

You may have 1 product or you may have 20,000+ products.

In my experience, the closer you can get to giving each product it’s own campaign, the more impressions you will get.

This works because it consolidates the types of keywords or products that it targets, and this tends to produce the most impressions.

You can separate out colors, sizes, various other factors in Ad Groups.

Here is an example Amazon advertising ad campaign setup:

What Should I Name My Amazon Advertising Campaigns?

Name schemes will be entirely different based on what you’re selling and how many items you’re selling.

I like to use this name scheme:

• NAME OF PRODUCT – TYPE OF AD
  • EXAMPLE:  GALVANIZED ANTIQUE BUCKETS – SPONSORED PRODUCTS

How To Structure Amazon Advertising Ad Groups

The easiest way I’ve found to think about Ad Groups in Amazon Advertising are these are where you target your customers.

You have 2 main objectives when setting up your Ad Groups.

1. Create as many ad groups as it takes to isolate out particular unique identifiers that customers are looking for.  (EXAMPLE:  You don’t want to show blue t-shirt ads to people who are looking for green t shirts.)
2. Consolidate the relevancy of your ad groups to get as many impressions for the most cost-effective cost per click.  (EXAMPLE:  The same keywords that do a good job selling a v-neck t-shirt will be quite a bit different than a crew-neck t-shirt.)

What Should I Name My Amazon Advertising Ad Groups?

As mentioned above, these are entirely dependent on what makes sense for you.

I like to use this name scheme:

• NAME OF KEY DIFFERENTIATOR
  • EXAMPLE:  LARGE GALVANIZED ANTIQUE BUCKETS
  • EXAMPLE:  SMALL GALVANIZED ANTIQUE BUCKETS

Which Amazon Advertising Bidding Strategy Is Best?

You have 3 choices for bidding strategies.

Here is how Amazon describes them:

Dynamic bids – down only

When should I use this?: Use this when you haven’t dialed in your ACoS on Amazon yet.

Should I Use Automatic or Manual Keyword Targeting For Amazon Ads?

You should work to the point where you’re only using manual keyword targeting on your ads.

This is because it means you know your customer and you are only advertising on keywords that you know your customers are using to make a purchase.

That said if you aren’t familiar with keyword research yet or are selling products where you do not know your customer as well, do this:

• Start with an automatic keyword targeting campaign
• Run it for a month or longer
  • During that month, add nonsense or irrelevant keywords to your Negative Keywords so your ads do not run on them.
• Make note of what keywords that make sense that you are converting on or want to convert on.
• Add those keywords to your Manual campaign as:
  • Broad
  • Phrase
  • Exact

When Should I Use Automatic Targeting For Amazon Ads?

You use your Automatic campaigns as a tool to discover what keywords you should be running ads on.

After you’re in the ballpark, your Broad match campaign then becomes that tool for you.

After you’re really dialed in, you typically only run Phrase and Exact match campaigns.

It is worth noting 2 important points:

1. You need a mechanism in place to discover new keywords that people are searching for so you should be using keyword tools to identify them year-round.
2. To help with this, you would run a Broad match campaign from time to time to discover new keywords that people are searching for as search patterns change over time on Amazon.

Why Am I Not Getting Impressions On My Ads?

Amazon will show your ads if it thinks you will make a sale, regardless of you trying to deal with Amazon Seller Support to ask for your ads to be shown more.

This is often the most jarring part about advertising on Amazon for sellers.

Even if you’ve selected keywords and are willing to pay for the clicks, it doesn’t mean Amazon will show your ads.

Think about that.

You’ve spent a lot of valuable time finding the best keywords to convert customers.

You’ve set up your Amazon advertising ad campaigns and even set your bids to be higher than the suggested bids.

Then, you don’t get very many impressions.

Even worse?

You get the-dreaded – in the impressions column, meaning you have NO impressions.

This happens because Amazon doesn’t think you are relevant and will not result in a sale.

This all boils down to Amazon ad relevancy.

So what do you do?

What Should I Do If I Am Not Getting Impressions On My Ads?

• Make sure the exact keywords you are running ads on are on the front end and back end of your Amazon listing.
• Increase your bids.
• Lower your price temporarily, run a sale.  —  You need to become more price-competitive to earn the opportunity to get seen.
• You need to drive off Amazon traffic to Amazon
  • Amazon rewards you for this with visibility
  • Leverage Amazon Influencers
  • Build the buzz about your brand online

How Can I Reduce My ACoS So I Can Spend Less On Ads?

I take a very deep dive on how to reduce ACoS on Amazon but in short, here is what you will need to work on:

• Amazon Ads Targeting
  • Cut non-profitable keywords or reduce their bids by 35% – 50%.
  • Find more profitable buyer-intent keywords
  • Work to increase your relevancy for high buyer-intent keywords.
• Amazon Influencers
  • Use tools like Referazon to quickly find and work with the right Amazon Influencer for your brand or retailer.
• Amazon Product Titles
  • Write shorter, more benefit-driven keywords under 80 characters so they’re not cut off on mobile devices.
• Amazon Product Bullet Points & Product Descriptions
  • The most important skill to master is sales copywriting.  You need to become good at writing product descriptions that convert customers and the skill is called sales copywriting.
• Amazon Product Imagery
  • Revisit your product imagery to sell more effectively by:
    • Answering Questions
    • Handling Objections
    • Increasing Perceived Value
    • Highlighting Competitive Advantages
• Amazon A+ Content
  • Read this article on how to create Amazon A+ content that converts sales:  Amazon A+ Content The COMPLETE Guide
• Amazon Reviews
  • If you’re having trouble getting Amazon reviews, read this:  How To Get Amazon Reviews