5 Ways to Optimize Your Amazon Campaigns

Feel like you’ve hit a wall with your Amazon campaign growth? It happens to a lot of retailers! There’s little to no documentation on how to truly grow your campaigns directly from Amazon, making a lot of strategies feel like a shot in the dark. On top of that, Amazon’s reporting is still lacking and doesn’t give analysts a very long lookback window—which means fewer data points to use to improve your campaigns. So how can you optimize your Amazon campaigns? 

It’s frustrating, and we’ve been there! In managing Amazon campaigns for many of our clients, these are all hurdles we’ve had to overcome and we want to share our findings with you. Stop throwing money at ads and hoping they work! Try these 5 ways to optimize your Amazon campaigns. They’ve worked for our clients: 

• Body Care Retailer Grows Revenue 95% on Amazon 
• Portmantos Takes Flight with a 4X Increase in Revenue on Amazon 
• Ecommerce Site Triples Amazon Profits 

And these optimizations will work for you!

1. Optimize Your Overall Amazon Campaign Strategy

Do you have an overall strategy for advertising on Amazon? No, not just a digital marketing strategy—we mean a strategy specifically crafted for Amazon Advertising. What are your goals, and how can you achieve them?

What Metrics are You Using to Measure Success?

Take a look at the metrics you are using to track success. If you’re using ACoS to direct your campaigns, we recommend adding another metric into the mix which will help make ACoS a more efficient measure of success: profit. ACoS doesn’t account for the cost of goods, commission, or shipping fees, which can account for a large portion of your overall revenue. Profit includes these important factors, so you can see how your sales affect your bottom line. Check out our blog here to learn more about using profit and ACoS together: Want to Lower ACoS on Amazon? 

What is Your Bidding Strategy?

What about your bidding strategy? There are several options for directing your ad spend on Amazon. You can utilize dynamic or fixed bidding or take advantage of suggested bids, and that’s not including special situations like Prime Day or Black Friday, which require their own approach! Understanding these bid adjustment options will help you precisely direct your advertising dollars—improving the efficiency of your ad spend. This knowledge will help you develop a bidding strategy that makes sense for your business. Learn everything about bidding on Amazon here. 

What is Your Keyword Targeting Strategy?

Finally, let’s talk about your keyword or targeting strategy. Automatic campaigns take some of the guesswork out of ad targeting on Amazon, but manual targeting is a great option as well! If you also advertise on Google Shopping, you’ll have access to valuable keyword data you can use on Amazon. We wrote a guide on how to use your Google Shopping data to build a keyword strategy on Amazon here.

2. Know Your Amazon Products

Do you know which of your products are most profitable on Amazon? It might not be the items that drive the most sales, but which items are the most efficient to advertise. Costs like commission and seller fees on Amazon can add up—making some products unprofitable to market if these costs are too high.

We suggest advertising every product that has the potential to be profitable on Amazon. You’ll be missing out on valuable profit dollars by not advertising those products. But, how can you figure out which products make sense to advertise? We recommend measuring the cost of goods and any other variable overhead costs (including any fulfillment fees or shipping costs!) on the SKU level and using that information to determine which products to advertise.

Example of Advertising Profitable Products on Amazon

It doesn’t make sense to advertise Item 1 because it would be unprofitable to advertise. Obviously, you can still list this product on Amazon, but you won’t want to include this item in your ad campaigns. Why? Because any additional costs attributable to this product (including ad spend) would make this product unprofitable! Not sure where to start? Reach out today for a free profitability analysis of your Amazon campaigns!

3. Cache Historical Amazon Data 

All Amazon advertisers know the historical data for the platform is subpar. Is there any way to work around one of the biggest frustrations with advertising on Amazon?

Yes! It’s time to break free of Amazon’s short lookback windows and start collecting your own historical Amazon data to optimize your Amazon campaigns. There are two ways to accomplish this – manually, by downloading the files regularly yourself, or automatically, by preserving the information in a database. Keep in mind that the first option will require you to consistently download data every 30-90 days, depending on the report, and you’ll need a method for organizing your data and a place to store it.

Automatically preserving your data isn’t easy, either (and we should know – we offer historical data caching for all of our clients!) It’s worth it, though! With this data in hand, you’re able to compare data year/year for a more complete analysis of your Amazon success. You’ll be able to make more informed decisions about what’s working in your campaigns and what’s not—and make sure every ad dollar counts!

4. Understand the Amazon Buy Box 

Understanding how to win the Buy Box is crucial to success on Amazon. If your products don’t appear here, they won’t be seen by shoppers. Price is key to the Buy Box; the lowest price for a certain product or type of product comes out on top and has a much greater chance of being seen and purchased. This is a key difference between Amazon and Google Shopping. If you aren’t price-competitive on a platform like Google Shopping, you still might be able to get the sale. If you aren’t price-competitive on Amazon, though, you won’t get the sale. 

So how can you overcome the hurdle that is the Buy Box? Check out our blog How to Win the Buy Box. We’ll show you where to look to make sure your products are price competitive, monitor your product performance, and address price undercutting on Amazon.

5. Frequently Check Your Amazon Campaigns 

Unfortunately, you can’t just set up Amazon campaigns and let them run. You’ll need to frequently check on your campaigns and see which products are doing well (and which aren’t). Make sure your products are winning the Buy Box, and stay up-to-date with Amazon’s latest updates to their reporting and advertising. 

If you’re using a profit-driven bidding strategy (like we recommend), you’ll need to have the most recent margin data for this strategy to work successfully. Just having that data isn’t enough. You’ll need to upload new margin data to Amazon frequently to make sure your bids are relevant.

Hit a Wall on Amazon? 

If your sales have plateaued on Amazon, you now have the tools to overcome your roadblock! We’ve tested these optimizations time and time again across our client-base and know that these fixes work. Some of them take time to set up, but your Amazon campaigns will thank you. 

Don’t have the time to optimize your account? We manage Amazon campaigns for clients across many different industries of all sizes. We would love to get to know your business and your unique goals–and help you grow. Reach out to get a free analysis of your Amazon account today.