Maximizing Amazon Sales by Coordinating Amazon Ads with Social Media
In addition to being the world’s largest online store, Amazon has also become very strong in the "advertising space”. As many people visit Amazon with purchasing intent, it makes sense to want to promote your products there
Focusing efforts on increasing Amazon ad performance is great, but it can be further maximized if it’s done in collaboration with external platforms such as social networks.
Amazon, from an advertising perspective
Amazon’s strength
Amazon’s core strength is its ability to attract a large number of consumers, most of whom are choosing to browse a range of products by various sellers.
They also conduct promotional activities themselves that take advantage of their scale, such as Prime Day.
Amazon’s weakness
The biggest weakness of Amazon is its “discovery” layer. The reality is that a large percentage of people browsing Amazon use it already with a product or brand name in mind.
The Amazon search results feed doesn’t cater to branding by individual retailers
Similar to Search on Google, Amazon lives closer to the intent phase of a customer’s journey and isn’t built to maximize branding by individual retailers.
This can be seen by search results looking more or less the same.
This means that it is vital to gain awareness outside of Amazon first.
A combination of awareness efforts outside of Amazon and utilizing Amazon Ads within Amazon leads to higher sales.
Amazon’s Sponsored Ads help offset the marketplace’s weaknesses.
Amazon Sponsored Ads
The merits of Amazon Sponsored Ads are:
Distribution that leads to purchase
Effective distribution with operation-based advertising
Click-billing and decreased budget waste
Simply put, the advantage is effectively delivering ads to places everyone sees when purchasing products on Amazon.
Since these ads display the product in a native way with respect to search results, the promoted product is shown to people who have high purchase intent. As with any advertising, “who” and “where” are important factors to consider, and Amazon effectively addresses this.
However, this capability leads to increased advertiser competition, so it’s important to operate these ads correctly in order to see positive outcomes.
Recommended approach to Amazon Sponsored Ads
There are three ad options in Amazon’s Sponsored Ads - Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display.
We recommend a "1 campaign, 1 product" operational approach for Sponsored Ads. This is an account configuration method that allows you to create an advertising campaign for each registered product.
In addition, we recommend a mix of auto-targeting and manual targeting. This way, we can take advantage of the AI’s algorithm strengths as well as the human strengths of instinct and creativity.
Even if everything is done well in Amazon, there is a ceiling.
This is because of Amazon’s weakness in the upper layers of the purchase funnel.
The Amazon purchase funnel
People generally come in contact with information unknowingly that influences them to consider purchasing a certain product or something from a certain brand. This generally happens before they even get to Amazon.
Incorporating external awareness efforts
Just like you wouldn’t approach someone and rush a sale before even introducing yourself, you wouldn’t simply run ads on platforms that lead to an Amazon product page in hopes they purchase.
There are a variety of approaches when incorporating external awareness efforts, but let’s take Facebook and Instagram for example since they’re common.
With Facebook Ads, doing something like promoting videos can be good because one, they can be passively watched versus making someone read or click to a page. They also store engagement data, allowing you to deliver ads to people who’ve watched your video.
If someone has watched it for 3, 10 or more seconds, it means there’s an increased likelihood that they’re somewhat interested.
Measure the impact
Of course, measuring the impact of your efforts on these external platforms is important. The challenge is that you can’t embed an external tracking tag or Facebook Pixel into Amazon.
One of the easy and free workarounds is creating an Amazon Store page.
The Amazon Store page is a self-service tool that allows you to create a landing page within Amazon that summarizes your products in an easy-to-understand manner.
This gives you access to an Insights dashboard that gives you data such as traffic sources, daily visitors, page views, and revenue from ads and more.
A final word on Amazon
With Amazon showing now sign of slowing down, it’s hard to ignore what it can do as far as sales for a business.
While it’s not the only platform businesses should be strategizing for, it’s one that should be considered and if used, utilized to get the most out of it as possible.
