Even if you have plenty of experience with Amazon advertising campaigns, Seller Central can get overwhelming and confusing very quickly.
But it’s extremely important to stay up to date with what’s happening with your Amazon Ads in order to find success and maintain it. Especially when we’re talking about one of the leading global e-commerce retailers.
That’s why we have come up with a checklist for you to consistently audit your Amazon Advertising and have more peace of mind that you’re swiftly cutting any wasted ad spend.
Consistently running this audit will also help you find more relevant keywords and ad groups. We recommend conducting it at least every quarter or, preferably every two weeks to ensure peak performance.
Determine your CPC
One of the first things you’ll want to consider is how your CPC (cost per click) compares to the average CPC on amazon. This will help you determine if your CPC makes sense and how much competition there is in your niche.
Amazon advertising works just as an auction, meaning that if your CPCs are high, so will your competitors. Who gets the ad click will depend on who outbids their competitor first.
Evaluate ACos
ACos stands for Advertising Cost of Sales and means exactly that; how much each dollar of revenue will cost you in advertising.
You can check your ACos on Amazon’s Adversiting Reports or in third-party software.
Your ACos amount will depend on your niche, your business goals, and profits.
Checking your ACos on different timeframes will help you to determine consumer trends or new strategies to take advantage of for your business.
For example, a business could decide to be extremely aggressive and match their Acos to 100%of their product cost to just drive traffic and reviews to their new product. Then they can re-evaluate at a later timeframe and change to a more conservative Acos.
Check your KPIs
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a set of measures of how the different aspects of your business are performing related to your business goals.
Checking on your KPI will help you have a better and more immediate understanding of how your Amazon PPC (Pay Per Click) is performing.
KPIs will differ per account depending on your CPC and ACOS targets. To have a better idea of how well your account is performing, you can compare your KPI to the Amazon averages.
A drop in impressions could be due to new or more aggressive competitors or irrelevant keyword usage. This is why checking your KPI is important to help you realize when you should change your strategy to avoid losing money.
Analyze Your Keywords
Without the right keywords, your target audience will never find your Amazon listing.
One of the most trivial mistakes to avoid is keyword dumping. This is since, in a similar way to Facebook Ads, Amazon will not serve full impressions to ad groups with over 25-50 keywords. You will need to add specified individual keyword ads instead.
If you observe strange keyword patterns like a keyword with many impressions but zero clicks, it will be your clue that it’s not optimal and to add it to your negative keyword list/flag it.
Conclusion
With how competitive the Amazon marketplace is, you’ll want to audit each of these components regularly to re-evaluate your strategy.
However, if you prefer to allocate your resources to make sure your products are competitive and focus your attention on optimizing your operations, hiring a professional marketing agency is the best bet.
