How to Set Up Your First Amazon Sponsored Products Campaign?

Here is  a quick run down on how to get started with an Amazon Sponsored Products campaign (Amazon’s version of PPC). 

Goal of Running a Sponsored Product Campaign

The first thing to note is that the goal of running a sponsored product campaign is to get your product on the first page for your desired keywords, which will result in:

• More impressions from your customers (more people seeing your product)
• More conversions (more people clicking and buying your product). 

How Amazon Sponsored Products Work

If you are familiar with Google Ads, this program has very similar “bidding” type of system. However, it is in it’s infant stage and not as robust as the Google Ads platform. Each keyword has a cost that changes as sellers try to outbid each other to “win” the bid. The more sellers bidding for the same keyword, the cost per click for that keyword goes up (see economics 101). Your strategy should be to find relevant keywords that customers search to find your product and will in turn purchase the product that ideally has a low cost per click to retain some of your product margin. There is no way to see, before running a campaign to know what the estimated page 1 bid for each keyword is. You need to run a campaign, select your targeted keywords, and Amazon will tell you the bid price. 

Factors to Win Amazon Sponsored Products Bid

Another thing, there are two factors that Amazon uses to see who “wins the bid” :

• Bid price, if you are not bidding above the average bid price than you will not win the bid. 
• The other factor is “keyword relevancy” meaning Amazon will not let you win the bid if you do not target relevant keywords that are associated with your product (i.e. No targeting “kitchen tongs” if you are selling bluetooth headphones)

Setting Up Your First Amazon Sponsored Products Campaign

Here is a quick and easy way to set up your first campaign (Note: You need a professional selling account):

1. Go to Seller Central > Advertising > Campaign Manager > Create Campaign
2. Enter your campaign name (anything will do, how about: Campaign 1)
3. Enter your daily budged. Anything above $1 works. I would go with $20-$100 if you are not trying to break the bank.
4. Select start/end date if you would like
5. For targeting type, choose MANUAL TARGETING
6. Now you can create different Ad groups within your main campaign. Ad groups should contain similar products because they keywords you are targeting will show up for all of the products you select. For example, if you are selling IPhone Cases, do not include a spatula in the ad group.
7. Your default bid should be $1 (you can change later, but this is an easy way to see the cost of the different keywords later on).
8. Select the suggested keywords that customers would search to buy your product. I recommend at this stage to select more keywords to cast a wider net on possible keywords that customers would search and have a better understand the cost of different keywords. You should also provide your own keywords if the suggested does not contain relevant ones.
9. Save and Finish - There you go! You just created your first Amazon Sponsored Products Campaign!
10. Give the Amazon software a day or two to register your campaign. Visit your campaign manager page to view the performance of the campaign

After about a week, click into your campaign and look at the keywords. Assess which keywords are getting the most sales for the least amount of Ad spend.