Amazon Pay Per Click Advertising

If you didn’t know, my background is in digital marketing (who would have guessed). I spend the day learning about social media, search engine marketing, creating original content, and a bunch other things that excite me and would put you to sleep.

A few months back, I got an email from Amazon talking about Pay Per Click advertising. For most people, they probably looked at the email and deleted it. I got super excited and decided to give it a whirl. I went straight to Seller Central and got started right away (not to mention I had experience running multi faceted Google Adwords campaigns for global companies).

I was expecting an extremely complicated interface that would confuse most people. When I entered the Campaign Manager, I was quite surprised. For anyone who is still nervous about using the system, I am going to show the few simple steps needed to get an ad campaign started.

WAIT!!!!!

Maybe I should take a few moments to explain what in the world Pay Per Click Advertising is and why you would even want to use it for selling your product through Amazon. Here is how it works:

1. People don’t realize that Amazon is one of the world’s largest e-commerce search engines. People make millions of search queries each day and Amazon tries to provide each customer with the best product for each search. Just like Google does, Amazon sells some of their website real estate to the highest bidder (making them extra money and helping sellers who need to get their products in front of more people).

2. The more people that see your product, the more likely you are to sell that product. If you are showing your product to people are searching for keywords related to your product, the more likely you are to sell your inventory.

3. A large majority of sellers are not taking advantage of this service offered by Amazon. The sooner you get involved, the more likely you are to reap the benefits of this service.

Here is an example of a paid ad (which can be seen in the red box):

Here is an example of my success using Amazon Pay Per Click Advertising:

The third column from the right is the amount that I spent on advertising. The second column from the right is the amount of sales that were generated through the ads.

Now let’s get you set up to take advantage of this!

Step 1: Go to Seller Central and click on Advertising > Campaign Manager

Step 2: It will take you to a screen like this:

Oh yeah – And you get your first $50 for free. It’s freaking free money.

Step 3. Click “Create Ad Campaign”

Step 4. You will get a screen like this.

You will need to do the following:

Name your Campaign – Name it something that you can easily identify down the road.
Average daily budget – The minimum is $1. I would always start with the minimum and increase it from there.
Select a start day and an end date – I would start as soon as possible and not set an end date right this moment.
You will then need to select a targeting type – I highly recommend using automatic targeting. Manual gives you more control, but automatic will make you life a lot easier.
Once this all done, click “Continue”

Step 5. You will then get to this page. You will need to do the following:

Name your Ad Group – I always use the same title as my campaign.
Default bid – I always leave this at $0.05. If that isn’t working, I raise it.
Select your products – You will need to choose the products you would like to run ads on. You can do as few or as many as you like.
Click “Save and Finish” and you are good to go!

A few things that are good to know:

1. The ads will only run when you item has the “Buy Box.” This will save you money by not running ads when you item is not in the Prime position to be sold.

2. You can start or stop a campaign at any time.

3. You will be a little impressed with the results.

If you have any questions at all, please let me know! I am always happy to help and I think you will be glad once you give this a try.

Until next time,