Seller Performance Solutions
Efficiently Managing Advertising on Amazon
May 19, 2022
Selling on Amazon is becoming more and more of a pay-to-play endeavor. In this episode we talk with Priyanka from Seller App about how to get the most out of your pay-per-click ads & the rising benefit of automation in the advertising sphere.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers. This is Leah McHugh from e-commerceChris. I am here of course, with the e-commerceChris, Chris McCabe. And today we are speaking to Priyanka from Seller App talking about Amazon PPC, which is something that I feel like I've had more conversations about PPC this year than like any other year.

[00:00:27] Chris:
We've had brands come to the Seller Velocity Conference, of course, for several years in a row now, but we're expecting many more conversations about PPC this year than any prior year.

[00:00:39] Leah: Yeah, it seems like everybody's kind of figured out that it's now a pay-to-play platform. So Priyanka, I'd be really interested in hearing what your top predictions and trends that you're seeing are for Amazon PPC in the next year.

[00:00:54] Priyanka Bohra: Absolutely. It's a great question, Chris. And I think I see multiple of them. Number one, being programmatic advertising our advertising experts actually foresee that programmatic advertising will be on the rise in 2022. And as google actually continues to limit third party cookies and search query data advertisers really need to rely on, first party data to ensure that successful advertising strategies actually get executed. As a company that holds data about shoppers buying habits, I would say Amazon's advertising will really evolve to be more powerful. They also would be encouraged to use Amazon's programmatic platform to really target and automate their ad placements and campaign performance.

So for sure, that would be number one for me. Other things that I also see more personalized advertising, getting a lot of, you know, thought there also another trend that you can expect in 2022 is the increase in personalized advertising across the entire marketing funnel. So gone are those days when sellers really used to target their keyboards and expect success.

Now, advertising is really increasingly becoming data driven and you're really making informed decisions out of the data that you gather. So meaning that consumers really tend to see that ads are relevant to their searches and shopping behavior. So therefore we can really expect increased engagement there among the shoppers, and really this brings us to our third point as well, adopting more sophisticated targeting options. With the amount of data that's available on Amazon, the e-commerce giant would really come up with more personalized ad types like OTT video ads, et cetera, and targeting options that are more customized ads for consumers, I would say interest. And if utilized properly, this will really ensure that you grow as a brand. But video ads will provail. So video ads are also very, very popular among the gen Z population and a study by Google shows that seven out of these 10 gen Z-ers said that watching videos will really help them feel very connected.

And because you really don't have any tangible way of really looking into the product, but video ads do come very close to representing that product. So Amazon will likely improve options for advertisers to use video as part of the funnel. And images are great, I would say, but video I think play a far bigger, higher role.

[00:03:37] Leah: Yeah even with organic traffic video is so powerful. We've, we've heard some pretty amazing stats of people who've added unboxing videos to their product detail page.

[00:03:48] Priyanka Bohra: Absolutely -- Yes, that's great. That's great way of showcasing your product.

[00:03:53] Chris: Who would have thought, like, I would have thought, why would somebody watch a video of taking a product out of a box, but it just shows I'm the wrong? Well, it just shows the wrong perspective.

[00:04:08] Priyanka Bohra: I think it also creates a lot of engagement right? And creates that awareness among the target audience. So I think, it's a great way of showcasing your product.

[00:04:17] Leah: Yeah, absolutely. And I think as more and more of these tools become available and more and more people are using advertising on Amazon, automation, I think would potentially be something that's going to become more and more important. Is that something that you're seeing where people are really understanding that there are benefits to Amazon advertising automation?

[00:04:37] Priyanka Bohra:
Tons and bunch, right?

I mean, business automation is the buzz around the town. You know, we talked about CPC. That's another bus that we talk about. The CPC rates are rising. That's kind of a topic of discussion altogether, but absolutely. Yeah. Managing the PPC performance. You know, the campaigns is one of the most important yet also time consuming activities for sellers.

So it's more like a double edged sword, so to speak and optimizing your PPC campaigns requires you to monitor your bids, keywords, campaigns, very, very regularly meticulously. So we need to optimize and ensure that your ads stay profitable and in line with your campaign goals. And this can be daunting.

If you have a huge product portfolio with the complexity of advertising rising, advertisers now actually look for PPC optimization tools that are offering automation capabilities to really help them achieve their goals faster & like never before. And thanks to of course the tools you'll be able to save hours reputative workflows manual labor, manual effort and direct your efforts into strategizing towards your campaign goals. Also in other areas of your business, like product research, inventory management. And basically other marketing activities. So I think it is extremely vital and imperative for your business to grow.

[00:06:10] Chris: And there's different kinds of automation. Right? What are the key differences between say machine learning based automation and a rule-based automation?

[00:06:19] Priyanka Bohra: Sure. Sure. I think that's a great question. And so the key differences that I think between machine learning based automation and rule-based in terms of, I think advertising controls, ML driven automation really gives you low control versus a high amount of user control for rule-based automation. Also when it comes to really boosting your ROI or return on investment ML driven automation uses historical data to achieve optimum results while in a rule-based automation advertisers will need to give manual bids, like manual input.

So in terms of ease of use, I would still say that ML driven automation tools gives you complete hands-off automation experience for sellers. However, the rule-based one would also offer good control over campaigns, but sellers should also have minimum knowledge of campaign management. So I think that's also one of the reasons why we've developed, you know, an app like seller app, which kind of gives you the best of both worlds approach kind of thing. So using ML algorithm too will really optimize the bids, harvest new keywords, and really add negative keywords, which means better ad position, lower ACoS and of course an increase in sales, along with the higher return on ad spend. So you can really track and improve your ROI and optimize the metrics that matter the most to you to grow towards your business .

[00:07:50] Leah: Do you find that a lot of sellers use a hybrid of both?

[00:07:53] Priyanka Bohra: I think it's important to do that. I really recommend that you do, because you cannot just leave it on, like set it, forget it kind of approach. As I mentioned, there are custom rules that you can use. You can also, you know, if you're targeting keywords, you can actually automate it and find those keywords through automation and use them manually. So it's kind of a hybrid mix approach. I would say. Absolutely.

[00:08:19] Leah: I think that was maybe where in the past with some of the earlier tools like this, people got in trouble where they would just set it and forget it. And it would end and be a complete waste of your ad spend.

Yes because they're not looking at the positive keywords, which are converting for you. You are not being cognizant of the negative ones which you want to kind of eliminate. So all of these things kind of come in play and we talked about automation. That would also give you a lot of time to look into these aspects of your client's account.

[00:08:50] Chris:
Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today about these crucial important topics for PPC. We appreciate it.

[00:08:58] Priyanka Bohra: Thank you. And thanks for having me here was great talking to both of you.

[00:09:01] Leah: Yeah. Thank you so much and we will link all of the information so people can get in touch with you, about your tools and how you can help sellers with our ads.

[00:09:09] Chris: Terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.