Amazon Ads Agency London

The basics

How Amazon advertising works

Amazon advertising is pay-per-click, often shortened to PPC. You choose the searches or products you want to appear against and set a bid, which is the most you will pay for a click. When a shopper searches, Amazon runs an instant auction among the advertisers and shows the winners. You pay only when someone clicks your advert, and usually a little less than your bid.

The auction is not won on bid alone. Amazon also considers how relevant your product is to the search and how likely it is to sell. A well-matched product with a strong listing can win placements more cheaply than a poor one with a higher bid. That is why advertising and listing quality cannot be separated.

The types of Amazon advert

Sponsored Products

These promote a single product and appear within the search results and on other product pages. They look almost identical to ordinary listings. For most sellers they are the core of advertising and account for most of the spend and most of the sales. Any seller with an eligible product can use them.

Sponsored Brands

These are banner-style adverts, usually at the top of the results, showing your logo, a headline and several products, or a short video. They build recognition of the brand as a whole and can send shoppers to your Amazon Store. They are available to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.

Sponsored Display

These reach shoppers who have viewed your products or similar ones, on Amazon and on other websites and apps. They are used to bring back people who looked and did not buy, and to appear on competitors' product pages.

Automatic and manual campaigns

In an automatic campaign, Amazon decides which searches and products to show your advert against, based on your listing. In a manual campaign, you choose the keywords or products yourself and set a bid for each.

Each has its use. Automatic campaigns are good for discovery: they reveal the search terms shoppers really use, including ones you would not have thought of. Manual campaigns give control: once you know which terms sell, you bid on them precisely. We run both, and move proven terms from the automatic campaigns into manual ones.

Keyword match types

For manual campaigns, each keyword has a match type that controls how closely a shopper's search must fit it.

• Broad match shows your advert for related searches, in any word order, including close variations. Widest reach, least control.
• Phrase match requires your phrase to appear in the search, with other words before or after it.
• Exact match shows your advert only for that search or a very close variant. Narrowest reach, most control.
• Negative keywords stop your advert appearing for searches you choose. They are the main tool for cutting waste.

The numbers that matter

Amazon reports a great many figures. A few decide whether advertising is working.

• ACOS, advertising cost of sales. Ad spend divided by the sales those adverts produced. If you spend £20 to sell £100, your ACOS is 20%.
• TACOS, total advertising cost of sales. Ad spend divided by all your sales, including organic ones. It shows whether advertising is lifting the whole business or only buying sales.
• Break-even ACOS. Your profit margin before advertising. Above this, each advertised sale loses money.
• Conversion rate. The share of clicks that become orders. A low rate points to a problem with the listing, the price or the reviews.
• Cost per click. What each visit costs. It rises with competition.

Before we change anything, we work out your break-even ACOS for each product with you. That figure becomes the line every campaign is managed against.

How we manage Amazon advertising

We start by finding the waste

In an existing account, the first job is to see where the money goes. We download the search-term reports and separate the terms that produce sales from those that only produce clicks. It is common to find a large share of the budget going on searches that have never converted.

We rebuild the structure

Campaigns are organised so that each product has its own, with separate groups for discovery, for proven keywords and for brand searches. With that structure, the performance of every keyword on every product is visible, and budgets can be moved to what works.

We manage bids against your margin

Bids are raised on keywords that sell profitably and lowered or paused on those that do not. Placement settings are adjusted where the top of search performs differently from the rest. Changes are made steadily, with enough data behind each one, not in daily swings.

We keep harvesting and blocking

Each review of the search terms adds new winners as exact-match keywords and new time-wasters as negatives. Over a few months this is what turns a loose, costly account into an efficient one.

We look at the listing

If a product gets clicks and few orders, more advertising is not the answer. The title, images, price, reviews or delivery promise is letting it down. Because our package includes listing optimisation, we can fix that side as well.

Advertising and organic ranking

Amazon ranks products largely on how well they sell for a given search. Advertising creates sales for the keywords you target, and those sales help the product climb the organic results for the same keywords. As organic ranking improves, the product needs less advertising to hold its position. This is why a new product is usually advertised more heavily at launch, at a higher ACOS than is sustainable, and the spend is brought down as organic sales take over. We agree that plan with you in advance, so a launch-phase ACOS is a decision and not a surprise.

What you need before advertising

Advertising magnifies whatever is already there, so a few things should be in place first. The listing should be complete, with a clear title, good images and accurate bullet points. The product should be in stock, since adverts stop when stock runs out and ranking suffers. The price should be competitive. It should, ideally, have some reviews, because shoppers rarely buy the only unreviewed product on the page. And the product should be eligible for the featured offer, the main "Add to Basket" box, because Sponsored Products adverts will not run without it. We check each of these before spending your money.

Why choose Website Designer 1 as your Amazon ads agency

We charge a fixed fee, not a share of spend. Your advertising runs in your own seller account, which you own and can see at any time. We are given access through Amazon's user permissions, never through your password. You receive a monthly report that explains the figures in plain English. And we are straightforward about results: advertising performance depends on your product, price, reviews and competition, so we do not promise a particular ACOS or sales figure.

We also understand life outside Amazon. We build websites for Amazon brands, so that your brand has a home of its own alongside the marketplace.

Planning

Setting an Amazon advertising budget

Sellers often ask what they should spend. There is no single figure, but there is a sound way to arrive at one. Start with the product's selling price and work back through Amazon's fees, the cost of the goods and delivery to find the profit on each sale. That profit, as a share of the price, is your break-even ACOS. Then decide the aim. If the aim is profit now, campaigns are held below that line. If the aim is to launch a product or win ranking, you may choose to spend above it for a set period, knowing the cost.

With the aim agreed, a daily budget follows from the cost per click in your category and the number of clicks needed to produce meaningful data. It is better to fund a few well-chosen campaigns properly than to spread a small budget so thinly that none of them gathers enough clicks to judge. We review the budget with you each month against the results, and you can raise, lower or pause it at any time, because the money is spent from your own account.

Seasonal peaks

Demand on Amazon is not level. Prime Day, Black Friday and the weeks before Christmas bring far more shoppers, higher click prices and fiercer competition. Preparing in advance matters: stock has to be at Amazon in time, budgets need room to stretch, and bids are adjusted as the peak arrives. We plan these periods with you ahead of the date.