As we’ve highlighted before, Amazon has been getting serious about advertising recently, most notably with the amalgamation of its advertising solutions under one brand; Amazon Advertising.
The start of 2019 has been no different, with Amazon rolling out ‘dynamic bidding’ and ‘bids by placement’ for Sponsored Product Campaigns. This move towards a more automated Amazon will help advertisers maximise the effectiveness of it as an advertising platform.
A Guide to Amazon Advertising Automation
To offer you a better view and deeper understanding of the automation options at your fingertips when using Amazon Advertising, we’ve pulled together a guide of its 3 most interesting features; ‘dynamic bidding’, ‘bid adjustments by placement’ and ‘sponsored brand ads’.
And to make sure you get off to the best possible start with automation on Amazon Advertising, we’ve also included a number of best practice “top tips”. These are based on our own experiences of working with clients, so gloss over them at your peril.
Dynamic Bidding
In a move to give advertisers even more control over the targeting of their ads, Amazon has released the option for dynamic bidding. This tactic will allow Amazon to adjust bids in real time according to the probability of a sale. The tool will either increase or reduce your bid by up to 100%, based on the likelihood of your ad leading to a purchase.
If you’d prefer to only adjust down, you can choose the ‘down only’ option. In this case, Amazon will reduce your bid when a sale appears less likely, but bids will never be increased regardless of the likelihood of a purchase. There is still, of course, the option to opt for manual ‘fixed bids’, where Amazon will bid the same for each auction, regardless of the chance for conversion.
These new automated bidding strategies have the potential to make a big impact on the effectiveness of your Amazon Advertising campaigns. Implementing dynamic bidding should save you money when sales are less likely and maximise your revenue at times when purchases are probable.
Bid Adjustments by Placement
To complement dynamic bidding, Amazon has rolled out the ability to ‘adjust bids by placement’. This gives you the ability to set a placement bid adjustment for Sponsored Product Ads for either top of search page and/or product page placements. Bids can be increased by up to 900% for both types of placements.
Bid adjustments by placement can be used alongside dynamic bidding to fine tune your final bid and push Amazon to work as hard as possible for you.
Sponsored Brand Ads
As well as automation for Sponsored Product Campaigns, Amazon has begun rolling out automaton for Sponsored Brand Ads.
This means you now have the option to implement bid adjustments, again both up and down, for placements that are not the top of search. This follows an update from last October where Amazon added more ads slots for this bigger ad format - mid-search, bottom of search and on the left-hand side of search, all below the fold.
Amazon Advertising Automation Top Tips
When testing both dynamic bidding and bid adjustment by placement, it’s crucial to begin testing on just a handful of campaigns. This way it’s much easier to monitor the performance of the bidding strategies, keeping an eye on CPCs, and making a judgement on their effectiveness.
Once these initial tests have garnered results, you can then decide whether it should be rolled out across the account.
Before applying placement bid modifiers, it’s important to review your current activity, specifically performance by placement. In the Amazon Advertising interface - or by pulling a Placements Report - you can view the efficiency for each ad placement.
Data in hand, you can ensure increasing bids for certain placements will be beneficial to your activity. Again, trialling this on a small number of campaigns is the best way to start testing automation on Amazon.
A Final Word
Overall, these moves are a further indicator that Amazon is continuing to get serious with its advertising, something we hope that will only continue.
If you’re interested in advertising on Amazon or want to make your Amazon campaigns work harder, get in touch with the team today to see how we can help.
