Amazon PPC Tips & Tricks: How To Use Amazon Sponsored Ads To Sell More On Amazon

Amazon PPC advertising is a great way to increase your Amazon sales and brand visibility.

While I was at the SellerCon event in Orlando, Florida I had the pleasure of interviewing Cherie Yvette, who specializes in Amazon PPC advertising. Cherie is the founder of The Urban Cowgirl, a successful Amazon ad agency. She teaches people how they can sell more products on Amazon and outrank the competition.

Everyone wants to advertise their products on Amazon, but not everyone knows how to do it. Like any new skill, you need to invest the time and energy into understanding how it works. If done properly, Amazon PPC advertising can catapult your online business success.

Cherie is going to share some Amazon PPC tips and tricks on how to use Amazon sponsored ads to sell more on Amazon. Are you ready to learn from the expert herself?

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Do you want to learn how to deal with constant increasing ad costs and break away from the crowd? CLICK HERE for instant access to Cherie's free Amazon PPC training!

Are you ready to learn how you can leverage the power of Amazon FBA to generate financial freedom? CLICK HERE for instant access to my free online training!

Do you want to learn how to sell more products on Amazon and outrank the competition? CLICK HERE to learn more about Cherie's ad agency!

Did you know that Amazon pay per click advertising is a great way to sell more of your products online?

Even though a lot of people are aware of this, they don't take advantage of this incredible opportunity. Actually, creating an ad campaign is actually quite a simple process. However, you want to make sure that you have a strategy in place before you run one.

The goal of Amazon PPC is for your campaigns to convert into sales. Nobody wants their money to go to waste. It's all about finding a way to make it work for you and your online business.

Here is a sneak peek of my interview with Cherie, where we talk about Amazon PPC tips and tricks and how to use Amazon sponsored ads to sell more on Amazon.

Can you tell me a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are today?

I come from a background in pay-per-click advertising in the days of Google AdWords, which is why being a part of Amazon advertising is incredibly exciting. It's an open market. Not to mention, there's tons of opportunity. Amazon is constantly putting out new ad units. It's very competitive, but you can win.

The main thing with advertising is that it will mess with you if you treat it as a linear event. Amazon PPC is not about setting up a campaign, selling some products, and making money. That won't work.

In fact, advertising is actually a feedback loop. Essentially you bring those ads, live. However, then you have to look at the results to see what's working, and then go back and make pivots and moves. Based on the feedback that you receive from those pivots, you can then put more stuff in.

People get frustrated when they treat PPC on an A to B line.

Actually, if you start to treat every campaign as a test, look at the feedback on performance, and keep revisiting it, you will succeed. With advertising, it's all about the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of what you test will not work in a campaign, but 20% will. That 20% can make you millions of dollars.

This is why it's important to not get disheartened. Everyone has bombs, including me! Not every product or keyword will scale, so you have to hone in and take that 20%. It's in the data. Oftentimes, you don't know why it works. However, if you continue to analyze, build on it and make small bets over time, it works well.

For those people who have a product on Amazon, where would they start with their ads?

The Amazon algorithm builds history, keyword by keyword. However, it doesn't just look at sales velocity. Rather, it looks at each keyword and how the products in its index have sold on that keyword.

To tell the truth, if you have a product where you have no sales history because you aren't organically ranked, your competitors will continue to consume that traffic because they have sales history. They are moving on that keyword every day. Advertising is what allows you to push the ads up and get that history.

Your primary goal in your first campaign is to put together a good list of ten keywords that uniquely define your product.

I mean, these are good search volume keywords that are in all of your competitors' titles and are frequently seen in the category. Get those keywords out there and make sure that you are ranking on the first page. Visibility is important. From there, you build your campaign, keyword by keyword. As you establish history on those keywords, everything will start to move.

You said that you should use ten keywords, but why wouldn't someone use as many keywords as possible?

To tell the truth, you've got to fight where you can win. You have to come from a place that is very strategic and you must have your advertising dollars pushed to those keywords. Sure, you are making a lot of small bets from a data standpoint, but you're not making those bets in full motion.

Rather, you are making low bets.

In order to get that sales history, you can't take the top position on a consistent basis. You can't win that way. I don't encourage anyone to throw hundreds of keywords into their campaign.

What's a typical budget for someone that is just starting out?

As open as you can get it. Most algorithms are based on the Google framework. The thing with the budget is that the search algorithm is trained to look for who can spend what on any given day. If you have a really low budget, the algorithm pushes you to decide when you should buy.

Conversely, if you are a player and Amazon sees that you have a $700 budget, then you are going to be there at all prime-buying hours. Be careful with small budgets. In all honesty, they are bad for your campaign. It's one of those metrics that has nothing to do with your performance.

Actually, the algorithm is looking for what you can spend, so that's why it's important that you set it correctly. This sends it a strong signal that you can take the entire market.

How important is it to track your numbers? Is your goal initially to break-even?

Yes, you're always trying to break even on your ads, and use it for velocity on the backend. However, I'm never trying to make money on my ads. They are used as a tool. Keep in mind that this wouldn't be the case if I was on a different platform, like Google.

My campaigns tend to be very robust because I'm used to running profitable campaigns.

The goal is to build a sales history on the keywords. It's all about establishing market leadership. It's not about the product. It's the perception of your buyer that you are focused on. By being there all the time with these prime keywords, you indicate leadership and that leadership is what sticks to your brand.

How do running ads help the algorithm for organically ranking your products for keywords?

It's all about the sales history piece. You are giving that algorithm a really strong signal that you can sell off of that keyword and that you can make that keyword work for your product. It's not much more beyond that.

In all honesty, by getting all those sections to your page, it's a popularity signal. You can't really track it. If you've looked at any of the stats that they give you for ads, 80% of sales come off of product pages, not searches. This means that the majority of your sales are going to come off of your competitors' pages.

Most people are like, “Go find a product where there's no competition.” I'm like, “Go find a product where there's a lot of competition and steal their sales!”

Every Amazon shopper goes all the way down the page to the reviews. 

To illustrate, if you are on a normal website, like Google, you are always working your ads to make sure that they get seen because not everyone goes to the bottom of the page. On Amazon, everyone goes from the buy box to the reviews, back up to the buy box. You've got all that real estate to sell on, and its 80% of sales.

There are thousands of people vying for three spots on Google. If you are scared of competition, what a terrible game. I'm used to peeling through my competitors and looking at them. For example, when the competitors pitch people something, we have to be coherent of that pitch and outpitch them because we know that they will come back.

With the ads the product image, the headline, and the title are important. How much are you testing and optimizing those things?

That is one of the things that has to be left on the table. I think you could use all your data from sponsored ads to optimize a listing. It's a very interesting thing to do. However, most of my clients are always in the top 3 of the Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR).

Normally, I'm working to be the best seller in the most competitive category. I love that.

Because I focus on competitive markets and scale, I can't go in and change someone's product listing because that product is already ranked. Once you have a history with an algorithm, you cant mess with it. All of my clients come to me with a lot of traction so I'm never going to risk that.

Who would be a typical client of yours? What stage would someone seek out your services to work with?

Normally someone comes to me when they are in the fray. They have got a ton invested in their business and brand and they are fighting for those top spots. For example, sometimes they may have had someone take their best seller badge or they are starting to see their sales velocity go down. Similarly, a client may be doing really well and then someone starts to take their market share. That's when I get the call. I am the one that fixes those hard problems.

In addition to this, do you do PPC on other platforms as well?

I have only focused on Amazon for two years now because I have a background in Google. We used to do a lot of Facebook and native advertising. To tell the truth, I've worked on just about every digital platform. However, in 2016, I personally decided that I would take on the Amazon opportunity.

This is my time to take the market. I'm in it early and I love it.

I try to not dilute myself because Amazon was a really tough platform to learn and there's always new stuff coming out. With that being said, they are going to start allowing some tracking from Google to store pages. Considering this, I'm not going to be able to resist that one because I love Google. More importantly, it's also really going to help my clients.

Any general advice that you would give to new sellers that are getting into the PPC game?

For one thing, I find that people tend to get too tactic focused. If you're just starting out, your best work is done in the trenches. Go to Amazon, do the keyword searches and scout your entire market. Who shows up and what products do they have? That's giving you an indicator of what the algorithm likes. As a matter of fact, it's ranking for what works and it's going to look for something similar.

Moreover, you can learn so much more from just looking at the current trends and knowing about your competitors. I could name all of my client's competitors off the cuff. You need to understand their price points, how much they are selling, and how much of that market share you can go and take. Lastly, understand the whole category and how the keywords are searched. Do that through the Amazon platform, with your feet on the ground.

Actually, you don't need a tool. You just need to get in the game mentally.

I do my best campaign work off of the computer. For example, in the mornings, I get a notepad, a pen and a glass of green tea. That's when I outline a strategy. I don't do this in front of a computer. I find that it can sometimes slow down your creative thinking. Jump in and get strategic. Don't rely solely on the data. Get an instinct for how this train is running so that you can hop on board.

I hope Cherie's Amazon PPC tips and tricks have inspired you to start a campaign of your own!

If done correctly, Amazon PPC advertising has the potential to take your business to the next level. Are you ready to get your product out in front of millions of potential customers?

Do you want to learn how to deal with constant increasing ad costs and break away from the crowd? CLICK HERE for instant access to Cherie's free Amazon PPC training!

Are you ready to learn how you can leverage the power of Amazon FBA to generate financial freedom? CLICK HERE for instant access to my free online training!

Do you want to learn how to sell more products on Amazon and outrank the competition? CLICK HERE to learn more about Cherie's ad agency!