PPC Advertising on Amazon

The Influence of Social Media on eCommerce Sales

As of October 2022, there were roughly 4.74 billion social media users around the world. That equates to 59.3% of the total global population. That is an increase in 190 million people from the same time last year (and that number will continue to grow). THAT is why utilizing the influence of social media to advertise your eCommerce business is a good idea. Of course, there is more to it than my mere blanket statement of opinion, but never fear! I will be uncovering the blanket with a list of interesting facts to help prove my point below. Let’s get started!

A Covid eCommerce Miracle?

Let me first be clear that nothing was good about the world being under quarantine for over a year. However, it would be tough to argue that eCommerce did not receive a significant boost during that time. And thank goodness for it because people were still able to purchase food, medicine or any other types of supplies needed without risking their health.

During the span of Covid, eCommerce sales increased by an astounding $244.2 billion. This ended up altering the consumer landscape, shifting the dominance of in-store shopping towards the online experience. In turn, eCommerce businesses started stepping up their game by updating their search functionalities, payment methods, and the personalization of a customer’s experience through artificial intelligence. These positive changes in convenience left a lasting effect that has lingered on after the pandemic ended.

It’s Easy to Connect!

Over the last decade, people’s attention spans have been steadily decreasing. Advancements in technology have left little wiggle room for retailers to make their products known. As of 2022, the average U.S. household has approximately 20 smart devices that includes smartphones, computers, tablets, and TVs. That is a large number of potential connections that can be made through social media. The ease of having access to the World (wide web) at your fingertips is too high a commodity to dismiss. A customer is much more likely to purchase a product or service if the accessibility is easy!

The Advantages of Social Media

Depending on who your target customer is, a strong social media advertising strategy can be a helpful proponent for great success! Here are some of the great social media advantages that can benefit your eCommerce business:

Low Cost – Fortunately, most social media ad models operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) system, which means your business only has to pay when someone has actually clicked on your ad or video. Essentially, you only have to pay when your advertisement is working, which means your chances of earning money increase and could even offset any ad costs! Plus, the average cost for doing a PPC ad on a social media platform such as Facebook is only $1.68.
High Brand Awareness – Social media ads give your brand instant awareness, even before any potential clicks, by showcasing it to millions of people online. Having your business ad up on social media feeds helps keep your products and services fresh in people’s minds, even subconsciously. Increased exposure like this can bring about fresh leads and high conversion rates.
Healthy Brand Loyalty – In addition to promoting your business, social media provides a great opportunity to engage with your audience and develop a strong connection. You can also share testimonials from satisfied customers to help build a positive reputation for your brand.
Detailed Analytics – One very helpful advantage of social media advertising is its ability to quickly provide analytics and statistics regarding how well your campaign is performing. This will help you design future campaigns to optimize what works best. You even have the option of utilizing live campaigns and A/B tests to further refine your strategy.
User-Friendly Software – Yes, again, it’s easy! The majority of social media advertisers provide a simple, user-friendly platform to work with that will walk you through each step for getting set up. You just have to choose an objective, input your audience’s requirements, and specify your budget. Some platforms even allow you to create your own rules and customized reports that should make managing your campaigns even easier!

TikTok Customer Trends

It is being forecasted that in 2023, for the first time, more than half of U.S. social media users will make purchases via social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and especially TikTok. These platforms seem to have mastered the logistics for putting out strong, easy-to-maneuver eCommerce sales content. However, TikTok has by far the largest audience. But how has an app that was known mostly for creating silly dance trends catapulted itself into the eCommerce spotlight? Well, it all started with TikTok providing a different type of eCommerce environment that included native shopping, payments, logistics, and fulfillment. The process benefited from the following:

The app’s commerce monetization follows a unique structure developed by their sister-app, Douyin, based in China.
Douyin already has eCommerce customer fulfillment centers, which enable them to operate like a true retail company. TikTok is looking to open their own fulfillment centers in the U.S. which would make their eCommerce platform even more streamlined.
The majority of TikTok users are younger people whose thoughts and behaviors are more impressionable and more receptive to purchasing products directly through the app.

Brands have also taken note of the advantages of advertising on TikTok and some have seen tremendous, if not overnight growth due to it. The influence of social media has never been more obvious than on TikTok; users frequently saying “TikTok made me buy it”.

Social Media’s Influence: In Closing

The influence of social media is clear and only growing. I hope that you now feel a bit more comfortable engaging your eCommerce business with a social media presence. It truly is a wonderful way of optimizing your brand’s reach without breaking your budget. Next time you’re on any type of social media platform, take a look at how many ads for things you may be into actually show up. You may be surprised how many there are, but know that YOU can have your own wonderful company/product/service up there as well, ready to help the right person who truly needs it!

E-commerce and Advertising

Corey Gary is Viral Launches amazing Demand Generation Strategist and Advertising Manager. This guest post written by Corey highlights the importance of E-commerce and Advertising in how they go hand in hand.

The beginning.

I started my career in Digital Marketing as an Analyst at an agency located in New York City. I joined an account with separate teams for programmatic, paid social, and E-comm. Since we rarely communicated with each other, I felt siloed and inefficient.

A few years and a few clients later, I’ve worked across almost all facets of Digital Marketing. I’ve run Display & Video as well as Search & Social ads. There have also been opportunities to buy programmatic podcast ads and CTV (connected TV ads). I also purchased a programmatic Digital-Out-Of-Home campaign where the vendor claimed they could change ads at a bus stop based on the interests of the people walking by. We ran this campaign before iOS 14.5 and increased privacy regulations.

Working on a channel-agnostic team of digital marketers not only rounded out my Working on a channel-Agnostic team of digital marketers not only rounded out my skill set but was best for the client’s expanding needs. Having multiple types of marketers on one team helped us own all stages of the digital marketing funnel.

Awareness campaigns matter for E-commerce and Advertising.

Awareness campaigns are excellent for large brands, but how about those small Amazon start-ups who don’t have millions of dollars to spend on billboards that connect to the Metaverse? That’s where e-commerce advertising is essential. Buying for conversions is where marketers can gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. E-commerce advertising becomes essential once a consumer is familiar with a brand. As a consumer, if I allocate myself $150 for a new pair of running shoes, I can choose between big brands such as Nike or Adidas and Asics. Or, I can shop with up-and-comers like On and Hoka. These two shoe brands are agile and efficient in their digital marketing. Both On and HOKA have extensive running shoe digital marketing campaigns while the big brands are nonexistent on the SERP (Search Engine Landing Page).

As a consumer during the evaluation process of the marketing funnel: I decided to allocate my $150 depending on a wide range of criteria such as cost after taxes & shipping, quality of the product, reviews, merchant (Amazon or EastBay), and color. For the digital marketer on the other end of the purchase, yes, people buy running shoes based on color, guilty as charged.

The seller can optimize their ads to account for all these criteria to meet the customer when they’ve allocated time to research and budget. It takes time for the Digital Marketer to A/B test which ads perform best on a specific channel. Here’s one example.

On Amazon, an ad for the keyword [running shoe] could perform vastly different than an ad for the keyword [racing running shoe]. The first keyword is for buyers who want a running shoe but aren’t necessarily intense runners. However, [racing running shoe] clarifies that the buyer could be participating in this year’s New York City Marathon in addition to their local Turkey Trot. Viral Launch has expert-level keyword analysis software to help e-commerce marketers discover the best keywords to target for their online advertisement.

Conversions mean results.

So, why is it essential that all Digital Marketers learn E-commerce Advertising? Conversions drive business results, and ultimately the purpose of marketing is to have a positive return on investment. Marketers can spend all day ideating grand awareness campaigns. Still, conversion marketing is where CMO’s can go to stakeholders exclaiming, “look at how my campaigns drove an increase in sales with a positive.

Accessibility in Digital Marketing: Amazon Advertising

Accessibility is an integral part of a fair and just society; this does not exclude the online experience. Accessibility in digital marketing is frequently overlooked.

Without accessible goods and services, millions of people will be cut off from the products they need. In the US alone, 61 million Americans live with a disability that impacts their shopping and buying experience.

You can incorporate accessibility in digital marketing by accounting for the diverse needs of all users and consumers. This will improve your reach, strengthen your brand image, and ensure that all users can buy from your eCommerce site.

Common Mistakes

Offering accessibility in digital marketing isn’t just the right thing to do — it can save you from expensive litigation fees, too. Even major brands like Netflix and Nike have been sued for failing to provide an accessible web presence. As a growing brand, the last thing you need is legal battles and fines.

When developing your Amazon advertising, try to avoid common accessibility mistakes like:

Missing alt-text on images;
Using non-descriptive text for links;
Embedding non-accessible documents;
Using a low color contrast.

Avoiding these mistakes will ensure that most users can use your web content. However, you may still need to complete an accessibility audit with a licensed web developer to ensure that your content meets today’s standards.

Accessible Listing

As an Amazon seller, the listing is the most important piece of the marketing puzzle. Your Amazon listing has to double as a point of sale and a marketing opportunity. As such, you must ensure that your listing is fully accessible to all users.

Fortunately, Amazon itself is an accessible website. This means that you don’t have to worry about the code behind your listing or headline advertisement and can focus on the visual and written elements of your Amazon listing.

Ensure that you provide multiple images of your product so that visually impaired users have the best chance of seeing your offering. Fill out the keywords field, as this will be used as your alt-text for your product. While alt-text doesn’t need to be grammatically correct, it should make sense for users who are using screen readers.

Use a color-blind simulator to ensure that color-blind users can see your products. Keep your descriptions short and ensure that any anchor text you use is descriptive of the link’s destination.

You should also account for neurodiverse users who will come across your Amazon listing. Neurodiversity is an umbrella term that “covers multiple diagnoses” like autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, and ADD/ADHD. You can help neurodiverse users interact with your Amazon listing by avoiding unnecessarily explosive language and metaphors and using better organization.

If you’re looking to increase traffic and convert more visitors into customers, we can help. Our listing optimization software tools will compile a comprehensive list of keywords for your product and title, helping you to reach new audiences and drive more traffic to your product listings. Assuring you’re able to produce high-quality, vivid product descriptions that highlight specific product information not located elsewhere on the listing – helping potential customers find and buy your products faster.

Social Media

Social media is an invaluable tool for Amazon eCommerce sites. A successful social media strategy can improve your reach and drive traffic toward your Amazon listing. However, you need to ensure that your social media posts are fully accessible before you begin your next campaign.

Start by choosing the right social channel for your business. Choosing the right platform will simplify your approach and make it easier to craft effective, accessible marketing. If you’re new to social media, consider creating a business page on Facebook and working with an influencer on Instagram or TikTok. These platforms will help build your brand awareness and gather vital customer reviews.

Make your Facebook page accessible by following social media accessibility guidelines. Caption all of your video content before you post it, and give context for animated GIFS. This will ensure that visually impaired users can understand and interact with your content. If you use emojis on Facebook, be aware of how screen readers will present the emoji to users.

Work with your chosen influencer to create accessible branded posts on Instagram or TikTok. Encourage them to capitalize each new word in their hashtags, as this will improve the screen reader’s effectiveness. A short description of the content can also help users understand the context of the post.

Websites and WCAG

If you host a website in addition to your Amazon listing, you need to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards. WCAG 2.0 is designed to help all users navigate web-based content with ease and independence. WCAG has four major indicators for accessibility:

Perceivable: can users tell that your content exists? Is your content perceivable to folks who are color blind, deaf, visually impaired, etc?
Operable: can users navigate your content? Is your website keyboard accessible? Do users have enough time to navigate the site before they are timed out?
Understandable: do you use unusual words or explosive language? Will all users be able to understand the abbreviations you use?
Robust: will your content be accessible in five years? Is it compatible with new models of screen readers?

Meeting these WCAG 2.0 standards ensures that your website is authentically accessible. This will drive more traffic toward your Amazon listing and will improve your digital brand presence.

Conclusion

Accessibility in digital marketing, specifically in Amazon ads, is an important part of your Amazon advertising strategy. Start by reviewing WCAG 2.0 guidelines and work with influencers who already understand how to create branded, accessible content on social media. You can also rewrite your alt-text and double-check your anchor text to ensure that your marketing is understandable and operable for all users.

If you’re still having trouble boosting traffic to your Amazon listings, you can also compare it to your competitors with the Viral Launch Google Chrome extension. You can also analyze which keywords you’re striving to rank for, and other Google trends.

Turn Amazon Customer Reviews Into Marketing Success

Successful Amazon sellers know how critical customer reviews are. They can help build your brand’s reputation. They can deepen trust with current and potential customers. Not to mention help you increase sales and generate more profit.

Amazon customer reviews can strengthen your marketing too. Not only do reviews better your Amazon search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, but they can also boost the traffic coming to your listings from external sources.

You can and should use your reviews in your marketing to accelerate a thriving Amazon e-commerce operation. Whether the reviews are positive or negative, here’s how to turn them into successful marketing initiatives.

Find Out More About Who’s Buying Your Product

Collecting, processing, and analyzing data is necessary if you want your marketing and store to succeed. Customer reviews are a critical source of data for any Amazon seller.

You can learn:

The overall impression of your product
Details about your brand perception
What customers love about the product
Any specific complaints about it
Suggestions for improving the product or overall experience
How the logistics experience is (i.e., shipping, packaging, etc.)

Customer review data is also crucial for quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC). Quality assurance focuses on establishing quality standards and ensuring future products meet them, while quality control focuses on whether products meet and have met those standards in the past.

Your customers discuss quality in their reviews and can share with you whether or not that quality standard has changed (in a good or bad way) over time, thus assisting you with QA and QC.

You can use all the information you get from customer reviews to determine who’s buying your product, how they’re using it, whether they’re enjoying it, and how you can improve.
The key is to be transparent about how you collect and use customer data. Give your customers some say in the process. And only gather and use data absolutely necessary and relevant for your marketing or e-commerce store duties.

Use Customer Reviews on Social Media

Social media might be the best place to get genuine product reviews outside Google and Yelp. These platforms are also goldmines for marketers. Millions of people go to social media daily to learn more about if a product is good and where to buy it.

Whether a customer writes a review on your Amazon product page or does a video review of the product on their social media page, use them on your social media platforms. Screenshot the written review and post it on your page and in your stories. Or ask to use any user-generated content on your platforms.

Then, you can put a link in your bio directing those interested in buying to your Amazon store to purchase.

Turn Customer Reviews into Ads

Have you ever seen those ads on Amazon, television, Youtube, or social media that are video reviews from actual customers? Well, you too, can take advantage of turning your customer reviews into ads.

Paid ads should be a part of your marketing strategy when you can afford them. Ads can supplement your organic marketing strategies and drive traffic to your Amazon store and other digital marketing channels.

Sit down and define a strategy for paid ads first. Then, ask for permission from customers who send you video reviews to use them in various paid ads on Amazon and social media. Finally, consider automating your ads with our Kinetic PPC Tool.

Share Reviews on Your Website

If you’re putting in some intentional effort to build your brand outside your Amazon e-commerce store site, you probably have your own website. If that’s you, be sure customer reviews are on it. Anywhere you talk about the products in your e-commerce store, include customer reviews.

You can create a separate page on your website that houses all of your customer reviews. You can include your best reviews for each product on your individual product pages. You can also include a link to the actual review on your Amazon store product page to drive traffic to the listing.

Create an Email Marketing Series From Them

You may or may not have an email list for those that follow your brand. However, if you do, you can use your customer reviews in your email marketing strategy in two main ways.

Create an after-purchase email series that thanks customers for their purchases and encourages them to leave a review.
Use reviews in various promotional emails to generate interest in your products and invite anyone who hasn’t to leave a review so they can be featured in emails like this, on your social media page, or website.

However you decide to use your reviews in your email marketing, consider offering an incentive attached to the request for a review, like a discount or free shipping on their next purchase to persuade customers even more.

Turn your customer reviews into an email series to not just encourage new customers to leave a review, but also to show them what they have to look forward to with their purchase.

Conclusion

Amazon shoppers’ purchases are influenced by reviews. So, take them seriously, whether negative or positive, and channel them into successful marketing initiatives to further their impact on your customers.

Amazon Selling: How to Advertise Your Business During Major Sales Events

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s the importance of being able to recognize changing conditions and adapt and adjust to changing conditions. This begs the question: How to advertise your business during major sales events?

On September 26th, Amazon officially announced the inaugural 48-hour Prime Early Access Sale slated for October 11th, leaving Amazon sellers just two weeks to prepare for what projects to be one of the biggest shopping events on the calendar.

While it had been rumored for months before it became official, the timing of the announcement leaves little time for Amazon businesses to stock up on supplies and optimize inventory. Additionally, the sale effectively speeds up the holiday shopping window.

Needless to say, the market conditions have changed.

For many Amazon sellers, advertising on Amazon can be a headache even on an average day. So how does a major sales event like Prime Day, the holiday season or Prime Early Access Sale change how to advertise your business?

Below, we’ll take a look at a few crucial pieces of advice and data points that may help you take control of what can be controlled at this point, and navigate through busy sales periods like a seasoned pro.

Know When The Math Changes

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Perhaps it goes without saying, but it certainly helps to know when these busy sales periods are. With a heightened awareness of the potential of changing conditions comes a greater ability to act swiftly and decisively with confidence.

On rare occasions, times with drastic change can’t realistically be accounted for. But for the most part, Amazon sellers can do themselves a favor by anticipating seismic shifts in the market.

Even for savvy, longtime Amazon sellers, the rules and conditions they grew accustomed to disappeared when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normalcy around the globe, with plenty of trickle-down effects impacting the e-commerce and Amazon marketplace.

While the COVID-19 disruption served as an extreme example of how an agent of change can flip a marketplace on its head, we can apply that thought and learning experience to other avenues when business as usual takes a turn.

More typically, busy sales periods like Prime Day, Cyber Monday, Black Friday, the Prime Early Access Sale and holiday season will cause greater fluctuations in the market. If you sell a product with a greater deal of seasonality, the ability to forecast when sales will see an uptick or downtick in demand can have a great impact on the profitability of your ads.

High-traffic sales events up the ante in every way for Amazon businesses. It’s a key factor to consider when deciding how to advertise your business at these times. With more shoppers searching for a deal, the opportunity for record sales multiplies. But with that opportunity being there for the taking, the competition in the market intensifies.

Your typical ad bids that routinely win prime digital real estate are highly unlikely to get the job done during these high-sales periods, changing the math significantly in the battle between visibility and profitability.

Understanding Benefits Beyond The Obvious

Although it can be easy to focus on the big sales number during a major sales event, that big bag of cash isn’t the only thing to keep an eye on.

Without a doubt, seeing skyrocketing sales is always welcomed. But success during Prime Day or the Early Access Sale can do so much more, helping your business prosper far beyond the promotional period.

For example, increasing brand awareness and new-to-brand customers through advertising can go a long way toward earning sales all year long. According to an Amazon study, brands that advertised leading up to and during Prime Day showed a 216% increase in awareness and 214% increase in considerations, compared to the prior week.

The most difficult aspect of customer retention? Earning their purchase in the first place. Once a customer has purchased a product from your brand, they are much more likely to purchase yet again from you as long as they feel like they got a good return on their investment.

Additionally, the sales made during these multiplier events greatly affect your visibility going forward. When you achieve sales either via search or through keyword-targeting advertising, your product sees an increase in organic rank. With organic rank serving as the holy grail of profitable sales, a successful sales event can help your bottom line all year round.

Capitalizing on the influx of traffic during these sales events can become a foundational part of your year-round performance, bringing in repeat customers who seek out your product the next time they need it.

Because of the increased competition for eyeballs, your ACoS (average cost of sale) will likely increase, a metric sellers like to keep as low as possible. However, consider these ancillary benefits while concocting your strategy and use these extra wins as consolation for the added cost.

Balancing Sales and Profitability

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com

For every seller, finding the perfect balance between advertising costs and profitability through conversion takes a large sample size of data and plenty of trial and error. And these numbers become warped on high-traffic sales events, but typical data can still be incredibly useful for mastering that balancing act.

One study conducted by Perpetua provides valuable insights into the numbers during July’s Prime Day 2022 compared to data in the month before and weeks after.

One of the more interesting figures from their case study shows that for Sponsored Products, Amazon businesses that increased ad spend by 50% saw a minimal rise in ACoS while experiencing a significant boost in conversion rates.

Graphic and data originally from perpetua.io.

In short, this data indicates that increasing ad spend to match the hype of these events can be quite profitable despite the rise in ACoS depending on your product, price point and ad spend budget.

If you can afford to raise your ad spend by a significant amount, you’re much more likely to see a positive return on ad spend. For those who choose to stick with business as normal or provide a meager boost to their ad spend, the return on your investment are more likely to disappoint.

How to Advertise Your Business: Execution

How Can You Execute These High-Opportunity Strategies?

For each and every product, the data changes can be drastically different, making it difficult to apply widescale rules to follow.

However, Viral Launch’s Kinetic tool makes creating profitable advertising campaigns and tracking performance as easy as can be via automation. With easy-to-create rules you can create to trigger action, you can optimize your ad spend by combining an informed strategy with state-of-the-art automation.

Within Kinetic, you can customize your advertising experience to match your goals and budget like never before. Create rules that increase ad spend for profitable campaigns and shut down campaigns or keywords where you’re not getting a proper return on investment once they’ve met the criteria you’ve set.

Kinetic PPC provides all the Amazon advertising functionality and tracking to help maximize your advertising success all year-long. However, it can be especially worthwhile when it comes to deciding how to advertise your business during high-velocity, high-stakes sales periods.

Set yourself up with Kinetic PPC today to manage campaigns, monitor keywords and product performance and optimize your advertising experience today.

Amazon Advertising: Zoom In On Product Level PPC Performance & Take Action With Kinetic

Amazon Advertising can be a complex topic, but Viral Launch’s Amazon PPC platform Kinetic simplifies your performance so you can stop wasting money on inefficient ad spending and maximize profits.

In a recent update, Amazon announced certain ASIN-level metrics added to their Brand Analytics dashboard in Seller Central.

“With the launch of ASIN view, you can measure the search performance of a specific product by metric, such as clicks or conversion rate, within a selected time frame.”
– Amazon Seller Central announcement

Before this addition to the Brand Analytics suite, you could only find ASIN-level data and metrics through Viral Launch’s Kinetic PPC tool. While the addition certainly assists sellers, it’s a far cry from what Kinetic is capable of when it comes to capabilities like data fetching and rule-based automation that optimize your campaigns at the ASIN level.

How to use Product View in Viral Launch’s Kinetic PPC platform.

Optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns at the product level

Kinetic’s main benefit is the ability to make rule-based automations that trigger when a set of selected criteria is met. These capabilities provide endless possibilities. With pre-set rules to get beginners pointed in the right direction and plenty of custom rules for PPC experts, it truly is the single tool for newbies and PPC wizards alike.

For example, suppose you’re running an ad and want to target keywords with small-to-medium search volume because they’re less expensive than their higher-volume counterparts but fear overspending on low-volume. In that case, you can set your limits on search volume estimates and create campaigns that automatically shut off if a certain level of unprofitability is met.

On the other hand, suppose a campaign for another product is absolutely crushing it. You can set it up for successful campaigns to increase spending for your best keyword or ASIN-targeted campaigns and appear more frequently in your most successful positions.

In either condition, Kinetic’s product-level PPC data and automation assists sellers with skyrocketing their most successful campaigns and halt unprofitable ones.

Kinetic showcases a comprehensive collection of data points for your product for you to take action on with the push of a button.

With integrations from the rest of the Viral Launch suite pulling invaluable data such as search volume estimates, suggested PPC bids and recommended keywords, Kinetic provides critical data points to make your campaigns easier to run and much more data-informed.

Not to mention your most crucial, personalized sales data points can be quickly discovered in Kinetic. PPC Sales, PPC spend, RoAS, ACoS, conversion rates, organic and sponsored rank and much, much more are all automatically tracked for your campaigns and can be seen at the product level for PPC.

All of this data goes a long way when it comes to running your ad campaigns. Not only does this simplify the data to make more data-informed decisions, but they also assist with seeing why and how they’re succeeding or not. In an easy-to-view, easy-to-navigate platform, you can see the performance at a very broad level, or zoom in for a more granular view of how your product performs for specific keywords and similar or complementary ASINs.

Start improving your PPC performance today

Dig into Kinetic PPC for campaign and product level PPC data and automation like you’ve never seen before.

While Amazon’s recent addition of displaying product-level PPC performance in Brand Analytics marks a step in the right direction, it’s only a fraction of the data, automation, integration with other tools and strategic assistance provided within Kinetic.

Kinetic makes it easier than ever to supercharge your PPC campaigns and understand your product performance like ever before. For more information, check out our guide on How To Use Kinetic PPC for your first step in becoming a PPC guru.

As PPC becomes an even more significant tool in the Amazon seller arsenal, it’s even more critical to have the intelligence advantage. Now that every brand-registered Amazon seller has easy access to ASIN-level data in Brand Analytics, it’s as critical as ever to gain the edge with the advanced metrics and actionable automations available in Kinetic.

Want to stop wasting advertising spending and run more efficient campaigns? Of course you do! See what Kinetic can do for you! Sign up for your free Kinetic trial today to start running more efficient, more profitable campaigns.

Retail Ready? When to Start an Amazon PPC Campaign

The truth is: You should not scale up or aggressively run PPC before you are retail ready.

A majority of advice that comes down the line on selling is focused on Amazon PPC campaigns. You are able to find hundreds of articles conveying “The best PPC campaign” or “Do this to build sales” for your business. Yet, not many articles go over when you should focus on PPC campaigns and start investing in those areas.

Retail Ready comes first

You and your business need to be retail ready in order to successfully run Amazon Advertising. Set yourself up correctly with reviews, correct SEO and keywords, product photos, etc. It is okay to not immediately jump into PPC, it is the safer route. A majority of sellers want to quickly scale up and aggressively run PPC in order to get ahead and set the curve. The truth is, if you are starting out right now, you are going to have to slow down.

Most of the differentiating ad types on Amazon simply use your existing listing as the ad itself. Sponsored brand ads that are largely designed to drive awareness even include the listing elements such as product photography and reviews.

Don’t pay before you are ready.

You are paying Amazon to show your listing to more shoppers. If you start paying for more people to see your listing before it is ‘retail ready’ you are bound to get low click through rates and low sales. Regardless, Amazon will still happily take your advertising budget.

There are millions of sellers out there all running PPC as well. Before getting your feet wet, have all of your ducks in a row. Join Amazon seller community groups and ask questions in the forums, learn all there is to know about PPC while still building the business. Once your business is running smoothly and is retail ready, then create the PPC strategy and implement it.

Doing this will save you time, energy, and a lot of money at the backend. Save your reserves and don’t jump the gun. If you need resources on Amazon PPC specifically, this guide will give you more insight into how Amazon runs their programs. Viral Launch has their own guide as well utilizing the Ad Manager tool and Kinetic.

How to Promote Amazon Products on TikTok

Over the past couple of years, TikTok has skyrocketed in popularity. Here’s how you and your Amazon business can leverage advertising on TikTok with its growing user base.

During TikTok’s rise, many Amazon sellers were understandably wary about investing time and money into advertising on TikTok. Social media apps don’t pop up as frequently as they once did. Social media sites are notorious for being here today, and gone tomorrow.

When a newcomer to the social media scene pops up and experiences success, it doesn’t take long for the social media giants to integrate the new popular feature into their site to eliminate any advantage newcomers may enter with. Vultures were circling around TikTok when government intervention threatened the app’s livelihood in the United States.

With so many responsibilities on an Amazon seller’s plate, they don’t have the time to become well-versed in an app that may have the staying power of the fidget spinner.

After it all, TikTok still stands tall.

With over 600 million users and steady growth, TikTok is the most downloaded app of 2021 and remains a heavy hitter in social media with a growing advertising platform.

And in case you were ever questioning the investment of time, energy, and money into advertising on TikTok, Amazon’s recent Brand Referral Bonus Program adds an extra incentive for those who drive sales from outside of Amazon.

So how can you start creating TikTok ads to boost your sales and take advantage of the bonus program? Let’s take a look at the ad types, how to monitor ad performance, and some tips for getting started. Here’s How to Promote Amazon Products on TikTok

Ad Placement Options on TikTok

At the time of this post, there are five types of ad types for advertisers to choose from on TikTok.

In-Feed

Users encounter in-feed ads when scrolling through videos on the “For You” page, which caters content to the user’s viewing history via TikTok’s algorithm. These ads contain a call-to-action functionality, so you can urge users to visit your web store, download your app, etc.

TopView

Considered prime digital real estate, TopView ads appear when users open up TikTok and boast sight, sound, and narrative functionality. Because of this, they are generally very expensive and more commonly used by prominent brands.

Brand Takeover

This ad type appears for users when first opening the app and stay true to TikTok’s initial idea with a 3-5 second, sound-off video. Exclusive to one advertiser per day, Brand Takeover ads are ideal for increasing brand awareness.

For these ads, the entire screen becomes clickable to an external or internal destination of your choosing. Designed to be rare, these ads are likely infrequently used by Amazon sellers with the exception of mature brands with larger storefronts.

Branded Hashtag Challenge

There’s a decent chance your first exposure to TikTok came via the app’s challenges, which go viral frequently. These challenges typically give users a template to create fun, shareable content. Perhaps the most successful example of the power of the app’s challenges is the song “Old Town Road” by Lil’ Nas x.

The genre-bending song and its easily distinguishable sound provided fertile ground for viral videos, which helped catapult the catchy song into the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 consecutive weeks.

These ads appear via in-feed video, a featured banner on the Discovery page, and on a special page for Hashtag challenges, where users go for content ideas. Up to 15 seconds in duration, these sound-on ads help increase brand awareness and have limitless potential for engagement.

Branded Effects

A unique type of advertising, Branded Effects ads provide digital stickers, filters, and special effects for use in videos. Essentially, brands create their version of a Brand Kit for users to use in their content. When used, it allows your brand to be added for easily shareable content by TikTokers.

Whichever ad type(s) work best for you are dependent on the goal of your campaign, targeting structure, size of your business, and budget.

How Do You Get Customers To Amazon?

Engaging content, a click-worthy product, and Amazon Attribution!

When setting up your advertisements on TikTok, be sure to utilize Amazon Attribution.

Amazon Attribution is an advertising and analytics measurement solution that gives marketers insight into how their non-Amazon marketing channels across search, social, video, display, and email impact shopping activity and sales performance on Amazon. With these insights, you can discover new ways to grow your business on Amazon by optimizing experiences off Amazon.
Amazon

In order to benefit from the aforementioned Brand Referral Bonus Program, the ads must utilize tracking from Amazon Attribution. These links will help measure impact, optimize your strategies based on results, and improve your planning on future campaigns.

At the moment, Amazon Attribution is exclusively available to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry in the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Tips for Creating Ads That Generate Engagement

While it’s every brand’s dream for products to catch on via TikTok, one of the most challenging aspects is the lack of control on the internet. All you can do is great ads that best represent your business and hope it connects with viewers. But once it’s done and sent out, who decides what goes viral amongst the endless amount of content?

The answer is nobody, but also everybody. On TikTok, trends can start anywhere. Dances to obscure songs by teens with small followings can catch on, while challenges created by famous celebrities with large followings like Jennifer Lopez can fall flat.

With that said, there are a few general rules to consider while creating ads that are more likely to connect with an audience for the right reasons.

Be Authentic

Since TikTok is largely a youthful audience, it can be tempting to overcompensate with ads that can end up with cringeworthy results.

If there’s any audience that can spot an imposter or a brand trying a little too hard, it’s younger people. More than most target markets, the youth know when they’re being lied to or when they’re being used.

Of course, you’ll want to stick with the fundamentals of advertising and “speak the language” of your audience. Stay true to your brand voice without coming off as fake or inauthentic to ensure your message is well-received.

Make It Interesting, Quickly

TikTok’s penchant for quick content even birthed the term “The TikTok Generation” when referring to Gen Z or younger audiences with dwindling attention spans. If it isn’t interesting quickly, then it gets tuned out quickly.

With this being the case for content users choose to watch, it’s even more true for ads placed in front of them. Don’t waste time setting up a big payoff in your video, or else it will alienate a significant chunk of users who will be counting the seconds until they can swipe away.

Start off with a bang to capture the user’s attentiveness, educate and entertain afterwards, and finish with a strong call-to-action to close the deal.

Use Attractive, High-Quality Visuals

Since many users create content using only their cell phone cameras, it may appear the barrier to entry is low. Anyone with a decent cell phone can create a video.

However, the bar for production value has been upped a few notches. With light rings, camera stands, and various other recent inventions to upgrade the visual and sound quality becoming more commonplace, don’t cheap out on your production.

Attractive aesthetics and pleasant sounds are the standard for desirable content on the app, so ensuring it meets and surpasses the viewer’s expectation is the bare minimum to draw them in.

Track Your Results and Optimize

As with most new ventures, hitting some speed bumps as you get started should be expected no matter how much research and effort you put in. While researching before making the leap into TikTok advertising can remove or minimize mistakes, you’ll quickly learn what works and what doesn’t work for your product in TikTok’s environment.

Tracking and monitoring key performance indicators and results can go a long way towards optimizing your long-term ad approach. Replicate what works and diagnose why certain ads aren’t delivering peak results to optimize your ad performance.

Work With The Experts (Influencers)

https://www.tiktok.com/@teresalauracaruso/video/6979345054611557637

Many influencers show off their favorite products and provide a link to their favorite items for followers to purchase from.

As always, it’s never a bad idea to work with those more knowledgeable than you. If you’re brand new to TikTok, one way to mitigate your lack of experience can be getting in touch with an influencer who makes sense within your niche.

Summary: How to Promote Amazon Products on TikTok

For Amazon sellers, there may never be a more rewarding time to start advertising on TikTok than now. With extra traffic and sales, the Brand Referral Bonus Program incentivizing sellers with extra money, and a growing advertising platform, this is a prime opportunity to start advertising on TikTok.

Sign up for TikTok for Business, set up those Amazon Attribution links, and formulate your content strategy to become the next viral hit and start raking in the money!

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Getting In The Game

With this announcement, Amazon advances its relationship between the marketplace and Twitch. Amazon’s Prime Gaming community works as a link for Amazon Prime subscribers to connect their account with Twitch. With deals and “loot” such as in-game currency serving as an incentive for customers to attach the two.

As the PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series X become more accessible after the production and delivery, one would reasonably expect further advancements in Twitch. To promote user count and usage.

In addition to the millions of engaged customers who can now be targeted being newsworthy. This also highlights the growing emphasis on advertising from Amazon. Since Twitch is a subsidiary of Amazon, its addition makes perfect sense.

Impact on Advertising

While Apple’s highly-publicized changes to advertising and protecting user data threaten to shake up industries, Amazon and its far-reaching subsidiaries present an opportunity to target customers in a way that may not be as easy to do elsewhere.

As Amazon continues to grow on its own and through purchasing companies such as Twitch, Whole Foods, and Goodreads, so does the potential for extra advertising avenues.

If you’re an Amazon seller with little experience in Advertising, there’s no better time than now to get involved. Over the past year, the Amazon Advertising Console has evolved at a rapid rate.

In previous years, advertising knowledge was a luxury. Soon enough, it’ll likely be a prerequisite towards customer acquisition.

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Amazon PPC Tool Quick Start Guide

Learn what to expect, how to navigate, and where to start when mastering an Amazon PPC tool.

As Mark Twain once said, the secret of getting ahead is getting started. But in many instances, getting started can be the most challenging part. Especially with the amazon ppc tool.

That much is certainly true regarding Amazon PPC and software designed to simplify and add sophistication to Amazon’s advertising platform. Amazon Advertising is still very much in its early stages. There should be no expectation to know where to begin.

So we’re here to help guide you in the right direction. To provide a basic knowledge of the Viral Launch advertising platform. You will know where things are, what to look for, and what’s included. Everything else begins to make much more sense.

Just like we must learn to walk before we run, you’ll need to understand the basics of Viral Launch’s PPC automation and management tool. Then, you’re free to start implementing advertising strategies that take your business to the next level!

You’ll need to set up a Viral Launch account that includes access to Viral Launch’s advertising platform, Kinetic PPC.

Sign up for our FREE Amazon PPC Playbook. With training from experts guiding you through all steps, you can perform PPC like a pro and dominating on Amazon!

First, you will need to provide Viral Launch with both MWS and seller central authorization in order to integrate Kinetic with your Amazon Advertising Console. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to do that here.

Once successfully added, you’ll see your storefronts and ASINs within your account. Additionally, we strongly recommend setting up your landed unit cost and target ACoS within Kinetic. While admittedly tedious, doing so pays off in the end to fully experience the benefits. We’ll explain more on that shortly.

Campaign View vs. Product View

Once you’ve added proper authorizations, you’ll notice there’s not one but two ways you can view your ad.

Campaign View shows information for every campaign across all your products. It looks a lot like Seller Central.
Product View shows information per ASIN, so you can see how each individual product is performing.

For those familiar with Amazon PPC, campaign view offers a more familiar appearance. With souped-up features, embedded data reporting, and cutting-edge integrations from the Viral Launch software suite, it’s like the Amazon Advertising Console on steroids.

But Product View truly allows for innovative insights into their ads like never before. With Product View, you are able to view how your ads are performing at the ASIN level so you can maximize efficiency. Once you’ve added your landed unit cost and target ACoS, you gain the ability to pinpoint your campaigns to minimize risk and maximize your ROI.

Make Your Own Rules

Create a rule for your campaigns or utilize our templates to optimize your ads.

One of the biggest roadblocks to Amazon advertising success continues to be monitoring adjustments. With all the duties placed on a business owner’s shoulders, monitoring campaign statistics and making changes at the right time can feel impossible.

Kinetic solves that problem with its ability to create rules to optimize your ads. Don’t know where to get started? No worries! Our handy pre-made templates can help get you started with understanding what rules you can create by providing the strategy behind them.

Set parameters to shut down underperforming campaigns or increase the budget for ads that are skyrocketing your sales to enact performance-based automations. That’s right. Kinetic’s by-the-minute monitoring and your personalized rules combine to stop losing campaigns in their tracks or reward winners with more ad spend.

You can set the rules to three different states of action.

Automatic

Rules set as automatic continuously go into effect once the rule has been triggered. In this state, the rules you’ve created for a campaign will fire off whenever the conditions have been met. For example, if you create a rule that increases your bid amount for keywords with a low ACoS and place it on automatic, the rule will take action every time it’s applicable without any action needed from the seller.

Manual

Rules in a manual state work similarly to those in automatic. However, instead of the rule going into effect as soon as the conditions have been met, you’re notified within the tool without Kinetic making any changes. Once notified, you can review the rule that’s been triggered in the Activity History tab to decide whether or not to approve the action. As the name implies, this state is more hands-on.

Paused

In a paused state, rules exist without any action taking place as a result of them. Perhaps you’d like to experiment with rule creation but don’t want to trigger changes for your campaigns. Placing them in a paused state ensures that your work is saved, but there will be no automations or notifications regarding the specific rule. At any point, you can take paused rules off the bench and into the game by selecting manual or automatic with the push of a button.

With Kinetic, your campaigns can literally make desired real-time adjustments while you sleep! If you prefer a more hands-on approach for your ad campaigns, you can do that too. Featuring the option to do either,

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Get Familiar with Your Keywords and Search Terms

On top of the ability to create campaigns at the ASIN-level with customizable rules to more effectively carry out your goals, this Amazon PPC tool collects extensive reporting for a clear view into your ad performance at the keyword level.

The Keywords and Search Terms tabs within Kinetic display critical metrics that better informs your advertising strategy and tactics.

In Seller Central, you have to run a report for a particular date range, export it to Excel, add a series of filters and try to understand where it’s actually delivering and look for opportunities to improve the targeting. Kinetic simplifies this process, giving sellers the power to dig deeper into their data and make changes to optimize their campaigns.

The Keywords and Search Terms tabs offer unbridled insights into your ad performance.

While many make the mistake of using these words interchangeably, a very important detail differentiates these two Amazon buzzwords. In short, the Keywords tab is where you’re targeting, while the Search Terms tab presents only where your ads are delivering.

Keywords Tab

This view helps to consolidate all of the keywords you are targeting and allows you to see how the keyword is performing, and what campaigns are contributing to that.

Search Terms Tab

The Search Terms tab can save you loads of time in understanding where your ads are delivering. Once you’re using an Auto campaign, or broad and phrase match targets, your ads can deliver for a wide array of customer search terms.

In short, the Keywords tab shows keywords are targeting, while the Search Terms tab presents only where your ads are delivering. Your Search Terms report will show you a list of keywords that have garnered at least one impression, along with a bevy of metrics that gauges performance.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this quick start guide helps you gain a better understanding of this cutting-edge Amazon PPC tool. As PPC continues to become a larger priority for Amazon, it can serve as an engine for your business to scale like never before.

Now that you have a better lay of the land, taking your business to a new level is within reach! Register for a Viral Launch account today and start your 14-day free trial to turbocharge your FBA efforts.