9 Amazon Advertising Tasks to Outsource

In 2019, Amazon Advertising made its mark in the eCommerce world as a true force to be reckoned with. Digital advertising has changed since Amazon established itself on the scene. It is already the third largest advertising platform online. Amazon is expected to take 10% of digital advertising revenue this year, so advertisers need to keep up if they want to remain competitive.

Knowing the ins and outs of Amazon Advertising is just the beginning. There is a lot involved in rolling out, monitoring, and tweaking campaigns. We can expect many updates as the platform learns and grows, as well as new features to explore and add to standard operating procedures.

It’s always a race to the top, and there never seem to be enough hands or hours to get everything done. Outsourcing Amazon Advertising tasks is the key to success as changes come at a dizzying rate. Below is a list of these tasks and who you need to help you get your campaigns squared away.

1.  Sponsored Products

These standard product listings targeting selected keywords for individual products now have automated notifications and recommendations. You need someone to monitor these notifications and analyze them to apply the right tweaks to your campaigns. There’s a new performance dashboard, too, so if you haven’t been doing a lot of Amazon Advertising, you need someone who can navigate it efficiently.

Manual and automated bidding options have increased and Product Targeting has been added to manual bidding. Keyword and product targeting adjustments have also been enabled within automated bidding. The Product Optimization feature allows the automated selection of products based on contextual relevance.

Placement Multipliers are another addition to Amazon Advertising. They allow you to increase bids for top-of-page ad placement, controlled by a pre-set multiplier. Updates to broad matches have been added as well, allowing negative keyword targeting, including variations, and adding broad match modifiers.

Finally, the carousel format for ad display has been added to mobile ads.

You need an experienced advertiser to properly manage the many options to maximize your ad spend. It can get very complicated with so many angles to look into. Only an experienced advertiser can juggle all the different factors. Amazon Advertising is full of automations that are meant to make it all easier, but you still need an expert at the helm to make sure that everything checks out.

2.  Sponsored Brands

These more deluxe and creative ads that you can send to a custom landing page instead of a product detail page can target up to three ASINs at once. They now have new placement options on the left side and the bottom of pages.

Automated bidding is now enabled for Sponsored Brands, so you need someone to monitor spend more closely to make sure you maintain a good advertising cost of sale (AcoS) percentage. More reporting options are also available for keyword and campaign placement, which make this easier.

3.  Portfolios

Portfolios can help you to organize campaigns according to your particular business structure. This admin side of Amazon Advertising has usually been done outside of the platform. Now, campaigns can be sorted within the system. It definitely makes things easier to manage, but you still need help setting up the system, at least, so that it is in line with your overall strategy and goals.

4.  Product Display Ads (PDAs)

These ads, which are not keyword-triggered but based on a product or a category, still include the same three types of standard display ad inventory:  display, video, and custom. The format varies, but they all appear below the “Add to basket” button on product pages.

Though there are no significant changes to PDAs, you need someone skilled at using this type of ad because of the competition. PDAs are available to all advertisers, including those who are not even selling on Amazon. This makes the chances of your audience clicking away from the marketplace – and your listings – greater.

Possibly the greatest thing about Amazon Advertising is that you are targeting purchase-ready customers. It’s less of an investment, for sure, than running ads on a platform where you purchase their attention then still need to take them down the sales funnel. It can tend to make you risk more on your ads. With the change of losing it all to an off-marketplace site, however, you need an expert to manage that risk.

5.  Custom Reporting

The Demand Side Platform overall has a new layout and bulk editing has been enabled for line items. There are also more exact columns for Custom Reporting. This is a long-awaited update for many advertisers. It allows them to more accurately track and analyze the specific data that they need to make decisions on how to modify campaigns. They can now make more accurate adjustments to keywords, targeting, bids, and more.

This is all very technical, and you need someone who knows how the new system works with all the updates. Moreover, you need someone who lives and breathes Amazon Advertising – someone who spends a lot of time tracking the competition and how they are using the ad platform.

6.  Keyword Lists

Now more than ever, with such a robust platform to work with, you need to level up your keyword research. You need an SEO for this, but not just any SEO. You need someone niched down in Amazon SEO because the Amazon Advertising algorithm works differently than those on other platforms.

The goal here is to find those search terms that your target customers are typing in when they are looking for your products. Optimizing keyword performance on paid Amazon Advertising is the next step. But you also need organic SEO to support it.

Researching the competition is an important step in building your keyword lists. You can get someone to do it manually or use a tool to find what terms each competitor is using for organic optimization and paid ads. Their skill and experience are what you need here to determine which keywords are working, and how well each one is working. You don’t want to just throw them all in or guess. You need the data and the right mind to draw the right conclusions from it.

7.  Listing Optimization

You need someone to take the best keywords from the research and update your listings to reflect them. This person needs to both understand how organic Amazon SEO works and have the talent and skill to write great copy. They also need to have complete product details so they can fully describe each product, leaving nothing out that can help capture your next listing visitor.

After your listing text – titles, bullet points, and descriptions – is optimized, look to all the backend elements. Aside from the backend keywords, there are many more areas where you can add keywords as you describe the products uses and specifications. All these help to boost the performance of your products and pages in organic search to raise your rankings. All you need is someone to skillfully set it up for you and monitor it against your advertising campaign data to add tweaks to keep it in top shape.

Again, updating listings on the organic side as well as updating Amazon Advertising campaigns on the paid side are both vitally important, and these adjustments work together to give you the best results. Organic SEO gives you the basic keywords to test out on paid ads. Your advertising data will then inform on the most profitable keywords, the ones that bring in high-value customers. These keywords need to be given higher priority in your organic strategy to attract more of these customers outside of paid ads.

An Amazon organic SEO expert will also look at keywords that you have difficulty ranking for because the competition is stiff. They will know which of these are too valuable to let go of. They will know to make the recommendation to use then in your paid Amazon Advertising campaigns so you can rank for them despite organic competition.

8.  Brand Optimization

This is part of the organic side of optimization, but it can hurt you as much as it can help you. You need an experienced marketer to help you decide whether or not to go for brand keywords, and if yes, how much focus to place on them. It all depends on how well your brand is known by your target customers, and that requires research and a keen eye monitoring customer behavior.

There is always an opportunity cost in organic SEO because there are limited prime keyword placements available on each listing. When you prioritize one term over another, you lose whatever benefits that other term could have given you in the choicer position. You need an optimizer with marketing and SEO experience to figure out the cost versus benefit ratio of each key search term on your list. Then you will know how to get the maximum benefit from your campaigns.

More than getting more clicks and conversions, this knowledge will help you identify top-level customers that you need to reach. You should never stop giving more shoppers the opportunity to learn about your brand and why they should buy from you. At the same time, you need that expert skill and knowledge to protect your brand so others don’t take valuable keywords and the customers that they capture.

And don’t forget the opportunity available in competitors’ brand keywords. You can create paid campaigns to ride on their brands’ level of awareness to bring customers to you. But you need to do this carefully because you don’t want to alienate customers who are actually looking for that brand. It creates a negative impression of you when they click through to your product instead of the one they were actually looking for. You need someone with the knowledge to sort through the data. But you also need their experience with customer behavior and trends. This combination is what gives them the ability to identify household names that indicate a general reference to a type of product and not a specific branded item.

Ultimately, you simply can’t guess at whether it’s better to protect your brand or go after the competition, and to what degree if you choose one, the other, or both in tandem. You need someone who knows how to determine the best course of action.

9.  Off Amazon Advertising

Amazon Advertising is also greatly supported by advertising efforts conducted on other channels. These efforts must actually do that, though. Random Facebook Ads or Google Ads campaigns are not going to help you maximize profitability. More likely than not, they will cost you more than they’re worth, and this is the reason why most people don’t believe in advertising off Amazon.

The truth is that you can greatly improve your performance on Amazon by leveraging other channels. But you need someone who knows what these channels are good for and how to correctly plan and implement strategies on them. Everything must go to support Amazon Advertising. There is potential in both organic and paid campaigns, but the right balance and formula is needed to make it work.

The greatest benefit of using off Amazon channels is that they can do things that you can’t do and shouldn’t do on Amazon. They allow you to track location, demographics and device types, for instance. Notably, you can get a lot more real and useful raw customer data, something which Amazon keeps as a well-guarded secret.

You can also use data from paid ad campaigns off Amazon to inform your decisions for Amazon Advertising pushes. You just need someone who knows the value of these keywords in terms of where the customer is at in the sales funnel to choose the right ones for purchase-ready Amazon customers.

More data is always better, as long as you have someone who knows how to extract the value from it. Think again of the sales funnel and how you can bring in people at all stages and filter them all down to the buying stage. That’s a lot more sales than if you just stayed on Amazon, relying on those who are ready to buy. The more channels you leverage, the greater your opportunity to tap into larger shopper pools.

Tracking and monitoring and tweaking are just as relevant on other channels as they are on Amazon. You need someone who specializes in each channel that you use to support Amazon Advertising to do this properly. Each platform offers different options and has a different focus and method and target.

Final Thoughts

You need to outsource these Amazon Advertising tasks. This is the only way that you can bring the best skills, knowledge, and experience to your business without spending too much. Then you can allocate more of your budget to the actual ads to get top-performing campaigns every time.