By Gefen Laredo, VENDO Advertising Manager

Amazon has a wealth of advertising tools that a seller can use to drive sales, increase ranking, and grow profitability. In this post we’ll discuss the old tools – the “evergreens” – that have proven success in the Amazon marketplace, if used correctly. It should be noted that advertising can only truly be successful when the products we are advertising are fully optimized. At VENDO, we do not begin aggressively advertising a product until we feel it is a strong, well built out listing that can convert once people are driven to the listing through ads. We will cover what that looks like in future posts. In this post, we’ll dive into a bit of our strategy, and how we have had success in keeping ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) down for all of our clients.

We’ve been asked by many of our partners which type of Ad Campaign (auto, manual, and sponsored brands) is the most effective. The answer is a combination of the three. Each campaign type brings with it a set of advantages that, when combined, complement each other. We run auto campaigns for two purposes: to gather data about keywords, and to supplement our manual campaigns with more placement. When you run an auto campaign in addition to your manual campaigns, you place for lower bidding locations on the listing or detail page in addition to the primary placement that the manual campaign has earned.

Sponsored Brand Ads are a mixed bag. When they lead to product pages, we see a lower ROI than when they lead to brand stores. In addition, it depends on the quality of the brand store, the quality of the product line(s), and the quality of the ad itself. When successful, they can accomplish a few things. First, you can add another piece of top page real estate to your arsenal. Next, by populating the campaign with branded keywords, you can expose your loyal customers to your entire product line in the interest that they buy more than one SKU. Finally, it establishes a strong brand image when customers see that banner on the top of the page. It’s worth testing out, and if it doesn’t work out, just disable!

Amazon Advertising can be a maze to maneuver without the correct information. It is important to first master and properly set up the fundamentals of your advertising effort. Once you have the “evergreens” in order, then you can expand into more experimental, as well as external channels. On our next Advertising blog post, we will cover some of those tools.