Google Ads For Amazon Sellers – Extend Your Sales Beyond The Amazon Platform

A quarter of all Amazon sellers are using AdWords. If you are an Amazon seller who isn’t currently running Google Ads, you are giving your competitors an enormous advantage.

It’s not enough to run Amazon Sponsored Ads to stay competitive. You should develop a multi-channel PPC strategy, and do it better than your competition to succeed.

In this article, we will explore ways to go beyond the Amazon platform and show you how to advertise your Amazon products on Google Ads.

According to eMarketer, Google remains the largest digital ad seller in 2019, having 31.1% of worldwide ad spending. On the global stage, Amazon comes in fourth place. As you can see, there is an enormous opportunity in adding Google Ads to your advertising mix. 

A question any Amazon seller might ask is: 

Can I advertise my Amazon product page on AdWords?

The short answer is, yes! You can create Google Ads campaigns to drive targeted traffic and buyers to your Amazon listings. Here’s the caveat – you cannot do this directly, as it’s against Amazon’s terms and conditions. 

The way to circumvent Amazon’s terms is by creating a squeeze page for your Amazon listing and sending traffic to it through Google Ads. Dedicated tools like LandingCube make it easy to build effective Amazon landing pages.

The perks of building a landing page for your Amazon listing

By driving traffic to a landing page, you can set up a tracking code for retargeting. This is something you simply cannot do within the Amazon platform. Here lies the biggest advantage of using Google Ads for Amazon sellers. You can also collect email addresses to later retarget them in Google Ads campaigns, if you so choose.

Another great benefit – the landing page will both:

• drive more traffic to your Amazon products
• help improve your Amazon rankings.  

Types Of Google Ads Campaigns To Create For Your Amazon Products

Let’s dive into the types of Google Ads campaigns you can run for your Amazon products: 

1. Search campaigns

Search ads are designed to serve people who are actively searching for a product they are interested in.

A clean search campaign structure is important, so it’s recommended to organize ad groups by commonly themed generic keywords. Try to limit your ad groups to no more than 10 keywords as a best practice.

Make sure you don’t show your ads on irrelevant searches by adding negative keywords. 

Bonus strategy: Make sure you also target your brand-related keywords in a separate Search campaign. Generally, there is less competition on branded keywords, so you are more likely to get a higher Quality Score and a lower Cost-Per-Click.

Pro tip: If there are highly popular Amazon sellers in your industry, we recommend bidding on their brand names too.

Check out this video to learn how to set up the right bids.

Retargeting in search campaigns

You can target users who have previously visited your Amazon product landing page in the same Search campaign. How? By adding your remarketing lists for Search Ads with the “Observation” setting. 

Multi-session users are more likely to convert, hence more valuable to you. So you can add a minimum +15% bid adjustment to this audience list. 

Pro tip: Use ad customizers and create relevant ads with the if function.

For example, let’s say you want to give a 10% discount to people who have visited your checkout page but haven’t placed the order. To show the 10% discount message in your text ad, simply:

• open a “{“
• choose the if function for audience 
• fill in the blanks with the copy you want. 

In this case, the users from the “Search Checkout Page” audience will see the discount offer, the others just a general message.

Think carefully about what your target audience needs to see and adjust the ad message accordingly.

Bonus strategy: Remember when we said you can collect email addresses from your newly built Amazon product landing page? Well, you can upload a customer email list in Google Ads with all these users and retarget to them directly in your search campaigns.

2. Google Shopping Ads for Your Amazon Listings

Even though it comes in second to Amazon, Google Shopping still captures a huge percentage of the product search market. 

Do you want to diversify your marketing channels to acquire more customers? Of course you do! Google Shopping Ads should be on your list.

Source: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6275294

With a higher CTR compared to text ads, Google Shopping ads are the best way for retailers to promote their online and local inventory on Google.

If you haven’t started running Shopping ads yet, you are lacking visibility at the top of the Google Search Result Page. And that means that you are also losing potential customers.

You can find out everything you need to know on how to structure your Google Shopping campaigns here.

3. Display Campaigns

Similar to Amazon’s Product Display ads, ads from the Google Ads Display campaigns are more about building brand awareness. You’ll be able to reach more people across the Google Display Network (more than 2 million websites and apps). 

Display Remarketing Campaigns

With Display remarketing ads you can target specific users who have previously visited your landing page but didn’t buy your product. You can create different audiences based on the recency of their visit (eg. 1 day, 15 days, 30 days, and more) and deliver appropriate ad messages for each segment.

4. Video Campaigns

Choose video campaigns when you want to advertise videos on YouTube and across the Google Display Network. There are several video ad formats: 

• in-stream ads
• video discovery ads
• non-skippable in-stream ads
• outstream ads
• bumper ads.

Regardless of the format, it’s important to create an eye-catching video.

Based on people’s past interactions with your videos, you can reinforce your message with a remarketing video campaign.

Empower Google’s Algorithms To Take Control Over Your Bidding

You have the option to leave behind manual bidding in your Google Ads campaigns. The alternative is to let Google’s advanced machine learning algorithms adjust bids based on a wide range of real-time signals. This way, you can spend more time developing new advertising strategies.

Each strategy addresses different business goals with different campaign goals. Check out this article on all the smart bidding strategies available in Google Ads if you need a refresher.

Two More Reasons For Running Google Ads For Amazon Sellers

Although advertising on Amazon has a lot of benefits, Google Ads has some additional useful features. 

Amazon reporting

If you have ever run ads on Amazon, you’ve probably spent way too much time working with frustrating Amazon reports and Excel pivot tables. Currently, Amazon’s reporting provides limited data. If you want to see advertising data beyond the last 90 days, you’re out of luck. The only other option is to see your campaigns’ lifetime data.

By comparison, if you’re using Google Ads for your Amazon listings, you can run reports on any timeframe you want. Or compare or segment the data. So you can visualize meaningful patterns and trends.

Amazon campaigns’ accelerated delivery only

Amazon campaigns’ default delivery mode is accelerated, meaning there’s a high chance you are spending your daily budget in a few hours.

This is not the best way to distribute spend while advertising for your products. For example – you can discover that performance is more efficient later in the day, but your budget has already been exhausted.

With Google Ads campaigns, you have a second and better option – standard delivery – where you can spend your budget evenly across the day.

A Final Word On Running Google Ads For Your Amazon Business

We cannot stress it enough that all the above are not simply nice extras or benefits. They are necessities in today’s ultra-competitive Amazon – Google Ads sales landscape. 

Developing a multi-channel PPC presence for your e-commerce business is the key to extra revenue. Yet, being omnipresent on all channels requires a substantial amount of time. 

If you need guidance with your first campaigns or with sparking new life into existing ones, request a PPC proposal from the Search Scientists team. They’ll be happy to help you with turning your e-commerce business into a thriving one!