How To Sell On Amazon With Amazon Marketing Services (AMS)
Amazon is the world’s most popular shopping platform and you can buy just about anything there now. However, so many online retailers ignore it totally and instead focus on SEO and AdWords alone to drive traffic to their website. Although Amazon does charge a relatively high commission, if you set your goods at the right price and market them well, you can make great returns using Amazon Marketing Services.
Amazon started out selling just books so you’d be forgiven for ignoring them as a platform to market your goods. However, over the last decade Amazon has diversified and you can now buy everything from furniture and household cleaning products to sheds and building supplies. To help their many merchants to promote their products they launched Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). It has been running in the US for a while, but is still relatively new in the UK.
What is Amazon Marketing Services (AMS)?
It really is not very different from Google AdWords or Facebook Ads – you pay to have adverts for your products displayed within the pages of Amazon. In case you are not familiar, or never noticed the ads before, here’s and example: a search for a kettle brings up an advert for Breville at the top of the page, with a kettle and a sandwich toaster, and then 3 more kettles, all of which are adverts:
To access AMS you need to have an account on Vendor Central, or Vendor Express
Like AdWords, AMS is keyword driven, so you set up search terms associated with your product, and then pay Amazon whenever the adverts are clicked. You will also get a free page on Amazon.co.uk, along with detailed sales reports.
Manually Set Up AMS
While it is tempting to try to automate your advertising, it is always best to manually manage your ads for the best performance. As with AdWords you can quickly burn through your advertising budget with a poorly run campaign. While providing an automated system helps businesses get started on Amazon, it is not an economical form of Internet marketing.
Amazon’s automatic targeting does have some uses though as you can use it to research the best keywords, and then monitor performance and disregard the worst performers to optimise your campaign.
As with any form of paid advertising, you need to constantly analyse your campaigns to optimise them so that you are not wasting money on clicks that never convert. Because Amazon’s sponsored product listings are often shown at the top of the page they do attract a lot of clicks from buyers, so a poorly planned campaign that uses irrelevant keywords will burn a hole in your marketing budget before you make a sale.
You can learn more about Amazon AMS on their official page, and this is where you can also get started. If you require any help in setting up your account on optimising it, then contact Freelance SEO Essex today and one of our PPC consultants will guide you through it. You can also take advantage of our PPC management services.
