39 Questions From Our Amazon Sponsored Products Webinar – Answered

Last week, we partnered up with Amazon for a joint presentation on the strategy behind driving product discoverability and leveraging the revamped Sponsored Products program. There a lot of questions we didn’t get a chance to touch on, so here they are now with answers from both Pat Petriello (CPC Strategy) and Lindsey Green (Amazon):
A: (Pat) Correct. You don’t need to include any sort of punctuation. You’ll definitely want to save those character spaces for actual letters, not punctuation like apostrophes or commas.
A: (Pat) For category-specific attributes, you’ll ideally want to include these so that shoppers using filters can more easily find your listings. When you’re talking about Jewelry, the attributes surrounding the category (like Material and Metal) will be details you’ll want to include.
A: (Pat) Not at all. While it’s highly relevant whether the seller is fulfilling the product via FBA or FBM (fulfilled by merchant), the physical distance of the warehouse to the buyer is not an influence on the Buy Box. Products that are FBA, however, do have a very distinct advantage in influencing Buy Box ownership over those that are not FBA.
A: (Pat) Sellers may run into contradictory information on this issue (like here and here). I believe this could be to discourage sellers from keyword-stuffing their titles.
If you’re uploading individual products manually (in Seller Central), then your product titles will be restricted to 250 characters. However, if you’re uploading products via a bulk upload (ex. like through your third-party platform), then you can submit product titles up to 500 characters.
A: (Pat) That’s correct, feature bullets and descriptions are not indexed for search, as stated here. However, they’re still significant influencers on the overall conversion rate of the product detail page. The more robust descriptions and features you submit (and are surfaced) on a detail page, the more likely shoppers will feel confident in ordering that product.
A: (Pat) Platinum keywords serve to structure your Amazon storefront and have no impact on Amazon search (discoverability). Generally speaking, shoppers don’t discover products through storefront browsing.
A: (Pat) Unfortunately that’s one of the downfalls of manually pulling reports from Seller Central. Larger volume reports can be pulled using Amazon’s API calls, either directly or through third-party technology partners.
A: (Pat) You can find product performance reports in Seller Central by going to Reports > Business Reports > By ASIN > Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item. Once you’ve reached that information, you can start to outline strategy for specific segments of your catalog. More on that strategy analysis in this blog post.
A: (Pat) Amazon ultimately decides which seller’s content gets surfaced on the detail page, so you’ll want to be efficient about which ASINs you’re going spend time/resources on increasing the quality of the product info. For example, you wouldn’t want to spend time optimizing product content for an ASIN where you have very low Buy Box share. Amazon’s detail page ownership policy here.
A: (Pat) That’s correct. To be completely transparent, the screenshot we used in the webinar was not a good portrayal of what we would consider optimal use of the Search Terms fields.
A: (Pat) There are multiple factors to Seller Rating that could be dragging down your score. These include Buyer-Seller Contact response Time, Late Shipment Rate, On-Time Delivery Rate, Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate, etc. You’ll want to stay on top of these metrics to maintain a high score, and if you’re looking for a bit more info on this, we have a white paper focused on Product Buyability that speaks to this.
A: (Pat) Here’s the link for the Amazon Brand Registry (GCID) program.
A: (Pat) Solid blog post here on Amazon catalog analysis for both discoverability and buyability.
A: (Pat) This sounds like more of a Buy Box issue than a session issue. In this case (where there’s a lot of competition), you would want to focus on increasing your Buy Box ownership share. If it’s a good selling, very competitive ASIN, it probably doesn’t have a low-session problem. But Sponsored Products could play a helpful role here. Our Product Buyability white paper is all about this specific issue.
A: (Lindsey) Apparel is not an open category right now. We are continually working to develop the best customer experience for Sponsored Products so that we can add new categories in the future.
A: (Lindsey) Each category has special requirements. If your account meets the eligibility criteria, your account will receive an invitation from us to participate in Sponsored Products.
A: (Lindsey) No, Sponsored Products cannot be used for items in the Sexual Wellness category at this time.
A: (Lindsey) Yes, you are able to manage accounts on behalf of clients, however they must grant you access to their Selling on Amazon account in order to do so.
A: (Lindsey) Sponsored Products provides the opportunity for your ad to show up on page 1 of the search results for any relevant product. Also, anecdotally, some merchants have reported that sales driven by Sponsored Products have contributed to natural search ranking improvements.
A: (Lindsey) We know approaches to advertising vary across businesses, products and seasons, so we don’t make any recommendations about managing to a specific ACoS value. Instead, we provide you with ACoS and other helpful measurements so that you can see if Sponsored Products is meeting your advertising goals.
A: (Lindsey) Even if you have 100% of the buy box, your product may not appear in the first page of natural search results. Sponsored Products provides the opportunity for your product to be seen on page 1 of search results by customers searching for relevant terms and can help drive traffic to your other offers.
A: (Lindsey) An argument can be made for either – we recommend starting with whatever your top priority is. New ASINs can benefit from Sponsored Products by gaining exposure and ASINs with strong conversion rates can provide a favorable ROI.
A: (Lindsey) Yes, you can run a manual and automatic targeted campaign concurrently for the same ASIN.
A: (Lindsey) Yes, you are able to run both a manual targeted and automatic targeted campaign at the same time. You are able to pause either at any time if you would like to only run one at a time.
A: (Lindsey) No, you will never compete against yourself.
A: (Lindsey) You may check the “bid by keyword” report as a reference to the average winning bid of a keyword to ensure you are not bidding drastically higher than the average winning bid.
A: (Lindsey) No, you will never compete with yourself.
A: (Lindsey) After you launch your campaign you are able to use the “bid by keyword” and “campaign performance” reports to gauge performance and bids. The “bid by keyword” report will tell you what the average winning bid is for each keyword and the “campaign performance report” will tell you how each keyword is performing for your campaign.
A: (Lindsey) You do have to be winning the buy box for your ad to be displayed. We want to avoid sending customers to a product detail page if another seller is winning the buy box so they don’t potentially gain a sale from your advertisement.
A: (Lindsey) You are able to include ads in your campaigns when they’re not winning the buy box, however the ads will only serve when you are winning the buy box.
A: (Lindsey)Sponsored Products provides “suggested keywords” when you are setting up a manually targeted campaign, which is a great way to see relevant search terms for your products. However, we do not provide insight into volume of keyword searches at this time.
A: (Lindsey) You can download the “bid by keyword” report to learn the average winning bid for those keywords. If you feel comfortable raising your bid to compete with the average winning bid then you should consider raising your bid. We don’t recommend archiving keywords simply because they are not getting very many impressions.
A: (Lindsey) Yes, you will be able to download an “Automatic Targeting Report” which will show you all keywords that received clicks for your automatic targeted campaign.
A: (Lindsey) A keyword can be either a single word or multiple words.
A: (Lindsey) Negative keyword match is something we are looking into for a future enhancement but it is not yet available.
A: (Lindsey)The new campaign manager is not yet available in the UK but it will be very soon.
A: (Lindsey) No, there is no limit to the number of campaigns you can create.
A: (Lindsey) Yes, our minimum bid is $0.02, although we recommend bidding higher depending on your comfort and the performance of the keyword.
A: (Lindsey) We use a 7-day sales attribution window in the Campaign Manager UI, so sales may update for up to seven days after the user clicked on the ad.