Why You Need Technology to Manage Amazon Advertising & What To Look For in a Software Program
As an agency managing hundreds of Vendors and Sellers, we know how beneficial the right advertising technology can be to help you optimize and effectively manage your campaigns on Amazon Sponsored Products or Amazon Marketing Services.
In the following article, we discuss why you absolutely need technology to manage Amazon advertising in 2018, but more importantly which features and capabilities to look for in an Amazon advertising software platform.
Why Do I Need Technology to Manage My Amazon Advertising?
1. Technology Provides Access to Better Management Tools:
Ultimately, being able to analyze consumer & product data (at a granular level) allows advertisers to build the most effective and profitable campaigns possible.
In an ideal world, every product deserves to be treated as it’s own business, but in reality – managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs manually isn’t feasible for most advertisers.
Simply put, granular product analysis requires custom Amazon reporting and management technology.
2. Technology Provides Access to Better Reporting Features:
For Vendors (via AMS)
Although Amazon Marketing Services offers effective tools to help vendors stand out against their competitors and drive traffic to product detail pages and branded pages, it can also be cumbersome and inefficient to make edits or optimizations within the ad platform itself.
According to David Weichel, VP Product Development at CPC Strategy, “Active management of AMS campaigns can be extremely time-consuming in AMS itself, not to mention the general lack of insights resulting from the interface’s singular view of performance – the Lifetime date range.”
For Sellers (via Sponsored Products)
Although Sponsored Products is one of the most powerful tools for driving discoverability and incremental sales for Amazon sellers, there are specific types of reporting & functionality that don’t currently exist within Campaign Manager (via Seller Central).
According to Pat Petriello, Head of Marketplace at CPC Strategy, “Because of the way Campaign Manager is set up, it’s not uncommon to find that a piece of data exists in one report, but another relevant piece of data exists in a totally separate tab or view.”
“Amazon does not make it readily available to tie all of this data together to create reports that allow you to make actionable decisions on your advertising.”
3. Technology Gives You A Leg Up On Competitors:
Aside from not having access to advanced reporting and management features, it’s likely your competitors are already leveraging some form of advertising technology to improve their own campaign performance.
If you continue to limit yourself to the reporting and capabilities available within Amazon’s advertising interface – you are already at a disadvantage and destined to fall behind your competitors.
What should I look for in Amazon advertising software?
Once you’ve decided to implement Amazon advertising technology – the next step is figuring out what type of technology is best suited for your needs.
This will largely depend on whether you are a Vendor or Seller and which advertising platform you are currently leveraging.
Below, we outline 3 scenarios:
1) I am an Amazon Vendor Managing AMS Campaigns:
If you’re an Amazon Vendor leveraging AMS, then you already know how time consuming the platform can be.
If you’re already in the market for an AMS management solution, we’ve narrowed it down to 5 essential features that you should seek out in your new platform:
- Custom Date Ranges – Custom Date Ranges allow vendors to set their own date ranges & discover insights into how things are changing week-to-week, day-to-day for each campaign.
- Intuitive Filtering – One of the key features you will need in an AMS platform is being able to filter across campaigns and keywords using all kinds of fields and metrics that matter to your business goals and your optimization strategy.
- Quick Trend Analysis – Access to an executive dashboard that displays high-level account performance helps AMS managers get a pulse on overall sales performance.
- Edit Bids in Bulk – In order to scale your optimization efforts, you should also be able to edit bids across all campaigns and ad groups at once.
- Change History – Every optimization strategy should come with a frequent impact analysis to assess whether the current tactics are helping or hurting your account performance.
2) I am an Amazon Seller Managing Sponsored Products Campaigns:
If you’re an Amazon Seller already leveraging Sponsored Products, here are 4 essential features that you should seek out in an Amazon advertising technology platform:
- Algorithmic Bidding – Having access to a bid impact analysis feature (with change history) and custom scheduling will give you the power to make impactful changes in your campaigns – quickly.
- Organic Rank Tracking – This feature shows you how Amazon views your products against relevant ranking factors. It also helps you discover how product price impacts your organic rank & BSR (Best Sellers Rank). Think “true organic rank tracking” without ad placements.
- Sponsored Products Management – Seems obvious, but being able to edit bids based on performance across all campaigns (and pause campaigns & keywords that aren’t performing well) is essential. Bonus? If you can add negative keywords to existing campaigns / ad group and measure impact – you know you have found a winning software.
- Ad Performance Reporting – Sophisticated and customized filtering features for reporting and bid management are not only helpful – but necessary to compete in the competitive market.
3) I am an Amazon Vendor or Seller, Seeking Full Service Management
As a marketplace seller or even a vendor considering expanding to 3P, you know competition is fierce. The winners will be defined by their ability to focus on their overall business goals while adapting to changes on the platform.
The failures will waste their time blindly optimizing product descriptions and modifying bids until their business gets choked out (by the winners, of course).
But there’s a secret weapon a lot of winners rely on: An Amazon agency or consultant they trust.
Here are a few ways to tell if it’s time for you to outsource your Amazon advertising to a full service Amazon management agency:
- You Don’t Have Time to Optimize and Manage Ads
- You Haven’t Invested in Branding (But You Know You Should)
- You’re Unsure How to Optimize Product Listings to Rank
- You’re Always the Last to Know About Amazon’s Policy Changes
- Tedious Daily Operations are Eating Up Your Time
- You Can’t Seem to Get in Touch With Amazon Support
- You’re Relying on Tools and Apps to Get By
- You’re Worried About Giving Up Control to An Agency or Consultant
- You’re Successful in Brick and Mortar Stores, but are Just Starting Out on Amazon
- You Know You’re Losing Money Somewhere, and You’re Not Sure Where
If any of these apply to you, you definitely want to check out, “10 Ways to Tell You Need to Hire an Amazon Agency“
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