With the rapid expansion of advertising channels, advertisers have a broader and more diverse array of platforms to engage with their target audience. The depth of data accessible through these new channels means advertisers can now target ads accurately and measure their effectiveness efficiently. Among these is Amazon Ads, which through its growing retail media network, has rapidly ascended as an indispensable element of the media mix for brands aiming to maximize their visibility and sales.
With millions of shoppers flocking to Amazon to discover, research, and purchase products, advertising on this platform offers an unparalleled opportunity to reach potential customers at every stage of their buying journey. However, the sheer volume and complexity of managing Amazon Ads can quickly become overwhelming for traditional ad operations teams.
In this article, we’ll break down the best practices for leveraging Amazon Ads in your media mix and how you can ultimately scale it—among other critical channels. You will learn:
- An overview of Amazon Ads
- Key benefits of Amazon Ads, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands
- How Amazon Ads’ ad tech capabilities can drive improved outcomes
- Why scaling advertising efforts puts pressure on your most important—yet finite—resource: your people and how you can mitigate this stress with ad automation
An overview of Amazon Ads and ad tech capabilities
As millions of shoppers continue to turn to Amazon daily, the platform has become a vital space for brands looking to increase visibility and drive sales. Amazon Ads, specifically, allow brands to position their products directly in front of consumers who are already in a purchasing mindset, offering targeted advertising solutions that can significantly enhance product discoverability. These capabilities leverage Amazon's deep insights into shopper behaviors and preferences, providing a powerful suite of tools for advertisers.
Amazon Ads distinguishes between endemic and non-endemic advertising, catering to a broad spectrum of advertising needs. Endemic ads are those directly related to selling products on Amazon, ideal for vendors and sellers looking to increase their product's exposure directly on the platform. On the other hand, non-endemic advertising serves brands and companies aiming to promote their services or products not necessarily for direct sale on Amazon, allowing for a wider range of brand messaging and customer engagement outside the immediate shopping context. The diversity of advertising media within the Amazon Ads network—including display and video ads—leveraging Amazon's profound insights into consumer behavior and preferences. This ensures that advertisers have at their disposal a comprehensive toolkit for effectively reaching their target audience at every step of the customer journey.
Key benefits of Amazon Ads
Key features of Amazon Ads include Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, which allows advertisers to promote individual products or their brand as a whole directly within Amazon's shopping experience, ensuring visibility right at the moment of purchasing intent.
Another key feature is Amazon Stores, which is a free self-service product that allows brands to design and create multi-page stores within Amazon to showcase their brand and product portfolios. This feature enhances brand visibility and provides a more immersive shopping experience for customers. Each of these capabilities is designed to integrate seamlessly with Amazon's vast shopping and entertainment platform, providing advertisers with unmatched opportunities to engage with potential customers.
We’ve recently highlighted some other key benefits of Amazon Ads in one of our recent articles, check it out here: Fluency Now Integrates “Amazon Sponsored Display for All” in our Platform, Unlocking High-Intent Non-Endemic Advertising at Scale.
How to effectively advertise on Amazon
To effectively advertise with Amazon Ads, it's crucial to understand how to leverage its multifaceted advertising solutions to your advantage. Start by identifying your advertising goals and budget, ensuring they align with the features offered by Amazon Ads, such as Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Stores.
Utilizing Sponsored Products, for example, can highlight individual listings directly in search results and on product pages, ideal for driving sales of specific items. Sponsored Brands help in boosting brand awareness by displaying a custom headline, logo, and a selection of your products in search results, directing shoppers to your custom brand page or a curated selection of your products. Lastly, creating an Amazon Store provides a unique opportunity to design a branded space within the platform, allowing you to tell your brand's story and showcase your product portfolio in a compelling and visually engaging manner.
By combining these tools and regularly reviewing performance metrics to refine your approach, you can maximize your visibility and attract highly targeted traffic to your products and brand on Amazon's sprawling marketplace.
Ad automation enables efficient testing and iteration of your Amazon Ads strategy
With more options of where to advertise, advertising strategists face the challenge of managing an increasing number of channels to effectively connect with their audience in their most frequented online spaces. Instead of relying on your digital advertising team to manage another essential component of your media mix, ad automation transforms this challenge by giving your team the ability to exponentially scale their expertise across an unlimited number of clients and campaigns, all while improving performance.
Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of leveraging ad automation in your media mix to scale your Amazon Ads strategy:
Save valuable time and resources by reducing the need to manually execute on critical campaigns: Leveraging ad automation for your Amazon Ads strategy can be particularly useful for advertisers who run large-scale advertising campaigns across multiple channels and platforms: For those unfamiliar with the benefits of ad automation, this technology allows users to instantaneously create, manage and optimize campaigns—ultimately helping advertisers save time and resources by reducing the need for manual labor and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of ad campaigns.
Leverage sophisticated algorithms for optimizing key campaign components: With ad automation, your teams can launch and scale their campaigns more efficiently with sophisticated algorithms optimizing bids, targeting, and ad placements in real-time. This dynamic approach ensures that your Amazon Ads are always aligned with the most current market trends and consumer behaviors, significantly increasing ad success.
Stay on top of rapid market changes and get ahead of strategic initiatives: Ad automation enables brands to respond more rapidly to changes within the marketplace. Whether adjusting to seasonal demand fluctuations or reacting to new competitor strategies, automation provides the agility needed to maintain a competitive edge. By leveraging the power of automation in your Amazon Ads strategy, you can ultimately free up your ad ops teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in the day-to-day management of yet another advertising channel.
Launch your Amazon campaigns at scale: Using ad automation for your Amazon campaigns boosts efficiency and effectiveness by automating the creation, management, and optimization of numerous ads. It involves selecting an automation tool, defining advertising goals, and configuring campaigns, among other steps. This approach saves time, optimizes ad placement, and leverages AI for better performance and ROI.
Rapidly test and iterate on your campaigns: Automation plays a pivotal role in the rapid testing and iteration of new advertising strategies, which is especially critical when adopting a new channel. By automating repetitive tasks and deploying algorithms to analyze effectiveness, advertisers can quickly gather data, gain insights, and refine their approach. This efficiency not only saves valuable time but also significantly enhances the ability to adapt to and capitalize on emerging trends.
Incorporate Amazon campaigns into your overall multichannel strategy, and manage it all in one place: With the growth of advertising platforms, strategists now grapple with the complexity of navigating numerous channels to meaningfully engage with users where they spend the most time online. By leveraging a centralized platform you can manage all channels, and an unlimited amount of clients and campaigns simultaneously, and thus significantly enhancing performance without the need for proportional increases in manual oversight or resources.
Leveraging ad automation to scale your Amazon Ads strategy with Fluency
In order to truly take advantage of the power of this channel—and to ensure your strategists can maximize the most out of their media mix—ad automation will be essential in your strategy.
It’s important to note that while ad automation tools can streamline the process of managing and optimizing your teams’ campaigns, operational automation is not a substitute for human input and expertise. While automation can help optimize the performance of advertising campaigns, it is still essential for your strategists to have a clear messaging strategy and understanding of their target audience, as well as to monitor and adjust their campaigns as needed.
To confidently harness the potential of automation, Fluency can help you by activating an unlimited number of campaigns with groundbreaking speed and efficiency inside our ad automation platform. One early adopter in the automotive vertical is now launching over 800 sponsored display campaigns through the platform — a process that can be achieved in hours vs. weeks. To learn more about how you can leverage ad automation, get in touch with Fluency.
