When it comes to advertising on retail media platforms, you get out what you put in. In 2022, the top 3 search results on Amazon amounted to a whopping 68.36% of click share. This fact, and increasing competition on Amazon and other platforms, make a PPC strategy vital for scaling your advertising and your business.
The pay-per-click advertising scenario today is all about customization based on your product categories, marketplaces, and goals. Shoppers don’t connect with robotic ads, which can also lead to a dip in organic visibility.
Maximizing your budget is a given, and Amazon PPC ads are a good solution to cater to demand while still providing returns you need to scale up. Scaling your PPC advertising is the most important step to ensure continued growth in 2023.
In this blog, you can read a guide on why you should care about Amazon PPC ads, read through a 9-point retail media readiness checklist for your strategy, and understand how to organize your advertising campaigns to increase sales.
Why You Should Care About PPC Ads
The retail economy continues to take strides to bounce back from the impact of the global pandemic. Advertising budgets took a severe hit and affordability has been on top of priority lists. PPC ads have understandably grown in popularity, and 40% of companies say that their PPC budget is still way lower than they want it to be.
PPC ads are an opportunity for you to pay by the returns you gain, and it makes for a better bargain than most. With that, you achieve two important goals—improving profit margins and maximizing every invested dollar in every step from the shopper’s perspective, from discovery to purchase.
With that, it’s important to understand how to build a PPC ad. If you can design the right creative, it becomes easier to stand out and results are both exponential and sustainable.
Retail Media Readiness Checklist
The retail media readiness checklist has 9 elements, and your ideal product detail page should tick off all these boxes:
- Optimized Content
- Images & Videos
- Inventory
- Reviews & Ratings
- Buy Box
- Enhanced Content
- Variations
- Product Categorization
- Fast Shipping
With these fundamentals, you can think of your product detail pages as assets that drive your brand. To put these to work, you need to craft and organize campaigns that increase visibility and improve the performance of each product in your inventory.
How To Organize Your Advertising Campaigns
On a retail platform, your account’s structure is the foundation you build everything else on. It singlehandedly drives efficient advertising performance for your brand online. So having a clear, consistent, and logical advertising campaign is non-negotiable today, especially with an omnichannel strategy.
On Amazon, for example, your account’s success depends on your campaign segmentation. Each brand account is divided by campaigns, which are divided into ad groups containing targets and ASINs.
Retail platforms offer a range of features and tools for brands when it comes to advertising both on and off-platform. Your campaign segmentation decides how well you are able to take advantage of capabilities like automation, reporting, and analyzing.
A common problem is overusing multiple ad groups in one campaign. This is counter-productive because it limits your traffic and reach for the included products. Instead, try to build and maintain a campaign planning document. This ensures clarity among all teams to see the campaign’s status in real-time and improves your brand functioning across all stages of the shopper’s journey.
A good campaign planning document does not have to be complex. With simple categorization, you can create columns for campaigns by type, subcategories, ASIN(s), and versions. This format for a table also helps with one key aspect—campaign naming conventions.
You can easily establish a sense of consistency by having overly descriptive, clear names for each campaign. Five elements make communication and segmentation easier:
- Brand Name, representing your unique identity
- Ad type, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display
- The tactic, manual or automatic
- Category, based on the marketplace, consider adding subcategories too
- ASIN(s)
These campaign attributes enable you to fully utilize all filtering, tagging, and competitive tracking features to get a bird’s eye view into your campaigns and optimize them for maximum returns.
Retail media is on an upward trajectory and projections show no signs of slowing down. Q2 2022 saw the highest-ever numbers with retail eCommerce sales in the U.S. crossing $257 billion. This, combined with ad tech, is proof that well-thought-out investments in advertising can boost sales revenue.
Taking the grunt work out of the equation, you can yield results using intelligent marketplace management software like Pacvue Commerce. To learn more about how to scale your business and win the market, book a demo today.
