Amazon Ads – Like the old days of PPC (sort of)

Cast your mind back to a time where you were making manual bid adjustments in Google Ads – daily.

When I first joined Fountain back in 2018 as a PPC consultant, automation was working more & more effectively. Roll back 1 year and the most I had dare try was enhanced CPC!

But we’re here to talk about Amazon Ads aren’t we?!

When I first started working with Amazon Ads in 2017, it didn’t even allow you to select a date range. Something which I remember being added back in December 2017! What a great addition! But besides from reminiscing, let’s look at the opportunities and challenges working with Amazon Ads presents.

Why is Amazon Ads fun?

While I know the Amazon ecosystem can be frustrating, I love the fact that you can amend and change many things to improve performance.

Think campaign structures and keyword lists which you haven’t seen the likes of for years. Having to increase bids to get a keyword to serve, search term reports which are useful and match types which do indeed perform differently. While I love measurement & tracking, it’s also refreshing to not have to worry about sales, revenue, Cost of Sale (ACoS) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) accuracy quite so much.

On top of this, being able to control the product details pages in terms of titles, descriptions, images, videos, A+ content is satisfying too. Unearthing my SEO and conversion rate optimisation skills of old, plus working with our teams is just fab. Add Stores, offers, best deals etc to this and you have several tools at your disposal to draw from.

Why is Amazon Ads not fun?

Anyone who has been a Seller or Vendor with Amazon will know that Amazon wrangling is a fine art form.

You’re the owner of the brand and you want to control the price you’re selling at, always winning the buy box? You want to stop third-party sellers from undercutting you? You’re in the wrong place!

If you sell on your own website as well as through Amazon, you also have the fun of competing against Amazon, particularly through Google Ads. It’s a balancing act to make sure you get this right.

Amazon is fully aware of its power to acquire sales, and this means you don’t “own” those customer details. They belong to Amazon.