When tasked with driving more sales on Amazon, most sellers focus on the usual tactics.

     Grow organic rankings. 

     Get more reviews. 

     Invest in Amazon PPC. 

     Drive a little traffic from Google. 

What I don’t hear many sellers talking about is using display ads to grow sales on Amazon.   While I understand this sentiment, it’s also a mistake.

Now there’s a way to harness Amazon shopper data to target hot prospects with display ads promoting your products on Amazon. Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform) allows marketplace sellers to run display ads on Amazon properties (like the Amazon App and IMDB) as well as other networks. By leveraging the immense amount of real-time shopper data that Amazon has you can target some pretty amazing groups of prospects. 

In this blog, I’ll outline the top 3 audiences to target using Amazon DSP. We regularly see return on ad spend (ROAS) metrics in the $3 to $1 all the way up to $15 to $1 and occasionally higher.  Meaning if you spend $1 on Amazon DSP ads, you could see $3 to $15 in sales in return. 

  1. Retargeting Audiences.  While this is not even close to a new marketing tactic, it is new for most Amazon sellers. Merchants selling on their own store have been investing profitably in retargeting campaigns for years. Now you can target people who view your products on Amazon and don’t purchase. You can follow them around the web enticing them back to your Amazon listings. This is a no-brainer for marketers. If you’re doing great on Amazon in terms of conversion rates, then you might be as high as 10%. Probably your conversion rates are lower. Even at 10% conversion rate that means 90% of all viewers of your products leave without making a purchase. What if you could strategically target that 90% with ads after they view your products and fail to purchase?  You’ll close more sales. Few marketing activities are guaranteed wins. This is about as close as you can get. 
  2. Similar Product Audiences – As an agency we also drive a lot of traffic from Google Ads. People always ask, “can we retarget visitors to our competitors site?”  It’s a great question and it would be an amazing marketing tactic, but for ecommerce sites off Amazon this isn’t fully possible. Now, with Amazon DSP, it is possible for Amazon sellers. In addition to targeting viewers of your products who don’t convert, you can also target viewers of similar products who don’t convert. So, the next time someone visits your competitor’s product on Amazon and doesn’t purchase you could serve them an ad enticing them to view your products. While this audience will never produce returns with the same level of efficiency of retargeting your own ASINs, it’s still a great audience to target. 
  3. In-Market Audiences – This type of audience is made up of people Amazon deems “in the market” for your category or similar categories. These are shoppers who’ve visited category pages in Amazon that match your product. If you sell organic dog food, as an example, you could target an audience of people “in the market” for organic dog food.  Amazon builds this list of people shopping your categories who haven’t purchased yet.  Once they purchase they are taken off the list.

Like any advertising effort there are several factors that determine whether you’ll be successful using Amazon DSP. Two other important factors are:

  1. The ads you run – getting the creative right to attract customers is critical.
  2. Your bids – ad campaigns can only be profitable if you’re paying the right amount for them. Getting your bid right to ensure the most exposure possible at an acceptable return is key.

That said, audience targeting is arguably your most important task. It trumps everything else. A decent organic dog food ad to a prospect who is actively shopping for organic dog food could result in a sale. Serving a perfect ad for organic dog food to someone who only has a cat will not result in a sale.

It’s time to consider running display ads for your Amazon products. It’s likely something you’re missing, and it’s almost guaranteed to boost sales.  

Learn more: https://omgcommerce.com/