Throughout 2019 and early 2020, Amazon introduced several updates to Sponsored Brands to help sellers better reach interested customers and vice versa. Better targeting is good for everyone on Amazon. Understanding these changes and how they may affect your strategy is essential to ensuring success on the platform in 2020.
New Keyword Options for Sponsored Brands on Amazon
Amazon has implemented some changes to how keywords work for Sponsored Brands. These changes involve new options for defining more targeted campaigns. Using these tools, advertisers can ensure that their products reach more interested shoppers and fewer uninterested ones. The new features include broad match modifiers, variation matches, and negative keywords.
Modifiers for Broad Matches
Broad match modifiers are a way to get more control over how the broad-matching logic works. Traditionally, broad matches have given equal weight to the keywords within a targeted term. However, with modifiers, advertisers can adjust the importance of certain words.
For example, if you had a broad match campaign targeting “men hats,” you could add the modifier “+” to make it “+men hats.” This ensures that “men” is always in the search terms that trigger this ad. So, “men’s cap” and “men’s toque” would also be matches. However, the ad would not appear for “wool hat.” This gives advertisers more control to ensure their ads are only displaying for interested shoppers.
Variation Matches
Variation matches extend the potential of broad-match targeting by allowing for synonyms, plurals, and other associated words. This can be helpful in some cases but must be used carefully.
For example, a campaign for your shoe targeting “heels” may also display for searches such as “sandals.” This may be valuable, but it could also cause excess spend. Fortunately, with some of the other targeting tools such as negative keywords, advertisers can maintain control over their targeting.
The key advantage of the Variation Matches change is that advertisers don’t need to think of as many keywords to target. They can allow variations and base their future targeting on the data they collect of what shoppers are actually searching for and clicking through. This system is a valuable opportunity for new insights.
Negative Keyword Update to Sponsored Brand Ads on Amazon
Sponsored Brands can now use negative keywords in the campaign manager and campaign builder. These are keywords that stop your ads from appearing in certain search results. They can be targeted as broad, phrase and exact match types.
For example, if you have an ad for a men’s black blazer, you may have it targeted under key phrases such as “black blazer.” You could use “women’s” as a negative keyword to prevent it from showing up in irrelevant searches.
More recently, this feature was made available for auto-targeted campaigns as well as manual ones. This addition is a major step forward for helping brands avoid wasting ad spend on shoppers that are unlikely to convert.
Amazon Advertising Search Term Report
Another one of the search term changes from Amazon advertising is a new report. While the keyword options are powerful, this is arguably a more clamored-for change.
With this report, advertisers can see the customer search terms that resulted in impressions or clicks of their campaigns. It also provides useful information such as the click-through rate, cost per click and total spend.
For some time, this type of information was woefully inadequate, forcing advertisers to make decisions based off on intuition and end-of-the-funnel sales results. This report provides valuable insight into the earlier stages of the sales funnel on Amazon.
The report can help advertisers to narrow down their keyword targeting. For example, they make find that a subset of searches is producing very low click-through results. This can be used to add new negative keywords or to redefine the targeted keywords in the campaign manager.
Get Help With Your Amazon Sponsored Brands
OperationROI provides experienced and impactful e-commerce marketing management services. Advertising on Amazon and other digital platforms is challenging. Furthermore, the platforms keep adding, removing and changing functionality. It can be hard to keep up. Trust our team to help you master all the latest intricacies of e-commerce marketing.
Check out our portfolio of marketing solutions. If you are ready to start reaching more customers, contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business.
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