Why Your Brand Needs Amazon Advertising Automation

It’s no secret Amazon is heavily investing in expanding their advertising capabilities in an effort to attract larger brand budgets, and to compete with the duopoly of Google and Facebook’s advertising platforms. This year we’ve seen Amazon rapidly roll out new features and performance metrics to help advertisers better measure their campaigns, and to encourage brands and agencies to spend more on Amazon search advertising.

As enterprise brands clue in to the huge revenue potential with advertising on Amazon, competition is heating up for advertisers who face rising keyword competition, bid prices, and an increasingly saturated advertising landscape. To stay competitive on Amazon, many advertisers are using third-party tools to help them manage their campaigns, and perform a range of optimization activities that are not yet possible directly within Amazon’s advertising platform. 

Amazon Advertising automation software is now able to take the traditionally-offered bid automation one step further, by adding in the next layer of automation —  keyword harvesting automation. With an end-to-end automation system in place, Amazon advertisers can now fully automate their daily campaign management tasks — and even increase their return on ad spend (ROAS) in the process.

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The report is based on a comprehensive analysis of over 2 million Sponsored Products campaigns and you can download it for free today.

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How does Amazon advertising automation work?

When you run Amazon Sponsored Ads, the bulk of your daily campaign management tasks can be split into two main activities: keyword management and bid management. Both activities need to be performed routinely and can be very time-intensive for the advertiser, who needs to ensure that the keywords and bids running in every campaign are optimized for maximum performance and ROI.

When we talk about automating Amazon Advertising, we are mainly talking about using tools to automate these processes; keyword and bid management. Automated bidding software for Amazon merchants is already available on the market, with various platforms including Sellics offering rules-based bid automation software.

However, Amazon PPC keyword management, i.e. the process of harvesting new keywords, moving top-performing keywords between campaigns, and adding low-performing keywords to negative lists — continues to be a time-intensive task performed completely manually by advertisers.

Full Amazon Ad Automation = Bid Automation + Keyword Harvesting Automation 

For Amazon advertisers, keyword harvesting automation is the missing piece of the puzzle that would complete the suite of tools needed to fully automate Amazon Sponsored Ads management. At Sellics, we’re very proud to be one of the first Amazon software platforms to bring this new automation tool to the market:

How does Keyword Harvesting Automation work?

With keyword harvesting automation, advertisers are able to automate the movement of their keywords between ad campaigns based on positive performance (e.g. sales), and simultaneously move low-performing keywords (e.g. clicks but no sales) to negative keyword lists to minimize wasteful ad spend. 

This automated keyword movement is very powerful, as it speeds up the mass optimization of keywords based on their performance, which leads to higher sales volume, and more revenue generated via Amazon Advertising. It also reduces the manual workload of the advertiser, without risking any campaign performance issues.

The rules-based automation software is a huge perk for Amazon advertisers who want flexibility and control over their keyword strategy, as they have the ability to fully customize the automation rules as they see fit. 

How does Bid Automation work?

With bid automation, advertisers are able to automate their keyword bid management. Bid management (and your bid strategy) have a direct effect on the performance of your Amazon ads; if you don’t optimize your keyword bids on a regular basis, your ACoS will creep up and you risk losing sales to competitors bidding against you for the top advertising space in Amazon search results. 

With bid automation software, you are able to set predefined rules that will automate the entirety of your daily bid management tasks. There are 3 basic automation rules you will setup that will cover your routine bidding tasks:

1. Automatically increase keyword bid (when ACoS is low)

2. Automatically lower keyword bid (when ACoS is high)

3. Automatically add keywords to Negative (when a keyword generates a certain amount of clicks but 0 sales)

Use Amazon Advertising automation to improve your bottom line results

Depending on the size of your Amazon business, automation software can prove to be immensely useful in different ways. For small-to-medium businesses who typically only have 1-2 employees managing their advertising account, it’s hugely beneficial to be able to reduce the learning curve and workload needed to set up and run successful Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand campaigns.

Instead of manually managing keywords and determining when to change bid prices on a daily basis, the software will decide when to raise or lower bids and move keywords through campaign types, based on your pre-defined rules and campaign goals. The advertiser only needs to do a periodic overview and check-in to see if their campaigns are running smoothly, and occasionally tweak the automation rules as they see fit. 

Naturally, the same benefits also apply for large brands and agencies who typically manage large advertising portfolios with hundreds of SKUs advertised on Amazon. Here, it’s even more critical for the advertiser to leverage automation tools that can help them manage hundreds of Amazon PPC campaigns, where they will only need to input a few parameters (target ACoS, budget, etc), and let the software do the rest.

Finally, the biggest advantage of ad automation software, regardless of the size of your Amazon business, is the measurable improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) that can be achieved. Our clients typically see a 26% increase in ROAS after 3 months of using Sellics to manage their Amazon Advertising campaigns. You can read our customer success stories here, and learn more about how our client FWRD used Sellics to successfully hit their target ACoS goals.