Choosing the right agency partner for your Amazon brand can be tricky, especially since a lot of sellers run into disappointment multiple times with their choice. Finding a reliable and trustworthy agency is difficult, so we wrote this guide to help you make an informed decision.

Relevant experience and background in business analytics

Choose an agency partner that has years of proven experience in online advertising. Ask what is their team’s experience with other advertising platforms, such as Google ads or Meta. A good advertising manager will have experience in platforms prior to Amazon ads. Only then you will know that you are dealing with a true data analyst, and not someone who jumped on the “amazon agency gold rush” that began at the same time as the “private label gold rush” began.

The relevant experience in similar areas will guarantee you that they have better understanding of most important metrics such as: click-through rates, conversion rates, refunds, impressions, clicks and more.

Additionally, when you need to expand your brand, with agencies like this, you can keep your advertising operations all in one place, since they will be more than equipped to run Amazon DSP ads and audience targeting through AMC for you. It should be a normal thing to them.

Agency owners are members of various groups, where internal know-how and experience is exchanged

A solid agency will stay up-to-date with current trends, and will take online and offline conferences very seriously. The best agencies are present on conferences and are part of groups with similar interests where knowledge and know-how are shared.

If your agency partner is frequently attending the best conferences, chances are strong that they learn from the best experts in the industry. Usually, on conferences cutting edge technology and tools are being discussed, so visitors ensure that they have the best resources.

Flexibility

Check how flexible your agency is. The best agencies don’t have the same offer for everyone. Amazon advertising agencies who keep seller’s best interests at heart are usually very flexible in terms of pricing strategies and business models; and they will adapt to the one that works best for you. Don’t go for agency whose approach to onboarding clients is cookie-cutter. There are no two Amazon FBA businesses that are the same. Where you have rigid rules related to onboarding; know that they follow strict SOPs in every other area of their business. With strictly designed rules, it’s easy to forget about context and look at the bigger picture.

This flexibility extends to contract obligations, too. Many agencies require a minimum 3-month engagement from a seller in order to onboard them. Asking someone to commit to working with you for 90 days with no prior guarantees is just plain unreasonable. If you don’t think contract obligation is the right fit for you – you’re right. Just ask for a better deal. Amazon FBA business is very dynamic and the relationship with your suppliers, including service providers, should honor that.

Transparency

Trustworthy Amazon agency will have strong references in amazon sellers’ communities, but also on online reviews websites such as Clutch, Trustpilot, Google. Read Amazonia’s reviews here: https://clutch.co/profile/amazonia-ppc#reviews . If no one heard about an agency before, it’s probably for a reason. You can still give newcomers a chance but you do that at your own risk.

Connections

For your Amazon advertising agency partner, choose companies that are well-connected. Ask them if they know anyone directly from Amazon, and if they have account representatives for some account. Ask them if they know anyone in this industry who could help out with other parts of your business, such as: graphic design, copywriting, SEO optimization, analytics, inventory balancing, sourcing, general VAs, etc. One good recommendation could help you make thousands of dollars, and one good connection could help reinstate your account or save money on preventing mistakes.

Final thoughts

Choosing the right Amazon advertising agency is crucial for your FBA brand’s success. Look for agencies with proven experience across platforms, a deep understanding of key metrics, and flexibility in pricing and contracts. Transparency, strong community references, and valuable industry connections are also key. The right agency should not only meet your needs but also help you scale and succeed in the competitive Amazon marketplace.

Browse through our other articles as well:

Final thoughts

To sum up, ACoS on Amazon is the key indicator of your PPC performance, but it is not the only one. While optimizing the account remember to look at other factors such as keyword relevancy, CPC, number of clicks and impressions, and click-through rate. Although there is no really bad or good ACoS in general, individually having a “good ACoS” means achieving the desired result with a minimum spend. In order to achieve your goals, you should dedicate your time to regular campaign optimization. 

Browse through our other articles as well:

What is Amazon Attribution and how it works?

Blog Content brief:

1. What is Amazon Attribution?
2. How to get started with Amazon attribution?
3. What metrics can you see?
4. How to setup Amazon attribution?

How to setup Amazon Attribution?

You can easily setup attribution tags by using the following steps:

• Register through either Seller Central or Vendor Central – first you need to register for the Amazon attribution program and get approved. Once approved, you can start building attribution tags for all traffic channels you use to drive traffic to your listing.
• Start creating attribution tags – this is done through creating “new orders”. You can choose to create attribution tags either manually or through using bulk files. By using bulk files, you can create up to 100,000 attribution tags at the same time.
• Choose which product you want to track – mark the products that you are doing special promotions for. In example, if you are promoting a discount, you’re doing on one of your listings, you’ll want to track those product’s performance in order to know how many visitors turned into shoppers by clipping the coupons.
• Choose the “publisher” – publisher here is known as a traffic channel, basically. So, with this level of settings, you are able to choose on a product level and traffic level to generate attribution tags.

What are some of the best practices when using Amazon Attribution?

Once you’re all setup and your campaigns are ready to go, they will start collecting the data and it’s time to take action again.

• Target the right audience – social media, especially Facebook, have always been one step ahead of the curve in defining audiences. Use their resources to narrow down audience definitions to the users that will be your potential shoppers one day.
• Improve conversion rates – by directing your external traffic to custom landing pages and storefront, you are able to improve conversion rates. The metrics from Amazon Attribution easily allow you to calculate what traffic source is contributing to the highest conversion rates on Amazon, and act accordingly.
• Ad copy split testing – having access to expand your product reach across social media, also gives you the opportunity to test out various ad creatives and learn how the audience reacts to each one. With continuous split testing, you will quickly find the winner copy and adjust your product listing creatives according to the conclusions from your social listening efforts.
• Use bulk operations to speed up the process – don’t handle this manually if you have hundreds of different campaigns across multiple traffic channels. Bulk files are also available here which makes the whole process a lot easier.

One of the most common obstacles sellers face when they are entering the Amazon marketplace is to get their product to rank and sell. If you’re new to Amazon advertising, this article will help you understand better how amazon ppc works and what ad type serves your goal best.

Before we dive into the specific ad types that are available on the Amazon advertising platform, we’ll answer some basic questions that are common among sellers that want to start with PPC.

What is Amazon PPC?

Amazon PPC is an advertising model where advertisers only pay for clicks from prospective buyers. To put this in simple words, you only pay for a click you get, you don’t pay for the amount of times your ad is shown in the search results page or on product detail page on Amazon. You need to have a seller’s account setup with Amazon in order to be eligible for amazon PPC advertising.

How does Amazon PPC work?

Every time a customer makes a search on Amazon, algorithm estimates what results will it show to them, based on relevancy of the product relative to their search. There is a difference between organic and paid results – paid results are the ones with the sign “sponsored” next to them, like in the below example:

In order to show your product in the sponsored section which usually gets all the premium placements, you need to enter the ad auction. Ad auction on Amazon means that every time when customers are searching on Amazon, a number of sellers are all bidding to show up high in the search results page. The one who bids a highest bid, usually wins the first place in the search results page.  Also, they usually pay less than what was his maximum CPC (cost per click) bid. Maximum CPC bid is the maximum amount of money that you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. Your max. CPC should be as close as possible to the suggested bid, because then your chances to win the ad auction are the highest.

The reason why Amazon is giving everyone a suggested bid recommendation is because average CPCs vary from one category to another.

One thing that can really help you win the ad auction aside from high bids is a high-quality listing. Learn how to optimize a product listing on this link. Having an optimized listing will send Amazon a signal that you are a serious seller and they will take that into consideration amongst other ranking factors.

How to setup Amazon PPC?

In order to begin, you will need a seller’s account on Amazon. Once you have that done and approved, you can go to campaign manager to setup your first campaign. Amazon has three main campaign types available:  sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display.

Aside from different campaign types, Amazon also has different targeting options: keyword targeting, product targeting and audience targeting. Product targeting option is one of the most unique targeting options that you can’t find on any other platform. We will dive deep into each campaign type as well as targeting types to provide you in-depth understanding of the whole platform.

All campaigns have an option to choose the end date or choose to run it indefinitely. Choosing no end date means your campaign will run longer, and a longer timeframe can give you better insights on search terms and keyword performance to further optimize your campaign.

You can also assign a daily budget to your campaigns. Daily budget is calculated as an average daily spend of 30.4 days in a month. This means that – if you want to spend $1,000/month on Amazon ads, you should split that monthly budget by 30.4 and that way you will know how much to assign as a daily budget. Amazon uses average daily budgeting in order to prevent situations when advertisers run out of traffic just because they already spent their daily budget. Every day, the traffic varies, so some days you will spend even double than your average daily budget, and some days you will not even spend 10% of it.

Each campaign has an option to use different bidding strategies. There are three campaign bidding strategies: “Dynamic bids – down only”, “Dynamic bids – up and down”, and “Fixed bids”. You can learn more when to use each bidding strategy in this article here.

Sponsored Products campaign type

This campaign type was the first one to appear in Amazon PPC platform, in form of automated campaigns. You can choose to run your sponsored products campaign automatically or manually. Manual campaigns are good because you have maximum control over your placements, ad spend distribution and targeting. Auto campaigns are good because they contain maximum ad inventory (they consume as much ad space as possible), and also give you great insights into how Amazon is seeing your product. Once you collect some data in your search terms report from the automated campaign, you will much better understand how Amazon is positioning your product in the marketplace.

Ad placements that are offered through Sponsored products campaign types are in the search results, and in product pages. Some of the examples are here:

Manual sponsored product campaigns are the types that offer the same placements as automated campaigns, with the difference of being able to design your own targeting.

The power of manual targeting is in having complete control over where your ads will show up and who you will be competing against.

Keyword targeting through sponsored products ads allows you to rank higher in the search results page. On the other hand, manual product targeting allows you to choose which competitor you want to compete against. That way you get to choose your own placements, by either using category targeting, ASIN level targeting or refined category targeting. Learn more about product targeting options in this article here.

Sponsored Brands campaign type

This campaign type is very convenient for your own brand representation. Sponsored brands ads offer you a premium first place placement in the search results page, as well as some additional placements at the bottom of the page. Have a look at some examples:

Sponsored brands campaign are a combination of a visual aspect and precise targeting. You can also use keyword targeting as well as product targeting to build a sponsored brand ad. The beauty of Sponsored brands ads is that it offers a variety of ad formats and landing pages as well.

There are various combinations you can use: to promote your products from a landing page of your choice, or to feature a single product with an auto playing video. Your ads can lead to a product detail page or to the whole storefront, or to only a part of a storefront that represents a product line. Sponsored brands ads are the first ad type that allows custom images and videos in their creatives so they represent a very powerful tool for raising brand awareness for your brand and driving new customers. Sponsored brands campaigns are the only campaign types that allow you to measure the number of new-to-brand purchases. This is the number of first-time buyers for your brand, so you can easily understand the contribution of Amazon’s advertising platform to your brand’s expansion. New-to-brand purchases are one of the most commonly overlooked metrics in Amazon advertising, and they are one of the most important metrics for growing brands.

Just like in Sponsored products, Sponsored brands ads campaign type allows you to use negative targeting to prevent bad traffic from coming to your website. Negative keywords prevent your ads from displaying when a shopper’s search term matches your negative keyword. You can exclude irrelevant searches, reducing your advertising cost and making your campaigns more profitable.

Sponsored Display campaign type

This campaign type is one of the newest campaign types in amazon PPC. Sponsored Display ads are still being under-utilized because they are relatively new, but you can use them to drive sales growth for your account and take over more market share from competitors. Some of the most common placements of display ads right now are the product detail pages on Amazon. One thing that is also interesting about display ads is that they can also show up on Amazon’s partner websites. This is practically the only ad type that can show ads off-Amazon. Targeting types for sponsored display ads can be either Audience-based or product targeting (this is new). With audience targeting, the ads will show to shoppers who viewed the detail pages of your advertised products or similar products.

With product targeting on display ads, you have an opportunity to win more market share by appearing on your competitor’s product detail pages.