Amazon provides many advertising options to help sellers get their products in front of more buyers. One of the most popular formats is Amazon Sponsored Products.
This is one of the simplest advertising options for sellers and a great place to start.
But are these ads worth it? Should you use them to get more sales?
Here we take a closer look at the pros and cons to help you decide whether they’re worth it for your business.
TL;DR
- Amazon Sponsored Products provide you with a simple way to start advertising on Amazon.
- They have several benefits, including ease of getting started, accurate targeting options, and full control over your budget.
- They also have a few disadvantages, like being very competitive and not being the best option for generating brand awareness.
- Overall, they’re a great way to advertise your Amazon listings and get more sales, so try them yourself.
Advantages of Amazon Sponsored Products
There are several benefits of using Amazon Sponsored Products. Let’s start by taking a look at them.
Increase the Visibility of Your Products
One of the key benefits of using Sponsored Products is that you can almost immediately generate more visibility for your chosen products.
If you’re struggling to get enough potential customers to find your products in the first place, these ads can quickly get more eyes on them.
You may have a new product that you know will be popular, but you don’t have many sales yet, and it’s not appearing high up in the Amazon search results. As such, no one can find it in the first place.
Even if your listing is well optimized, it can still be difficult to get it more visibility. And that’s where ads can help.
You can set up your ad targeting using products or keywords and start to make it more visible almost immediately.
The ads can show in several places, including at the top of the page above the search results, where they’re prominently displayed to catch the eye of shoppers.
They can also display within the search results on product detail pages, as well as desktop and mobile devices, so people can see the ads wherever they’re searching.
There are lots of different places to get more visibility for your products. If more people find them, you’re more likely to drive more sales as long as you’re selling products that people want.
Advertise to Warm Targets
One of the best things about Amazon advertising is that the people who see your ads are already looking to buy.
When you advertise on Google Ads or another platform, you’re reaching a different type of audience. Amazon, however, is a place where people go to buy.
They may not be ready to make a purchase, but they’re certainly considering it. Many people are researching products and prices, and when they find something they like the look of, there’s often not much in the way of getting them to click the Buy button.
This is all to your advantage. You’re presenting your ads to warm targets rather than cold ones.
If you have a great product and you have a good pricing strategy in place to make sure it’s competitive, you might just need more people to find your product to get more sales.
When people start purchasing your product, there’s a good chance your listing will start to appear higher up in the search results. So you’ll get it in front of even more people alongside the extra visibility provided by your Sponsored Product ads.
These are cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means you only pay when someone clicks on an ad.
The people who click on your ad are interested in the product, and while they may not buy it, at least they’re interested. So you’re only paying for clicks where there’s a good chance that the shopper has some interest in what you’re selling.
Easy to Get Started
There are many advertising options available on Amazon, including Amazon Sponsored Display ads, Sponsored Brands ads, Amazon Live, and more.
But none are as easy to get started with as Sponsored Products.
If you haven’t got much experience in advertising or this is the first time you’re paying to run ads, you may be unsure where to get started, how to develop tactics, how to ensure you’re targeting the right audience, and more.
But everything is easy with Sponsored Ads.
You can create an ad campaign in minutes, choose the products you want to advertise, and set up an automatic targeting campaign. With this, Amazon does all the targeting for you. You can then set your budget and launch your campaign right away.
You could even start to generate sales and earn ad revenue that same day.
The beauty of using Sponsored Products is that you can get as involved as you want to. Go into Campaign Manager and take full charge of targeting, set up an ad group, and optimize your ads.
You can do as much of the work as you want to, but you also have the option of letting Amazon do it for you.
So there’s nothing to stop you from getting started, and you don’t need any specialist skills to run your campaign. As long as you know which product you want to advertise and how much you want to spend, you can get going.
Related: The Complete Guide to Advertising on Amazon in 2023
Get Full Control Over Your Budget
One of your primary concerns will be expenditure. How much can you afford to spend on ads?
You may be worried that you’ll suddenly find you’ve spent your entire annual advertising budget in a week.
With Amazon PPC campaigns using Sponsored Products, you don’t have to worry about that because you can easily set your budget, and Amazon won’t go over that.
The way this works is by setting a daily budget. This is an average amount, so it may go slightly over one day and slightly below on another. But over the course of a week, you don’t have to worry about going over your budget.
This gives you complete peace of mind because you know you can’t overspend on your ads unless you consciously raise your budget.
Get More Sales for Specific Products
With Amazon Sponsored Product ads, you can choose which products you want to advertise. It’s not so much for branding but more for getting sales on particular products.
This means you can choose specific products to promote for different reasons.
This could mean seasonal products. If you have Christmas products or Halloween products, you can advertise them in the lead-up to these events.
With time-sensitive products, you don’t want to miss out on sales at the most important time of the year. So use ads to ensure they get more visibility just when you want to sell more of them.
But it’s not just seasonal products. You might have excess inventory that you want to get rid of. You could cut the cost, but to get rid of the items faster, you can run an ad campaign for a few weeks and shift them faster.
Or you may have new products that you want to gain more traction for. It can be difficult to do this even when you know it’s a great product. Shoppers need to first be aware of the items before they can buy them, and Sponsored Products can make this easier so you can get more awareness for new products.
Excellent Targeting Options
When you run Amazon Sponsored Products ads, you want to get your ads in front of as many potential buyers as possible while reducing your costs as much as you can.
Sponsored Products come with excellent targeting options. So, you can make sure your ads only display to the right people, meaning shoppers who are more likely to be interested in making a purchase.
You can do this by targeting specific keywords, which are the words that people type into the search bar to find what they’re looking for.
You can use Broad, Phrase, or Exact matches for even more targeted results. Or you can target products instead and use negative keywords too.
Whatever your Amazon advertising goal, you can use accurate targeting to make sure more potential customers see your ads.
Track Your Results
Another good thing about advertising on Amazon is that you get access to lots of tools to find out how well your ads are performing.
There’s no point in running ad campaigns blindly or just looking at how many products you’re selling. You need to get access to more accurate data.
Find out which keywords are working best and which keywords you shouldn’t be targeting, and then optimize your ads. Try to spend less on advertising and get better results to avoid wasting your marketing budget unnecessarily.
Generate reports to get more insight into the performance of your ads and find out how different ad placements are doing. There are lots of analytics you can use to identify the best tactics and continue to optimize your campaigns.
Disadvantages of Amazon Sponsored Products
There are fewer disadvantages to using Amazon Sponsored Products. Here we’ll take a look at some of the potential pitfalls to be aware of when you start advertising on Amazon.
Not Ideal for Brand Awareness
Sponsored Products are great when you want to target specific products to make more sales. However, they’re not the best option if your primary advertising goal is to increase brand awareness.
In this case, you might want to use a different advertising option, like Sponsored Brands or Amazon Live. If you have a larger budget, you might even want to run Audio ads that people can hear while listening to Amazon Music.
The Sponsored Brands format allows you to include a headline and your logo, and display three products in your ads.
When shoppers click on your ads, you can send them to your Amazon Store, where you can provide a branded experience.
So, while Amazon has lots of great options for your brand awareness, the Sponsored Products format is better for boosting sales of specific products.
It Can Be Very Competitive
It sounds like a great idea: you want to boost sales of a product, so you run an ad campaign, get your ad in front of your ideal target customers, and boost sales.
Unfortunately, everyone else has the same idea. Amazon ads are competitive because other sellers know how effective ads can be.
As a result, you’re going to have to compete with more sellers. That can make it more expensive to bid on popular keywords, and you may end up not getting the results you were expecting.
Of course, the best option is to keep going and optimize your ad campaigns. Over time, you’ll work out how best to compete to reduce your ad spend and boost your sales at the same time.
Time-Intensive
If you’re just starting out with advertising on Amazon, it can take a while before you optimize your campaigns properly and start getting the results you want.
As mentioned earlier, it’s easy to get started. But optimizing your campaigns is an ongoing process.
Competition changes, some keywords stop being as effective, and it’s not something you can switch on and forget about while enjoying the extra sales.
If you want to maximize sales, you’ll have to keep working on your ads on a weekly or even daily basis.
The alternative is to hire an ad specialist to do the work for you, saving you time that you can put into other areas of your business.
Should You Use Amazon Sponsored Products?
Now we’ve looked at the pros and cons of Sponsored Products, should you use them?
The answer is yes, you should definitely try them out.
Almost every seller can benefit from advertising on Amazon. You may find that after a few months, the extra sales are not worth the extra cost of advertising, but you’ll never know until you try it out.
You may find that you can give your sales a serious boost, and you may end up wondering how you ever survived without advertising.
For the ease of use, the targeting options, the ability to limit your advertising spend, and the potential for results, Sponsored Ads are definitely worth it.
Before You Get Started
If you like the idea of using Sponsored Products to get more sales, there are a few things you should do first.
Before spending any money on advertising, make sure the other areas of your business are in good shape. That means optimizing your listings.
You don’t want to pay for clicks and then send shoppers to unappealing listings. Your listing should include all the relevant information customers need to make a buying decision, as well as appealing images and copy.
Try to get more reviews for your products too, which are important for social proof.
Don’t forget to get your pricing strategy sorted out too. You want to be winning the Buy Box and make your products more competitive, and a good repricing strategy using Repricer will help you do this.
Then you can start advertising on Amazon using Sponsored Products to take advantage of all the benefits.
Experiment with Sponsored Products
The Sponsored Products advertising format is one of the most popular options for advertising on Amazon. It’s the easiest way to start advertising, and the results can be excellent, especially when you make an effort to consistently optimize your campaigns.
Even if you’re completely new to advertising, there’s no reason you can’t start a campaign—and you could find that you give your sales an immediate boost.
Whether Sponsored Products are right for your business or not, you’ll likely only find out once you start running campaigns. But if you want to increase sales of specific products, this format is a great starting point.
