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Use Facebook Ads and Google Ads to promote your Amazon products

OldStreetMedia
Kennedell Amoo-Gottfried
Published
April 28, 2022
Modified
September 16, 2022
Use Facebook Ads and Google Ads to promote your Amazon products

Amazon is by far the largest single platform that people go to when they want to buy something online. It is the first stop for roughly half of all customers.

But what about that other half? How can you get your products in front of them?

You can harness the power of other massive tech advertisers, not least of which are Google and Facebook, and Amazon is okay with you doing this! After all, it’s business for them, too. 

The advantage of using Google or Facebook to drive traffic to your product listings are pretty self explanatory. Simply put, the more channels you put out there for people to see your product, the higher the likelihood you will rope them in to sell. 

Going outside Amazon will also allow you to build up a customer list - something you cannot do on Amazon’s own platform. Through AdWords, you can build lists and have access to customer information you don’t get on Amazon, meaning you have the chance to communicate with them for new promotions

Google it!

Fortunately, Google Ads are mainly based on text and keywords - not unlike Amazon Sponsored Products. This already provides an advantage as much of the hard work - such as identifying the keywords, getting a cost-per-click you are happy with, setting the campaign budget - will already have been done and can mostly be transferred. 

AdWords also requires less maintenance than Sponsored Products does and can be generally left to operate on its own without a huge amount of upkeep and input. 

Even if ads get lower play on Google or Facebook, it would still be worth placing them there. If, for example, you’ve got a keyword that gets 1500 searches each month on Amazon, but only 500 on Amazon, that’s still potentially 33% more revenue on the table - though it is true that shoppers on Amazon tend to already be further down the conversion tunnel than those browsing on Google. 

Just keep in mind that on Google’s side there are also a few requirements that Amazon does not necessarily have, including the need to provide a quality user experience that includes providing enough navigation options and a professional-looking landing page that includes a privacy policy. 

There are also a lot of similarities between how AdWords work and how Amazon campaigns are structured.

There are three layers to advertising on AdWords - which you can access through the Google Ads account dashboard: the campaign, the ad group and the ad itself. 

The top layer - campaigns - is not one you will have many of as a typical Amazon seller. Perhaps you’ll have one per product you’re looking to advertise, and maybe even another dedicated to building an email list. 

Below campaigns, you have ad sets that tend to be organised thematically or by groups of keywords, which you can set against each other to compare their relative effectiveness. You don’t want to stuff too many ad groups into each campaign, 10 should be a comfortable maximum.

Finally, you’ve got the ads themselves within the ad groups, which you can also compare against each other for the top performer. 

As with the structure, the match types are also similar to Amazon’s: Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match and even negative keywords that you want to exclude.

What about Facebook? 

So here you have a social media site that is encroaching on 3 billion active users - a huge chunk of the world’s population, and advertising through its platform is some of the most cost-effective marketing you can do outside of Amazon’s own service.

Facebook has become so effective at collecting data that it has turned its ad service into a fine-tuned and precise tool, showing your ad to the people most likely to convert, based on a highly effective algorithm. 

One element Facebook ads have that Amazon and Google don’t is the social element: reactions, likes, comments and shares. If your ads can produce these, the ad costs will go down. Reactions like these also act as a way to measure performance when testing ads against each other on Facebook.

The level of precision on Facebook also lets you target lookalike and custom audiences, showing your ad to audiences that look like a list of leads you already have, which you can then layer further by adding demographic details like age, interests and other behavior. Much of the time, for understandable reasons, the custom audience will outperform the generic one. 

It also translates to more flexibility in testing, as you can test similar ads - with the same copy and ad creative - to different target audiences, then show different ads to the same audiences and find the best combinations from different angles. 

With both Google and Facebook, you will want a landing page as a buffer between the campaigns and your Amazon listing, allowing you to place a pixel to track the users and collect their emails. It will also let you put promotions out there and - very importantly - filters out customers that are less likely to convert, which in turn limits potential damage to your conversion rate on Amazon and, by extension, your rankings. In Google’s case, it becomes more difficult to get approved if you don’t have a landing page. 

Naturally, this will push up your ad spend - putting your ads on other platforms doesn’t come free - and the conversion rate on those other platforms will likely be lower than Amazon’s, but you will be getting exposure. Your advertising cost of sales (ACoS) will go up, but a major objective is to get your total advertising cost of sales (TACoS) down as your organic sales increase from the added visibility.


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Threecolts acquires, launches, and grows eCommerce software & services, and owns other stellar businesses including Old Street Media, HotShp, SellerBench, Tactical Arbitrage, Bindwise, RefundSniper, ChannelReply, and FeedbackWhiz.

Old Street Media supports businesses with their advertising, inventory management, and other eCommerce services. We collaborate with over 4000 brands and have generated $600M in sales in the past year.

Reach out to HotShp for help with product titles, descriptions, bullet points, social posts, and blog posts.

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If you are more interested in the #1 Amazon Arbitrage software, try TacticalArbitrage. With over 6,000 users, TacticalArbitrage will help you discover profitable products to resell on Amazon.

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FeedbackWhiz is an Amazon sellers management software that helps merchants scale their business by automating email campaigns, improving seller feedback, getting more product reviews, monitoring listings, and analyzing profit and accounting data.