Comparison Shopping Engine Spotlight: Amazon Product Ads
CPC Strategy releases a merchant-oriented comparison shopping engine (CSE) spotlight every month. This month we feature Amazon Product Ads. We’ll break down how it operates and provide some insight on how to optimize your Product Ads account.
Currently, only certain categories of products can be advertised on Amazon Product Ads, including: Baby, Computers, Electronics, Health and Beauty, Home, Home Improvement, Office, Sports, and Toys. Advertising in Shoes, Jewelry, and Watches is available but restricted. To sign up or submit a request to advertise in restricted categories, visit this page.
In the second quarter of 2010, our quarterly study of top ten CSEs ranked Amazon Product Ads the highest in conversions. Product Ads is a hot marketing program for sellers who want to drive traffic to their own Web site and to put their products in front of Amazon’s 79.2 million unique visitors (in August 2010).
At the end of September 2010, Product Ads rolled out their new bidding model. The model is similar to Shopping.com‘s pricing structure in that cost-per-click bids are based on the product price. The model’s impact on ROAS and conversions remains to be seen, it’s definitely a future topic we’ll write about here.
Creating Product Ads
Product Ads requires information for the Category, Title, Link, SKU, and Price fields for each product in your data feed. Recommended fields include Brand, Department, UPC, Image, Description, Manufacturer, and Mfr Part Number.
Top Three things to know about Amazon Product Ads:
1) Unlike most comparison shopping engines, Product Ads does not have its own unique tracking pixel. If you are planning to adjust the bids for your products, make sure you keep a watchful eye on your ROI. Do this by tracking stats through Google Analytics or other third-party tracking software, and make sure you add a referral tag to your product URLs so you can find sales generated by Product Ads.
2) Check your Amazon Product Ads feed processing summary frequently to make sure that your products are being processed and listed correctly by Amazon. To receive your processing summary daily by e-mail, go under the Settings tab and click Account Info, then click the Edit button for Notifications, and verify that your e-mail address is correct and your notification preference is set to Send.
3) Be sure to include a quality image of your product. According to Colleen Aubrey, Senior Product Ads Manager, “In an Amazon test, we found that adding a good quality image to a detail page increased page views by over 60% and orders by over 25%.”
New Product Ads sellers who get their first click before December 31, 2010, will receive $75 in free clicks (link).
Next week we’ll write a blog focused on merchant best practices with Amazon Product Ads. Stay tuned!
Related articles:
Merchant Best Practices with Bing Shopping – Part II
Merchant Best Practices with Google Product Search
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