Amazon PPC is a marketing strategy that involves using pay-per-click ads on one of the largest online retail platforms — Amazon. It entails creating a campaign to show your target audience what you’re selling through ads. Every time a customer clicks on that ad, you pay a pre-determined sum.
With so many sellers on Amazon, how do you ensure your ads are better than the rest?
Instead of spending hours online looking for the answer, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 effective Amazon PPC tips to help your campaigns perform better. We even asked our experts to share their views on the best Amazon PPC strategies for 2025!
Table of Contents
- Analyze Your Competition
- Use Keyword Research Tools
- Start With Longer and Indirect Keywords
- Test Your Ad
- Leverage Cross-Channel Promotion
- Optimize Your Ad Content
- Increase Your Ad Budget During High Traffic
- Use Ad Groups for Products With Similar Prices
- Encourage Customer Feedback
- Leverage Sponsored Display Ads
- A Short Amazon PPC Guide
- Amazon PPC Tips Takeaways
1. Analyze Your Competition
The first tip on our Amazon PPC list is to pay close attention to your competitors. What types of Amazon ads are they using? What keywords are they targeting? When are they posting their ads? Questions like these can help you figure out how to structure your own Amazon ad for maximum optimization.
Tools like Ahrefs can also be of help by providing insights into how your competition is getting its organic traffic. Use this information to shift the same audience to your brand with the help of Amazon paid ads.
Tilak Shiwakoti, CEO of KBK Digitals, gave us his opinion on why competitor analysis is important: “In any business competitor analysis is one of the key factors to uplift the growth of business. You need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing as a marketing process. We need to understand their strategies; this can give us fresh ideas for our own campaigns.”
2. Use Keyword Research Tools
The second tip for Amazon PPC optimization is to carefully research the keywords you want your ad to target. A good keyword analysis is imperative to nail your Amazon PPC tactics. Luckily, today, there are plenty of tools that can help you do comprehensive keyword research.
A very popular — and free — option is Ahrefs. Other options include Quartile and Intentwise. Regardless of which keyword tool you choose, use it to construct a list of valuable words and phrases you can use to boost your Amazon ads. Make sure they're connected to your niche and lead the audience directly to what you sell.
If you don’t like using third-party tools, Amazon also has a Suggested Keyword feature. It provides words you can use based on past search queries and ads with similar products.
3. Start With Longer and Indirect Keywords
The third tip on our Amazon PPC list is about the types of keywords you use. If you’re just starting with Amazon PPC or launching a new product, start with long-tail keywords as your first step. These are longer phrases or questions people search for online. They usually have three or more words and can help you target a broader audience.
Why go for longer keywords first? Usually, long-tail keywords have less competition so they’re easier to rank for. Once you establish your brand or product and people recognize you as a player in the market, you can begin adding shorter terms to your keyword list. Then, move high-performing keywords to Exact match and little by little, separate the ones that perform the best into a Single Keyword campaign.
Aside from long-tail keywords, targeting indirect keywords is another good first step. These keywords also reach a broader audience and drive brand awareness.
Extra: Don’t forget about negative keywords. Amazon PPC allows sellers to exclude the words they don’t want to be associated with their product when constructing the ad. As Tilak Shiwakoti told us, “Ignoring negative keywords can result in budget waste and pointless clicks.”
4. Test Your Ad
Testing your ads is one of the best Amazon PPC strategies for businesses of all sizes. It helps you determine whether your ad is performing well, pointing out different areas where you can improve it.
One type of testing that is always suggested for Amazon PPC campaigns is A/B testing. It involves creating two versions of the same ad with slight variations and running both. The version that performs better is the ad you should be focusing your efforts on.
We asked Tilak Shiwakoti for his opinion on A/B testing, and he shared how ignoring A/B testing is one of the mistakes businesses make when marketing via Amazon paid ads. He said, “Campaign efficacy may be restricted if alternative ad copy or creatives are not tested. Keep doing A/B tests on ad versions to see which ones your audience responds to the most.”
5. Leverage Cross-Channel Promotion
To get the most out of your Amazon PPC ads, consider promoting them on other platforms as well. Although leading Amazon sellers understand there are differences between Amazon’s PPC and ads on other platforms, Amazon ads can still be shared elsewhere. Usually, it’s on other affiliate pages like Netflix and Google and even livestreams like Twitch. This way, your ads get to reach more people, potentially leading to higher profits.
For this tip, Shiwakoti added, “We need to consider building PPC campaigns with different marketing channels, such as email and social media, to create an aggressive brand presence that can drive traffic across platforms.”
6. Optimize Your Ad Content
A solid Amazon PPC campaign strategy is to keep optimizing your ads. But we’re not just talking about the budget and keywords — optimizing your content is also needed so your ads attract more visitors.
When optimizing Amazon PPC ad content, pay attention to:
- Ad text
- Ad format
- Call to Action (CTA) buttons
- Landing pages and their content
- Image or video format (if you include any)
7. Increase Your Ad Budget During High Traffic
Optimizing your Amazon PPC ads is not just about tailoring the ad itself. A smart strategy is to schedule your ad or increase your ad budget during peak hours. For instance, if your Amazon Sponsored Product ad has a Christmas theme, you can expect more traffic and conversions during the holidays. Hence, it’s best to increase your ad spend for that period.
Another strategy is to focus more of your budget on high-performing ads. If there’s one ad that outperforms the rest, you should invest more in it instead of wasting resources on other low-performing ads.
Regarding this tip, Shiwakoti said, “Missed sales opportunities may result from campaigns that are not modified for seasonal trends.” To fix this mistake, he added, “Keep abreast of market developments and proactively modify campaigns for busy times of the year or noteworthy occasions.”
8. Use Ad Groups for Products With Similar Prices
Grouping different products in ad groups is a better way for you to keep organized and manage your advertising cost of sales (ACoS). Products with similar prices will keep the advertising costs at a decent level relative to your revenue.
Contrarily, including products with higher prices will influence the ACoS of the highest-paying product. To put it simply, your lower-priced products will bring down the ACoS of your higher-priced product.
9. Encourage Customer Feedback
Another tip for Amazon PPC is to take advantage of any customer feedback you get. Use the feedback not only on your main site but include it in your ads. For instance, if your campaign has a video, you should include testimonials from previous clients. Alternatively, you can highlight the most significant testimonial and add it to your ad text.
Shiwakoti had this to say about this Amazon PPC tip: “Don’t underestimate the power of reviews. Encourage satisfied customers to share their thoughts, as positive feedback can significantly enhance your credibility and conversions.”
10. Leverage Sponsored Display Ads
The final suggestion we have on our list of Amazon PPC tips is to use the Sponsored Display ads. These are essentially retargeting ads — campaigns sent to previous customers or ad viewers to re-engage them and spark renewed interest in your product.
For Shiwakoti, Sponsored Display ads are still overlooked by many businesses. He adds, “Using this type of ad to retarget the visitors who have viewed products but didn’t convert at a particular time is important. We need them to keep our brand promoted and encourage customers to revisit.”
A Short Amazon PPC Guide
The 10 Amazon PPC tips we shared above can significantly improve your business by boosting your paid advertisement tactics. But to ensure you use them correctly, you must have basic knowledge about Amazon PPC.
That’s why we also include this short guide to help you get started with paid ads on Amazon.
Why Use Amazon PPC?
Think about it — Amazon has a net revenue of over $500 billion and more than 236 million monthly visitors. Considering these numbers, it would be a huge mistake for a company to skip Amazon as a potential advertising option.
But this also means the competition is high. With so many players in the game, your business can easily get lost among the countless listings. So, how do you get over this? By directly presenting your service or product to your target audience, a.k.a., using paid ads.
Pay-per-click ads on Amazon help you reach a broader audience and allow your listing to stay relevant. They also increase brand awareness and get customers intrigued when searching for a similar product.
Amazon PPC Key Metrics
When placing paid ads on Amazon, you should note these few KPIs:
- Clicks: This is the number of people who have clicked and opened your ad. Clicks are used to calculate how much your ad will cost.
- Impressions: This is the number of times your ad was shown to your targeted audience.
- Attributed sales: These are the actual sales you make. It shows how many viewers have opened the ad and completed a purchase from it.
- Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): This percentage lets you see how much you need to spend to earn $1. With it, you can compare the success of your ad — by knowing how much you’re getting vs spending on the ad, you can tailor it for better results. Calculate it by dividing the ad spent by ad revenue.
- Return on Ad Spend (RoAS): This shows how much you’re making on an ad for every dollar spent. It’s calculated by dividing the total ad revenue by your ad spent. Essentially, RoAS is the reverse of ACoS.
Types of Amazon PPC Campaigns
The types of ads you can use on Amazon include:
- Sponsored Products ads: These are the most common types of PPC ads on Amazon, used to boost a certain product. Sponsored Products ads can be set up with automatic or manual targeting. Automatic allows Amazon’s algorithm to determine which keywords are best for your listing, while manual lets you hand-pick them.
- Sponsored Brands ads: With Sponsored Brands ads, businesses can draw customers' attention to more than just one product in their lineup. They’re used for presenting the whole brand, rather than a product. These ads have three formats: video, store spotlight, and product collection.
- Sponsored Display ads: These ads are used for retargeting customers who have previously checked out your products. The biggest benefit of these ads is that they can appear on Amazon and affiliate pages like Google and Netflix.
Creating an Amazon PPC Campaign
Finally, let’s briefly skim through the steps you need to start your Amazon PPC strategy:
- Open your Amazon account: Go into your Account Seller Central. Then, click Advertising and go into Campaign Manager. Click the “Create Campaign” button.
- Choose the type of campaign: Select one of the campaign types by clicking “Continue” below them.
- Fill out the campaign information: Next, fill in all the information about your campaign. This is where you add the name, start and end date, budget, and more. Think carefully about the budget, how long you want the ad to run, and the type of targeting.
- Choose your keywords: Add which keywords you want your ad to target. Amazon also has a Suggested Keywords tab, or you can do your own keyword research to find relevant words and phrases. Don’t forget to include negative keywords.
- Choose a bidding strategy: Because we’re talking about PPC ads, you have to set a bid for the keywords in your ad. Amazon offers different bidding strategies: dynamic (up and down, or just down), fixed, and rule-based bidding.
Amazon PPC Tips Takeaways
As one of the leading online retailers around the world, Amazon PPC ads are a great way for businesses to boost their brand awareness, increase traffic, get more customers, and raise profits. By implementing the Amazon PPC tips we’ve shared, you can gradually optimize your campaigns to achieve the best possible results.
Remember, crafting an Amazon pay-per-click strategy is not a quick process. It’s a process of trial and error, testing different Amazon PPC tips until you find what works for your business.
If you need help coming up with a detailed and effective Amazon strategy, turn to our directory of the best Amazon PPC agencies.
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