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Product Launch Amazon Sponosored Ads|Beispiel für Sponsored Products auf der Suchergebnisseite. (Quelle: Screenshot amazon.de)|Beispiel für eine Sponsored Brand Ad auf Amazon

Product Launch with Amazon Search Engine Marketing

Would you like to launch a new brand, product line or product on Amazon? Is your inventory listed on Amazon and ready to get shipped? Then you should start pushing sales. This is where Amazon Advertising comes in: How do you launch a product on Amazon by utilizing search engine marketing (Sponsored Ads)? Find out the answers to these key questions:
  • What are the prerequisites for a successful product launch on Amazon?
  • Which advertising media are suitable for a product launch on Amazon?
  • Are there any special keywords you should use?
  • What does a sales-promoting bid strategy look like?

The prerequisites for a product launch with Sponsored Ads

Before you start advertising your items, you must fulfill a number of conditions. You should start your advertising campaigns only when these conditions are met.

1. Optimized content: First of all, it is necessary to optimize the content on the product detail page. Performing a comprehensive content relevance analysis ensures that you create content tailored to the needs of your customers. Optimized content forms the basis for an effective advertising strategy.

2. (Vine) Reviews: For online shoppers, reviews are key drivers for visiting the product detail page and a crucial factor for the purchase decision. Without reviews, the conversion rate is much lower. To assess whether the new product has enough reviews for the launch, take a look at your product’s surroundings. Depending on the category, the number of ratings can vary considerably.

Note: Vine reviews are a special type of reviews. Amazon selects consumers based on various criteria and then invites them to test and review a product before publishing it. The manufacturers have no influence on vine reviews. The independent opinion of the product testers is at the forefront. Instead of Vine reviews, you can also try to get verified customer reviews purely through organic ranking and traffic. Generating "normal" reviews for a new product is difficult in most cases and requires that the article has been sold several times.

3. Sufficient stock: Make sure you have enough merchandise in stock before advertising a product more intensively. Especially at the beginning, the supply should be guaranteed not to run out of stock (OOS). Advertising OOS products generally makes no sense, as either a competitor has the Buy Box or customers cannot order the advertised product at all. This means that you waste your marketing budget and may even be promoting the sales of other sellers.

Which advertising media are suitable for a product launch on Amazon?

For a product launch on Amazon, it makes sense to use all three Sponsored Ads formats: Sponsored Products (SPs), Sponsored Brands (SBs) and Product Display Ads (PDAs). In addition, you can place ads via social media or Google.

Sponsored Products

At the beginning of the campaign, mainly SBs and SPs are used to promote sales of newly introduced products. The more sales are pushed, the higher the placement of the item in the search results by the Amazon algorithm. As a result, organic sales usually increase as well.

Note: Products that do not make it to page 1 of the search results are uninteresting for the respective keyword and virtually invisible for the Amazon user. Only a very small portion of users search on page 2 or 3. The first four rankings on the first search result page usually generate the most clicks.

Sponsored Brands

Sponsored brands have the advantage that you can immediately draw attention to the novelty with a suitable claim. Note that it is recommended to stop advertising the former product lines in advance to focus on the launch products.Included items should have a certain number of customer ratings so that potential customers consider them for purchase, thereby increasing the CTR. Other than that, you still have the option to refer to your Amazon Store in the ad and include ASINs that do not have a priority.

With an Amazon Store you can feature products better as it offers more space than the product detail page. You can also incorporate various design elements, such as product videos. Alternatively, it is also possible to create your own landing pages and add ASINs to specific keywords. A subpage of your Amazon Store can also be linked.

Less is more: Too many items in the store or on the landing page could quickly distract potential customers from the actual, freshly launched product and increase the bounce rate. If necessary, users will purchase another product from your Amazon range instead.

Best Practice: Experience shows that a maximum of 24 products per subpage should be integrated in a store. For self-made landing pages, the optimum is between 6 and 10 ASINs.

Product Display Ads

Product display ads can also be an effective support for a product launch on Amazon. They are usually located close to the shopping cart.

PDAs are an effective tool to draw customers' attention to your new product immediately before the purchase is completed. However, do not place ads on product detail pages of higher priced products of your own brand. In this way you prevent the shopping basket value from decreasing (down-selling).

Choose keywords for the product launch

In general, you should advertise the launch ASIN in your own brand name to draw consumers' attention to your new products. Thus, advertised ASINs are listed directly under your brand.

If your product already has several reviews, advertise it directly with generic keywords. The organic ranking can be improved most effectively due to the high reach of generic keywords. The more budget is available, the wider you can advertise your products. The quantity and quality of the keywords plays a role in increasing the reach.

There is a distinction between short-tail and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are for example “pot”, “pan” and/or “pot”. When your budget is limited, specific long-tail keywords are used, such as “pressure cooker 26cm silver” or “ceramic induction pan”. The more specific the customer search, the higher the conversion rate.

It is necessary to differentiate: Would you like to sell a completely new brand on Amazon or are you launching a new product or product line?

For a new product line, it is advisable to place sponsored brands and sponsored products on keywords of the preceding products. In this way, you can draw your customers' attention to the fact that a revised product line exists.

Best Practice: Avoid advertising items that are already displayed under the brand name search results. You can protect your brand and present new products at the same time.

It is recommended to create additional automatic SP campaigns. Amazon shows this ad type automatically. Auto campaigns can provide information about which (new) keywords are relevant for the launched product. The algorithm remembers when, for example, a customer searches for a silver saucepan and then clicks on a corresponding ad. You should integrate the keywords from the auto campaign into your manual campaigns later.

Note: Auto campaigns are useful if you are not yet fully familiar with your market. They are displayed on all relevant keywords - usually brand keywords. As Amazon carries out the targeting independently, the setup effort is very small for the advertiser.

What does a sales-promoting bid strategy look like for product launches?

When launching, it is important to give products a boost over a certain period of time. For the campaign to gain momentum, aggressive, high bids are necessary.

SPs offer you the possibility to influence the placement of the ads in a targeted way. Advertisers can adjust the bids in the Amazon Advertising Console. If you increase your bids for all keywords in the first places of the search results, the chance of occupying them increases.Place CPC bids above the market average to generate as many clicks and keyword insights as possible. Nevertheless, you should monitor the campaigns continuously. Especially low performers may need to be adjusted or turned off. On the other hand, you should force top performing keywords more strongly.

Fortunately, increased costs for market launches are only incurred initially and selectively and are therefore easier to cope with. Ideally, your product launch campaigns will lead to a good organic ranking on relevant keywords. This results in a long-term increase in turnover. After the launch phase, bids and budgets can easily be reduced. However, the campaigns should not be switched off, as the competition never sleeps either.Decisive KPIs for the product launch with Sponsored Ads are the conversion rate and the click-through rate, as they have a lasting influence on the visibility of the ASINS. Therefore, focus on keywords with a satisfactory conversion rate, even if they may be more expensive. For such campaigns, it is not advisable to look at the ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) in isolation.

The more relevant the keywords are to a product, the more likely customers are to convert them into a purchase. This promotes the product’s organic ranking as it gains sustainable traffic for keywords relevant to the purchase. Due to continuing sales, the launch products stay on the top positions of the search results even with less advertising.

Conclusion

Search engine marketing is an effective instrument for a product launch. You can increase your sales in a systematic way, especially in connection with the possibilities of the Amazon Demand Side Platform (Programmatic Advertising).

The main focus of a product launch with Sponsored Ads is on an aggressive generic bid strategy. As a result, you generate sales on the one hand and build up the ranking for your launched product on the other.

When introducing a new product, you should be careful about running campaigns on competitor keywords. You would be wasting a valuable marketing budget that could be invested in organic rankings. The ASINs of your competitors usually perform better for their own brand keywords and have a higher relevance to the Amazon user. This makes it difficult to establish a satisfactory ranking for competitor keywords.