According to Push-pull’s report, approximately 90% of the UK population uses Amazon to buy products. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you don’t leverage this percentage for your online business? We’re talking about widespread brand awareness, overflowing pound notes, and increasing profits. Just imagine that.
But you need to know how to advertise on Amazon UK for that. And this is exactly what we’ll discuss in this article. In a clear and defined way. Let’s start.
TL;DR – How to Advertise on Amazon UK
In this article, we’ll discuss the 7-step process for advertising on Amazon UK. The steps are shown below, and their details are discussed in the rest of the article.
- Step 1: Set up an Amazon seller account
- Step 2: Create your first advertising campaign
- Step 3: Select which products to advertise
- Step 4: Execute keyword research and targeting
- Step 5: Place your bids
- Step 6: Launch your campaign
- Step 7: Monitor and update your campaign
This may seem like a lot, so quit the guesswork and partner with IG PPC to maximise the effectiveness of your Amazon advertising – get a free audit with us today.
What is Amazon Advertising?
Amazon PPC advertising is a model where advertisers (or businesses) pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way to buy visits to your product page, rather than earning them organically.
PPC for Amazon involves setting a budget, choosing a set of keywords, and creating targeted ad campaigns to reach your desired customers. Primarily, there are 3 types of ads you can use for your PPC campaigns:
- Sponsored Products: These ads appear within shopping results and on product detail pages.
- Sponsored Brands: These Amazon ads feature your brand logo, headline, and up to three of your products. They appear at the top of the search results.
- Sponsored Display: These ads appear at various places where your customers spend their time. Prominent positions include the home page, product detail pages, customer reviews, and even Amazon marketing emails.
Effective Amazon PPC optimisation would leverage all these ads by dedicating a fixed portion of their ad spend to each.
Is Amazon PPC Worth It?
The short and clear answer is yes. An optimised Amazon PPC ad campaign will increase your sales by introducing your products in visible spots while sprucing up its organic ranking as well. Not only that, you also achieve a high Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) because the PPC ads enable your products to appear in unique placements, which are inaccessible with organic strategies.
Yes, the rising PPC costs and the complexity of the Amazon Marketplace might make you doubtful of this investment. Still, if you can get yourself an experienced and result-oriented team of individuals who can implement effective bid strategies, things will almost always be in your favour. Book a free audit with us.
Types of Amazon UK Ads
There are various types of Amazon UK ads you can use to target potential buyers and grow your revenue.
Let’s outline them below:
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products help you broadcast individual listings that you offer on Amazon. They help your items rank on Amazon shopping results and product searches.
These ads use a cost-per-click model, so you only pay when interested customers visit the listings.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands, previously called Headline Search Ads, focus on promoting your merchant account. The ads highlight your brand to enhance visibility and increase recall value among potential buyers.
Promoting your brand also informs interested buyers about other products in your catalog.
Sponsored Displays
Use Sponsored Displays to grow your brand’s online presence beyond the Amazon ecosystem.
Unlike Sponsored Products and Brands, which are limited to Amazon marketplaces, Sponsored Displays publish your displays on third-party platforms to attract potential buyers and direct them to your product listings.
Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
Whether you are a self-service merchant or a brand, you can leverage Amazon’s DSP service to reach a wider audience.
You can pay for an ad slot on various affiliated platforms, including Prime Video, Twitch, Kindle, Alexa, freevee, and Fire TV.
The ads will be broadcast in at least 10 markets, including:
- Austria
- Australia
- Canada
- France
- Italy
- Germany
- Spain
- United Kingdom
- United States
How to Use the Amazon Advertising Platform
Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) is Amazon’s demand-side platform that enables sellers and Amazon aggregators to advertise outside Amazon. Unlike Amazon’s marketing service (AMS), which aims to advertise on Amazon, AAP targets people on other sites based on their behaviour on your Amazon listing.
For example, a shopper looked at your mascara’s listing on Amazon but didn’t purchase it. The next day, she visited a beauty blog to read about new outfit trends and saw your ad there. She clicks on that ad and lands on your Amazon listing – that’s how you use AAP to drive more sales and brand recognition.
Essential Checklist Before Starting Ads on Amazon UK
The goal of advertising on Amazon UK is to attract interested buyers and convince them to order your products. However, you must meet some requirements for effective Amazon PPC optimization.
Check all items on the list below when placing ads on Amazon UK:
- Professional Seller Account: Create or verify your professional selling partner account to qualify for Amazon ads.
- Amazon Brand Registry: You must register your store on the Amazon Brand Registry to unlock the Sponsored Display or Sponsored Brands.
- Valid Payment Method: Attach a payment method that you’ll use to remit the ad rates.
- Shipping Capacity: Confirm that you can ship the listed items to the countries in which you are targeting the ads.
- Featured Offer: Ensure the advertised items are eligible for the Featured Offer when using Sponsored Products. Otherwise, your ad will be flagged and not displayed to shoppers.
- Product Eligibility: Amazon does not allow ads for adult products or used and refurbished items. Check Amazon’s ad policies to confirm that your products are on the permitted list.
- Relevant Keywords: Learn how to find keywords for your products and ads to improve your listings’ or store’s Amazon organic ranking.
How to Advertise on Amazon UK
Let’s now touch base on how to sell on Amazon UK. It’s not much different than advertising in any other country—just the target market and the nature of products will vary. For example, tomato sauce was the top canned food sold in the U.S. in 2018. In comparison, baked beans were the most consumed in the UK.
Okay, now to the steps.
1. Set up an Amazon Seller Account
Register for an Amazon Seller Central account by providing your credentials. You must decide between an individual plan, where you’ll be charged per sale (75p), and a professional plan, where you’ll be charged a monthly fee (£25).
2. Create Your First Advertising Campaign
You’re finally about to click on an option that will pave the path for incoming pound notes worldwide. Okay, let’s cut to the chase.
Based on your advertising goals, you must choose between Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display Ads. We’ve mentioned where each of these ads is shown in the marketplace. After this selection, populate the following fields:
- Campaign name: Decide on a recognisable name.
- Daily budget: The daily limit on how much you spend each day on your ad campaigns.
- Start and end date: This defines the duration of your campaign.
3. Select Which Products to Advertise
If you’re a small store with 4-5 SKUs only, it’s better to select all of them. If you have a large catalogue, select them based on their price, rating, and seasonal trend. The official Amazon UK webpage explains this in more detail.
4. Execute Keyword Research and Targeting
Keyword research is as important to an Amazon PPC campaign as a heart is to the body. That’s why you should be smart and insightful in this process. Identify relevant keywords that have low competition but forecast good conversions. A good tip is balancing the broad, exact, and phrase match terms. You can target them in 2 ways:
- Manual targeting: This allows you to have complete control over which keywords or products your ads will appear for.
- Automatic targeting: You leverage Amazon’s intelligent algorithms to determine where your ads should appear.
5. Place Your Bids
This involves choosing the bid strategy between dynamic bids (up/down), fixed bids, or bid+. A fixed bid means Amazon won’t touch it, while a dynamic bid means it will change your bids in real-time if they’re likely to convert.
6. Launch Your Campaign
You’re all set to hit that ‘Launch campaign’ button now. But launching a campaign is one thing. Monitoring and improving Amazon ads is another. The latter will define your success in Amazon’s cutthroat and competitive world.
7. Monitor and Update Your Campaign
Regularly check metrics like clicks, Advertising cost of sales (ACoS), and Cost per click (CPC). Increase the bids for high-performing keywords and reduce them for underperforming ones.
IG PPC can assist you in designing effective ad campaigns for Amazon UK that increase sales. Book your free audit today.
How Much Does Amazon PPC Cost?
Although the cost of pay-per-click on Amazon UK depends on different factors, it typically varies from £0.1 – £5 per click. The cost depends on:
- Competition: Competitive products like electronics have a high CPC.
- Click-through rate (CTR): A high CTR results in lower CPCs.
- Bidding strategy: An effective bidding strategy that merges both manual and automatic targeting decreases the PPC cost.
Amazon Advertising Best Practices in the UK
Planning on how to advertise on Amazon UK the right way? Here are 5 best practices to follow:
1. Maximise Visibility by Skipping End Dates
Skip adding the end date to your Amazon ad campaigns. This helps the customers discover your products any time they search on Amazon. Remember that you’ll never spend more on an ad campaign than its daily budget, so no problems there.
2. Monitor and Target Winning Keywords Regularly
Perform regular monitoring. After every 2 weeks, check your search terms reports to find the keywords resulting in clicks and sales. Then, these keywords will be targeted manually by setting up a Sponsored Products campaign and one automatic targeting campaign. This dual approach allows you to stay on top of search trends. It’s also one of the necessary steps that the best Amazon PPC agencies take to grow the sales of their client’s brands in the marketplace.
3. Start Broad, Then Scale Winning Variations
Start selling with all variations of your products and then scale the ones that perform the best. For example, you’re selling a protein powder in different flavours and serving sizes. Make separate product listings for each and run ads on them. After 3 weeks or so, analyse which product pages are driving the most ad revenue for you and double down your Amazon advertising effort on it. Mina Elias, a renowned PPC expert, swears by this tip.
4. Comprehensive Ad Strategy Across Amazon UK
Use a combination of Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, and Sponsored Display ads in your Amazon UK advertising strategy. This approach targets shoppers at every stage of their buying journey. Dedicate the highest percentage of your ad spend to Sponsored Products, though (60% – 70% is a good number).
5. Optimise Listings for Promotional Badges
Optimise your product listings for Amazon’s promotional badges. This skyrockets your CTR. MetricsCart explains this perfectly.
Common Challenges in Amazon UK Advertising
As a merchant selling on Amazon UK, you may encounter challenges that limit your audience’s reach and prevent you from maintaining a healthy Amazon TACoS.
Below, we highlight the main pitfalls merchants face when advertising on Amazon UK and how to mitigate them:
Crowded Marketplace
The Amazon UK marketplace is extremely competitive, making it difficult for your store or products to stand out even with ads.
As such, you need a refined strategy, such as focusing on a micro-niche, to help you create a unique positioning for your brand above your competitors.
Product Seasonality
For most products, demand fluctuates throughout the year, depending on the season. Amazon often prioritizes in-season products to drive sales.
While this favours merchants whose products are in demand, it hurts those whose products are out of season.
You may need a change in strategy, such as running promotions, to boost your seasonal sales on Amazon.
Evolving Consumer Trends
It has become challenging to keep up with the ever-evolving consumer trends. Ads that were effective and generated significant clicks could become obsolete within months.
Immigration trends also mean you must adapt your ads to various languages and cultures.
Rising Ad Costs
New merchants join Amazon UK every day, increasing the demand for the available ad slots.
Consequently, this increases advertising costs, locking out smaller merchants with tight advertising budgets.
You must strategically select which ads to purchase to maximize your budget.
Complex Ad Formats
As a new merchant, you might be overwhelmed by Amazon’s ad formats, especially how to utilize them effectively.
The ads impact your campaigns’ reach and whether you maximize your ROAS. Compare different formats, such as Amazon Sponsored Products vs. Sponsored Brands, and pick the option that aligns with your marketing strategy.
Regular Algorithm Updates
Amazon updates its algorithms regularly, impacting your ad reach and engagement.
As such, you must quickly adapt to the new algorithms to retain visibility.
Most of the highlighted obstacles when advertising on Amazon UK require digital marketing expertise to address them. It takes time and money to learn the skills you need and become proficient.
Book a free audit so we can help you refine your Amazon advertising strategy and boost your ROAS!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let’s now discuss some common questions you might have regarding Amazon advertising in the UK.
What is Amazon DSP Advertising?
Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) advertising allows businesses to programmatically buy display, video, and audio ads both on and off Amazon. It helps target specific audiences using Amazon’s customer data, increasing brand visibility and driving sales for sellers.
What Are Some Amazon Advertising Tips?
Some powerful Amazon advertising tips experts swear by are the following:
- Download the search term report and filter out the keywords that generate zero sales or have a high ACoS to reduce underperforming keywords.
- Each ad group should contain a maximum of 5-7 keywords. After this limit, impressions and sales drop.
- Use broad match modifiers to expand the scope of ad appearance.
Can Anyone Sell on Amazon UK?
According to the official Amazon UK website, you can sell on the marketplace as an individual or as a brand. The selling plan rate (at the time of writing) was 75p for the individual plan and £25/month for the professional plan. That being said, certain products can’t be sold on Amazon, e.g., spy cameras and solutions manuals.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, advertising on Amazon UK isn’t quite different from selling in any other country. You just have to consider the cultural trends, seasons, and purchasing inclinations of your target customers.
This article gave you an overview of how to advertise in that region effectively and profitably. However, assigning tasks to professionals is always a smart decision.
At IG PPC, we specialise in tailored Amazon advertising strategies and management for your business. Schedule a free audit to see how you can increase your conversion rate.
