Amazon used to do books only, but now they essentially do everything. They provide grocers, videos, cloud storage, music, and even some physical places. They actually have an advertising platform as well, and that’s called Amazon marketing services. There isn’t too much talk about it, and it actually is slightly different from PPC and AdWords. They’re both keyword driven, have an API, but AMS isn’t accessible, have flaws and limits, and they do push the auto-campaign option.
The advertising platform at the goal wants to make it so that you don’t need an expert team to manage it, not because they hate agencies, but instead to lower barriers. The automated campaigns are simple to set up, and dynamic search ads are terrible, and the automated ones are decent in comparison to what you can achieve with manual ads. You should use AMS though in order to build up keyword knowledge. The auto targeting is to research the best keywords that are performing. From there, you funnel from broad to exact keywords, and from there, you go to exact match, with automatic getting the rest of the inventory.
In AMS, Amazon wants you to have a singular campaign for each product. The granularity s good, and for some people, it works, but often there is too much granularity since it can be quite hard to manage this, especially in the sea of tens of thousands of campaigns that are being built. You should focus on the headline, the sponsored product, and the product display ads. Within each of those, you’ll need to put a separate brand on there and to see how they match up to other retail products. With AMS you can also use automatic reporting, and this will create a test that you can optimize with since sponsored ads and product types can be used to measure it. You should make sure to A/B test these and the variations that are there. you’ll be able to, with AMS, optimize each of these based on the tests.
Your biggest issue with AMS is the accelerated delivery mode, and it can cause issues with traffic. Accelerated delivery and Standard delivery are taken from AdWords but are applicable to AMS as well. The algorithm is designed to spread the budget around the entire day, and in accelerated mode, the algorithm is used to optimize and ensure that the entire budget is used, and it creates the problem with the budget being lost about halfway through the day, which causes you to miss out on various leads. However, this is potentially going to be fixed as more data supply happens.
AMS is similar to the other types of marketing campaigns that are out there, and you should still use AdWords, but this is a new system that you can use to pioneer, and if you are looking to get the early-bird advantages on this, you can do so in order to take AMS to the next level you desire.
