If you’re like seemingly everyone else, you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. That makes it a great space to expand your paid search footprint to drive more sales. Amazon offers its own services with Vendor & Seller Central but they can be really confusing and its user interface is a bit lacking.
If you’re interested in promoting your products on Amazon but want to stay in familiar territory, there is another option: using Facebook.
Facebook allows much more leeway with landing pages meaning you can send users to Amazon. If you’re listing unique items on Amazon, this is a great way to send traffic to your pages & drive sales on Amazon.
What are Straight to Amazon Ads?
Pretty self-explanatory, you’re directing users to your product pages on Amazon rather than to your own e-commerce website. You can proceed as you normally would if you’re familiar with ad creation on Facebook. While starting off, I recommend concentrating on products that are unique to your business and not fussing with products that have competitive buy boxes.
Another tip is I recommend calling out Amazon in your copy to keep things as transparent as possible. There are also some benefits to including taking advantage of Amazon’s brand recognition and other benefits such as Amazon Prime 2-day shipping.
Finally, something to keep in mind while setting these campaigns up, you’ll want Facebook to optimize around driving traffic to your landing page rather than around conversions. We’ll get to the reason why later on (no conversion tracking) but this should give you a good starting place.
Advantages of Straight to Amazon Ads
By leveraging the strengths of both Amazon and Facebook, you can come away with a really unique opportunity. There is a reason Amazon accounts for 43% of all online sales, they have built a great reputation with consumers and keep people coming back time and time again. Small sellers have a great opportunity to sell their products and have it backed up with the peace of mind one gets from buying directly from Amazon.
This comes in really handy if you’re a small brand trying to establish yourself. People do have reservations about buying things from sites they’ve never heard of before. This is a great way to circumvent that problem and shorten the amount of time from brand introduction to sale.
This strategy also eliminates the need to make & maintain your own e-commerce site. I would recommend having a website to build brand recognition and help tell your story but you can “host” your store on Amazon.
You may also see a host of other benefits from directing traffic to your pages on Amazon. Increasing the number of sales of your product can help you rank better, you can re-engage with those buyers to leave a review on Amazon, and hopefully, that leads to more sales organically.
Problems with Straight to Amazon Ads
If you’re thinking this is an amazing idea and have already planned these campaigns out in your mind, there are a couple problems that come up.
Remarketing
Remarketing becomes a big challenge when you’re directing traffic to sites that you can’t place a pixel on! Not everyone is going to buy the first time they see your ad or click to your Amazon product page. Re-targeting those people can help drive more sales and decrease your CPA. If you’re using carousel ads to showcase a few products, you also lose the ability to dynamically remarket that product back to the end user.
A way to compensate for that lack of remarketing would be to use video in your creative. You’ll be able to build a remarketing audience of people who watched some of your video which is better than the alternative of nothing!
Conversion Tracking
This could be a huge drawback unless you have a great ability to track your conversions from these ads. Since one can’t place Facebook’s pixel on Amazon’s website, you’re going to have to get a little creative!
Affiliate tracking may be your best option. If you create a unique affiliate link, you’ll be able to amend your URLs so you can track how many people are purchasing your product after clicking off of Facebook. You do lose the ability to track people who come back a second time directly through Amazon so it’s not perfect.
Final Thoughts
This is something I’m seeing a lot of smaller brands trying; especially for fairly common products. There is no competing for expensive keywords on AdWords and you can use creative ads to help build brand recognition while still getting sales.
While there are some major drawbacks, it can be a great starting point for online advertising or simply something new to test out and put some focus on a platform you may not be utilized to its full potential.