From the Frontlines: Your Amazon Guy

How Does Bid Competition Work:

When customers search Amazon, the search engine sprinkles sponsored placements throughout the results. Often top 3-4 places, 3-4 in the middle, and 3-4 at the end of search.

Vendors/Sellers create campaigns by providing a list of SKUs and a list of keywords/modifiers/bids.

The Search engine takes all relevant bids that match the users’s search and puts them into a stack ranking with highest bids first.

Amazon advertising placement examples

How is CPC calculated:

If our Bid is $2 and our competitor bids $1.25, Amazon would charge us $1.26 (one cent higher than the next lowest bid)

Each click and purchase is recorded in our data export so that we can see any given time-frame there are X clicks and Y purchases for these campaigns.

What is the attribution window:

Amazon allows a 14 day attribution window for purchases to count towards conversion data in our campaigns. This means it is only efficient to update keywords and bids on a weekly cadence.

How does keyword matching work:

If we bid on “wine refrigerator” then it would match many relevant searches:

  • “red wine refrigerator”
  • “white wine refrigerator”
  • “best wine refrigerator”
  • etc.

We are also required to setup modifiers (exact / phrase / broad) which changes how our keywords are matched to the user input.

  • An exact modifier on “wine refrigerator” WOULD NOT match to the keyword “red wine refrigerator”
  • A phrase/broad modifier on “wine refrigerator” WOULD match to the keyword “red wine refrigerator”