As you may remember, I’ve been experiencing computer trouble for the past week, so I’ve been using Electra’s computer. The first time I tried to log in, I was stunned to see a new login screen asking me to specify what kind of Advertising I was interested in:
This was the first I realized Amazon has retired three of its ad services and products as well. The move looks like a response to Google’s move earlier this year which saw the search engine giant dropping many of its advertising brands. Despite becoming America’s second $1 trillion company, Amazon’s marketing and advertising division still lag behind its two direct competitors: Google and Facebook Ads.
The All-new Amazon Advertising Department
In an announcement made last week, as reported by The Passive Guy, Amazon SVP Paul Kotas introduced the all-new Amazon Advertising department. Amazon will be retiring three of the company’s most popular marketing platforms: Amazon Media Group (AMG), Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP).
We’ve unified our product offerings under the name ‘Amazon Advertising.’ This is another step towards our goal of providing advertising solutions that are simple and intuitive for the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who use our products to help grow their business.
The company will phase out the three previous platforms – AMG, AMS, and AAP – in the next couple of months.
Under Amazon Advertising, the company hopes to eliminate the confusion caused by the number of ad products and platforms they have built these past years as the digital marketing space flourished. Apparently, these multiple marketing services and products have left some marketers and business owners baffled on what product to use.
What Amazon Advertising Offers
Here is a simplified portfolio of Amazon Advertising services:
- Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands that will enable advertisers and marketers to promote their products or brand by making it easier for customers to search and purchase products in Amazon.
- Display ads will help advertisers reach relevant audiences on Amazon, third-party sites, and apps with the aid of customizable brand or e-commerce creatives and actionable insights. This will enable advertisers to optimize their ads further to achieve various objectives. The Product Display Ads will also be available to advertisers that sell products on Amazon, helping them drive traffic to their product detail pages.
- Video ads will allow advertisers to narrate their brand story and get better customer engagements in brand-safe environments through trusted channels like Amazon and IMDb, on exclusive Amazon devices such as Fire TV or Fire tablet, and across third-party sites and apps.
- Stores enable vendors and sellers to develop their own website that will have its own branded URL on Amazon. With a Store, vendors and sellers will be able to showcase a brand story and product portfolio in a curated customer destination.
- Measurement solutions which include campaign reporting, retail insights, and third-party reporting, will help businesses understand advertising’s impact on shopper behavior—whether they run on Amazon or third-party sites and apps—so they can optimize marketing strategies to achieve results.
- Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows advertisers to programmatically reach their audiences both on Amazon sites and apps as well as through direct publisher relationships and third-party exchanges. Advertisers can manage, optimize, and report on their programmatic display and video campaigns through the Amazon DSP console.
What It Means For You
Well, for one thing you’ll need to log into the new platform.
But the main change is the availability of some nifty new tricks, especially when you combine them with the fantastic Machete App. I will describe Machete, an AMS Amazon Advertising add-on, in an upcoming post but here are two new tools that can do wonders for your sales:
1. Bid Optimizer
Bid Optimizer is a game changer. Offered by the Machete App, it adds the ability to tweak your keywords in a way that lets you optimizing them automatically for your Target ACoS (Average Cost of Sale, i.e. how much it costs you to make a sale) or for the desired number of sales per day.
You can optimize the keywords manually or automatically. The only catch is, the keywords need to have displayed enough times to generate data, so it’s best run on older campaigns.
For anyone interested, Machete is free if your monthly sales are under $300, then increases to $10/month for sales up to $1,000. Also, the first month is free, which means you can safely try it out and see if it works for you.
2. Keyword Analytics
3. Campaign History
4. The Machete/Bid+ Effect
On September 8th, I combined Machete with Bid+, a new setting offered by Amazon. Found under the Campaign Settings tab, it lets you increase your initial bid by up to 50% if that will land your Ad at the top of the Search Results page:
You can find out more on the Machete App site.
Note: The links above are affiliate ones. You pay the same, and I get a rebate for every person who later becomes a paying customer. My recommendation is based solely on how helpful Machete has been for me and how decent their new pricing policy is. However, if you’d rather use a non-referral one, just click here.
Tweet This
Still sounds confusing, lol 😉
Lol–I know what you mean!
Is Machete free if your income is $300 or less per month, or if your income from AMS ads is $300 or less per month? I definitely qualify for the latter…
Lol–the latter! Which is why most of us qualify for the free version 🙂
I need to work with these types of ads more, I admit it confuses the heck out of me!
It’s true, it can get pretty confusing at times. My first 3 attempts were a disaster–you can read all about it under the Marketing tab 🙂
Thanks. I signed up. Now to wait 24 hours and see what it comes up with. 😉
I hope you find it as useful as I have 🙂
HI Nicolas,
If I understand correctly with Machette you pay a monthly fee in addition to your per click cost you are already paying to Amazon. The advantage is you can optimize your ads more closely to where the actual sales are. If this is a great program, why didn’t we see some promotion from Amazon? I noticed that if anyone signs up from your link page (this post) you get credits towards your monthly bill. No offense, but seems like they are using you, a high profile advertising author to do their promotions. Great way to do promotions and save cost for Amazon. Thanks for letting us know, but I’m a little cautious until I know more.
I understand what you mean, and yes, I use affiliate links (as I admit on the sidebar and various other places, I use affiliate links on occasion).
However, you should know that (a) most of my visitors will only ever use Machete free (not many people who make thousands visit my blog, sadly enough) and (b) I only mention on my blog services that I have used personally and have found useful. If not, I make it clear that I’ve never used that myself, but it may be of interest to others.
As I said, Machete is free for sales under, I think, $300. And the first month is free anyway, so you can try it out for yourself and see if it works out for you. No strings attached, affiliate link or otherwise 🙂
Hi Nicholas,
Thank you for the reply to my post. After I hit the submit button, I realize what I said might have been interpreted wrong. I know you never promote anything you haven’t tried and feel it is useful to another writer. I have followed your recommendations in the past and will continue in the future. I will give Machete a try and let you know how it works for me. Thank you for the recommendation.
No worries, Chuck, there’s no offence taken. If you do use it, I hope you find it as useful as I do. Thanks for the comments 🙂
As we say here, ‘It’s all Greek to me”. But reading your explanation, it does sound like an improvement. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
It is, and I’ve seen a nice difference in my sales as a result. But I know it’s not the most exciting of posts for non-authors 🙂