If you’ve been seeing your Amazon PPC Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) get worse recently, then keep reading. I’m going to share with you some reasons why your Amazon PPC may not be working as well in 2022.
Reasons Why Your Amazon Pay-Per-Click Isn’t Working As Well
This is something I’ve been hearing a lot from different Amazon sellers. I figured, I’d share my thoughts on the issue.
Why do sellers’ PPC campaigns are not as profitable as they were a couple of years ago? Or even a few months ago?
Progressive Increase In Prices Of Good And Services
Presently, we’ve seen a massive amount of inflation happen within the last year or even just six months. There’s a ton of inflation, random little things that we buy every day. These may include: gas, eggs, milk, cheese, bread–everything just increased in value.
When you have that kind of increase; your shopping bill, let’s just say, doubles in amount. Now, for some people that are on very tight budgets, that’s going to price them out of frivolous spending. This means they’re not going to have as much money to buy the things they used to because it’s been burnt up already by the higher prices of everything else.
If you have a product that is not necessarily an essential good that they need to buy to survive, then you may be seeing a decrease in sales. When you’re spending the same amount on PPC or you’re still bidding high on keywords but your sales are not coming in, then you’re going to naturally see your Return on Ad Spend go down as well.
The traffic may still be there and people may be searching but they may just not be buying. Sometimes shoppers just want to shop, because that’s their way of killing time and entertaining themselves but they may not be buying because they know that they’re on a tighter budget.
That’s why I’m thinking inflation could be reducing people’s spending and buying habits now. There’s not much you can do about that, right?
Maybe you can put a coupon on your listing, maybe you can try to reduce your price, but ultimately you can’t affect or change anything to do with inflation, because your costs are probably going up just like everybody else’s. I would just say if anything, pull back on PPC, don’t spend as much if you can help it but, at this point, you can’t do much about that.
Fear Is Affecting People’s Buying Habits
There’s a lot of fear-mongering going on, as we got the stuff that’s going on in Russia, this whole shortage, inflation; we got all the stuff with the virus going on. There is a lot of fear being spread out there, so that’s going to affect people’s buying habits.
They may be a little bit more conservative with their spending, they may be wanting to save more because maybe they think that a recession is right around the corner, maybe they think their income is going to drop here soon and so they’re being more conservative and putting more dollars towards their savings account instead of more dollars towards random stuff that they would buy on Amazon.
Unfortunately again, there’s not much you can do about people’s spending habits. You just kind of gotta wait it out and see if anything changes or if we somehow get away from this fear-mongering period that we’re in. Unfortunately, it is what it is now.
Quick Introduction
Before I jump into the next reason; real quick, if you don’t know me, my name is Ian Smith with Evolve Media Agency. We’re an Amazon marketing agency that helps sellers boost the conversion rate of their listings, rank higher, get more reviews, and increase PPC performance.
It’s Just Seasonal
Going back to our list; perhaps because the seasons have changed. We’re kind of in the middle of winter now. There are a lot of other factors that play into the season changing, as far as what I mentioned; inflation and people being more conservative.
Now in winter, demand for your product may be lower and maybe the search volume for those keyword phrases is lower as well. So with supply and demand: if the amount of volume is lower, then that means there’s still the same amount of sellers’ demand bidding on those keywords but there are not as many keywords being served there.
With the reduced demand and the same amount of supply, it’s going to naturally make your PPC ads perform not too well, so what you could potentially do is look into off Amazon marketing, reduce your budget and spend that you’re spending on Amazon PPC, go spend on Google Search ads or off Amazon platforms, like investing in content creation and differentiating your listing from your competition by spending money outside of Amazon on content and other ad platforms, then driving traffic to Amazon to try to reach outside of it and bring people to your listing. Try to stir up some of that demand now reason.
How Pandemic-Related Products Are Performing Now
This is more about products that did well because of the virus that we’re kind of coming out from. So I’m seeing this with a lot of my supplement clients and with other products that benefit from that virus.
I’m seeing that the demand is going down, sales are going down, and revenue is going down because not many people are trying to go crazy with buying immune-boosting supplements.
For example, if you are in that immune supplement space and your sales are going down and you’re still spending the same amount on PPC and it’s just not giving you that same profitable return. A reason may be because people may be thinking that we’re coming out of it, so they don’t need to keep spending on the supplements and the same preventative products they were buying before.
Increased Competition In Market Share
Next up: competition increases, so there are a lot of sellers entering Amazon; launching new products daily. You gotta know that this marketplace is becoming more and more competitive. You need to step your game up because they are for sure stepping theirs up.
When they’re trying to launch new products, they’re trying to beat out whatever competition is currently in that product category. With them potentially selling their product better than yours: with better photo assets, better video assets, maybe they’re bidding higher on PPC–which is pushing up the cost of PPC in general, then you need to know that with more competition comes a higher cost of customer acquisition. Overall, you need to improve your listing.
Try Refreshing Your Listing
Your listing might need a refresh. You may need to revisit those photos that you have on and you may need to start doing things that you weren’t doing before; which is amazon posts.
That’s s a free exposure type of place: if you’re brand registered and if you have a storefront built out, you can now post and show up in more places around Amazon for free. I suggest to start creating video content and filling out that video slider above that question that customer Q and A section.
You need to start posting videos there, as well as video answers to your customer questions. Also, you need to start pushing more videos onto your product photos area.
Overall, start running more videos as sponsored video ads; split testing there, so investing in more content creation to differentiate yourself and separate yourself from all those competitors on Amazon daily. You need to step up your game with your conversion rate and get yourself to seem like a much better option than your competition now.
If you need help with getting some videos created, photos created, lifestyle photos, getting Amazon posts going getting a store built out. Please do reach out to me and my team. We’d love to help you: go to evolvemediaagency.com.
Change How You’re Bidding On Keywords & Phrases
The next strategy is something to just keep in mind. You can’t bid too high, but you might observe that your bids on certain keywords are too low.
Maybe you’re bidding on two popular keyword phrases and you need to probably go more long-tail keyword phrases, but ultimately you need to possibly increase your biddings on certain keyword phrases.
You can only bid so much until it’s no longer profitable and it doesn’t even make sense to bid that high but just an idea I wanted to throw out there: maybe you need to have your PPC team revisit those keywords and find new keyword phrases that you can start bidding on, as well as putting into your listing, changing up your title, putting more customer Q and As on your listings, that you can have more keywords in that section.
Maybe looking into revamping your EBC A+ content area, putting new and different keywords into that section as well.
Bad Reviews Might Be Influencing Conversion Rate
Lastly, the conversion rate has suffered because you’ve gotten some bad reviews. Now, this is most important in the top reviews section, near the bottom of the listing.
If you’ve got some bad reviews that are showing up in that top review section, what I recommend to you is to go find those four and five-star reviews that are maybe on deeper in another page, click the helpful button, get a bunch of your friends and your audience and your customers to go to that page and click the helpful button to push up the higher reviews and push down the lower one-star, two star-reviews.
That way, in that top review section–at least not many people, are seeing the bad reviews that you’ve gotten. I know this is a very challenging task to slightly manipulate your reviews and try to get your better reviews to the top of the actual top reviews section, but if that’s hurting your page’s conversion rate because there’s that one photo review that gave you a one-star and they just have a ton of photos, you need to try and combat that. Play a little bit of defense with that.
Those are some of my reasons as to why your PPC campaigns may not be performing as well as they were, even just a few months ago. There has been a lot of changes in the economy, the government, and the rules.
Going forward this whole virus happening and we’re in some very weird times right now, so a lot of people are being conservative. A lot of people are taking a second look at their spending habits.
Just keep that in mind but ultimately, you need to be more innovative in your marketing for your Amazon business.
What Evolve Media Can Do For You
We’re here to assist you. My team and I specialize in Innovative ideas for marketing Amazon businesses and launching new products.
We also give you your Amazon Customer Data so you can:
- Email them from Amazon
- Send them a postcard
- SMS text them
- Get more reviews
- Make them come back and buy again
- Have them purchase from keyword-rich URLs to boost your ranking
Those are some reasons why your Amazon PPC are not working as well now. So again book a free call with me by going to evolvemediaagency.com. Thank you for reading.
