Jewelry ECOMM Tech

Q4 can be a wild and hectic time for any retail business, and with competition fiercer than ever in the eCommerce sphere, online retailers are looking to leverage any advantage to get their messages out. Amazon captures a staggering market share of online holiday shoppers, so competing on their platform is crucial for most businesses—but how can yours gain the competitive edge? If you want to see great conversion rates and strong sales on Amazon during the holidays—and who doesn’t?—PPC is a critical part of the picture. Relying on organic search results to get your product in front of shoppers is quite risky if you don’t have a strong market share already established, so it’s important to let PPC be your “foot in the door” to help you get there. And even if you’re already doing well on Amazon, PPC can help you drive higher performance. However, we all know that during the holiday season, things work a little differently, and PPC is no exception. These seven key strategies will help your business refine its PPC operations and make this holiday shopping season your best one yet.

1. Start your PPC campaigns before the holidays hit.

A great PPC campaign usually isn’t built overnight. Most will require some time to fine-tune keywords and bid strategies, so start early. The longer you have a campaign running for, the more eyes you’ll have gotten it in front of, and the more relevance you’ll have built up in your customers’ minds.  This is especially important for shoppers who start looking early. Whether or not they consciously remember the ad they saw when they searched for golf club bags at the beginning of October, when they see your ad again in December, it will communicate the message that your brand has an established presence and is probably worth a look. One particularly effective way you can leverage this strategy is to start automatic exploratory campaigns using Amazon’s suggested keywords in Q3, then check their performance and zero in on your most powerful keywords later through manually targeted campaigns. This allows you to get the best of both worlds: refreshing your campaigns with new blood in the keywords while selecting only the most cost-effective and relevant terms.

2. Run A/B tests ahead of time to find the most effective messaging. 

To avoid wasting time and ad dollars during a period when both are at their most precious, you should have a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t by the time the holiday shopping season starts. You can get a jump on this by running some A/B tests during Q3. Test your CTR, CPC, conversion rates, and any other metrics important to you on PPC points such as images and image angles, copy, which products to pair with which keywords, and so on.  Remember that you’ll need to optimize product detail page content as well, so don’t neglect it in your comparison tests. And if you’re dreading the process of testing each variable, using a professional Amazon PPC management service can make your A/B tests easier and more effective and take some of the stress off your marketing team.

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