In the world of Amazon advertising, every dollar counts.
The right strategies can turn your ad spend into a powerful engine that fuels growth, drives sales and amplifies your brand visibility.
Even so, without careful planning and constant optimization, a hard-earned budget can easily slip away on ineffective campaigns, irrelevant clicks and poorly targeted ads.
This guide will equip you with actionable insights on limiting wasted ad spend and maximizing ROI, ensuring every cent invested in Amazon Ads works harder for your business.
Zero in on targeting: Optimizing for precision
Refine your audience targeting
One of the fastest ways to waste ad spend is by casting too wide a net. Amazon offers helpful tools to narrow your audience, but they’re only successful if used correctly.
Start by digging into Amazon’s audience insights, which offer valuable data on shopper behavior, purchase history and demographics.
Use this data to build and refine detailed buyer personas representing your ideal customers. The more precise your personas are, the better you can target your ads to those most likely to convert.
Consider segmenting your audiences based on factors like:
Purchase frequency.
Average order value (AOV).
Seasonal behaviors.
For example, if you’re selling outdoor gear, you might create separate campaigns targeting summer hikers versus winter sports enthusiasts.
This approach guarantees your ads resonate more with specific audiences, reducing wasted impressions and clicks.
Master keyword strategy: Quality over quantity
Target high-intent keywords
When it comes to mastering keyword strategy on Amazon, it’s not just about driving traffic – it’s about driving the right traffic.
High-intent keywords indicate that a shopper is ready to make a purchase. These include keywords like:
“Buy.”
“Best.”
“Deal.”
“Discount.”
Focusing on these terms guarantees that your ads are shown to shoppers further down the funnel and more likely to convert.
To identify high-intent keywords, go to your existing search reports and identify keywords with high conversion rates and low ACoS (advertising cost of sales). These are your money-makers.
Use Amazon’s keyword research tools (i.e., the Keyword Planner) or third-party tools (e.g., Helium 10 or Jungle Scout) to find new keywords with similar intent.
Another main component of a quality keyword strategy is long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are longer and normally more specific, with lower search volumes. However, because they can capture very particular search intentions, they often return higher conversion rates than generic keywords.
Instead of targeting a broad term like “running shoes,” consider a long-tail variant like “men’s lightweight running shoes for marathon.” The specificity reduces competition and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Dig deeper: Optimizing for Amazon branded search: Best practices to boost visibility
Implement negative keywords aggressively
Negative keywords are your shield against wasted ad spend. They stop your ad from appearing in irrelevant searches, ensuring you don’t flush your budget with clicks from customers who aren’t interested.
For example, if you’re selling premium running shoes, you might want to add “cheap” or “budget” as negative keywords to avoid clicks from shoppers looking for low-cost options.
The process of identifying negative keywords should be ongoing. Start by regularly reviewing your search term reports to spot terms that trigger your ads but don’t convert. These are prime candidates for your negative keyword list.
Tools like Sellics or ZonGuru can help automate the identification of negative keywords, saving you time while optimizing your campaigns.
Another tactic is focusing more on phrase match and exact match types rather than broad match.
Broad match can be too vague, leading to irrelevant impressions and clicks.
While phrase and exact matches require more precise targeting, they give you more control over when and where your ads appear.
By concentrating on high-intent keywords and effectively using negative keywords, you’ll make your campaigns more targeted and efficient.
This reduces wasted ad spend and boosts your Amazon advertising efforts’ overall effectiveness and profitability.
Optimize campaign structure: Simplify and segment
Segment campaigns for control
Running a well-structured campaign will allow you to minimize waste in ad spend and maximize control over your advertising efforts.
Essentially, that means finding ways to segment your campaigns so that you can track performance very closely and make precise edits.
Rather than lumping all your products into one campaign, consider organizing your campaigns by product type, match type or specific goals.
For example, if you sell a variety of kitchen appliances, you might craft separate campaigns for blenders, coffee makers and toasters.
This approach tailors your keyword strategies, bids and budgets to each product category, ensuring that you don’t overspend on one product type at the expense of another.
By segmenting your campaigns, you can more easily identify which products are performing well and which need further optimization.
Another important strategy is to separate branded and non-branded keywords into different campaigns. Branded keywords typically convert more because they target shoppers who already know your brand.
By isolating these keywords, you can allocate a higher budget to them while managing non-branded keywords more conservatively. This segmentation also provides clearer insights into how well your brand performs independently versus competitors.
Granular bid adjustments
You can further optimize your campaigns through granular bid adjustments once they are segmented.
Amazon allows you to adjust bids based on various factors, such as:
Placement (top of search vs. rest of search).
Device type (desktop vs. mobile).
Time of day.
These bid adjustments are critical in ensuring that your ads appear within the most profitable contexts.
For example, if your ads perform exceptionally well on mobile devices, you can increase the bids on mobile placements to capture more of that traffic.
Conversely, if your ads tend to perform poorly in the evening, you might lower your bids during those hours to avoid wasting budget on low-performing times.
Dynamic bidding is another powerful tool at your disposal. With dynamic bidding, Amazon automatically adjusts your bids based on the likelihood of a conversion.
There are three options:
Dynamic bids – down only.
Dynamic bids – both up and down.
Fixed bids.
While dynamic bids – up and down can help you capture high-converting traffic, it’s important to use this feature cautiously, as it can also increase costs if not closely monitored.
Fixed bids offer more control and can be preferable in campaigns with a strict budget.
Avoid budget dilution
One of the most common mistakes with Amazon Advertising is spreading a budget too thin across several ad groups or keywords. This leads to suboptimal results, as no campaigns receive the focus and resources needed to excel.
To avoid this, regularly review your campaign performance and consider pausing or consolidating underperforming ad groups.