An Accounting Take On Competitive Amazon Marketing Campaigns

If your Amazon marketing campaign efforts are going to waste, it’s time for a shift in perspective. Read here and see it differently using an accounting lens.

Photo by path digital on Unsplash

 

Every successful Amazon eCommerce store starts with a well-performing marketing campaign. As someone who sells on this online marketplace, you’ve seen evidence of this success by looking at your competitors—the ones you try to emulate to get a share of the market.

But, for some reason, all the tips and strategies taught to you aren’t working in your favor. You begin to wonder why you’re not succeeding as well as the rest despite using the same techniques.

Maybe you need a fresh take on Amazon marketing campaigns, particularly the pay-per-click (PPC) category. We’ll help you zoom out and use an expert accountant’s perspective on how to make your marketing efforts successful. But before we get into the core of things, we have to ask this question.

Have You Done These Things to Make Your Amazon Marketing Campaign Successful?

Amazon marketing campaigns involve all marketing efforts, and they all have the same goal: to get your products in the hands of those willing to pay to have them. So before we get to PPC advertising, you must first check if you’ve done the following Amazon marketing endeavors.

Promote Your Store

A business that’s frequently seen is seen as trustworthy. Its presence will register customers as a reliable entity they can go to if they want or need what it offers.

Whether new or seasoned in the Amazon marketplace, establishing a business presence is a must. The only way to do that is to promote your Amazon store. It can help boost your Amazon marketing campaign efforts if you haven’t done so yet. Here’s how you can promote your Amazon store.

Optimize Your Listings

Products you offer have more chances of selling if they’re set up to attract a conversion. Listing optimization is what this is called.

Each of your products on Amazon has its own product page. This gives them an online presence. But to sell products, the pages must provide more than just a representation. They have to give page visitors a compelling experience.

So be sure to improve each of your product pages. Upload high-quality images and videos, write compelling copies, and research precise keywords for search engines to read. This will improve your Amazon marketing efforts.

Set Up Affiliate Marketing

Some Amazon marketing campaigns are done off the marketplace platform. Affiliate marketing is one of the common choices. In a nutshell, you create a blog and place product listing links on its pages. The traffic and engagement driven by the blog can trickle down to your product’s exposure and sale.

This is an excellent way to boost engagement and sales. If you haven’t done this for your Amazon store, you should consider getting into Amazon affiliate marketing.

Determine Your Amazon PPC Budget

If you’re an Amazon entrepreneur, you know that most of your marketing efforts rely on PPC advertisements—it’s a game on its own. That’s why sellers fixate on this marketing facet. It gives them control of results that ultimately lead to sales that make your money dreams real.

But to determine success in the Amazon PPC arena and Amazon marketing, one thing you must get right is your spending budget. It must be precise because having less can mean a low-performing advertising campaign while having too much can be wasteful.

This can be one crucial reason why your marketing efforts are stale. You’ll need a new perspective to make sure you approach your PPC efforts with an advantage.

Try viewing it with an accounting lens.

Amazon PPC Viewed Through Accounting 

When it comes to setting your PPC ad budget, the ultimate question is this: how much should you spend?

In many articles, you’ll often get a straight answer. Some will say 10% of your revenue is a good rule to follow. Another one will tell you something different. But the common denominator among these answers is they can be implemented immediately.

This can be a relief, especially if you want to ease your frustrations about non-performing PPC campaigns. But this quick fix is a gamble that can lead to wasted resources and zero results. You’ll need to challenge these answers to really know your ideal budget and have a leg up over your competitors.

Is Your Budget Really a Percentage of Total Revenue?

The problem with setting a fixed percentage of revenue as your budget is it discounts how dynamic your business is. As an entrepreneur, you know how your Amazon business moves relative to the market trends and business environment. So that budget you’re determined to keep may not be suitable after a certain time.

To address this problem, the easiest way to do it is to veer away from a PPC budget focus and widen your view. You must ask yourself not how much you should spend but what business factors within your control affect the PPC advertising budget you set and for how long.

This reframing shifts your focus from a purely advertising perspective and widens it to include the rest of your business, just as an accounting expert sees it. Then, once this is considered, you can accurately plan the right budget suited to your business or seek assistance.

Budget According to Accounting

From an accounting perspective, a budget predicts revenue and expense for a future period. For Amazon businesses, accounting experts can create a budget plan that considers all the aspects of your business’s operation.

For example, they look at your production costs, how many people are on your payroll, what taxes your business should pay, and what assets and investment vehicles you plan on acquiring for a given accounting year.

Considering this, they can pinpoint exactly how much you can spend for PPC advertising efforts without negatively affecting your revenue, cash flow, equity, and other planned acquisitions.

Planning Your Business’s Budget Is One of the Keys

To get the right budget for your PPC efforts, you must plan it with your whole business in mind. We know this is a difficult task, but it will be worth it.

Later we will discuss how experts will set the right budget for your PPC advertising efforts. What’s important now is you understand the advantage of holistic budget planning. This is the first key to building a successful Amazon marketing campaign. The second key is to maximize your budget by using strategies.

Amazon PPC Strategies to Maximize Budget

Proper spending is the second key to a successful Amazon PPC campaign. After determining the right budget, your next step is to execute it, and your goal is to keep to your planned advertising budget or spend less than the planned amount, all while aiming to reach your PPC advertising goals.

Here are some tips to ensure strategic spending of your planned advertising budget to ensure your campaigns stay running until you get your desired results. Note that these are not comprehensive strategies but tips you can use to maintain your budget.

Cap Your Daily Budget

Setting a spending limit for your PPC campaigns is an effective way to ensure you’re in control. This option prevents any further costs when your advertising campaigns are live. In addition, you are ensured that the campaign will stop until the next day when it reaches a certain spending threshold.

This means no more overspending on campaigns you’re not sure will perform as expected. You also avoid committing spending errors when trying to set them manually.

Use Down-Only Bids for Keywords

To ensure your advertising budget is allocated efficiently, you can set your keyword bidding strategy to down-only dynamic bids. This way, you prevent bids for ads less likely to convert, effectively rerouting resources to high conversion ones. It’s an excellent way to ensure you spend with a high probability of return.

Invest in a Few Niche Keywords

Another tip you can use is to focus your budget on a few keywords that are relevant to your business. This spending tip must be accompanied by good keyword research. Once you have enough data or insight into what keywords have the most clicks, you can focus your advertising budget on bidding on these keywords for higher clicks and conversions.

Default on Investing Sponsored Products

If your budget is relatively small, you may consider pushing your products directly via Amazon’s sponsored products. This type of PPC peddles your goods instead of using other advertising efforts such as search ads.

Sponsored products can garner high clicks and conversion rates, so it’s a workable tip if you want to get as many conversions with whatever budget you have.

You can allocate at least 75% to 80% of your budget. This is provided you’re not following a long-term strategic advertising plan, which brings us to our next tip.

Play the Long Game When Setting Campaign Duration

PPC advertising works just like any advertising: the more you stay in the game, the more you get the desired results. So if you have a relatively high budget to spare, play the long game and advertise your products longer, and set that campaign duration for a longer period.

How Accounting Experts Can Help Build a Successful Amazon Marketing Campaign

We’ve established that the factor for a successful amazon PPC campaign is to do well with your advertising efforts, and this boils down to getting two things right: budget and spending strategies.

Your Amazon PPC spending strategy can be done by you or an expert in the field. But aiming for the bullseye on your budget will require more than just shooting from the hip. You will need accounting experts working for you and your business. Here’s how they’ll do it.

Maintain Accurate Bookkeeping Records

Experts can take your existing business transaction records and resume recordkeeping. They can also transfer it to online accounting software such as Quickbooks or Xero to make it easier to monitor and maintain.

This way, they can track your business activity real-time and make sure everything is accurate. Bookkeeping done this way will tremendously help with budget planning.

Cost of Goods Sold (CoGS) Calculations

A huge chuck of cost eating up your revenue is the CoGS. This variable cost increases in proportion to the number of products you sell. This may lead to your business having fewer resources allocated for PPC marketing efforts.

Accounting experts can calculate your CoGS to give you insights on how much margin is left in your profits that you can allocate for PPC advertising and if it’s still on par with the standard Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS).

Having this insight will help you plan your production efforts for a lower product cost-per-unit. Alternatively, this can also help you decide whether to scale down on other expenses to make way for a better PPC budget allocation.

Account for Taxes

You can’t spend what is not yours. That goes the same with business. Experts ensure they account for Amazon’s ecommerce sales tax, so you don’t mistakenly use them for advertising purposes.

With taxes at play, your income statement will have a better picture regarding forecasting. Thereby making your advertising budget more accurate.

Forecasting

Finally, accounting experts can work with your financial data to forecast your revenue. As a result, they can propose revenue targets and set the overall budget by generating a projected income statement with your exact PPC budget allocations laid out as part of other planned operating expenses.

Your Next Step to Reach Amazon Marketing Campaign Success

Hiring a team of experts in the bookkeeping business is your secret weapon towards Amazon marketing success. They are equipped with knowledge and expertise that will let you see how your advertising budget plays out in the larger scheme of your business operations. 

Through accurate recordkeeping, analytics, and forecasting, you can be assured that you’ll get the right answer to the question of how much you should spend on PPC advertising.

Accounting experts take care of the financial aspect. To fully realize Amazon success you can combine it with knowledge and insight about how the marketplace works. So be sure to stop and look through our Amazon growth hacking articles and stay on top of your business.