(5.2) Why You Need to Run PPC Ads on Amazon.

Why You Need to Run PPC Ads on Amazon.

Eazyppc welcomes you to the article ‘Why You Need to Run PPC Ads on Amazon’ – you should read and familiarize yourself with the previous posts, as Eazyppc uses terms and concepts that were explained in earlier lessons.

“Great product, polished images, SEO-optimized content – do you really still need to run ads?” → This is a very common question and completely understandable from many Sellers when they first start selling on Amazon.

In reality, running Amazon advertising (PPC) is an indispensable part of the selling process as well as long-term growth on Amazon. In this article, Eazyppc will explain why advertising is an essential tool – not just to generate orders, but to drive sustainable long-term growth.

1/ How does advertising boost organic search ranking?

Amazon operates on data: the more people click on a product and make a purchase, the more Amazon understands that this is a product that should be shown more often and marketed more broadly to customers -> this leads Amazon to distribute the product to more customers and push it to higher positions in organic search results, provided that traffic and CVR are strong.

Conversely, if there is not much traffic (due to no advertising), the product will not be marketed to many customers – it will only be seen by customers who scroll down to the page where the product is organically listed.

Or if visitors come but do not buy (low CVR – which can be caused by various factors, but targeting the wrong keywords in ads is a common reason why a product reaches the wrong audience), the system also “understands” that the product should be shown less.

→ Advertising is the input signal that Amazon uses to determine traffic and purchases for a product, especially for newly launched products.

2/ The key role of advertising

(There is no publicly available, official data from Amazon in this section – this is entirely based on conclusions drawn from cases handled by Eazyppc)

Before diving into the main content, Eazyppc would like to use an example to help you visualize the role of PPC advertising on Amazon:

• When you walk into a shopping mall, you head to the eyewear section and enter a store to browse glasses → you don’t buy right away, you want to check other stores and other styles → you leave the first store, return to the hallway, and walk into the next store you want to visit.
• However, on Amazon, customers visit the first product they want to view → when they want to continue browsing other options and styles, the alternatives are displayed directly on that product page – usually through ads → customers click through immediately rather than going back to the previous page (they don’t return to the hallway). Therefore, without running ads, your product will almost certainly not appear in the customer’s product discovery journey.

Amazon customers typically only browse the first results page until they make their first click on a product. If your product has an organic rank position on page 1 and also appears in an ad placement on page 1 → your chances of capturing the customer’s first click after a search, in theory, will double.

• But what matters even more is: after a customer makes their first click on a product (on desktop, a small number of customers may open multiple tabs to view several products, but on mobile it is very inconvenient to open multiple tabs), their entire subsequent discovery journey – browsing related products, viewing additional images, comparing options – starts from that product. For your product to appear in this customer journey, PPC advertising can arguably be called the only tool available (apart from a few placements in A+ Content, in the Store,… and you can also revisit the article (4.3) Product Pages for a deeper understanding)
• Additionally, a product in the top 10 organic rank will certainly receive far more free traffic than a product sitting at position 40 → the number of free impressions and free visits will also be higher. Therefore, achieving a strong organic rank is a goal that every high-performing Seller targets (across most categories, with the exception of categories like fashion).

3/ Amazon Snowball Growth:

Amazon works like a snowball. When you start running ads, you are helping that snowball roll for the very first time: the product gets impressions, and sales from advertising begin to come in. This helps your product climb the rankings for target keywords. Once you have a better position, organic orders start to appear. And as organic orders grow, the ranking continues to rise.

The first stage of the snowball is the hardest to get through (unless you use a price-cutting strategy). After that, once the snowball is rolling consistently, you simply need to manage your inventory properly to avoid going Out of Stock.

4/ Advertising: to be able to reduce dependence on advertising

When you use advertising to push your product into the first page of search results (Top 50) or the Top 10 organic rank, a steady stream of free organic traffic flows in every day. At this point, ad revenue is no longer the primary revenue source – advertising now plays a supporting role in maintaining your ranking.

However, a common mistake many sellers make is: turning off all ads once they see a strong, stable organic rank. This is like capturing a prime position but leaving it completely undefended → it often leads to the unfortunate situation of losing that position and experiencing a fast and deep rank drop – because competitors continue running ads, capturing the traffic and revenue that should have been yours. The result: they rank up, you rank down.

→ Once you reach the top, maintain advertising with a reasonable budget to stay in control and protect the position you worked hard to earn.