Since Amazon banned incentivized reviews in 2016, sellers have been scrambling to find ways to get exposure for their products and grow sales. Amazon Sponsored Products ads and SEO have become the tactics of choice to boost product discoverability. In this post, we’ll discuss how we were able to generate $4,400 in sales by spending just $177 on Sponsored Products ads.

Find Profitable Keywords

Instead of running an automatic-targeted campaign for weeks to collect keyword data, we did some digging on Amazon for profitable keywords. How? With Scope, Seller Labs’s Amazon keyword and product research tool. We used Seller Labs’ Scope to research ranked ASINs that were similar to our product. We were able to find dozens of keywords that generate many sales and are also popular search terms.

Using the keyword data

Once we compiled a list of profitable keywords, we exported them to a .csv file. Here, we were able to remove any duplicates. This was also a great time to do some backend and frontend listing optimization. See how this process is done here.

More importantly, though, we used our keyword data to start running Amazon Sponsored Products ads.

How We Generated $4,400 In Sales by Spending $177 on Sponsored Products Ads

We began by running a manual targeted Sponsored Products campaign for 14 days using the keywords we discovered with Scope. We created our campaign to mimic an automatic campaign that we started more than 60 days before.

The results of our campaign

Within the first five days of running the manual-targeted campaign with Scope keywords, we did $4,418.30 in sales and spent just $177.16 on ads—with a 4.01% ACOS!

In five days, our manual-targeted campaign generated 3x the amount of sales our automatic campaign did in more than 60 days. How? We just plugged in the keyword data Scope provided us from our competitors and other similar, top-selling products.

Here’s the breakdown of our manual and automatic campaigns:

Campaign Type	Impressions	Clicks	CTR	Cost	CPC	Units Sold	Revenue	ACoS
Automatic	Impressions	370,795	Clicks	363	CTR	0.100%	Cost	$48.24	CPC	$0.13	Units Sold	12	Revenue	$1,444.40	ACoS	3.34%
Manual	Impressions	65,973	Clicks	292	CTR	0.440%	Cost	$177.16	CPC	$0.61	Units Sold	34	Revenue	$4,418.30	ACoS	4.01%

Our manual-targeted campaign generated $2973.90 more in sales with $128.92 more in ad spend in just 14 days than the automatic-targeted campaign did in 60+ days. By looking at the number of impressions to clicks the manual campaign received, it’s clear that our keyword targeting was the deciding factor in our success. The automatic campaign received 5x more impressions than the manual campaign but only had 363 clicks for 60 days. This means that the automatic ads were viewed about 6,180 times with 6 clicks per day. While the manual ads were viewed about 4,712 times with 21 clicks per day.

The manual-targeted ads were displayed in more relevant searches than the automatic campaigns.

Conclusion

We’re not saying automatic-target Sponsored Products campaigns are a bad thing. In fact, every seller should be running them as a catch-all strategy to make sales on obscure and long-tail keywords. But if a seller wants to do a calculated advertising push, then running a manually targeted campaign using profitable keywords is an absolute must. 

Best of all, sellers can also use the same keywords they run ads for to optimize their product listings.

Learn more about Scope!