Optimize Your Ads
Best Practices for the Holidays
According to comScore, for the 2012 holiday season up till Cyber Monday, “$16.4 billion has been spent online, marking a 16-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.” Take advantage of this growth with Product Ads.
Here are four tips to help you drive more traffic to your website during the holidays:
Tip #1 - Keep your selection fresh
Keep your product catalog up to date and complete. Make sure that prices and availability are fresh to create a great customer experience. Use FTP to save time if you upload products several times a week. To reduce feed file sizes and processing times, you can use incremental feeds, which only require product information that is different from your last feed. Also, if you have items that you cannot deliver before Christmas, remove them from your feed to avoid disappointing customers.
Tip #2 - Review your bids and budget
Optimizing your bids will help improve ad placement and exposure to the 89 million monthly unique visitors to Amazon.com (comScore). Review your bids and set them to the highest CPC you are prepared to pay. The final CPC is influenced by your ad performance and bid amount. We also recommend increasing your budget to take full advantage of holiday shopping traffic.
Tip #3 – Include shipping costs
Include the shipping rate in your feed to show customers the total cost of a purchase. Forrester Research reports that 59% of online shoppers factor in shipping costs, making it one of the biggest influences in online purchase decisions.* You can set one shipping rate for all your products by using the Shipping Settings functionality, found under the Settings tab in Seller Central. You can also set a shipping rate for a specific product, by including this information in the Shipping field of your product upload.
Tip #4 – Set your account to inactive if you are on vacation
If you are going on vacation between Christmas and New Year's Eve, or if you would like to temporarily remove your Product Ads listings, you can use the Program Status feature. Just set your status to inactive until you are ready to make your Product Ads listings available again.
*Forrester Research, North American Technographics Retail Online Benchmark Recontact Survey, Q3 2012 (US)
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