How I Grew My First Business With Amazon Ads | Amazon Ads Starter Guide

Did you know that 60% of Amazon sales come from small to medium-sized businesses? That is people like you and me with a hobby or a passion project or a family business. And we're responsible for $2.5 trillion in sales, over 60% of sales on Amazon. And those businesses employ over 2 million people annually. That is nearly 1% of the population of the United States. And that right there is why I'm making this video. There are millions of people, again, just like you and me with a small business out there that are using Amazon FBA and e-commerce on Amazon and specifically Amazon ads to grow their small to medium-sized businesses. So in this video, I'm gonna explain what Amazon FBA is. I'm gonna walk you through the key steps to get started selling. And then I'll do a full debrief of Amazon ads so you understand exactly how to use them for your specific business and product. And this video is a little bit personal for me because the first serious business that I ever started online was on Amazon. You may have seen videos like these on the channel, but essentially when I was 12 or 13 years old, I loved writing and I wanted to sell my books out there in the real world. And the way I did that was through Amazon KDP, which is a program in Amazon to let you sell and publish books on the Amazon platform. And that became the mainstay of a business that I ran from the time I was 13, 12 or 13, all the way up to when I was 17, just a few years ago. And by that time, when I was 17, we were selling in over 70 countries all around the world. And at the end of this video, if you stick around, I'm gonna cover three rapid fire advanced Amazon ad strategies. And I'm gonna try and keep this whole thing casual and friendly, so if you have never heard of Amazon FBA or Amazon ads before, this is going to be your introduction. That said, what is Amazon FBA? So Amazon FBA stands for fulfillment by Amazon. And what it means essentially is that Amazon does a whole lot of the work required to sell your product for you. See, Amazon's advantage as a multi-trillion dollar business is its distribution network. They have millions of people working in factories and offices all over the world and hubs and this whole transport network between all those locations. And it's that network that is why you can order things on Amazon and get them in the next eight hours, right? No one else has that kind of distribution. So that's one side of it. And then the problem is that as individual sellers, we can't beat that, right? We have no way really, no effective way of shipping out our products at scale that fast to people all over the US and in other countries. So Amazon FBA is those two things merging into a solution for sellers like you and me. So Amazon FBA or fulfillment by Amazon means that, let's say I'm selling phone designs, right? Like let's say I customize actual phone cases and I wanna sell them to you. What I can do is I can take a hundred of my phones, I can send them to Amazon and then they're gonna be listed on Amazon. And when someone goes and buys that product on Amazon, the units are stored in the warehouse. Amazon for me is gonna go take the unit that was bought, they're gonna put it in a box, they're gonna put a shipping label on it and they're going to express send it right over to the customer that bought it. And I don't have to do any of that. And so all that work that I would have to do to take the products, to get packaging for it, to get a shipping label for it, to drive it to the post office, to drop it off, to ship it, all of that is done by Amazon. And that essentially is how Amazon FBA works for the millions of businesses that use it around the US and the world. That said, there are four key steps to start selling. Now, if you already have a business and a product and you just wanna think about the listing on Amazon FBA before we get to Amazon ads, you can skip steps one and two. So you can just go down into this video and move forward a little bit. Otherwise, step one is just product research. Like what are you actually, what kind of product are you going to list? So again, if you have a business and a product and you're all ready to go and ahead of the game, just skip forward. But if that's not you, I think there are two big considerations to think about when you want to find a product or multiple products to sell. The first is you and the second is the market. By that, I mean, obviously a lot of what you should consider is the demand that's out there for some kind of product that you can go ahead and sell. But that's not all of it because if you hate that product or you have no experience in it or you have no personal value add and you don't know how to sell it, you're not gonna do very well. But the opposite also applies. If there's something you are really, really passionate about that no one wants, you're not gonna do well selling it. So you have to mix these two and find these synergies among you and your background and passions and what you know really, really well and are skillful in with demand and what the market actually wants. And there's a lot of tools we've covered on this channel. We do all kinds of experiments with finding new products, whether that's Google Trends or scraping Twitter and Reddit or just going to the mall and seeing what kind of products and stores are busy. There's a lot you could do there and there's books that are written about this stuff. Again, generally, I would just consider those two core things of you and then the market. If you check those two boxes and you like it and you are a value add as a person, you know how to sell it, you understand the customer base and what they're looking for and there is demand out there for this product and there's some kind of twist or something new that you can sell with this product. Next up is sourcing. So sourcing is all about how do you actually materially get this product and how do you make it your own? And this really comes down to the type of product. So I won't go too into depth here. Generally for some products, you can make them yourself, right? Like Etsy type products, where maybe it's more artisan or you'd like to make it yourself in your home or in a small shop or there's a lot of resources out there for either print-on-demand or just custom wholesale goods where you can take an existing product and then customize it and work with manufacturers to make it your own. I'll link some resources in the video on how exactly to do that if that's the stage you're at. But once you're past these two steps, essentially you have an idea for a product and for your business and then number two, you have the physical product. You're ready to go ahead and list it. So that said, step number three is inventory. It's actually taking these products that you have maybe at your home or that you're ordering from a manufacturer and actually getting them to Amazon through Amazon FBA. Now for that and for the listing process, we'll jump in my computer and I'll show you exactly how to go to Amazon FBA to set up your accounts and then to add new products and actually ship your products to Amazon so they can take care of everything after that. And if you wanna follow along with any of the steps or walkthroughs in this video, then there's two links that I'm gonna put on the screen right now or just go to the links in the description and sign up. It's completely free to sign up for these platforms and it just takes a minute and it will help you get a headstart while you're watching this video. That said, let's go. Okay, so first, if you wanna sign up, what you can do and the link is in the description as well is just head to sell.amazon.com. So pretty easy link there. And what you can do right there is just click on that sign up button to get started. That said, if we actually sign into Amazon Seller Central and you sign up with your business name and you don't have to register or anything, it can be a sole proprietorship and the name that you want for your business, then you just click on add products right here and that's going to bring you to this list your product page. Now, this looks a little bit different for every seller. Generally, if you get started with this flow, then you're gonna be able to finish it. There's lots of prompts and you can Google or go find a video about anything specific that you don't know. Now, the final step here is to actually send the units of this product that we created to Amazon. So that's the inventory step. So in this menu on the left, you can see inventory. If we go under fulfillment by Amazon, you can see shipments. Let's just click on shipments right there. And then this is where we can actually ship our items to Amazon. And from there on, Amazon does the rest. And you do that. Now your products are with Amazon. And with that said, we can get to the core of this video. So Amazon ads and how to use them for your Amazon FBA products. And now it's the mainstay of this video. It's an introduction to Amazon ads and everything you need to know to succeed on Amazon ads. Now that you have your products on Amazon through Amazon FBA. There are three main types of ads on Amazon. First, I'm gonna jump in to the dashboard in my computer to show you what it looks like. And then we'll get into those three Amazon ad types. Okay, now we're gonna jump into sponsored ads in just a second. But first I wanna make it absolutely clear how you can get started with Amazon ads. Totally free to just check this out and walk through or follow along with the video. So just go to ads.amazon.com. So right like this, it'll go to advertising.amazon.com. You can see the whole website here and then you just click register in the top right, right here. Just click on sponsored ads. That's what we're about to look at. Click create account and you can go ahead and get that done. That said, this is what it looks like inside the Amazon ads dashboard. So this is an old account of mine that I don't use anymore. And if I click right here on campaign manager under sponsored ads, I can see all the campaigns that used to be run in this account. So I got about 300 orders it looks like on this account. And you can see right here, there's about 258 different campaigns in this account. So a lot of different work that was done here. So now what you can do once you're logged into Amazon is click create campaign here. And then this brings us to the different campaign types. Now this right here gives you a little sneak peek of what we're gonna look at as the third campaign type. But first we're just gonna look at the sponsored product campaign. This is kind of the mainstay of the Amazon ads platform. And if you go onto Amazon and you see sponsored when people search for things or under products, that is sponsored products. So that is how and where these ads are going to show. So to explain this to you, I just want to create a campaign so you can see exactly what this looks like. So first just click create campaign right here. And then you have two options right here. You have custom text and then standard text. I always recommend custom text because that lets you customize, as the name implies, what is shown along with it, right? And then you can split test different things. You can use the title or the name of the product, or you can use a stronger call to action or something with intrigue or speak to a problem or a solution or call out the demographic you're advertising to. There's a lot of different things that you can do. And then again, you can A, B split test all these different kinds of custom text. And then you can add your products to the campaign. So this account has some books of mine. So in this case, I would just select, let's say this book right here. So now I've selected the product, I've selected custom text and I can scroll down to choose the targeting. Now this is important. So there are two big ways to run sponsored ads. There's automatic targeting and then there's manual targeting. Now automatic targeting is kind of letting Amazon's AI and systems do the work for you. So they're gonna go try out different keywords and products that they think are going to do well given the product that you're selling and they're going to kind of run those ads and choose those specifics for you. What you can also do is manual targeting. And this is where you choose exactly where your ads are going to show. And I'll get into that in just a second. What I always recommend is just do both. Just create one automatic targeting campaign, one, at least one, probably a lot more than one manual targeting campaign and then just split test and see which one does better. And if it's automatic targeting, that's great because then Amazon's gonna do the work for you. If it's manual targeting, no worries there that gives you a lot more control and flexibility over what exactly is going to work for your ads. So first I'll show you the manual targeting setup and then we'll move back to automatic targeting. So manual targeting has two big options. First is keyword targeting, second is product targeting. So keywords would be, let's say you're selling a bracelet, for example. So you could say, okay, I want to target the keyword, let's say gold bracelet, something as simple as that. And then let's say gold bracelets for women, for example, let's say we're targeting women. Then I'll click add keywords right here. And now you can see right over here that we have these keywords that were added with bids. And I'm gonna explain what all of this means. So first there are three match types and exact match type means this ad is only going to show when someone searches exactly gold bracelets for women, that exact search into Amazon. Phrase is nearly this, but it could be some variations as well, right? Like for example, gold bracelet for women would be a phrase match type for gold bracelets for women. Or let's say someone mistypes, for example, there's a typo and it's G-O-L bracelet for women. This could still show for that, right? So those are the two kind of match types. And then the third one is even more broad. So you go from exact up to phrase up to broad and broad is, and I'll just select that right there. You can see all keywords in any order in variations and related keywords. So that's much more broad. It's not just variations of it, but it's also like bracelet for females, for example. It's kind of the same thing, but different words are actually used, but this could still, and not that anyone would actually search that, but you could still rank then or your ads could show when someone searched this with the broad match type for the keyword gold bracelets for women. And so typically you're gonna pay a lot more for the exact match type since you know exactly what is being searched versus the broad match type. So the bids then are what you're actually paying for someone to click on this. So for example, we might set this bid at $1.10, this bid at 60 and this bid at 45. So you can see kind of how that works right there. So those are keywords. And for the actual bids themselves, you can go with the suggested bids. So this is what Amazon thinks is going to get you the win, so to speak, so that you beat out everyone else who was bidding on this so that your products can show. You can also just stick with a custom bid or you can do a default one, which is just one bid for all of your different keywords. So one super useful system here is to say, I'm selling gold bracelets for women. Oh, I mistyped that. Come up with 100 keywords for my Amazon ads now. So I'm gonna click enter there and here we go. Here's our list of 100. Return a raw, unformatted list with a line break in between each keyword. So we're gonna wait for this to finish. Looks like that's done. Now I'm gonna tell it to give me the data in a way such that I can use it. Now we're gonna go and we're gonna copy all of these keywords. And the goal here is strategically speaking, we want a lot of different keywords because that gives us just more room to figure out what works. And maybe for example, just 18 of these are gonna be profitable. But if we can figure out which of those 18 are profitable and at what bid price, right, then we can start to really hone in our ads because over time we can start to lower the bids to make them more profitable if they were already profitable and we're winning all the placements at a higher bid. So now we have 300 keywords added here. So there you go. That is keywords. You can also do negative keyword targeting, which isn't super useful, so I won't get into it. And you can also do product targeting. So I'm gonna click on product targeting and this is where you target actual products in Amazon. And I'll talk about this in a minute as well. So you can search for product categories. So this could be like, oh, I want to show, let's see if anything comes up for bracelet actually. Yeah, so I could target the whole category of women's bracelets and my ads would show up there. I could also go into products and I could select, let's search for bracelets. I could show specifically up under those two exact products. And what I recommend again, just test all of this, right? Have one campaign where you're targeting keywords, another one where you're targeting products and figure out what works better for your individual ads and products that you're selling. So next up is the creative. And so this is where you can add text to go and advertise your product. So this is a book, for example, what I could say is curious about investing, best, let's say it's best to start young. So something simple that just helps sell the book and make the ad pop out and to better connect with the people seeing it. So next up here, if we scroll down, you have the campaign bidding strategy. And so you can see three options here for sponsored ads. We have dynamic bids, up and down, down only and then fixed bids. Now, what I recommend is starting out with dynamic bids where it's up and down and you can just pause the video and you can read the descriptions here. So start with up and down, figure out what works. And then from there, try and hone in on the bid strategy to really bring in the profit. And a lot of ads aren't gonna work in a lot of keywords and placements. So it's a matter of filtering through the ones that don't work to find the ones that do work and then starting to, if you're overpaying for those, for example, lower that price, for example. Now you can also see bid adjustments here. This would just mean, do you want to pay more to show up at the top of the page or on product pages? You can do this if you want. It really just depends on the niche and the product. So I can't give general advice here. There's also a new feature here on Amazon, which is audiences. And this is pretty cool. So I highly recommend playing around with all of this. For the actual bid adjustments, I would say just leave it as bid dynamic bids up and down and you don't need to worry about bid adjustments. And then all you do in settings, you select the name of the campaign. What I would suggest for names is just all the information that you want to know about that ad, or excuse me, about that campaign, assuming you're running a lot of them, you want to be able to understand just from the campaign name. So maybe I would do 829 because that's the day I'm launching it. And then I would do, this is sponsored ad. And then I would say I'm doing product targeting. So PT, and then maybe I'm selling my woman's bracelet. So I'm doing GB for gold bracelet. So that way I can just glance at this quickly and I can understand all the different things about it. Then you just select the start and the end date, the country, the budget, and then you can go ahead and launch that campaign. Now, remember everything we just looked at here was manual targeting. And you don't actually have to do all of that if you don't want to. What you can do is go back up to targeting and then click on automatic targeting. And you can see all those settings just went away. So now all of that is being done by Amazon behind the scenes, by their algorithm, and you can just set a default bid here of a certain amount. And generally what I would say is you can start either really low or really high and then see how many impressions you get and then change the bid based on that. For example, maybe I would start off with a bid, default bid of 45 cents. And if I'm just not getting volume, if that is not enough money to actually get my ads shown anywhere, then I increase this to 55. And then maybe I get a little more, but not enough. Then I increase it to 65. Okay, now I'm starting to get some traffic. It's profitable. That's good. If it's still profitable and I still want more traffic, maybe I go 85. And maybe 85, it turns out, is the sweet spot where I get a lot of traffic and I'm still making money on my ads. So again, just run an automatic targeting campaign and run multiple manual targeting campaigns. And for that, you can do some combination of keyword targeting and product targeting. So again, this ad type is the mainstay of Amazon ads, the sponsored ads. And what you can do, you can run these for all kinds of different products, for one product at a time, for multiple if you want. But there's a lot more here. And with that being said, let's jump into ad type number two. So ad type number two is sponsored brands. And what this lets you do is showcase your whole brand and multiple products. And it's much more visual and engaging typically for viewers. So what I'm going to do is click Create Campaign. And you can see right here, first off, Sites. For Sites, you can just select Amazon for the most part, especially if you're B2C. And then there's a few different types here. Now, video is something key that I'm gonna talk about at the end of the video a little bit. So let's just focus on product collections for right now. What this is, is promoting multiple products on kind of a brand landing pages. And so what you can do in this case, since this is kind of a book setup, they have the author page. But what you can also do is create your own landing page. Or if you do this setup through Amazon FBA, you're going to have your own brand page. What you can do if you go to Amazon Brand Registry right here, so go to thissell.amazon.com forward slash brand dash dash registry. Go here, enroll in this, create your kind of homepage on Amazon for your brand. And then they let you put all kinds of graphics and visuals in there. And then come back here, excuse me, to this page. And then for the landing page, you want that to be the page on your Amazon account. So that said, you pick your products and then we're right back here. It's the same deal where we can choose keyword targeting, product targeting. We can go ahead and create the ads. And in this case, we can customize the landing page. There's gonna be a different editor depending on the type of products that you are selling. Now, what I want to emphasize for sponsored brands is that this really all comes down to the brand visuals. So go do this for your brand, fill it in with media, and then come back and try out some of your sponsored brand campaigns. And that was the ad type number two. And now as promised, I'm gonna end this off with three rapid fire advanced Amazon ads strategies. So number one are video ads. Trust me when I say no one, especially small businesses, use this kind of video ad. And there's an opportunity here to get in front of the camera and be personable as a small business about your product or service. So get in front of the camera, film an ad, and go launch that ad with Amazon ads. Number two is target the exact products that you want your ads to show up next to. You can literally select those exact products. So you can go to your competitors or products that your product pairs well with, like a hot dog bun seller with a hot dog meat seller. And then go and just literally select those products in Amazon ads so that you show up on that page listing. Number three, I think a great strategy is to let automatic bidding run with a very, very low default bid across your entire product catalog. That way you can catch some of the traffic that people and other people aren't looking to target and just catch some of the searches at that very, very low default bid. And you give the algorithm or the AI behind these automatic campaigns a lot of freedom, almost maximum freedom to go find out the little niches that no one else is looking around. Now, if you've made it this far, I can nearly guarantee that you got something out of this video, whether the Amazon FBA or the Amazon ads component. So like I said prior, make sure to go visit those two links in the description for Amazon FBA and Amazon ads. It's completely free to get started and to go create an account and you'll learn all about the systems and how they actually work for your business. So make sure, go hit those links, get started on those platforms. And that said, thanks for watching. I'll see you on the next one, ciao.