Is Amazon PPC a curse or a blessing?

Blessing: Yes & No

Yes Amazon PPC can be a curse and a blessing at the same time.

Aggressive Amazon PPC is a curse

Strategic Amazon PPC is a blessing

When you use Amazon PPC for launch i.e. in an aggressive mode for enhanced discoverability to simply “sell” more, its a curse and once it becomes a curse, it shall forever be a curse for that particular product that you shall launch using aggressive PPC.

When you use Amazon PPC strategically, i.e. in a well-thought-through, low spend advertising tool setting, it is a blessing that you shall not have had anywhere else but on Amazon to scale and to solidify your brand position.

If you launch a product using aggressive PPC, once it gains the sales velocity to rank and is ranked and you think you can retract the PPC spending and stay the rank – you are mistaken.

Think like a business – for a moment. Why would Amazon let you sell without making that extra Revenue per Click (RPC) on top of 15% referral commission, that you have been throwing its way during the aggressive PPC launch phase? This also applies to those launches where you are told to do aggressive PPC launches with GAs.

It won’t and as a result, when you stop paying Amazon to sell that extra Revenue per Click (RPC), you shall lose sales velocity and shall get de-ranked.

But if you are using Amazon PPC strategically, with the minimum ad spend allocated, lowest but strategic bids, you are choosing to “advertise” instead of “selling”. There is a huge difference between the two. I shall explain that in the next post.

Right now – what you need to learn out of this particular post is to – always use Amazon PPC as a strategic advertising tool instead of a launching tool. This is shall help you not only stay ranked but would also help you scale in the longer run.

Also, please bear in mind that Amazon PPC is more about “winning ad placements” than anything else.

And I shall answer one more commonly asked question in this post, “Is a PPC management tool better than manually managed PPC?” – Mostly, no it is not!

I will explain this “no, its not” in my next PPC post as well.