4 Pillars of Impactful and Cost-Effective PPC Campaigns in Q4

For ecommerce sellers, Q4 is the most magical time of the year. With major shopping holidays like Black Friday and Christmas (and the rumored second Prime Day event in the fall), the fourth quarter is an orchard of opportunities, ripe for picking.

For sellers who want to make the most of these opportunities, a comprehensive pay-per-click (PPC) Sponsored Brands advertising strategy is essential. Read on to see how you can use these four key pillars to build your brand and find Q4 success with your PPC campaigns.

1. Cater to the Holidays

People love the holiday season, so offering them some welcoming holiday-themed vibes can help put them in the spirit. With holiday-themed Sponsored Brands (S/B) and Sponsored Display (S/D) ads, you can raise brand awareness and get people thinking about what gifts to buy before the rush.

If you want to really step your game up, make holiday-themed video ads. Today, you can now direct video ads to storefront pages, enabling a full holiday-specific strategy that gets people browsing and shopping within your product listings.

Go the extra mile and make holiday-themed posts to guide curious shoppers to your products. Currently in beta, posts are available to Amazon sellers registered with Amazon’s Brand Registry, as well as vendors in the US market. Shoppers on mobile devices can see your posts  in feeds and on detail pages based on relevance and customer engagement.

2. Jump on Keywords Early

Traffic skyrockets in Q4 — and so do advertising costs. Make sure you know which keywords are your money-makers and target them ahead of the wave with exact match campaigns.

We recommend using automated tools like PPCEntourage and ZonTools that can identify high-volume keywords, adjust bids based on success, and remove S/B non-converting search terms. Save time by letting the algorithms do the work for you.

For S/D ads, search for “gift” in the new Amazon Audiences section to find keywords that you can capitalize during the busy season. 

3. Implement Targeting and Retargeting Strategies

Avoiding wasted ad spend requires proper targeting. Because of the purchasing influx in Q4, the quarter offers many avenues to creating a cohesive strategy.

One such avenue is implementing contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, sellers are able to show their ads to audiences based on what they’re currently browsing, as opposed to using collected, stored, and analyzed data about shoppers over a period of time. This more traditional advertising method has seen a resurgence ever since the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and iOS14 severely limited the efficacy of personalized advertising. Contextual targeting will naturally find people interested in your product categories, and it can drive both on- and off-Amazon traffic.

In fact, before the holiday season comes into full swing, it’s a good idea to consider an external traffic push. Use this time to grow awareness and interest across a wide range of potential customers. You can plant the seed of desire early and let it grow, all before the advertising costs start soaring.

What do we recommend?

Using PixelMe, which allows sellers to launch and manage Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok advertising campaigns all in one single platform. PixelMe also tracks metrics on everyone who clicks your ads, allowing you to use advanced retargeting strategies.

Another great Q4 move for your PPC campaigns is to use S/D ads with view-based remarketing to reclaim any shoppers who check out your products but don’t make the purchase right away. Here’s an insider tip: Use “optimize for reach” when retargeting page viewers to get the most bang for your buck.

4. Take a Data-Based Approach to Advertising

The best way to be effective — and cost-effective — with your advertising for PPC campaigns is to stop guessing. Instead, measure everything. Be a scientist about it, and record what’s working and what isn’t.

Organizing by campaign type quickly shows you the heroes and the duds. For example, we’ve found that “Sponsored Product — Keyword Targeting” and “Sponsored Product — Product Targeting,” are currently doing exceptionally well.

However, just because something is doing great right now doesn’t mean it will always be the  winning move. 

“Constantly test new formats. Whatever Amazon releases, test that new format,” says Victor Dwyer, vice president of marketing at pirawna.

For Q4 specifically, focus your ad spend on the most effective formats. You can run experiments to test various formats after the traffic has returned to normal.