The Smart Approach To Amazon’s Dumb Ads - Ganesh Krishnan - Amazon Legends - Episode # 139

From the outside, the Amazon Ad algorithm looks like a black box that somehow assigns ad placement based on some unknown system, but that’s not quite the case. Today’s guest has almost 2 decades of experience in e-commerce advertising and in AI. Ganesh Krishnan is the Founder and CEO of AiHello.com and is a professional chess player. Ganesh shares the secrets behind how Amazon’s ad system works, where to look for the keyword data you need, and what metrics you need to pay attention to as an Amazon seller.

Takeaways: 

• Advertising is the fastest-growing segment of Amazon. Amazon is currently making more money from advertising than from selling products or from its AWS cloud-computing software.
• Because of the time and effort it takes to do correctly, Amazon sellers are better off spending their time on developing their business plans and letting the experts handle the auctioning system for Amazon ads.
• Amazon’s ad auction algorithm first sorts by keyword context, and then by the bid. The highest bid always wins. In cases when the bids are the same, the algorithm will then pick according to the performance of the seller. 
• Amazon judges seller performance using many parameters and scores sellers based on a point system. You can view your seller performance in Seller Central.
• Amazon’s ad system works differently than Google PPC because even if you win the top spot and your ad is displayed if no one clicks on it then you don’t pay anything. 
• Brand loyalty does exist on Amazon. One great way to build brand loyalty is to include a package insert with which you can ask for feedback and provide a discount to returning customers.
• As a seller, there are multiple ways for you to access the data to see the performance of each keyword you are targeting. You can start by looking at your brand analytics where you can find each keyword’s performance.

Quote of the Show:

• “Don’t worry about being first, worry about the ROI of the ads” - Ganesh Krishnan

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Amazon Legends is sponsored by Argometrix, the authority on, and a leading supplier of, competitive intelligence for online retail. To learn more, head over to https://argometrix.com/ 

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