In honor of Prime Day starting tomorrow, I wanted to give our thoughts on the state of Amazon & Amazon advertising (PPC) for Food & Beverage brands.

Amazon experienced crazy growth (especially within f&b) during COVID, and hasn’t seemed to fade. In the past few years their advertising platform has adapted to strong automatic (algorithm based) campaigns, featured new shoppable video ad units, and organically has unleashed a whole new slate of creative options for listings and storefronts.

As a team, we specialize on the advertising + listing strategy for food & beverage brands. We create and optimize informative listings then fuel growth with our precisely targeting keyword and ASIN campaigns.

Below are some high level recommendations & insights based on what we have seen:

Find a brand or competitor in your category you admire and use them as your North Star:

The best part about Amazon in comparison to other platforms is that we can see exactly what a brand is doing from their SEO, to their choice of imagery, key selling points, etc. With tools like helium10 we can even see sales volume & patterns for specific brands.

We all know those brands who seem to be “doing everything right” in our category.

Our most successful emerging brands will clearly identify their category leader, and “who they want to be”. From there, pay close attention to:

• How they are positioning their products within their headline keywords. What keywords are they putting first and foremost? What keywords did they leave out that you should include?
• How are they leveraging creative? Are they showing their products in a certain lifestyle setting? Pushing the most relevant recipes?
• Reviews. What are people saying about the product. Is there feedback within the reviews we can leverage as a brand to put ourselves ahead.

When you feel confident enough about your listings, you can even directly target the ASIN (or product) of your competitor. Directly steal sales from the brand you are striving to be.

Take advantage of all new (or beta) creative opportunities:

Amazon continues to roll out stronger and stronger creative features both within the listings/storefront + the advertising campaigns.

A+ Content has allowed an extended roll of imagery & video to prove credibility to prospective consumers. Strong brands are showing off user generated content of real consumers using the products, or high quality recipe focused videos.

Take up a consumer’s feed with a high-quality video ad when they are searching for a product or keyword in your category.

The more high quality and relevant content you put out there, the more likely they are to trust you over a competitor. Take a look at listings with a high volume of positive reviews, I guarantee they are displaying a variety of assets across all features. 

If you aren’t FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) it is difficult to scale:

This one is plain and simple. FBA = Prime eligible. If you aren’t available on prime the majority of consumers won’t have the patience to wait for the product to arrive, resulting in no trial. That is just the world we live in, and COVID expedited that behavior.

Our ad campaigns pushing FBA products heavily outperform anything FBM (fulfilled by merchant). The campaigns are really difficult to scale.

Your rates to get fulfilled by Amazon are determined by dimensions, most importantly the weight of the products. This is why we see a lot of glass bottle beverage brands have issues with FBA & profitable margins.

Understand consumers will almost always choose to purchase from Amazon over your DTC website:

Unless your DTC website offers a can’t miss deal + reasonable shipping, consumers will 9/10 times choose to purchase from Amazon. The convenience makes too much sense, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon.

With that being said, your listing must reflect every point of introduction the consumer may have had to the brand. If they are learning about you on your Instagram handle, make sure you listing and storefront is reflecting the same message and tone.

One last note, we feel Amazon for food & beverage is a different ballgame than any other category, and rarely comparable. Don’t fall for the flashy unrealistic case studies that get passed around Linkedin. Building up strong Amazon listings & campaigns takes lots of time and data based optimizations.

If you are interested in learning more about our Amazon Advertising services just email info@gawronskimedia.com or fill out the form below.