The Awareness Stage of the Amazon Customer Journey

To truly build a brand on Amazon, sellers need to go beyond the basics of auto and manual, high bid or low bid PPC campaigns, and begin to understand the psychology behind the Amazon sales experience.

Learning about the various stages of the Customer Buying Cycle, such as the Awareness Phase, will help guide you determine how to allocate budget in order to grow your brand halo.

All About The Awareness Stage

The Awareness Stage is the part of the customer journey when the brand makes shoppers aware of the existence of a problem that they may or may not know pertains to them. The brand targets relevant audiences and then drives traffic to a solution (their product). 

Since this is early on in the customer journey, you are likely to see a higher ACoS. That’s because you’ll be exposing your brand to a wider audience and testing different targeting types. You’ll be able to use this data later on. Conversion rates and CTR percentages will also be lower.

Try to avoid targeting high CPC keywords since your conversion rate will be lower - it may be tempting, but going after the mega keywords comes at a price. You don’t want to pay that price when you’re less likely to actually convert.

Be sure to track your New to Brand Orders Percentage. This will allow you to ascertain how many new orders are a result of your ad spend during the Awareness Phase.

Put all your Awareness Stage campaigns into a portfolio with a reasonable budget (no more than 20% of your total ad spend).

Types of Awareness Ads

Auto PPC Campaigns (Focus on Loose Match and Complements Targeting Types)

• Loose Match –  Connects you to search terms and keywords that are ‘loosely’ related to the products you are selling. Although your goal is to get in front of relevant audiences, these campaigns give you leeway as to the degree of that relevance with the actual keyword.
• Complements – Showcases your products in front of relevant audiences on pages with complementary products to “cast a wider net”. 

Manual PPC Campaigns

When using them you should…

• Lower Bid – Start with a lower bid to conserve your ad budget for the latter stages of the CBC.
• Target Awareness Keywords – You can use a free tool, such as Keywords on Fire, to find keywords to place into your discovery-based campaigns. Try not to use too many keywords initially (start with between 20 to 30) for both match types.
• Broad and Phrase Match – Use these because they allow Amazon to place your products in front of a larger audience (as opposed to Exact Match).

Product Targeting PPC Campaigns

• Use Category Targeting – Target categories that are closely related to what you are selling, or somewhat loosely related to the general audience. By testing out these categories, you begin to learn more about your audience by digging through the Search Term report after you’ve gotten some sales.
• Do Not Set up Refinements – You don’t want to tell Amazon which type of ASINs to go after. Your goal is to raise awareness of your products by placing them in these relevant categories. 
• Target Parent Category as well as Complementary Categories – Discover which categories really connect with the products that you are selling. 

Massive Brand Exposure Campaign

These campaigns are used to highlight your products in a Top of Search Sponsored Brands campaign. This is ideal for online shoppers who may be searching for an item in a general category, rather than a specific one. 

By clicking on your Sponsored Brands campaign, the online shopper is exposed to your entire storefront (all of your products). This gives you Massive Brand Exposure.

Sponsored Display FBA Ad Campaigns

Sponsored Display Ads can be used for Product Targeting. This gives you great ad placement beneath the Buy Box. It can also be located below the bullet points and elsewhere on the products detail page.

With Product Targeting Sponsored Display Ads you will get the type of visibility, product exposure and brand awareness that you’re looking for.

These ads are simple to set up. Follow the previous strategies used with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands for category targeting to test and go after relevant audiences.

If you’re looking for the right keywords to insert into your PPC campaigns, we recommend checking out ZonGuru’s Halo Effect Method.