Today we’re going over the top 9 tips to help Amazon sellers during these unique times. Of course, we’re talking about Q4 of 2020. We at Profitable Pineapple believe that this will be a holiday season like no other for Amazon this year, and we want to make sure you’re prepared and have the best Amazon PPC Strategy. Here are some tips that we have found to be the most helpful just before diving into the end of this unique year. 

1. Turn down your target ACoS until a day before Prime Day

Traffic online is overwhelmingly low during the period before Prime Day, so there’s no point in going after a higher target ACoS and wasting the ad spend. The best time to ramp ads back up would be right around 12-24 hours prior to the launch of Prime Day and keeping them rolling all the way through. 

2. Increase Bid Adjustments for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the Christmas Season

Go into your ad campaigns and increase your bids by at least 20% or as much as 100%. Also, focus on a select few of the top keywords to ensure that you can maximize your budget for the most amount of traffic and sales.This will help with ensuring that you’re winning those ad bids and your ads are showing at top of search. This period of time will be extremely competitive, so this is very important to capture those clicks and sales. 

3. Focus on your 80/20 between now and Prime Day and focus on those ads that are working

It’s important to download your Search Term Report in Amazon Seller Central. After downloading it, you will notice that only about 20% of your search terms are driving 80% of your revenue. There should only be a select few search terms that you should focus on during this time period. These are the search terms that you will want to increase the bid adjustments on or even separate them out into different campaigns to really customize and focus on them. 

4. Start scheduling Lightning Deals for Q4 to help boost rank and sales velocity

By doing Lightning Deals throughout Q4 for all of your products, it will help climb the rankings, increase more traffic to your listings, and ultimately propel sales velocity. Don’t be afraid to put a discount on your products. This is a great way to get rid of products or inventory quickly and to dispose of products that haven’t been working for you in the past. This will ultimately remove stress and allow you to focus your attention on the products that are working. 

5. Based on your 80/20 Search Terms create Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display Ads

As previously mentioned on tip #3, focus your ads on the 20% of search terms that are providing you with 80% of your revenue/results. You will make more profit, more sales, and it will just create a more efficient advertising experience for you as the seller. 

6. Anticipate longer lead times and keep an eye on shipping deadlines.

During this year, there are more and more brands selling on Amazon, so the fulfillment centers are getting more and more crowded. This is why it’s important to keep an eye on your inventory levels and shipping deadlines that Amazon provides. Also, it’s crucial that when you’re sending in your products that you DON’T SEND IN PALLETS. If you send it pallets this will lead to longer check in times and could lead to your listing being out of stock longer than it needs to be. You should send in smaller boxes to Amazon in order to make it easier for them to check in your products and make them available for sale online. 

BONUS TIP: If you have the ability to do FBM (Fulfillment By Merchant), have this available just in case your inventory won’t make it to the fulfillment center in time for Prime Day or other holidays. 

7. Analyze the data from previous Q4 and forecast sales numbers for this year

If you have previous year’s sales numbers available to you, anticipate usually about 20% more sales for the next year. For 2020, due to it being such a unique year with the pandemic, you may want to be more aggressive and go much greater than 20%. 

8. Keep an eye on last minute Amazon policy changes for Q4 (ex: fee discounts, fee changes, extra fees for lack of box content information)

It’s important to always keep an eye on Amazon’s terms of service and any changes they make throughout the year. They have been suspending products for various reasons across the platform, so it’s important to try to prevent those suspensions from happening well in advance. 

9. Include holiday keywords and rank for them before customers start to search with those keywords

If you have a “giftable” product, this applies to you. Also, this would mainly be for sellers that have products that are related to the end of the year holidays like “The Elf on a Shelf” or holiday lights, for example. Ultimately, Amazon is looking for relevance and a good customer experience, so ensure that the search terms are not misleading customers with your product. 

BONUS: Q4 Will be a long and strong season of high sales traffic due to Prime Day (October), Black Friday/Cyber Monday (November), Christmas (December), and then the rest of Winter with everyone stuck indoors. Anticipate the long period of sales, plan out your restocking, shipping deadlines, and have discussions with your suppliers to be ready for the final months of the year.

At Profitable Pineapple, we are an agency that enjoys working with and growing brands. More and more customers are moving to Amazon to meet their shopping needs due to their quick shipping speeds and ease of use. At profitablepineapple.com we love to work with brand owners and help play the Amazon game the right way. It’s important to defend your brand, your products, and your listings.

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