Many cross-border e-commerce sellers face a common dilemma: during new product launches, advertising budgets evaporate like water, especially in highly competitive niches where high cost-per-click (CPC) coexists with low conversion rates. Ads frequently exhaust their budgets by midnight. How can sellers effectively control advertising expenditures and avoid blind investments? This has become a critical challenge in Amazon operations.
Precision Advertising Management: Evolving Strategies Across Product Lifecycles
The Amazon marketplace changes rapidly, with traffic fluctuations directly impacting product sales. Advertising strategies must dynamically adjust according to product lifecycles. A rational approach involves high budgets and bids during the launch phase, gradually reducing both during the growth stage, and eventually maintaining profitability with low budgets and bids at maturity. Many sellers complain about operational difficulties and shrinking profit margins due to high advertising costs, often stemming from insufficiently refined advertising management.
Automatic vs. Manual Campaigns: Complementary Forces
A common question among new sellers is whether running both automatic and manual campaigns simultaneously during product launches creates conflicts. The answer is no. These two campaign types serve different but complementary purposes. Automatic campaigns focus on identifying listing relevance by analyzing product titles, content keywords, backend search terms (ST), and category nodes to accurately target products and attract the right audience.
Automatic Campaigns: Building Listing Relevance
Automatic campaigns offer unique advantages in enhancing listing relevance. Through precise keyword placement, they improve the alignment between listings and search terms, delivering targeted traffic with higher conversion rates. This cost-effective approach represents a powerful tool for creating bestsellers. However, many sellers misunderstand automatic campaigns, considering them less effective than manual options, leading to significant ad spend with disappointing returns.
Manual Campaigns: Precision Targeting and Weight Accumulation
New listings lacking historical sales data and weight often suffer from excessive advertising costs (ACOS) when targeting broad keywords directly. Even using manual exact or phrase match types may yield unsatisfactory conversion rates. Therefore, sellers should initially leverage automatic campaigns for keyword discovery, identifying high-performing terms before applying them to manual campaigns for precise targeting and weight building. This gradual strategy effectively reduces advertising costs while improving conversions.
Advertising Architecture: Budget-Conscious Strategy Selection
Building complex advertising structures requires substantial financial resources not available to all sellers. New or small-scale sellers should develop product promotion plans according to their budgets, avoiding overconfidence and reckless investments. The ultimate goal of Amazon operations involves improving organic rankings to increase natural order percentages and organic traffic growth, rather than relying solely on advertising to maintain sales.
Organic Rankings: The Fundamental Logic of Amazon Operations
The true foundation of Amazon operations lies in improving organic product rankings, not just advertising dependence. Only by using manual campaigns to boost keyword rankings and accumulate weight can sellers achieve sustained position improvements, securing advantageous placements that generate substantial order volumes and profits. When manual campaign budgets deplete, low-bid automatic campaigns continue working. As listing conversion rates and weights improve, automatic campaign placements advance, potentially reaching premium positions on the first page. This creates 24-hour listing visibility, maximizing conversion opportunities.
Synergistic Effects: Round-the-Clock Advertising Coverage
The strategic combination of automatic and manual campaigns enables continuous listing visibility, increasing product exposure and conversion potential. Manual campaigns handle precision targeting and weight accumulation when budgets permit, while automatic campaigns maintain visibility after manual budgets exhaust. This collaborative model maximizes advertising efficiency and overall operational effectiveness.
Case Study: Bluetooth Headphones
Consider a seller launching new wireless headphones. During the introduction phase, both automatic and manual campaigns run simultaneously. The automatic campaign attracts potential customers interested in Bluetooth headphones by analyzing listing information, while the manual campaign targets core keywords like "Bluetooth headphones" and "wireless headphones." After operational refinement, the automatic campaign identifies high-conversion terms like "sports Bluetooth headphones" and "noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones," which the seller incorporates into manual campaigns for enhanced precision. Ultimately, the listing achieves significant improvements in both organic and advertising rankings, driving sales and profit growth.
Optimization Recommendations
- Keyword Research: Thoroughly understand target audience search behaviors to identify precise keywords
- Listing Optimization: Enhance titles, descriptions, and images to improve relevance and appeal
- Bid Adjustments: Dynamically modify bids according to product lifecycle stages and market competition
- Data Analysis: Regularly review advertising metrics to refine strategies
- A/B Testing: Experiment with different ad copies, keywords, and bids to determine optimal combinations
Amazon advertising requires meticulous, ongoing attention. Through strategic use of automatic and manual campaigns, listing optimization, bid adjustments, and data analysis, sellers can effectively control advertising costs while improving conversion rates, ultimately achieving sustainable sales and profit growth.