Introduction

You have a new product on the market, or an old product you've never advertised before on Amazon - how do you make sure it gets discovered and purchased by consumers?
This comprehensive guide will walk you through setting realistic expectations for new-to-market products, as well as best practices for setting up goals in Perpetua for products with no advertising history.

Setting Realistic Expectations For Performance

Before you begin launching or making adjustments to your goals in the hopes of maximizing results, it's important to set realistic expectations for your products in the short term. Keep in mind, it is extremely difficult to obtain profitable Sponsored ads right away with products that are new-to-market or have no previous advertising history.

Here are a few reasons as to why:

Your product is not retail-ready. When the products you are selling on Amazon are considered “retail-ready”, it means their product detail pages include all the necessary information for a customer to make a purchase. This includes an accurate product title and description, product images, customer ratings and reviews, inventory, buy box presence, and enhanced content.
Your competitors in the market have an advantage. In shopping for products, customers are likely to purchase items with the most ratings and reviews, as those seem to be the most trusted and reputable products (in other words, their products are "a safer buy"). In comparison, your new-to-market products are bidding on the same targets as these other sellers that have a competitive advantage, making initial advertising quite difficult.

Best Practices for Launching

For products that have not yet gained momentum in the Amazon marketplace, it is crucial to be aggressive with advertising strategy in the short term in order to reap the benefits in the long term.

1️⃣ The Importance of Reviews

New-to-market products typically lack reviews and ratings. These are extremely important, as they generate substantial momentum on the Amazon Flywheel and ultimately make your advertising efforts much more effective. Before approximately 10 reviews, Amazon may make it hard for you to show up on premium keywords for your products, thus making advertising quite a challenge. It's hard to convert without ratings/reviews, and without conversions, it's difficult for our ad engine to gather enough data to properly optimize your campaigns. Once you have more reviews, your ads will have a much better chance of performing well.

2️⃣ Start with a High Target ACoS

In launching a product with no advertising history, it is best to set an initially high target ACoS (50% and above) as well as high bids on all targets. This allows our ad engine to be more flexible and experiment with bids, as well as bid competitively on targets and gain more spend. An initially low target ACoS for products with no history restricts the engine from being aggressive and ultimately prevents it from spending, as there is no previous data on the keywords that allows it to have a confidently high bid.

Additionally, allowing the ad engine to bid competitively is crucial to compensate for a lack of ratings and reviews on the product. It's very hard to advertise effectively at a low ACoS for any products that are new to the market/new to advertising, as those products lack momentum on the Amazon Flywheel. Advertising allows momentum to be manufactured on the flywheel, and a high initial target ACoS and bids provide great opportunity for this momentum to build.

3️⃣ Utilization of Suggested Bids and Bid Adjustment

Another strategy that can be used to best set your goals up for success is to look at the suggested bids on Amazon for keywords that you feel are the most relevant and strategic to your campaigns. In examining the suggested bid prices, you can get a good idea of whether or not your bids on these keywords are high enough.

If you find that Perpetua is not bidding high enough, a fixed bid adjustment can be applied to your selected keywords. Higher bids contribute to your ad's success as they help the ad engine gather more data on a product without any advertising history. These fixed bids should be applied for a minimum of 7 days to allow time for adequate data collection. A detailed explanation of how to properly set up fixed bid adjustments can be found here.

After launching, you can continue to add keywords to your goals that you think are relevant. From there, we recommend creating bid adjustments on the most important keywords to give the ad engine an idea of what kinds of keywords the product will/should be converting on.

4️⃣ Additional tips:

Run Sponsored Display product targeting.
Run Sponsored Brands with your new product in it with a Branded targeting type - you can integrate this new product displaying it with your old products to you your loyal customers.
Run a Sponsored Brands video.
Cross-selling in your other goals: adding the new ASIN as a product target
Higher Target ACoS on Branded segments with the new product to show your loyal customers the new product.

Additional Resources

Check out the video below from our Ad School for additional details on this topic:

Article last updated December 2023. If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io.