It’s likely that you’re among the 26% of Amazon PPC sellers that list only a single product on Amazon. Or maybe you’re among the 77% that offer fewer than 10 products(1). You almost certainly account for one of the 1.2MM(2) sellers on Amazon who are overworked, struggle to afford increasingly expensive ads, and don’t have the time or expertise to create highly efficient advertising campaigns. I see you!
I know it can be very hard to run ads on Amazon, because for about 6 years I was the Director of Software Engineering in Amazon Ads, responsible for the reporting and campaign management experiences. I worked with some wonderful people on fabulous technology to build a versatile set of tools for large scale multinational brands and very large agencies. This is a $60B(2) business for Amazon today. My teams and I always wanted to build tools that were easy for smaller sellers to use, faster to navigate, but there was always a large demand to support the biggest brands who spend the most.
I founded Seller Ascent AI to focus on you. Makers, small businesses, and new sellers. I thought that AI can do what expensive agencies do to work around the current challenges in ecommerce advertising, and do it better, faster, and cheaper than an agency. That means, because of AI, I could help these hundreds of thousands of sellers, and help you spend more of your money on ads and your product, not on an Amazon ads agency or a big-brand focused Amazon PPC management tool.
Today, I think AI can help you run and optimize Amazon ads in four major ways: By making ads easier and faster to run. By helping you understand your products and their success better. By delivering better results for less money through regular optimization. And by creating optimized strategies specific to your brand and products.
Let’s take these approaches one by one:
How it’s an easier, faster way to run Amazon Ads
Amazon's interface has to handle thousands of products and many large scale advertisers who are used to a traditional campaign, ad group, ad, and target structure. This, plus the very large amount of data that Amazon tries to manage, makes navigating between pages slow. You have to use different interfaces for different ad products, step through three screens to see each set of targets, and so on.
We solved this by building an application that makes navigation almost instant. We show you changes over time so you don’t have to pull reports. And best of all, we’ve built a powerful AI chat assistant that can use Amazon’s tools and our tools to change your campaigns for you so that you don’t have to find the right input fields, change each keyword, or wait for pages to load. You can simply say “Increase my bids on competitor brand X for this ASIN” and Seller Ascent AI will do it.
A one-click way to run a single ASIN campaign structure, so you understand your sales.
Amazon is ASIN focused, but its ad products are advertising focused. Most small advertisers create an autotargeted campaign and put their products in it. But if you put two products into one campaign, you can't control their share of budget and the poor (or great) performance of any one product can heavily skew your results. Most sellers don’t create individual product-specific campaigns because it's time consuming to create many campaigns, one for each product, because you have to add the ASINs, ad groups, targets...so even if we know that single-ASIN campaigns are the best approach, it's still too hard.
This is why we built Seller Ascent around products, not campaigns; pick a product to advertise and we create all of the advertising structures for you, instantly.
AI driven continuous optimization unlocks “set it and forget it”.
Your campaign performance will change as competitors change, as the marketplace emerges, and as you gain increasing sales. You’ve probably heard that “set it and forget it doesn’t work” (I know I have). What people mean is that if you just create a campaign and leave it, you won’t get the performance you need. For example, you have to monitor search terms as they arrive and drive conversions so they can create new high performing targets. But that monitoring, analysis, and bid adjustment takes skill and time and that makes advertising hard. Furthermore, the marketplace is constantly shifting on you - a new seller can drive the bids up on a target cause you to either pay way too much or lose any potential traffic. When that happens you need to make a decision about what to do, and if you’ve “forgotten” about that campaign you’ll lose money and opportunity.
This is why Seller Ascent optimizes all your campaigns every week. Even better, we send you weekly, monthly, and quarterly account updates so you can understand what’s happening in your business on a regular basis without having to sit in expensive agency meetings.
It's hard to create custom strategies to optimize your spend.
The best advertisers don’t run a single generic campaign. They separate strategies to drive short-term sales, source new opportunities, defend their brand, and reach their competitor’s customers. Ideally doing this means repeating all the steps for advertising and optimizing a single ASIN multiple times. For most founders, maintaining that structure consistently isn’t realistic. Even sellers who hire agencies rarely get that level of precision - because it takes time, and time costs money.
We make creating a set of optimal campaigns a one click process, not a multi-hour slog. And then we optimize them regularly. Unlike Amazon’s recommendations, you’ll see that we regularly propose ways to decrease your spend or bids. In addition, you’ll find that our budget recommendations take into account Amazon’s suggestions, but they are based on how long your budget served so they’re grounded in the reality of what you can spend.
Is it for you?
If you’re a smaller seller or brand who is looking for the most affordable and easiest path to set-it-and-forget-it advertising, Seller Ascent AI may be for you. Or, if you’re not ready to spend thousands on an agency but you’re also not ready to go it alone on advertising.amazon.com - Seller Ascent AI may similarly be for you. If you’ve created an account on Amazon Ads and you’ve added at least one product in Seller Central, go ahead and try it for free for 30 days and see if it is. Visit https://www.sellerascent.ai/onboarding to get started with your free trial now.