Amazon dominates the online shopping experience. While many other competitors exist online, many have adopted similar tactics and offering as Amazon. From allowing small businesses to sell on their marketplaces to providing unique marketing opportunities, Amazon is setting the standard for the online consumer experience.

It’s not surprising that many brands and businesses use Amazon to market their offerings. However, you might be surprised to find out just how many people are using the platform incorrectly – especially with respect to optimizing their products for marketing purposes.

As such, let’s examine the biggest mistakes that businesses make when optimizing their ads for the Amazon experience.

Changing Campaigns Drastically and Quickly

We all know that every ad campaign is a chance to explore, try new ideas and ultimately figure out what works (and what doesn’t). However, all too often, businesses using Amazon advertising to drive traffic to their products become reactionary.

Instead of allowing campaigns to continue pinging URLs to their products for a reasonable amount of time, they cut off the campaigns after a short period of no transformative results. They may also suddenly change the ad budget, thereby nerfing the visibility of a campaign that would otherwise deliver value in time. As with all things, a bit of patience is in order: don’t make this classic mistake when advertising on Amazon.

Mismanaging Your Inventory

Every Amazon ad campaign you run should be designed to complement your existing inventory levels. Unfortunately, businesses that run many ad campaigns may find themselves running ads for longer than their inventory levels allow them to be effective. If your inventory level is low on one or more products, then lowering the amount you are spending may prove to be effective in balancing out the rate of sales until you can restock. Otherwise, you could be spending money just to lose business to your fellow competitors.

Failing to Research Keywords

Amazon provides both keyword recommendations and a flexible number of match types you can use to target audiences. Because of this, some businesses feel that keyword research isn’t as necessary here as for many other marketing efforts. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The great thing is that a combined effort of dedicated research plus recommended match types can help campaigns find what works and what doesn’t. For most ad campaigns or groups, businesses will want to target anywhere from one hundred to a few hundred keywords. By utilizing this research in conjunction with all available match types, you’ll develop a series of better performing campaigns and avoid the classic mistakes of other competitors.

Keeping Successful Campaigns Minimized

Once you find a successful format for a particular product via Amazon ads, the next step should logically be to start pinging URLs to a larger relevant audience (if available). Yet too all often, businesses simply focus on the existing size of the campaign, failing to scale its size upward.

While the efficiency of a campaign may decline as it grows, it’s important to assess the actual return on investment. It may cost more per conversion to run an ad once scaled up, but if you’re selling more units of inventory, then that may very well offset any efficiency losses.

Ultimately, Amazon is a big and scary place for many small businesses. Learning how to market effectively on Amazon is possible, but it’s vital that you steer clear of the most common pitfalls that businesses make when running ads. Now that you’re aware of a few, your campaigns can take this information into account and start off being more productive and efficient.