Three Step Guide to Choosing an Amazon AMS Agency

Making Amazon Advertising work requires daily discipline coupled with a sound strategic plan. Also, note that you are in the data business. The essential traits to look for in an organization for your AMS agency are illustrated below:

Mastery of AMS

AMS is a search marketing channel that is constantly evolving. Keeping up with the changes and continue taking advantage of opportunities to drive growth requires investment in learning, research, and development. In addition, mastering critical areas such as bid management and keyword management requires experience and analytics sophistication. Questions you must ask your prospective agency include:

1. Your learning & development plan for your analysts
2. How many years of experience do you have with bid management? (Note: keywords optimization and bid optimization are areas that have been around a while because of Google and Bing search advertising)
3. Do you have an AMS performance management checklist?

Data Savviness

Performance of a particular product in AMS is dependent on many factors including AMS spend, organic ranking, content, pricing, promotions, inventory, etc. However, there are no readily available tools that can bind these factors together seamlessly. The onus falls on the agency to comprehensively understand all the contributing performances. In order to do a good job of this, what is needed is an ability to collect, integrate and analyze disparate sets of data. A few questions to explore strengths in this area include

1. What data sets do you collect?
2. What data infrastructure do you have?
3. How do you do performance diagnostics?
4. How quickly can you answer the question “My performance is down? What happened?”

Daily Optimization Discipline

From our 15+ years of experience with search marketing across Google, Bing and Amazon platforms, one thing we have learned is that search marketing optimization requires daily discipline. Having the right process and tools is essential. A few questions to ask your AMS agency to explore their strengths in this area include:

1. What is your AMS optimization checklist?
2. At what frequency do you execute which tasks and how do you provide transparency to clients around it?
3. How often do you execute tests/experiments?
4. What are some of the tests you have executed recently?
5. What happens if my current account manager quits? How do you maintain continuity?

Looking out for these three traits will ensure that you hire an AMS agency that can help you stand out and succeed in today’s competitive Amazon landscape.

 

Read our post “Amazon Advertising Maturity Model – Roadmap To Success” to learn how to build a sophisticated Amazon advertising strategy.