Amazon Marketing, taught from A to Z.
The full AMALYZE Amazon Marketing course — three modules covering Promotions, PPC fundamentals, and hands-on campaign setup & execution. Each article is the English companion to one episode of our German A-to-Z video course.
Amazon Marketing from A to Z — the course intro.
A short kick-off to the full AMALYZE Amazon Marketing course: the two halves of the work on Amazon — Promotions and Sponsored Ads campaigns — and what each of the three modules covers.
Module 1
Promotions on Amazon
Every Amazon promotional mechanic — coupons, Lightning Deals, Prime Exclusive Discounts, Subscribe & Save, sale prices and the Outlet — when to use each and the settings that decide whether the promo actually runs profitably.
12 of 13 episodes published
The ground rules every Amazon promotion should follow.
Eligibility, reference pricing, margin floor, stacking, inventory cover and measurement — the pre-flight checklist for every promo before you click submit.
Where customers actually see your promotions on Amazon.
A tour through every surface that displays promotions — search, detail page, cart, Deals page, email — and which placements drive incremental volume.
Build a product selection your future self can reuse.
Every Seller Central promotion starts with a product selection. Naming conventions, variation handling and the configuration choices that prevent silent failures.
Money Off — the simplest Amazon discount, used well.
Price Discount is the most basic promo and the easiest to misuse. Tiered structures, claim limits and the three situations where Money Off earns its place.
Buy One, Get One — when a gift beats a percentage.
Same-product vs different-product BOGO, the qualifying threshold, and the categories where a free unit consistently out-performs a percentage discount.
Prime Exclusive Discounts — the quiet workhorse.
PEDs render the SERP badge, qualify for Prime Day placements and are free to schedule. Why they often beat Lightning Deals during peak events.
Lightning Deals and 7-Day Deals, played to win.
The only promotions that put your ASIN on the Today's Deals page — what they cost, the inventory rules, and how to pick slots that actually pay back.
Coupons — the everyday SERP badge that earns its keep.
Percentage vs fixed-amount, the redemption fee, when the green badge actually fires, and the four coupon structures we use most often.
Subscribe & Save — one promo, a recurring revenue line.
Amazon's baseline vs the brand-funded boost, eligibility for consumables, and the LTV maths that decides whether the discount is an investment or a leak.
Sale Price — the strike-through nobody configures properly.
The pricing field that drives the crossed-out 'Was' price on every detail page — and the reference-pricing pitfalls of leaving it on too long.
Amazon Outlet — the clearance lane done right.
The dedicated clearance surface for aged FBA inventory — eligibility, how deep to discount, and why Outlet beats a long Sale Price for clearance.
The rest of the toolkit — and how to plan it together.
Social Media Promo Codes, Brand Tailored Promotions, Vine, and the year-round promotional calendar that ties Module 1 together.
Module 2
Sponsored Ads — PPC Fundamentals
The CPC ground rules behind every paid campaign on Amazon: how the auction works, ad eligibility, the bid range, dynamic bidding, the four advertising goals, brand defence, conquesting, reading and calculating from the data.
24 of 24 episodes published
Amazon PPC, demystified — why paid search exists on Amazon.
Sponsored Ads are the way Amazon arbitrates between sellers competing for the same shopper. The kick-off to Module 2.
The Amazon advertising account — and what you need before bidding.
Access roles, billing, tax profile, Brand Registry — the pre-flight every seller has to clear before the console accepts a bid.
Ad eligibility on Amazon — when an ASIN can actually run ads.
Buy Box, stock, suppression, restricted categories. Every silent way Amazon disqualifies your ads without telling you.
The bid range Amazon shows you — and what it really means.
It's not a recommendation; it's a backwards-looking summary of winning bids. How to use it properly.
Keywords before bids — the Amazon PPC ordering rule.
Why keyword research is the prerequisite to bidding, and the three keyword categories every PPC plan should separate.
Budgets and dynamic bidding — how they actually interact.
Down-only, up-and-down, fixed. Placement modifiers. Why budget and bidding strategy compound, and how to read budget-capped vs bid-capped.
The bid is not everything — what actually decides Amazon auctions.
Conversion rate, CTR, history, Buy Box — silent multipliers on top of your bid. Why raising the bid often doesn't help.
Customer intent meets the product page — where PPC actually converts.
Every click lands on the detail page. If the page doesn't answer the intent in five seconds, the spend is wasted.
Bid, CPC and average CPC — three metrics, three different stories.
Three metrics that share units and live next to each other. Each one should drive a different decision.
Homogeneous vs heterogeneous products — two different bid playbooks.
Commodity ASINs and differentiated ASINs need different rules. The most common misallocation in account audits.
Derive your target CPC from the advertising goal, not from a feeling.
Every defensible bid starts from an explicit goal. The maths, with worked examples for ACOS and contribution margin.
Reach — the goal where impressions, not orders, are the point.
Pre-launch warmup, seasonal share-of-voice, brand defence. When the right success metric isn't ACOS.
Clicks and click-through rate — a goal worth pricing on its own.
Search-term harvesting, creative testing, page diagnostics. Click-led goals and how to bound them.
Units and revenue — the goal most operators are actually pursuing.
Where unit and revenue goals diverge, the CPC derivation for each, and why they're easy to mis-budget.
Profitable — the goal that should guard every other goal.
Contribution-margin floors, max profitable CPC, and the traps that turn revenue plans into margin burns.
All four advertising goals on one canvas.
Reach, clicks, units/revenue, profitability — on one page, with the audit pattern for tagging every campaign in your account.
Brand defence — the quietest, cheapest win in Amazon PPC.
Should you bid on your own brand name? Yes — and this is how to size the campaign so it never overruns.
Conquesting — the offensive mirror of brand defence.
Bidding on competitor brand names and ASINs. When it works, when it doesn't, and how to size it.
The second-order effects of PPC — what the report doesn't show.
Organic rank lift, halo across variants, inventory turn, review velocity — and the cannibalisation risks on the other side.
Visibility — the goal that sits between reach and brand defence.
Reach with a placement constraint. When you want the impression specifically at top-of-search or on a specific page.
Reading PPC data the right way — Part 1.
Attribution windows, sample-size discipline, cohort thinking. How to stop over-fitting noise in the campaign report.
Calculating from PPC data — Part 2.
Break-even ACOS, max profitable bid, daily budget for a unit target, allowable loss per launch order. The four calculations.
The truth about CPCs — what the average hides.
Bimodal CPC distributions, where drift comes from, and why bidding against the aCPC misprices both ends of the curve.
The bid should always sit above your target CPC — here's why.
Counter-intuitive but correct. The headroom rule that closes Module 2 and ties every preceding episode together.
Module 3
Sponsored Ads — Setup & Execution
Hands-on campaign builds: account structure, naming conventions, launching auto and manual campaigns, harvesting search terms, negatives, dayparting, brand defence and scaling profitable winners.
24 of 24 episodes published
Module 3 kick-off — building Sponsored Ads campaigns from scratch.
Module 1 gave you Amazon's promotional toolkit, Module 2 gave you the PPC mental model. Module 3 is the hands-on build, end to end.
Sponsored Products, Brands, Display — formats and targeting at a glance.
Pick a format and a targeting type before you bid on anything. The full matrix, with the trade-offs the UI doesn't make obvious.
Calculate the bid before you type it — the maths in plain English.
Five inputs — price, margin, CVR, click-through, goal — produce a defensible number. The arithmetic with a worked example.
What you actually pay per click — the second-price auction, demystified.
Amazon runs a modified second-price auction. The winner pays one cent more than the second-highest qualifying bid.
The hard limits — bid caps, ad-group sizes, keyword and target counts.
Every format ships with hard numeric ceilings. The full table — and the structural decisions those caps force on you.
Naming campaigns and ad groups — the convention that pays for itself.
Five fields every name should encode, why renaming is harder than it looks, and the template AMALYZE uses in real accounts.
Portfolios — when to use them and how to name them.
Shared monthly budgets, shared date ranges, easier reporting filters. When portfolios add structure and when they get in the way.
Start date, end date, and the case for leaving end date blank.
Always set a start date for time-bounded promotions, almost never set an end date for always-on campaigns.
Budget types — daily, lifetime, portfolio caps and the pacing logic underneath.
Daily budget is not a hard daily cap. The pacing logic explained, with the +25% overspend rule that catches new advertisers off guard.
Sponsored Products bid strategies — down-only, up-and-down, fixed.
Three SP bid strategies, three different relationships between your bid and what Amazon actually places. When each is correct.
Sponsored Brands bid strategies — the rules are different here.
Manual bidding, rule-based bidding, and the optimisation goal that changes how every euro gets allocated across placements.
Sponsored Display bid strategies — CPC, vCPM, and the cost-type trap.
SD has two cost types and optimisation goals on top. Pick the wrong one and your KPIs become meaningless.
Broad, phrase, exact — match types, with the gotchas Amazon doesn't print.
Three match types, three different breadths of query coverage. Plus the close-variant behaviour that catches everyone the first time.
Broad PLUS on Sponsored Brands — extra reach, extra responsibility.
The fourth match type, exclusive to SB. Reach gain is real; negative-list discipline is the hidden cost.
Auto-campaign targeting — the four match buckets and how to bid them.
Close match, loose match, substitutes, complements — and the bid-per-bucket pattern that turns auto into a real harvesting tool.
Keyword relevance — what Amazon means and how to earn it.
Three inputs you can actually move to raise the relevance score Amazon multiplies your bid by.
Adding keywords to campaigns — the three sources, the one workflow.
Research file, auto-campaign harvest, console suggestions. The workflow that absorbs all three without duplicates.
Setting the bid per keyword — derived numbers, not console suggestions.
Every keyword bid should fall out of the arithmetic from episode 03. The shortcuts that cost money, and the bulk-file workflow.
Product targeting on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.
Selection criteria for competitor ASINs and the bid derivation that is subtly different from keyword targeting.
Category targeting — the broad lever that needs the narrow refinements.
Price, rating, brand inclusion / exclusion — the refinements that turn a budget-burner into a useful tool.
Sponsored Display audiences and remarketing — the audience-targeting lever.
Views, purchases, Amazon audiences, lookalikes. The four audience types and the remarketing window.
Budget rules — scheduling, performance triggers, and the BFCM playbook.
Schedule-based and performance-based rules, and the standard ruleset every always-on campaign should have.
Campaign and ad-group structure — the blueprint AMALYZE deploys.
The four-campaign skeleton per ASIN, ad-group split rules, and structural patterns that survive 10× growth.
Attribution for Sellers and Vendors — what counts, what doesn't, and the windows.
Sponsored Ads attribution windows, multi-touch logic, and the off-Amazon traffic case that needs Amazon Attribution proper.