Amazon CPC and vCPM Bidding

When shoppers search Amazon for products, Amazon runs a real-time auction to decide which ads, if any, will appear for relevant searches and in which order those ads will show on the SERP - Search Engine Report Page. Ads selected to compete in the auction must meet a minimum relevance criteria. Ads that compete in the auction are ranked and displayed to shoppers based on a combination of the seller’s bid and the ad’s relevance to the shopper's search. We must make sure that our targeting is relevant to our product, because more relevant, better-performing ads are more likely to be shown than less relevant ones. 

The more customers click on an ad, the more relevant it becomes.

Cost-per-click bids

The cost-per-click bid is the cost per click you are willing to pay when shoppers click your ad.

Your cost per click may actually be lower than your cost-per-click bid. Its important to know your max-bid based on calculating per-product expenses and average conversion rate. For Sponsored Products, selecting the Dynamic bids - up and down bidding strategy may cause some bids to exceed the cost-per-click bid.

Manual targeting

Your bid is the cost per click you are willing to pay when a shopper clicks an ad from the ad group or campaign. When you're creating a campaign, select a bid type that helps you meet your goals.

• Custom bid – allows you to apply custom bids to keywords or apply a custom bid to a set of keywords or product targets at scale.

• Suggested bid – use Amazon's bid recommendations that are calculated from a group of recent winning bids similar to yours. 

• Default bid – allows you to link multiple keywords to a single bid value. As you change the bid value it affects all linked keywords. Default bids is not available for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns. Cost-per-click bids that are set at the keyword level take precedence over the default cost-per-click bid set at the ad group or campaign level. 

Cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM)

With cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) pricing, you pay each time shoppers view your ad 1000 times. vCPM billing is only available for Sponsored Display campaigns and for on and off-Amazon recognized traffic, including Twitch and offsite, optimizing for viewable impressions.

When your Sponsored Display ad with optimize for viewable impressions gets 1000 viewable impressions, your bid amount is deducted from your daily budget. We recommend analyzing impressions and new-to-brand orders for this optimization strategy. 

You have a visibility into how many sales the views of your ad generated because when you use vCPM you’re paying for impressions instead of clicks. View-based attribution allows you to understand when customers have seen your ad and then buy your brand's ASINs on Amazon later.

Suggested bid and bid range

Suggested bid and bid range are calculated from a group of recent winning bids for ads that are similar to yours. The bid range is a range of winning bids for most ads in your product category. The suggested bid provides an estimate of bids that have been used by other advertisers for products such as yours. The purpose of this range is to help you get started with advertising. However, if you have a specific objective in mind, we recommend that you enter a bid that will enable you to meet your strategies and then adjust your bid based on your campaign performance.

Suggested bid and bid range update daily, based on the increase or decrease in competing bids and ads in each auction. Use the suggested bid and bid range together to decide on a bid for your ad group, campaign, or keyword.

If you decide that each click is worth more than the suggested bid, for example $1.60, you can set your bid at $1.60. Now, since your bid is higher than the suggested bid and above the high end of the bid range, your ads will be more competitive in auctions. This may increase your chances of winning more impressions, clicks, and sales. To take another example, if the suggested bid for an ad group or keyword is $0.70 and the bid range is $0.40 to $1.40, you might decide that each click on your ad is worth $0.60. Even though $0.60 is lower than the suggested bid, you can still win impressions. However, you may win more impressions with a higher bid.

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