Launching Your Amazon FBA Product – Should You Use a Giveaway or PPC?

You’ve signed up for Nine University. You went through the course, you found a product, you negotiated with suppliers – fast forward a little and boom, your product is sitting in the Amazon warehouse, waiting for people to click the “Buy Now” button. You have one big problem though – nobody knows it exists. And if no one knows it exists, you can’t sell it.

Generally speaking, at this point, you have two choices – you can give away product in exchange for positive reviews, which will help boost the Amazon rankings and put it in a position where people will actually find it, or you can launch a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaign and attract attention to it through sponsored ads. Which option is the best? Well, like so many things in an Amazon FBA business, that depends.

Giveaways versus PPC

Amazon buyers tend to come in two main categories – they’re going to buy either the first thing they see on the first page, or they’re going to check out all the prices and ratings, and figure out if they want to buy Product A with fifty five-star reviews, or Product B with a thousand reviews, b but it’s sitting at four-and-a-half stars. Either way, the vast majority of Amazon buyers aren’t looking at page 2 of the results, which is why it’s crucial to get your product up as high in the ratings as possible, as quickly as possible. This is achieved by either purchasing advertising from Amazon or getting enough reviews of your product that Amazon boosts it in the rankings.

With PPC, you have a lower initial cost. You don’t need as much product, it’s relatively simple to set up an advertising campaign, and it’s easy. You’re putting an advertisement out there to attract attention. The downside of a PPC campaign is that it can be a very slow burn. It may take weeks – or even months – for a product to make it to the top of the first page. Amazon loves PPC because ultimately, they make money even if your product doesn’t sell.

With giveaways, your costs will be much higher. You’ll be finding people who want your product and reimbursing them for the cost. You’ll need a larger initial quantity of products to make up for this. However, when Amazon sees positive reviews for your product coming in, it will know that this is something it should promote, and it will start to promote your product on its own – and up the rankings, you go! This can be a much faster way to get up the Amazon ranks. However, this may also be considerably more expensive.

So Which Is Better?

There is no truly “better” option here – but the best option may simply be, both. Use a giveaway campaign to launch your product to the top of the page, then use the slower-burning PPC campaign to help keep it there.

Using the combination allows you to have the stats and reviews to back up the giveaway – because going to the effort of getting up to the top of the first page does you no good if you fall off immediately. It’s a waste of your time and money in that event.

Hopefully, this provides some insight into how you should launch a product on Amazon. Remember, if you want to succeed in your business, Nine University is there and ready to help you out. Our new FastTrack program allows you to get the support you need in your Amazon business, regardless of when you need it.