How to Optimize Amazon PPC Campaigns When You Have Low Inventory

Amazon FBA businesses need to make sure their Amazon ad campaigns are always running at optimum efficiency. This can be a very time-consuming process, as you need to track your campaigns, look at the analytics, and create strategies for a wide variety of different scenarios that may come up along the way. One scenario you need to plan for is how you want to run your PPC campaigns with Amazon when you have low inventory.

Issues such as low inventory or even sudden inventory stockouts happen to even the most experienced Amazon professional sellers out there. And the FBA businesses that come out of the situation on top are the ones that have a winning strategy in place. This strategy includes optimizing your advertising accordingly in order to cut your potential losses.

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Amazon PPC Campaign Strategy: Dealing with Low Inventory or Stockouts

When you have low inventory or when you’re out of stock of a product listing on Amazon, it’s essential to make sure your PPC campaigns are optimized for your inventory, or completely paused until you can restock. While this seems simple enough, let's first break down the practical things to keep in mind:

• How can you stay on top of these PPC campaigns? 
• How can FBA sellers make sure everything is optimized based on inventory? 

As a professional seller on Amazon there are a variety of strategies you can try, but the best thing you can do is practice effective inventory management and have your Amazon PPC ad campaign strategies in place when you are dealing with inventory issues. Having a strategy prepared beforehand will make sure you’re not caught by surprise by these obstacles and your e-commerce sales don’t suffer as a result.

One way is using Mayan's unique software. Our data-driven tool was created to automate your Amazon ad campaigns for you. Learn more about low inventory campaigns below and contact Mayan today to see if our platform is a fit for your Amazon business!

This post dives into the techniques of optimizing your PPC campaigns to best deal with common problems like low inventory when you're running an FBA business. Problem solve like a pro and get those PPC campaigns optimized for any situation that might come up.

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What Happens to Ads When There is Low or No Product?

When your ad groups and campaigns on Amazon have low or no product, your PPC ads will be inactive until you restock and make your products available to your customers. While this may seem like a simple fix, it can actually be detrimental to your Amazon store. 

1. You'll lose ranking/visibility: Products in your store that aren’t being bought can cause you to lose ranking and visibility on Amazon. And unfortunately, regaining that visibility will take time. It can take as long as a few weeks or more to get these products back on track. 
2. Loss of sales: No (or low) stock means no ads and fewer purchases, which means that you'll be missing out on sales for the time that you're working to restock your inventory.

When this happens, you can adjust your Amazon ad campaigns to still sell the product, but prevent it from selling out before you can get more stock. This is the ideal scenario for sellers because you don’t lose out on sales, visibility, or rankings. 

Alternatively, you can make sure you have related products highlighted on your product listings that have low inventory, so your customers have another option that can work well for their needs. More on this later.

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Does Amazon Automatically Pause PPC Ad Campaigns?

Although Amazon says that PPC campaigns will be paused automatically when sellers run out of stock, there have been scenarios where campaigns continue to be eligible for hours after the product is sold out. If this happens with any of your ongoing PPC campaigns, you could be wasting your precious ad budget. 

So, while Amazon will usually pause campaigns when you suddenly run out of stock, it’s not necessarily a guarantee. It's also important to note that Amazon will only automatically pause any PPC campaigns when a product runs out of stock, not when it's running on low stock. That’s why it’s essential for FBA sellers on Amazon to to keep track of their inventory levels and ad campaigns in relation to them no matter what. One thing is for sure, Amazon will only optimize your campaigns to a point. It’s up to you to improve and optimize your campaign strategy to make up for any inventory issues you have. If you don’t take the right steps, you could run out of product faster than you can restock or you could be using ad spend on a product with low inventory that could be used elsewhere. 

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Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns on Amazon With Low Inventory

Let’s take a look at some effective strategies for optimizing your Amazon PPC campaigns as well as your store when your product inventory is low. 

Decrease Your Advertising Bids and Budget

When products have low stock, one of the first things you should do is decrease those advertising bids and budgets. Implementing this quick tip will keep your campaigns up and running but will slow down the demand for your products. This way, you can still make your sales without running out of stock. Just make sure you restock as soon as possible. 

Quickly decreasing your ad bids and budget once you have low inventory also means that you won't have to run this decreased ad campaign(s) for very long. What's more is that your clicks and visibility will decrease with fewer sales, so you want to be quick when it comes to getting things back to normal. The decreased visibility you get from low inventory on Amazon isn’t as bad as when you have zero stock, so this is still a preferable ad optimization. You can also increase your advertising bids and focus your campaigns on related products that your customers may like. Which brings us to our next point.

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Optimize Product Detail Page

The next step you can take in your low inventory PPC strategy is to optimize the Product Detail page. Your Product Detail page is essential for getting your customers to purchase your products and develop a relationship with your brand. But when you’re out of stock or you have low inventory, it can also help nudge them toward other items in your Amazon store. 

Let’s take a look at some of the standard optimizations you should make on all of your product detail pages:

Optimize your title: Product titles should always have the right keywords that your ideal customers are searching for. These keywords could also include features of the product.

Images: Make sure you’re providing top-notch images for your products. The pictures shouldn’t be too busy, they should highlight your product, and be high resolution. Usually the first image will be on a white background, the second image can show the product at a different angle or in use, and other images can show the size of the object along with other angles. Make sure users can zoom in on the images. It also helps if you have elements and text in your product images that highlight or describe product features. If you can communicate the benefits of your product through images alone, you can get a lot more conversions.

Bullet points: Your bullet points for your product page don’t need to be overly long. They just need to highlight the main features of the product and tell people why it’s the best product for them. Make sure your copy is effective, grammatically correct, and engaging for this section, as it’s usually the first thing people read.

Price: Make sure you have your pricing right and that any sales or discounts are applied.

Variations: If you have different colors of the product or different versions, make sure your product pages are consistent when they click through to the different options.

Reviews: If your product has great reviews, you’ll want to make sure they’re prominently displayed. Lots of good reviews are a good buy signal for potential customers. If you have a great product page combined with great reviews, you’re going to have a much better chance of getting that conversion.

Answered Questions: If users ask questions about the products, make sure answers are provided so they have less hesitation about making the purchase.

Keeping your product pages clean and consistent should be a standard part of your process of dealing with low inventory on Amazon. Shoddy product pages are going to lead to fewer sales, no matter how well you’ve optimized your PPC ad campaigns.

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Guide Your Customers to Similar Products

When a potential customer goes to your Amazon store or clicks on one of your ads and they arrive at a product that is low on stock or out of stock, make sure you’re giving them other options. By optimizing your keywords and your product pages, you can give yourself the best chance at getting a conversion.

Let’s say a customer searches for one of the keywords that you’ve targeted in your PPC campaigns. They come across an ad for one of your items and they want to buy it, but unfortunately the product is out of stock. If you have your product pages optimized and you have related products highlighted on the product detail page, they can see the best alternatives you have to offer instead of seeking a product elsewhere on Amazon. 

This is the ideal scenario and can only be accomplished if you’ve taken the time to optimize your product detail pages, along with your ad campaigns and your keywords.

This can take a lot of time and work, but the results are well worth it. If you want to get more conversion and boost sales, you have to make sure every aspect of your Amazon FBA business is optimized to its full potential.

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Restock As Soon As Possible

Campaign adjustments for low inventory aren’t necessary if you’re able to keep your stock managed to meet demand. If you have low inventory or if you’re out of stock, it’s essential to restock as soon as possible. The longer you wait to restock, the more sales you miss out on. You should also make sure you have the stock to meet the new demand for any alternative products you’re pushing. This way, you don’t end up in a similar position with those products.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to load up on products just because you have low stock. Instead, mindfully restock. If you overstock, you’ll have to deal with the extra FBA storage fees and problems that come along with that. To achieve the perfect balance when it comes to inventory management on Amazon, FBA sellers should make sure to keep a good amount of inventory in stock to meet demand without running out of products or stocking too much. And this comes with time.

As your FBA business grows and you see how your customers buy your products and you get more data on-demand, you’ll be able to fine-tune your inventory management practices.

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Practice Effective Inventory Management on Amazon

No matter what you do with your PPC ad campaigns and keyword optimizations, they will be less effective if you don’t have inventory management practices in place.

If you don’t have good inventory management, you can run into a variety of issues other than just low stock. You may also deal with dead stock, storage costs, spoilage, and more. Of course, not having the orders to fulfill demand is always a negative, but these other issues can affect your bottom line too.

Although inventory management is automated by Amazon for FBA sellers to an extent, it isn’t 100% handled for you. Amazon takes care of a lot: they store your products, handle your returns and refunds, not to mention pack, ship, and track your products. This is great, but you can take your inventory management a step further and make sure your strategy is optimized to maximize your profits, keep inventory stock balanced, and avoid wasting ad budget or additional money on inventory storage. 

Basically with a good inventory management strategy, you can make sure your business is as efficient and profitable as possible. 

Practicing effective inventory management will help you keep the right inventory levels, reduce spoilage, bring down your storage costs, improve your deliveries, maximize your profits, and ultimately improve the customer experience. And if you need help with inventory management and Amazon ad campaigns, there are software solutions to help you get on track.

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Automate Your Ads Management with Mayan

If you’re looking to take the guesswork and extended hours out of Amazon ad management, then Mayan is your solution. Mayan is advanced automation software designed specifically to help Amazon FBA businesses grow and thrive. Our software optimizes your Amazon ad campaigns for you, so you can focus on the important things in your business. You do what you do best, and we’ll take care of the advertising.

Amazon FBA sellers who use Mayan are able to surpass their sales, ROAS, and other long-term goals. With our advanced reporting dashboard, you can get all of the insight you need to make the best decisions for your business. Of course, you’ll also be saving a ton of time since the Amazon ad process will be automated for you. Plus, if you have any additional questions, our awesome customer service team has your back. We combine advanced machine learning with an MIT-led team of data scientists to provide you with the best ad automation software possible.

Mayan optimizes your Amazon ad spend from the top down. You’ll never have to waste dollars on ad campaigns when you’re using our platform. Here's a little breakdown:

• Any low inventory campaigns will automatically be adjusted to best fit the needs of your business.
• You’ll also get in-depth data on advertising bidding strategies and keywords. That's because our system can analyze your inventory and provide you with the best strategy forward to optimize your sales without losing visibility when stock is low. 
• Our data analytics will also help ensure that your Amazon inventory management is always optimized.

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Get a Free Advertising Audit with Mayan

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