The Best Amazon Advertising Tools For Sellers & Vendors

Tools to automate Amazon Advertising, Amazon Seller Central, and Amazon Vendor Central for growth and efficiency

Published in

Openbridge

12 min readJan 11, 2023

While researching the "best Amazon advertising tools," the typical results are focused mainly on Amazon PPC tools. While Amazon PPC management tools are essential, they reflect one category of solutions Sellers and Vendors need to optimize and grow their Amazon businesses.

Advertising is a critical factor for any company's growth. It aids in drawing in new customers, building brand awareness, product consideration, and increasing sales. But, with the ever-changing economic and operational atmosphere, advertising does not operate in a vacuum. Facebook, Google, Shopify DTC, email, physical retail, and many other channels create a fragmented e-commerce landscape.

The right tools can make all the difference for any business on Amazon Seller Central or Amazon Vendor Central. As a result, this is where thinking more broadly about your tool options for performance, efficiency, and effectiveness comes into play.

Before jumping into the "tools," it is vital to take a step back to appreciate how expansive the Amazon Advertising ecosystem has grown over the past few years.

The Amazon Advertising Platform Ecosystem

Amazon Advertising is a platform that allows businesses to advertise their products and services to customers on Amazon and across the Amazon Advertising network. It offers a range of advertising products and provides detailed performance data to help businesses track the effectiveness of their campaigns, including metrics such as impressions, clicks, and sales.

Sponsored Products: Sponsored Products are ads that appear in the search results and product detail pages on Amazon. These ads can help businesses increase the visibility of their products and drive more sales.
Sponsored Brands: Sponsored Brands are ads that feature a company's logo, a selection of products, and a custom headline. These ads can appear on Amazon, including the search results and product detail pages.
Sponsored Display: Sponsored Display ads can appear on various parts of the Amazon website, including the homepage, search results, and product detail pages. They can also appear on other websites that are part of the Amazon Advertising network, such as IMDb and Twitch.
Amazon DSP: Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) is a programmatic ad-buying platform that allows businesses to target specific audiences and reach them with display and video ads across the Amazon Advertising network.
Amazon Advertising API: The Amazon Advertising API is a set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allowing businesses to programmatically access and manage their advertising campaigns on Amazon. This can be useful for companies that want to integrate their advertising data with other business systems and platforms.
Amazon Attribution: Amazon Attribution is a tool that helps businesses understand how their Amazon advertising campaigns drive sales and revenue. It provides detailed data on the performance of your campaigns, including the number of impressions, clicks, and sales generated by your ads. This can be useful for identifying trends and patterns in your advertising performance and making data-driven decisions about your strategy.
Amazon Marketing Cloud: Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a suite of tools that helps businesses optimize their marketing efforts across various channels, including email, web, social media, and mobile. The tools within the Marketing Cloud are designed to help businesses engage with their customers, personalize their marketing efforts, and drive more sales and revenue.
Amazon Marketing Streams: Amazon Marketing Streams is a tool that helps businesses streamline their data analytics efforts.

In addition to the services outlined above, brands must increasingly leverage the Amazon Brand Registry for IP protection and Brand Analytic Reporting to understand broad brand advertising investments. Also, creating an Amazon Brand Store that reflects your business's tone, positioning, and visual elements is essential.

This is a broad ecosystem with vast nuances, gotchas, and complexity. Tools and automation are a must.

However, there is an expansive collection of tools connected to this ecosystem of Amazon products and services, and which tool is "best" is a function of what you are trying to accomplish.

Why Utilize Amazon Advertising Tools?

If you are an Amazon marketing agency, Amazon Vendor Central agency, Amazon consultant, or brand team, using Amazon advertising tools (or tools in general!) has several benefits. This is especially true considering the magnitude of the e-commerce ecosystems we just detailed.

Here are a few key points to consider:

Improved advertising efficiency: By consistently assessing and taking action from the information from these tools, companies can pick up where their advertising could be working more effectively and make transformations to their plan. This will increase the efficiency of their advertising endeavors and get more worth out of their ad budget.
Better targeting: Utilizing these tools, companies can more accurately focus their advertising campaigns. With their data on customers, competitors, and industry trends, businesses can recognize the most efficient means of reaching the intended audience while displaying the appropriate message at an appropriate time.
Increased sales and revenue: The ultimate ambition all businesses strive to achieve is to better their sales and revenue. With the help of these tools in optimizing their paid media tactics, companies can boost the effectiveness of their plans and improve consumer sales and profit revenues.
Flexibility: Standards-based, open solutions that avoid expensive vendor lock-in.
Ownership: Tools that support creating proprietary intellectual property (IP) like profitability models, visual storytelling, and others that offer competitive differentiation from peers.
Comprehensive data: These tools provide comprehensive data on the performance of your advertising campaigns, which can help identify trends and patterns and make data-driven decisions about your strategy.
Integration with other platforms: These tools provide extensive information concerning the effectiveness of your advertising efforts on other platforms like Facebook and Google, allowing proper detection of patterns and trends that give you a chance to base decisions on data.

Starting With The Basics: Amazon Advertising Advanced Tools

Advanced Tools is provided directly by Amazon, which helps businesses optimize their advertising efforts on Amazon. The tools are free and include various features for managing and analyzing advertising campaigns, including automated bidding, budget optimization, and audience segmentation.

Some of the key features of Amazon Advertising Advanced Tools include:

Automated bidding: This feature allows businesses to set up automated rules for adjusting their bid prices based on various factors, such as the performance of their campaigns or changes in the market. This can help businesses optimize their bid prices and get more value from advertising.
Budget optimization: This feature helps businesses optimize their advertising budgets by automatically allocating them to the most effective campaigns and keywords.
Audience segmentation: This feature allows businesses to create targeted campaigns based on specific customer segments, such as demographics, interests, and behavior. This can help companies to deliver more relevant and personalized advertising to their target audience.
Reports: Advanced Tools provide performance reports of your advertising campaigns, which can help identify trends and patterns and make data-driven decisions about your strategy.

While Amazon Advertising Advanced Tools is the starting point for most advertisers, there are some pros and cons to consider:

Pros:

Cost: It is free!
Advanced features: The Advanced Tools Center offers a range of advanced features that can help businesses get more value out of their advertising efforts on Amazon. This includes automated bidding and budget optimization, audience segmentation, and campaign scheduling.
Comprehensive data: The Advanced Tools Center provides comprehensive data on the performance of your Amazon advertising campaigns, which can help identify trends and patterns and make data-driven decisions about your strategy.

Cons:

Complexity: Some of the tools within the Advanced Tools Center can be complex to use and may require a learning curve to utilize their features fully.
Flexibility: You are limited to only the capabilities and views released by Amazon, especially in reporting.
Ownership: Your performance data is siloed, meaning it can not be extended to support a holistic, non-Amazon Advertising view of your business
Limited to Amazon: The Advanced Tools Center is specifically designed for advertising on Amazon, so it may be less relevant or valuable for businesses that advertise on other platforms.

Amazon Advertising API: Putting You In Control

If you feel stuck in the web-based Amazon Ads UI and are tired of manually downloading and managing 100s of spreadsheets across your clients, the Ads API is a must. The API will enable new levels of automation, eliminating messy, expensive, and error-prone manual work.

The Amazon Ads API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of APIs allowing businesses to access and manage their advertising campaigns on Amazon programmatically. The API provides access to various advertising data and functionality, including creating, updating, and retrieving ad campaigns, processing performance data, and performing bulk operations.

If you are a brand team, Amazon consultant, or Amazon agency, manual work drives costs and under-delivers;

Your bill rates and delivery schedules factor in labor-intensive and error-prone wrangling work, which means longer timelines and bigger budgets.
Your clients (internal or external) are underserved and unimpressed with the "spreadsheet" output. It does not meet their expectations OR achieve the value promised by you. They lose confidence in your ability to deliver insights into their ad investments.

While an API may sound intimidating, as a tool, it unlocks significant opportunities. For example, Openbridge, a verified Amazon Ads partner, offers code-free, fully automated API integrations, unifying data to a trusted, private data warehouse you control and own.

Automated, unified data means you can put your data to work with your favorite analytics tools. Explore, analyze, and visualize data to deliver faster innovation while avoiding vendor lock-in using tools that align with your service delivery.

Below is a collection of Amazon Advertising tools for insights, analytics, and reporting;

Tableau: Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that allows you to see your Amazon advertising data in various formats, including charts, maps, and graphs. With Tableau, you can easily track the performance of your campaigns, see how different variables affect your sales, and identify trends and patterns in your data.
Power BI: Power BI is another data visualization tool that provides a range of features for analyzing and interpreting your Amazon advertising data. It allows you to create custom dashboards and reports to track your performance and integrates with various other business tools and platforms.
Looker: Looker is a business intelligence platform that offers advanced analytics and data modeling capabilities. It allows you to create custom data models and queries to analyze your Amazon advertising data and provides a range of visualization options for presenting your findings.
Qlik Sense: Qlik Sense is a business intelligence platform offering various tools for creating dashboards, reports, and visualizations.
IBM Cognos: IBM Cognos is a comprehensive business intelligence platform offering various data analysis and reporting tools.
MicroStrategy: MicroStrategy is a business intelligence platform offering various tools for creating dashboards, reports, and visualizations.
SAP BusinessObjects: SAP BusinessObjects is a business intelligence platform that offers a range of tools for creating dashboards, reports, and visualizations.
Sisense: Sisense is a business intelligence platform offering various tools for creating dashboards, reports, and visualizations. It is designed to help businesses analyze and understand large and complex data sets.
DBT: DBT (Data Build Tool) is an open-source data modeling tool that helps businesses transform and analyze data from various sources. It allows companies to define data transformations and build a data model that can be queried and used for analysis.
Alteryx: Alteryx is a business intelligence platform offering various tools for data preparation, analysis, and visualization. It is designed to help businesses of all sizes analyze and understand complex data sets and make data-driven decisions.

Each of these tools offers unique features and can be helpful in different situations, depending on your business needs and goals. By leveraging the power of these tools, you can gain valuable insights into your Amazon advertising performance and make informed decisions about optimizing your strategy.

Best Amazon Advertising Tools: Amazon PPC software

Many Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) tools help businesses optimize their advertising strategy on Amazon. A prepacked Amazon PPC tool may appeal if you are an Amazon Seller central agency or Amazon consultant. Here are a few examples:

Teikametrics: Teikametrics is a tool that helps businesses automate and optimize their PPC campaigns on Amazon. It offers “machine learning algorithms” for automated bidding, keyword optimization, and campaign tracking features, which can help enterprises get more value from their advertising spend. They also offer managed services for those who need them.
Helium10: Helium10 is a suite of tools for Amazon sellers that includes several PPC-related features. It offers tools for keyword research, campaign optimization, and competitor analysis, which can help businesses identify opportunities to improve their Amazon PPC campaigns.
Jungle Scout: Jungle Scout is another Amazon PPC management software designed for Amazon sellers that offers a range of features for optimizing PPC campaigns, like target ACOS or bid optimizer. It provides tools for keyword research, campaign management, and performance tracking, which can help businesses identify opportunities to improve their Amazon PPC efforts.
SellerApp: SellerApp is a suite of optimization tools designed to help businesses that sell on Amazon optimize their performance and grow their business. It offers a range of features for keyword research, product listing optimization, and performance tracking, which can help companies improve their Amazon rankings and drive more sales.
Perpetua: Perpetua is a tool that helps businesses optimize their Amazon PPC campaigns. It offers automated bidding, keyword optimization, and campaign tracking features, which can help companies get more value from their advertising spend on Amazon.
Sellozo: Sellozo is a tool that helps businesses optimize their Amazon PPC campaigns. It offers a range of features for search terms, campaign management, and performance tracking, which can help businesses identify opportunities to improve their Amazon PPC efforts. Sellozo also provides detailed analytics on the performance of your campaigns, which can help identify trends and patterns and make data-driven decisions about your strategy.

By using these Amazon PPC tools, businesses can gain valuable insights into their PPC campaigns on Amazon and make informed decisions about optimizing their strategy. These tools provide a rich collection of premade capabilities, which can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your advertising efforts and drive more sales and revenue.

Amazon Advertising Tool Case Studies

Many businesses have successfully used these Amazon advertising tools to drive brand awareness and sales growth. Per Amazon, here are a few examples:

ŠKODA: ŠKODA, a car manufacturer, analyzes their Amazon advertising campaigns' performance in various markets worldwide. By regularly reviewing the data, ŠKODA could identify trends and patterns in its advertising performance and make data-driven decisions about optimizing its strategy.
Johnnie Walker: Johnnie Walker, a whisky brand, tracks and analyzes the performance of its Amazon advertising campaigns. By creating custom dashboards and reports, Johnnie Walker could get a clear picture of their advertising performance and make informed decisions about optimizing their strategy.
L'Oréal: L'Oréal, a cosmetics brand, analyzes its Amazon advertising data and identifies opportunities for improvement. By creating custom data models and queries, L'Oréal gained valuable insights into its advertising performance and made data-driven decisions about optimizing its strategy.

Each of these brands used these Amazon Advertising tools to gain valuable insights into their advertising performance and make informed decisions about optimizing their strategy to drive Amazon sales. By regularly reviewing and acting on the data provided by these tools, they improved the efficiency and effectiveness of their Amazon Ad efforts.

Don't Forget Amazon Retail!

The Amazon Retail platform provides tools and resources to help businesses manage their sales on Amazon, including listing and pricing tools, order management, and fulfillment options. These tools provide reports on the performance of a business's products and sales, inventory, and financial accounting information. Amazon Retail perfectly complements the paid media investments related to Amazon Ads.

If you are an Amazon Marketing Service, Amazon agency, Amazon consultant, or brand, get fast, flexible, and simple data integration and analytics with Openbridge! The Amazon platform offers APIs for Ads and Retail.

Unify Amazon Advertising data with Amazon Retail Seller Central or Vendor Central account data (i.e., product listing, inventory, traffic, sales, and fulfillment). Create a unified 360 view of your Amazon business, regardless of the Amazon marketplace, that includes advertising and retail operations. Dig deep into your Amazon customer trends and the type of new Amazon customer you want to target by harnessing your data.

Unlock the full power of your data with a 30-day free trial of Openbridge.

Sign up for a 30-day, no-risk, free trial and see how easy it is to connect your data sources, analyze your data, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and improve efficiency.

With Openbridge, you'll be able to get up and running quickly so you can unify Amazon Advertising data in a trusted, private industry-leading data lake, data lakehouse, or cloud warehouses like Databricks, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, Ahana, and Amazon Athena.

Use the analytics tools you love to explore, analyze, and visualize your data to innovate more quickly. Analytics-ready, unified data supercharges tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight, SAP, Alteryx, dbt, Azure Data Factory, and Qlik Sense.