Sponsored Products Ads now allow bids of 1,000 EUR or Pounds on AMS

Just as the title of this article says, you can now bid up to 1,000 Euro or Pounds on AMS with your Sponsored Products Ads. The change was made in the last two weeks and it applies to all keywords’ match types (i.e. broad, phrase, and exact). This hasn’t yet been implemented in Headline Search and Product Display ads – the bids in this type of campaigns have remained the same: 39 Euro/31 Pounds.

This change deserves a special attention as it shows an even greater effort from Amazon in making the AMS platform as competitive as it can get. It may seem like an insignificant change, but this might rocket Amazon’s profit from AMS in the future. If this test works well for them, they will most likely implement the possibility of bidding so high with all three types of campaigns.

How will bids of 1,000 EUR/£ influence you (us)?!

Firstly, it will create a more competitive market where it will be more and more difficult to win bids and impressions (unless you have a very big pocket). As we have debated in Black Friday Week – An Amazon Scam To Make You Pay More For Advertising?!, this would work splendidly only for Amazon, while vendors and sellers will have to increase their AMS budgets to win impressions.

Secondly, the possibility of bidding more will most likely influence directly the ACPC (i.e. the average cost per click – the only pay plan used in AMS), thus the overall spent. Let’s take an example: if in the past the ACPC could have only gone as high as 39 EUR/31£, now it can go up to 1,000 EUR/£. So, if you have a budget of 10,000 EUR/£ for your campaign, instead of being able to get 256 clicks, you may be getting only 10 clicks (10,000/1,000) – even if this is an extreme example, the idea behind it shows what could happen in the future.

Thirdly, as the market will become more competitive, it will become almost impossible for small vendors/sellers to win impressions on competitive keywords. To win, they will need to afford spending considerable amounts of money and bidding up to 1,000 EUR/£ per keyword.

There are probably two questions on your mind now: 1. What keywords are so important to bid 1,000 EUR/£ for them? and 2. Who can really afford to bid so high, be them a small vendor/seller or a big one? If the “bids of 1000” test will work for Amazon, we’ll definitely find the answer to these two questions.

What do you think about this change? Do you see it as an advantage or as an advantage? Finally, who do you think will most likely benefit from the change? Leave your comments below.