DANNY’S NOTES ON STARTING WITH AMAZON ADS
The goal here is the reduce your time spent optimising your campaigns and limit the confusion of endless undocumented tweaking.
It is common for sellers to only experience PPC for the first time via the Amazon platform. Whilst the Amazon platform is quite simple compared to say Adwords or BingAds, sellers still get confused, run low on patience and can maybe expect a little too much in a short period of time.
There are some great techniques and PPC strategies online, see this as just another option to add to your cannon. Please remember these are all experiments and that you will need to experiment yourself to get the best results.
We are going to go through the process of stacking auto campaign at different price points in the attempt of making longterm PPC savings on your product(s). There is no disputing that manual campaigns are effective, especially if you are well versed in Pay Per Click. However, if you are just starting out and have limited time and resources, this could be an option for you to start with and then expand later (manual campaigns).
***Prior to this you would have done extensive keyword research and optimisation of your listing.
LINKS TO DANNY’S SPREADSHEETS: click here
What you will need for this experiment:
1.A copy of Excel
2.Buckets of patience
3.A notepad to document each change so you can reverse this if required down the road
4.A text file to keep tally of all your negative keywords – We will use this as a wash list for all your campaigns
Instead of starting with really high bids and larger Daily budget we will instead look to find long tail keywords first and develop this further as we stack auto campaigns over the coming weeks.
Eventually your campaigns will look something like this:
1. Campaign 1 (0.20 / 10.00)
2. Campaign 2 (0.40 / 10.00)
3. Campaign 3 (0.60 / 10.00)
4. Campaign 4 (0.90 / 10.00)
***You may want to play with daily budgets if you are blasting through them as the cost per click clicks climb (Campaign 3/4) or in a high velocity category. These are just a guide to suit your requirements.
1.Set up an Auto Campaign and determine your Daily budget and Bid.
2. Let this run for at least 48/72 hours but highly recommend 7 days (Amazon reporting has a time lag) as we want to qualify the data as best as possible.
3.Download a Search Term Report and open in Excel
4.Select the data for the campaign you wish to optimise and paste it into it’s own tab and place a filter on the header column.
5. Go to the Customer Search Term column and start cutting and pasting each keyword into Amazon and review the listings. What we are looking for here is relevance.
***Example; let’s say you sell an organic product for 22.99 and everything on the page is a chemical based product with the average price of 5.99.
The chances are this has less chance of converting as, whilst your listing is somewhat related, the intent is not necessary there for your product.
Another example is if the keyword displays lots of random products…
Note: random keywords can convert so keep an eye Product Sales /Conversion columns.
Also, you need to check from a data point of view on how the keywords are performing, look for high impressions with low click through rates as an example – The scope is too big to discuss here for this walkthrough, have a play with my spreadsheet in the notes, this will guide you a little better in decision making.
6. Open a text file and dump all non relevant keywords in – This is going to be our wash list for further campaigns.
7. Add the above keywords to the campaign as negative Exact Match.
8. Document this without fail – Put the date and the changes you make, make a note of observations and data (ACoS, clicks and impressions as an example)
***Over the coming weeks what you should notice is the daily budget reducing as you add more negative keywords as less wastage is happening. If you are finding that you are getting little or no impressions after a week you may need to raise your bid as there are not enough keywords under the set threshold of the bid price.
Also, do some housekeeping and ensure your listing is not suppressed or you have been bounced into an unrelated browse node for your product.
Tuning your listing
This can also be a great exercise in tuning your listing so Amazon is presenting you with the best keywords possible. You may find that you are getting random keywords that are unrelated or look ok but do not convert.
This is where you need to review your Title and backend Search Term fields and optimise these for better keyword suggestions from algorithm.
Phase 2 – Setting up Auto Campaign 2
-Repeat steps 1-5 but the CPC and Daily budget are set at a higher price point
-Take your wash-list from Campaign 1 and add these keyword phrases as negative Exact Match to Campaign 2.
We are doing this to ensure that Campaign 2 does not start serving you keywords you had rejected from Campaign 1. From my experiments I have noticed on the first day that the activity jumps from Campaign 1 to Campaign 2 but settles down over a period of time. There seems to be a reduction in reach and spend each time a new campaign is added (15-20%). Though there are so many variables here so difficult to determine over the short term.
Now you have two campaigns running at different bids. This is where it can get slightly complicated as we need to optimise both campaigns and add the negatives to each campaign without worrying about duplicating. Whilst first Day and Last Day are very useful (managing) I found using Conditional Formatting a easier way to pull out the doubles.
LINKS TO DANNY’S SPREADSHEETS: click here
1. Download your latest Search Term Report
2. Separate each campaign onto own tab with the header
3. Cut and paste your wash-list into the bottom of the Customer Search Term column
4. Select Conditional Formatting – Highlight Cell Rules – Duplicate Values (then choose a colour)
5. Make sure you have the Filter on and select from the Customer Search Term column By Colour – Cell Colour
Congratulations; you have now highlights all the duplicates for deleting… You can use this method for further campaigns as you move through different phases and stack campaigns. Remember the goal here is to reduce time spent on tweaking, find keywords that have a lower CPC and if you are already flying, a great way to complement Manual campaigns.
Wrapping up….
Now you have a framework to play with, to share and discover different ways of doing things.
This method will not fix a bad product or a saturated market. But it will hopefully help you find keywords at a lower CPC to bring down your PPC spend over the longterm. Like all non optimised campaigns you will start with a higher ACoS until you have weeded the Amazon garden.
Good luck. And may you have much success with your experiments…
Danny McMillan
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