For new sellers entering the Amazon market, it can be a bit difficult to compete initially. According to Marketplacepulse (2019), Amazon has about 2.9 million sellers right now. That’s a lot of competition. That’s why a lot of sellers use Amazon PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ads to help boost their products in the marketplace.
Using PPC can be a double-edged sword though. On one hand, it can really help you scale your products fast. On the other, it can cost you a lot of money when not managed properly. That’s why I’ll be giving you these five great tips that only the top sellers use to help you succeed with Amazon PPC, even as a beginner!
Name your campaigns well
Naming your campaigns well doesn’t just make it easier for you to find them, but it will help you a lot when filtering or reading your data. Moreover, it will be easier as well whenever you hire someone to manage your PPC campaigns for you in the future, since they’ll be able to understand your campaigns faster.
As of now, there are three kinds of advertising you can choose from in seller central: Sponsored Products, and Sponsored Brands & Display (If you’re brand registered). Underneath those campaigns, there’s many more variations you can do like match types, or if they’re auto or targeting campaigns, headline ads or video ads, and so on. Not to mention if you’re selling more than one product, you’re going to find yourself with a LOT of campaigns to manage.
I suggest a simple naming convention like this [SKU KR DATE IN MT]. SKU stands for your product’s Stock Keeping Unit. KR stands for KW research you got your keywords from, like Helium 10 (H10) or MerchantWords (MW). Date is self-explanatory. IN is the initials of the person who made the campaign. And then MT for the match type.
It will look a lot like this, [e.g. Mango-Slicer H10 100820 KS Exact]. Of course every Amazon business is different, you can form your own naming convention as your business grows but I do suggest to have these information in your campaign names.
Segment to Scale
Now that you know how to name campaigns properly, it’s time to launch campaigns! There’s a lot to choose from and it’s daunting to even understand what each specific campaign is for. No wonder a lot of sellers just put all their SKUs in one Auto campaign and just hope for the best. But that’s a huge mistake!
You see, putting all your products in one campaign makes it hard for you to read the data in the future. Yes it might perform well for others but you won’t know what specific keyword was triggered for a certain product. In other words, you’ll lose the ability to scale your campaigns at the product level in the future.
If you create your campaigns specific to a SKU or a product category, in other words: segment, Amazon will be able to index your listing easier. And combine that with a great naming structure for your campaigns, you’ll easily find potential keywords once you start harvesting from your search term reports (more on that later).
Start from the bottom
Alright, now that you’ve set your campaign structures, it’s time to launch those campaigns (again)! However, competing head on with the best of the best in your market is difficult and oftentimes very costly. That’s why you should start from the bottom and work your way up to the top.
There’s lots of ways you can do this, one of which is to target long-tail keywords. These keywords usually have cheaper cost-per-clicks (CPC), and for someone starting out, that’s very helpful.
Take note of negative targeting
You’re not limited to just increasing bids and budgets when scaling your campaigns. Sometimes simply inserting a keyword or ASIN for negative targeting can boost your campaigns!
When doing your weekly optimizations, take a look at keywords or ASINs that have been bleeding your campaigns. Double check that targeting if that’s really relevant and use your intuition if it’s really worth activating that keyword.
If that targeting has been getting a lot of clicks with 0 sales, it might be okay to lower the bid. If it happens for over a month. It might be a good idea to completely pause that targeting and have it as negative targeting. It will help you a lot with lowering the ACoS of your campaigns in the future.
Do KW Research & Optimizations Regularly
Now that you’re successfully managing your campaigns, the next set of questions would be: How often should I check it? Should I add more keywords? Should I lower the bids now since it spent a dollar?
All these can be a bit chaotic when starting, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s why you have to set a schedule for both KW Research and campaign optimizations. I suggest doing additional KW research at least once a month. That includes harvesting from your search term reports, or looking at SP suggested, or through your KW research tools.
Campaign optimizations on the other hand, should be done at least weekly. Check for KWs that aren’t getting sales but getting a lot of clicks. Check KWs that are getting sales but have very high ACoS. Check KWs that are performing really well, and think about increasing their bids once in a while. And lastly, check if you need to make adjustments in your campaign budgets.
Having a schedule makes your workflow more structured, allowing you to have more time to focus on the other aspects of the business.
Source: https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazon-has-three-million-active-sellers