Amazon PPC Bidding Strategies Explained: Match Types, Suggested Bids & Optimization Tips

Hi guys and welcome to another episode on our YouTube channel. In this video I'll be talking about bids, match types, bidding strategies and in general bid management. I think it's the topic that is kind of neglected in the cloud of but all the other things PPC related are happening and many other options becoming more and more available. So stay tuned. I'll be covering some of the nuances of PPC strategies and how to um properly manage your advertising accounts. So, uh at first let's start at the beginning. Which bits should you use when you start with your campaign? Now, that's a huge topic that I covered in our video about product launch. So if it's a new product then you have to do your proper keyword research advanced keyword research using multi-reverse as uh lookup using cerebro from helium 10 or any other tool. I prefer helium 10 and then follow the process that I outlined in our previous video uh about advanced keyword research. So, but in a nutshell, you will get a sense on how high you want to bid if you're just starting out with a new product. So, if you want to go with maximum suggested bit that Amazon is giving you or what you discovered using some other tools like data roa or helium 10 or whatever other others that are available like I don't know uh product opportunity explorer or search by performance report whatever you like and prefer. So at the beginning you need to determine how aggressive you want to be or if you want to maybe if it's um if you have a sense and you know that in the past one of your similar progress had issues with bits or sorry CPCs being too high then maybe you want to start a little bit lower and then uh increase gradually over time and depending on the volume of clicks that you're seeing. So, uh, that's it about the beginning. So, it really depends on if you're just starting out or if it's um new keyword that you added to the campaign. Um, let's move for example to the situation where you have to an option to add um keywords to your campaign. So, what we have here is just a dummy account. And here what I like to do and this is not the only way and the right way but I how I like to do my my little bit of a research that is outside of Helium 10 or any other tool just let's see what Amazon is giving us. This is a I entered the sponsor brand campaigns but campaign type but it's similar to sponsor products. Here you can see for example that for each keyword because I enabled all three filters. So if you exclude broad then you will not see the broad suggested bit here and same goes for the others. I like to watch what is offered here. This is typically sorted by the number of orders that a certain keyword is accumulating over a period of time. So what you can see here is that for each keyword if the suggested bid is high that usually means that that keyword is relevant with high buying intent. As you can see pencils this is unbelievably high for for a keyword in pencils. But it's also worth noting that pay attention on the different match types. So here we have a situation where phrase match is uh for phrase match Amazon is suggesting us lower studying bit while on broad it's it's higher which is for some accounts perfectly makes sense but for some it it clearly doesn't here for pencils it makes sense in broad to bit higher because if you do your proper negative keyword words, then using broad match type can be really valuable because not many brands are actually using broad match type and it's worth testing in every subcategory and every product type that you're selling. So do not neglect it because broad, yes, broad comes with a with a twist that you will get hundreds if not thousands of keywords with few impressions and one click. And even if a click is 50 cents, that can accumulate pretty quickly to hund hundreds and thousands of dollars of wasted ad spend that didn't bring any sale. But at the same time, I've seen great results using broad match when used properly and when you you use proper negations because simply you cannot cover all the variations that someone has in their head when they start typing whatever they need like pencils for my little special boy for his school or whatever. I've seen really crazy search terms over the years. Uh it's also worth noting that here exact match is really expensive which doesn't make any sense because in pencils that can be anything but also as I said being the sponsor brand campaign type that I started here in for sponsor brands exact match is almost like a broad match or for whatever reason Amazon decided I think it was last year or the year before to completely destroy the exact match as it should be and started using exact match in sponsor brand campaigns completely different to what it should be. So for example, pencils in exact match in sponsor brands could easily be crayons or anything along those lines like I don't know you name it what can be similar to pencils and crayons in uh that is something that you can expect maybe that even makes sense here because that's the reason why the exact matches is so expensive when you type in pencils as a keyword. Um, it's all about having a context about what you're selling and what kind of keywords are you using in this particular campaign. I like to group campaigns by the similar keywords. For example, uh for example, we have pencil back here, then I would group all the pencil back related keywords. Like if I have pencil cases, then again um five to 10 keywords regarding the cases and then maybe organizer or whatever the the thing is. Anyway, um uh then yeah, I was saying you need to to have a context in mind. What is it that you want to accomplish? Is it going to be your research campaign where you want to harvest as many different and more and valuable high intent long tail keywords then you may bid more aggressively maybe on phrase match and broad match with but being careful with um with negations or is it a ranking campaign then you definitely want to use only exact match because you want to bid only on a specific speific term, not just any variation of it. So depending on what you want to accomplish, that's how you want to choose your exact phrase or broad match type. Now I want to shortly cover a fourth match type that is neglected most of the time overlooked and which is called broad match modifier campaign uh sorry match type and it comes with a plus for example mechanical pencil. So this is a broad keyword if I add it in a as I as I just did in um in a broad match type. But if you add plus after each word in in this keyword that means that this keyword in broad match type whichever search term that's going to be created after using this keyword it has to contain mechanical and pencil as words inside. So it cannot be any variation of that like whatever it can be I don't know. So it cannot be let's do let's take pencil as an example. So it cannot be mechanical crayon for kids. It can only be mechanical pencil for kids. Mechanical pencil something something mechanic pencil or mechanical use. So it can move around in in order. But any every search term generated from this keyword must have these two two words. So it's really it can be really powerful. But more on that in my next video that I'm going to cover different use cases for that and for for what kind of categories you want to use them for. Now uh that's about match types. Also let's cover bid managing for example for for short. That's that's completely out of the scope of this video. So also a topic that I will be covering in more details. But I get questions um a lot of questions around when is it the right time to optimize. The right time to optimize is not about time. It's about how much data you gathered over whatever period of time is. So it can be over one hour, it can be over one day or a week depending on the volume that you are seeing in your account. Rough estimation that I do is that for example if your uh conversion rate is at 5%. That means that on average every 20 clicks give you a sale. So to be sure, for example, if you're too strict, you can set see like say like, okay, if I have seen 20 clicks, no sale, lower the bit or pause the keyword, whatever you decide how aggressive you want to be with with the next action, like increase or decrease the bit. But I would like I usually like to go double than that if it's a relevant keyword. So if I get 20 uh sorry if I get maybe 30 clicks or mechanical pencil and nothing changes that's the the moment when I want to do something with that bit. So it's not about how much time have passed it's about how many clicks you gathered how many relevant clicks you gathered. So you cannot look at it at the keyword level but at the search term level. If it's um broad or phrase keyword at an exact match, yes, you can watch it as a keyword at the keyword level, but very often you will see the case where for example, mechanical pencil in this case is going to have I don't know 40 clicks and you will say, okay, this keyword I should do something with it. I should increase the bit or lower the bit. But that's not the case. You need to go to your search terms and see which search term generated from this mechanical pencil keyword maybe accumulated a lot of clicks. You may see that it's completely irrelevant or maybe a good candidate for a negative keyword in phrase if it's completely out of this world but was in a search term negated that accumulated maybe 30 out of those 40 clicks. So it's not so beating lower or higher depending on the 40 clicks on a keyword level would be complete uh would completely complete mistake because on a search term level you didn't get enough meaningful data to actually make a decision because that one irrelevant search term generated um 30 out of 40 clicks and you have additional two or three search terms generated like three or four clicks. That's not that that's not enough to make a decision. Um, should you increase or decrease the bid? No, when increasing or decreasing the bid also depending on your context and what's happening in your account. Is it the season? Is it a Christmas f shopping frenzy you or if it's if you have a campaign with a high sales volume, you need to be careful even more careful with bid adjustments. So I've seen campaigns that I cannot increase or decrease bit more than 1 cent because they're big. They have huge sales uh velocity. So even those small increments in bits produce a lot of different results over the period of time depending again on the size. But if you have maybe it's not the right word to say normal flow of of clicks but let's say you get 20 clicks per day and you can so after each day you can see see and check if the if it makes sense to increase or decrease the bit. So I would never increase or decrease more than 5 cents because I've seen especially with a decrease if I go higher than that like decrease by 10 cents 200 50 cents a dollar then I see a huge drop in traffic. So but if you do it in um in small steps then it's much better and much more controlled. Yes, it takes time. So you you shouldn't be doing that for keywords that obviously do not make any sense, but if they do and you want to tweak it to get the to hit the right uh a cost and profitability levels, then nudge it just a little bit. Um watch it as a free train. So you don't want to have big turns to the left or to the right 90° angle. You just want to shift it a little bit the left, the right, uh, where you want to go. Um, I think this is more than enough for an overview. I hope I managed to answer some of your questions because those are like evergreen questions about bidding and and adjustments and and match types. But I'll be digging more deeply into broad match modified uh match type and into this bid management on my next video. So stay tuned guys and have a good day. Bye-bye.