Amazon PPC - Auto Campaigns Deep Dive

hi guys this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC in today's video I'm going to share all the details about other campaigns on Amazon about why they are so important to use why should you what which options should you utilize how to understand the targeting groups thoroughly so you can effectively apply them for your brand and just a couple of strategic approaches that we also use in our everyday work for our clients that you might find valuable and we wanted to share them with you there will be a lot of useful information in this video so stay tuned through the end and let us know if you have any questions so what are automated campaigns automatic campaigns on Amazon our campaign types that were first introduced by Amazon for every other campaign types that later camp came on and basically this campaign type is the one way have least control over what's serving your ads so this was before II this was even less developed than it is now now I have some kind of options to diversify the traffic that comes through and in general automatic campaigns have a couple of really good there is a couple of really good reasons why it should you use them and include them as a mandatory part of your strategy course if you can afford them so basically how they target automatic campaigns they use information from your listing as targeting the instead of keywords right for example if you have some if you have a listing that's optimized with a lot of keywords in it that are relevant and they if these keywords are high and volume rich which means they have a lot of monthly searches then the chances are that automatic campaign is going to be performing really well for you ads that show up like here in this example in this screen that I shared with you for this search phrase hiking backpack you have you can notice there are a lot of ads on this age like for example this is a sponsored brand ad so we're not talking about this ad type but when it comes to sponsor products your automated ad could be any one of these like for example these first two or maybe four scroll down we'll probably find some more examples ok so here we have another three different ads like for example I could with great certainty guessed that this is an automatic result automatic campaign result because this is a sponsored result and we have typed in hiking backpack which is some kind of a specialized backpack for kite hiking and this is just like a regular rucksack backpack which is probably was a result of not so tight targeting or maybe the specific brand had different alternative goals for their advertising maybe they're just trying to expand the reach of their campaign for the specific product or they may be using a substitute targeting either automated campaign which is something that will later deep dive into so basically your automated campaign ads will show up anywhere where regular manual sponsored products campaign will show your ads to just that we know from experience that some of these are automatic like this one I just mentioned this rucksack because it's not that precise usually when you're targeting with manual you have keywords as your main tool of diversifying the quality of traffic that comes through and basically when it comes to automatic campaign they will use anything that's written in your listing in the front end or the backend front end is something that users can see which is basically part of title prior description key product features and has been the contents stuff like that that they can see that's on the page also the images and the tags on images everything you type in as information about your product is going to be utilized for purposes of automatic targeting but also stuff in the backend such as subject matter keywords were for example back in such thermos would be very helpful in helping your automatic campaign serve the right ads or in other words helping Amazon's platform about helping it with understanding what the product really is so that this kind of campaign can automate the keyword research for you so why are automatic campaigns important to run basically there are two main reasons first one is for you to understand what the platform thinks that your product is that's number one reason why I would use automatic campaign in almost every account that I manage to understand if the this product was thing that we're running ads for is being optimized correctly so that's number one thing secondary alternative reason why should you use automatic campaign is to automate your keyword research this means that for example you have a hiking backpack which is a phrase that's mentioned also in the listings product title and this is used for targeting and you will then obviously see it see this kind of search term in your search terms report after you run the automated campaign for a while and once you identify this keywords that's that it's a relevant keyword that's making you sales you should move that over to your manual campaign as keywords target keyword targeting and add this as a negative in your automatic campaign why should you do this well specifically because you want to tell the system it's like you are telling the system okay this is the kind phrase I've identified and harvested and now I want you to look up for something else that's basically what you're doing by adding this as a narrative even though it's a relevant keywords that's converting well for you if your goal of your automated campaign is automated keyword research then this is exactly the path that you should follow then after a while after you have gone through this search thing reports a couple of times you should be able to identify more and more good keywords candidates to add to your manual campaign so basically understanding what your product listing what what's Amazon's understanding around your product listing and automating your keyword research are the two main reasons why automated campaigns are so important we also see a lot of sellers leave them on even after we have harvested majority of it simply because they continue to perform well so this is a one of the reasons why you should definitely test automatic campaigns now that we know how they work and what they're what's the main principle of serving as through automated campaign I think we should dive deeper into four different targeting groups that Amazon recently introduced into automatic campaigns you probably have heard of them let me just try and find what those are okay here under automatic targeting there's a new feature that says set bids by targeting group first to understand how we should use this new feature we should first understand what targeting groups are and how they work so basically on to this main principle that I've just recently explained how automated campaigns work there are also four different ways in which Amazon diversifies traffic that comes through to your listing you should understand that unlike other channels Amazon is very successful in terms of driving traffic that has high purchase intent which means you know for example when you compare Amazon and Google everyone comes to Amazon to shop basically they come to social products compare them and end up buying them like they have this strong buying intent when someone comes to Google then you should like I guess you should suppose that they are here for various reasons like for example if someone needs information or they want to watch video they want to do tons of other things so their intense vary from one it to one case to another so there this is the main difference between amazon's traffic and google's traffic like for example so any type of automatic campaign that you run if you have an optimized listing shouldn't really result in bad traffic in general simply because we are working with high purchase intent folks and these people are here open to sales and just you know running as towards them it's not going to be a waste of money in any case but amazon has introduced these targeting groups simply because they know a lot more than what we do know about this traffic and this was the part that they are willing to share I have a strong feeling that this will continue to develop with time and basically there are four different targeting groups four different targeting options that automatic campaigns are utilizing to make sure that your listing is showing up in front of only the relevant people who are your audience for your specific product because they also it's also in Amazon's interest to serve relevant results to relevant audiences because that way everyone wins there is a sale if there is a sale everyone else wins so here's how they have diversified their traffic there are there is a close match there lose match there is a substitute and compliments type of targeting automatically on Amazon what is a close match I would divide these four into different into two different groups close match the loose match in one group and substitutes and complements in another group basically both match and lose match would be something very close the keyword targeting based on your based on the information from your listing and substitutes and complements would be something similar to that but very much combined with user behavior while on Amazon I'm going to explain this into details so bear with me close match means basically if a keyword is this is an example hiking backpack for women basically your ads your automatic ad is going to show up for women's hiking backpack something that's very similar to the type of keyword that user has typed at so with close match you will get very close match between what's written in your listing for example in your product title and what someone typed in as a as a search phrase so most match would work something like if you were using manual campaigns then close match would be phrase in exact type of magic that for keywords and loose match will be something very similar as if you were using broad match keywords in manual campaigns I hope you know what I mean like for example loose match would be someone types in sorry someone types in hiking backpack and your this thing has a hiking backpack for women for litres storage something like that in your listing then the chances are very great that your listing will show up for this kind of search and also for example if if you're hiking backpack is has a phrase like women's hiking back with special features I don't know and someone types in just a backpack as a phrase backpack chances are that your listing is still going to show up as long as you use this targeting group called loose match so this is something to be much more careful with especially if you're not very deep into special features that your product carries or if you're unsure that exactly what your audience is and what types of searches they would type in then be a little bit careful with this loose match there is a bidding strategy that you can use the said bids by targeting group that was recently introduced by Amazon as you can see right here so you can kind of discourage traffic coming from irrelevant targeting groups by lowering the bids for them like for example if you really want to focus on post match then you would set a higher bid for this one and then leave this 40 cents something like that so make sure you're careful with this one when it comes to substitutes and complements these two targeting strategies apply to a little bit different and goal of automated campaigns why for example if your automatic campaigns goal is to drive the maximum of sales with the lowest possible a cost then you obviously will be running automatic campaigns with just the first match of loose match this is something the only thing you will use because it will drive information from your listing to magic with the keywords that users are typing into the search bar so you will end up getting relevant results and higher the relevancy the better better the chance of acquiring the profitable sale obviously when it comes to substitute targeting this means what I mean by different goals of automatic campaigns basically substitute targeting is the type of targeting where the user is typing looking through a competitor's listing like for example here we have a competitor's product listing page and someone is looking through it and then below somewhere here we don't have an example on this page but below here after the these other items you should see a line here horizontal line of search results that will be sponsored results where basically the system would show your product that will be considered a substitute sorry Amazon tracks user behavior while on the page including heat maps which means if Amazon notices that someone is looking through the listings images and they're you know learning about the product they read one part of the key product features then they were looking for more information and then they scrolled down by for example they're looking for more information about this product in the EBC sides and they are looking for more of it means that they haven't exactly found what they are looking for so they're coming back to see other suggestions that Amazon might have so they will click like you know something like this this is not as responsive results I'm just doing this for example purposes and they will be looking for another listing substitute means that they're basically substitute means that customers are looking for same type of product but maybe from a different supplier different sellers so you should use this option only if you are alike in a very competitive category and you don't really know how to stand out maybe you have maybe you have a better price maybe you have additional features to your product like for example if your competitor has three functionalities of one product and the same product by you has four or five functionalities and additional gifts with the product that comes for free or free warranty - twelve months something like that it will be you know like an additional unique selling proposition that you can offer and your competitors can't then it would make all the sense in the world to use the substitute options because you're using you are targeting the substitute and [Music] basically giving them a better offer for the same or lower money which usually ends up in driving traffic away from our competitors which is one of the competitive strategies that you can use so substitute option should be used it's a good option but it should be used only if you know for sure that you have some kind of competitive advantage in front of your competitors something that will help your listing stand out from the rest then you should make sure to use this when it comes to the complements targeting this type of targeting option will show your ads to listing that's complementary to what your product has to offer like for example if you have an audience that is wearing hiking shoes and these people are looking for various types of shoes and you are selling specialized socks for hiking then it would maybe make sense to use the complements targeting option from automatic targeting this is this is a good strategy also when you're launching new product you have like for example nine and ten products and you want to launch your eleventh that will be extremely complementary to something that your users are buying like if you have a very well-defined audience that you know is purchasing from you then you should use the complements automatic targeting option and like for example if if you know that your your brand is dedicated to helping people sleep like for example and someone is buying a sleep mask from you then you can offer you can advertise earplugs as a complementary product to the to the sleeping so that would be a good example where when you should use this and compliments type of strategy is is usually bit more expensive than all of the rest so make sure that you only use it when you are patient enough for it to work and you have a little bit more bandwidth in terms of budget to spare the spends in order to acquire new customers so that would don't make a lot of sense what is this new option set bits by targeting group setting bits by targeting group means that you'd have a little bit more control over what kind of you know bits you will set for each of the each of the targeting groups according to what your product is so think about each of these options now that you have all the information and think about what kind of strategy for all these targeting groups actually would apply to your brand and improve it so make sure you utilize this information to get the right decision done for your and also when it comes to these targeting groups there's a good little hack that we wanted to share with you like for example I'm going to show you how one of search terms it looks like when it comes from an automated campaign like for example here we have search results search there's reports for an automated campaign and this automated campaign called Auto is one of the has one a group called advanced Candida and as you can see it's all little stars over here nothing nothing for targeting basically which means this is automated targeting and you have various types of search terms that come from this targeting type if you have only one ad group with all of the four automatic targeting options in there then chances are that your results in the search terms report are going to look like all mashed up like here in this example and you won't have enough clarity to make informed business decisions in terms of which search term is a good candidate to be removed two negatives or which one should be added to your manual campaigns as a good performing keyword so to gain more clarity maybe you should split down try testing try testing testing it's all about testing it's all about learning through case that is what works specifically for your brand or and what doesn't work but there's this good idea where you could try splitting one automatic campaign into four different ad groups out of which each one will target just one match match type or one targeting group so for example would have won our group the targets only close match one for loose match one for substitutes one dress for compliments so when you next time you open up your search terms with reports and they're the a group names you will have like you know for example it's it's obvious but let me show so basically you would know that these are close mattress and loose matches and then we have substitutes and complements and then you will know for sure exactly exactly from which groups exactly which search term came from and then you will have enough clarity to understand which targeting group works best for your brand you will maybe know this even before testing it out but the test will only confirm so before you go ahead and eliminate any of these targeting groups from your automatic targeting we advise you to test all of that but in this control these controlled conditions where you will have good quality results to see and compare like for example you will see that maybe close margins a loose matter of bringing you very skewed results like for example they're not giving you hundred percent accurate results you're receiving a lot of aces and the customer search term column which means probably that your system that the system isn't driving enough information from your product listing so maybe some improvements need to be made in the product listing or for example if if you can see sharp difference between quality of search terms that comes from post match versus compliments then you will know for sure that compliments is something to discontinue and this will give you enough clarity to make an informed decision so it's one a little tactic we wanted to share with you additionally if you want to combine all of these targeting groups into one ad group then just try and make sure to gain control over bidding bits according to each one of these because quality of traffic will have some levels between them which will vary between all of them so that's about it when it comes to automatic targeting that we wanted to share with you today we will also make another separate video about bidding strategies in general because this was something that a lot of us our viewers were interested in seeing if like the content that you are receiving them make sure to subscribe and ask questions if you have any questions about the content that we shared with you today thank you for watching and see you next week in our next video bye bye