Amazon PPC Campaign Optimization FAQ 2024

hi guys my name is Igor and I'm the co-founder of Amazonia PPC agency we've been helping Amazon brand scale since 2016 in this video I'll be talking about General campaign optimizations I'll try to cover some of the most common questions in terms of campaign optimization in general uh the video is going to be divided into sections so feel free to jump to the section that is most interesting to you okay so um the first one is that very often we have different placement depending on the environment so you can maybe have high cpcs on top of search and then midrange cpcs on rest of search but lowest on on produ display plages or PDP now what you can do is that you can slowly start to increase there are also placement calculators but you can also slowly increase the placement adjustments for certain um placements but in general what I tend to do and advise every seller that asks this question is to spit Your campaigns per placement it's granular it's maybe it will maybe increase the number of campaigns that you're using but it gives you a complete uh control of what's happening so to do that I call that the placement isolation so you increase the placement modifier to I don't know 400 300 500 you name it and by that you block the other uh two placements there's a video I recorded how to do that so you can reference it that goes to the second question how to avoid certain placement for example I've seen that some of the products perform best on product display Pages uh product display Pages uh some of them I I saw for example top of search is having great conversion rates lowest CPC that's also an option so you in that case you want to drive most of the traffic if not all to your top of search um now to determine which one is best for you obviously top of search most of the time has the best conversion rates uh while the rest of search and product display plages where often have a lot of exposure rest of search is sometimes really a balance between the two between the top of search and prod pages so for example if you're aiming to improve your conversion rate and have in that case you should have single keyword campaigns you should create a single keyword campaigns with a high top of search modifier to exclude the traffic to rest of search in PDP you do that just because you have a highest conversion rate on top of search so you want to maximize that so it's it's the the best bang for the buck you will get most out of your ad spend uh for the goal of increasing your organic rank for the those keywords now uh if you aim to slightly more reach in terms of Impressions and and clicks then you should focus on product dis pages and rest of search depending on again I always try to to look uh first at the conversion rate uh between the placements and then all the other things like cost per click now if you have a campaign in exact match with 10 keywords I I don't recommend going more than that but if you have 10 keywords in your exact M campaigns then the placement adjustments can become tricky for example if you lowered your bits to say 10 cents on all the exact match keywords and you have a top of search modifier like I don't know 400 then when you start to optimize bids on your keyword level then it's kind of becomes time consuming because when you up dat um bit like 2 cents because of the modifier it's not actually two cents but it's what like what the mat you do the mat um so it gets uh it gets tricky the way to overcome this is if you see that certain keyword is having better um performance sorry guys my brain is kind of slow better performance than the others then I should isolate that keyword and concentrate uh on it separately while the other uh guys will be left in the in the old campaign Now quickly around structuring campaigns so also I what I've been seeing while doing the audits are how to structure the auto campaigns properly for the future growth uh there are many ways to do that uh there are also those catch a catch all AO campaigns that everybody loves uh little touch on defensive campaigns and which biding strategy overall to use fixed up and down or down only now structuring the a campaign sec you can go really by default and add all match types in one campaign then run that for several weeks or several months and see what's working and what's not the downside to that is that for example if you optimize placements then you optimize placements for old match types inside so the close match loose match substitutes and compliments so if when you uh boost the placement you don't see you don't actually know which one's going to perform correctly and which out of those four actually drive the Cur current placement stats that you're seeing so it's kind of um really a great area how to do that now uh I've seen many Auto campaigns structured that way that have amazing performance so that's okay if that's the case use that uh only do your search term analysis and add negatives where necessary uh but the best option would be again uh as granular as possible so One auto campaign on only with close match type one for loose one for substitutes one for compliments uh that gives you absolute control over placements so Search terms and the performance and bits now there's that famous catch all auto campaign where you set your auto campaign you can for this type of campaign you can you can put all of the match types in in one campaign and the the basic structure structure for this one is just to set some low bits if your average CPC is I don't know 70 cents for this one this type of campaign you put like five or 10 cents bit and you let it run you almost always get amazing AC cost uh really low spend High sales okay not high volume of sales but you know the the aost return is really good uh What you the second step to this is to add multiple tiers of uh our catch all our campaign so you set up one to be at 10 cents you set up another one to be at 15 another one at 20 another one at 30 I wouldn't go more than that in this example than you're going to go pretty close to your average CPC uh that you have on your other campaigns because please note if you have uh that maybe I should have add that to to another slide uh but data that we see in Amazon is not always 100% accurate and uh they kind of really explain to us that if you have a CPC of 70 cents very often I I hear people saying like my my CPC is 70 like they're paying 70 cents every every every click which is not the case that's an average so it could be that you paid uh I don't know 40 cents uh per click in I don't know five or 10 10 clicks and then you had a few huge ones but the average is is the same so pay attention that with these Auto campaigns you don't want to go too close to what you actually have on average so average of 70 can be even 60 or 50 and it can it can go up depending on your bidding strategy uh I'll cover uh in a second uh okay let's do that now and then we'll go to the defensive C so bidding Strate strategy to to use fix bids means that if you set up a fixed bit of one dollar or pound or whatever use um it doesn't mean that you're going to pay each click one bit that the more precise way would be a precise name would be Max bit in terms of fixed um but you don't with fixed bits you don't let Amazon Play that much with what what you're willing to bid so if you're just new starting with a new campaign or even starting with a new account I would I would always go with fixed bits because up and down and down only relies on Amazon's data and what do they know about your brand but if you're new they don't know nothing about your brand so for the first month or two I would go with fix bits and then after I see the data I can switch to down only I'm not a big fan of up and down because you cannot control that but you can do that on purpose for example put up and down on some Auto campaign that you want to just go crazy with it uh discover new Search terms and just if maybe if you don't have enough data you don't have enough fure you can then play with up and down but be careful when using up and down not to mess with the placement adjustment too much because up and down can increase your bid by 100% so if you use up and down with a bid of one it can bid two $2 per per click for any bit auction for for a keyword and if you add to that uh placement modifier with a modifier of I don't know 100 uh then you will end up with a end bit of $4 instead of one so it can get really complicated so use it wisely um so yeah down only uh is for established campaigns fix is for starting and for for launches and up and down is when you experimenting and have a solid uh historical data with Amazon and then we just want to switch and see how things are going now the defensive campaigns let's talk a little bit about that so the thing with the defensive campaigns those can be product targeting campaigns those can be sponsor display campaigns those can be even keyword campaigns that's basically branded campaigns so we're not going to cover those uh right here so you should have your branded campaigns definitely because if you're not beating on your brand name somebody else will I will at least take some part of your share um defensive C campaigns uh are mostly created uh to be used with a sponsor products uh product targeting and display targeting what do you do is you're actually creating a campaign with all your uh products as an ad and all your products as a Target so you're actually showing ads on your on your own products um I recommend splitting these defensive campaigns by product type so if you're selling jeans all the jeans together advertising on all the other genes and then if you're advertising sweaters I would I would group sweaters you can combine that if you want to upsell but that obviously you would do that intentionally but um and just for the sake of just showing off your brand that's also a valid uh strategy but uh I would like I love to keep it uh on on a product family basis because I can then easily control uh what's showing up I don't want to the the chances are that on your jeans ad your competitor selling jeans going to show up not somebody selling flip-flops what's the uh what's the logic um so that's why I like to to to use that so you use that for sponsor display and for sponsor product what you get with that is a sponsor display is going to appear on under the buy box and sponsor product is going to appear Elsewhere on the page below the listing and then down below before the reviews and and stuff um so definitely use both of them and increase the bids to a maximum level these campaigns sometimes operate at very low a cost like 15 20% sometimes it's at 60 or 70 depending on your category but nevertheless I don't recommend optimizing these type of campaigns because if you optimize them and you lower the bid then you're actually letting some competitor go to your listing and show show their um their ad on your uh product page which is not a good thing especially if you are not as good as them okay bpc product launch this is getting serious so a lot of debate here uh a lot of questions but I've sum it up as these five so one of the biggest and very often asked question is how much will it cost me to do a product launch um well it's it's basically as a a question related to how much money a car would cost me you know depending on the car obviously um but there's a calculator that you can use I've shared that in a previous video it's pretty spot on in terms of estimating the the product launch budget so the thing is how much money can you invest that dictates How uh important keywords you're going to Target if you're going to Target high search volume keywords mid search volume or low search volume uh longtail keywords because uh very often we are not able to see the correct cost if you do your research as you should in in helium t cbro uh and pull up an estimate that Amazon PPC maximum suggested bid for keywords if you aim to be top five top six top seven that's going to be way higher than that very often twice or if not three times higher than the estimation both in helium 10 and in the Amazon uh campaign budg uh campaign Builder itself so it's an estimation you can never be sure but if for example if you use my calculator and you see that maybe you estimated that you have $2,000 for a product launch and you see that what you had in mind as a strategy or whatever somebody who's helping you but if you had in mind to spend $2,000 for a product launch on a keywords and you realize that the results that you want to accomplish actually is going to cost you 500 per day then you need to re re reevaluate your budget or re-evaluate your strategy so use that product launch calculator that I shared so it's really it's really uh uh a gamechanging uh calculation that you need to perform before a product launch so nobody can advise you that over a chat or a message over WhatsApp you need to really dive deep into that or I don't know hire a consult consultant for that the next one we're going to cover is which campaign types should I use in a product launch this is somewhat tied to the first question too um because um in okay let's cover the general in general I would always go with the uh single keyword campaigns in exact match that's for ranking you want to push that because establishing an organic rank is most important thing and if you do that during the honeymoon period uh then it's going to be much quicker much easier than afterwards if you Skip to My honeymoon period then uh it's going to take too much you won't have that exposure um also pay attention on when do you actually select a live date of your product for a product launch if if you do that um uh if you skip to do that carefully and calculate the product launch date then if for example your product live on Seller Central starts today and your product launch real product launch starts in a week you're losing a week of data because it's going of started to appear live on Amazon so that's very important thing to note um so campaign uh I would start with exact match campaigns and then I would back that up maybe after a week with the phrase match campaign or maybe depending on results I I would add additional sponsor products exact match campaigns with several keywords inside not more than five depending on your budget of course but I've seen great results having four or five um keywords targeted in a single keyword campaign just going for the organic ranks this everything that I've ever say in my videos um goes that you need to have your listing optimized for conversions so that's a number one priority before you even start selling anything being it a pencil garlic press or anything um but um you should use Pik Fu for that you should use Intel for that there are uh options to to test your products you can ask your friends which one would they select but use these invest in Pik Fu invest in Tel uh to know your product before your product launch um so yeah later on you could add even uh like after a month I would add maybe a broad match campaign but really be care careful with the with the search term and negating stuff uh and also an auto campaign is pretty good Auto campaign can be added maybe even two weeks in uh product targeting campaign is very very important during product launch it it doesn't affect your ranking for those most important keywords that you selected like top four or top five keywords you're aiming but if you start it will it will help help you because it's going to be honeymoon period you're going to get that uh additional push from Amazon and you're going to start getting ranked um for bunch of important keywords that you maybe didn't even realize and you that product campaign uh product targeting campaign is going to be like an addition to just give you a little bit of more sales volume if you can afford that obviously now the third uh interesting question is how to lower my a cost and total a cost in a product launch well the simple answer to that is you shouldn't uh having a high a c product launch is basically a must there are occasions obviously and you could keep hearing these stories like hey I launched my product just launched and I'm week in and have my aost at 40% that can happen but that's an exception an outlier but having an acost of 100% 150% during a product launch is normal thing starting to sell an Amazon brand new product launching your product that's a process you don't you shouldn't expect return on your newly launched product in a week or two or month or two after two months you will start to equalize you will start start to see your a cost going down your total AC cost going down if you do things right but to expect uh low a cost on product launch that's just not reality and we need to set our expectations right and be honest towards ourselves uh don't fall in love with your product just be realistic uh because that will make you that will enable you to have a proper strategy in place not by having a realistic expectations on on a product launch so you can lower and will lower your a cost and total a cost in the product launch after two months because you will get sales organically and the organic rank is going to grow if you do things right um I'm not getting Impressions um the thing about that uh during a product launch even the usual campaign that you're starting out if you're not getting Impressions uh and you did the other stuff okay so you're in correct category and there's not the the ad is not suspended or ineligible or out of stock if you're not getting Impressions quick win in increase your bit if if you see that you're having a bit of $25 and you expected to have it at one and a half so you went to 2 and a half not get impressions ramp it up have a $15 um bid have a $40 bid $50 bid to see is it a bid issue if it's a if you start to see Impressions and start to see traction the the worst thing that can happen you will spend uh 50 or $100 uh you obviously have a campaign budget limitation so you not get robbed but you'll see the data soon so if you do that may sound crazy but if you do that in a day you will see you will get some data you will see what's the issue um and most of the time it's that you just not strong enough or you put a down only strategy bidding strategy so put it as a fixed bit put it high high bit and see what's happening if you see some some traction going then it's obvious it's about a money as with probably everything about Amazon lately should I Target high search volume keywords or mid-range that's di to the question number one I already covered that so depending on your on your budget um if you have if you can I would almost never recommend to go to the category hero keyword in short because most likely those guys are there for years uh if not decades and they're going to nail you you're going to spend ton of money without any Real Results uh what you can do is focus okay for for example if a main category keyword is having what say 100,000 search volumes searches per month you should aim for if the next one is 50 I would go with the one with 50 and maybe 20 12 7 that's still a lot of searches for a product launch you should be okay if you're my budget is not that high sorry optimization strategy in general probably the favorite one when is the right time to optimize my campaigns and how much should I wait before I make any change uh first of all it's a different time frame in general if we talk about time depending is it your sponsor product ad or your sponsor brand ad sponsor product ad have an attribution window of 7 days and sponsor brand ads have an attribution window of 14 days what that means it means that 7even days it means that if somebody clicks on your ad on Monday and they actually end up buying uh on Sunday that's going to show up at as a sale contributed to that LE on Monday if that was the last CLI the same goes with um with the sponsor Brands but the 14 days window so if you start your campaign sponsor brand campaigns today and after 10 days you see hey I'm not getting any sales let's turn off this campaign let's optimize let's change B bunch of things you're actually wasted 10 days of AD spend you need to wait at least 4 days before optimizing except the extremes like some keyword went crazy and started spending most of the budget obviously you need to um fix that by excluding that keyword in a separate campaign or changing your your campaign structure but if everything is in line and every keyword is having enough traction then you should wait those 14 days for sponsor brand ads before making a decision and 7 days at least 7 days for sponsor product ads to make a change now I never recommend waiting for a number of days to pass until you optimize in general yes based on the attribution window but you should always optimize based on the data if you're operating in a highly competitive category your product is really wanted uh you should you can even optimize after a day after I don't know 3 hours depending on how much volume you get uh because if your conversion rate is 25% that means every four clicks you land a sale so if uh if you waigh uh 5 hours and you accumulated 50 clicks yeah okay I paus for a second and took my calculator so after 50 50 clicks you should get uh around 12 sales but if there no sales obviously you don't need to wait for a week to accumulate hundreds of clicks so uh the general rule that I follow is that I wait up to two times more to to see a sale so if if I should see a sale after four clicks I would wait wait for eight clicks or 10 clicks to see if something's going to happen so there's no actually right time to optimize um but to optimize based on the data you can even wait for 3 weeks for sponsor product campaign and in 3 weeks you will accumulate 13 clicks and with a low conversion rate that's not uh justifiable to make any change if you have only like 12 clicks accumulat of over two or three weeks now the second one of the most important is how to lower my acost and my uh opposite question is should you lower your acost because it's all about the profits so I've seen a cost per product of 20% and still the product was unprofitable it's not because of the the break even is at 40 so you would say yeah okay I'm make making money out of it but um you're not growing organic ranks on that for example if you have a variations and you can see that certain variation is spending a lot of money uh and you get only advertised sales in the nutshell yeah that's good you get you're getting sales the acost is low but at the end of the day that spend on your um not that good variation is uh jeopardizing the profitability for the other ones as a as a parent um as and a group of products what I recommend always is focusing on profit and if you most of the time you will see one variation having the best conversion rate best performance so you concentrate on that one and you concentrate your ad spend growing the the organic rank for that particular variation not just be all over the place and advertise all the variations so it's not just about acos um in general how to lower my acos is most of the time eliminating the ad spent uh so um there are number of tools a lot of agencies individuals are sharing those calculators um yeah I might create one Al also and share with you some other occasion but there are ways even without a software to locate the ad span so the wasted adpen so immediately when you pause uh the ad Spen on those unprofitable uh Search terms and targets you will see lower AC cost and that can be pretty hidden recently I've seen good sales with broad match but with that also comes a lot of wasted ad spin that's pretty hard to uh hard to control um I mean it's a it's a big uh topic but also lowering the acos um you can uh with lowering your acos your lowering your exposure you're lowering your reach so as I stated it for me it's always on a long-term goal not get rich quick goal like long-term goal is to increase organic ranks if it takes for you to have 50% acos and you're breaking even a 35 then that's the investment you need to have to get sales if you get if you have that 40% of acost on bunch of campaigns and you don't focus on uh organic ranks for your products then for me it's a waste okay you get sales but you end up like in a in a corner like okay I'm getting I'm having acos of 50% and now how can I lower it and then you can contact a consultant to fix that problem for you and what he's going to do is I would say well to lower your AC cost you need to to spend more no because you skipped the opportunity to focus on your organic ranks and now you uh depend on the yeah it's too much so it's really hard to lower your acos without hurrying your sales so you need to invest now more more efficiently smarter than before with Lessons Learned and grow organic ranks and by growing organic ranks uh loading your acos comes as a result of that so not by optimizing campaigns to the fullest so keep that in mind always grow your organic ranks yeah I can of tied all all the three questions three last questions uh into into the same same answer so how to reduce spend and increase sales that's um growing organic Rank and eliminating the the the waste now uh this video is getting a a little bit long but anyway let's cover the Amazon DSP what's Amazon DSP why should I even consider using Amazon DSP how much money do I need to start and why shouldn't I just use sponsor display and don't bother with the with a DSP uh don't don't bother about the abbreviation DSP just doesn't make any sense um it look at it as like sponsor display with the Boost with steroids you name it it's very powerful option to Target your audience Target your competitors and use remarketing options really closely you should consider using DSP only when you have your campaigns in the campaign manager optimized to the full potential okay obviously you can never be at 100% but if everything is running smoothly you have your campaigns running on regular maintenance optimization Etc then it's a time to start with DSP now in the past uh there was a road block for DSP to enter in the US Marketplace I was around 60 Grand and 35 Grand Grand now it's much lower you can even start with 10 or maybe even less depending on who you use uh with what kind of agency to to start with a DSP so yeah only when you finished optimizing start with DSP now why should you even consider consider using DSP because you will have really um narrow targeting for example what you can the most famous one that I like to mention is that in DSP you can Target your uh product that are your direct competitors you you you name them by name them by as like okay uh show my product to the people who saw my competitor asence these these guys in the last seven days but they haven't bought so those are the really hot leads so they were interested in them maybe they're still thinking maybe it's too expensive for them they're not happy with something and then boom you advertise your product to them so your ad is now chasing them not the product listings they visit but wherever they go on Amazon uh to shop for example you're selling I don't know sports equ equipment and they go to the baby products or beauty products your ads going to be there and follow them along so it's really powerful you can narrow down the the targeting uh to that also there's pretty powerful audience targeting um nothing similar to what's available in sponsor display for example you can um really narrow down by demography you can add layers like only people in this country only people speaking this language only mothers whatever it's sometimes you can get even creepy what the the they are available so it's it's really powerful to use to uh Target your competition definitely that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use sponsor display campaign sponsor display campaigns are also getting pretty powerful but not too extent to what you have also there are similar to sponsor display there are in Market audiences um lookalike audiences you can even upload your uh custom emails to to to Amazon DSP and they will how they call it hash they they're going to Hash they're going to anonymize them so you upload the your customer list uh that you gather from the website and then Amazon DSP can create uh lookalikes based on that on on that one so Amazon owns a lot of data so yeah uh it can be very very useful so we as a as an agency can offer we offer Amazon DSP as well to our clients so if you need that or just want to chat about it let me know and I'll make sure to give you all the necessary information now uh it's been too long this video so didn't plan that but yeah I hope I managed to cover this so as I said there are sections uh you can jump around to answer to to to the answers I provided every now and then for you refresh your knowledge let me know what you think and again if you need um specific advice for your um account and brand let us know will be happy to answer the contact is at the description or website Amazon yc.com my name is eigor and I hope you enjoy the content bye-bye