Sep 30, 2019

11 Tips to Dominate Amazon PPC

Valeria Pagano

Amazon PPC, also known as Sponsored Products, is an advertising platform that help sellers amplify their product sales online. Here's how to optimize your campaigns. By Valeria Pagano

1. THE RIGHT START'
Choose ten keywords that define your product in a unique way. This will determine the right target and categories for your campaigns. Just ten keywords will provide enough data for analysis and avoid unnecessary loss of budget. DON'T use bulk keywording, it will needlessly spread your budget. Use free tools like Sonar to check your keyword volumes.

2. REVERSE ASIN SEARCH
Find your competitor's best product in your group (see Amazon's Choice), extract the ASIN, and use tools like Sonar or Amazon-ASIN to find their keywords. The ranking indicates the best performing; include some in your campaign.

3. YOUR FIRST KPI
Use your margin in percentage as KPI for your ACoS and optimize each keyword based on this value. ACoS is an Amazon KPI that indicates the Advertising Cost of Sales. How to calculate it: ACoS = 100* (total ads spend / total sales). Categorize the performance of keywords as Above ACOS, Below ACOS, and Break-even ACOS. You will use them later.

4. PLAN YOUR INITIAL BUDGET
...for the first 10 days (Research) of $10 to $15 per day.

5. TRY TO RUN CAMPAIGN ALL DAY and avoid stopping them.
Firstly, pausing your campaign will lead to a loss of potential sales in the golden hours, such as after work. Besides every time you stop your campaigns, you have to start from scratch once you restart and you'll lose your collected data.

6. OPTIMIZE YOUR CAMPAIGNS
...excluding the last three days due to the 48h delay on Seller Central stats.

7. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
After running campaigns on automatic for 10 days, you'll have collected enough data to optimize keywords. Insert all nonperforming keywords (Above ACOS Keywords) in the negative keywords field as 'Negative Exact Match'. Find it here: Amazon Advertising Account > Campaign > Click on Negative Keywords Tab

8. KEEP ON RUNNING KEYWORDS WITH BREAK-EVEN ACOS
Although you may want to insert them in negative keywords, my suggestion is to keep them running, as Amazon will continue boosting your organic ranking and traffic thanks to the golden rule: 'the more sales, the better organic ranking'.

9. ONCE YOU KNOW THE BEST PERFORMING KEYWORDS
...'add them to a manual campaign and focus your bid on them. Start moderately, you can scale the bid later.

10. ADAPT THE MATCH ON THE CAMPAIGN
Use broad and phrase match on your campaigns in a research phase, to discover which keywords perform best. Once you want to run a highly targeted campaign with your performing keywords, you can use exact match.

11. YOUR PPC CAMPAIGNS WON'T BE EFFECTIVE
...if you don't optimize product title, bullet points, pictures (a 1000x1000 will boost your sales), and product description. The reason is simple: if you send traffic to your product but you don't deliver relevant content, you will just waste money. [FF]