Watch Jenna Lieber, our Director of Client Services discuss advanced dynamic PPC bidding on this week’s Facebook Live
Gain even more control over your PPC Campaigns
We’ve recently been seeing amazing results with Amazon’s Advanced Dynamic Bidding features. Dynamic Bidding helps sellers make stronger decisions when it comes to managing their PPC campaigns, by allowing Amazon to dynamically adjust your keywords bids based on where the ad will show up.
Why is this useful?
Different placements (which are where on Amazon that your ad is actually displayed) have different conversion rates. So, you can tell Amazon you’re willing to pay more if your ad is being served to a better placement. Here’s an outline of the different placements, and what you can generally expect from them.
Top of Search (first page): This placement is the first 2 or 3 listings displayed when someone makes an Amazon search. Top of search will almost always have significantly higher click through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates, so you’ll generally want to allow Amazon to make a bid adjustment, to increase your bids here.
Product Pages: When someone makes a search on Amazon, then clicks onto a product listing, your ads may be displayed at the bottom of that listing. This placement will usually have the largest portion of impressions, and the lowest CTR and conversion rate, and generally a higher ACOS. In most cases, you’ll want to leave your bid adjustment at 0%, so Amazon is more likely to favor the other placements.
Rest Of Search: With this placement your listing is displayed lower on the page among the search results. While this can oftentimes have a favorable ACOS, the CTR and conversion rate will nearly always be much lower than the Top Of Search placement. The Rest Of Search placement cannot be adjusted.
So how does it all fit together?
Take a look within one of your campaigns at the “Placements” tab. If you’re seeing results like we’ve described, where Top Of Search has the best performance, add a 100%-200% dynamic adjustment. Then, go into your keyword bids, and decrease them by the same amount.
For many, Amazon PPC elicits feelings of being overwhelmed and confused. Some struggle to hone in on the right keywords, and ad budget is left on the table. Some are overspending on key terms that are expensive and not converting. Some are confused whether to do manual or automatic campaigns. Plus, things are always changing in the Amazon landscape. We totally understand the confusion and we want to help get you on the right path.
Our #1 tip is to hire an expert. You can’t possibly become an expert in PPC, when your time and attention is divided doing so many other tasks as an Amazon seller. We talk to a lot of people who feel really confident with off Amazon marketing, but on-Amazon their experience is limited. There’s no reason to spend hours learning the ins and outs of Amazon PPC, plus spend hours every week managing it, when you could hire an expert to do it for you the right way. While this is a critical part of a seller’s Amazon business, it is truly one of the first things you should relinquish to an expert.
If hiring an expert isn’t in the cards at the moment, here are three more tips for executing at a high level with your PPC.
Focus on the right keywords. We recommend running manual and automatic campaigns with the same keywords. This seems counterintuitive, but when Amazon runs automatic PPC campaigns for you, it’s based on their extensive knowledge of their own algorithm. Once you see which automatic campaigns are working well, plug in those same keywords in manual campaigns, and adjust the bids according to your goals. That way you can trust it’s a strong keyword for the product AND you have more control over the budget than you do with automatic campaigns..
Test out various PPC features. Amazon has recently rolled out a series of new Amazon PPC features — among them the intriguing options ‘Campaign Bidding Strategies’ and ‘Adjust Bids by Placement’. For example, with dynamic bidding, Amazon adjusts your bid according to the probability of a sale. This means you have the opportunity to: Bid Down, Bid Up and Down, or do Fixed Bids. If you are looking to more effectively utilize PPC, trying out new features could be the change you’ve been looking for.
Listing Optimization. While everything we’ve discussed above is important, the #1 most important thing for successful PPC campaigns, is having a fully optimized listing. Regardless of your budget, without a great listing, the clicks you drive from Amazon PPC won’t convert, and you’ll have a high ACOS. Click here to learn more about our PPC management (which includes listing optimization), apply for our services, and make sure you’re set up for success.
While hiring an expert ASAP is always our recommendation for ensuring that you are competing at the highest level on Amazon, give these three tips a try and see what a difference they can make. Unlike our competitors, when we manage PPC for clients, auditing their listings and making sure they are fully optimized is our first stop. We want to make sure that if you are spending money to drive traffic to your listings, that once a potential customer arrives on your page, they are going to be sold! Good luck!
What does it take to successfully manage your PPC Ads on Amazon? It seems like there’s no clear answer, and that’s why so many sellers do it incorrectly. They overspend on keywords that don’t convert or they don’t have the ad budget to make an impact because they can’t generate the sales. While there can be some uncertainty with Amazon PPC, we’ve had some incredible results with our clients, as we manage PPC the TurnKey way. Today, let’s look at one of these clients.
A client came to us in early 2019 struggling with their PPC. They knew they wanted different results, but didn’t know how to achieve them on their own. They hired TurnKey to help them identify the holes in their PPC management and alleviate that stress in their business.
The first thing we did was pull the data from 2018. From January to October of 2018, they spent $203,000 in ad dollars. In return, they were generating $871,000 in ad-related sales. Their ACOS was at 23% when we started with them. So, we had our baseline and a very healthy budget to work with and gather data from. Please note that while this particular client had a large amount of capital to dedicate to PPC, you don’t have to have a massive budget in order to see real results. It’s a matter of using your budget wisely.
Next, we analyzed the campaigns they had been running and began generating a plan. At TurnKey we build campaigns according to the following tenets:
Start with low risk keywords
Strive for easy optimizations
Run multiple types of campaigns (automatic, manual, branded, etc…)
Add negative keywords into campaigns
A huge pitfall we see with sellers is that they set up campaigns once, and then never revisit them. They don’t have the time to devote to monitoring the success of the campaigns, analyze the data, and make ongoing adjustments. But, that is what truly makes the difference between throwing money at ads that might work and strategically utilizing your ad spend.
When we work with PPC clients, we are doing the following on a regular basis:
Optimize ads on a weekly basis
Harvest new keywords, including negative keywords
Adjust bids and budgets to build PPC profits
Continuously expand and build new campaigns
There are some things about Amazon that are incredibly predictable and other things that are unexpected. When a seller fails to analyze the data that Amazon provides, especially the analytics related to PPC, they are leaving so much on the table when it comes to revenue and maximizing their ad budget.
So, how did TurnKey change the game for this client? Well, in 2019 in the same timeframe of January to October, this client increased their ad budget by just $40,000 and raised their ad-related sales to $1.2M. That’s $350,000 in growth, and that is JUST in ad-related sales. Not only that, but their ACOS was reduced to 20%, a number our client felt really good about.
It might seem like PPC is something that you can figure out, or you can set up automatic campaigns that will be “good enough.” Let this case study be a lesson to all sellers out there who are winging it. When you hire someone who specifically manages PPC full-time and is an expert at doing it the right way, you will see the benefits.
If you’re uncertain about what kind of results you can expect from Turnkey, you can try us month to month and just see. We bet that after a couple of months, you’ll never trust yourself to do it on your own again. Stick to the tasks you are truly gifted at and trust us with your PPC.
We’d love for you to be our next case study and success story. To learn more about our PPC Management and apply for our services you can head over here to chat with a member of our Client Success team. Let’s see some big numbers from you in 2020!
Watch Jeff Lieber, our founder and Nolan Rakow, our resident PPC expert discuss Ins & Outs of Amazon PPC during our January Roundtable Group Call
Learn to manage PPC like a TurnKey Amazon Expert!
Last year was incredibly busy and Amazon made tons of updates and changes to their platform! Hopefully you checked out last week Facebook Live on how to be successful on Amazon in 2020. (If you didn’t, don’t worry! Here’s the recording)
Since there was no big Amazon updates for this week, we figured we’d fill this email with a little treat for all of you! Our team would like to invite you to our first Roundtable group coaching call of 2020 this Friday, January 10th at 12 pm PST.
Roundtable is our group monthly coaching membership where we cover the latest and greatest strategies on Amazon! On this Roundtable call we will be discussing the PPC strategies you need for 2020!
Use this one-time free trial as a time to learn how our team executes PPC on Amazon.
PLUS there will be a live Q&A with CEO Jeff and PPC Expert Nolan at the end of the call!
