There are many guides online that will help you with Amazon PPC strategies. You’ll find plenty of information on strategies you can employ to make money using sponsored ads. There’s nothing wrong with that. They are generally strategies used effectively by successful sellers.
However, I’ve noticed one glaring gap. Some fundamentals are hardly discussed, especially a simple topic like the PPC campaign structure. That’s what I want to do here.
Why you Need to Structure Your PPC Campaigns
I’ll be honest here. An organized campaign is not going to propel your business into seven figures. However, an organized campaign makes it easier for you in the long-run. It can even have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Here’s how I look at it:
- It makes it easier for you to manage your campaigns effectively.
- Better campaign management will help you minimize wasted ad spend
- It ensures that your ads don’t accidentally compete against each other
I mention these points from experience. There have been multiple cases where clients have approached us at SellerApp with lackluster PPC campaigns. One of the glaring errors that we usually notice is campaign structure – ad groups that make no logical sense, campaigns cannibalizing each other, or even something as simple as not having a proper naming convention.
These issues are not as pronounced when you have a small product portfolio. Poorly conceived ad groups might lead to inefficient ad spend, but the major problems begin when you start to expand and grow. Naturally, the number of PPC campaigns also increases as your business grows. This is when a poor campaign organization starts to negatively impact your profits.
You can easily avoid these problems with a proper Amazon PPC campaign structure for your business.
Now that you know your targeting and match type options, let’s take a look at how to structure your PPC campaigns. A messy campaign structure can directly affect your bottom-line. It is almost impossible to scale or optimize unstructured campaigns. Well-structured ones will let you easily monitor your campaigns and enable you to budget more efficiently.
Let’s start with the basics.
How to Structure Your Campaigns
The first step to creating an organized campaign is by categorizing the products. Grouping products based on similarity is a great way to break down your ASINs and ad groups into easily manageable chunks. Down the line, this will help you create more effective bidding strategies and make it easier to gather relevant data from your campaigns.
These are some of the factors you should consider when creating ad groups:
- Product line: Creating a campaign around a parent ASIN is one of the easiest ways to organize your ad groups. This allows better targeting because all the ASINs within the group serve the same function.
- Product price: Creating ad groups around product margins is a great way to ensure bidding optimization. When the margins are similar, it is easier to estimate your ideal advertising costs and ACoS. This helps you fine-tune your bids for the entire ad group with minimal effort.
- Campaign goals: Your advertising strategy needs to be tailored to suit your campaign goals. Therefore, it is vital to categorize products based on a common goal. This ensures that your bids are aligned for all products. Otherwise, there may be a situation where you underbid or overbid for certain products in the ad group. For instance, clubbing a newly launched product with those that are already mature generally leads to unoptimized campaigns. This is because the new product is unlikely to perform as well as the established ones, even though you have the same bid.
These are just some of the factors you need to consider. There may be more depending on the product category and your business goals. So, the important thing is that you group your products with care. Once you have created effective and manageable ad groups, it is time to start creating campaigns.
Note: You can also create an ad group with just a single ASIN. It allows for refined targeting!
Run Auto Campaigns
For every ad group, SellerApp recommends creating at least two different campaigns – one automatic and the other manual. This is because automatic campaigns are a great source of data and new high-converting long-tail keywords.
Keyword research is a necessary aspect of most PPC campaigns, so the additional keywords found via auto campaigns can massively boost your ROI. Once you find these keywords using automatic campaigns, just transfer them to manual campaigns for further optimization. Manual campaigns give you more control over your ad spend and will help you achieve your target ACoS.
Platforms like SellerApp make this a seamless process by identifying stand-out keywords and letting you transfer them to manual campaigns in the click of a button.
Split Your Manual Campaigns
You can also create multiple manual campaigns for the same ad group for refined targeting and better reporting. One way you can split campaigns is by using match types. Create a campaign for exact, phrase, and broad match type keywords.
This will allow you to refine your bids further to meet your advertising targets. If you find promising keywords from your broad match type campaign, you can switch them over to phrase or exact match type campaigns to increase conversions.
If you are using Sponsored Product ads, you can split campaigns for the same ad group based on keyword and product targeting as well. You can keep adding layers of categorization for more accurate, better, and better targeting. However, you need to find a balance. You must make time to manage your different campaigns.
One way you can save precious time is by using PPC automation. Certain tasks like negative keyword targeting and bid optimization are tedious and consume most of your time when it comes to Amazon PPC optimization. With SellerApp’s PPC automation feature, you can let an algorithm do the work for you. Automation helps save time and eliminates the possibility of human error!
Create a Naming Convention
This is standard practice. The aim here is to organize campaigns to make it easier to distinguish between them and manage them. If you’re planning to make it big on Amazon, you need to create multiple sponsored ad campaigns. It’s one of the most efficient ways to scale your business. A naming convention ensures that you have an organized workspace.
Things you should keep in mind when creating a naming convention:
- Simplicity: Make sure your naming convention is easy to replicate for many campaigns. Essentially, it should be easy to ensure uniformity.
- Informative: All critical information about a campaign should be present in the name. This includes information about the products, type of campaign, targeting, goals, etc.
Always Follow Your PPC Campaign Structure
Any PPC campaign structure that you create is pointless if you don’t consistently follow it for future campaigns. As your catalog grows, ensure that you maintain your original campaign structures or tweak them overall to keep pace with the changing marketplace.
PPC optimization is iterative. You need to regularly optimize every aspect of your campaigns to get the best results. So, if your campaign structures aren’t optimized today, it is time to get to work. Just follow this game plan, and you will have well-structured campaigns in no time!
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Making Sure Your PPC Campaigns Are Profitable
We’re all familiar with PPC campaigns and how they’re instrumental in increasing brand awareness and product sales. But how many of us are actually running campaigns that generate a good ROI?
Simply running PPC campaigns for whatever goals you have set out, don’t cut it. You have to make sure that they’re optimized and run in such a way that you profit from them while keeping your ACoS as low as possible.
Calculate the profitability of your PPC campaigns by taking into account the ACoS (Advertising Cost of sale) along with other costs of the product like – FBA fees, shipping, and manufacturing costs, discounts, etc. All these costs combined will give you the correct profit margins. To declare a PPC campaign as profitable, an increase in the sales rate has to be directly proportional to an increase in the profit margin. The ACoS (ACoS = Total ad spend/ Total sales generated) is what helps regulate the budget that sellers need to allocate for Sponsored ads.
How to build a highly profitable PPC campaign
Here are some strategies formulated by the Amazon PPC experts at SellerApp:
Streamline your auto campaigns by carefully picking your target groups
When you’re running ads on Amazon, you can choose to run either a manual campaign or an automatic one. The automatic campaigns have keyword and ASIN targeting options – compliments, substitutes, close match, and lose match. Enabling all four targeting groups at a time for any given campaign can lead to wasted ad spend. The sole reason behind this is because it might turn out to have no relevance or utility. Instead, what you should do is create four different auto campaigns and for each of these, turn on a different targeting option.
So, turning on only one targeting group works towards making the most out of that instead of having its efficiency reduced because of being mixed up with other options. It increases the chances of deriving sales from the set targeting option. This makes it easier for you to set your bids as well, according to what is suitable for each of the groups. There are always new keywords and products being added which means you have more opportunities to explore more up-to-date and advanced targeting options.
Cherry-picking and eliminating keywords according to their performance during a time frame
When you’re running sponsored ads on Amazon, you will most likely be running more than one campaign at a time. Some campaigns will need more scrutiny than others and you need to segregate them carefully. Once that is done, you will need to weed out the keywords that are underperforming and costing you a hefty amount.
Find out which keywords are generating low sales and have low CTR and clicks and pause or eliminate them. It helps to observe these metrics over a time frame starting from two weeks earlier extending up to 2 months. This will help you understand which keywords have a low level of relevancy to what customers are actually looking for. Check data and metrics that are most recent and compare them with metrics from a longer time frame. This is so that you can adequately analyze if any keywords are performing well during a certain time period (for eg – the majority of the campaign) and give them their due weightage instead of eliminating them for their performance over a shorter period of time.
Sellers need to thoroughly evaluate the Search Term Report to focus on those keywords that are bringing in the profits. All the other keywords that are non-converting or underperforming, not bringing in any sales, or have a very high ACoS and CPC (cost per click), need to be paused. This will prevent you from bleeding your budget and improve your profitability.
Budget efficiently for your campaign
There’s always a problem with budgeting too high or too low for your ad campaigns. However, budgeting too low can have more adverse effects on your campaign than a high budget. This is because with a big budget you have the flexibility to bid as low or as high as you want until you gain a good number of impressions and clicks without draining your whole budget at an early stage. It helps to regulate your ACoS as well.
In order to keep your campaign budgets low, you also need to regularly check on negative keyword targeting. This works towards considerably reducing wasted ad spend on keywords that aren’t bringing in enough sales but are still costing you money. Keep adding negative keywords to your campaign because this reduces your ACoS and increases the profitability of your campaigns.
Another important point to keep in mind while budgeting is to analyze the traffic and the number of conversions you currently have. According to this, you should set a goal for how many new shoppers customers you want to visit your page and make purchases. The cost-per-click for different keywords and products will vary and you will have to be ready to spend more on keywords that are more popular if you want to beat your competitors.
Be consistent with checking the performance and advertised products that have a high conversion rate should have higher bids adjusted. This will work towards boosting the ranking position on Amazon SERPs. Simultaneously, lower the bids for products that are underperforming so that your budget is intact and can be used where it is needed.
Avoid making too many changes
Patience is key when it comes to seeing notable results from your campaigns. A lot of people make the mistake of applying too many changes and optimizations to their campaigns within a short period of time. This is bad for your campaigns because you’re not giving them enough time to gain momentum.
While analyzing the results of your campaign, what is it that you look for? Well, that would depend on your campaign’s goals but it helps to look at the number of impressions your ads are getting as well as your bids. Whatever optimization you make to your bids, ensure there’s always enough advertising budget to at least get a good number of impressions. It’s the only way your ad will be displayed to customers often enough to achieve a good conversion rate.
The amount that you bid on Amazon Sponsored ads and the changes you make will depend on the category that the product belongs to. To see what works best for you, analyze whatever changes you make over a certain number of days and then see the results. Put to use A/B testing to deduce whether a change has been successful or not and to ascertain how often you should be making those changes.
Leverage tools built for profitable PPC campaigns
SellerApp’s Amazon advertising suite comes equipped with specialized features and tools aimed at giving you maximum ROI from your Amazon Sponsored ad campaigns. You can choose from a set of automation rules and apply them across all the PPC campaigns that you are running. Each rule is meticulously designed and you can choose one depending on your end goals for a campaign.
You can set any of the rules for your campaigns from their easy-to-navigate dashboard. The rule sets are as follows:
- Money Saver
- ROI Optimizer
- Keyword Harvester
The Money Saver Rule is aimed at reducing wasted ad spend on keywords that don’t bring in any conversions. It fine-tunes your negative keyword targeting strategy and catapults you towards achieving your target ACoS when you have a fixed budget.
The ROI Optimizer works towards bringing in a specific ROI for any given campaign by setting a maximum target ACoS and minimum RoAS. SellerApp’s tools will scour potential keywords and adjust bids accordingly so that you can achieve your campaign goals. This rule is specifically aimed at giving campaign profitability a powerful boost.
The Keyword Harvester accelerates your campaign in terms of increased visibility as well as conversions. How? This rule takes into account that impressions and conversions work hand in hand. The actions performed by the tools optimize bids in such a way that they reach a wider audience which in turn increases conversions.
Keep in mind that making manual adjustments alongside automation rules can have a negative impact on your campaigns. Therefore, being patient and trusting the automation process is key to the profitability of your campaigns.
Use the ACoS as a standard measure of campaign performance, success, and profitability for all your Sponsored ad campaigns even if the advertised products are all generating different ROI.
Conclusion
Running a profitable Amazon PPC campaign isn’t something that is easy to achieve on the first try. You need to spend time scouring search terms and keywords that are high converting yet have a low CPC so that you can keep your ACoS low and ROI high. Using PPC analyzing tools and software is a reliable way to go about collecting the data you need to make informed decisions. Alternatively, the strategies mentioned above also work towards helping achieve your goals and outcomes.
So now that you have a great PPC campaign up and running, the next step is to make sure you have the cash on hand to keep it going. That’s where Payability comes in – we can help you get funding so your campaigns continue to run smoothly and drive sales. We understand how important it is for your business to stay top of mind with potential customers, so don’t let a lack of funds slow down your progress.
