If you are like most people, you have either used or at least heard of the company Amazon. Started in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon very quickly became known for popularizing online shopping. Nearly twenty-five years later and Amazon is still at the top of the food chain when it comes to online shopping, but a lot has changed. There is now a whole world of behind the scenes action that takes place every time you search for a product. The company now offers Amazon PPC Campaigns to sellers all across the world. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, meaning it is a method in which advertisers only have to pay for an ad if a potential buyer clicks on it. To amplify your sales, one must properly understand how to optimize and run a successful campaign.
Optimization
Having a good optimization strategy in place is what will make or break an Amazon PPC campaign. Most optimization strategies are best utilized when done daily. This will ensure that your amazon ads are always performing to the best of their ability. Without optimization, certain ads will begin to a much higher spend with a much lower spend. The main goal is to maximize your sales while keeping your spend at a minimum, making your ACoS as low as possible.
What Is ACoS
Advertising Cost of Sales or, ACoS, is your Total Ad Spend divided by your Total Sales. ACoS is an incredibly important factor in determining whether or not your campaign is successful. For the most part, all sellers will want to see a low ACoS as it usually means you are making more than you are spending. All in all, you will want to see your ACoS percentage 40% or lower, if it is much higher than that, there is a good chance you are about to lose money.
Lucky for you, we have laid out 5 great optimization tips that will help you amplify your sales. If this interests you, read below to find out more!
1) Increase Bids Based Off of ACoS
As stated earlier, ACoS is a great indicator as to whether or not your campaign, ad group, or keywords are successful. One way to make sure your ACoS stays below the 40% threshold is to optimize your bids. This can be done at the campaign, keyword, or ad group level, but we recommend the keyword level because it is more individualized.
What To Look For: If your ACoS is below 40% we recommend increasing your keyword bid by 20%. You will want to do this for everyone one of your campaigns at the very least daily. If you are feeling motivated and want to drive sales you can do it as often as every two hours throughout the day.
2) Decrease Bids Based Off of ACOS
The opposite of number one, decreasing your keyword bids based on ACoS is just as important. There will always be those few pesky keywords that can never seem to stay below the 40% threshold, but the question is what do you do with them.
- If the ACoS is between 41%-60% we recommend reducing your keyword bid by only
- 10%. You never really want your ACoS to exceed 60% because you are going to lose money.
- If the ACoS is 61%-80%, we recommend reducing your keyword bid by 20%. You want your spend to go down immediately if your ACoS is above 60% but lower than 80%.
3) Consider Implementing Negative Keyword
Negative keywords are a great way to prevent your advertisements from showing up on certain words or phrases that are not relevant to your product. This is a great way to save money, by not wasting your bids on irrelevant search queries, you can maximize your sales by bidding on searches relevant to your product.
For example, if you do not sell cases for iPhones and a prospective customer searched for “iPhone Screen Cover”, then you can use “Screen Cover” as your negative keyword to prevent your ads showing up with this search term
4) Create Separate Campaigns for Brand and NonBrand Keywords
When creating a campaign, we recommend creating separating keywords based on whether or not they are related to your brand. Your NonBrand keywords, for the most part, are more likely to convert better than the Brand keywords. Having the two divided into their own campaign will allow you to more easily track the progress of each. The easier it is to track your campaigns, the easier it is to optimize them.
5) Utilize all Three Match Types
When adding keywords into an ad group, you will have the option to put your keyword in one of three match types. The three types are Broad, Phrase, and Exact.
- Broad Match: This is the least restrictive match type out of the three. The keyword is matched to a user’s search term if all the keywords are present what the customer searches.
- Phrase Match: For Phrase, it is all about the order of the keyword. If your keyword is winter gloves, if someone searches for black winter gloves for men, then you will be matched to a user’s search term.
- Exact Match: This match type will only match you to a user’s search term if they are searching for your exact keyword. So if your keyword is winter gloves and someone searches gloves for the winter, you will not be matched.
Creating separate campaigns for each match type can also aid in tracking and optimization. We recommend, at least at first, duplicating campaigns in each type. This will allow the seller to see if one match type is more effective than the others. It will also indicate which keywords do best in each type.
All in all, Amazon is a great place to advertise your product or service, as long as you are using it correctly. Optimizations are the key to having a successful campaign. If your campaign is successful, that means you are making money, For the most part, if you are making money either you or your clientele will be very happy, and at the end of the day, happiness is all that matters.
