The Sellozo team pulled together Amazon PPC strategy expertise from the support and account teams to put together this Q&A session for Amazon sellers who are looking to better understand their Amazon PPC strategy. Here’s the recap from our January 27, 2021 webinar:
2021 Amazon PPC Advertising Strategy:
A Q&A Webinar with Amazon Experts
In this webinar, Sellozo’s Amazon selling experts set up a fast and furious Q&A style session to discuss Amazon advertising :
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:57 – What do you think about running Amazon PPC from day one?
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1:21 – What is the point of Amazon PPC in general? Is it to find keywords or for ranking for specific keywords? Both?
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1:54 – When we set up campaigns, what are the starting bids you suggest for the Automatic campaigns and Manual campaigns?
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2:36 – How many campaigns are ideal for a product?
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3:50 – What are the different uses for negative keywords?
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5:11 – What do you recommend: one ad group per campaign to be able to manage budget per ad group instead of per campaign?
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6:20 – What should my ad budget be?
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8:00 – When setting up a campaign, should I use dynamic up or down or dynamic down only?
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10:30 – How do I use the ad placement option?
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12:52 – How many keywords do you suggest per research campaign and broad?
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14:50 – When do you get rid of a research keyword that doesn’t produce sales after generating expenses?
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15:55 – When you see an ASIN with conversions in the search term report, what do you do with it?
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16:50 – How often should I be adjusting my bids and when do I raise them up or down?
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18:00 – I’m getting a lot of clicks, but my conversion rate is low. How can I fix this?
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20:45 – Would you set up variants in separate Amazon PPC campaigns or organize them in ad groups within the same campaign?
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21:55 – A lot of your advice is for a manufacturer, anything you would suggest for a wholesaler or distributor on Amazon?
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23:30 – What type of scenarios would you use the dynamic up/down versus the dynamic down?
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24:30 – Do you need to repeatedly add a negative keyword to a campaign or do you need to add it multiple times?
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25:15 – What’s the difference between Sellozo’s methodology and Quartile’s methodology?
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27:20 – What’s a good Amazon PPC strategy for a new product launch?
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30:05 – Amazon Advertising is suggesting I not have so many campaigns. They suggest that I only have three campaigns to keep the same keywords in different campaigns from competing with each other.
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32:30 – I use dynamic up/down when I’m running a lightning deal and it works really well. The second question, do you have insights on the best times of day to run your ad?
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33:50 – I noticed that since I started using Sellozo my bids are higher than the Amazon suggested bid. What factors go into this?
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35:50 – What kind of keyword do you put in research campaigns? Only root keywords?
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36:55 – I’m a newbie to Amazon PPC. I’ve been burned by companies before but I know I need help. I’m a big fan of Tatiana James and that’s what brings me here.
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37:25 – What kind of keywords do you consider to be a good performer in discovery in research campaigns? What do you do with it? What do you bid on it?
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38:49 – What are your thoughts on running coupons for lightning deals? When and how often would you recommend running those?
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41:50 – If I have a parent listing with many child listings should I only put one child listing into a campaign or should I put all of them/
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42:52 – Would you run a low bid catch-all campaign alongside your individual automatic campaigns for each of those products?
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43:58 – What are your thoughts on Amazon PPC campaign dayparting? Does it work? What are the best scenarios to use it?
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45:15 – Can you talk about how you’re leveraging sponsored display for remarketing? Are you running unique campaigns for each option, like similar products versus your products?
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46:10 – We use the Amazon attribution tool to help track traffic from sources like Facebook, Google, and Tiktok ads but the data seems really out of wack. Have you seen this work or do you have thoughts on the attribution tool? And can you talk about your thoughts on running ads using category targeting with a sponsored brand and sponsored display?
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48:26 – What are your thoughts on pricing? Should I increase my price so I can spend more on ads or will that lower my conversion rate? How do you determine a happy medium?
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49:40 – Where can I see a Sellozo demo?
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50:05 – Can you talk more about sponsored video ads?
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51:25 – Thoughts on using Amazon Demand-Side Platform (Amazon DSP)?
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52:47 – I have an exact match campaign and a keyword. At what point do I know that I don’t need to raise my bid anymore?
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55:00 – Amazon wants your product on a white background. Do sellers really need to do that?
Other resources featuring Amazon PPC strategy:
Five Amazon Advertising Strategy Tips
Amazon Advanced PPC Strategies with Mina Elias from PPC University
Improve Your Amazon Advertising Strategy with Amazon Attribution
Amazon PPC Advertising Strategy
– Welcome everybody to today’s webinar where we have our fast and furious question and answer session with our resident expert here at Sellozo, Brock Gettemeier. Brock, thanks for joining us for this.
– Pleasure, looking forward to it.
– Yeah, so the format is Kris and I have already laid out a few questions that we’re gonna throw at Brock to discuss just his advice on PPC on Amazon, and then we always have the chat open. So, we want you guys to throw your questions in at Brock there’s a few requirements. Brock’s gotta answer the question fast and we’re gonna roll through as many questions as possible. We’ll see if we can do that, Brock.
– Sounds good.
– Yeah, so this will be a lotta fun. I always wanna get to as many of these as possible. Kris, you and I are gonna alternate the questions. So, why don’t we just get started, Kris? You take the first question.
– Sure, sure, so let’s roll into this, Brock. What do you think about running Amazon PPC on day one for a new product?
– I think you should, but I also think on day one, you should have reviews. So, normally I’ll get those reviews first and then do a full FBA launch. So, it’s a bit of a caveat, but yes, yes I do.
– [Dustin] All right, next question.
– Keep it rolling, and we’ll come back to some of these.
– Oh yeah. What is the point of PPC in general? Is it to find keywords or for ranking for specific keywords or both?
– Well, I definitely think both, and I think the other main one here is it’s really taking sales away from your competitor too. It’s taking a larger piece of the pie and that shouldn’t be understated because I think that there’s a lotta people that could definitely value from that.
– Kris, next one.
– Okay, when we set up campaigns, what are the starting bids you suggest for automatic campaigns and manual campaigns?
– Yeah, so if you’re using something to adjust your bid daily, I normally start the automatic campaigns out actually pretty low. So, it depends on the niche, but I might even start the automatics at 50 cents or 75 cents, and then I’ll let something go up over time, such as the optimizer increasing a bit every day. You’ll get up to the $1-$1.50. You’re selling $20,000 couches or something like that though, obviously, you’re gonna have to start much, much higher. So yeah, I normally in general start things 50 to 75 cents unless you’re in a unique niche such as like 1000 to $20,000 products.
– Next up.
– Okay.
– All right, here’s a good question. How many campaigns are ideal for a product?
– These are supposed to be fast?
– You can take your time on this one
– All right, so I think bare minimum, you should probably have an automatic to exact match. Now, if you get to the point where you harvested everything out of your automatic, it’s perfectly fine to be running just your exact match. Now, all of the new advertising methods that have launched over the past year on Amazon though, I mean, I can think of so many people that have switched exclusively to them even, such as the sponsored brand videos. I can think of a number of accounts that run nothing but one sponsor brand video for a number of products, and that is the most efficient way we can do it. So, I think it depends on your niche, where you are in your product life cycle, are you trying to rank? Are you trying to just hold your ranking and maximize your profit because it’s in a later stage? I’d say at a minimum though, in the past or currently, you should have at least one automatic and one manual.
– Good stuff, Kris, next one.
– Next one is what are the different uses for negative keywords?
– Okay, so I lump keywords into two categories. Good negatives and bad negatives. So, bad negatives are to cut wasteful spending, right? Good negatives are because you are trying to consolidate that volume to a different location. So, for example, in an automatic campaign, you wanna negate a search term, so that way your exact match can get all of the data needed to make the appropriate decision based on where the bid should be to hit your target aid cost. The only other options in my opinion that you should use negatives for are, I have seen people use blacklists before. So, if you’re doing manual bid updates, you might have a list of keywords that you know are bad and you apply those always, so like a blacklist. If you’re doing daily bid updates, you really don’t need that. The other option is if you’re trying to segment things out, so you might take your sponsored or your branded spend for example. Let’s say you have that in a separate campaign because you have goals you wanna hit for branded spend. That’s another great reason why you might wanna actually use a phrase negative in your automatic and non-branded campaign. So, I use exact -99% of the time, and I use phrase negatives only for those situations where you are trying to control something like all branded terms, not spending this campaign.
– All right, good.
– All right, next question. What do you recommend, one ad group per campaign to be able to manage the budget per ad group instead of per campaign?
– All right, so I think it depends on how many skews you have. If you’re running 40,000 skews, that can get overwhelming really quick, that having said, if you’re running 50 skews, there’s really no reason not to just have one ad group per campaign and have 50, 100 campaigns. Again, if you get into the wholesale model where you’re constantly churning through products that you won’t ever sell again, that is a great situation though, where you might actually want to have multiple ad groups and have categories of products lumped under one budget. Other than that though, I do like to have one ad group per campaign, or I might also have a second product attribute targeting-ad group. Obviously, you gotta separate those out.
– Very good, next question, Kris.
– Oh, we get this all the time. and everybody in here, like the 50 of you in here, feel free to write questions in the chat, put some questions that you may have in the chat, anything about PPC, and then what we’ll do here at the end is we’ll go through those questions and we’ll just fire them away at Brock, and Brock will go through a little bit more in-depth. So, this question, and this is a question we get all the time, what should my ad budget be?
– Yeah, so Amazon they say something like $30 a day to run all day long on a campaign. So, that is just a huge generalization and it totally depends on your niche and the product life cycle. If you are launching a new product, it is very likely you are gonna spend dramatically more than $30 a day to start getting organic sales. You are located in the search abyss, page eight, page 10, on your main keywords, $30 a day in a high-volume niche that’s not gonna cut it. I will say though, I have seen people maintain organic ranking on keywords with only $10 a day. I mean, I have seen it. Those are super-specific niches and there are not as many competitors in those niches, but I’ve definitely seen some really low budget ad campaigns be successful. So, I would say when you’re starting out, it is a good idea to go ahead and launch the budget based on what you expect to take to get you where you wanna be. So, if you need to get to 20 sales a day, you have a 10% conversion rate, and you have a $1 cost per click. That means it’s gonna take $10 to get one conversion, right? So, if you want 20 conversions, you can do the math. I would recommend setting your budget to at least that to start.
– Very good, all right, next question. When setting up a campaign, should I use dynamic upper down or dynamic down only?
– Yeah, this is easy, dynamic down only. This is like, I’ve never tested over and over. I keep testing it. I’m like waiting for Amazon to up their game on this. I would love for dynamic up/down to work. The concept is great. The customer comes in and buys hot pink products and yours is hot pink, that’s data Amazon doesn’t give us, right, but we know now that this customer is more likely to buy your product because they buy everything that’s hot pink, right? And in theory, Amazon could see that and dynamically increase your bid. It works great when they’re dynamically lowering your bid. I cannot get it to work dynamic up-down. I always go dynamic down only, and the only time I run the third option, which is fixed bids, that is when I want total control so such as I’m branding on, I’m sorry I’m spending on a competitor’s brand or our own branding. I don’t really care if a lower likelihood of converting. I am buying all the traffic, and so I set those up as fixed bids. Honestly, dynamic down wouldn’t be better for those either because it only kicks in like 10% of the time.
– How about a follow-up on that? How would that conflict if you had dynamic up-down going when you have the optimizer running in Sellozo? There could be, how does that?
– Yeah, so the dynamic up-down happens after the bid. So, everything that the optimizers running in Sellozo is actually the bid. So, the dynamic setting is changing your bid after the fact, after you’ve bid, you’ve entered that bid auction, right? So, how it impacts it is this. Sellozo sees that you’re bidding $1 and you’re paying $2 a click. It doesn’t really care what you’re bidding. If it sees you keep paying $2 a click, it’s gonna lower your bid from $1, even if you were paying $1 per click and it was profitable. So, if you use dynamic up/down, it has serious issues because if the issue is dynamic down or sorry, dynamic up-down, the optimizers gonna lower your bid to cut that wasteful spend, and sometimes it cuts it to the point where then the dynamics part stops kicking in and then you just stop traffic altogether. I think no matter what you are doing, do not use dynamic up-down in 2021, at least if that holds true, and maybe 2022, they improve it and it starts working, but for now, 100% dynamic down only or fixed.
– Good stuff, next question, Kris.
– Kinda back onto that. How do I use the ad placement option?
– Yeah, all right. So, just to confirm this is the top of the search or product page. All right, so our top of the search, there’s a couple of unique situations. A lot of people shop Amazon Mobile and it’s a huge percentage of the traffic. I’m not sure what it is right now, but I think it’s over half to now. I think it’s been over half for a year. Anyways the point is a lot of people are coming in on mobile and one thing to note is that mobile has fewer ad slots especially at the top of the page. And so, it may be more valuable for you to bump up your top search multiplier. If you are selling a product that really focuses on mobile browsers. So, for example, if you’re selling phone accessories there’s a high probability of people that are buying phone accessories at a much higher rate from the phone. So, that is a great situation where you might wanna implement. Other than that, my general rule of thumb is don’t go super high unless you have a specific use for it. So, when I say add one on a lot of times I’m talking about a 10%, a 15%, I’m not talking about 200. It goes all the way up to 900, by the way. So, the only time where you really wanna cross over like a 30 to 50% multiplier, honestly, 50 is probably too high is if are trying to only bid on the top of search placement which of course is super useful if you’re doing a ranking campaign, ’cause the whole goal of a ranking campaign is to trick Amazon into thinking you have a better conversion rate on these keywords. And so, if you take your budget and you put it all towards that top of search it increases your conversion rate on that keyword ’cause you’re only getting the high conversion rate ones might be a higher aid cost but the goal of this campaign is ranking, not aid cost. So, that is a situation where I will find the bid to get you to the top of the search, and then I will divide it by three or four and then I will to set a three or 400% multiplier to essentially achieve the same bid but I’m not spending anywhere else.
– Got it. Really good stuff. Really good.
– From page multiplier again, I almost always only stick that in like maybe 10 to 15% if there’s a situation where you look at the data and it’s very clear you have a bump there, keep it small though. Always on the product, keep it real small.
– All right, next question. How many keywords do you suggest per research campaign?
– Oh, man, I mean.
– All the good questions we get all the time.
– Yeah, so I’m going to, all right. So, research campaigns would be broad or phrase match not an exact match or broad and phrase ad groups for that matter. So, the big thing about this is budget it’s not actually a number of keywords is ideal. It’s the number of keywords your cost per click and your budget. That is really, you wanna keep those three things in balance. If one of those goes out of balance that’s when you start getting into issues where you’re getting less than optimal data and sometimes it’s really, really bad. So, a great example of that is if you have $10 a day for your broad match campaign and you have 100 keywords and they cost over a dollar-cost per your CPC is over a dollar. I mean, you can do the math. You’re not gonna be able to actually test all of these keywords. And so, that’s a situation where you have too many or you have too little of a budget. So, it’s not that you have too many keywords. It’s you have too many keywords for your budget or you don’t have enough budget for your keywords. So, I’ve seen situations where they have over 1000 keywords, no problem and they’re still running fine in a campaign throughout the ad groups because they have so much. So, an easy calculation to do is go ahead look what your average CPC is then go ahead and determine how many keywords you have that are doing discovery meaning they haven’t been fully tested. There are being discovered and then just go ahead and say, “Do I even have enough “for each one of these keywords to get a click?” And the answer is no, you have too many keywords or too low of a budget.
– That’s great stuff. All right, next question, Kris.
– When do you get rid of a research keyword that doesn’t produce sales after generating expenses?
– All right. So, if it’s not producing sales anymore because you’ve discovered all of the good keywords you’ve moved them to exact match, or I shouldn’t say good, just all of the keywords you moved them over to exact match, and then you’ve done a negative exact in your discovery or your research, your run phrase. That’s a situation where you just need to look at the cost. It might be worth running really high aid costs or spend on broader phrase matches and you’re discovering only one keyword a month. I mean, that might still be worth it for you if that one keyword a month you discover has a really long lifetime and it could be profitable still. Personally, what I say is just look at the opportunity costs. If you’ve got another campaign that could spend more and it’s at a good aid cost why are you trying to discover new keywords when you can focus on the stuff you’ve already discovered.
– Good answer.
– Yeah, Next question. When you see an ASIN with conversions and the search term report, what do you do with it?
– Yeah, so PAT, Product Attribute Targeting is new for 2020, I think it maybe came out in late 2019. So, we can go ahead and essentially do an exact match for the ASIN. So, when you see an ASIN in the search term report it means that somebody typed in something customer type in something and clicked on a competing or one of your products and then down below on the page they actually saw your ad on sponsored related problems. So, that’s a search term, doesn’t get passed back. The ASIN gets passed back. So yeah, go ahead move those over just like you would keywords. So, what was though actually has, a built-in toggle where you can turn it on and the whole ad group, everything was spawned for you but yeah, go ahead, treat it like a keyword.
– Next question, Kris go ahead. All right, here we go. How often should I be adjusting my bids and when do I raise them up or down?
– Advertising automation is essential. I mean, if you’re not using Sellozo or use someone else there’s no reason you should be doing this manually. I mean, this is what Sellozo does. So obviously, I think daily adjustments are a deal. I don’t think you have to be doing it more than daily. I mean, we’ve run tests, we’ve tried it hourly and there’s absolutely no reason to be doing it more than once per day. All right, in all of our tests. So, I would say that it is a good idea to do daily bid adjustments but that’s not scalable for a person. Use a tool for it and get daily bid adjustments it’s necessary. You should be using your average conversion rate. You should be using your average conversion value. and then you should be setting a target aid costs. That’s a whole another story, but you should just be calculating where you should be bidding and you should be going through that day.
– Very good.
– Dustin, I think I lost you there. I cut out on you a little bit.
– That’s all right, I got you. I got just covered, no problem.
– All right, next question here, Kris, you can take this one.
– Yep, I’m getting a lot of clicks but my conversion rate is low how can I fix this?
– Well, there could be a lot of reasons why you have a low conversion rate. If you’re getting a lot of clicks it’s normally a good sign for what you’re targeting because it means customers were at least interested enough to click on it, right? Do you have a really poor click-through rate and your main product image, your price point, and your title, something’s wrong there but assuming you have a good click-through rate and you’re getting a lot of clicks, but you’re not getting conversions a lot of times its a backorder. So, go check and make sure that you have prime two-day shipping and if you don’t, you’re gonna get more clicks. They’re gonna go to your product page and they’re gonna realize, “Oh, “I have to wait a week to get my product.” I mean, normally you have 1/2. Your conversion rate is halved whenever you don’t have two-day shipping. So, I would say, go take a look at that how you fix it is just what’s wrong. So, if your price point is too high, for example obviously just lower the price point or convey the value and why you’re should be at a higher price point. If it’s the shipping date I mean, we can’t really control that unless we just get more inventory into Amazon, and then the main image is one of the most important things. A lot of people overlook that spend way more money on your main image because if you have a poor click-through rate, it’s probably your title or main image.
– Yeah, Dustin and I see this a lot. We talked to sellers daily and a lot of the time I’m running ads and we’d go to find out we look at their listing and it’s more of a listing problem than it is a PPC problem. So, sometimes check your listings, change your image, check a title, and maybe look at your price, know your market and then that’ll help out with your ads as well.
– The other thing to mention here is you could go ahead and take a look at the business, Unit Session Percentage. So, this is essentially all of your sessions just how they’re converting on your listing. If that is low for your category, that tells you that if you pay to get more people on your listing, they’re not gonna convert at a higher rate than the people organically getting to your listing or total. So, it wasn’t that number and kinda track that over time, that percentage because you’ve changed your price and you have a really big hit to that conversion rate that Unit Session Percentage Rate, maybe you went too far on the price or maybe that main photo isn’t as appealing, right? So, that’s definitely something to check as well.
– Cool, all right. We’ve got some questions for the chat is blowing up and if you got questions put them in there.
– Yeah, we’ll get through these that we’ve done ourselves but we’ve got a lot for you Brock’s and we’ve gotta get the rapid-fire going here, all right. Next question. Would you set up variants in separate PPC campaigns or organize them in ad groups within the same campaign?
– Super good question, a search term differentiator is what do you wanna structure your campaigns based on. So, what that means is if everybody is typing it you sell red socks, blue socks, ankle socks, the socks. If everyone’s typing in red socks and blue socks and they’re under the same parent, their variants put them in separate ad groups or separate campaigns, the red and the blue. Obviously, need height and ankle height isn’t a search term differentiator there are not many conversions that happen on those. So, you can combine those, and you just structure based on color. Obviously, if it was the exact opposite you would structure based on that. There are benefits to having more skews under the same parent. So, if most of the search terms are the same they’re just typing in socks. When they buy, put them all together you will optimize twice as quick by having one ad group as two.
– Well, that’s a question we get all the time.
– Yeah.
– Great answer. All right, next one. Oh, that was it. All right, here we go. I’ll get us started with the questions, the great questions we have coming in from everyone here so let’s get started. All right, Brock. A lot of your advice has to do with launching new products as a manufacturer. Anything you would suggest for a wholesaler distributor on Amazon?
– Yeah, so if you’re not running a low bid catchall just 100% do it that is gonna be your number one campaign as a wholesale or distributor. So, a little bit catchall is where you just take everything you got, put it into a single ad group if you’re over capacity, put it into two, and then go ahead and set the bid anywhere from the lowest I run are about 6 cents and the highest I run are about 15 cents. And so, that is literally everything in one ad group, in one campaign and you are not optimizing that. When I say you’re not optimizing you are not transferring keywords out. This is not scalable. The whole point of this is on page seven when somebody is just clicking around it’s still worth having a click at 6 cents rather than having no click at all. So, from your brainer get the catchall. The next thing is budget, make sure that if you are running out of budget on your account so the global budget cap in the settings page of the Seller Central advertising, you have the opportunity. If you’re running out of budget you should be using dayparting. So, ad scheduling or dayparting. The other thing is just, if you are running out of budget and you have a catchall, pause your other campaigns and just run the catchall and spend on the catchall exclusively until you get to the point where you’re comfortable increasing the budget and spending on other campaigns.
– Perfect, next one. What are your thoughts on using the bid-down, up-down only feature? I think you talked a little bit about this but what type of scenarios would you use these effectively?
– Yeah, don’t use the up-down. I’ve tested it so many times. I’ve done so many different niches. I have never once seen better performance from it. I even tried it around prime day as they suggested around the holidays. I don’t know what they got going on. Use dynamic down only.
– Just to add to that. What we tell sellers is Amazon doesn’t know your target ACoS. They don’t know your ACoS goal. So, they’re gonna continue to raise that bid as high as it can go just to get a conversion, and sometimes it can get out of whack so just be careful there.
– And in our test, we found that like 80 to 90% of the time they were increasing it by the full multiplier. So, they were increasing at 100%, 80 to 90% of the time. So, you’re telling me 80 to 90% of the clicks I’m getting you to think they’re gonna convert at such a high rate? This is okay to go up 100%. Yeah, don’t use it. Use dynamic down only
– Great stuff. All right, next question. Do you need to repeatedly put the same negative keywords on each campaign or only need to put them in once in a campaign?
– Well, I prefer to add negative keywords at the ad group level. And so, if you do have multiple ad groups you will have to put it multiple times technically in the campaign, but you really only have to create a negative keyword once it doesn’t, you can’t create them twice. If you are launching new campaigns and you have a blacklist, these keywords are bad because of your product. I mean, of course, you could launch the campaign with the negatives but otherwise, you just have to put them in once.
– This next one, we get a lot too. This is gonna be going I’m hoping you’re ready for it Brock. What’s the difference between Sellozos’ methodology and Quartiles’ methodology?
– Well, we’re pretty firm believers and more of a consolidated campaign structure. So I mean, one of the biggest things is we’re not gonna make a mess of your campaigns to the point where you don’t know what’s going on. That’s probably the number one reason we get people switching. I would say that just looking at the single keyword isolation approach I’ll be honest, it sounds like a really great idea on paper. If you pitched it to me and I had no prior experience I would probably think that sounds great. The problem is it gets out of hand really quick and then you also have it’s not a true competition between, by the way, what I mean by keyword isolation is keywords per campaign instead of having a campaign with lots of keywords. So yeah, it gets out of hand really quick and then it also is really tough to actually figure out what has gone wrong. So for example, if there’s a big change in your aid cost starts going up. If you’ve got 200 campaigns for a product it’s just extremely tough to actually work on it and then also there’s really not a reason. So for example, if you put your budget what you’re willing to spend on this product at the manual campaign, your exact match and it has hundreds of keywords in it it’s gonna spend on what’s working the best. Instead of controlling the budget at the keyword level why not just set the bid to the perfect bid to hit your target aid cost for every single keyword and then let it spend based on what’s performing the best like you’re not actually getting a benefit by separating the budget out because then if one of them runs out a budget, you can’t keep spending. So yeah, big fan of having more consolidated campaign structures as well as multiple keywords in a single campaign, and that works long-term much better for long-term management and monitoring and seeing what changes are happening.
– That’s a great breakdown Brock at that. All right, next question. What’s a good PPC strategy for a new product launch?
– One niche. Yeah, if you really niche down and there’s only a couple of competitors, I mean you might be able to just launch the product with an auto to exact match campaign do an early review program and you might be able to hit the ground running with that, no problem. That’s probably the most common way to do it. Obviously, get your reviews in order, the outside stuff from PPC. The other approach is let’s say, you’re in a super competitive niche. I mean, like a brutally competitive one some of the supplement space, some of the tough ones, those competitive niches you might actually skip keyword discovery and just right off the day one pick keywords you’re gonna rank for and go ahead and set up a ranking campaign. So, if you only have $30 a day and you’re in a tough niche where you can spend all $30 a day you might wanna put it in the entire budget to a single keyword to try to get organic ranking because you don’t have the budget to do discovery.
– That’s nice.
– [Kris] Which is lighting fixtures?
– Lighting fixtures, okay. All right, so if you’re more premium lighting fixtures and you’re doing like merchant fulfilled I definitely think you’re gonna wanna probably do a different approach. So, instead of automatic to exact match go ahead and get one of those in but if you’ve got other listings that are doing well you probably wanna try something such as a comparison module on your enhanced brand content cross-promote your new products because if somebody is looking at one of your existing products, that’s doing well they might be more interested in one of your new ones and that is a free click. You don’t have to pay for that. The other one is the virtual bundle even if you’re selling lighting fixtures and you think people aren’t gonna bundle two together there’s benefits because it’s essentially a free banner ad that’s highlighting your new products. I love doing this in essentially all niches where it’s not as high-velocity cheap lighting fixtures is a little different. If you’re going for cheap lighting fixtures maybe doing an auto to exact match right off the bat as well. This is the high volume ones. These are the 19 to $30 ones. If you’re high volume, you might also wanna look at a piggybacking approach where you target some ASINs and that are high volume that you think you’re uniquely fit to compete with. So like, they look really similar, but yours cheaper or you have better reviews piggyback on those who use a product attribute targeting and just target a handful of ASINs. That’s another great way to start getting immediate exposure that’s more cost-effective ’cause obviously you might not have the budget to go for the high volume keywords from day one.
– And we work with probably the largest lighting company on Amazon. You can go to our site and see who that is so we’ve got a lot of experience in this particular niche. Okay, here we go. Amazon ads specialist is saying I should not have so many campaigns. They suggested that I only have three campaigns to avoid the same keyword in different campaigns, competing against each other.
– All right, so if you’re talking about an Amazon employed. let’s be clear that those are salespeople, nothing against salespeople, but,
– Take it easy over there.
– I used to live with one of these guys I’m gonna be blind to I was out in the Bay area and I lived with multiple people that worked at Amazon and I actually did work with somebody that was their job. It’s a sales position and they have KPIs and one of those KPIs is actually to get you to try to use some different campaign types. So, definitely make sure you understand that Amazon’s goal is to get you to spend more. And so, be careful about suggestions. Now, for the specific question, if you’re using exact negatives you never had that problem. So, if you’re using a system with keyword transferred that you can just let them know that can’t happen. When the search term converts in the exact match, for example, you will be created as a negative exact in the automatic or the brawn or the phrase. So, you can just let them know I have a tool that’s running that will take care of that and you won’t have to work. Now, if that is happening, because of some other reason you’re not actually competing. Competing is the wrong word. You will not build yourself up unless you have multiple sever accounts. So, you pay one penny higher than the next highest bidder, not the next highest campaign you are the bidder. So, one thing I would mention is the reason why you don’t wanna have the same keyword in multiple campaigns targeting the same search term. So, if they’re targeting different search firms is different but starting the same search term is because you’re dividing the data between two points. So, what can happen is you lower the bid in one place than the volume, all the higher cost per click the less profitable, lower conversion rate ones maybe those bounce over to the next one. And so, you’re like playing a whack-a-mole game where you’re bouncing back and forth. Again, if you have a campaign structure that’s actually sending it all to exact match down like a discovery pipeline this can happen.
– All right, take a drink of water. We’ve got another question for you.
– Yeah, here we go. This is from Brian. I use dynamic up down when I’m running a lightning deal and it worked really well and then a second question, do you have any insights on the best times of data to run your ads?
– So, the lightning deal is interesting. I almost think that you could have been running at a much higher bid and done really profitable while you were doing the lightning deal. So, it wasn’t the dynamic up-down that actually worked. What happened is you were just paying 100% higher for a lot more clicks and since you had a much better conversion rate I’m assuming here, when you’re running the line new deal because people click on it they see that it’s a lightning deal so the conversion rates are better. I actually think that it wasn’t the up-down that had success. I actually think it was just the fact we were bidding higher. So, my take would be just bid higher. I’d go ahead and put on a multiplier, put on a top of search multiplier for that one lightning deal day, or go in and use our relative bid adjustments. You can go in there and change all of your bids 50% for one day and then drop them down 50% the next after the deal runs out, I would be very surprised if you did not have the same performance by just increasing your bids for the day, you’re gonna have a better conversion.
– Good answer there, okay. This is a good one. I noticed since starting using Sellozo that my keyword bids are way higher than what Amazon recommends. For example, Amazon recommends $3 but sometimes Sellozo bid is at six. What’s the reason for this?
– Well, so the first thing is Amazon they’re not actually telling you the bit of you need they don’t know you’re a cost target they don’t know your conversion rate. They’re actually suggesting a bid based on getting you to pay for it. So, keep in mind their suggested recommended bid it is just to get to page one. It is not actually based on your conversion rate. It is not based on aid cost target. It is not based on any data that really need to calculate to set an ideal way. So, keep that in mind. Sellozo is setting your bid based on a variety of different things. It’s looking at how first off, what target aid costs do you have most important and then it’s looking at your conversion rate and it’s looking at the conversion value and it’s weighting those based on the more recent data. So, it’s actually setting your bid to hit your target aid costs. Now, it sounds like in this specific example what’s going on is actually keyword testing. So, if it’s doing keyword testing it’s gonna raise the bid, trying to get to enough clicks to say that it has enough data. So, in this specific situation, I would recommend this user take a look at first off how much spend is actually going through just ’cause you’re bidding $6. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re paying $6 or you’re paying it all. The next thing I would look at is there a reason you’re not getting data? Is it because you changed your backend search terms? And like now your relevancy score is too low in this keyword. And so, we can’t get clicks so the optimizer is trying to, but it can’t ’cause Amazon thinks you are not relevant enough on this term, or is it because of the budget thing I mentioned earlier and you’re actually on a budget. And so, there’s just not a budget to actually test this keyword which obviously if you fixed the budget the bid wouldn’t have to get up so high to get data.
– Great answer. We get that question all the time about that. All right, next one. What kind of keyword do you put in a research campaign, only root keyword?
– No, I actually like to do automation. I like to do Amazon advertising automation for discovery optimization. That there’s no reason not to. So, what I do is when search terms convert, I move them over. Now, if you’re in a situation where you can’t be doing that much keyword testing say you got a limited budget, right? That’s a situation where maybe you pick just some top route broad match or phrase match. Go ahead, throw those in there. Maybe just keep 10. Don’t do any keyword transfer to the discovery campaign just pull out from it and maybe run that from the beginning just do some limited discovery. To be honest, though, if you’re limited on the budget you might just wanna stick to the automatic campaign transferring to an exact match, max that out and then say, “Okay, now I’m gonna do broad match.”
– [Dustin] Good stuff.
– How can a newbie? I’m a newbie to PPC. I’ve been burned by companies before, but I need help. I’m a big fan of Tatiana James. and that’s what brings me here. Renee, reach out to Dustin and I go to Sellozo.com. Book a demo. We have a program for new sellers. That’s not on the site yet. It’s a new program we’ve got coming out. Go check that out. You would be a perfect fit. Dustin, go ahead.
– All right, next question. What kind of keywords do you consider as a good discovery on the research campaign? What do you do with it? How high is the bid you put upon it?
– So, are we talking like comparing between broad or phrase? I’m guessing
– I’m assuming that yeah.
– Okay, so which match type to use? I use them both, broad match lately I have been seeing a better performance with broad over phrase match for discovery. Obviously, the highest level of keyword testing you can do is doing an automatic to a broad, broad, to a phrase to an exact. I only recommend that if you’re having trouble spending enough if you are spending all of your budget do not do maximum keyword testing. Not a benefit. Focus on the exact match you’ve already discovered. So, I would say if you are gonna pick one of them maybe test out the broad match, see how the performance is you have the new keywords that are being transferred over to your exact match. See if it’s enough for you. Phrase match can work much better than broad for certain niches. Some niches just have so much crossover with another niche that sells a totally different product but the words are very similar and you could end up having a lot of wasteful spending. So, certain niches do much better with phrase match for discovery because there’s so much crossover with another niche. Test broad, just start.
– Perfect, what are your thoughts on running and Brian asks these, what are your thoughts on running coupons or lightning deals? When or how often would you recommend running these?
– Okay, so if you’re a fan of Sponsored Display ads. Don’t panic Sponsored Display ads, they do have a new beta out as Sponsored Display product targeting and this is totally different performance than a normal Sponsored Display audience targeting at. I hate Sponsored display audience targeting. I only run a handful of unprofitably or where we need to be. I do love stacking Sponsored Display Product targeting with coupons though and the reason being is that I love that badge, how it shows up and I like how most of the display ads are showing right below the buy box or the bullet points on your competitors’ listings. So, when you’re doing Sponsored Display Product targeting you can pick those competitors. You do well against. You have a good offering against it and that coupon is golden when you’re doing that kind of an approach. So, definitely consider it there. Lightning deals are tough. So, many times lightning deals that are are awful and you get nothing out of it. I would say more often than not that having said, I also have seen some of the biggest sales days on any account of all time, like insane numbers when we do a lightning deal. the thing is the lightning deal it’s on a product that already sells really, really well and it’s a big discount. So, like if you have excess inventory and you need to move this stuff think about a really good lightning deal offer, right? Other than that, definitely look at just manipulating your price to get the discount badge. That’s pretty popular these days and it’s probably just as effective as the coupon and I think most people if you’re having trouble moving inventory, a lightning deal is not gonna be great for you. You’re not gonna have much better results. So, definitely look at why you’re not moving velocity instead of just paying for it
– Am with you, Brock. I’ve run lending deals all the time and some they just don’t perform as well as they used to and something that you can kinda get stuck on is if you do coupons and lightening deal be careful ’cause they’re gonna clip that coupon as well and you’re just kind of really losing money. Yes, subscribe and say products. I’m a big fan of this run a coupon all the time ’cause it’s gonna help you get more subscriptions.
– Well, one other thing to mention the lightning deals, the most successful lightning deals I’ve seen are always industry leaders. So, when you’re top row, you’re going to the top four products those are always the lightning deals that would be the best. So, if you’re like number one for the main keyword and you see that you dropped down to like four or five, you’re like in the second row now that is a great opportunity to run a lightning deal and bump yourself right back up to the top. So, defending your number one organic position you’re like a big philosophy seller those are the ones that do well.
– Yep, for sure.
– [Kris] Keep it rolling Dustin.
– All right, here we go. If I have a parent listing with many child listings should I only put one child listing into the campaign or should I add all of them? Another question that all time.
– Great question. Yeah, and it’s kind of like an anchor skew approach is I think what they’re referring to. So, an anchor SKU is a SKU, a child variation under your parent that performs better. Maybe it’s a color variation maybe it’s because it’s a cheaper price than the rest of the variations. More often than not you will have better performance just promoting your anchor skew than promoting all of your skews. A one-pack in a two-pack is a great example. Don’t promote your two-pack if your one pack is merged under the same listing and has a significantly better click through rate, right? If they want a two pack, they’ll see it there and then you’ve got the better click-through rate and more total impressions on the listing. There are some caveats if the products are totally unique, I mean you might have to promote them all, right.
– Robert says, “Would you run a little bit catchall “alongside your individual auto campaigns “for each of those products?”
– Not for each of the products. I have one catchall with all products in it and yes, I also run a normal automatic, which is optimization or discovery campaign, right? So, the catchall is gonna be bidding between six and 15 cents no matter what. You should put in a mark if you’re using the optimizer first off, make sure you go into campaign studio and remove keyword transfer and make sure you put in a max bid of 15 cents or 20 for certain categories. But the reason you wanna do this is your automatic campaign that you’re optimizing and you’re transferring keywords over to a manual. The goal of that is discovered. The goal of the catchall campaign is to be spending 24/7 on really low hanging fruit that are really cheap. And so, if your other campaigns run on a budget you wanna make sure your catchall has enough budget to run 24/7 and that is a perfect example of why you wanna run them both
– We got about 10 minutes left.
– Yep, yeah. We’ll crank down a few more questions here. This is another one we get all the time. What are your thoughts on dayparting? Does it work and what are the best scenarios to use it?
– All right, yeah. Amazon advertising ad scheduling or dayparting, whatever you wanna call it, I use it. So, you need just like the top of search multiplier or the product page multiplier, have a justification for using it, but there are a lot of them a number one use cases you’re running out of budget. If you are an ad manager for a company and you have a very restricted budget say and you’re running out of budget by 6:00 AM go ahead and daypart, right? Like you’re not unless morning in the middle of the night and morning are your peak hours, which I highly doubt. You’re not gonna have good results. Let’s say you’re selling office supply products. Put your whole budget Monday to Friday. I mean, simple eight to five, right? Or yeah, eight to five. Well, plus specific East coast times, but yeah, you definitely should be using that for budget reasons. The other one is cloning the campaign and then de partying it to figure out what time of day you’re more effective. So, really good for AB testing. So, you’re changing some of your copy or something like that dayparting. And so, both campaigns can run at the same time or hour to hour really, really useful. So, that’s another great one.
– Can you talk about how you’re leveraging sponsored display for remarketing? Are you running unique campaigns for each option like similar versus your products?
– So, I’m not having the best performance with those. I’ll be honest I really, really stick to Sponsored Display Product targeting ads. The remarketing I’ve had some success but it’s just so limited. I’ll be honest unless you’re maxing everything else out. I normally would put your budget somewhere else like sponsored brand video ads. If you’re looking at switching from just sponsored products or normal traditional headline search sponsored brand ads don’t go for the display retargeting go for sponsored brand video instead go for sponsored display product targeting. We see over and over significantly better performance.
– All right, next one, here. We used the Amazon Attribution tool to help track traffic from sources like Facebook, Google, and TikTok ads but the data seemed really out of whack. Have you seen this work or do you have thoughts on the Attribution tool and can you talk about your thoughts on running ads using category targeting, sponsored branded sponsored display?
– Definitely not an expert in the attribution tool. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if the data I’ve seen is inaccurate. I have definitely seen accounts where it looks accurate. So, I don’t think widespread is just not working. I definitely have heard there are situations where it just is impossible to see the data that you’re seeing. So, I would say that any data from Amazon has good data the more data we can get the better. So, I would use it. It’s free. Why not? But yeah, I can tell you that it’s actually working. What was the second part?
– The second part was, talk about your thoughts on running ads, using category targeting sponsored brand and sponsored display.
– Yeah, so category targeting is definitely something that I think is gonna be growing this year. I used it to a limited degree in 2020. Definitely, wasn’t the best performance that having said, I think I really need to re-evaluate it, and the reason I say that is if you’re running the optimizer for six months and you have it or you’re manually pulling out all of your converting search terms from automatic campaigns for your exact match your automatic campaign is gonna get worse and worse and worse, right. But that’s good because you’re discovering keywords you’re moving them over to your exact match in your outcomes. That’s the point you’re discovering. So, I really think I need to be looking at the category targets with a different expectation because even though they are running at a higher target aid cost normally or higher rate costs on target if I view them as a way to discover specific ASINs and transfer that to an exact path in ad group I actually think that could be really profitable. So, I would say go ahead and use that as a way to discover new ASINs but make sure you also are discovering ASINs from your automatic, ’cause those are normally really profitable compared to category.
– Good, all right, next one. What are your thoughts on pricing? Should I increase my price so that I can spend more on ads or will that lower my conversion rate? How do you determine a happy, medium? Good question.
– Yeah, what does an incoming mentality test, right? So, you can ask it. There’s definitely some options out there. The other thing to do is look at your competitors, type in your main keyword. and if all of your competitors are significantly higher price than you, I think it’s a no brainer that you can go ahead and raise it. If the exact opposite is true you really wanna think, “Okay, “do I have a reason why I’m a higher price?” And is that reason apparent from the SERP? Because it really has to be apparent from the SERP. So, that’s like your main image and your title or the first part of your title. They need to tell the customer why your higher price. Otherwise, you’re probably not pricing accordingly,
– Right, that’s your question. You also asked the question about coupons. So, maybe you could try there carving a higher price and throw a coupon on there might work as well. So check that out, okay. Here we go, good question. This is probably the best question of the day.
– [Brock] Okay.
– Where, where can see a Sellozo demo?
– I’m not doing that one.
– Go to sellozo.com, S E L L O Z O.com. You’ll see a button at the top right it says start a trial or book a demo. You’re gonna get Dustin and I and we’re gonna go through the platform with you. Answer questions just like this and just kinda see where you’re at so go to sellozo.com. Okay, can you talk more about sponsored video ads?
– Use them. Are they’re great? They’re amazing. Reach out to us if you need a videographer, we will refer ones that we have had positive experiences with them. It is rare that I cannot get a sponsor brand video to significantly outperformed sponsor products, simple as that. So, techniques like an exact match. Don’t broad match keywords into your sponsor brand or any of them for the matter. Stick with exact match and then selectively use broader phrase ’cause we can’t have separate adverts for each of those. Other than that, you need to have text closed captioning. You have to actually have texts in the video saying why they need to buy your product and then lifestyle use those two things, match your lifestyle with your product differentiator as text on the screen and the reason for that is, of course, people are not turning on the audio. They have to actually turn on audio. So, if you just have audio talking about your differentiator why they’re gonna buy your product I’d say nine out of 10, eight out of 10 people are not gonna see it.
– There are five minutes left. We’ll do just these last two questions and then we’ll wrap it up, all right. Thoughts on using Amazon Demand-side platform or DSP?
– Well, I’m not an expert in it. It’s still very new as far as all the new iteration, at least, my big thing is just to make sure you have a reason to do it. There’s only a couple of brands that I work with that have seen better as good, I should say as good performance on the demand side platform compared to what you can do in just the normal seller, central vendor, central advertising console. So, I would say, make sure you’re maxing out before you go into DSP because when you go into Google, you search for something, when you type in dog food into Google you might be looking for it locally. You might be trying to research it. You might be trying to find a different brand, right? When somebody goes on to Amazon and they type in dog food they’re getting a bag of dog food at their door in 48 hours. So, I know Amazon is pushing it really, really hard but just keep in mind what it is, right. It’s very likely you should focus first on maxing out what you can do with your on-platform in your seller central or vendor central account before going in that direction.
– Good answer there. Okay, so I have an exact match campaign in a keyword. At what point do I know that I don’t need to raise my bid anymore?
– Well, yeah, that’s a good question. So, I would say that your target aid cost is being met. So, if you have a 20% target aid cost and you’re at 20% that’s where your bid needs to be. If you have a 50% target aid costs and you’re at 20 you should probably raise your bid and if you’re already the highest bidder, well you’re just gonna defend your highest spot up to a higher level. You only pay one penny higher than the next highest bidder. So, there’s really not a downside of raising that bid up. Now, you should probably have a max reasonable bid, but at the same time, there are benefits of having a really high bid, even though your CPC is really low and that’s to defend. So, if somebody else adds that keyword in, they’re gonna think it’s a really bad keyword because they’re gonna pay a super high CPC or you’ve got six months of performance at a low CPC, and this is just a temporary blip. So, take a look at your target aid costs, and don’t be afraid to have a higher bid than what you need to be if you’re already the highest bidder.
– Brock, you did it. That was rapid-fire. Quick, good answers. That was awesome. Kim, can you go to the next slide real quick? And we’ll, we’ll wrap this up, but Brock that was amazing information.
– [Kim] One more question guys, one last question.
– You mentioned the main image, Amazon what’s your product on a white background? How do we improve that?
– How do we Sellozo or just like in general?
– In general.
– Okay, ’cause I was gonna say, so one thing to mention is that they are guidelines. They’re literally called guidelines, photo guidelines, and any search you go into Amazon and type something in. I can guarantee you in the top 10, you will have probably a majority see something that violates those guidelines product packaging, for example, a great option. If your lifestyle I’ve seen people get away with it to be totally honest this is one of those situations where I side on asking for forgiveness rather than permission and if they come after me and I got six months of a lifestyle image they might take me down one day and then I swap it out. I’m not gonna tell you to do that, but I would definitely say, you don’t get suspended for changing your main image, unless you really, really like put something wrong in it. So, push those guidelines as much as you can and there’s a lot of YouTube videos specifically about how you can push them so take some time researching it and I’m sure you’ll see something
– [Kris] Good stuff.
– Yeah, that is all right. Well, I know we have a lot of people on here that are not currently using Sellozo if this is something you would like to look at to help you automate this entire process that Brock has been describing, you can go to sellozo.com and book a demo with Kris, or I will talk about anything in your Amazon business, show you a demo of the platform and how it’s gonna automate this optimization process. Also, if you’re an existing client on Sellozo and you’ve been listening to Brock and you realize, “Man, “he knows what he’s talking about. “I want that managing my campaigns.” And that our support team is amazing. Brock’s in charge of them. We can upgrade you to fully managed. You can again, get in touch with either Kris or I and we can discuss what that looks like to upgrade you to fully manage. So, you can get that level of expertise managing your PPC.