Dustin and Kris discuss Amazon sponsored product ads and the types of campaigns Amazon sellers should be doing. Learn about branded vs un-branded, broad, phrase, and exact match types and how to use the top of search multiplier to ensure your main keywords are appearing at the top of search results.
See more of Dustin and Kris on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCImqJsK7Ru_hC2ZLnBC_f_Q
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– Hello everybody and welcome to episode 16 of Two Amazon Sellers and a Microphone. I’m Dustin Kane, and with me as always is Kris Gramlich. How’s it going man?
– Hey, we’re humming right through these, 16 already? We’re just keep going, it’s going good.
– It’s great. We just started a couple of weeks ago, we’re already at 16. Before we know it will be in the 100s, that’ll be exciting. But today this will be good there is a lot to talk about and unpack with Sponsored, Sponsored Product Ads on Amazon. We are gonna really try to dig in, to the different campaign types you can run, different strategies, the different strategic campaigns you can set up, with Sponsored Products. So there is a lot, we’re gonna just touch on some of it, I mean there’s so many different things we can do with Sponsored Product Ads but, I’m excited this will be a lot of fun. This is what we deal with on a daily basis with Sellozo, and Sellozo could help automate this process for you as well. Once you get these choose what kind of strategy you’re gonna go for or so. This will be a lot of fun Kris, lot of information in here.
– Yeah, for sure and this is like a good like a starting point for your new product as you’re launching a new product, these are types of campaigns that you wanna make sure you have up and running. ‘Cause, this is only gonna help bring more traffic to your listing and hopefully more conversions and help you rank better.
– So, let’s crank up. Let’s start with the basics here. When you are launching a Sponsored Product Ad, you basically have two initial choices of what kind of campaigns you’re gonna create. And that’s an automatic targeting campaign or a manual targeting campaign. So real briefly Kris, just wanna talk about the differences, between those two?
– Yeah, automatic campaign. This gets confused as it’s being automated. This is a campaign that Amazon, goes to your listing and schemes your listing and controls where your product shows up based off how your listing looks. So they’re gonna show you for different types of search terms based off your listing. Manual campaigns, you come to the table with Amazon, you say here’s the keywords I wanna bid on, I want these campaigns, I want these keywords to be in my campaign, I’m gonna bid on these individually, and you control what you bid on. So it’s two different types, but they both work really well.
– Yep, so it’s those two types of campaigns, that we use or you would use to design your strategy. And so it’s easier combination does and then the combination of the way you’re gonna target things and what you’re gonna target inside those campaigns. So let’s talk about again, another thing is there’s three different match types inside of a manual campaign that you can choose as well. So once you put a keyword you decide, “Hey, I wanna bid on this keyword in a manual campaign,” you can decide to make it a broad, a phrase, or an exact match type. So you wanna just talk quickly about those three different match types and the differences there?
– Yeah, broad is just like it sounds, you’re bidding on dog brush, if somebody types in German shepherd brush for my dog, you’re gonna show up because dog and brushes are in the same search term, but they’re in different types of order. So, your ad would show for their phrase match and has to be in the exact same order, that the phrase ends so dog and brush have to be together. So, large dog brush, golden doodle dog brush, like they have to be exactly in that same order. And then exact match is exactly the term you’re bidding on so that it shows exactly what you’re bidding on. And you can use all three, I recommend using all three, ’cause you may be able to get a lot of different variations for the search terms.
– Yeah, so basically, besides keywords, the other thing that you can bid on, is you can bid on your competitor’s essence, right? So that’s called product targeting. That’s where you’re gonna show, your ad will show up actually on your competitor’s listing. So that is just another type of target that you can do inside a manual campaign. It’s also when you’re on an auto campaign, Amazon’s gonna be showing you, a for essence as well, inside those auto campaigns. So, using all of those things, that we’ve just talked about now, you get to design your strategy for how you wanna show your ads and how you’d like to optimize your ads as well over time ’cause obviously, the goal with any sort of advertising is to get the maximum amount of sales you can get while keeping your ad spend profitable. You can’t be spending too much otherwise, it’s not sustainable and you can’t do it. So, let’s talk about, if you’re looking if you’re starting and launching a product right now and you’re looking just to set up some really sound basic structures for your campaigns. let’s talk about how you can set those up and what you would need to do to get going. So, I’ll start it off and you can describe this one for us Kris. Probably the most widely used optimization tactic is to run an automatic targeting campaign, and then as things start converting to sales, you move them to, you move those keywords or targets to a manual campaign. Which is what we would call an auto to an exact match campaign structure. So what is, what does that do? Why is that optimizing for your ads? How’s that structure special?
– Yeah, yeah, good question. What you’re doing is you’re just taking the proven search terms out of the auto campaign, by going to your search term report, anytime a search term converted you wanna take that out of your auto and put into a manual campaign, and then you make that same term a negative exact in your auto campaign. And this just allows your auto campaign to find new search terms. This is bare-bones optimization. I mean, there’s a lot more you could do with this as far as optimizing campaign, but in generic, an auto to a manual exact, this is basically just taking the search terms out of an auto that converted, put them in a manual exact, and now you’re gonna bid on those search terms, at an individual keyword level, and you’re gonna let your auto campaign, continue to mine and find new search terms.
– Yeah, that was well described and I think, to even go deeper into this, the reason you have to use those two is because the limitations that you get from Amazon on this types of campaigns. For example on an automatic targeting campaign, you can only bid at the ad group level. You can’t bid at the keyword level. So it’s, it can be very inefficient in what you, you could be underbidding on certain keywords that doesn’t show up for it and you could be over bidding on keywords. And so you utilize the automatic targeting campaign is like a keyword research tool. And so you’re allowing the spin to happen so that you can find these things. And once you convert you get it out of there immediately. And now you know, it’s successful so now you can put it in, when you put it in that manual campaign, that allows you to define the bid at that exact keyword or ads and level. And by negating terms in the auto campaign, you’re forcing that auto campaign to look elsewhere, and you’re also getting rid of words that are inefficient, spending a lot, they’re costing you money, but not converting to sales. you get rid of all that, and then this becomes a nice, flow of keywords in your manual campaign, and that ads spend gets really efficient. So, that’s very tried and true. That’s, the kinds of structures that’s the kind of work that you and I did back when we started, you know 2014, 2013, we were able to utilize structures like that very well. Now you can get much more thorough, and there’s, so now we’re gonna try to talk about just different campaign structures where we utilize more of like the broad and the phrase match types and what that’s gonna do. And then let’s talk even more about, how we can even isolate more keywords and just different campaigns so they perform even better. Or so that we can, have a goal associated with each campaign and what our goal is with that, we’ll talk about like defensive campaigns or branded campaigns or competitor campaigns, all that stuff that we’ll go on ’cause, you can really get down a rabbit hole here and talk about this stuff. But it makes a difference, it makes a real difference though. We’ve talked about the auto to exact match. That’s probably your most efficient if you got a limited budget, and you’re wanna do keyword research, but it’s still limited. That’s probably your best bet. That’s gonna limit the amount of keyword testing you do. But now let’s say, you’ve got a decent advertising budget, you’re launching a product, and you’d like to optimize really fast. You know you wanna get, you wanna find as many keywords as possible and move them through your structure. What would you now include some more broads and phrases in that match strategy?
– I would and what I would do is I would have an auto campaign still run, ’cause that’s gonna be, where I’m gonna find new search terms from Amazon. But I would also do a broad campaign, a phrase campaign, and an exact campaign. And then I would take, what I was just doing is try to find your top six to 10, or you can go a little bit deeper, like that top 20 keywords that you want to go after. And I would add those all in broad phrase and exact campaigns. That way I have a really wide net, I’m showing Amazon, I really wanna bid on these keywords and I’ll put them different match types. So I’m trying to get all the traffic I can to my listing. So that’s what I would set up as my first structure, taking that even a step further, if you know like the top five keywords you wanna target the top six keywords you wanna target. You can create what we call a hero campaign. And Dustin, you could touch a little bit on this. You create a hero campaign, and you put these in a separate campaign by themselves so they get their own budget, right?
– Yeah, yeah hero campaign can be really effective especially in a launch, in a launch setting or in a setting where you have a keyword that’s dominating one of your campaigns and it’s using up all the budget. So yeah, you can absolutely create those hero campaigns and they can make it bigger in a product launch cycle, you know, just deciding the few keywords that you wanna rank on the most and putting a lot of your budget there can really help. As opposed to casting a wide net, where you’re spending money on all these different keywords you’re focusing on a couple, but also if you’re running a campaign and you find out that keyword XYZ is, is aiding the 90% of your budget, if you take it out of that campaign, give it its own budget, that’ll allow the rest of those keywords in that campaign to actually get money spent on them instead of, instead of being used up. So yeah, those are great ideas and that what you’re talking about that auto to broad, to free, to exact match campaign structure is really, really, really thorough keyword testing. So, I mean you’re in, like you said, that’s another approach, where if you’ve got the budget you can show your product all over Amazon. You’ll be discovering keywords across all those three campaigns. And then, to take that a step further, is now if you are running those, when you get complex like that it gets to be difficult to manage manually.
– Yeah.
– So that’s where automation comes in. That’s where a tool like Sellozo comes in where inside Sellozo you can actually link up those campaigns. You could link the auto to broad, to phrase, to exact, and then Sellozo will automate the transfer of keywords and the negative keyword creation, every time there’s a conversion, through your camera, it’ll also adjust all the bids, based on a target and cost. So, once you start developing campaign strategies and you have an understanding of how they operate, the next step is for sure, you need make it automated. Get with Sellozo, something like Sellozo, and have that automated. That way you can be more focused on designing the strategy, as opposed to doing all the work.
– Yeah.
– And that’s where that’s where all these other campaign types that we’re gonna be talking about here. Once it gets complex like that, you’re talking about thousands and thousands of bid adjustments daily or weekly, potentially that you’d be doing on these campaigns. So you’d need to automate it. And you just need to be focused on, what structure you’re setting up. So, in terms of just basic campaign structures, the ones we see the most are auto to exact match. That’s just driving through, the auto to broad, to phrase, to exact, really good. You’ve got some parallel ones, where if something converts in the auto, it’ll go into the broad phrase and exact at the same time. And you know that. So, there’s just different strategies and different ways that you can do it. All of those types can be automated inside of Sellozo. I guess so I must have.
– You got something going on there, what’s happening?
– It’s happened in the last live stream we did. I could have sworn, but I guess I’m just busy. But, so anyway those are two. Those are some of the basic ones. Now, if you want it structured in a way where you can set up different strategies, for different keywords that you have, let’s talk about some different campaign types, that you can set up. Number one, let’s say you want to set up a defensive or a branded campaign. What’s the goal of a defensive campaign or a branded campaign?
– Yeah, in short, it’s to protect your brand from other people bidding on it. So, when somebody taps to your brand name in, their Sponsored Brand Ad or the Sponsored Product Ad placements, you wanna make sure your products take those placements. And not your competitors, the cost is a little bit lower on these, but your cost per clicks are gonna be higher because you’re bidding on this as a branded name. So, be prepared to pay a higher cost per click, but you’re gonna kind of build a moat or kind of protect your brand and so when somebody types your brand name in, they find the right product and not one of your competitors and buy one of theirs so. I like doing this especially if you have multiple products, but if this is something new, you just launched a product, you could probably wait a little bit on your branded campaign. But you know as you start to launch new products and start to scale up, you’re gonna wanna think about getting a branded campaign. So, people don’t bid on your brand and you wanna make sure you’re the one bidding on it.
– Yeah and this one is so counterintuitive. You know, and it’s, and until you’re in the space a long time it’s hard to understand the need or the value of this. ‘Cause in theory if I type in my brand name, my products show up, right? So why, what the question is, is why would you want to spend money, where you’re already showing up. Anyway organically, and the answer is, is because those sponsored product spots don’t disappear. Somebody is gonna be in them. And if they’re gonna be seen ahead of your product, and if someone’s coming in, you don’t want them to see anything but your brand. So like you said, it’s like building a moat well, if I type in, if someone typed in my brand name, and there was a sponsored brand campaign at the very top of the page that was me, all the sponsored products were me, the first two lines of organic results were me, I’m protected, they’re gonna buy my product. They’re not gonna be swayed by something else sneaking in there. And there’s a lot of times where if leave it unprotected, you could actually not be ranked organically very high for your own brand name. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve fallen prey to that where I’m like, I’m just gonna ride this out, I’m already ranked high. Let’s go, and next thing you know, you’re completely out, all they see is your competitors. They type in your brand name, they see you but you’re surrounded by your competitors. They click on your listing, every like sponsored display ad is your competitors. It’s like they, you start pulling different here. And so yeah, the defensive branded campaigns are unique and that’s why you gotta, that’s why you gotta set this up as a separate campaign. This ’cause you don’t want these brand names in your, regular campaign, where you might be optimizing it to a different target like you might be optimizing it to be super profitable, and maybe you need to bid a little higher, to protect that brand spot. So that’s why they should be in a good, in a separate campaign spot. That’s a really good, and we could, we’re talking about just now sponsored products but, all of these new things they’re rolling out with sponsored display, and all of a sudden you can do so many cool defensive campaigns. Onto display and other and other in sponsored brand etc. There’s so much you can do. All right so we got that. Now, why don’t you talk about like a competitor campaign or a product targeting campaign? What’s the benefit and use of that?
– Well, just on the flip side of protecting your brand, you kind of want to go after your competitors too, ’cause you’re gonna want to make sure that your product is showing up when they type in that competitor’s name and you may have a better offer. Your price may be better, you may be running a discount code, you may have better images or title maybe, or whatever it is. But, you do wanna target your competitors, so you can kind of take some sales away. Like, you may wanna sneak some sales away from them. So I do both, I’d do my branded campaign, ’cause that’s a separate goal. My competitive campaign as a separate goal has different find my top 10 competitors are in that campaign. And I would put them in there as a broad phrase and exact all three match types. That way if somebody types it in, you have a better chance to showing up for that brand name. But yeah essentially, this is stealing sales from your competitor. And, everybody’s running it. So a lot of people running these, I would definitely do both, branded and a competitive campaign.
– Yeah, absolutely. So those are- those are just really different strategies of separating things out. That allows you to have separate goals like you talked about, you can be aggressive with a certain type or less aggressive with another type, certainly product targeting, where you’re bidding on your competitor’s essence those can be some of your most profitable keywords. And for sure, I’ve had many, many, many, campaigns where an essence is my, is my best-performing keyword a lot of times especially if, like you said, if it’s a big value ad compared to the, your competitor that you’re showing on, and may get a lot of traffic, that can be big time. Now let’s talk about one more. This is the campaign now. We every single time, you and I talked to an Amazon seller at Sellozo. We recommend they set this campaign up immediately. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these not be effective. It’s an amazingly easy strategy, and that’s a ‘Catch-All Campaign.’ So why don’t you, tell everybody what a Catch-All Campaign is?
– Yeah I didn’t even know about these until I started working at Sellozo. I didn’t know what this campaign was but, these things are awesome. What this is, it’s an auto campaign, that you set up, would have asked for you to select the product, that you wanna advertise, you just select everything. Whether you got it’s in stock or out of stock, you just select every single product you have. And you put this in this auto campaign, and then when it comes down to the budget and the default bid, this is where the strategy comes in. I don’t have any way of proving this but, you make a lower bid of like five cents, a nickel maybe even less, but you make your budget really high like 400 bucks, 500 bucks. I don’t know if there’s any truth to this but some people say that you know, Amazon looks at the budget of the campaign, and kind of dictates on how it shows up in the campaign or on the search results. So Dustin and I were bidding on the same term, and he had a $5 budget, and I have a $500 budget. It would be in Amazon’s best interest probably to let me win it ’cause I have a bigger budget. So there’s already a proven that but that’s there, but these campaigns can really like strip the bottom of the barrel and get you a lot of different sales and search terms at like, 5 cents, 4 cents, 3 cents, 2 cents. The cost per clicks is really low. You let these run over time. You don’t need to do any optimization to them, just let them run, set it and forget it. For these, I set this up for, I had a restaurant supply company contact us, and they have never ran any ads, but they had like 20,000 or something on different items. And he did a Catch All Campaign, I don’t know, I don’t know how many ads he really had but he had a lot. He ended up, at the end of the year they did an additional $250,000 in revenue. Just from that ad campaign. And they didn’t even use Sellozo. They just gave us a call, we kind of went through the platform. They really weren’t a fit yet, but they just learned how to do a Catch-All Campaign just by reaching out to us and learning about PPC. So, that’s a cool story because that whole company, increased their revenue by a lot. And all they did was just set up easy Catch-All Campaign.
– Yeah, I constantly have them running. And the key here is the low bid. Don’t miss that.
– Yap.
– We should call them low bid Catch-All Campaigns
– For sure.
– Because, if you just force it all you’re doing like Kris said is it’s just any random weird search that somebody does, that could be served with a low bid ad wins and you’d be shocked how many times your ads get served through these campaigns or whether used end up showing up on the third page or the fourth page or whatever that little bid says, you’re still showing up. It’s costing you almost nothing, I’ve never seen an ad cost, over like 4 or 5%, for this they’re always really low. So effective strategies. Day one, launch a low bid Catch-All Campaign.
– For sure.
– Yep, so those are basically, we’ve covered the majority of the common, just campaign structures, the different match types, the different types of campaigns you can run. And then just the different strategy behind them whether you’re running defensive branded, product targeting, competitor campaigns, hero campaigns, catch-all campaigns. There’s a lot, and if you guys out there are listening and this is just ad time, it is for sure, but you can always reach out to Kris or I and set up a call, we can talk about your advertising strategies. We can also talk about how we could just set those up really quickly and then our tool at Sellozo will do all of the automation for you on a daily basis. So you can go to sellozo.com, click request a demo, Kris and I will talk with you for 30 minutes about anything you wanna talk about, about your ad campaigns or anything on Amazon. And walk you through how Sellozo might go and help you out.
– Yeah, for sure.
– Yep, well this is it, this is a great topic, Kris. Thanks for all the expertise in this. It’s fun talking about this, it’s fun talking about how stuff like this can really change, your brand on Amazon could change advertising the way it is now. And if you do it right, you can really succeed so. Great, great talking to you again Kris, this was fun and we’ll be seeing everybody tomorrow, for the next one.
– On the next one, see you man.
– Yeah.
What are Sponsored Product Ads?
Amazon sponsored product ads are keyword or product targeted ads that sellers can use to promote individual product listings.