So, you’ve just joined Sellozo and are getting ready to begin your AI Advertising adventure. Congrats!
But, you still have lots of questions because you’ve never had a robot do your bidding before. Well, no fear, because the experts at Sellozo have compiled a few tips to ensure that you get the most out of the Sellozo Autopilot.
What is the Sellozo Autopilot?
The Sellozo Autopilot allows you to automate the management of your campaign strategy and budgeting on some or all of your products. The Autopilot is especially great for managing large amounts of campaigns or products or for people who have never advertised on Amazon before and need some guidance on an overall campaign structure. Setup takes just a few minutes and will save you loads of time on your campaign management.
How does it work?
You create product groups and set a budget for each. Then, the Autopilot will automatically set up a campaign flow while divvying up the budget you set among all the campaigns within that product group. Any campaigns that include the selected products that were already set up and running in your account will be paused automatically to avoid wasted spend. Ad group and keyword data will be transferred to the new structure, if possible.
Sellozo Autopilot vs Sellozo Optimizer
The Autopilot and the Optimizer are similar but are different in their reach. Turning the optimizer on for selected campaigns will allow Sellozo to adjust bids up and down to hit your desired ACoS goal. It will also create negative keywords when search terms are determined to be unprofitable for the advertised product. Autopilot will actually create campaigns and campaign flows for you and defaults to having the optimizer turned on. So, with the Sellozo Autopilot, you are getting both the Autopilot campaign structure and the optimizer all in one, whereas the optimizer is simply the “brain” behind the bidding operations and actually controls how the campaigns behave.
If you have campaigns running through Seller Central already, and you’re not wanting to start over from scratch, we recommend turning on the optimizer on your existing campaigns. This will help improve the performance of those campaigns.
However, if you have never run a campaign on Amazon before, or if you have a large catalog of products and are underwhelmed by the performance of your many campaigns with a desire to start fresh, then you should definitely give the Sellozo Autopilot a try.
Sellozo Autopilot Best Practices
Once you’ve decided to start working with the Autopilot, keep the following tips in mind:
Keep Similar Products or Variations in the Same Product Group
Create product groups of similar products or of a product and its variations. The idea is to lump products that share the same or similar keywords, using the advertised product as an “anchor” to drive traffic to all the other variations or similar products within your catalog. Setting up your product groups properly will ensure that the keywords collected by the campaign relate to all the advertised products, not just some of them, reducing wasted spend.
Focus on Top-Performing Products
If you are cash-strapped or just want to take a more conservative approach with your advertising budget, consider focusing on your top products first. Create product groups consisting of your top-selling products and drive traffic to those listings. By focusing on your top products, you’ll ensure that every penny you spend is as profitable as possible.
Set Your ACoS Target Properly
If you have campaigns already running, check out what the ACoS has been in the last month or so on your products. You’ll want to set your ACoS target (i.e. your ACoS goal) to something similar to the current performance. Setting the ACoS target at the existing ACoSmore often than not does still lower your ACoS as it maximizes sales on the best targets while reducing spend on the higher ACoS targets. The most important thing is to set them reasonably. If it’s not possible to hit a target ACoS simply because the category is very competitive you will reduce sales as the optimizer tries its best to hit that ACoS. If you set your ACoS targets close to what they are currently and incrementally move them down instead of making drastic changes, the system won’t throttle your ad performance in hopes of maintaining an impossible ACoS target. Or, alternatively, if you have no prior ad performance to reference, set your ACoS goals moderately and adjust up or down as needed.
Pay Attention to the Keyword Discovery Level
The Keyword Discovery Level determines which campaign flow the Autopilot should use when transferring converting keywords from one campaign to another. If you are just starting out or are budget-conscious, set the Keyword Discovery Level to “Low”. On average the best ACoS is with keyword discovery “low” while higher sales are on keyword discovery “high”. Low will give you a campaign flow transferring keywords that convert (1) time from an Auto campaign to a Manual campaign as “exact match” keywords. Or, in other words, only keywords that result in a sale will be transferred from an Auto campaign (whose job is to “mine” for keywords) to a manual campaign as “Exact Match” (which is as targeted as you can get – you can trust these shoppers are in-market for the advertised keyword).
For more information on the different campaign flows available, check out our Autopilot section in the FAQs here.
Monitor, Monitor, Monitor!
The robots will keep an eye on the greater market and your campaign’s bidding, but you’ll want to frequently check back to make sure your ACoS targets are still working for you. If you are seeing progress and you are reaching your target ACoS goals, then you’ll want to keep lowering the ACoS to see if you can continue to improve performance. Alternatively, if you notice that you are not hitting an ACoS target and are not spending very much, you can consider raising the ACoS target to encourage finding more profitable keywords and increasing sales.
If your spend is high but the campaigns are not performing well, consider lowering keyword testing by pausing broad match and phrase match campaigns and instead funnel that budget into the exact match campaigns. This will make sure you are targeting only those shoppers who are searching for your specific keywords and cutting out wasted spend on keywords that are similar, but not resulting in sales.
Finding the sweet spot for your ACoS target will ensure you are reaching for attainable goals and improve your overall ad performance.
Conclusion
The Sellozo Autopilot will cut down a lot of time and attention needed to set up and manage your campaigns. Making sure you set your product groups, ACoS target, and Keyword Discovery Level properly, focus on your top products, and continually monitor your ACoS, will put you in the best position to get the most out of the tool and reach your advertising goals.
Beep Boop!
(That’s robot speak for “Happy Advertising!”)