Amazon Ads Roundup with Sean Smith and Danny McMillan – Session 001

Admin
July 27, 2017

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Amazon Ads – Cutting Waste with Sean Smith

Sean has been camped out in his data tent immersed in the PPC search term reports of his many clients across multiple SKUs, campaigns, ad groups and keywords. I’m sure if you cut him he would bleed keywords! In this session we go into how to maximise your ad-spend and cut-out waste. Marketing your product is a key expense of business so anything you can do to optimise and make your advertising work harder for you will grow your business.

The magic of maths comes to bear here with cool algorithms to help you optimise your starting bid prices. You get a scientific approach to pricing your ad spend across Broad, Phrase and Exact.

Digital marketing background

Started taking on his own accounts
Jungle Hustle and Amazon PPC and Product Photography
Spoke at SCO at Philadelphia, ASD and Prosper Show and Seller Optimisation Summit
Weighted averages
The numbers tell the story
Use averages to work out starting bids using weighted averages
Gives a more accurate picture to your starting bids
Filter search term report
Use an All search terms report that are exact match
Then calculate the weighted average of the average PPC
Use this to make a more informed starting bid
More accurate than using an arbitrary number
Use weighted average CPC and start bids at 10-20% above this.
If it’s >= 3 orders we multiply by 1.5 now
It takes into consideration the number of clicks
Qty of clicks tells you how much traffic you’re garnering for the search term
You should pay attention to the weighted averages
Average PPC for that product or category can give you a bigger bang for your ad buck

Keyword filtering

Separate keyword filters from search term report
Rank 1 – greater or equal to 3 orders placed within one week of a click (avg conversion rate of 10% or higher)
Rank 2 – 1 to 2 orders placed within a week of the a click and it’s less than 10% conversion

Filter Rank 1

Pull 3 orders placed within a week of a click all search terms
De-dupe everything
Take weighted average of the average CPC and multiply by 1.5 (using 2 makes ACOS to high) for starting bid
We’re using a multiplier of 1.5

Filter Rank 2

1 and 2 orders placed within 1 week of a click
De-dupe
Take exact match types
Take weighted average of average CPC and multiple by 1.1 for starting bid
For phrase go 20% below for exact match
For broad go 20% below phrase
These filters allow us to find the keywords that are working for clients
Bulk Uploads
A pain to learn but help scale Amazon PPC
We use them every day

Used for:

Control the timeframe within bulk operations menu item in Seller Central
You can get snapshots of wha’t going in your PPC account over specific timeframes
We use it to download snapshots of time to measure campaigns performance
Gives impressions, click, orders, sales and ACoS
We use downloads for analysis at campaign, ad-group and keyword level
Scalability
Download and change MAX BID – save it and re-upload it and the bids change immediately
Change all bids on keywords by 10% and re-upload it – so much quicker than clicking around the campaign manager tool in Seller Central
Image this manually for over 100 keywords
You can also use ‘negative’ as well
Do negative exacts for anything with 20 clicks and no sales
Create new campaigns and ad-groups – you can use the bulk upload manager for all sorts of things
BEWARE doing things at scale can cause problems if you go wrong
If your campaign does not have at least one impression then it won’t appear in the bulk download
Campaign costs control
If a keyword has 8 clicks or more then we drop it by 2 cents
Wait 3-4 days for new campaigns and then revisit if you’ve had 8 clicks and no sales take it down by 2cents

Testing keywords

Saving money on keywords
Launching a product we
Do title keywords and bid on those keywords as title weighs heaviest in rank
Pull keywords from the title a 200 char title can generate a lot of keywords
Start on title keywords
Exact $2.03
20% below for phrase
20% below for Broad
PPC should work right off the bat
Title keywords give you some feel for amount of competition for the space
Then we do a reverse ASIN on the competitors
Type in your main keyword
Use JS to work out which generate the most sales volume
Pull those ASINs
Run these through an “extensive”
Our claim to fame was that we generated 750k of keywords across 25 SKUs!!We go pretty deep 🙂
Upto 10k keywords or low as a few hundred (26c for a Broad and Phrase match)
Sometimes you find ‘sleepers’ where you are the person bidding on this keyword
We found a competitor name and we had hundreds of conversions off it
You’re looking for outliers – new searches are being created everyday
Run automatic keyword campaigns
Common mis-spellings are good too
Spanish keywords are also a pretty good route as well
My process changes all the time as the algorithm adapts and changes
Use AMS to check low/med/high keywords to target your keywords
Go for 3 keywords all around your title and use AMS to assess Low/Med/High

Strategies for Variations

In a really competitive space
Pencils is a general traffic keyword
On campaign using “pencils’ and driving traffic to all variations
We took his existing data and we segmented
Variation specific keywords (Red Pencil, Blue Pencil, 2 inch pencil) etc
Segment every variation manually and much more targeted
The general pencils keyword has huge ACOS targeting all variations
We segmented each variation by it’s attributes and bid on segmented keywords
ACOS was a lot lower, conversion and click-through took off on the variations

Best performing variations

Variation A – 15% units/session 900 units
Variation B – 6% units/session 300 units
Send general pencil keyword to the highest converting variation as it performs better
The lower one we send the ‘variation’ specific keywords as it lowers ACOS and gives better conversions
Every SKU get it’s own campaign named [SKU-Keyword type-Date]
We break out every variation so we can control the traffic to them and increase conversions

Performance

Cut keyword with CTR at <0.4% – it’s not performing and not relevant to audience If >0.4% we’ll keep it around
Impressions without clicks
1 divided by impressions and if <0.4% then cut it
When to cut a keyword
Go to Business reports and look at unit/session % to see if it’s working
Compare your listing with the sales page of competitor products

Main image

Price compared to market
Use MerchantWords and type in brand name of competitor and see if they have search volume – if they have volume then their conversion will be higher so you may bail out of that market as too difficult to break-in
Make sure your main keyword is in your title – must be visible
Amazon is great at sorting Products (like Google is at sorting information) using Enhanced Brand Content and AMS to shift into content – Amazon is moving towards listings being ‘blogs’
Product Research is always key to making a success of a product – PPC will only amplify your product both Good and Bad
Get really good at keyword research as it helps your product research by knowing the data