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Join us and the deadly duo of Taylor Benterud and Sean Smith for an Amazon PPC, AMS & AAP Round Table session covering the latest on PPC and future predictions.
Sean – PPC
- Accounts that didn’t really see the effect of holiday, no increase in sales and no decrease in conversion rate.
- Some highly seasonal accounts saw conversion rates drop by a third
- Had a 12% PPC down to 4% during the holidays, image what this did to ACoS
- Challenging to troubleshoot and work out how much do you cut and monitor it frequently
- Sean uses PPCscope
- Look at graph – PPC Sales and ACoS – when the lines cross you need to mark that date and start looking at it
- 22nd Dec Sean saw the trend hit – mark your dates so you can tackle it year on year
Taylor – AMS
- New Keyword performance support – hover over advertising and you can see Keyword Reports
- Brand gated to get into AMS – that’s the barrier now
- It’s good as a barrier to entry to headline ads and product display ads – less people using and Avg Cost Per Click will stay lower
- Annual cost per click has gone up a lot on certain keywords
- Avg Cost per click has doubled on certain keywords
- Now in Seller Central so being used by more people and is more relevant
- Becoming less effective, so you need to be more of a ninja in figuring it out
- Seasonal AMS trends – Dec 22nd was a key date where everyone was dipping
- Next year we will cut on 22nd Dec as it could save upto $3k on some big accounts
Testing – Amazon PPC, AMS & AAP Round Table
- Make sure you are testing every interest possible on your product display ads campaign
- For each product setup ‘target by related category’ and another for ‘target by interest’
- Setup these two campaigns for each of your product
- Test in each campaign and load it up
- Clients did $15k in sales with an ACoS of 12% – pretty much auto campaigns that are crushing it
Bid Prices
- Never start ads over a $1 – never do an ‘auto bid’ checked box
- Starting bids are 37c to 77c
- Average cost per click on product ads has been pretty steady and not gone up
- Super low average cost per click
Amazon charging for ‘forgotten’ clicks
- Amazon email saying they will charge you for clicks that happened at Christmas that they hadn’t yet got around to charging Sellers
- Likely be a load of seller support tickets
- AMS not seeing this email coming through
- Taylor sees it as just a cost of sale as these clicks would have been bringing sales
- Amazon send you an email before Holidays to up your bids – but never send you an email afterwards telling yo to bring the bids down again!
Is AAP a Money pit?
- Depends on your strategy as a seller
- Going to align to more traditional ecommerce space
- Lower conversion rates than on Amazon
- Dialling in for conversions
- Adwords display network is a moneypit on Google
- Working on the targeting segments – working with Amazon to get some segments targeted and are working directly with the AAP team
- Sponsored products and headline display ads are the bottom of the funnel – they are ready to buy
- AAP is just a level up from this – it’s at the discovery stage and people aren’t ready to buy – can’t expect 25% ACoS
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) at 0.30 – some people think this is terrible but it’s a different stage in the funnel and must been seen as such
- Horses for courses on AAP v’s Display Ads, etc.
Advertising reporting
- Have a report that tells you if someone clicked on your retargeting AAP ad but didn’t purchase, but 2wks later they clicked on your headline of product ad and bought – the report will tell you they had impressions from AAP before that buy
- AAP – Amazon Advertising Platform, agencies or Amazon manage this for you
- Advertising mostly off of Amazon
- Targeting – Amazon owned entities and 3rd Parties
- It’s a CPM (Cost per impression) platform
- You build your own creatives for this or use automated ones
- Can target different segments, own a van, aged blah, interested in…
- Key is to stay super-targeted but it’s still more of a brand play
- You have ‘automated dynamic retargeting’ – it’s automated retargeting
- You need a minimum of 20k emails into a campaign to start retargeting and create a lookalike audience
Using them all Mix it up
- We have to mix up the AMS, AAP, PPC to ensure you have mixed traffic coming through to your listing
Predictions for the year – Amazon PPC, AMS & AAP Round Table
- Sean:
- More PPC software and robust feature set from these services – people building their own tools
- PPC avg cost per click will go up
- Platform is going to mature and become more difficult – incentivised reviews, etc. More specialised products
- More increase in products that are more specialised – you can’t sell stuff you used to be able to sell
Taylor:
- People are getting smarter
- Software is getting better
- Costs are going up
- It’s not the strongest that will survive but the most adaptable that will survive
- Be always learning
- In AMS is that product display ads will be available on Seller Central
- Always be testing or you will fall behind
Last points
- Built ability to do day-parting for Amazon campaigns (pausing and unpausing during certain timeframes)
- Also reducing bids around low sales times and increasing during high sales times
- Amazon doesn’t have this – we are testing it
- Ability to download suggested bids – we have a BETA of this currently and are testing it
- Use a UK theme in your images, colours and flag in the background – made a leap in conversion rate from 10% to 18%
- Optimise your listing to be better for higher unit / session percentages
