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Sean Smith is with us to talk about hanging out in the data and how to forecast your search term traffic.
Lead times on reporting and data attribution
- Had an Amazon update on data attribution
- Data attribution for sponsored products is updated
- Product data is updated every hour and data is no older than 4hrs (from 4hr and 48-72hr old data)
- Can make more accurate decisions sooner
- Also excludes cancelled orders – much more accurate
- Sean is VERY HAPPY they did this
Reporting Is Fresher
- The old reporting contained 7day, 14day and 30day order product sales
- Now they only report 7 day
- It’s a 7day attribution window that we only have access to
Campaign Suggest Tool
- Campaign suggest tool is not here yet
- A tool that will comb through your inventory report and provide sponsored products campaign recommendations
- And then import them directly into your campaign manager
- Amazon Sellers get alerts on their inventory, and Amazon will ask if you want to advertise your excess Amazon inventory.
- How this will work will be interesting
- Sean does not recommend using sponsored products ads for really poor performing products
- Integrating inventory with sponsored products side makes sense
Search Terms report for Forecasting
- Pull the search term report and use the data unit as TOTAL not Daily, this is how to forecast your search term traffic
- How many impressions / clicks / sales am I going to get for a search term?
- This is a good way to forecast it
- Look at Column A (Start Date) and B (End Date) Column H is your customer search term
- So you can look at how many impressions and clicks you got between these dates
- Gives you a forecast of daily stats to see the average
- Also look at your cost per click – divide impressions or clicks by that timeframe so you can bid competitively for that search term
- This enables you to forecast the starting bid for your PPC campaign
- Sean is going to test this out
Confusion
- People bring stock in from China, get the listing great, fab photos, inspections done
- But the PPC budget was mis-calculated and they run out of budget before they get to organic sales this is not how to forecast your search term traffic
Most Effectively use your PPC Budget
- Run a conservative PPC approach until you get reviews – from 0 to 1 review it’s a false negative as if it performs badly you can’t really know as you don’t have reviews
- You SHOULD HAVE a BUDGET! Important to put it together and plan
- Put together your hypothesis, it may be way off but you test it and adjust it
- Make sure you’re in a good relevant category
- Super-optimized listing – otherwise don’t bother!
- Use auto-campaigns because they are not broad match but more like ‘amazon match’ as takes in your listing content and category data
- To most effectively use the PPC budget, you need to pull those long tails in
- Do more long tail research and have a larger keyword dataset
- Keep seeking out new those long tail keywords
Predictability
- How to forecast your search term traffic predictably come in stages Low, Med, High bids
- People dumping keywords into a campaign and setting them to merchant fulfilled and checking the suggested bid to know what to budget for from this data
- Get a view on forecasted cost per bid
- If it’s not showing a value then probably a keyword to avoid
- Look at the bid pricing against your item sell price and margin
Avg PPC Conversion
- For a product selling for $20-40 look at avg PPC conversion rate of 9%-15%
- Sean goes for 8% and cut twice a week on this
- Also depends on the cost per click as well as to whether it stays or goes
Bid-plus
- Sean did a controlled study on this and didn’t see much improvement
- It’s the giving over control that is different
- Amazon has an objective to grow their platform
- Sean isn’t really using Bid Plus
- Sean asks if there’s a strong use case for this as a feature as he’s not using it for anything currently
- Danny has used it as a bid ceiling
