Taking The Emotion Out Of PPC and Listing Optimisation

Richard Morgan
March 11, 2019

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Liran joins us to educate on ppc and listing optimisation drawing attention to our biases and emotional attachment to keywords and PPC campaigns often to the detriment of revenue and profit. Be objective and let the market and data guide your decision making.

Looking at listings for PPC and Listing optimisation
Somewhat emotionally tied to a product are we?
Wanted the product to be premium product with premium packaging and pricing
Sometimes you have to take a step back to move forwards
Didn’t want to give a 20% discount coupon for emotional reasons rather than objective reasons
Don’t be tied to emotions around prices

Can you Give Up that Main Search Term?

Images are not upto scratch
PPC has to go through a discovery phase
Hang onto search terms and ‘willing’ them to work
If the data is not there then you should get rid of it
Do you give up that main search term that you’ve spent a lot on PPC on?
You have to keep spending money on PPC to get to a rank level
You’re burning through PPC sales and eating some of your organic sales
You might back off spending on that search term nad settle for position 8 and have more organic sales making you more profit on the organic sales
Some people are scared of stopping spending on the keyword and don’t find out if they can make more on a lower position with less PPC spend
You can test this and see if it works for you taking the fear out of it

Not working today but could do tomorrow

A keyword may not work for you today but come back and test it when you have 10-20 reviews on your product and it might work differently
Look at things objectively and don’t take emotional decisions
You need to look at your pricing and listing as if it’s not yours

Quick Wins – relevant search term

Search term report – how many clicks to conversion – a great indicator as to whether you should spend money
Go and look at hte search results – take that search term and search it for yourself
Does your product fit in this search
Water bottle – can be 99c to $3 or even $16.99
Although it’s a water bottle is this the right term for you?
You may not got after ‘water bottle’ as a search term but everyone else is after it too
But really ‘infusion bottle’ might be a better search term to go for as it’s more relevant and a better relationship to the price you’re selling at
Look at the price on the page of searches – if they’re all at $3 and you’re selling at $16 then re-think it

Test with PPC

Test your listing for conversions first before starting giveaways or driving traffic
If you high-bid the PPC to get to top placement and find you’re NOT converting then you definitely won’t convert on organic traffic
Test which keywords are the ones that convert – let the market decide which keywords are relevant for your product
Use the keywords that convert for you and the data tells you it works and converts
Use the market to tell you what to go after

Don’t just focus on ACoS

Sales versus PPC spend
Orders per month via PPC
Measure these over time to see them go up or down over time
Organic to PPC ratio a good indicator
Average spend per PPC sale (bring it down over time)
Average impressions to PPC conversion
Measuring these overtime lets you know if you’re dialing in on the marketing and conversions

Measure your Keyword Rankings

For PPC and Listing Optimisation
Total Sales – PPC and Organic
Track your keyword rankings for your most important keywords
If your ACoS is high at 50% but you see your rankings keep trending higher then you might keep that ACoS level
If you’re not moving up rank then you might want to pull back on your bids

Measure Sponsored Ad Position

Measure your sponsored ads ranking
Viral Launch just brought this out
Charting where you are with your Sponsored Ad positions and overlay your BSR on this
Ad position is a key metric
Casey at Viral Launch did a post on ad position hack and product pages and bid multiplier
Need to be ‘cuter’ now with what you do – especially if you’ve got an account with 500 x SKUs
Sellers haven’t really been monitoring this
You performance in ad position 1 will be different to ad position 4
Keeping on top of ad and organic ranking is key

Use the 80/20 Rule

Consistently trying to get ACoS from 120% regularly down to 30% is not likely to happen
Focus on the campaigns that are making money
When you’re way over breakeven and lots of campaigns running you can’t see the wood for the trees
Pare it back and focus to increase performance and keep track of everything
Use 80/20 to not waste your time
Stop flogging a dead horse
Go back to your listings
Pinpoint the things in your account you should be going after more aggressively and things you should drop
Pricing, keyword strategy
Go back and look as though it’s not your listing
Take an outside look and re-analyse what you’re doing

Get other Opinions on PPC and Listing Optimisation

Take a few friends that you’ve not saturated with your Amazon talk
Send this new group a set of listings and ask them what they don’t like about hte listings
You’re interested in what they don’t like
These are the critical elements nad holes in your listing that will help
Pickfu service can help you get judgements on different images or listings
Use these survey type websites to get really fast feedback
You can target ‘Amazon Prime’ customers to get specific feedback

Estimation Tools

Looked upon as the Bible
One month you might get a set of numbers from the estimation tool
Your results might be very different to the estimate the tool gives you
You might turn up on page one but find very different results
What changes to the product have you made to differentiate your product
Difficult to predict month one what you’re product will do and how many sales will you take from the competition?
You need enough search volume in there to get the data

Keywords driving sales

Macro versus micro conversion
After discovery you end up with a handful of keywords that drive all your sales
50k searches on Keyword 1, 5k on Keyword 2 and 2k on Keyword 3
Unless you nail Keyword 1 then you’ll get nothing on Keyword 2 and 3
You’ll have blown it in terms of a launch
If you go after too small a market then there’s nothing to go after as not enough sales in there
THink of relevance – if Plan A does not work what is your Plan B for this product?