Setting Up Your Initial Campaigns For Success
As Amazon continues to grow their advertising platform, it can become confusing on how best to utilize each tool and campaign type. Whether you have a new listing or are trying to improve an existing one, Amazon advertising is an effective measure to bring traffic to your product to drive additional sales. After you have identified your keyword markets, optimized your listing content, and achieved retail-readiness with your product, it is time to put all of the work in the research phase of your ad campaigns to the test. A smart seller with a well thought out advertising campaign structure can start capturing sales efficiently from the get-go. Accruing a history of efficient sales early will benefit your ad delivery in the future. A campaign strategy that follows a logical, hierarchical structure is critical to deliver on your advertising goals. Follow this basic campaign structure to start building efficient sales history in your ad campaigns today.
Auto Campaign
First, Amazon and PPC experts alike recommend you set up an Automatic campaign to start getting your ads to deliver and building cheap sales. In an Auto Campaign, Amazon will “automatically” match your ad with keywords and products that are similar to your product based on shopper searches related to your product information (Title, category, etc.)
Using this campaign type will allow your ad to be shown in related search term results or on the detail pages of products. As of November 2018, the four different target types can be seen in your Auto campaign’s Ad Groups’ Targeting:
- Close match: “show your ad to shoppers who use search terms closely related to your products.”
- Loose match: “show your ad to shoppers who use search terms loosely related to your products.”
- Substitutes: “show your ad to shoppers who view the detail pages of products similar to yours.”
- Complements: “show your ad to shoppers who view the detail pages of products that complement your product.”
Amazon will start to deliver for one or two of these, but bids can be assigned to each tactic to help find out which category best meets your objectives.
Since Amazon is choosing the terms and detail pages that display your product’s ad, not only can it be used to help you build sales history cheaply and efficiently, but can also help identify search terms to expand the keyword set that you will want to target in other advertising campaigns. Likewise, you can look at search terms that deliver and spend without driving sales. Finally, because Amazon can choose to deliver Auto campaigns in a variety of places, they can deliver a lot of impressions quickly.
By looking at the Search Term Report under the Advertising Reports tab, you can see exactly which customer search terms drove clicks for your product. Once you Identify a search term that has converted into sales at or below your profitability thresholds, you can target these converting terms in your other advertising campaigns to focus and efficiently scale your spending. Conversely, keywords that get a significant amount of traffic and don’t convert should be considered as negatives. By adding these non-converting search terms as negative keywords to your auto campaigns you can divert traffic away from inefficient keywords and funnel more of your daily budget to keywords that drive sales.
Product Targeting
Another way to start building efficient sales history early is with Product Targeting campaigns. Product targeting places your ad on other product detail, add-to-cart, check out, order confirmation, and even search result pages.
For targeting, you can choose specific products, categories, brands, or other product features to target with your advertising. Giving you the ability to expand the amount of traffic brought through your advertising campaigns while remaining narrow in targeting. By selecting individual ASINs as your targets, your product ad will only deliver on the detail pages of those products. While it can be time consuming, it’s worth going through potential targets and looking at the product and offering and selecting ASINs where your product is the same or better in one way or another. It is also worth considering that higher volume ASINs have the most traffic, but also have competitive bids.
A good place to start looking for which products to target would be in one of our newest updates to Listing Analyzer. Viral Launch has released a Competing and Complementary Products report to each analysis. Using the content of your listing alongside sophisticated machine learning, our software will deliver a list of suggested products for you to capture in your Product Targeting campaigns. The competing and complementary products feature includes the ability to:
- Discover complementary products frequently purchased together
- Identify competitor products in your keyword markets
- Sort and filter by products with high revenue and sales to maximize exposure
This new feature makes it quick and easy to get started with product targeting, saving you time by cutting down on manual research so you can make decisions quickly. Try Listing Analyzer for free to see for yourself.
Discovery Campaign
In another post, we talked about the importance of Keyword Research. During this critical phase of product development, you will identify which keyword markets best fit your product. Entering your main keyword into Keyword Research will return a list of associated search terms alongside metrics such as search volume, relevancy, etc. Run a search in Market Intelligence or on Amazon itself and look at the product results for each search term. How does your product match up against the competitors in each market? Be looking at metrics like price point, average review count, average review rating, sales copy, photo quality, shipping method (FBM or FBA), packaging and price by value. To understand how you should be analyzing each keyword market check out this webinar where we dive deep into the best ways to evaluate keywords. The goal is to have identified 10-15 keywords in your research that have a blend of high search volume to drive sales as well as high opportunity.
You want to focus on keyword markets that you have the best potential to convert traffic, and that have enough volume to warrant dedicated focus. Keywords with high opportunity scores typically have fewer advertisers bidding on them. This may allow you compete in cheaper keyword auctions than other higher volume keywords in the market.
Now that you have identified a narrowed keyword set to target in your advertising in the research phase, you need to put your research to the test. These keywords will be referred to as “Discovery Keywords.” Create a new campaign and put your Discovery Keywords into individual ad groups for Phrase and Broad match types. The goal is to run traffic through your keyword set and test whether or not the traffic through these keyword markets will drive sales volume. The structure of a Discovery campaign allows sellers to have a narrowly identified keyword set through keyword research, but have the slightly expanded audience of Broad and Phrase match types to test more search terms in delivery. Using this structure will quickly identify which keyword markets can be profitable and have the ability to increase sales volume. If the total daily budget of your Discovery campaign is expended regularly, this campaign can easily be given more budget to continue to drive increased sales volume through spending and converting search terms. Since this campaign is utilizing both broad and phrase match types, check your Search Term Reports regularly to identify any unique customer search terms that should be broken out on their own or inefficient ones that should be added as negatives. This can greatly increase campaign efficiency.
If a single keyword in the Discovery campaign drives a large percentage of sales or takes up a large percentage of daily spend, consider breaking out this keyword into its own individual campaign. Give this new single keyword campaign its own budget and scale it separately from the Discovery campaign. Removing the keyword will let the budget be directed to the other keywords in the campaign which were previously not accruing any daily spend.
Exact Match campaigns can be a way to scale up a high performing keyword, but unless you are very certain you know what keyword will work for your product, they are not typically part of an initial campaign setup. Similarly, Sponsored Brands (Formerly known as Headline Search Ads) can be a efficient way to generate traffic to your brand by featuring multiple products, but should generally be rolled out as part of a larger strategy after you know your keyword markets well.
Next Steps/Conclusion
Amazon Advertising allows sellers to control what traffic is brought to their product listings and increase their sales. Following a well-organized campaign structure will help you identify the most valuable keywords and attach a record of efficient sales to your product. This step in the overall lifetime strategy of your product is critical before moving to the next phase of growing and scaling your business. Start seeing the results to take your Amazon business to the next level. Try a 14-day free trial with our Pro Plus Ads plan today!
