How To Optimize Amazon PPC Campaigns Properly (Save $1,000’s!)

Daniel Audunsson

There’s a lot of complexity and confusion surrounding Amazon PPC.

Most sellers focus mostly on what campaigns to launch...

But the area I notice them missing out on is campaign optimization.

In other words, what to do once a campaign is up and running?

Most sellers do an occasional check-in to optimize performance.

But the environment is never static and optimal PPC performance depends on frequent and consistent optimization…

And it’s one thing to manage all this work for a handful of products -- it’s another thing entirely to manage it for 10+ SKU’s.

The complexity and amount of data points will make your head spin… and without the right kind of system it’s actually impossible to manage properly.

In this video I break campaign optimization down into the simplest possible terms, to get you totally clear on the key things that matter.

This is the first step. And you can manage these key things quite easily if you’re just starting out with a couple of SKU’s.

But if you’re an established seller with a larger business, I also discuss the complexity factor that comes with scale…

...and what it takes to do campaign management properly at scale, so you can get fantastic results across all SKU’s -- even with 10,000+ data points to manage.

This information is literally saving many of my client’s $1,000´s in wasted ad spend each month (which software and agencies weren’t able to remove) -- and it can do the same for you too.

HERE’S WHAT WE COVER:

  • How to analyze your products and set targets to ensure campaigns are optimized for the greater good on Amazon (meaning total profit from paid + organic sales)
  • What to do when a keyword / ASIN is not generating any sales?
  • What to do when a keyword / ASIN is generating sales at a high ACoS?
  • Why turning campaign optimization into a consistent weekly workflow is more important than anything else
  • Why you must have the right type of system to optimize PPC at scale and how to acquire it

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO:

[+] APEX SELLER! We're open for enrollment! Schedule a FREE 45-minute Discovery Call to see if we're a good fit (spots are limited)

Check out the video and then join the conversation by sharing what you think in the comments below?

Wishing you success!

Daniel Audunsson & the team at IntoProfits.com

(00:00):
Hey, this is Daniel Audunsson here. And in this video, I'm going to talk about Amazon PPC campaign optimization. And I'm really going to explain how to optimize PPC campaigns properly in very simple, basic terms. I'm going to make it as simple for you as possible. And you know, what I'm about to share with you now is something that has worked wonders for many of my clients when it comes to their PPC on Amazon. So this stuff has really proven to work and it doesn't have to be too complicated. Uh, but there's some key things that are going to mention that are actually really important, which, you know, 95, 99% of sellers don't actually do, what's makes a huge difference. So I'm excited to share these things with you and let's just dive right in. So basically, you know, here are the first like, like the steps, you know, you have to take, so I'm going to explain this, you know, part here at optimized campaigns part, but before I do that, I have to mention that before you go in and you optimize any campaign, so let's say you've launched, you know, some campaigns, uh, before you go and optimize them, you have to first look at the whole, right, because what a lot of sellers do is they actually just comment and optimize the campaigns to drive down their ACOS.
(01:21):
And they don't really have a specific target in mind or a specific ACOS that they want to be at. And so it's just about driving down the costs pretty much, but you can really be harming your results on Amazon. If you do that without really putting in a proper thought and planning in advance and really seeing, you know, what is the optimal ACOS, because you're going to have a low ACOS and the ads that you have are profitable, but you're really missing out on sales potential on the site. If you are just focused on the low ACOS, because this means you're not going to be competing on a lot of keywords. A lot of product are getting in a lot of things that you have at your disposal to gain market share. It's means that overall your product is going to less sales.
(02:11):
And it's also going to, um, reduce your chance of ranking organically and grabbing organic sales. So that's why, you know, sometimes a higher rate cause it's actually a good thing. Uh, it depends. It's all about finding the sweet spot with your ACOS. And so what you're looking at really to produce, you know, the, basically the most profit in your business is this metric here, the ACOTs, which is considering the whole and really, you know, that's how you, um, find the ideal spot or the ideal balance with your paid advertising and your organic advertising basically on the site, uh, is through this metric, not the ACOS is the ACOTs. And then also you have to have a TACOS or tacos defined before you go and optimize your campaigns, because that's what you're going to use to make decisions when it comes to optimizing your campaigns.
(03:12):
So these two things you have to figure out first, and this is based on the whole situation with your product or your product, you know, to make the most money on the site, then optimize the whole, right? So I'm not going to explain that in this video, because I did explain how to do this in a previous video a couple of weeks ago. So at the end of this video, I'm going to actually make to that video. So after you watch this, you can go on what's that, so now you're going to get step two. But then in that video, if you haven't seen it already, you're going to get this part, how to do this. So with that being said, let's go into step two. So once you've done this first step, you want to now start optimizing campaigns. And in this video, I'm going to focus on manual campaigns, uh, just because, you know, there's an entire different approach when it comes to auto campaigns and you know, all kinds of different things you can do on Amazon nowadays, but to keep it simple, I'll focus on manual campaigns.
(04:08):
It's are the most basic fundamental, you know, most important campaigns on Amazon with PPC and specifically sponsored products, which make up the bulk of your sales potential when it comes to paid advertising on Amazon. So this is like 80% of what matters, 70%, something like that. So I'm going to break that down for you and just explain again, in the simplest possible terms, how to optimize campaigns on Amazon. Uh, of course there's a lot more to it than this. There's many other things as well, but this is, you know, still like the most important. So basically there's like two main situations that you're going to have with campaigns that you want to optimize for anyone to watch out for. And the first situation is having no sales. So now we're really looking at again, the manual campaign and you have the ability to control and monitor each individual targeting option, right?
(05:11):
So it's individual keyword product are getting different things like that. So let's say you're running ads on a certain keyword and it doesn't produce any sales. Well, that's only, you want to detect as early as possible. And as early as makes sense, you know, as soon as you can make a decision on it, this keyword isn't producing sales or this ASIN, you're targeting, isn't producing sales. You want to detect that as soon as the time is, right? So as soon as you have enough data to make a decision, you want to detect that. And you want to, uh, take an action on that because if you don't, it's going to continue to run this keyword, not producing any sales and just wasting money, right? So that's the first situation you want to out for. So let's say, you know, how do you actually detect this?
(06:02):
Well, let's say you've got a keyword. You know, you're running ads on it and you've got, let's say 10 clicks on this keyword, right? And you've got 10 clicks, but so far you have had several orders from this keyword. And you can obviously see this in campaign manager or through your, uh, sort of certain reports and things like that. But basically you run an ad on the keyword, 10 clicks, no orders. And obviously this means you're going to have a 0% ACOS as well, because you haven't made any sales. Now, at this point, when you reached about 10 clicks or more, you can pretty confidently say that this is going to lose money because in most cases, you know, if you can't generate a sale, it's a one sale in 10 clicks with a product on Amazon. It's not going to be a, it's like the cost of running an ad on that.
(06:57):
Keyword is going to be too high for this product, right? It's going to lose money for you. Uh, sometimes it's less. Sometimes you have to produce a sale in six clicks or less, you know, eight clicks. It depends a little bit on the product. So you want to factor in, again, you're looking at the hole and you're factoring in these things before you're gone run ads. So for this specific product, you understand, you know, roughly like how many clicks should we put the threshold at? Is it 12? Is it eight? Is it six? You know, depends on the product and the cost per clicks. You're having things compared to the price, the profit margin, you know, how much, how many clicks you can basically pay for. And obviously depends on the cost per click on the keyword and everything like that. But to make it really simple, essentially, if you have no sales after 10 clicks on a keyword, it probably means that this one is not going to work for you.
(07:46):
So at that point, you basically just want to kill it. You know, you just want to call this particular keyword or racing that you're targeting because it's, it's not gonna do anything for you. Like it's going to just, you're going to lose money on it. So you don't want to keep running it and get a 20 clicks, 30 clicks, 40 clicks, keep it on it's you know, most sellers will do, and this is going to just drive costs way up. And, um, that's not an optimized campaign, right? So this is the first thing you want to look out for. Look at the first situation is actually no sales coming from a keyword or a product that's being target targeted. The second situation is really, um, you know, you're making some sales through the keyword, but the cost is too high. So it's costing you basically too much money, uh, relative to your target.
(08:41):
Now, before you can make this determination, you must know what your target equals is actually at, right? Which you can only understand properly if you know what the ACOS should be in. You understand the whole situation with your product, because some products you want to run an eCourse of 50%. So you want to run an ACOS of 10%, depends on a couple of variables that you want to, you know, spec out before you make these decisions, right? So, uh, if you just blindly say that anything about 10% ACOS is high, you know, then, um, you're certainly not going to be producing the best results possible with your product on Amazon, in terms of sales. So high ACOS let's illustrate. So let's say you also had 10 clicks on a keyword, right? And, um, you've had one order. So instead of zero orders, you had one order on this, um, on this keyword, but let's say this means you're running at a
(09:45):
50% ACOS, right? So, um, that's usually pretty high. Uh, let's say your target ACOS is actually at like 30% for this SKU, this product. So now a 50% equals is above the target ACOS. So in this case, you know, with, uh, um, a course on the keyword being higher than the target ad cost, you need to take some action as well. Cause if you keep running it, you know, it's above your target ACOS this means it's not the ideal position with this keyword because it's a above the target ACOS, you have defined, you know, you figured out like that's the sweet spot or where you want to be at right now with the product. So in this case, you don't want to just kill it. You don't want to call it so to speak because it is producing sales, right? You've had a sale, but the equals is too high.
(10:37):
And you could have obviously like 50 clicks and five sales, but the orders, you know, the ecosystem is still too high, right? Um, but basically what you want to do in this case is you want to lower the bit, because in this case you want the ACOS to come down to 30% or lower, assuming that targeted cause is 30%. And this example. So instead of killing it, culling it completely, you want to actually reduce the bit and you can do the math on it in terms of, if you're at 50% of the target, ACOS of 30%, you know, how much would you reduce the bid to probably hit a 30% ACOS. Now, sometimes this means you're not going to get any more clicks. It's going to kill a keyword, but that's what you've got to do in that case. You don't want to be running at a 50%, ACOS if your target is like 30%, but if you lower the bids, most likely you might get fewer clicks, but you'll still get some and you're going to get some sales and then at a lower ACOS and are at the target 30% or lower, most likely, right? So these are the two like big, uh, situation. And you're looking out for when it comes to optimizing campaigns. Again, this is 70, 80% of it, uh, manual campaigns, you know, just detecting this. And if you just detect this properly and take the right action, which said, just laid out for you. This will, you know, this alone is going to put your head off more sellers because they don't have, they don't do this now. Um, it's one thing to do this on like 10 keywords, right? Pretty easy to do that. But it's another thing to do this on, uh, hundreds of keywords, thousands of keywords across a lot of SKUs, right?
(12:17):
So now really the main thing is not so much, you know, this concept because it's fairly simple. It's more the system that you have to actually execute on this. And that brings us into our weekly workflow, basically. So every single week you want to be doing this. You want to be monitoring this. You want to be detecting these situations and taking the appropriate action. And if you have a good system to just run this every single week, you can make sure you catch everything, that's bleeding money, and there's going to be, you know, there's, there's more things than this. Like there's a couple of different other situations you're looking out for as well and different things you're taking action on. But for the sake of simplicity, you know, this is 70, 80% of what matters. So there's a few more things you do as well.
(13:02):
But basically the absolute key here, and this is what most sellers just don't have is an actually solid process and a good system to be able to run this as a weekly workflow that takes, you know, an hour, even for a ton of keywords and a ton of SKUs, right? So it's about the system. So let me illustrate a little bit, you know, the complexity and you know, this, why you can't do this, uh, properly through, let's say campaign manager manually at scale. That's really the issue we're going to have at scale is how to execute this for so many different data points all the time, every single week, and you don't miss anything. So let me just illustrate like the complexity that you're going to have as you scale up and you would know this, if you're already, you know, a sizable business. So let's say you've got like, uh, you know, 10, um, like, like let's say you've got, um, 10 different campaign types.
(14:00):
So what we do is we have a couple of different types of campaigns, like about 10, and then we launched that on any, every SKU, but we will also launch each campaign many times because each time we, uh, once the campaign, we run the process, we're doing keyword research, we're do and things like that, uh, as we're going through it and we're finding new opportunities to, to, to, to expand our advertising, to grab more, more markets here, every time we launch, you know, the same campaign type on a product. So we will launch each campaign, at least let's say, for example, say like 10 times for each products or 10 campaign types for 10, like 10 times on one product, at least, uh, over time. Right? So this means you're going to have basically a hundred different campaigns running for a one SKU. Now how many different targets are?
(14:58):
No, I'm just talking manual comparison. There's other campaign types and different things as well, but not strictly talking manual campaigns. So let's say you've got, um, you know, let's say you've got a hundred campaigns for the SKU. Now how many targets do you have in a campaign on average? And I'm just going to give you just an example, right? It could be more, it could be less, uh, probably will be actually more, but I'm going to make it simple here. So, uh, in the manual campaigns for each one, let's say on average, you've got 10 again, 10 keywords or, or products that you're targeting. And again, you've got a hundred different campaigns now running each with about 10 different keywords or products being targeted, which brings us to
(15:51):
Thousands, right? A thousand data points now for the product like a thousand keywords or products being targeted, it sounds like a lot, but this is going to happen. If you run proper systems and processes on a SKU consistently over time, like you're going to get to something like this, like a thousand keywords or ACEs being targeted, at least if it's a high volume product and obviously some products have less lower volume. But if it's a high volume product with a lot of different options, you know, you can optimize to this point with a successful product. That's doing well, that's converting well. So let's say you've got that. Um, so now you've got, you know, a thousand targets. Now, how many SKUs do you have? Uh, you know, you could have, if you're a sizable business, easily 10 SKUs, right? 10 different products. So if you've got 10 products now, and you've got a thousand different, uh, targets, this brings the complexity level to like 10,000 in your business.
(16:54):
So you've got 10,000, um, basically keywords and Asians that you're running and you have to be monitoring this every single week on 10,000 different data points. So this is how it gets really complex. And just having the ability to do this at scale is huge. You know, that's something more sellers that just don't have the ability to do them, but it's absolutely key if you want everything to be running a fully optimized all your campaigns, uh, at all times. And again, there's a couple more things than what I've laid out here, but these are the main two. And just being able to do this, these two processes essentially on 10,000 data points is not a given, right. You cannot do that. Let's say manually through a campaign manager. So that's really it. I hope this has been insightful. And, uh, it's, you know, it's giving you some clarity on how to optimize PPC campaigns.
(17:49):
It's pretty simple actually, but the key is really in the process, in the consistency, you know, with that, you're applying the processes. So the weekly workflow never letting go, you know, cause things will change and ebb and flow and you have to be able to catch these things or you're going to waste money over time. Right. And it's very easy when you're paying money, like every day inside and out, uh, to lose money. If you're not careful, like it's very easy to just throw money on the fire, so to speak. So it has to be properly managed and optimized. And if now the final thing is the system, right? So if you don't have a system to do this, that's good. Then what you can do is you can go and you can book a call with me or someone on my team, and we can have a conversation about implementing this into your business.
(18:41):
So we have great systems for PPC and you know, for doing this part for now, you know, actually taking this into your SEO, your on page optimization for rank and different things, it's all connected. Uh, but the weekly workflow for campaign management is important. And so that's a part of the system. So if you're lacking, you know, this system right now to actually run these types of things in your business and really optimize, for example, PVC campaigns, then you can go ahead and you can click a link below this video and you can book a call with me or someone on my team and we can, you know, find out if we can help you with this. And if it makes sense for you to actually potentially get our systems and install them into your business, uh, it has to be a good fit for, for both of us.
(19:28):
And it has to be something that will get you clear, immediate benefits, uh, for it to make sense. But if you're curious to find out more about this, then you can again, click the link below this video and book a call with me or someone on my team. And we will have a conversation with you. So that's it for the video, if you like the video or the like it here, let me know. I would appreciate it. You can comment below I'll answer any questions you have and you can share this with people that you think would benefit from this as well. And of course you can subscribe to the channel as well. If you want to be notified when I release videos like this. So that's it for this video. Thanks for watching and talk to you soon. Bye for now.