Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Master Amazon PPC: 5 Pro Tips to Maximize Sales & Profits
72 Plays17 days ago
Struggling with Amazon PPC? This episode breaks down my 5 proven strategies to help you take control of your ads.
From spending millions on my own brand, MMA Nutrition, to managing tens of millions at Trivium, I’ve learned one thing: never stop testing.
I’ve tested hundreds of PPC strategies, so you don’t have to.
Learn how to optimize your bids, budgets, and keywords and turn your PPC spend into bigger sales and profits.
Need help scaling your Amazon Business? Click here for a free audit from my team: https://hubs.la/Q0312R4P0
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Amazon Advertising Tips
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint Podcast.
00:00:06
Speaker
Amazon PPC Tips. In this episode, I'm going to cover tips that I think every single brand and every single seller on Amazon needs to know to manage their Amazon advertising effectively. Now, these are tips that I figured out over years of spending millions of dollars on my own brand, MMA Nutrition.
Why Test and Document Amazon PPC Strategies?
00:00:23
Speaker
and obviously we spend tens of millions of dollars on you know clients brands at Trivium and so I've learned a lot of stuff I've tested a lot of stuff and the number one most consistent thing with Amazon PPC is never stop testing it's always about testing different things trying different hypotheses seeing what works seeing what doesn't work you know multiple ad groups too many keywords in a campaign all that kind of stuff I'm always split testing and I'm always trying to figure out what is real and what's not real And what works for me might not work for you, right? It could work on my brand, but not on your brand. So certain things will work for supplements and they might not work for like clothing brands or whatever. So it's very important to just constantly test, only change one thing at a time and make sure that you're always documenting the data so that you can make a data-driven decision. Was this a good thing or was this not a good thing? now
00:01:06
Speaker
Let's get right into
Optimal Bidding Strategies
00:01:07
Speaker
the tips. Tip number one, starting bid. Now, a lot of people ask me, what is a good starting bid? What is a good bid to have for this keyword? Should I match the cost per click if I'm, you know, taking it from a search term report, whatever? So let me break it down. If you have no data on that keyword, what I like to do, I like to start at some level where I'm comfortable with the bid. For example, for supplements. For me, I generally, if I don't have any data on a keyword, I will ignore all of the suggested bids and all of that bullshit and I will focus on one thing. I will start with $1.
00:01:36
Speaker
Now, usually in supplements at a $1 bid for me, for MMA nutrition, I don't see that much spend. So I know at $1, I'm not going to be spending that much, but also it's fine because I'm expecting it. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to slowly inch my bids up. I'm going to go to 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4.
00:01:53
Speaker
and slowly work my way up. Now, how quickly am I doing that?
Weekly Keyword Performance Evaluation
00:01:57
Speaker
Basically, I'm looking for a certain target you know and spend a day, so something like $5 to $7 a day. Why? Because I have a $30 product or a $40 product, somewhere in between $30 and $40. Now, if I'm spending $5 a day, in two or three days on that keyword, I should have spent enough money to make a sale.
00:02:15
Speaker
If I haven't made a sale in another two or three days, I should have spent enough money ah to at least make a sale at break even. If I haven't, then that keyword needs to be turned off. So I'm giving myself a week and in a week I'm making a judgment call on a keyword. Now I can double that number, right? I can you know make it every three days. I need to make a decision on a keyword and negative it or you know keep it running. But at the end of the day, I'm keeping a pace for myself that I'm comfortable with.
00:02:39
Speaker
which is every seven days on average I'm spending about the price of my product on a certain keyword and at that point it's either performing or it's not performing. So I start with the dollar bid and I inch the bids up up until I see five dollars a day in spend. So for you that could be three dollars a day it could be seven dollars a day whatever you think is comfortable based on your pacing and then once it hits that it's either gonna spend and not make enough sales so I'm gonna lower the bids or it's gonna make sales and I might have to optimize the bids or it's going to be very profitable and I might keep pushing the bits to show up higher and convert more and more. All right. And if we do have data, so if we're taking a keyword from a search term report and launching it in its own campaign because it performed well in let's say like an auto or a broad campaign, I am going to match the cost per click
00:03:23
Speaker
but increase it by five cents just because I want to make sure that I funnel the money into that keyword that I have more control over. Now, here's the thing.
Managing Campaign Competition
00:03:31
Speaker
I will never negative a keyword that is working. So technically, yes, they might compete, but think about it. They're only going to compete a fraction of the time, right? Because this is a keyword or a search term in a broader auto campaign. It's showing up like two, three, four times a day, right? It's not showing up that much versus the exact or or phrase keyword that we're targeting in its own campaign. That's going to show up way more. So at the end of the day, the campaign that we launched, that's the one that's gonna get more of the advertising budget. It's the one that's gonna get more visibility, but the other one's gonna still stay there. And essentially, that's how I like to run bits. Now, let's talk about budgets.
Budget Setting for Campaigns
00:04:04
Speaker
I like to start with a minimum of $100 budget. A lot of people I see launching with $10 budgets, 15, 20.
00:04:10
Speaker
that does not make any sense at all guys think about it if your cost per click is 80 cents to a dollar and you put a $10 budget and you probably have multiple keywords in that campaign that means that you can only get clicked on 10 times in that day so Amazon is going to notice that you don't have enough budget to be clicked on multiple times. Right. And so what it's going to do is it's going to throttle your performance. It's going to shove you. And again, obviously, I don't work for Amazon. I don't know the algorithm, how it works. I'm just telling you observations of what's happened when I've had a big budget or a small budget. All right. So let's take a real life scenario. I'm going to launch a campaign with a single keyword and it's going to be one dollar a bit. Now, in one campaign, I'm going to have a ten dollar budget. And then in another campaign, I'm going to have a hundred dollar budget. Again, same bid and everything's the same. The only difference is the budgets. Now,
00:04:55
Speaker
Let's assume that it only spends $7 in the $10 campaign and it gets a sale. In the second one, it might spend $30, $40 or $50 and get more and more and more sales, right? And so why does this happen? Well, obviously because it has more budget.
00:05:11
Speaker
But what also happens is that Amazon sees that you don't have a lot of budget. It doesn't show you as much. When Amazon sees that you do have a lot of budget, it will show you as much as your dictates. So if you have a dollar bid and a dollar bid means that you're going to show up in the middle of page two, it's going to show you up as much as possible in the middle of page two. That's just, again, my observation. But if a dollar puts you in the middle of page two with a $10 budget, you might show up only 10% of the time instead of 100% of the time. And at the end of the day,
00:05:40
Speaker
you want to show up a hundred percent of the time in a certain position because that means that based on the position is how you're gonna perform so if middle of page two is not good enough maybe you need to go to top of page two or middle of page one or if you know middle of page two you're spending a lot not making enough money maybe go down to the bottom of page two but at the end of the day you're spending the whole time in that same position as opposed to you're spending a fraction of the time in that position and then you know the rest of it you're just not showing up and so that's why it's really important to pay attention to things like that. So what is my recommendation? Minimum $100 budget and let your bid dictate how much you spend. Don't let your budget do it. It's not like TikTok shop. It's not like Facebook where if you put $20 budget a day, it's going to spend the full $20. No, it's actually going to spend based on your bids because if your bids put you in the bottom of page four and maybe only five people show up there and one of them clicks, you're going to get one click. That's it. And you're not going to spend the whole budget. All
Keyword and Ad Group Management
00:06:35
Speaker
right.
00:06:35
Speaker
Tip number three, do not put too many keywords in a campaign. So first of all, just a ah middle bonus tip right in there. One ad group per campaign. The reason I do one ad group per campaign is because when you have multiple ad groups in a campaign, you know, you can't control the budgets, but you might have 90% of the budget go to one ad group and then 10 go to the other ad group, or you might have 50 50 or you might have 40 60. It's not in your control. And so for me, I don't want to have something that's not in my control. Like, yes, sure. You can let Amazon control it and then, you know, go with the flow with their algorithm.
00:07:05
Speaker
I like to have control. I like to know, okay, if I'm spending $100 or i'm putting $100 budget, I wanted to go into this you know ad group and then I wanted to go into these keywords. And so that was a bonus tip. But like the main tip is when you have too many keywords in a campaign or technically in an ad group, what happens is you'll notice that the top keywords generally tend to get all of the budget. And then the bottom keywords don't get any budget. And so as a result, what's the point of having those keywords in that ad group? So here's an exercise you can do. For any campaigns, you have 10, 20, 30, 40 keywords in there. Go into the ad group and then sort by spend and sort by sales, you know either or. I like to sort by sales, right? Because that's kind of the metric that matters more.
00:07:45
Speaker
and then look at the sales you know in descending order. After keyword 10 or 15, you might be getting one sale or almost no sales for those keywords. So what's the harm in pausing those keywords and then creating a new campaign and then moving only five of them in that campaign and let the full budget go to those keywords? You'll notice that, oh, I went from making three sales a month on those keywords to 15 sales a month on those keywords. And this is a very, very real thing that happens all the time. Go and audit all of your ad groups, all of your campaigns. Look at how many keywords there are in there. Anything that you have more than five or just anyways, just do it as ah as a best practices. Soar by order of sales. Anything that hasn't gotten sales or has gotten very low sales in the last 30 days. What's the point of them being in there? It's not like they're contributing that much.
00:08:29
Speaker
launch them in new campaigns and see if giving them more budget is going to result in them making more sales. At the end of the day, that's the goal, right? Making more sales. Next tip, sponsored brand and sponsored display.
Impact of Video and Brand Ads
00:08:39
Speaker
A lot of people think that in campaign manager, the data that you see for sponsored brand and sponsored display and sponsored products all add up, right? Like so, if you made $100 in sales for sponsored product, $100 for sponsored brand, $100 for sponsored display, you made $300 in total PPC sales.
00:08:55
Speaker
I'm here to tell you that I've tested that theory and it is not accurate. How did I know that? Okay, this is what happened. So I had a client that kept pushing when video first came out, sponsored video, they kept pushing. We want video, we want video, we want video. I'm like, okay, fine. I'll launch a bunch of sponsored video campaigns for you. So I launched a bunch of sponsored video campaigns and they all performed amazing, right? 8X, 10X, 12X return on that spend. And I was like, wow, very, very cool.
00:09:21
Speaker
but I looked at their total sales, their total sales had not changed. I looked at the sponsor products a results and sponsor products performance got way, way, way worse. so So they kept saying, sponsor products is bad. You need to optimize better. You're not doing your job. You're not optimizing. And I said, guys, what are you talking about?
00:09:36
Speaker
Our performance was amazing. I launched a sponsor video and then all of a sudden the performance changed. Do you really think that all of a sudden my team or or, you know, we're not doing a good job with sponsor products. You think that's what changed, right? You don't think like sponsor video has anything to do with it. No, no. Look at the campaign manager. Sponsor video is doing amazing. So after like two or three weeks of list, I'm like, listen, yeah I'm the expert. You hired me to do a job. So shut up. I don't care about your opinion anymore.
00:10:00
Speaker
I shut down sponsored video. We saved $300 a day in ad spend and their total sales were unaffected. And their sponsor products all went back to having amazing ROASs. So that kind of tells me that sometimes you could have a sponsored product and a sponsored video, sponsored brand video campaign.
00:10:17
Speaker
And someone will click on the sponsor product, and then they will see the sponsor video campaign. And the sponsored video might get the benefit for the sale, right? It might show the ROAS. Sponsor product wouldn't get it because maybe it's like a last touch or last view attribution, some sort of thing like that. But at the end of the day, you did not result in additional unique sessions. So for everyone that gets a hard on for sponsor brand and sponsor display, be very, very, very careful.
00:10:41
Speaker
The way to measure it is launch some sponsored brand campaigns, look at the increase in ad spend and look at the variation in your total revenue. Total revenue, not ads revenue, total revenue. Because that's the true measure, right? It's like, okay, I'm launching a billboard ad. How much am I spending on it? I'm spending 10 grand a month. Okay, cool. How much did my business do last three months on average? 30K. Now how much is it doing? 40K. Okay, cool. I spent 10 grand and I made 10 grand more. That's a one X ROAS. That's how you measure anything that's not sponsored products. and technically that's how you even measure sponsored products is you start off with nothing right and then you launch sponsored product campaigns and all of a sudden you have you know whatever 20k a month in pbc sales and then 40k a month total and you're like yeah i have 20k pbc and 20k organic
00:11:26
Speaker
bro, you don't have 20K organic. Everything's coming from BBC. Well, how did the organic just all of a sudden, you know, be about, right? It came on its own. No, it's probably just not being attributed. That's what people, you know, they don't understand is don't think that you're getting organic sales. It does not exist, right? and You're not going to make sale. Turn off all your PPC and you'll see. Okay. Turn off all your PPC. And if all of your organic stays forever, great. That's your organic.
00:11:51
Speaker
99% of the time you turn off your PPC, three or four months, you lose all your organic too. And you're like, oh, I wonder why that happened. Well, it's because PPC affects organic. Anyways, the next tip, right?
Click-Through Rates and Optimization
00:12:02
Speaker
Low click-through rate keywords. You need to optimize those aggressively. Here's what Amazon, I feel, thinks about low click-through rate. When it sees that you have low click-through rate, it thinks that this is a bad customer experience. A lot of people are seeing you, they don't want to click on you. Now, there is an exception to this rule, in my opinion. If you're driving external traffic, I don't think you have to worry about click-through rate because Amazon's like, yo, I don't care what he what his click-through rate is on external traffic. He's bringing people into the platform. So, thank you. you know we're going We're going to rank you higher organically. Thank you for doing that. Please keep doing that. You know what I mean?
00:12:36
Speaker
but If you're on Amazon and you're running PPC, sponsor product campaigns, right? And your click rate is low, Amazon is seeing, okay, this person is getting seen a lot, but no one wants to click on them. They must not think that they're relevant or they must not think that this is a good product. So rank them lower. And they end up dropping your rank and increasing your cost per click because it's almost like a penalty for not giving the customer a good experience.
00:13:02
Speaker
and vice versa. If you have a higher click-through rate, what you're going to notice is your cost per click goes down and all of your ranking starts going up, right? you Even your organic rank because Amazon thinks that you have a really good customer experience. So make sure that you aggressively optimize those low click-through rate keywords. And then go listen to my episode on listing optimization and all the things you can do to improve your click through it so as a result increase organic rank and lower your
Handling Negative Keywords
00:13:24
Speaker
cost per click. Alright and the final tip is aggressive negatives. A lot of people have this criteria of like okay 1 to 20% echos that's what I'm going to keep. Anything above 20% echos I'm going to add as a negative.
00:13:35
Speaker
Again, I just want to remind you that attribution is not accurate on Amazon. So a lot of the times, and and again, like, you know, I love you Amazon, but this is just what I'm noticing, right? Attribution is just, it's not fully correct. And it's fine. Like you don't understand how complex of an operation that is. Like I would dare anyone to even try and attempt to create accurate attribution you have people who are shopping on their phones and then buying on their desktops and then checking out on their iPads and then it's just it's very complicated right so don't blame Amazon for any of this just realize that it's a fact of nature that attribution is not going to be 100% accurate so all you have to do
00:14:13
Speaker
is you know pretty simply when you're optimizing start with a much higher criteria so instead of a 20 percent make it 50 60 70 percent start high right optimize at 70 percent echoes anything above 70 add as a negative anything under 70 leave it if you feel like you're still not that profitable go down to 60%, go down to 50%, do it slowly, and make sure that that total revenue, as much as possible, is protected. Because at a certain point, you start adding negatives too aggressively, you crash your sales. And especially, especially if it's a main sales driver. How do you evaluate if something's a main sales driver? Go into your search term report, and then I want you to sort everything by sales, add up all of your sales for a certain product, and get that sum. So let's say, you know, total of sales is $10,000.
00:14:59
Speaker
And then take each keyword and divide the sales of that search term divided by that $10,000 total sales. It'll tell you the percentage of sales that each of those keywords is driving. Now, if you have a certain keyword driving 5, 6, 7, 10, 15% of your sales and the echos is 85%, please leave it alone. Optimize the ones that have high echos and they're not generating that much in sales.
00:15:22
Speaker
And then focus on the main sales drivers. I made that mistake. I negative the electrolyte powder, which is my main keyword because it was 82 or 83%, but it was driving 12% of my revenue, my sales on the search terms. And i I'm like, oh, it's just bad. I'm going to negative it. I negative did and I lost like maybe 30% of my revenue that day. And then I brought it back and obviously didn't bounce back as well. So um Just pay attention to those things. It's all those little things that honestly add up like PPC isn't magic. It's just strong foundations and you build one brick at a time, one brick at a time. And then at the end of the day, you have a very strong, solid foundation and the PPC starts working. And it's like PPC plus click through rate optimization, plus conversion rate optimization, plus improving your product, you know plus improving your branding. And all of a sudden your brand keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger because you're doing all of the right things. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:16:13
Speaker
I have so much more value on my YouTube channel. So check out my YouTube channel, Mina Elias, or and check out the Trivium, the YouTube channel, Trivium Group. I drop fire content on there, so much value. And if you guys are, you know, looking for management or looking to learn more about Trivium and how we could help you grow on Amazon, visit the website, TriviumCo dot.com. That's T-R-I-V-I-U-M-C-O dot.com. We do a full free audit. We'll tell you exactly what you need to fix your listings. You could do it yourself or we could do it for you, whatever you want. All right, take it easy.