Hey Joe, welcome back to the show.
And yeah Anheuser-Busch beer factory, I always imagine what cool jobs are happening in a place like that.
Glad to see you launched 2 products but unfortunately one isn’t doing great, so lets see what we can do about that.
The good news is after this payment in February, there won’t be any more payments for products that have been at the warehouse for under a year. But after 12 months it will start being charged again.
You have a few options here:
- Drop the price and try to sell out (which sees like you did already)
- Create a removal order (This will cost you about 50 cents per unit) if you do this, and you want to continue to sell this item, dont remove them all. Leave 60 days of supply at Amazon and remove the rest
- Increase PPC or make it more effective (this is what you asked about in your message)
So lets talk about the PPC.
Normally I start with an automatic campaign, and let this run for a week or so, depending on how much traffic the ad is getting.
What this does is, it lets Amazon tell me what the search terms being used by the customers are. And from here I use those search terms in my manual campaign, plus keywords generated from those search terms.
Each Manual Ad can have up to 1000 keywords, and some products can have 2, 3 or 4 ads with 1000 keywords each.
One of the tools I use for keywords is free and it’s called Keyword.IO you enter your search term, pick amazon.com and let it generate results, then enter a new search term, etc
Now when creating the manual campaign, you can create several ads inside that campaign, and name accordingly so you know which one is whitch.
Now, there are a few things that also work in favor of, or against PPC campaigns but they are not controlled inside the Campaign manager. It is the relevancy of the keywords to the category.
Sometimes people post an item in a different category than it belongs, trying to escape competition, but Amazon’s algorithm tracks relevancy and in a case like that, your ad doesn’t even show up when people search (even if you have the highest bid)
At this stage you probably already ran an automatic campaign, so you can go to that campaign and download the advertising report, even if the campaign isn’t active anymore.
The main reason I don’t like selling products under $20 is because since they are so cheap to source, millions of new sellers will have the ability to source them as well, and then the PPC bids start going up and you end up having to bid $2 for a keyword that
Another of the external factors I believe influences PPC is the CTR the click-through rate, is the percentage of people that the add was shown to, vs the percentage that actually clicked on it (basically its the ad’s engagement)
On other platforms, the CTR has to do mostly with the copywriting and the image, while on Amazon it has to do solely with the Thumbnail and the title of the product. So if you have a good image and all the white space around the product is cropped out, your thumbnail will stand out more.
So on a manual campaign create an ad with up to 1000 keywords, at this time you are going to use the campaign’s suggested bid, then as time goes by you will tweek each keyword up or down depending on the ACOS and the number of impressions you get.
For example, if keywords don’t receive any impressions, it means the bid is too low or not relevant… if you believe it is relevant increase the bid for that keyword and give it a few days to test.
As for the ACOS (Advertising Cost Of