#597 - Expert Tips for Dominating Amazon PPC

Serious Sellers Podcast: Learn How To Sell On Amazon FBA & Walmart

Join us for an insightful TACoS Tuesday with Amazon PPC expert Destaney Wishon of Btr Media, as she shares her expertise on Amazon advertising strategies. We explore the key benefits and features of Adtomic, a powerful tool for managing Amazon PPC campaigns, focusing on bid management, keyword research, and holistic performance tracking. Destaney emphasizes the importance of understanding market dynamics, competitor actions, and customer behavior to effectively manage ACoS fluctuations. She also offers strategies for handling high CPC in competitive niches, including evaluating repeat purchase rates and the impact of ad spending for organic placement.

Next, we cover essential Amazon PPC campaign strategies tailored for businesses of all sizes. Discover how to kickstart your keyword research with low-bid, low-budget auto campaigns, and the importance of profitability-focused campaigns optimized for ACOS or ROAS objectives. We also discuss organic ranking campaigns, the nuanced application of sponsored brands and sponsored display ads, and the comparison between CPC and CPM models for sponsored display. Learn about optimal product launch strategies and effective product targeting strategies that focus on competitive advantages and thoughtful ASIN grouping based on budget and objectives.

Finally, we dive into advanced Amazon PPC optimization strategies, especially for those with limited budgets. Listen as we discuss the benefits of using broad and phrase match keywords over auto campaigns, targeting long-tail search terms, and leveraging customer demographics. Destaney also addresses challenges such as campaigns not receiving impressions and the effects of pausing campaigns versus lowering bids when using day parting. Additionally, we highlight the importance of bid management during off-peak hours, understanding customer purchase behavior, and using the refine feature in category targeting campaigns for more precise ad placements. Don’t miss our interactive Q&A session with Destaney, where she answers a range of insightful questions from our audience.

In episode 597 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Destaney discuss:

• 00:01 - Amazon PPC Strategies With Destaney Wishon
• 01:52 - Maximizing Amazon Advertising With Helium 10's Adtomic
• 06:15 - Optimizing External Traffic for E-Commerce
• 07:43 - Essential Amazon PPC Campaign Strategies
• 09:19 - Choosing Between CPC and CPM
• 12:27 - Optimizing Keywords for Amazon Sales
• 13:35 - Amazon PPC Optimization Strategies
• 20:50 - Optimizing Bids Frequency and Bulk Strategy
• 24:32 - Interactive Q&A Session With Destaney

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

On today's episode we have PPC expert Destaney Wishon and she's going to be answering all of your PPC related questions.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this episode is our monthly live TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart, PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.

Carrie Miller:

We have back with us Destaney Wishon, who is an expert and everyone loves asking questions too. So welcome again, and her kitty.

Destaney:

Destaney and Luna today.

Carrie Miller:

I'm really excited to see you know, to have another TACoS Tuesday with you and ask you some great questions. First question I had for Destaney today is for anyone who might be starting out with Adtomic to manage their PPC ads, what kind of things do you think that they should pay attention to? That are kind of benefits and features of Adtomic or just kind of strategies to get started with it?

Destaney:

It's funny when you have a conversation around Amazon advertising softwares in general, it's always going to be bid management and keyword research. That's what it comes down to in order to drive success. No tool can provide a huge competitive advantage in those areas because we're all given the same levers to pull. But, that being said, I think the area that I've seen drive a lot of success for brands and sellers is having everything in one portal, so like something that we've been playing around with a lot and done a few presentations on is like something like Market Tracker 360. Being able to directly influence your Amazon advertising based off what you're seeing within the market. Same thing as utilizing, like brand metrics, conversion rate data or I know a lot of people use Helium 10 for tracking performance and BSR and organic rank. You can easily track that and then open up Adtomic and make adjustments and allocations based directly off what you're seeing in some of the other categories. That, in my opinion, is like the biggest value add. Beyond that, I think some of the features that I think really stand out are just the utilization from like an ad type. Expansion standpoint is really important because I think with an ad console it can be a little bit complicated when you get into sponsor brands and sponsor display as well as some of the day partying mechanisms of really being able to understand time of day and hour performance.

Bradley Sutton:

If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me forward slash A-D-T-O-M-I-C.

Carrie Miller:

I'm going to go ahead and get into some of these questions from the audience. I noticed a ton are flooding in because they let's go ahead and start with the first one. My ACOS over the last month on a week-to-week basis has fluctuated between 21% on some weeks to 35% on other weeks. I haven't changed or adjusted bids much at all. Is that normal to have that type of fluctuation?

Destaney:

I would say 100%. Yes. The problem with PPC is it's a pay per click model, so that can be fantastic because we're only getting charged when someone clicks. But it also means that if the industry or your audience changes, there can be fluctuations. A good example is, let's say, your number one competitor goes out of budget during one week. That means that the overall CPCs in the category could decrease because your competitor is no longer bidding them up. And if your CPC decreases and you're paying less for a click, then you could see a lower ACOS. So it's pretty normal to see fluctuations, either from changes in CPC that's kind of the first thing you need to look at or changes in conversion rate. If your conversion rate changes, that typically means your customer habits have changed. If your CPC changes, it typically means your competitor habits have changed.

Carrie Miller:

What is your strategy for this. You've got a relatively popular $20 item which is in a competitive niche. CPC is often over $2, giving COGS, my max bid is set around $125. Looking at Amazon's SKU economics over the last six months, on a per unit basis, the sponsored product cost is $18.25. Click-through rate is 0.81%, Cost per click $2.20. Conversion rate 7.85% on one campaign average of all campaigns. So that's a lot of numbers. Here ACOS is 90%, Click-through rate is 0.61. CVR 6.10. And then CPC is $1.23. Looks like a very expensive hobby. What would you do?

Destaney:

I have three quick call-outs for this. One do you have repeat purchases? If you have high repeat purchases and high LTV like maybe you're selling trash bags and they come back every six to eight weeks then this is completely different. You need to view all of your metrics on what that lifetime value looks like. A lot of people in the supplement space, for example, will pay $20 a click and have a 200% ACOS because they know that customer is going to return four to five times and not click on an ad the fourth, fifth time. If you don't have a high repeat value, I think there's kind of two other options you need to consider. One if you spend more on ads, does your organic placement improve? If the answer is yes and you have that dialed in really cleanly because there is direct correlation if you run your ads appropriately, then sometimes it's worth spending on your advertising and taking a loss because you know you're going to move up on the page and when you get ranked in the top eight you can pull back slightly on ads, focus on profitability, but you're going to drive so much overall revenue because your organic ranking improved. That's the second thing you ask yourself. The third if you're not in a position of focusing on organic rank and it's more of an expensive hobby than a brand building exercise for you. I would consider looking at external traffic and see if there's cheaper avenues to drive traffic to your listing outside of PPC, because PPC can be relatively expensive because it is the highest intent traffic we see in e-commerce.

Carrie Miller:

An interesting question that he has, because I've actually seen a lot of people with this kind of question after they've launched and so that product research is a really, really important part of the whole process and just determining if you have the money to kind of compete in those. But I have seen kind of a shift in this because of TikTok. I've seen people launch in really competitive categories but do extremely well because of that outside traffic from TikTok and like that promotion on, you know just content. So those are all different, different things to look at and you know consider as well. All right, next question is from Eric. He's asking for brand tailored promotions. Do you recommend applying a coupon for top tier audiences?

Destaney:

There's hundreds of different conversations we can have and it really depends on your product. I think in general we've seen a lot of success with brand tailored promotions. I think that there's been some arguments that that customer maybe would have already came back, depending on what audience you're selecting. So you're just giving them a coupon or a discount, but we don't have to get into the psychology behind that. I think in general we've seen a lot of success applying them. But you can also consider some of these applications on the DSP side of targeting those same audiences without a coupon but serving them another ad, depending on their purchase habits.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Sean asks what are the essential PPC campaigns that you'd recommend getting started with?

Destaney:

Great question. I believe Helium 10 as a whole we're working on solving some of these questions in the space with a more actionable education. I think for this purpose the things that we really look at is we do typically recommend running a low bid, low budget auto campaign. Auto campaigns do win more unique placements than manual campaigns, but you can't control the bid and budget. So we run them for keyword research and unique placements. We typically run profitability focused campaigns where we're optimizing our bids solely for ACOS or RAS objectives and we focus on our keywords that we know have already converted through our auto campaigns or the work we've done with helium 10 keyword research. We recommend running some level of organic ranking campaigns as well. So we'll take our two to three keywords that we really care about improving our BSR on and we'll run them at a more aggressive, higher ACOS targets but focus on conversion rate and maximizing impression share. As we get into sponsor brands and sponsor display, it really depends on the stage of business that you're in. We almost always recommend running sponsor brands, especially if you have video assets, if you have lifestyle images, but brands don't always have those. We do recommend running sponsor display, product targeting in a really granular fashion and views remarketing. But if you only have a $500 a month budget, don't invest in those and all of these ins and outs and expectations is where it gets difficult in recommending what campaigns are essential. For a big brand. All of them are essential. For a small brand. Start with the first three I mentioned.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Pedro asks for sponsor display, when should we choose CPC versus CPM?

Destaney:

Great question. So there are two very different models and typically two different levels of targeting. CPC is the format we typically recommend starting with, so we like to run just CPC product targeting ads. When you start moving into retargeting and some of the other initiatives, CPM is an option. There will be a lot of people who will post view CPM results with a $29 return on ad spend or a 5% ACOS. But that's not actually that accurate. A CPC ad a customer clicked on it, so you know the ad did its job. A view CPM ad a customer can view it for one second and then purchase your product later and Amazon will give it credit. That doesn't mean it's bad. That just means the results sometimes look inflated or better than average, because think about how many times you scroll a product detail page and glance at an ad. You don't actually remember the ad, but you glanced at it and then maybe you bought it. Amazon's going to give that ad credit if it's view CPM. So they're both fantastic. They both have different targeting types, but understand that a view CPM can sometimes frequently be inflated.

Carrie Miller:

All right. The next one is what is the best launching strategy for a new product?

Destaney:

Yep, there's a ton of different opinions on this as well. Some people recommend doing auto campaigns so you can collect a ton of data really fast. An auto campaign will cast a really wide net and it'll rely on Amazon's algorithm to figure out where your product needs to be showcased. They're going to review your listing, review your backing keywords and say, hey, I think this product needs to be shown here, here, here. It can be really good for expanding your keyword research, but it's also casting a wide net, so sometimes they're not profitable during launch. So we recommend starting with a low bid auto campaign to collect data on the side and then taking all of the keywords that were prioritized from when we wrote our listing using Helium 10. And we put those in a specific campaign, typically an exact match. So we're really really controlled. And then, depending on our budget, depending on review acquisition how many reviews we get we'll start looking at expanding to broad match phrase match. We'll start looking at expanding into product targeting or into sponsor brands video, but it really depends on your review acquisition strategy at that point.

Carrie Miller:

Andrew asked when you're running a sponsored products product targeting campaign, is there an optimum number of ASINs to target and related? Can you have too many or too few ASINs in a product targeting campaign?

Destaney:

I love this question. Great question. So we typically recommend like 5 to 10 ASINs to target. Again, it also depends on our budget. What we've seen if you put in like 100 different ASINs, your budget's not distributed evenly and one to two drive the majority of your traffic, similar to keywords. We also find that if you were to do a sponsored product category targeting campaign, it almost goes too broad. It's very similar to an auto campaign again. What we recommend doing is grouping our targeting by competitive advantage. So we'll create a product targeting campaign targeting everyone with a higher price point than us. We'll put higher price in the title. We'll target everyone with worse reviews than us and put that in the title. Maybe I sell chocolate protein and I want to target everyone else who sells chocolate protein. We'll create those groups so we can understand our competitive advantage and create our copy in our images if it's sponsored display and sponsor brands to align with that as well.

Carrie Miller:

Namesh says for the product launch, should you go exclusively with the core 1520 keywords that you know, drive sales for sure for your competitors initially, or have auto broad phrase campaigns too for keyword research or keyword sourcing?

Destaney:

Great question. Another it depends on budget. And the reason it depends on budget is we always recommend going after those 15 or 20 core keywords, because you need to prove to Amazon that your product is relevant. That's how you're going to get ranked. The problem with that is those 15 to 20 keywords are almost always your most expensive If you're thinking to bid on them. So is everyone else, so your ACOS is usually poor. So we recommend creating those campaigns for organic rank purposes but then creating other campaigns and broad phrase and auto that are going to find your long tail terms that are cheaper, more profitable for you. So example if I'm selling a water bottle I know water bottles can be expensive. Everyone's going to think to target water bottle, but I have to bid on it because that's what's going to improve my organic rank, it's my most important keyword, so I'll create one campaign for that, but then I'll create another campaign where I'll target things like travel water bottle, cooler travel water bottle for kids, right, those long tail broad phrase terms that are more profitable for me.

Carrie Miller:

What do you think about especially for people who don't have good budgets just doing keyword research in Cerebro and instead of doing some of these like broad and phrase and auto campaigns?

Destaney:

I think instead of an auto campaign 100%, especially with a low budget, I do always recommend still typically running in broad and phrase if possible, because you're already going broad with your keyword research, so then putting it in broad match, we'll just go a little bit more broad, right? So sometimes it's okay because it's going to continue to find those long tail terms. I mean, I've seen some of the craziest search terms, like water bottle for preschool kids in Pennsylvania. I would have never been on that, but the person who selected it and saw my ad it's got like two clicks and maybe two orders. So it's really long tail and really cheap is typically what happens.

Carrie Miller:

Is there a way or a technique to target ads at customers by the year of birth? Say, I wanted to target people who were born between or in 1989, is there a way to do that?

Destaney:

With display. Yes, you may have too small of an audience, depending on like, let's say you wanted to use DSP and say I want to target everyone that was born in 1989 and loved whiskey. Like, maybe you're selling a whiskey glass with the name, your audience may be too small and Amazon won't allow you. But in general you can target based off that. Yes, it's just depending on the audience that you want to. How broad you want to go with your audience, I guess, may limit you?

Carrie Miller:

Why do some campaigns not have impressions?

Destaney:

If it's eligible, which we kind of discussed earlier. Check in your ad group. It's typically because you're bidding too low that you're not showing up anywhere.

Carrie Miller:

Does pausing a campaign with day parting temporarily affect its performance when it's reactivated? Is it better to pause campaigns or to lower bids with this feature?

Destaney:

Great question. Huge debate in that arena. If you're hourly parting throughout the day, we recommend lowering bids. If you are day parting as in, no ads on Saturday or Sunday. We've tested both. We don't see a huge detrimental effect. I personally prefer relying on bid management. If you have the capabilities to. I think bid management's the better recommendation, but I think pausing is the easier recommendation and they both drive a 5% difference from what we've seen, if that. So whatever you have the systems to do.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, what strategy would you advise for implementing day parting rules, especially during off-peak hours?

Destaney:

Really, again, bid management is the best solution, is to see where your conversion rate's decreasing and optimize your bids. For that I go on this soapbox every time. But the other thing to consider is that people don't buy the moment they click. So a lot of people will look at their ads and say, hey, I have a ton of clicks at 1am, turn off my ads at 1am. In reality, people are shopping and adding to cart at 1am but potentially not buying until 9am when they wake up again. So a day parting is really beneficial because Amazon marketing stream, from an API perspective, does allow you to optimize for these areas. But also I recommend like not getting incredibly caught up in it because of the length and purchase times. So, that being said, focus on conversion rate and optimizing your bids based off the conversion rate in certain hours. Or, if you need to oversimplify method, go ahead and turn them off if need be, but just test.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point that I haven't thought about is that people are browsing and they're saving them for when they're like oh, I can get my credit card tomorrow, or something.

Destaney:

Yeah. My question always is why did they click on your ad then? Because I personally don't go to Amazon unless I'm looking at purchasing something, whether then or in the future, like, oh, I have a birthday party coming up in two weeks, I'm looking now, and if I look now I'm still interested in buying. I just may not purchase until two weeks later. And I think people forget that part.

Carrie Miller:

All right, can you explain the refine feature in the category targeting campaign?

Destaney:

Well, we have some very hands-on keyboard. These people know what's going on in ad console. I don't typically get this level of detail and questions. Yeah, the refined feature basically takes the category and refines it. So I always explain a category targeting campaign is similar methodology to an auto campaign. Amazon's saying hey, this is Chapstick, let me serve an ad to everyone in the Chapstick aisle. Is what they're doing with the category targeting campaign? Right? The refine feature lets you get a little bit more precise. They're saying let's not target everyone in the Chapstick aisle, let's target every ASIN in the Chapstick aisle who is higher priced than me. That could be beneficial, right? If you're showing an ad on your competitor and you have a lower price point, that's competitive advantage. So that's one of the refinements. You can refine by reviews. You can say hey, I want to target everyone that has two-star reviews, because you know, if someone's looking at a two-star review listing, they're not going to buy it, but if they see your ad, they may buy your product. So the refine feature is just a really fantastic way to get a little bit more specific around the ASINs that you are targeting within your category targeting campaign.

Carrie Miller:

If the cost per click is $2 and the current bid is $1, should we wait until CPC is very close to bid, until we can increase or decrease the bid?

Destaney:

If your CPC was lower. Yes, you're on the right train of thought. Your CPC being higher than your bid tells me that you probably have some weird placement modifier applied that's causing your bid to be even higher than what you want it to be. Or you're looking at a different time frame, like maybe you're looking at two months, so your CPC is $2, but you lowered it over time because it wasn't working, and now your bid's a dollar. So maybe look at a smaller timeframe. Maybe look at what the performance was like after you made the bid change to $1. And then your CPC is closer. That'll help you understand the math quite a bit better. So I think you're on the right train of thought, absolutely.

Carrie Miller:

How long does it normally take to see ad performance improvement once you start using Adtomic, using Travis's full bid rule once?

Destaney:

That's a great question. I think it really depends. I think that it depends, as with everything else I'd said, if you're bleeding money, then it's going to be really quick. If you are running everything just to profitability, then it's not going to make a lot of changes upfront. It really kind of depends on the absolute structure. I've seen bid management take 24 hours to make a difference in an account but it's because they were hemorrhaging money at a 200% ACoS. I think the other thing that needs to be considered is PPC's only job is to drive clicks, like if someone clicked they were interested. People don't click into listings just for funsies not we do like as sellers and brands, but not actual customers. So the other thing you have to consider is like how your conversion rate affects your performance. I think that's always missed. One thing I'll see is, like I mentioned earlier, is a competitor will come into the category with a much lower price point. That's going to hurt your conversion rate because people are going to click into your product detail page and see a cheaper price and click out. So when something like that happens in the market, your PPC is now going to change, because your PPC is going to continue to drive the same amount of clicks, but now maybe they're not buying, so your ACOS is going to increase. So that's why it's really important to understand when there's a change in your performance. Is it a bid or is it a category conversion rate issue. So that was a little bit of a tangent, but I think it was kind of related.

Carrie Miller:

A lot of good questions and we don't have. We might not have time to do all of them, but maybe we can just do a few more. So how frequent should we optimize and what is the best look back window?

Destaney:

Look back window depends on how quickly you're collecting data. For example, I have worked in some very high traffic categories the term protein it would get 20,000 clicks in one day, which means their look back window needs to be almost every 30 minutes, pretty much, to optimize really quickly for all the clicks they're getting. If you're bidding on something that takes two weeks to get 10 clicks, then your look back window probably needs to be two weeks right. So I think it's more important to look at how frequently you need to check in. I usually baseline every 48 hours is a really good start and then, as you increase your traffic, make accommodations, sooner or slower depending on how many clicks you're receiving in that timeframe.

Carrie Miller:

All right. How can you optimize bids in bulk or manual?

Destaney:

Great question. The targeting tab is probably one of the best places to start nowadays. With an ad console that's really powerful. If you're using bulk, that is a whole YouTube lesson that I would recommend going to. There's a ton of content on YouTube for this and a ton of people teaching bulk. It's a lot more complicated than just a webinar response, so you can find that easily on the internet.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, for a mature listing. What percent of sales should come from organic, first PPC? What do you do when most sales come from PPC and PPC sales have no profit? That's a really good question.

Destaney:

So in general we recommend like a 50-50 split. If more than 50% of your sales are coming from ads, you're too reliant on ads and you probably have an organic ranking issue or poor organic rank, which is why you're having to rely on the ads at the top of the page to drive your visibility. That's the baseline. If I see that you know I have less than 50% of my sales coming from ads, there's an opportunity to grow. More than 50% of my sales coming from ads, opportunity to improve my organic rank. That's kind of my baseline question. What do you do when most of your sales come from PPC and PPC sales have no profit? You have to focus on your organic rank. That is why you're having to rely on PPC, because customers aren't scrolling to the bottom of the page where you are ranked. They're having to see it from an ad which is at the top of the page. So that's kind of the secondary thing that you need to focus on. The problem with that is is when you focus on organic rank, you're probably not going to have profit because it is very expensive to rank well organically. So you have to decide that line. You want to walk between long term increasing your organic rank and lowering your profit until you kind of hit that balance of I'm ranked really well, I can profit and pull back on ads.

Carrie Miller:

All right when starting to use Atomic. What criteria do you recommend for keyword harvesting rules and negative rules?

Destaney:

Great question. On the negative side, I typically don't negative aggressively because, again, if they clicked on it, it was a good ad, more than likely it brought them into my listing. Why didn't they purchase, is the question. Now, if I am selling an Apple iPhone charger, I would negate Android charger because maybe they look the same and that's why the customer clicked, but it's obviously not going to work at all. So that's kind of the rules I use for negating. I don't like basing my negating off conversion rate. I would rather lower my bid. So I'll throw that out there. When it comes to harvesting in general, though, we typically recommend harvesting based on orders. That's our biggest metric that we use internally. If a search term drove an order, we're going to put it into a manual campaign and harvest it, and we're just going to set the bid that's appropriate. If it's doing really well and converted on credible ACOS, it's doing really well and converted on Credible ACOS, it's going to be a high bid. If it was 100 clicks in one order, I'm going to set a 10 cent bid to make it profitable.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Well, that's the last question. I want to say thank you to everyone for asking really awesome questions. I think this was a really good discussion, and a special thanks to Destaney, too, for answering for about 42 minutes straight all those questions. That's a lot to answer those questions without really pausing. So thank you so much for doing that and everyone. We will have TACoS Tuesday again next month, so we hope you join us again. But again, thank you all for joining, thanks for participating and we'll see you again next time. Bye everyone!

Destaney:

Thank you all, see ya!