Anyone may create a campaign for a product, run it for a certain length of time, and hope for sales. Marketers who do business in this manner are simply betting on finding a winner before their finances run out. In order to launch a successful Amazon ad campaign, they’re looking for a miraculous break.
To be successful in the Amazon advertising sector, every Amazon seller must master the art of PPC Optimization and PPC Expansion. These are two competing yet balanced forces at work in every Amazon campaign, the yin and yang of Amazon PPC. Knowing how to optimize on Amazon requires mastering both of these skills.
You spend more money on ads when you expand, but you get more clicks and conversions. You receive fewer clicks and conversions when you focus on optimization, but it's easier to keep your budget in check. In the end, it's a trade-off, and you'll need to create a balance between the two in order to expand your campaigns while staying under budget.
We're going to assume that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your campaigns. Take some time to set down a clear, well-defined goal for your Amazon PPC campaign if you haven't already.
Let's explain Amazon PPC optimization and expansion, how they differ, and the typical tactics you'd apply for each.
Amazon PPC Expansion
Expansion in Amazon PPC is exactly what it sounds like: you grow your campaigns by putting more resources into them, and if everything goes according to plan, you'll see more sales and momentum.
Examining the breadth of your account and all of its campaigns and asking yourself whether anything is missing is one Amazon PPC expansion activity. Examining your search term report is a tested and true means of doing so. You can then determine where you should promote, create better campaigns, or focus on your top earners. Because your Amazon PPC expansion selections are based on actionable data, this is considered the best and easiest approach to expand.
When it comes to adding missing components to your portfolio, you have two options. You can either build on what you already have and seize some untapped potential there, or you can branch out into a completely new ad type.
Sponsored Display is perhaps the simplest turning point right now. Few, if any, sellers take advantage of it to its full potential, and it allows for remarketing to buyers nearly anywhere on the Internet rather than only on Amazon. Consider experimenting with Sponsored Display if your account is ready. If not, make sure you max out your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands skill-tree before moving on to the next ad type, taking use of all the varied campaign and targeting choices.
Sponsored Display Ads
Sponsored Display Ads are Pay-Per-Click Ads through which sellers are only charged when someone clicks on their ads. Amazon will automatically adjust the bid per ad according to the conversion rates. In order to gain these aspects of Sponsored Display ads, sellers have to be eligible for Amazon’s category. They should be enrolled in Amazon’s brand registry and agencies. Then they can leverage all of these following factors:
- Ads can be displayed to broader audiences by sellers.
- Targeting can be done after looking into the customers interest.
- There can be an increase in reach and brand awareness in their niche.
- Potential customers can be retargeted and re-engaged.
- Complementary products can also be targeted.
- Competitors list should be looked upon and best products should be placed.
How To Manage Your Budget During Expansion
If your ads are functioning well but you're consistently reaching the ad budget ceiling, it might be time to lift it a notch. By increasing that budget, you're allowing your already-profitable campaigns to generate even more revenue. You'll also gain access to additional useful data.
If you only have a one-click budget for an ad, you've essentially lost the money spent on that click because it didn't provide you with any actionable data. The more clicks, conversions, and impressions an ad receives, the more accurate your reports get at portraying that ad's genuine effectiveness.
Expansion By Isolating Search Terms
Thorough knowledge of keywords and search phrases provides your Amazon approach with specificity, cost efficiency, and competitive advantage.
Isolating Search Terms efficiently works for all campaigns but especially well for Research, ACoS Scraping, and Phrase/Exact Match Type Expansion. For a particular keyword, this is used to determine the specific search words that aren’t converting. Within a campaign, it may be used on both advantageous and non-profitable keywords. Use a “Negative Exact” method to exclude search phrases that are weighing down the progress of your advertisements.
Isolated search phrases allow you to control the bid on a single search term rather than a group of search terms connected to a keyword. This is the only way for Amazon advertising to expand while maintaining true ACoS and profitability.
Every dollar of your marketing budget matters and isolating search phrases can help you make sure you’re not wasting it. You’ll also have the perfect recipe to grow if you can find a technique to separate search phrases automatically with technology. You may take gradual control of your PPC ads, discover search term gaps, and enhance conversions with specific information from an analytics tool. It’s even better if you can segment this data into locations, personas, and purchasing paths.
How To Bid During Your PPC Expansion
When the focus is on click volume, bid optimization is extremely important. Experiment with bid increases on your A-list keywords to see whether they bring in even more orders if you're under your goal ACOS on a keyword or ad group level.
Though this isn't true for all keywords, you may have some that were underperforming when you originally tested them, but when given a second opportunity, they can put up some substantial numbers. Consider using those keywords again if your listings have changed significantly since you last used them, such as better listing optimization or more reviews. It's possible that all they needed were the ideal circumstances to completely shine.
Adding additional keywords to your campaigns is an expansion activity rather than an optimization one, contrary to popular belief, because it costs more money. Increase your testing by adding more keywords and keyword testing if your entire campaign is under its goal ACOS.
Make all of your bid modifications slowly, just like you would with your budget. You may get the exact bids for your keywords that offer the best ROI by doing so. Adding new keywords follows the same principle. Choose only the top 10 to 100 best results from a keyword research tool that returns 1,000 possible keywords.
Amazon PPC Optimization
Many Amazon sellers are unaware that their campaigns are set up in a way that hinders rather than boosts sales. To be successful in the Amazon advertising sector, every Amazon seller must master the art of Amazon Sponsored Ads campaign optimization. Consider Campaign Optimization to be the foundation upon which you will construct the robust framework of your Amazon business.
The most straightforward way to explain how Amazon PPC optimization differs from expansion is that it focuses on removing rather than adding. When you have keywords or targets that haven't responded well to expansion-style tactics, or when you've reached your target ACOS, you should prioritize optimization-based methods.
When you choose to concentrate on Amazon PPC optimization, your attention shifts from what's lacking to what isn't. Perhaps you have specific targets or ad groups that use a disproportionately significant portion of your entire ad expenditure in comparison to the results they deliver. Another scenario is that a product just does not perform well as a specific ad kind. Whatever the case may be, now is the time to make cuts in order to save money on advertising and lower your ACOS.
Understanding ACoS
The advertising cost of sales, which exposes the expense of acquiring one client, is an essential indicator to watch.
Managing ACoS will allow you to easily pinpoint the efficacy of each Sponsored campaign, while consistently optimizing your ad expenditure will help you achieve a lower ACoS. It is a criterion that helps you measure the effectiveness or the potency of your ad campaign. To be brief, there is nothing called a good or a bad ACoS. It all depends on your way of approaching the ad and the strategies you put into it.
Bid Optimization To Lower ACoS
When you exceed the goal ACOS, bid optimization is frequently considered the go-to optimization activity. To go back to that desired ACOS, you'll need to gradually drop your offers. You might even discover during the process that some advertisements perform substantially better in rest-of-search with lower bids!
You'll see that as your bids drop, your clicks drop as well. In an ideal world, you'd get more clicks and conversions for every dollar spent on advertising. For example, if you reduce your budget from $100 to $50 over time, you're doing well if you reduce your clicks from 80 to 50.
Negative Keywords Optimization
Finding and curating negative keywords is another Amazon PPC optimization job that almost every Amazon seller conducts. The simplest way to cut unnecessary ad expenditure is to scan your search term report for undesired search terms and add them as negative keywords. It gives you more control over your ad spend and allows you to direct part of that money toward your top performers, allowing you to receive more conversions for less money.
Works particularly well in the Automatic, Research, and ACoS Scraping campaigns. But can also be extended to all campaigns. Here you identify the terms that haven’t been related to any significant sales and use a “Negative Phrase” strategy to keep them out of the spotlight.
It’s rather straightforward to detect which search phrases are causing your campaign problems using Amazon Advertising’s measurability.
You can use this information to create a safety net around your advertisements, preventing these phrases from inflicting more devastation.
The measures listed below are recommendations, not rules, that can be tweaked to match certain niches. To discover low-performing phrases that should be transformed into negative keywords, apply the following three metrics:
- Low CTR non-converters – It’s not worth your effort to use search phrases that bring your ad over 2500 impressions with a CTR of less than 0.18 percent and no conversions. They are lowering the ranking of your product. They must be stopped.
- High spend non-converters – This may vary depending on your budget and profit margins, but any search phrases that generate more than $35 in ad cost but no conversions should be deleted.
- High click non-converters – Given that Amazon sellers’ average conversion rate is 9.8%, anything with more than 34 clicks that haven’t converted yet is already failing terribly. It must be eliminated.
Negative keywords are an important part of any excellent Amazon PPC campaign since they cut down on wasted money, improve product ranks, and prevent keyword cannibalism. The sooner you begin implementing them, the sooner you will be able to accomplish all of your Amazon seller goals.
Making Expansion and Optimization Work Together
Keeping the two in synergy is the key to getting the most of Amazon PPC optimization and expansion. Sure, it's a business buzzword that's been overused to death, but bear with us for a moment.
Expansion activities in some ad groups and optimization activities in others can simply be done at the same time. On some level, you should always be expanding and optimizing, and you should know which one you're doing and why.
The goal is to avoid making large, sweeping changes and instead focus on little increments of expansion or optimization. This will eventually fall into a loop where you optimise a little, then grow a little, and so on. This will allow you to keep as close as possible to your target ACOS while yet evolving and exploring new possibilities.
Some scenarios may demand a greater emphasis on one side or the other. For example, when launching a new product, you should focus on expansion to give it the head start it requires. On the other side, you will normally choose optimization for your long-running successful items.
Conclusion
The term "optimization" only tells half the story when it comes to refining and sustaining your Amazon PPC ads. In actuality, it's a delicate balancing act between optimization and growth.
You spend more money with Amazon PPC expansion, but you get more bang for your buck. When you're expanding, you examine your campaigns to discover what's missing. Adding additional keywords to your campaigns, raising bids and budget restrictions, and testing new ad types or bidding tactics are all common expansion tasks.
Amazon PPC optimization, on the other hand, takes a more conservative approach, reducing clicks and conversions to save money. Adding negatives, setting or tightening budget limitations, and lowering bids when a campaign exceeds its target ACOS are all examples of Amazon PPC optimization activities.
In an ideal world, you'll be doing both expansion and optimization at the same time. To keep at your campaign's target ACOS, do a little bit of optimization at a time, then a little bit of expansion, almost like course-correcting. You may lean more one way or the other in particular instances, but striking a balance between the two is critical.
Make sure you have enough data to implement an informed decision in both cases, and make all adjustments gradually while keeping an eye on your most essential KPIs.
https://www.aihello.com/resources/blog/striking-the-balance-amazon-ppc-expansion-and-ppc-optimization/
To be successful in the Amazon advertising sector, every Amazon seller must master the art of PPC Optimization and PPC Expansion. These are two competing yet balanced forces at work in every Amazon campaign, the yin and yang of Amazon PPC. Knowing how to optimize on Amazon requires mastering both of these skills.
You spend more money on ads when you expand, but you get more clicks and conversions. You receive fewer clicks and conversions when you focus on optimization, but it's easier to keep your budget in check. In the end, it's a trade-off, and you'll need to create a balance between the two in order to expand your campaigns while staying under budget.
We're going to assume that you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your campaigns. Take some time to set down a clear, well-defined goal for your Amazon PPC campaign if you haven't already.
Let's explain Amazon PPC optimization and expansion, how they differ, and the typical tactics you'd apply for each.
Amazon PPC Expansion
Expansion in Amazon PPC is exactly what it sounds like: you grow your campaigns by putting more resources into them, and if everything goes according to plan, you'll see more sales and momentum.
Examining the breadth of your account and all of its campaigns and asking yourself whether anything is missing is one Amazon PPC expansion activity. Examining your search term report is a tested and true means of doing so. You can then determine where you should promote, create better campaigns, or focus on your top earners. Because your Amazon PPC expansion selections are based on actionable data, this is considered the best and easiest approach to expand.
When it comes to adding missing components to your portfolio, you have two options. You can either build on what you already have and seize some untapped potential there, or you can branch out into a completely new ad type.
Sponsored Display is perhaps the simplest turning point right now. Few, if any, sellers take advantage of it to its full potential, and it allows for remarketing to buyers nearly anywhere on the Internet rather than only on Amazon. Consider experimenting with Sponsored Display if your account is ready. If not, make sure you max out your Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands skill-tree before moving on to the next ad type, taking use of all the varied campaign and targeting choices.
Sponsored Display Ads
Sponsored Display Ads are Pay-Per-Click Ads through which sellers are only charged when someone clicks on their ads. Amazon will automatically adjust the bid per ad according to the conversion rates. In order to gain these aspects of Sponsored Display ads, sellers have to be eligible for Amazon’s category. They should be enrolled in Amazon’s brand registry and agencies. Then they can leverage all of these following factors:
- Ads can be displayed to broader audiences by sellers.
- Targeting can be done after looking into the customers interest.
- There can be an increase in reach and brand awareness in their niche.
- Potential customers can be retargeted and re-engaged.
- Complementary products can also be targeted.
- Competitors list should be looked upon and best products should be placed.
How To Manage Your Budget During Expansion
If your ads are functioning well but you're consistently reaching the ad budget ceiling, it might be time to lift it a notch. By increasing that budget, you're allowing your already-profitable campaigns to generate even more revenue. You'll also gain access to additional useful data.
If you only have a one-click budget for an ad, you've essentially lost the money spent on that click because it didn't provide you with any actionable data. The more clicks, conversions, and impressions an ad receives, the more accurate your reports get at portraying that ad's genuine effectiveness.
Expansion By Isolating Search Terms
Thorough knowledge of keywords and search phrases provides your Amazon approach with specificity, cost efficiency, and competitive advantage.
Isolating Search Terms efficiently works for all campaigns but especially well for Research, ACoS Scraping, and Phrase/Exact Match Type Expansion. For a particular keyword, this is used to determine the specific search words that aren’t converting. Within a campaign, it may be used on both advantageous and non-profitable keywords. Use a “Negative Exact” method to exclude search phrases that are weighing down the progress of your advertisements.
Isolated search phrases allow you to control the bid on a single search term rather than a group of search terms connected to a keyword. This is the only way for Amazon advertising to expand while maintaining true ACoS and profitability.
Every dollar of your marketing budget matters and isolating search phrases can help you make sure you’re not wasting it. You’ll also have the perfect recipe to grow if you can find a technique to separate search phrases automatically with technology. You may take gradual control of your PPC ads, discover search term gaps, and enhance conversions with specific information from an analytics tool. It’s even better if you can segment this data into locations, personas, and purchasing paths.
How To Bid During Your PPC Expansion
When the focus is on click volume, bid optimization is extremely important. Experiment with bid increases on your A-list keywords to see whether they bring in even more orders if you're under your goal ACOS on a keyword or ad group level.
Though this isn't true for all keywords, you may have some that were underperforming when you originally tested them, but when given a second opportunity, they can put up some substantial numbers. Consider using those keywords again if your listings have changed significantly since you last used them, such as better listing optimization or more reviews. It's possible that all they needed were the ideal circumstances to completely shine.
Adding additional keywords to your campaigns is an expansion activity rather than an optimization one, contrary to popular belief, because it costs more money. Increase your testing by adding more keywords and keyword testing if your entire campaign is under its goal ACOS.
Make all of your bid modifications slowly, just like you would with your budget. You may get the exact bids for your keywords that offer the best ROI by doing so. Adding new keywords follows the same principle. Choose only the top 10 to 100 best results from a keyword research tool that returns 1,000 possible keywords.
Amazon PPC Optimization
Many Amazon sellers are unaware that their campaigns are set up in a way that hinders rather than boosts sales. To be successful in the Amazon advertising sector, every Amazon seller must master the art of Amazon Sponsored Ads campaign optimization. Consider Campaign Optimization to be the foundation upon which you will construct the robust framework of your Amazon business.
The most straightforward way to explain how Amazon PPC optimization differs from expansion is that it focuses on removing rather than adding. When you have keywords or targets that haven't responded well to expansion-style tactics, or when you've reached your target ACOS, you should prioritize optimization-based methods.
When you choose to concentrate on Amazon PPC optimization, your attention shifts from what's lacking to what isn't. Perhaps you have specific targets or ad groups that use a disproportionately significant portion of your entire ad expenditure in comparison to the results they deliver. Another scenario is that a product just does not perform well as a specific ad kind. Whatever the case may be, now is the time to make cuts in order to save money on advertising and lower your ACOS.
Understanding ACoS
The advertising cost of sales, which exposes the expense of acquiring one client, is an essential indicator to watch.
Managing ACoS will allow you to easily pinpoint the efficacy of each Sponsored campaign, while consistently optimizing your ad expenditure will help you achieve a lower ACoS. It is a criterion that helps you measure the effectiveness or the potency of your ad campaign. To be brief, there is nothing called a good or a bad ACoS. It all depends on your way of approaching the ad and the strategies you put into it.
Bid Optimization To Lower ACoS
When you exceed the goal ACOS, bid optimization is frequently considered the go-to optimization activity. To go back to that desired ACOS, you'll need to gradually drop your offers. You might even discover during the process that some advertisements perform substantially better in rest-of-search with lower bids!
You'll see that as your bids drop, your clicks drop as well. In an ideal world, you'd get more clicks and conversions for every dollar spent on advertising. For example, if you reduce your budget from $100 to $50 over time, you're doing well if you reduce your clicks from 80 to 50.
Negative Keywords Optimization
Finding and curating negative keywords is another Amazon PPC optimization job that almost every Amazon seller conducts. The simplest way to cut unnecessary ad expenditure is to scan your search term report for undesired search terms and add them as negative keywords. It gives you more control over your ad spend and allows you to direct part of that money toward your top performers, allowing you to receive more conversions for less money.
Works particularly well in the Automatic, Research, and ACoS Scraping campaigns. But can also be extended to all campaigns. Here you identify the terms that haven’t been related to any significant sales and use a “Negative Phrase” strategy to keep them out of the spotlight.
It’s rather straightforward to detect which search phrases are causing your campaign problems using Amazon Advertising’s measurability.
You can use this information to create a safety net around your advertisements, preventing these phrases from inflicting more devastation.
The measures listed below are recommendations, not rules, that can be tweaked to match certain niches. To discover low-performing phrases that should be transformed into negative keywords, apply the following three metrics:
- Low CTR non-converters – It’s not worth your effort to use search phrases that bring your ad over 2500 impressions with a CTR of less than 0.18 percent and no conversions. They are lowering the ranking of your product. They must be stopped.
- High spend non-converters – This may vary depending on your budget and profit margins, but any search phrases that generate more than $35 in ad cost but no conversions should be deleted.
- High click non-converters – Given that Amazon sellers’ average conversion rate is 9.8%, anything with more than 34 clicks that haven’t converted yet is already failing terribly. It must be eliminated.
Negative keywords are an important part of any excellent Amazon PPC campaign since they cut down on wasted money, improve product ranks, and prevent keyword cannibalism. The sooner you begin implementing them, the sooner you will be able to accomplish all of your Amazon seller goals.
Making Expansion and Optimization Work Together
Keeping the two in synergy is the key to getting the most of Amazon PPC optimization and expansion. Sure, it's a business buzzword that's been overused to death, but bear with us for a moment.
Expansion activities in some ad groups and optimization activities in others can simply be done at the same time. On some level, you should always be expanding and optimizing, and you should know which one you're doing and why.
The goal is to avoid making large, sweeping changes and instead focus on little increments of expansion or optimization. This will eventually fall into a loop where you optimise a little, then grow a little, and so on. This will allow you to keep as close as possible to your target ACOS while yet evolving and exploring new possibilities.
Some scenarios may demand a greater emphasis on one side or the other. For example, when launching a new product, you should focus on expansion to give it the head start it requires. On the other side, you will normally choose optimization for your long-running successful items.
Conclusion
The term "optimization" only tells half the story when it comes to refining and sustaining your Amazon PPC ads. In actuality, it's a delicate balancing act between optimization and growth.
You spend more money with Amazon PPC expansion, but you get more bang for your buck. When you're expanding, you examine your campaigns to discover what's missing. Adding additional keywords to your campaigns, raising bids and budget restrictions, and testing new ad types or bidding tactics are all common expansion tasks.
Amazon PPC optimization, on the other hand, takes a more conservative approach, reducing clicks and conversions to save money. Adding negatives, setting or tightening budget limitations, and lowering bids when a campaign exceeds its target ACOS are all examples of Amazon PPC optimization activities.
In an ideal world, you'll be doing both expansion and optimization at the same time. To keep at your campaign's target ACOS, do a little bit of optimization at a time, then a little bit of expansion, almost like course-correcting. You may lean more one way or the other in particular instances, but striking a balance between the two is critical.
Make sure you have enough data to implement an informed decision in both cases, and make all adjustments gradually while keeping an eye on your most essential KPIs.
https://www.aihello.com/resources/blog/striking-the-balance-amazon-ppc-expansion-and-ppc-optimization/
