#563 – Amazon PPC Bid Management and Dayparting Tips

Is the Amazon marketplace’s tide too strong, or can new and seasoned sellers still navigate the choppy waters of Amazon PPC to find success? Join Shivali Patel, along with Matthew FitzMaurice from Pacvue, as we chart a course through the intimidating yet rewarding seas of Amazon advertising. This TACoS Tuesday, we’re not just talking shop; we’re equipping you with a compass and map to master keyword research, manage bids with precision, and understand the rhythms of dayparting that keep your budget afloat and your goals in sight.

Amazon’s landscape is dominated by PPC, but that doesn’t mean getting organic sales from your campaigns is a lost cause. We share a lot of tactics for enhancing retail-ready content and fine-tuning your bids to catch the eye of shoppers sailing by. Learn how to stay vigilant on the metrics that matter—CPC, impressions, and click-through rates—while also steering the helm of your PPC campaigns with the discerning eye of a captain deciding when to lower sails (daily budgets) or adjust course (bids). Our discussion also offers insights into managing the choppy waters of high-cost keywords and understanding when it’s time to make a strategic retreat.

Our final topic dives into using Amazon advertising to claim your market share. We uncover the secrets of sponsored product placements, brands, and display campaigns, aided by the navigational tools of Helium 10’s Adtomic and Pacvue. Whether you’re launching a new product flotilla or reinforcing the fleet of established offerings, we’re here to help you sail smoothly through budget considerations, historical data analysis, and the essential practice of continuous testing. All hands on deck—this episode is a voyage to the heart of Amazon advertising success.

In episode 563 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Matthew discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon PPC Q&A and Ad Strategies
• 05:53 – Optimizing Keyword Campaign Performance
• 06:57 – Strategies for Boosting Organic Sales
• 11:37 – Optimizing High-Cost Keywords in Campaigns
• 14:09 – Optimizing Keywords for Market Share
• 16:41 – Keyword Performance Evaluation and Decisions
• 17:01 – Optimizing Amazon Advertising Performance
• 18:59 – Analyzing Sponsored Product and Display Performance
• 20:16 – Optimizing Sponsored Display Campaigns for Success
• 23:35 – Optimizing Keyword Campaigns for Efficiency
• 25:53 – Maximizing Amazon Campaign Performance
• 28:19 – Automations in Advertising Platforms

Transcript

Shivali Patel:
Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions live, while also discussing the nooks and crannies of bid management, day partying, different ad types and so much more.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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/adtomic. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the 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, Walmart, PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today’s host is going to be Shivali Patel. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:
Hello guys, this is Shivali brand evangelist here at Helium 10, and we are back with a TACoS Tuesday episode. You guys are in for a treat. I know you have plenty of advertising questions and we have a special guest expert here to answer those questions for you. So with that, I’m going to go ahead and bring on Matthew, who is here with us to answer your questions. How’s it going?

Matthew:
Good Thanks, how are you?

Shivali Patel:
Good, good. Thanks so much for jumping in. I know people have plenty of questions to throw your way, so before we really jump into those questions, I want to talk a little bit about you. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background, what you do here at Pacvue and your, I guess, history with advertising.

Matthew:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’m Matthew Fitzmaurice. It’s nice to meet everybody. I initially started in traditional advertising at a local agency in Baltimore where I live, very focused on kind of account management there, had exposure to social campaigns and kind of the traditional out of home. It was interesting. And then I kind of found my way into e-commerce and kind of felt it to be more relatable honestly, just like being on Amazon so much and just kind of interacting with different brands and products on what I felt like was a deeper level. So that’s kind of how I got my start in e-com. I’ve been in e-com in general I guess for probably four years now, specifically managing mostly PPC campaigns kind of at the enterprise level in some form of an agency to client relationship. It’s been the majority of it. And then I have loved my time at Pacvue. Leveraging the tech has been fantastic. I think it is absolutely best in the industry. Helium 10 has been a fantastic add-on as well. So it’s been awesome, it’s been great.

Shivali Patel:
Amazing. Yeah, I know advertising is really the bread and butter for so many brands and businesses and so being able to understand that or have a really good pulse on it is so important. So I know, because there’s so much that goes into the advertising metrics and monitoring that what would you say are some underlying factors that really affect PPC that you want to keep a pulse on?

Matthew:
Yeah, I think goal setting is huge. I think understanding what you’re trying to achieve allows you to set the framework really appropriately for any campaign, for any platform, for any retailer. So I think for me it really comes down to understanding the end goal, and I think contextualizing what those KPIs are tracking towards is also really, really important.

Shivali Patel:

Now we already have one filing in. We have Kristy asking Hi, I have a product and sell to retail but worry that the Amazon fees will be too expensive. Is it too late to be successful on Amazon? So I would say no, but I want to hear your side of things as well.

Matthew:

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I don’t think it’s ever too late, I think, obviously, understanding what those fees are associated with. I know there’s a lot that goes into it and fees can get out of hand quickly with Amazon based on packaging, shipping, the list goes on and on. But I would say, do as much research as you can try to understand what those thresholds are and what your capacity is. And I would say, obviously, once you’re in Amazon and in the network, the upside is large. So I would say, not too late and definitely give it a try.

Shivali Patel:
I would definitely agree there. I think it just depends on if you know where to look, and there’s certainly plenty of opportunity there. Amazon’s growing year over year All right, well, in other news of PPC. So we said it depends on the goals. Right, going back to that conversation, and you’re looking at keywords. So how would you say you kind of tackle keyword research for, I guess, a new seller as well as for somebody that you’re auditing an account for?

Matthew:
I think there’s a lot of ways you can go about it. I think the way that I always start is kind of in the mind of a shopper how do I look for the product? What are the things that I’m typing into the search bar to say, hey, how do I find this? I think Amazon is being used more and more like a Google or you know being or not that many people use big probably, but probably more like a Google right, where people can search and interact with products and do some almost preliminary research just on Amazon without having to go to Google. So I think, try to stay in the mind of a shopper, kind of as you’re getting going and then from there, Helium 10 has some fantastic tools. Magnet is something that I use frequently looking at search volume, looking at competitor ASINs that are on similar terms, things like that to kind of get a feel for the category. Any add on that you can kind of have from the Helium 10 tool, even in the search bar within Amazon, gives you related terms based on search volume. If you’re in Seller Central there’s SFR, things like that. So I would say, use those tools as much as possible, but try to stay in the mind of a shopper and experiment. You can run auto campaigns and run different reports to generate what kind of new keywords are being pulled. So I mean, the list goes on and on. But to start, I would always say think like a consumer.

Shivali Patel:

But even on that note, let’s say that you see you want to rank for a specific keyword and you’re ranking at the bottom of a page, right, and you want to get back up to the top. How would you really go about changing, maybe the campaign that you’re looking at? For example, when is a good time to negative match a keyword?

Matthew:

Yeah, it depends how specific you want to get with your actual campaign, but negative targeting can be really helpful if you want to be very, very laser focused. I personally am a huge fan of exact match keywording. For me, I feel like I have the most control over it. I know exactly where my ad is going to place if, obviously, you win the auction. But for me I definitely will default to the exact match and then from there, I think, understanding what my budget limitation is, leveraging things like day parting and trying to get the most out of every dollar. So that way my ad is serving as efficiently as possible on the right times of the day to kind of get that engagement and then drive up organic rank.

Shivali Patel:
We have Daniel asking what would be the effective strategy to boost our organic sales for our product. Currently, 60% of their sales come from PPC sales and they want to get their organic sales to improve more than their PPC sales.

Matthew:

Gotcha, yeah. So this is a common problem. Amazon and a bunch of other marketplaces are becoming increasingly more kind of pay to play, if you will, where the majority of the sales are going to come from, those top four sponsor placements, which makes it competitive, can make it very expensive, and driving that organic sales share up is really important and I think really some of the things that I’ve done that have been helpful is kind of, you know, adjusting some of the more you know quote unquote retail-esque metrics, making sure your page is retail ready. Having content developed that is bulletproof is as good as you can possibly make it, and then kind of coupling that with that PPC strategy of making sure that your bids are targeted to exactly where you want them to be. If strategy of making sure that your bids are targeted to exactly where you want them to be, if you’re casting a really large net, it’s difficult to gain that relevancy. So I’d say, be prescriptive where you know you want to be and then from there just track how you’re progressing up the page. And then you know always I would say always test. So test things like day parting schedules, test things like different bid multipliers to see what it takes to get out the page and then from there I would just kind of keep iterating and keep making little tweaks and trying to refine that as much as possible.

Shivali Patel:
Definitely. I think split testing is a large part of it, and then refining that based off what you’re learning. What metrics are you really looking at when you’re considering day partying and doing all the split testing?

Matthew:

Yeah, I think again, it kind of depends on the goal. But if the goal is just strictly for organic sales, what I’m looking at is kind of cost. I want to see what those CPCs are. I want to see kind of what the relevance of and kind of try to determine what the right to win is for my product in those particular campaigns and the particular auctions. So looking at CPCs, looking at impressions, looking at clicks, click-through rate, things like that, just to kind of see what that level of engagement is mostly.

Shivali Patel:
Okay, and I see we have another fantastic question from Joy that says I’d like to know in which case I’d like to lower the daily budget and in which case I should lower the bid. I want to understand the difference in situations when to lower the daily budget and when to lower the bid.

Matthew:

Sure, yeah, I think a lot of times they go hand in hand. I think if there are strict budget restraints that are preventing you from spending to X amount or a budgeted cut, or you need to pull money from one bucket and put it into another, the budget transition would be the most concrete. I think what happens when you start decreasing bids within a campaign is those bids out over a certain period of time will kind of almost naturalize if that makes sense, where you can have a campaign budget be, this is extreme, but say $15,000, and many of the keywords within one campaign can have lower bids, higher bids, but kind of have room to kind of breathe and almost live and go up and down day to day. I think if there’s one-off cases where it’s like we need to pause ads, we need to get this off, you know the listings as quickly as possible. Reduce budget, reduce bids, and then that’ll pretty much suppress from an advertising standpoint how visible that is. And then I think in terms of when to increase, kind of on the opposite, if you’re finding efficiencies and kind of finding where that keyword sweet spot is and what time of the day in particular you have the strongest right to win and when CPCs are reduced a little bit, that can be a really good strategy to kind of minimize the overall cost and make sure that you’re getting the most for each click.

Shivali Patel:
When you’re talking about, you know every keyword has different bids, so how do you really determine how many keywords you’re putting into a campaign structure? Let’s say you’re looking at a new account or even an old account. Where would you like to see a cap for certain keywords or ASINs?

Matthew:

Yeah, I’ve done a lot of testing around this. Actually I’ve gone as low as two keywords a bit a campaign. One keyword as high as 50. So, I think it depends. I think when you increase the amount of keywords that are in a campaign you obviously run the risk of people clicking on them and then the cost going up. So I think there’s a bunch of different ways to break that out where you can have kind of a priority campaign with your priority keywords. That might be five to 15 of your keywords that you definitely want to be advertising on, that are really important to driving your business. From there you can kind of have a secondary bucket where it’s kind of the nice to have so you can kind of keep the bids a bit lower, don’t necessarily need to win those placements to be driving the bulk of your sales. And then you can kind of have the expansion type of campaign where there might be more keywords where you’re just testing to see the validity, which can maybe move up to the next bucket and then up to the priority bucket if they tend to do well. So it just depends on, kind of, I think, what you’re trying to accomplish with each campaign or your overall strategy. But I found that to be really helpful, and kind of understanding those top priority terms I think between five and 15 keywords has been the sweet spot for me.

Shivali Patel:
Yeah, I think pretty much the same, even for my campaigns. All right we have. When the ACoS of a targeting keyword in a sponsored product campaign is high, how can I determine when to lower the bid or turn off the keyword entirely?

Matthew:
Yeah, good question, and this is something where it’s going to be somewhat category dependent. There are some categories that are just wildly competitive, like vitamins, supplements, things like that, just one that comes to mind. Some of them are naturally going to be high. This is where I would kind of weigh out what that difference is, or kind of what your threshold is, and what I mean by that is basically if your sales are still growing, if your business is still growing and there’s a couple keywords that may not be the most efficient. That’s kind of the risk reward of like, how far do we push? Are the sales new to brand sales? Are you gaining incremental sales? I know incremental is one of those buzzwords but it is really important when you’re considering do I lower a bid? If it’s a really high search volume term and you’re getting new eyeballs to your page, it might be okay to kind of let that run a little bit below the overall goal. But from there, ensuring that the rest of your campaigns are built out for efficiency and making sure that you’re getting those sales and conversions where people are relatively determined to get your brand is going to be equally important in keeping the portfolio ACoS where want it to be so I think, use it as a guardrail. I don’t think it’s going to be the end-all be-all. I think it’s an important part of the overall strategy that you’re deploying, but if it’s driving your business in the right direction a little bit of a high ACoS is something that could be tolerable, but if it simply is just tanking that campaign and is not driving the sales, then I would say that’s probably when to pause.

Shivali Patel:

I think tolerable is a good word for it, because it does come down to risk tolerance as well as where you are in your seller’s journey. I mean, if you’re a little bit in the beginning, right, you’re going to potentially have higher ACoS because you’re still trying to get the clicks and the conversions and you don’t necessarily have the social proof there.

Matthew:
Yeah, with new products too, it’s tough to break into that kind of relevance threshold and work your way up the page. And yeah, for new products it’s definitely a fine line. But I think just keep testing and keep reducing bids, keep increasing, keep trying to kind of remake how that campaign is structured.

Shivali Patel:

Definitely. Travis here asks how do you usually find a balanced approach to setting bids for keywords? Is there a happy medium for higher bids that get more exposure versus lower bids that provide a high return on your spend?

Matthew:

Yeah, I think this kind of goes into the conversation we just had. So a good example for some of the campaigns that I have. I break them out by category and branded and competitor and auto, all single ASIN, all exact match. Just is how I tend to run it. So I think it gives a very, very accurate read of what’s happening with each bid. For some of my products that I would say are the big business drivers, I have a much higher tolerance to say. I can live with these bids being higher for this particular product, this particular ASIN and within that campaign there’s kind of its own little ecosystem of these three keywords within this campaign drive 80% of my sales for this campaign. Those three I’m okay if the ACoS or ROAS is a little bit down from where I want it to be. In terms of some of those lower flighted ones, some of the longer tail keywords where it’s not necessarily the core of the product, or the highest SFR ones. Those ones I’m okay with letting the bid be a bit reduced and those are going to be more of those efficiency finders where people may be putting in something that isn’t the first kind of snap ready come to mind term for the particular product. So I tend to skew a little bit higher on the bids for the keywords that I know are driving the bulk of the sales.

Shivali Patel:

We have a question on how to increase market share further. They run sponsored and sponsored brand ads, product and brand ads. We use 80-20 rule, so is there something you can share on that?

Matthew:

Yeah, in terms of overall market share, I think it’s important to understand how many campaigns that you actually are running. So the 80-20 split I think is very, very fair. It makes a lot of sense. I think sponsored product is going to be the core obviously of the business driving placement, so definitely would skew heavier towards that in terms of the overall market share. I would also take a look at what your competition is doing. Where are they winning kind of? Where aren’t you winning? I think there’s a lot that can kind of go into some of that exact match keyword. I’m not sure how your keywords are set up, but if it’s phrase or broad, it may not be as focused as you want. And I think also when you’re talking market share, you can go all the way down to the keyword level, get super specific where, if you’re looking at, say, three keywords that drive the majority of your business, those are the ones that would really focus on kind of increasing and even reshifting the overall budget to kind of have, you know, that bigger chunk to those really important business driving keywords. I think that might be a good way to kind of also reshape the way we look at market share a little bit, but I would just try to capture again the most amount of sponsored product placements on the most important keywords that you have available, and just the consistency is going to be absolutely critical for that. I know budgets can change, things change, business happens. So the more consistent you can be with that strategy, I think it will start to increase over time.

Shivali Patel:

So you mentioned the most important keywords. On the alternative side of that, there’s obviously keywords that aren’t doing so hot. So Fernando asked when do you think it’s enough to pause a target keyword when there’s no sales happening, no PPC orders? How many clicks is enough?

Matthew:
Yeah, clicks is a tough one to measure. A lot of it depends on, I would say, search volume. If it’s a really low search volume term you probably won’t see the clicks or the sales kind of as a bit of a result. If it’s something that has historically been like a top performer and it’s changed, I would say that’s kind of maybe warranting a test of let’s pause it, let’s try something else, let’s try a different keyword or a group of keywords. I think sales for me is always kind of the north star and kind of the rest of those KPIs that we look at around them are good guardrails to understand how the overall business is achieving that sales goal. So I think if sales are very low, I think it’s probably safe to say that that’s okay to pause. But again, if it’s something that’s been tried and true in your strategy, I would try to rework it. Maybe even if it’s an exact match, try phrase match, try some PAT targeting similar products on those keywords and see if there’s any life left in it. But I think if clicks are low, like below 30 to 40 a month, I think that’s probably a good time to reevaluate what the bids are and kind of just take a deeper look at what that keyword’s actually doing.

Shivali Patel:

You are absolutely killing the questions, so I want to interject here with a question of my own before I continue with the questions that are being asked. So what sort of level would you say a seller needs to be to consider Pacvue as an advertising solution?

Matthew:

I mean the tool itself, I think can be beneficial for any budget. I’ve managed budgets that are in the hundreds of dollars a day as well, on the app or on the tool, and it’s been seamless. I think there’s a lot of data that it provides you that is incredibly painful to find in the actual UI and it’s clunky, it’s difficult. The way that Pacvue has it organized is very customizable. It’s very streamlined and you can really find the answers you’re looking for and really customize those pages to basically be driving to your key business goals, which it’s effective, and I think it’s been a total treat, honestly, to be able to work with it every day. I’ve really enjoyed it. So I can’t speak highly enough about it, but I think, regardless of what your budget is and what your goals are, I think this tool would be a benefit for sure.

Shivali Patel:

OK, and with that, Michael asks can you elaborate a few of the most looked at report format sponsored product, sponsored brand and sponsored display?

Matthew:

Yeah, I would say for a lot of the stuff that I’m looking at I’m probably pulling the raw data and looking for how I want to twist it in terms of what I leverage in the actual Pacvue tool. A lot of the kind of the home dash screens of kind of giving that initial read of what’s happening, are helpful.

But what I always find helpful is just kind of for sponsored product and sponsored brand specifically, kind of breaking out by product group or by brand or however your business is situated, looking at it by brand kind of the big, big metrics like spend sales, CPC, ROAS, conversion rate. I love to see that kind of at the sponsored product and sponsored brand level. I also love going through targeting type. So pulling targeting type with branded category, auto conquesting, pat and kind of evaluating that way as well and layering the two on top of each other then is incredibly helpful to get a read of what’s happening, kind of at that 10,000 foot view more or less depending on the time frame you’re looking at. But I think that’s a good place to start and then from there kind of whittling down, going into the actual campaigns and pulling data that way. For Sponsored Display, I’ve always used it as kind of a nice to have. It’s typically a little bit lower performing, but I think what it offers is the reach and I think from that side of it, looking at clicks, impressions, click-through rate, that’s typically what I would be pulling to analyze the sponsor display campaigns I run.

Shivali Patel:

Sherry asks with the Helium 10 Adtomic function, how can I see, excuse me, Helium 10 Adtomic tool? How can I see visually when I change a bit, to know if the impressions are picking up over time? So you can go into Adtomic, go to the Analytics page or the Ad manager and then go to your campaign and target, put in a date range to whenever you made the bid change and then check out your daily impressions and then change the date to afterwards and check that as well. You can also go into Keyword Tracker and check out how your sponsored rank has changed as well. Okay, next question, what PPC strategy do you recommend for a newly launched product in a competitive niche?

Matthew:

Yeah, for this one I would definitely say pick the keywords that matter most to you. Focusing on those, I would say test out the CPCs, see what you’re actually kind of going up against. From there, PAT targeting is incredibly helpful. If it’s a brand new category, it’s a definite cheaper rate for basically, the way that I describe PATs generally is kind of the nice to have, but it can be very, very strategic. Pick the number one product in the category, pick the highest organic rank and put a PAT on those particular ASINs and go where the eyeballs are going and you’ll get it at a cheaper rate. You’ll be on their PDP, kind of at the bottom of that carousel ad which is going to be lower volume in general. However, it’s going to be a really, really good way to kind of have that brand recognition. I’m not sure how consumable the product is or if it’s something that is, you know, like a subscribe and save option or kind of like a replenishment is high. But if your brand is being put next to those top performing brands in the category, it’s at minimum when you are serving on those sponsored product placements. There’s going to be that recognition which is going to be critical. So I would say, try to establish yourself on some competitor PDPs through product attribute targeting campaigns. From there also if you have a variety of products, your advertising sponsored brand campaigns can be really beneficial because you get to show 3 products for one campaign more or less, or one placement. CPCs can be a little touch and go there as well. But I would say, start there. Leverage your auto campaigns as well. Try to build relevancy. Continue to run the keyword reports from those auto campaigns, see what’s winning and keep your pulse on search volume and just go after a couple of keywords hard for a while and I think that should help build up whatever niche you’re in.

Shivali Patel:

Adam’s question is in terms of testing new strategies like dayparting, do you suggest we start a new campaign or just make tweaks to existing ones?

Matthew:
Yeah, I’m a big fan of keeping existing. I think that the algorithm is going to reward campaigns that have been live longer and there’s going to be more data behind the campaign. You’re going to have just more context to pull from. So I would say, keep your existing campaigns and just continue to iterate off of that. If it’s day parting, in particular, if you’re looking to expand into further testing, then I’d say probably would warrant a new campaign. But for day parting in particular, stick with what has the most data, because then you’ll, when you go to compare what your changes are, you’ll have a much larger sample set to say, did this work versus what we had before? And I think that’s where I would go with it, just in terms of the evaluation part.

Shivali Patel:

If I want to reduce wasted spend on broad campaigns because there’s a lot of wasted spend on single click keywords. Should I start making exact campaigns to harvest my profitable keywords, or should I keep them both running and see what performs better? My main concern is that if I shut off my broad campaigns, my exact campaigns are not going to perform as well.

Matthew:

Yeah, really good question. I mentioned a couple of times. I’m a huge fan of exact match keyword campaigns. I think you have complete control over everything in terms of what’s in your campaigns, what your bids are, so I am a huge proponent of it. I think again, at minimum it’s worth a test. I think broad serves a purpose. I think it can generate keywords. It can kind of help you at least get the product visible.

Whether or not it’s always a one-to-one is a little bit tough to kind of determine. But I would say, look through your broad keywords and what’s being pulled in. Some of them are very, very far off what you want to be. So I would say, pull back on spend. As you’ve kind of developed your PDPs and your content and kind of your relevancy on some of those keywords, I would pull back from that broad and move more into the exact and from a performance standpoint I would expect it to perform well because you are targeting exactly where the sales are coming from at a very prescriptive level. So you then would have complete control over how much money you’re funneling to that and kind of how aggressive you want to be. So I think it’s definitely worth a test at minimum.

Shivali Patel:

Hello Gonzalo. We have how many clicks on a keyword target without sales before closing it, lowering bids or dismissing it?

Matthew:

Yeah, I would say evaluate what keyword it is. If it’s a long tail low search volume term, then I think probably pretty safe to keep the bids either very, very, very low or pause. If it’s a really high priority term for you, I would say stick at it for as long as you can tolerate the cost and see if there’s a way to break through and become more efficient if the auction dynamic changes at all. But I think a lot of it’s going to come down to how high that search volume is on the term, but I would say if it’s driving sales and your desired ROAS is like $3 and you’re at a $2.15 or $2.20, I think it’s worth pursuing it. Again, I say sales is kind of the North Star here. So I would say before pausing anything, evaluate kind of what it’s doing for your business and then move forward from there.

Shivali Patel:

Eric has a question that says for a well-known brand with large global media spend but brand new to Amazon, how would you structure all Amazon campaigns to maximize performance on a $5,000 per day ad spend for five products?

Matthew:

Certainly starting with sponsored product placements, and I would say breaking into the category terms is going to be absolutely critical. If it’s a well-known brand, that brand recognition piece, which is very difficult to build, that box is checked. So I think that’s a huge benefit and then just really trying to find those areas where your shoppers are looking for you is going to be really, really important. So I would skew pretty heavily towards sponsored product category campaigns, probably get an exact match and I would have for your five products five separate campaigns for those, and then I would also layer in some branded campaigns. I think this is going to goes back to which I had about it earlier. But if someone searches for your brand and they don’t see you, that is an immediate missale and obviously not a great shopping experience. So I would say have some branded campaigns as well to layer on. And, depending on what that overall cost is going to be between those two ad types, definitely work in the auto campaigns, keep those low. And then, depending on how much you have left over and if you have creative assets, sponsored brands are going to be huge with, just again, kind of putting those products on display, giving your brand a little bit more of a real feel for people shopping. I know it’s difficult to kind of attain that on Amazon a lot of the times, but lifestyle imaging, sponsor brand videos is something you can leverage as well, and I’ve done a ton of testing with the AI generative media creative within Amazon and I would say, if you don’t have creative, try the AI tool. It’s really, really interesting. I could go on for hours about it, but it’s a really really good way to kind of get some sort of creative live for sponsored brands. So I would say kind of to kind of recap that, definitely sponsored product category campaigns, one, followed by some smaller budget branded campaigns with auto campaigns, and then expand to sponsor brand if you have the budget for it.

Shivali Patel:

Do you use any software for automation, such as Adtomic? If yes, what are the basic rules and criteria you suggest for creating any sort of automatic updates?

Matthew:

So I personally use Pacvue and the automation tools within that are, again, fantastic. There’s a bunch of different ways you can go about, I think, automation in general. But I would say, make sure that your goal is very, very clear. It’s just kind of blanketed statements for automation in general. Make sure your goals are very, very clear and always have that safeguard of if you’re going to increase bids to a certain point, make sure that there’s a cap on it. The last thing you want is to have, check your ads console and all of a sudden your bids are $40-$50 because that automation continued to increase based on the threshold you set. So make sure there’s some safeguards in place. But for Adtomic I can’t speak to Adtomic in particular, but for Pacvue overall there’s a whole litany of automations that are used for profitability, for weeks of cover, for impression gaining, for new-to-brand driving. So I think that it’s an endless kind of whole of test and learn, potential and all kinds of good stuff. So I would say test, test, test for automations for sure.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, and when you’re inside of Helium 10, it’s the same exact thing when you’re setting up those rules. I know we’ve talked quite a bit about goal setting here today and that definitely is true even inside of Adtomic. When you’re doing your rules, it’s going to really depend on what niche you’re inside of and what your risk tolerance is, how much budget you have, what you’re bidding on your keywords, and then you can go in and decide from there. I mean I know that as a standard I’ve gone in and done 20 clicks, no sales, you’re negative matching that keyword. So it really just depends. But Adtomic certainly has ways that you can put in those rules and automation, so you’re not spending so much time on trying to audit your entire campaigns. So with that, we’ve had a really great list of questions here today and I apologize if I didn’t get to some of the newer ones, in which case we have a Facebook group. So make sure that you guys go to our Facebook group, you go to Helium 10 members and post up any of those questions that you really have, because we are active in there and we do answer those questions and if not, somebody else definitely can. So make sure you guys are tapped into our communities, and thank you so much, Matt, for being here. We appreciate you coming on and sharing your time and knowledge.

Matthew:

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me and hopefully got to the bulk of the questions for everybody. Yeah, it was a treat to be here. I appreciate it.

Shivali Patel:

Likewise. Likewise, All right with that, we are done. We will see you guys next time, Take care.

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