4 Ways to Get Your PPC Campaigns in Shape For the Holidays (+ Bonus Advertising Resources!)

It’s officially the holiday selling season! Double the traffic on Amazon means potentially double the sales for your listing, if you know how to play your PPC advertising cards correctly. 

Recently Helium 10’s own Vince Montero sat down with Amazon Ads Business Development Representative Bret Darby to go over a few of Q4’s essential ad adjustments, best practices, and PPC reminders to help sellers capitalize on the holiday shopping surge.

If you missed the webinar catch the replay here ‒ It’s only available for the next 30 days!

How to Make a Successful Holiday Marketing Plan

While the topics included here are important reminders to keep top of mind heading into the holidays, a long-term PPC strategy requires constant adjusting and optimizing. 

Want monthly PPC sessions designed to give you the best Amazon PPC tips straight from expert Amazon advertisers? Join Vince Montero for TACoS Tuesday to get all your PPC questions answered.

Want to teach yourself how to optimize PPC for a scaling business with dedicated video modules to walk you through every step of the way? The Amazon PPC Academy has everything you need to learn the most advanced PPC strategies using today’s cutting-edge advertising tools.

On to the holiday PPC prep!

1. Control Your Budgets 

Schedule your budgets ahead of time!

Use insights from last year (Helium 10’s PPC management tool, Adtomic, saves up to 2 years’ worth of data.) If you’re a newer seller without a long advertising history, take into consideration your spend from the last few months. Prepare for about double the amount of clicks that you normally get over the holidays.

Holiday Planning
Goal: Expand 

Increase budget on Sponsored Ads by 50%. Maintain branded keyword investment on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday
Goal: Promote

Maintain an increase for Sponsored Ads for keywords driving the most traffic. Adjust branded keyword investment based on historical performance.

Holiday Stretch
Goal: Outlast the competition that drops off

Allocate enough of your budget to get last-minute shoppers (up to 2 days before Christmas.) Track your competitors and increase budgets accordingly.

Leverage Budget Rules 

Utilize budget rules within Amazon Ads to help manage Sponsored Product campaigns. This allows you to set rules to increase daily budgets for shopping events automatically, saving you a ton of time. These rules can either be schedule-based, for custom time periods/special events or performance-based, for budget adjustments based on your campaigns meeting a specific threshold before triggering. 

Use Amazon’s preset budgets, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, to automatically increase your campaign budget. You can use their recommended percentage or enter your own custom percentage.

2. Adjust Your ACoS Strategy

Your goal is to remain profitable on your PPC campaigns, especially during the holidays. In order to do this, you must know what your “break-even” ACoS is. In other words, at what point will you start LOSING money from advertising after product costs and fees? Once you know this, you may want to make this your target ACoS over the holidays. But why?

PPC on Amazon is about more than just advertising sales. It represents a larger marketing effort and branding effect on shoppers. More brand visibility via PPC ads means more brand recognition the next time a shopper is searching for a product which could result in higher organic sales. 

With this understanding, we should consider additional metrics to get a better handle on how successful our advertising efforts really are. This is where TACoS comes into play.

ACoS vs. TACoS 

ACoS (advertising cost of sale): PPC Spend / PPC Sales 

TACoS (TOTAL advertising cost of sale): PPC Spend / TOTAL Sales (organic + PPC sales)

Ok, I want to know my TACoS… how do I see it?

Helium 10’s Adtomic makes TACoS front and center for your products, helping you always have the correct, big-picture context for your PPC strategy. 

Tip: A product with a lower TACoS can always afford additional budget toward its PPC campaigns! 

3. Optimize Your Targets

Get clear insights into your search terms – they’re the lifeblood of your PPC campaigns! Search terms are the touchpoint for the customer and one of the most important indicators of actual advertising performance. 

The Search Term Detail Page in Adtomic allows you to look at search term performance over time across your entire account.

Easily visualize how a specific search term is performing across all of your keywords.

The Keyword Detail Page is another way to get important targets/keywords in an account. Adtomic’s Analytics page already provides sophisticated insights into keyword performance, but the Keyword Details Page takes it a step further. 

Now you can easily visualize how specific keyword bids performed across all of your keyword targets.

4. Leverage Hourly Data

Drill down into your campaigns to review trends that may help optimize your campaigns.

Have you ever wondered:

• What hour of the day is your ACoS lowest? 
• Does shopper behavior change for your product over the weekend? 
• When do you get the most traffic? 
• How long does it take customers, on average, to convert after clicking on an ad?

With newly added hourly data in Adtomic, you can now more easily answer these questions and more! Reviewing hourly performance can help unlock new levels of ad campaign efficiency that your competitors do not have access to.

“Schedules” is the latest feature in Adtomic that integrates hourly campaign data so that dayparting can be implemented. Targeting the best-performing hours of the day that your campaigns perform will be vital during the holiday season and beyond. 

Last-Minute Holiday Tips

Newly launched video campaigns. Use Sponsored Display Video – this is a high-converting ad type on Amazon that can be used to tell your brand story; available to Brand Registered sellers

Creating a Video Ad? 

Show your product quickly (within the first second!) and keep things brief. Optimal video length should be between 15-30 seconds, delivering a handful of selling points in a digestible way. 

Your video should be just as effective without sound as it is with sound. Make sure it’s visually readable. Consider looping – your video ad will loop. Think about creating an end card to give the video breathing room, or get creative and make it a seamless loop!

Dynamic Bids. For established campaigns, test Dynamic Bids – up and down. This will help to account for the volatile changes in the bid prices during the holidays. It gives Amazon the ability to increase your bid by up to 100% for placements more likely to convert!

When you select this under your Campaign Settings, Amazon will increase your bids in real-time for clicks that may be more likely to convert to a sale and reduce them for clicks that are less likely to result in a sale.

Coupons. Not only do coupons drive more traffic to your listing because they draw shopper attention, but they are available to all Amazon sellers. The green coupon badge can be seen on different campaign images and dramatically increase click through rate (CTR.) 

There are costs associated with coupons, so set aside a “mini budget” for coupons and make sure you’re not straying outside your budget. We recommend scheduling coupons for a single product or set of products during the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

Last Chance to Get Helium 10 Diamond Before the Holidays!

As a special treat for sellers looking for ways to give their brand a dramatic last-minute boost before the holiday rush, take 20% off 6 months of Diamond, which includes the Amazon PPC Academy ( A full 30+ video PPC training course!) 

Sign Up For Helium 10 Diamond
Promo code: CHEERS22 

Valid only until Sunday 11/13/22

Happy selling season!