Amazon PPC Best Practices

Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint podcast. Yeah, Amazon PPC best practices. In this episode, I am going to walk through all the best practices that you guys need to know on Amazon PPC advertising. My name is Mina Elias. I’m the founder of Trivium Group, which is an Amazon advertising agency.

We run about 150 brands right now, 80 employees starting in 2021. I’ve been on Amazon on since 2018, grew and scaled my own supplement brand. And I will walk you through everything that I’ve learned in terms of best practices for Amazon advertising. So welcome back to the show. This is the Amazon blueprint where I will show you everything that you need to do tactically, step by step, to succeed on Amazon.

So first things first, Amazon advertising, the most important thing is picking a single goal. A lot of people I know are either scaling, optimizing bids, doing all this stuff and mixing things all of the time. So think about this. If you increase the bid of a keyword and then decrease the bid of another keyword, and then your total sales change, how do you know what caused what? It’s very difficult to tell, especially when you extrapolate that to a lot of different keywords.

So let’s say you pick 50 keywords where the ACoS is too high and you lower the bids, and then you pick 40 keywords where the ACoS is very low and you want to increase the bids and basically get more traffic to those keywords. You basically move things in two different directions. And then the only thing that you can tell is working. Because here’s the thing, and this is the first misconception about Amazon advertising, is that Amazon PPC sales are inaccurate. I guess the misconception is that Amazon PPC sales are accurate, but Amazon PPC sales are not accurate.

And you could test this yourself. Right now. I want you to go into one of your campaigns, for example, it’s spending $100 and it’s making $200 in sales. 2X ROAS. Not that good, right?

50% ACoS. Pause that campaign. You should hypothetically only lose $200 in sales. But what you will notice is you’re going to lose more and you’re going to be like, well, why am I losing more? Well, the reason is Amazon is incorrectly attributing sales.

And I figured this out a very long time ago. I’ve been split, testing a million different things. I come from like a chemistry background where we did a lot of controlled experiments and changing one variable at a time. And so by changing one thing at a time, I was able to figure out that all of these changes and all these things pointed into one answer, one solution, that ACoS and PPC sales are not accurate. So looking at those numbers don’t help.

So what happens is you start increasing bids and then decreasing bids at the same time to different keywords, expecting that the ACoS for each of those keywords is going to guide you and tell you, oh, this keyword has a good ACoS, this keyword has a bad ACoS, and you feel like you’re making progress. But then you go look at your total sales and you look at your profits and they’re not improving. And that’s where the problem lies. The problem lies in that you have data like ACoS and conversion rate of the keywords and click through rate of the keywords and then you’re making decisions. But you can only tell the result of those decisions on total sales because you can notice that all of your PPC sales have gone up but your total sales have not changed.

And then you’re like, okay, well, what was the point of that? I basically increased my PPC sales, but my quote unquote organic sales went down. But actually they didn’t. The mix is the mix. We’re not really sure of the mix, but what we know is the total sales didn’t change.

So stop looking at PPC sales. Start focus on total sales and profits. Profit is the most important one. But then pick a single goal. So if you are focused on scaling, you’re like, okay, I’m spending $100 a day, I’m going to go to $150 a day.

I’m going to take all of the actions that I can take to increase my spend as profitably as possible. And so maybe you’re increasing bids for profitable keywords, increasing budgets of your campaigns, launching new campaigns for profitable search terms that you found in the search term report, but you’re not already targeting. So things like that. Now, the one exception to the rule I will say is don’t bleed. So if you are spending money and not making sales on certain keywords and search terms, pause them or add them as negative.

So if you spent 15, $20 and didn’t make a sale, you don’t need to say, okay, I’m in the scaling phase. I’m going to keep bleeding on those keywords before I pause them. You can add them as negative if they’re in the search term, if they’re an auto, broader phrase, or you can pause them because you just don’t want to bleed. But that’s the only exception. Besides that, I’m picking a single goal and a single focus.

And I’m saying, okay, I’m scaling, so what am I doing? I’m increasing bids, increasing budgets, increasing bid by placement, launching new campaigns, launching different match types, launching different campaigns, like different types of ads, basically like video, sponsored brand, sponsored display. And I will talk about sponsored brand and sponsored display in a bit because there’s a big caveat here and it’s something that I want you to be aware of because you might end up spending a lot more money and not making any more sales. So I’ll talk about that later. But for now, pick a single goal.

So you’re either scaling or you’re optimizing for profit. When you’re scaling, you’re again increasing bids. You’re basically trying to increase your ad spend, increase sessions coming into your listing and increase your revenue. And hopefully your profit stays the same or maybe drops a little bit. The reason that your profit is going to drop a little bit is because you’re launching new campaigns, you’re increasing bids, whatever.

Some of that stuff might not be profitable, so you might increase your revenue. But let’s say that you spent $50 more on ads a day and $20 were profitable and they got good results. And the other 30, maybe 20 of them were like, and ten of them were pretty bad. So that 30 is not doing that well. If you pause that 30 and you keep the 20 that worked, now you went from 100 to 120 and that’s profitable.

So going from one profitable point to another profitable point, you pass through an unprofitable phase or a phase where you will lose some of your profits. So number one, pick a single goal. Number two, let’s talk about campaign structure. So campaign structure is, I like to start with a campaign with a budget of at least $100. So the reason that I start with a bigger budget is I’ve noticed smaller budgets end up throttling results and a campaign with good results and low budget ends up not performing as well or a campaign that’s not performing as well.

When I increase the budgets and lower the bids, whatever, try and get it to perform better, it ends up performing better because I don’t know why, right. But this is obviously through a lot of trial and error. But my theory is that Amazon sees that you have a lot more breathing room and it could get you a lot more clicks. So it goes and starts finding you more and more clicks that are better. Now if you have $100 a day budget, it does not mean you’re going to spend $100.

It’s not like Facebook or Google. Whatever you set as a budget, it spends it. It’s all based on your bid because you can have $1,000 campaign budget and then a $0.2 bid on a keyword and it’s not going to spend or a $0.2 bid. It’s not going to spend because you’re going to be the last person, you’re going to be in the last page of Amazon sponsored product and you’re just basically not going to show up. No one’s going to click on you.

So the bid affects what position you show up in, and then what position you show up in affects how many people see you and how many people click on you based on your click through rate. So with that being said, $100 minimum campaign budget, one ad group per campaign. So that’s the second part of the campaign structure. I don’t like to do more than one ad group. And I would love if Amazon developed a way where we can have ad group level budgets so I can have a campaign and then let’s say four ad groups and ad group one has $100.

Ad group two has $100. But that’s not the case. The case is you have a campaign and it’s $100 budget and then if you put three ad groups, you think that it’s going to be $33 per ad group. Or let’s say you have two ad groups, it’s going to be $50 per ad group. But that’s not the case.

The case is it splits unevenly. So you’ll have one that has 33, one that has 50, and then one that has whatever the remaining. It’s weird the way that it works. And I don’t know why the budget splits unevenly. But at the end of the day, you don’t want the budget to split and go more to the ad group.

That’s not performing as well. Because here’s the thing. Amazon, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t care as much about how profitable your sales are, but more about your velocity of sales. So think about this. You have two ad groups split and you have $100 budget.

What happens is you might have one ad group with a 7X RoAS, really good for every dollar you get $7 in sales and then another one that has a 2X RoAS or 1X RoAS, but is getting you a lot more sales. Like you’re spending $100, you’re making $100 in sales. This other one, you’re spending $10 and you’re making 70 in sales. Obviously, you want to send more money to the other one that’s getting you the 7X RoAS. But Amazon might send more money to the one that’s with the 2x RoAS because the velocity is higher.

You’re getting more overall sales. And at the end of the day, Amazon is trying to make you sell more. It doesn’t really care if your ad spend is profitable or not. You make more sales. They make more money because they’re fulfilling and they’re getting a 15% commission.

So if I was a business that was Amazon and running ads and basically getting people to sell stuff, I’m going to sell the most amount of units. I don’t care if it’s profitable based on advertising or not because I’m getting paid on every single unit that you sell. So single campaign, single ad group. Right? One ad group.

And then the final piece of the puzzle is the number of keywords or the number of targets. I like to not exceed five. Now, five is a number that I made up. There’s no rule to it. But what you can do is you can go in and observe, go into all of your ad groups, open up and look at how many keywords you have.

And let’s say you have a bunch of ad groups that have 1015, 2050 keywords. You can sort by sales or sort by spend. And you’ll notice that obviously the top keywords get the most sales and get the most spend and all of the bottom ones aren’t getting anything. So if you have 50 keywords in a campaign, and let’s say the bottom 30, they’re not getting any ad spend, what’s the point of having them in that campaign? They’re essentially nonexistent.

They’re not running. And that could be detrimental. When you have 50, let’s say you have 30 keywords right out of the 50 that are not getting ad spend. But those 30 keywords are actually super profitable. So if you took those keywords out and put them five per campaign, four per campaign, whatever, they end up getting budget, their budget is not being hogged by the top keywords at the top.

Because think about it. If you have $100 budget and you’re going to actually spend $100 a day and your cost per click is $0.50, that’s 200 clicks. So if you have 50 keywords, 200 clicks, that’s four clicks per keyword per day, that’s not much. So that’s what you have to think about is Amazon is looking at like, okay, I’m not going to distribute all these four clicks a keyword, I’m going to find the one that’s going to generate the most traffic, put the majority of the spend there. That one is most likely to get me sales or get you sales, which is going to get them sales.

And so that is probably the way that Amazon’s thinking about it. Again, I don’t know. I don’t work at Amazon. I don’t really know the ins of their algorithm. If anyone says that they do, they’re lying to you.

No one really knows. And Amazon’s always changing. But anecdotally, based on the work that I’m doing and the things that I’m seeing in front of me, is that you want to not have that many keywords per campaign. I like to do five or less. Sometimes I’ll have five keywords per campaign and then two of them are getting all the spend and the other ones aren’t.

So then I’ll take those two out or those three out that are not getting any spend and put them in their own campaign. So campaign structure, to summarize, you want at least $100 campaign budget, one campaign, one ad group, and no more than five keywords or five targets. Then from there, the next thing that I want to talk about is changes in placements. Bid by placement is cool, right? Because a lot of people see you can increase your bid by placement for top of search, meaning let’s say that I have a dollar bid and I noticed the top of search is performing well.

I can do a 50% bid by placement, meaning I’m okay spending up to a dollar 50, which is 50% more than my bid. If I’m going to show up on page one. So the top of search and page one, so only if I show up top of search, page one, then I’ll spend a dollar 50. But if not, then my max bid is a dollar. So people love that because they’re like, oh, top of search, top of search.

Here’s the thing, big increases in bid by placement, top of search sometimes hurt you. And the reason is top of search has a lot of click through rate and a lot more traffic. But it could also be a place for a lot of window shoppers and that’s something that you want to avoid. You don’t want a lot of window shoppers because those people will get you clicks but not essentially not get you sales, your conversion rate will go down. And what will happen is if you show up and you have on your top of search and you’re getting a lower conversion rate, your organic rank might start falling.

So this is an example of something that happened. We were on position four ads, so we were the fourth top position on the top of the page for ads and we were basically position six or something organic. And then our client was like, we need to be more aggressive. We need to be number one. So we increased the bids, increased the bid by placement and all this kind of stuff and we started showing up as position one.

But what happened was because position one gets so many clicks but it’s low intent buyers, we got way more traffic, way more sessions from that keyword, but our conversion rate dropped and as a result our organic rank dropped and that resulted in our total sales going down because we started getting less qualified traffic. And our free traffic, which is coming from organic, took a hit because we moved from position six or something to position 15 and it was a losing situation for us. So something to keep in mind with placements next single keyword ranking campaigns. So another best practice is to utilize single keyword ranking campaigns. We just talked about campaign structure, one campaign, one ad group and then up to five keywords.

However, if you’re trying to invest in increasing the rank of your keywords organically, you might want to do a single keyword campaign. So you just put one keyword in that campaign, $100 budget, increase the bid accordingly. Obviously you’re going to change the bids with how much you want to spend. Maybe at a dollar bid you’re spending $30 a day and then at a dollar 50 bid you’re spending $60 a day. You have to figure out how much you’re okay spending based on how profitable this keyword is and how your total sales are increasing with that change.

But then from there you can track your organic rank before launch a single keyword campaign and then follow your organic rank and watch it increase. But organic rank isn’t the most important thing here. The most important thing is looking at the search query performance report, looking at how your impressions are increasing with that single keyword campaign, making sure that you’re getting more clicks and more add to carts and overall more purchases. Because if my rank goes from position 17 to position four but I look at my purchases and they went from 15 to 17, that’s not good because I probably spent a shitload of money trying to rank my keyword a lot higher. But overall it didn’t get me more sales and we were never able to tell this.

We were only able to track organic rank in the past, but now that we have search query performance report, you can actually tell if you’re making more sales from a keyword or not.

Next, small bid adjustments. A lot of people make this mistake and they have a keyword and the ACoS is 100% and they’re like, oh my God, this is not profitable. And they go from a dollar bid to 50 cent bid because they think maybe I’m going to cut my bid by 50%. My ACoS might go down by 50% from 100 to 50 or whatever. And I see some people on the Internet typing up all these equations and you take your cost per click times the target RoAS and divided by this and that.

All this bullshit. It’s all bullshit in my opinion. I don’t think any of it matters because the only thing that you can do with Amazon advertising is iterate. Iterate basically means it’s like you walk in the shower, you turn on the hot water, you put your hand in the hot water, it’s too hot. You turn the knob a little bit colder, you put your hand, it’s too cold, you turn it back now it’s like the perfect temperature.

And that’s how Amazon advertising works, essentially. The reason is it’s very dynamic. It’s human behavior, which is completely unpredictable. So you don’t want to change bids drastically. You don’t want to go from a dollar to a dollar, $50 to $2.

The way I like to do it is very small, but frequent changes. So you can go from a dollar to a dollar and every two or three days. And by doing that, you’re basically getting this constant feedback loop that’s telling you is your decision right or wrong. And it’s like the small adjustments of the shower. Instead of putting your hand in the hot water, you’re like, oh my God, this is too hot.

And then you turn it all the way, and now it’s freezing cold. And then you turn it back all the way, now it’s freezing hot. And the second thing is, if you have a keyword that’s making sales and the ecosystem too high and you lower the bids too much, what’s going to end up happening is you might lose all the sales and then you’re trying to increase the bids again to recover them to get some sales. When if you iterate it slowly and you change the bid slowly, maybe you were in position seven and that wasn’t good. You went to 911 1213, and at 13, that’s the sweet spot.

Instead of going from position seven to position 28 and then back to position 15, then to position 22 and then up to position seven and you’re bouncing all over the place. So small incremental changes and bid adjustments will be a lot better than big changes or ever trying to calculate some sort of formula. I recommend you stay away from formulas and just small tweaks should do the job. Now, the next best practice I want to talk about is optimizing frequently. Amazon advertising is something that I like to optimize frequently.

Again, small changes and frequently as opposed to once a week with bigger changes. And the reason is again, it’s a lot of iteration. And the thing I’m trying to do is I’m trying to change a small subset of things and then get a result. Get a quick result. Okay, I changed a small number of things here.

My total sales are better. Cool. I changed a small number of things here, my total sales are worse. Okay, change it back. That’s what I’m trying to get at as opposed to making a bunch of changes.

This is why again, AI, people talk about AI and all this stuff and I’m like, bro, first of all, AI is never going to work in this situation. It can work to prevent some unreasonable stuff like spending too much money or whatever. But think about this. You can’t change the bids multiple times a day because you will not get enough data to tell you if that change was good or not good. So that’s number one.

And then number two, if you change 1000 things a day, how can you tell if it worked or didn’t work when PPC sales and all of this stuff is all mixed up and then you have to look at one number at the end, which is total sales. So you go in, it’s like the dj set, right? You go in, the final thing that you can hear is the noise, right? You can see the gain and all this stuff. But at the end of the day you’re hearing what the music is.

So if I change 45 knobs all in one day at once, and then I’m like, okay, now the music sounds bad. Okay, I changed so many things. How am I going to figure out what caused what as opposed to changing a small thing, okay, I’m going to increase this, decrease this, okay, cool. It’s a little bit better or it’s a little bit worse. I can change some things back or adjust some things and I can start identifying what’s resulting in what and actually be able to take advantage of manipulating my advertising as opposed to making a million changes like AI, as opposed to claiming that they’re making so many changes and they’re going to improve your ads when it’s impossible to evaluate the results of all of those changes.

Next, understand if it is a conversion rate problem. So one of Amazon PPC best practices is if you think that PPC is the problem, but it’s actually conversion rate that’s the problem. That’s going to be a huge issue. So the best practice is to always be evaluating is conversion rate what’s holding you back? Or is it actually your PPC?

And the best way to figure this out is to basically understand how is all my campaigns doing from an ego’s eye view, like a broad view, how are they all doing if they’re all not doing that good or they’re all averaging a little bit too high of an ACoS spending too much than you actually want? It might be a conversion rate problem because you can go and look at your unit session percentage, which is your conversion rate in your business reports, and let’s say it’s like 13%. If you take that 13 and you make it a 20 20%, which is normal for some categories, or maybe you’re at a 6% and you take it to a 12% which is again very achievable. All of your performance of all of your campaigns, I mean, hypothetically, it should double. Now here’s why it improves so much.

First of all, all of your PPC starts performing better because those same clicks and sessions that PPC generated double the amount start converting. So you spent $10 and you made one sale, which is a $20 sale versus you spent $10 and you made $40 in sales double. So you go from a 2X RoAS to a 4X RoAS or a 50% ACoS to a 25% ACoS. So the changes that you make in your conversion rate can have a huge impact on your PPC. And then the main factors that affect conversion rate are going to be price and reviews are big ones.

And then your main image, which affects your click through rate too. And then your listing images, your a plus content, your SEO title bullet points, if you have videos on the listing, if you have premium, a plus and a brand story, those things will all improve your conversion rate. So as much energy and effort that you put into your PPC, you should be putting into improving your conversion rate. Because as you improve your conversion rate, all of your PPC will perform better. And then not only that, also your organic will perform better.

Like let’s say you’re getting 100 sales organic and 100 sales PPC. Now you’re getting 200 sales organic, 200 sales PPC. That additional organic sales also improves your overall spend. So when you look at your total return on ad spend, so you’re spending $100, making $200 in PPC sales and $200 in organic sales. That’s a 4X total RoAS.

You go from a 4X to an 8X total ROaS because you’re spending 100 and now you’re making 800, 404 hundred. And you can see that’s pretty significant. So it’s not just that your PPC is improving, your organic is also improving, and your overall sales are improving in terms of also your total roas, your return on each dollar that you’re spending is much, much better. Next, adding negatives. For me, negatives is reserved for auto, broad and phrase campaigns and expanded asin.

And the reason is, let’s say an auto campaign, or a better example, let’s say a broad campaign, you go and you have a keyword like electrolyte powder. That’s a broad keyword. It might start triggering for keywords like electrolyte supplement, electrolyte powder for women, electrolyte powder, orange electrolyte powder, sugar free, different keywords. And then I go, and I go into the search term report and I look at those keywords and let’s say like two of those keywords are doing very well. Again, very well.

Means their conversion rate is good, their ACoS is good. And like I said, the ACoS metrics is not that accurate, but it’s all we have to go off of, unfortunately. So I’m looking at those keywords, I’m like, okay, these two keywords are doing well, but those other two keywords all triggering for that same keyword, electrolyte powder, are doing bad. They’re spending $15 in no sales and $20 in no sales. And then when I look at the entire keyword at a glance.

So that single broad keyword, it’s spending $30 and making $45 in sales, but actually 20 of those $30 are spent on those bad keywords that are not making any sales. And then ten of those dollars are spent on the good keywords and they’re doing 45 in sales. So I actually have a four and a half x row, as if I excluded those bad ones. So that’s where I start using negative keywords. And I basically go into the search term report, highlight everything, sort and filter sort by auto, broaden phrase keywords, and then click on sales equals zero or orders equals zero.

And then I’ll have some sort of criteria. So the criteria for me is like greater than $15 in spending no sales that immediately needs to be negated. And that’s something that I’m doing regularly because obviously I don’t want those keywords to keep spending. If you tell me how did you get the $15? For me, it’s usually like 50% of my sale price, my product sale price or more, I’m going to add it as a negative.

And the way that I look at it is 50% of my sale price. That’s a 50% ACoS. So if it spent 15.2 and made a sale, that’s about a 50% ACoS. And for me, that’s starting to get on the high side. Knowing my campaigns and knowing that my campaigns generally operate, let’s say, at 30% ACoS.

And again, you don’t want to choke too much. You can maybe start at like 75% instead of 50% of your sale price. I always like to start less conservative and then tighten up over the time as I get data. But anyways, set that criteria and then figure out what those keywords are, extract them, and then go into the campaigns and add them as negatives. And then obviously you can do the same thing for not just the keywords that didn’t spend, but the keywords that had a very high ACoS.

So let’s say an acos over 90% or more. Those keywords. The key here is make sure that those keywords are keywords that are not generating a lot of sales. So if they’re, let’s say, generating a lot of sales and have a high ecos, I would leave those for later because they could be generating a lot of sales and those sales are resulting in organic sales, or maybe they’re not being attributed correctly and it’s actually adding to your bottom line pretty well. But you pause that or negative that, one keyword that is generating a lot of sales and you end up losing more than what was being attributed.

So you’re spending $100, making $100 in sales, you negative that keyword and you end up losing $200 in sales and you’re like, what the hell? Why did that happen? I should have only lost 100. Well, maybe it was contributing to sales organically or they were just not being attributed. So that’s the way that I would do negative keywords.

Best practice next, launching new campaigns. So alternatively, instead of just doing the negative keywords, I’m going to go into the search term report, highlight everything, sort and filter, and then I’m going to show only auto broaden phrase. So these are the keywords. Again, search terms that appeared in the results that I’m not actively targeting or potentially not actively targeting. And then I’ll do another filter.

So maybe ACoS between one to 20% and now I have keywords between one to 20% and you can add another filter which is like, let’s say orders are two or more because maybe a one time order was a fluke. So you could do two orders or more equals one to 20%. And now that I have all of that, I’m extracting those keywords and launching them in the match types that I don’t already have running. So let’s say I find a keyword electrolyte supplement, but it’s already running in exact. I’m going to launch it in broad and phrase but I’m not going to relaunch it in exact because that would be duplicating.

Guys, if you don’t know how to do this deduplication, just message me or go to triviumco.com. We have a toolbox which has all of our macros and all of our sheets. And basically it’s an excel sheet. You can download it, put your bulk sheet, put your search term report, put the criteria and it will extract all of the search terms and tell you in each match type that it’s unique in. So you can take that and then launch campaigns.

And then there’s also campaign builder. So you can take those keywords, put them in a know, put the bids all at once and then click a button and it creates all the campaigns ready to upload to Amazon. So I’ll make your life know. Just ask me next best practice. Do not pause performing keywords.

So a lot of people talk about graduating keywords, which basically means you’re on auto campaign or a broader phrase. And then there’s a keyword in there that performs well. So you pause it in that campaign and graduate it to an exact match campaign. Now this is the worst thing you could ever do. You can never replicate anything on Amazon.

I’m telling you, you can either listen to me or you can lose a shitload of money like I did and then listen to me. But you can’t replicate anything on Amazon. So if something is working, you never touch it, you never pause it, you never want to negate it or anything like that. You want to make sure that it’s always running. So make sure that if a keyword is profitable, don’t pause it.

In auto broaden phrase if you want, just take that keyword and run it in the match types that it’s not running in. So if you find that keyword, let’s say it’s a broad campaign, I’m running electrolyte powder and it’s electrolyte supplements for women. That one super profitable, take that keyword and launch it in different match types. Launch it in broad phrase and exact doesn’t matter. People are going to say, well what if they compete?

And I don’t think they’re going to compete. I’ll tell you why. Because when you have a keyword in broad, it is basically one keyword that’s showing up with a bunch of other keywords. It’s a combo pack. So electrolyte powder is triggering for 50 different keywords.

And anyways, if I have $100 budget and it’s a dollar cost per click, I’m going to get maybe max 100 clicks that day. Let’s say 50 probably because you’re never going to spend your entire campaign budget unless your bid is really high. So I have 50 clicks and across 50 keywords that are showing up at different times, I’m basically going to get one click from that keyword. But if I put it into exact, it’s showing up all the time. If I put it into phrase, it’s showing up maybe one in 30 times.

So the instance where they all compete with each other is incredibly rare. Probably never happens. Next, do not pause. Next, do not mix match types. This is another thing that I see all the time is people mixing in broad phrase and exact match types in their campaigns.

The reason that I would avoid that is Amazon sends budget and know the traffic to the keywords that generate more traffic. So if I have three keywords in there, one is exact, one is broad, one is phrase. The broad is generally going to drive more traffic because it can trigger for more different keywords. So let’s say that you put the search term as electrolyte supplement for women which has 1000 searches a month. But if it’s broad it can trigger for all these other, it could trigger for electrolyte powder for women which might have 5000 searches and it could trigger for this other one that has 10,000 searches a month.

So it has the ability to show up more for keywords that are more searched versus exact can’t. And so what will happen is when you mix the match types, you see the budget all go to that broad keyword or whatever. The keyword with the most traffic, the highest search volume, which is the biggest match type, usually broad and then not enough in the exact. Meanwhile, if the exact had gotten the budget, maybe it performed the best, or maybe the phrase one would have performed the best, but the budget is hogged by the broad because it has the most likelihood of generating sales. Doesn’t mean profitable sales, just means a lot of sales because higher traffic.

And then the other best practice is then if we’re not doing it for broad phrase and exact, we also don’t want to do it for keywords that have very large deferring search volume. So don’t put a keyword with 30,000 searches, with a keyword with 2000 searches a month because the same thing is going to happen. Amazon is going to divert all the budget to the one with the higher search volume because it has more likelihood of converting even though it might not be profitably. And the other one, when given a chance in its own campaign, will probably convert a lot more profitably. Now best practices now, best practices on how to handle variations.

This one is important because it took me a while to figure out, but if you have a product with multiple variations, here’s what I found. You want to initially put all of the variations in the campaign. So you’re launching a campaign and you’re going to add all the variations. So let’s say you have different flavors, different colors, different whatever, you’re going to put them all in that campaign. And then later on, once you have some data, you’re going to go and look at the different variations.

So open up the campaign and then click on the ads. Open up the ad group, click on the ads. It’ll show you. Here’s your different variations and you can see which one is getting the best click through rate. Now you want to find the one that gets the most impressions and the most click through rate combination.

So one that gets like 20 impressions and has like a 0.9% click through rate versus one that has like 15,000 impressions and a 0.7% click through rate. The one with the more impressions is going to be better because obviously when you have a lot less impressions, click through rate could look higher. So you want to find that balance of like it has a lot of impressions and the highest click through rate and that’s the one that you want to run. Now you’ll see. I didn’t talk about sales and I didn’t talk about roas or ecos or whatever because the main goal is just to bring people into the listing.

That’s the whole purpose of ads, is just to bring them into the listing. Once they’re in the listing, they’re going to see all the variations and they’re going to choose the one that fits them the best. So they might come in because they saw the chocolate, but they’re like, oh, mocha, I love mocha, I’m going to buy the mocha. Or oh, like strawberry banana. I love strawberry.

But it might be like strawberry banana. That sucks. But the chocolate one might have the best click through rate, maybe not the best sales because you have a lot of flavors, but it’s getting you the most people into the listing, which is what you want. So you’re going to have to do this one campaign at a time and basically pause the other variations and keep the one with the best click through rate and the largest amount of traffic because that’s probably the one that’s going to help you get the most amount of people into the listing and then they can choose which variation that they want.

Now, finally, the final best practice for Amazon, PPC is constantly, you know, I want you to always look at your ads and constantly tweak them because what worked yesterday might not be working today, might not be working tomorrow. What worked today might not work tomorrow. And so on Amazon, you’re kind of always chasing, you’re always chasing the goal. You increase the bids, it performs well. Now it’s not performing.

So you decrease the bids, increase the bids again, launch this, pause this, launch it again, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a constant iterative process. As long as you’re making small changes, not launching too many things at once, not adjusting too many bids, not making any drastic changes, any of that stuff, you’ll be fine. And so constantly iterate. And again, remember, PPC sales and acos, those things are not real.

If they’re the only thing that you can use, like it’s a keyword and you have to optimize the bid. And you’re like, okay, if it has a high ACoS, I’m going to lower the bid. Low ACoS, increase the bid, fine, because we have nothing else. But at the end of the day, track your profit. This is probably another best practice.

Track your profit. Your profit is what matters. Your revenue doesn’t matter. Your ecos doesn’t matter. Your tacos doesn’t matter.

All of these things don’t matter. Your profit is what matters. Your profit is your bottom line. That’s what’s going to get transferred into your bank account. So make sure that you’re tracking that.

And as you make changes, that number is going up. Unless you’re going through a scaling phase and you know it’s going to go down for a while, but revenue and sessions are going to go up. That’s fine as long as when you optimize, that number goes higher than it was before. And that’s it, guys. So thanks for tuning in.

If you want me to talk about anything specific, please hit me up. You can find me on Instagram at the Mina Elias or also, you know, head on over to our website, triviumco.com. We do free audits, free audits of your entire Amazon account. I’m talking about listing images, SEO, your PPC. I can give you feedback back on everything that you’re doing and how to improve it.

We’re here to help. If there’s anything that we can do to help, let us know if there’s any guides or any tools or anything you want me to add to the toolbox, I’m happy to do it. Make sure to check that out. All right, guys, take it easy.