Amazon PPC Tips for Advanced Sellers 2024

Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint podcast.

So you’re an experienced seller on Amazon and you’re looking to take your Amazon PPC to the next level. You came to the right place. I’m going to share with you three incredible Amazon PPC tips that are to take your account to the next level. This is stuff that not a lot of people talk about. And after tip number three, I’m going to share with you an insane tool that I’ve developed that will change the way that you look at your advert.

All right, tip number one, using sponsored brand for coverage where you don’t have sponsored products or organic ranking successfully. Now, I know there’s a lot of gurus out there that talk about sponsored brand, use headline search ads, use video, use them, use them, use them. Here’s the problem. Cannibalization. What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you have a high sponsored rank and you also have a high organic rank. So I’m a shopper. I type in electrify powder. I see MMA nutrition, sponsored MMA nutrition, organic. I’m going to click on one of them.

Let’s say I click on the sponsored, I just charged you money. Okay, cool. Now add a headline search ad. I click on the headline search ad, I just charge you more money. I’m the same person.

Now there’s a sponsored video ad. I click on sponsored video, I charge you even more money. And I’m the same person. And remember, the attribution goes seven days back. So if this person types in electrolyte powder and they click on your sponsored product, sponsored brand, headline search ad and video in the past seven days, it’s the same person charging you more and more money.

Amazon’s going to take that money. They’re not going to be like, oh, it’s the same person. We’re not going to charge you anymore. They’re going to take that money and it’s one session and it’s one potential conversion. So that’s the problem with sponsored brand.

So what I did was I said, okay, cool, show me where I have high sponsored product and high organic rank and let me not use sponsored brand. Let me maybe lower the bids or use them somewhere else. Okay, cool. So we figured out the problem with the cannibalization and eliminating cannibalization. Where am I?

Highly ranked. Let me not use headline search ads. Let me not use sponsored brand video. So where should I use them? Well, in the opposite where I can’t rank super high with sponsored because I’m not profitable or my organic rank is low and I’m not able to get it up.

So let me test different ad types. Let me test headline search ad sponsored brand and let me test video sponsored brand. And you can do this pretty easily with helium ten cerebro tool. So you can go into helium ten, go into cerebro, put your asin, get all of your keywords and then you can put filters and you can say okay, show me where I have low rank sponsored and organic. Show me greater than 30 sponsored and organic and it’s going to give you a list of keywords.

So take all of those keywords and say okay, let’s start testing one at a time. And what I would do is try one or the other. Like try only headline search ads and then have headline search ads on all of them. See which ones convert and which ones don’t. And remember the most important thing here, do not rely on campaign manager data.

Campaign manager data will tell you, oh, your sponsored video has 13x ROAS and 9X ROAS. 7x ROAS/  It’s complete bullshit. Obviously it’s not accurate, right? Because you’re like where’s the results?

What happens to my total sales? So what I would do is take five keywords like launch them, headline search ad or sponsored brand video and then look at total sales. So you’re spending $100 more a day. For example, how much more am I making in total sales? I was making 3600 in total sales.

Am I making 3900 at 4000 4200 a day in total sales? Or are my total sales pretty much the same, like plus or minus the noise? And if that’s the case, okay, the videos are not working. So that’s how I use sponsored brand video to fill in coverage where I’m not successful with sponsored products or organic ranking. Tip number two, start with all variations and then scale the performers only this is something that I’ve never heard anyone talk about and I don’t understand how because almost all of us have variations on our listing.

And personally I recommend that you launch variations. So if you’re currently a seller and you’re thinking about okay, what’s my next product launch? Milk this shit out of your existing listing with as many variations as possible because every single one of them will get a new honeymoon phase. So let’s say I have hard work. Electrolyte powder, it’s an unflavored version.

I’m going to launch blue razz, mango, pineapple, fruit blast, strawberry, kiwi, whatever, all of these different flavors and also different sizes. So maybe right now I have like the 100 servings canister and I have the 30 serving packets, so 30 packets. So I’m going to have eight flavors here, eight flavors here, the different sizes, because every single time that I launch, I get a fresh honeymoon phase. And here’s what happens. In the first 30 to 45 days, I’ll spend a lot of money.

It’s not going to be profitable, but all of a sudden I start tapering down that spend, the algorithm starts kicking in, organic ranking starts improving, and all of a sudden I’m profitable. And now I just lowered the ad spend. Anyways, that same traffic, like, let’s say I was getting 1000 sessions a day or whatever, or let’s say 500 sessions a day to my listing that 500, maybe only 30 or 50 or 100 of them were converting on the unflavored. Now that I added mango pineapple, an additional 30 are converting on the mango pineapple, or additional ten are converting on the mango pineapple. And then I add blue ras, an additional ten.

So adding variations is super, super useful because not only do you get a fresh honeymoon phase, but also the same people coming into your listing, you’re able to take a little bit more, a little bit more advantage of them. And it’s not that hard, right? It’s just variations. And all you have to do is just restock them after you’ve developed them, and it’s much easier to develop than a brand new product. And you get to merge all of the reviews, which is the beautiful thing.

So anyways, when you’re launching campaigns, you want to include all of the variations because you don’t know which one in that particular campaign is going to perform the best. So what I’ll do, I’ll take all of my flavor variations, all of my size variations, put them in one campaign, and I’ll let it run for a week or two, and then I’ll look and I’ll see. Okay, which one of those variations has the best combination of click through rate and sales. So if the sales are high and the click through rate is high, I’m not too concerned with the roas, because roas is like very like, okay, organic sales. Also, maybe it clicked on this variation and it made a sale on that other variation.

So not 100% sure, but if I notice that a variation is getting a lot of sales and has a high click through rate, the reason that I care about sales is because if it has high sales, it means a lot of people are interested in it. So it kind of validates that this is a good variation. And then if it has a high click through rate. Remember, this is the goal. If you think about the funnel, we are launching these campaigns just to show up in all the searches.

So to get more impressions. And if we have a really good click through rate, we’re going to get people into the listing. A lot of people are going to click on the listing. And so one way I can improve that click through rate is to basically have only the variations that have the highest click through rates. And here’s the crazy thing.

In one campaign, it could be variation a and a different campaign could be variation b. Why? I have no idea. Has nothing to do with the keywords or anything. Could be completely random.

There’s no pattern, it’s just the algorithm. I guess that’s what we’re going to chalk it up to. But anyways, put all of your variations in the campaign, wait a week or two, maybe wait a month, and then go look at the CTR and the sales of all of the variations. Pause the ones that are not that good, keep the one that’s really good. And then that’s how you’re going to scale because you’re going to have all of these campaigns with a much better click through rate.

All right, tip number three. And I saved the best for last, combining Cerebro with the search query performance report and the search term report. So what I did was I put all three together. Now, if you guys haven’t used the search query performance report, it is incredibly powerful and it’s everything that we wanted to see, but on a keyword level, and it shows you like the path through a keyword. So here’s a keyword, here’s the total number of impressions in that market.

Here’s how many impressions you got, what percentage of that impression share you have, here’s how many clicks you got, here’s how many add to carts you got, here’s how many sales you got. So you can literally see the path of purchase through one keyword. Now here’s the vague thing. What if I went through like six different keywords and I’m one person? This is where kind of, I’m like, okay, I’m not really 100% sure, but I mean, that’s with all of the data on Amazon, right?

Like which keyword did someone click on in PPC and made the sales? We’re not 100% sure. They could have clicked on four different keywords but made the sale on that one. And that’s the only one that got the credit. But anyways, for all intents and purposes, we’re looking at the search query performance report and there’s one main area I think that you have a lot of potential.

I would sort by purchase rate, I would sort by conversion rate. And you can easily do this by looking at okay, here’s all of the purchases and here’s all of the clicks. Purchases divided by clicks. That’s going to be my conversion rate on that keyword. And again this is just kind of a rough calculation but I’m going to sort from highest to lowest.

So here’s all of the keywords ranked from highest conversion rate to lowest conversion rate. And then I’m going to look at those keywords and I’m going to look at my impression share. Now one thing you have to do quickly is normalize your impression share. What I mean by that is go look at your highest impression share keywords, probably your branded keywords. So for me it was like hard work electrolytes because that’s the brand name.

And if you look at it you’re like okay, I am getting 8% impression share which means 8% impression share is probably like the max that you could get. So what I would do is normalize it which means I would divide all the keywords impression share by 8%. So if something had 7% it would be like a 95 or something like that, you know what I mean? And then I’m looking for keywords with a high conversion share and a low impression share or impression percent. What that means is shoppers who come in through that keyword have a very high chance of converting.

However, I am not showing up as much as I could be potentially for that keyword. I have a low impression share. I have a low market share on the impressions of that keyword. Next, what I would do is I would look at my organic and sponsored ranking. If you have a very high organic and sponsored rank there’s not much you can do.

You can maybe try like sponsored brand video or headline search ads, whatever. I don’t recommend it because of cannibalization, but you’re pretty much doing the best that you can do. You probably just have to do something with your click through rate. Optimize the click through rate. But if you have low organic and low sponsored rank and then you go look at the search term report and you see that you have low spend on that keyword, that is a huge opportunity.

It says okay, I have keywords that I’m converting well on that I am not spending enough money on and I’m ranked low on. Let me start spending more money track my rank, both organic and sponsored, and track my share. And let’s say your share was a 1%, it went to a 1.2, went to a 1.5, went to a 2.5. This will compound over multiple keywords, and I recommend doing this one keyword at a time. Again, you have 52 weeks a year, you can do one keyword a week.

You’re going to hit 52 keywords. And I guarantee you that 52 keywords you do this on is going to be 80% of all of the impression shares. So it’s not something that you have to worry about like, oh my God, I need to do all of this at once. You could do one a week, no big deal. Now you might be wondering, how do I combine all of those sheets?

Cerebro search query performance report and search term report. Here’s the beautiful thing. I did all the work, I hired the developer, we created a macro. All you have to do is go into my Amazon growth toolbox, sign up, you get access to all of my macros, campaign creation, bulk negatives, bulk optimization, including this one. So you download the spreadsheet.

All you have to do is load your search career performance report in one tab, search term report in another tab, and the Cerebro in another tab. And actually it’s not search term report, it’s search term impression share report, which is very similar. But I just say search term report because it’s easier. But anyways, once you load those three sheets in, you go into a tab, click a button, boom, it auto populates everything. But then you have to do all of the sorting that I talked about and highlight the keywords.

Okay? These ones have high conversion rate. These ones aren’t ranked well. These ones I’m not spending enough money on. Let’s start targeting those keywords with ads.

And I would recommend, when it comes to ads, launching broad phrase and exact, don’t just think exact. And if you’re already targeting in a campaign, you can do one of two things. Number one, increase the bid in that camp pain, increase the budget in that campaign and see if it does something. And if it doesn’t, maybe pause that keyword and relaunch it in its own campaign and try a big budget with a big bid and see what happens. And guys, I have another video up on YouTube that is an advanced PPC masterclass that I highly recommend you check out.

It is way more in depth than this. And there’s a lot more tactics just like this, way more in depth, way more explained. I screen share, I do all that stuff so highly recommend.