Amazon PPC Tips for Beginners – 2024

Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint podcast. Amazon PPC can be extremely stressful and intimidating, especially at the beginning. But I promise you, you’re gonna feel way more confident in running your Amazon ads, and you will have what you need to get started growing on Amazon. I’m gonna share three PPC tips that you guys are going to love, and one really big mistake that you should avoid. Now, this is after auditing over a thousand accounts. I’ve personally consulted over 1000 brands, and I’ve seen so many things go right and so many things go wrong.
So I want to share three really important tips with you. And after the third tip, I’m going to share the number one most common mistake I see in brands that I audit. All right, tip number one, campaign structure. If you don’t have a good campaign structure, this can be incredibly detrimental to all of your ads.

If you don’t have a good structure, none of your ads are going to work. Well, so what is a good structure? One campaign, one ad group, no more than five keywords. Let me explain. Within a campaign, you can have multiple ad groups. Now, here’s the nice thing about having multiple ad groups. It makes things nice and organized. But here’s the problem. You can’t control the budget. So let’s say that I have $100 budget in the campaign and I have two ad groups.
I would expect 50, 50, 50 in this, 150 in that one. But here’s what happens. Amazon decides where the budget goes. So it can send ten to this one and 90 to that one. This sucks, because let’s say this ad group has better keywords, like long tail keywords that convert better, lower ACoS, better RoAS. Amazon could send them only $10 and 90 to this other one. That is way less profitable, but maybe it just makes more sales overall. So that’s the importance of having one ad group in the campaign. You don’t want Amazon to control your budget and where your budget goes, you want all your budget to flow through into one ad group. And inside of that ad group, no more than five keywords.

Now, here’s why I only have five keywords in each ad group. After auditing so many campaigns, I would go into the ad group and I would sort by sales and I would sort by spend. And I want to see, okay, show me top to bottom, like, who has the most sales? Who has the least sales? And this phenomenon happens where?
I’ll see, okay, keyword number 12345. They have like, okay, sales. And then six and seven and eight and nine. They just start slowing down, slowing down. And then after like ten or eleven or twelve, there’s literally nonexistent.
And in my mind I’m like, there’s no way these keywords aren’t generating sales. I know they’re good keywords. So what I would do is I would pause those keywords and move them to a new campaign and all of a sudden those keywords start generating sales. So I start thinking about it, like, why is this happening? And then I realized that Amazon is just sending budget to the top keywords that it thinks it’s going to convert the most.

So let’s say you have a keyword with a higher search volume. You know that’s going to make a lot of sales. Now, even if another keyword with lower search volume but has way more profitability could be making those sales, Amazon will put all of the budget in those top keywords. And as you scale that budget, even if you have an unlimited budget, it just keeps putting more and more budget to those top keywords. So I realized that I have to limit my ad groups to five keywords and then keep moving keywords into more and more campaigns and different ad groups.
All right, to summarize, one campaign, one ad group, no more than five keywords. And one very crucial point here, make sure that you have a minimum of $100 budget. This is where people start getting freaked out. They’re like, Mina, I have 30 campaigns, $100 budget. Am I going to spend $30,000 a day or whatever that number is?
No, you’re not. Here’s how spending works on Amazon. Let’s say you have a campaign and you have $100 budget. If you have a very high bids on those keywords in those campaigns, yes, you will spend the entire budget of that whole campaign every single day. But let’s say you have a campaign $100 budget and you have $0.01 bid.

You’re not going to spend any money, right? Because your keyword is going to be on page 100. No one’s going to see it. And as you inch up the bid, right, let’s say you’re at maybe now you’re at page eight, then you’re at six, then you’re at four. And as you inch up the bids, what’s going to happen is you’re going to show up higher.
More people are going to see you, and then more people are going to start clicking on you. So you’re not necessarily spending all of the budget you have on the campaign level. What’s going to happen is it’s going to be controlled by the bid. If you have a high bid, you’ll spend it all. If you have a low bid, you’re not going to spend it.
And the reason that I say a minimum of $100 campaign budget is because anything under that I see Amazon affecting the performance of that campaign negatively in my opinion. What’s happening? And I can’t be sure because I don’t work inside of Amazon. I don’t know exactly how their algorithm works, but I think that Amazon looks at those campaigns and says, oh, it has $30 to spend a day. There’s five keywords in there.

Each one has a dollar bid. They can get six clicks maximum per day. And so then it’s like, okay, let’s just not show it that much because they can’t even afford to be clicked on. Again. This is just a theory, but it makes sense.
Tip number two, using different match types, match types like broad phrase and exact. So let me explain broad phrase and exact. Exact means when you’re targeting a keyword with exact match, basically what I’m saying is if it’s electrolyte powder only show me for that keyword electrolyte powder. So for a phrase match type, basically you have the keywords electrolyte powder and you can add keywords at the beginning of the end. You can also switch the order with broad.
It goes super wide. So you can literally switch any other keywords. So when you think about it, let’s say I’m targeting the keyword electrolyte powder in exact. I’m only going to show up in the search for electrolyte powder. For phrase.

I’m going to show up for like 20 different keywords. For broad, I’m going to show up for 50 different keywords. And so a lot of people think, oh, let me just use exact because that’s going to be hyper targeted. Let me not use phrase, let me not use broad. Or maybe use them sparingly or start with exact.
Whatever. All of this is wrong. Here’s the thing. You cannot anticipate how keywords are going to perform on Amazon. It’s impossible.
So here’s what you should do. You should take the keywords that you want to target. You should target them in all match types, exact, broad and phrase. With exact match type keywords, you’re going to understand the performance pretty quickly. It’s either profitable, great, or if it’s not profitable, you’re going to lower the bids and optimize it.
With phrase and broad, it’s a little bit different. Once you launch those campaigns. You want to go into the search term report and constantly look and see, okay, electrolyte powder. What are all the keywords that triggered for that keyword? What that means is my campaign that has a keyword electrolyte powder phrase.

I could have showed up in the search for 20 different search terms. So I’m looking at those search terms in the search term report. Some of them might be bad, and I’m going to negative those keywords. So I stop showing up for those keywords. And some of them might be good, so I’ll spend more money there and show up more there.
And at the end of the day, what I’m trying to do is stack up the number of keywords that are working profitably. So sometimes you have so much weight on exact, but you could launch 2030, 50 different keywords in broad phrase and exact, and some of them will perform. Some of them will not perform. You go into the search term report, you negative the bad ones, and you end up with a lot of good keywords versus exact. You might be limited.
All right, tip number three, optimizing your PPC through the targeting tab. This is a game changer. And honestly, if you’re watching this video, you’re lucky, because when I started, there was no targeting tab. I had to go into every single campaign, look at every single keyword manually or use the bulkheet. And if you guys have ever downloaded the bulkheet, it looks scary.

Like, I was very intimidated when I first started working in the bulk sheets. Now we have a bunch of macros and all this stuff, and I live inside of the bulkheets. But anyways, if you go into campaign manager and you go into the targeting tab, it’s going to show all of the keywords that you’re targeting. Now, here’s the thing. You want to look at one product at a time and optimize one product at a time.
And the only way that you can do that bonus hack is to optimize your campaign naming convention, which means every single campaign should have a product code at the beginning. So you know that this campaign belongs to this product. So, for example, for MMA nutrition, I have hu, hard work, unflavored, HBR, hardwork, blue raz, HMP, hardwork, mango, pineapple. These are product codes that I put at the beginning of every single campaign. So I know, okay, I’m in the targeting tab.
I’m going to type in Hu. It’s going to show me all of the campaigns for hard work, unflavored only. So I can optimize those keywords. So you’re going to go into the targeting tab, you’re going to look for one type of product, let’s say hu. You’re going to look at all of those keywords that are for hard work, unflavored, and then you can start adding filters.

Now here is how to optimize. I’m looking for two things. Keywords that are doing well and keywords that are not doing well. Let’s start with keywords that are not doing well. There’s two types of keywords that don’t do well.
Ones that spend money and don’t make sales, and then the other ones that spend money and do make sales, but it’s not that profitable. Let’s say they spend $50 and only make $20 in sales. The first type will just spend like $20 and no sales. The other type will spend $50 and $20 in sales. Both of them hurt our performance anyways.
However, make sure when you’re optimizing the keywords that have a high ecos or they’re spending money and making sales, but the sales are low, that it’s not ones that are generating a lot of sales. So if you’re spending $1,000 and generating $800 in sales and that’s one of the best selling keywords. So it’s not profitable, but it’s selling a lot, you don’t want to optimize that one because it could be bringing in organic sales and you don’t know if it’s going to affect your organic. So anyways, focus on the ones that are spending money and making very little sales. You can easily do this with filters.

So you can go in and you say, okay, spend equals or greater than this, sales equals zero or sales less than this, and so on. Or you can just do acos. So for ones that have a bad acos, you can say acos greater than 80%, for example, and it’ll show you all those keywords. Now if you’re a beginner, you can do this across all the keywords. But if you’re a little bit more advanced, you only want to do this for exact and product targeting keywords.
And then for broad and phrase you want to go first into the search term report. Put the same filters negative the keywords. Wait and see if that improves the performance. And if it doesn’t, then lower the bids. Because sometimes you have a broad keyword that is triggering for 50 different keywords and let’s say 20 of those keywords are bad.
So you negative them, you’re left with 30 keywords. And now those 30 keywords are performing well. So you’re like, okay, fine, I fixed the performance of that keyword or they don’t, and then you just have to lower the bids. But it’s better to try to negative first. So you can actually maybe end up with a good performing broad keyword versus when you lower the bids, you just lower the performance of all of the keywords.

And some of them, they’re generating sales, you might lose out on those sales and then vice versa. We’re looking for keywords in the targeting tab that have really good ecos, low ecos, making a lot of sales, and those keywords, I want to bump up the bids slowly. I increase the bids by $0.05. When I’m optimizing, like trying to lower the bids, I’m lowering them also by three to I’ll do it gradually and I’ll do it frequently. So optimize, optimize, optimize.
Instead of one big optimization. Now obviously, if you’re bleeding a lot, you want to do a big optimization, but if you’re not bleeding a lot and you’re just trying to optimize, lower the bids. And in the other case where you’re trying to scale keywords that are working well, increase the bid, increase the bid, increase the bid. Now here is the biggest mistake that I see most brands doing. I don’t understand where this ideology came from, but it is the concept of graduating keywords.
What happens is you have an auto campaign, you have a broad campaign phrase, campaign, exact campaign. So what people do is they find a keyword that is working in auto or they find a keyword that’s working in broad. Let’s say my broad campaign has a keyword that’s electrolyte powder and it triggers for electrolyte supplement for women. And that keyword is super profitable. It spent $30, it made $150 in sales.

So what people will do is they will take that keyword, launch it in an exact match type campaign, and then pause or negative that keyword in broad or auto. This is the biggest mistake. Let me tell you why. If you pause a keyword on Amazon that’s generating sales, you are not guaranteed to replicate those sales in any other campaign. So you think, okay, it’s working well in auto, I’m going to take it and put it in exact and it’s going to make me the same amount of sales or even more because I’m spending all of my money just on that keyword.
Not all those other keywords. Here’s the problem, you can’t replicate the success. I have failed miserably. I’ve made this mistake a million times. Oh, so many good keywords.
Let me pause them and put them in their own campaigns and spend more money on them. Here’s a rule of thumb. If anything on Amazon is making you money, do not touch it. Never touch it. If it’s making you money, don’t touch it.

If it’s profitable, don’t touch it. If it’s generating sales, don’t touch it. That’s the simple rule of thumb. If it’s an auto, broader phrase or whatever, do not touch it. Just let it keep making more sales.
And then you can maybe add it in a different match. Type exact, for example, keep it in auto, keep it in broad, put it in exact and see if you can replicate the results. And if you can, amazing. Maybe try pausing that one for a little bit and see what happens. But again, sometimes you pause, you lose on the sales and then you don’t make the sales in the exact or whatever and you’re left with nothing.
All right, guys, hope this video was useful and hope you have a lot more confidence with these three tips and that one big mistake. Now, I recently did a video on how to effectively manage your Amazon PPC and do it in a nice, time efficient way. Check out that video. It’s super useful. And I think the best way to get good at Amazon PPC is to essentially immerse yourself and watch a lot of those videos and implement.

Please take action. All of this stuff that I’m saying, it’s great and it sounds good, but just take one thing and implement it. Take one tip and implement it. And that’s how you’re going to stack your knowledge and your experience and your success.