How to Effectively Manage Your Amazon PPC

Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint Podcast. How can you effectively manage all of your Amazon PPC ads in a very time-effective way? This is a big problem for a lot of Amazon sellers. This is a big problem for a lot of brands on Amazon. Now, I’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours working on Amazon ads. I will break down to you step by step, exactly what you need to do in this episode and show you how you can be very time effective when it comes to managing Amazon ads. My name is Mina Elias. I’m your host. I’m the founder of Trivium Group, an Amazon marketing agency. We grow and scale brands on Amazon. We have about 143 brands under management. I started my own supplement brand back in 2018 called MMA Nutrition, figured how everything worked out, grew it, scaled it. I made this podcast to show you and share with you everything that I’ve learned step by step, very tactical. Consider me your Amazon professor, your Amazon tutor. My job here is to take all of these complex Amazon problems and distill them down into simple solutions. I want to walk you through my process.

First of all, we need to document the data. That’s the most important thing. Without documentation of data, we don’t have anything. We can’t work off of anything. That’s the biggest issue. The problem is you cannot rely on Amazon because Amazon has some data in Campaign Manager, some data in the business reports. It doesn’t calculate your profits. You don’t have cost of goods incorporated. The first thing you’re going to need is analytics. Now, you can get mine completely for free, Trivium Analytics. It’s a template. You can fill it out. But here’s the metrics that you need: PPC spend, PPC sales, total sales, sessions, units, cost per session, click-through rate, conversion rate, ACOS, TACOS, cost per click, sale price, Amazon fees, cost of goods sold, and then profits. Don’t worry too much about remembering all of these. I’m going to put the link in the description. But anyways, what you need to do is understand what goal we’re going after first. Am I scaling or am I optimizing? What’s the purpose? The biggest mistake that you can do is to go into two different directions, which means scaling and optimizing at the same time. Launching new campaigns, lowering bids, lowering budgets, upping the bid by placement.

What that does is it creates conflicting movements of the ad spend and the sessions, and you don’t know what caused what. First things first. What I’m looking for is am I scaling? Which means I’m increasing spend, increasing sessions, hopefully increasing revenue, unit session percentage or my conversion rate is not going to drop too much. Then I know that my profit is going to go down, but it’s for the sake of scaling revenue. Or am I optimizing where I will see my spend go down, my conversion rate go up, and my profit is going to go up. My revenue might go down, which is totally fine. What I’m doing is I’m discovering new profitable search terms. Some of the search terms that I’m going after are not going to be that profitable. When I lower the bids or add them as negatives or whatever, the revenue is going to go down for keywords that have a very high ACOS, but profit will go up. Those are the two calls. Step number one, analytics. You need your analytics. Step number two, setting the goal. What’s the goal? What’s the movement? Now, in the next part, I’m going to show you how, based on each goal, you can very effectively, in a time-effective way, go in and optimize everything very quickly.

Let’s say it’s scaling. The actions that you need for scaling are increasing bids, increasing budgets, increasing bid by placement, launching new campaigns, and launching different campaign types. But let’s keep the different campaign types on the side. Sponsored products should generate 85% of all of your revenue. So don’t worry too much about sponsored brand. For now, you can use sponsored brand for your brand keywords. You can use sponsored display for retargeting, but don’t worry too much about that. So increasing bids, increasing budgets. Step number one, go into your campaign manager, you’re going to see all of your campaigns. What you’re going to do is you’re going to set a filter. Filter is very simple. I like to set a filter for ROAS, something like greater than 3X ROAS. I’m going to set the filter to show me all campaigns with greater than 3X ROAS. Then from there, I’m going to select all, and I’m going to say set campaign budget or increase budget by, and then click increase budget by $100, $200, $300. What I’m doing here is I’m finding all of the campaigns that are already profitable right now, and I’m increasing their budgets.

Even though they’re not spending all of their budgets, what’s going to happen is Amazon is going to see that there’s more room to breathe for this campaign, and it can potentially show you more and get more sales. You might have a $100 budget and you’re spending $50. Next thing, you have a $500 budget, maybe you’re spending $80, $90. Even though it’s not that much, it’s still a little bit more profitable. Now, the reason I’m doing this filter is I can do this across all of the campaigns that are profitable. Next, increasing bids. This one is going to happen in the targeting tab. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the targeting tab. First, you’re in the campaigns tab. Next, you’re going to go to the targeting tab. Again, you’re going to add a filter, exact same way. Now, this time, I only want you to go after exact first. The reason is auto, broad, phrase, and expanded, and have a lot of different keywords in them. Before scaling those ones, I want to add some negatives. But I’ll show you that in a second. Next thing what I’m going to do is I’m going to set the ROAS filter.

ROAS greater than three or four, whatever you want to choose. For me, I like to be a little bit more aggressive. Three or more is fine for me. I’m going to set my match type only exact. Then from there, again, I’m going to select all of the keywords. You can just do a select all. From there, I’m going to increase the bid by a certain dollar amount. I like to do gradual increases like three cents, five cents, 10 cents. I like to do them gradually and I like to do them frequently. It’s controlled. As a result, I’m going to see the effect on a small scale instead of a big scale, because if I scale too much, I could take my ad spend from $100 to $300, and then I’m going to have to swing it back very hard. You don’t want that. You want slow growth. Next, I’m going to move to the search term report. Now, this is where I’m going to do two things. First, I’m going to add negatives. I know I said you don’t want to add in one direction and push in the other direction. However, if I’m trying to scale profitable search terms, I need to make sure that I’m negatively anything in those keywords that are not doing well.

I’m going to go to Reports and I’m going to download the search term report, Last 30 days. Once I do that, I’m going to highlight everything, sort and filter. Then I’m going to set a filter for sales equals zero. Then I’m going to set another filter for spend over a certain number of money. Let’s say spend is greater than $10 and no sales. From there, I’m going to take all of those keywords and I’m going to find which campaigns they’re in and I’m going to add them as negatives. That should take you about 10 minutes. Now that you’ve cleaned up those campaigns, and by the way, this is only for auto, broad, and phrase campaigns and expanded ASIN, it’s not for exact, because exact, we’re already messing with the bids directly. We don’t need to add negatives. There’s no search terms. Now that I’ve added all of the negatives, I’m going to go back to the targeting tab and I’m going to select everything with a ROAS greater than three for auto, broad, phrase, and expanded ASIN, and I’m going to increase the bids the exact same way. Now, if you want to increase the bids more for keywords with even better ROAS because you can sort highest to lowest ROAS.

If you want to increase the bids for anything that’s above 7X ROAS by 10 cents, anything that’s 5X ROAS by 5 cents, anything that’s 3-5X ROAS by 3 cents, you can do that. It’s very quick and easy to select. Again, you can create these filters and so you can do all of these bulk actions right in Campaign Manager. Now, two more steps here. First, I want to launch campaigns for search terms. Now, this is very, very, very difficult if you don’t have my deduplication sheet. I want you to download my deduplication sheet. It’s an Excel macro. What you’re going to do is you’re going to put the Bulk Sheet in one tab, the Search Term Report in another tab. You’re going to put the filters, so basically anything between 1-20% ACOS, for example, and click deduplicate, and it’s going to give you a list of all of the keywords and in which match types they’re present and not present. You do not want to duplicate any keywords. Once I set the filter, like identifying keywords between 1-20% ACOS in auto, broad, and phrase campaigns, it’s going to deduplicate and it’s going to give me a list.

I’m going to start taking some of these keywords and I’m going to start launching them in their own campaigns. Again, this can be done very effectively using our campaign builder. All of this stuff is easy and free for you to download. It makes your life 10 times easier. My team uses it. We don’t rely on software. We’ve built all of our macros and we made it super user-friendly. I make user-friendly for my team. I want them to earn stuff efficiently and not waste too much time. Now, campaign budgets, I would set no less than $100. Campaign bids, you can always start a little bit more conservative. Let’s say the suggested bid is a dollar, you can start at 75 cents and you can work your way up if you’re limited and on a budget. If you want to go aggressive like me, I like to start one and a half times the suggested bid. Unless the suggested bid is like $7, I’m like, Whatever, it’s not worth it. Now, the final piece of the puzzle is placements. You can do this in one of two ways. You can go into the different campaigns. By the way, you’ll notice that if you sort campaigns by sales, you’ll notice that probably per product, 10 campaigns generate most of the sales.

What you can do in this case is you can go into each one of those campaigns, go into the placement tab. If you notice that one of the placements is performing better than the others, like top-of-search, first-page or product pages, let’s say the top-of-search first page has a ROAS that’s better than rest-of-search, what you can do is gently increase the bid by placement, let’s say by 25 % so that instead of someone, let’s say your bid was a dollar, instead of someone spending a dollar to show up, you can spend up to a $1.25 to show up for the top of the search first page because based on data, you perform a lot better there. Now, the faster way to do this is right in the bulk sheet. You can download the bulk sheet and then from there, highlight everything, sort and filter, show only placements, and then from there you can see, okay, what’s my bid by placement for these different placements? What’s the ROAS for these different placements? For placements that top of search has a better ROAS and better cook-through rate, or product pages has a better ROAS, better cook-through rate, you can increase the bid by placement.

This should take you a few minutes, not too hard. Again, you can always do filters. You can say, Hey, filter only four campaigns with a ROAS equals this or that. I like to just go through them one by one. It doesn’t take that long. Now, in the opposite direction where it’s optimizing, here’s what you’re going to do. You want to lower bids, you’re not going to touch campaign budgets, so you’re only going to focus on bids. You want to lower bids, you’re not going to touch campaign budgets, you only want to lower bids. You’re going to add negatives and you’re going to remove the bid by placement. Lower bids, exactly what we did in the targeting tab, except you’re going to add different filters. You’re going to add spend and no sales, so sales equals zero and spend, let’s say, greater than $10, and a cost filter. You obviously remove these other filters and add an a cost greater than 80% or ROAS less than 1.5X ROAS filter. Again, that’s just going to show you all of the keywords that are not performing well. Start with exact only, exact and product targeting. Then you can select all lower the bid.

Do not lower too much. Lower by three cents, five cents, seven cents. Don’t go too aggressive because you want to just move your position slowly down the page, not go from middle of page one to bottom of page three. Then you’re just not going to have any sales. Then you’re going to go into the SearchStorm report and you’re going to add negatives, auto, broad, phrase, and expanded ASIN. Download the SearchStorm report, highlight everything, sort and filter. Again, you have the different filters. The first filter is going to be spending no sales. The second filter is going to be Acos is greater than, let’s say, 80% or ROAS is less than, let’s say, 2X. You’re going to take all of those keywords and you’re going to go into each of the campaigns and add them as negatives. Now, if you want a faster way to do this, I’m going to put in the description a way to download my negatives macro. What that’s going to do is you’re going to take your search term report and put it there, put your criteria, spend greater than this or ACOS greater than that. Then what’s going to happen is it’s going to immediately take all of these search terms, add them as negatives, create a campaign sheet for you, ready to upload to Amazon that will automatically add those negatives.

That should not take you any time. Honestly, it should take you maybe three minutes. What you want to do is just review that you’re not negative-ing anything that doesn’t make sense. Finally, you’re going to go again back into those campaigns, look at the placements. If the placements are not doing well, let’s say you decided to increase the bid by placement by 25% because the ROAS was good. Once you did that, the ROAS is now bad, you want to bring that back down to zero or maybe from 100 to 50, 50 to 25, and so on. That’s pretty much it. That’s how I operate very effectively. I have the analytics in front of me. You can use our automated system. If you want, hit me up. I’ll get you connected. It’s only available through us. It’s built on My Roe Profit, which is a software company, but it’s only available through us. It’s our custom development. Or I’m just going to give you my template for free and you can fill it in. You probably have to hire a VA to do all of the dirty work. I do not recommend that you do it yourself.

It’s going to take a lot of time and your time is best spent in other things. Then from there, the next step is once I have analytics, I’m going to decide what direction I want to go in. Here’s the thing. If you don’t have room to go down and to become more profitable because let’s say you’re spending $50 a day, the most you’re going to save is $10 a day and up your profit by $10. Go in the positive direction. Scale your spend, scale your revenue, make a lot more money, so then when you optimize for profit, there is more room there. That’s usually how I decide. Or if you’ve been scaling for a few weeks, now you want to optimize for a couple of weeks. Then once you have that, you just go in and you do your operations. If you’re scaling, increasing bids, increasing budgets, increasing bid-by-placements, launching new campaigns. If you’re optimizing, lowering bids, adding negatives and removing bid-by-placement or lowering the bid-by-placement. That’s pretty much it. Guys, if you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. I want you to get updates when I launch episodes because I make sure I launch a lot of value and I put my heart into this.

I’ll see you on the next episode.