The structure of any Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand account is pivotal to performance and growth. Simply put, structure is the backbone of the account and it determines how your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and targeting are set up. Here at Pure Digital, we break out our campaigns by manual & automatic targeting, match type, and category. It is crucial to make sure you are not skewing data by mixing branded & non-branded traffic together. This will result in inflated ACoS numbers and you will not have a clear picture of performance. Not only does this structure allow for optimal management; it provides us with clean data that performs with the utmost efficiency, without sacrificing growth or scale.
Next, let’s go over a manager’s ability to properly structure targeting methods and use collected data to make the proper optimizations in the account. Each campaign should utilize both automatic & manual targeting at the campaign level. Automatic campaigns will target queries that are relevant to your product, while manual targeting allows you to specifically bid on keywords you selected. When creating your campaigns, this option will be right at the top. It is as simple as clicking a button: Automatic or Manual. If you choose Automatic, you will not have to add any keywords into the campaign. The queries the automatic campaigns generate and bid on can then be reviewed at any time and be inserted into your manual campaigns. Why would you do this? To gain complete control over these new search terms, set their bids, and ensure your ads are showing up for the correct SKUs.
Now it’s time to review the decision process on keywords. It’s not about bidding on all keywords. it’s about bidding on the right keywords. Keyword research is the process of using tools and analytics to find a list of keywords that are highly relevant to your Amazon listings. It’s best to organize your keywords into tightly related groups with a common theme for proper control and management. This will allow you to easily optimize your top performing keywords, while decreasing or pausing keywords that are under-performing. For example, if you have a clothing company that sells t-shirts, sweaters, and hoodies, you are going to want to do individual keyword research on each category. You will find a list of keywords that only fall under t-shirts, keywords that are strictly related to sweaters, and then the same for hoodies. This will ensure optimal control over each category and avoid skewing data between different categories. Moving forward, it will be very easy to add new keywords into each category as you start to build up your bank of keywords in the account.
Another way to acquire keywords for your account is through Search Query Reports, which can be downloaded at any time. Search Query Reports provide a list of search terms that triggered your Amazon ad and should therefore be downloaded on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how much traffic your campaigns are getting. The next step is to analyze the data and filter through new search terms to be added into your manually targeted campaigns. New search terms that have sales and a low ACoS should be added into your manual campaigns with a bid set at its average CPC. Any search terms that did not result in a sale, spent a significant amount of money, or are totally irrelevant to your product should be added as a negative keyword. Making a keyword “negative” means your ad will no longer show up for that search term. The negative keywords tab is very easy to find after clicking into your campaign.
Now, let’s go over some of the coolest new technology from Amazon. AI is the future, and Amazon knows this. This is why Amazon has been making great strides in the AI technology & features available in their marketing platform. If you are not taking advantage of all AI capabilities in your campaigns, you are missing out. Amazon scrapes your page and listing to use automatic keyword targeting to hit queries that are relevant to your offering. AI in Amazon also gives you greater reach with your keywords and allows you to bid up on keywords by over 900% to show up at the top of search pages. Other AI features even let you bid on complementary or substitute product pages. Taking advantage of all of these features ultimately ensures around-the-clock optimization, so it is highly recommended to at least test them out in all of your campaigns!
