Did you look over your ads on Seller Central and scratched your head a bit? Even the most knowledgeable Amazon advertisers are in this situation.
No matter if your ads are working or not, being aware of what’s going on in your advertisements is essential to ensure success and maintain it. What better way to discover what’s happening than to conduct self-audits?
We’re here to guide you through how to complete your Amazon PPC audit step-by-step!
1: Taking the Temperature
The most crucial aspect of determining to gauge the performance of your accounts is to look at the KPIs to evaluate the extent of your Amazon PPC performance.
Every account will have various KPIs. Certain accounts may have distinct ACOS thresholds and targets, in addition, the CPC on each account will be about other indicators.
The primary reason to take your temperature will be to find out whether, in general, your account is performing well.
One of the most effective methods to evaluate how well your Amazon account performs is to measure your KPIs against Amazon typicals.
CPC
The first thing to consider the first thing we look at is CPC (Cost-Per-Click). Which is the typical CPC for your account? What is its performance in comparison with what the CPC average is from Amazon? Most importantly is your CPC associated with your Amazon account logical?
There’s a wealth of data that CPCs can reveal about your industry. In the beginning, CPCs can shed light on how competitive your market is.
If, for instance, your CPCs are very high (say about $5) Then your competition is also bidding similarly.
We can tell this since Amazon advertising operates as an auction and when the next bidder was bidding only $1, you’d be required to pay $1.01 for winning the Amazon advertisement.
A $5 CPC with a bid of $5 implies that your competition is bidding at the same price as you (and perhaps even higher).
When your CPCs are high, and your conversion rates are low this can be one clear indication of a weak product market fit.
The majority of accounts will have higher conversion rates and better market fit. No matter the size, knowing the “backstory” of your CPC will provide you with an understanding of what the competition in your market is, and the best method for making the most possible use of it. PPC account.
ACOS
The evaluation of ACOS is contingent upon the goals of your business.
Several elements are used to determine whether or not your ACOS is in line with the requirements:
- What do you want or need to have your ACOS for it to look like?
- How difficult is your field?
- Are you able to bid with confidence? ACOS is extremely low and do you can increase your ACOS and make a bid more aggressive?
- Are you looking to decrease the size of your ACOS since it’s not making you money?
Certain companies employ aggressive strategies that have ACOS more than 100% to garner reviews and generate visitors to their products. On the other hand one hand, the ACOS at 10% could occasionally be a break-even threshold when it comes to an Amazon product with low profits.
It is also important to ensure that you are checking your ACOS across various timeframes, including the YTD, the last 90 days, the last 60 days, the last 30 days, and MTD to determine any trends that are rising or falling.
Spend Per Day
When the folks from Ad Badger open an account we’d like to know how much they the amount of money they spend each day.
Do they have many thousands of dollars spent and a month’s worth is accumulating every day? Or is it a bank account that is spending 45 dollars within the same time frame and provides us with almost no statistically significant information?
When conducting the Amazon PPC audit of your account, it’s crucial to know the quantity of information that you can access. The final thing you should make is to make conclusions from data that have no significance statistically.
It’s useful to analyze spending per day throughout various time frames. It doesn’t matter if it’s 90 days or even down to one week’s worth of data, comparing your spending per day across these time frames can reveal patterns within your campaign.
No matter if you’re an avid spending customer on Amazon and just starting by launching smaller ones, you must be aware of some areas to consider if the account’s trend is downward.
- Check your time frames.
- Could the issue be a decline in impressions?
- Could it be a decline in the conversion rate?
If your site has an increase in clicks or impressions, it could be because of poor keyword performance and being outbid by rivals or a change in the algorithm from Amazon.
If however, your conversion rate is declining it’s likely that your market has become more competitive. Your competitors are putting ads on your product pages and are targeting your ASINS.
To stop this from happening it is important to find out ways to be competitive against your competition by obtaining more reviews and optimizing your photos.
2: Audit Your Campaign Structure
It’s no secret. Campaigns that fail are often poorly-organized. Even the most experienced digital marketers have trouble setting the right Amazon campaigns.
To make your campaign more efficient it is crucial to establish a clear hierarchy of products in your advertising groups, campaigns, and types of targeting.
A well-organized campaign begins by naming your campaigns correctly. If you’ve got a great campaign and ad group naming system all the rest falls effortlessly.
Things you need to include in the name of your campaign:
- Product or Product category
- Target ACOS
- Information about targeting (auto/manual/product or keywords targeting/etc)
Another aspect of a well-structured campaign is knowing the kind of campaign you’re conducting! One of the best strategies for keeping your campaigns organized is to categorize each campaign into an inventory.
This is an illustration of just how simple it is to make your life easier.
Do you want to be able to only view your auto-generated campaigns? Boom! You can access them all with a single click in”Auto Campaigns” in the “Auto Campaigns” portfolio.
Once the campaigns are added to the portfolio, you can sort the campaigns according to ACOS as well as Ad Spend. This will ensure that any campaigns that require urgent attention don’t get lost in the shuffle.
As a final point regarding the structure of campaigns, It is essential to know the distinction between intentional and unintentional positions.
Placements that are not intentional are typical in auto-based campaigns, while intentional campaigns use specific match keywords. Mixing both is recommended.
3: Targeting Management
Then, we can take a look at ad groupings and the way they target advertising for the product.
The first thing to remember is that when discussing the management of keywords, keyword dumping is a grave crime! Making use of a reverse ASIN search tool or keyword finder will almost always lead to failure.
When an ad group has more than 25-50 keywords Amazon ceases serving advertisements to more than 50% of the keywords.
In a way, It’s like all of these terms are animals who are crowded around the watering hole. When there are too many animals in the watering hole, it’s not ideal for anyone, and some animals are evicted.
In the world of Amazon Ads, when the drinking hole is too overcrowded by keywords Amazon lets some keywords out.
This is also evidence it’s also seen in Facebook Ads, and it’s believed that Amazon is also based on the same principles. The most successful advertisements will always earn views, while the others won’t be seen ever again.
The third and most important element of managing targeting is negative words. To clarify there are campaign-level negative keywords and ad-group levels of the negative keyword.
They’re not alike. If you’re looking for assistance with negative keywords make sure you take a look at Ad Badger’s Negative Keyword Automation.
4: Bidding Management
We’ve got our targets. Now, all we have to do is to bid!
It’s fairly easy to tell the signs of bad bid administration. Incredibly high bids, extremely low bids, and bidding on every bid the same suggest bid management problems.
The management of bids can be broken down into basic concepts. If something isn’t working do not throw more money into it. Money, you know will not compensate for a poorly planned or targeted advertising campaign.
Each ad group as well as every keyword you use in your campaigns must be bid on for performance.
Check out this blog to know more about Amazon PPC bidding.
5: Fine-Tuning Your Campaigns
This is the place where we squeeze the last amount of money from an account. The 80/20 rule applies to the list. While following the initial four steps will have the most impact taking care of the small things on your accounts can help a lot.
Small adjustments could be things like changing your auto Targeting bids for a tight match or loose match complements and substitutes. You may also modify your placement settings to maximize the effectiveness of your PPC.
The first stage of an audit is to take into account the level of temperature in your bank. To make a decision, you must know the information Amazon provides you with and how to use it.
When you consider the temperature the importance of well-organized ads that are well-planned and structured cannot be overemphasized. The ability to locate the information you’re seeking is a must. It’s almost impossible to ignore campaigns that are struggling.
Bid management and targeting are key to helping you save money Being aware of both can pay off later on. In addition, using new tools to refine your campaign could take your excellent account to the highest level.
