One of the most difficult dragons to slay as a new Amazon Private Label Seller is the issue of learning and using Amazon Pay Per Click (PPC). It can be a confusing and difficult thing to learn. But you aren’t alone in the process, Scott’s here to help. Amazon recently made some changes to their PPC platform and Scott’s put together this episode to help you understand the platform as a whole, learn about the changes, and know how to use Amazon’s PPC platform to get more sales for your Amazon Products. Sound like something you’re interested in? Then grab a pen and paper and get ready to take notes because you’re about to get the whole scoop, step by step on this episode.
Isn’t Amazon PPC a confusing thing to learn?
Today’s guest, Chris Schaeffer doesn’t think so. He’s been an ecommerce and internet marketing specialist for years and he says that it’s very easy. The new tweaks Amazon has made to their pay per click functionality makes it even easier than ever to maximize your marketing budget and increase your sales at the same time. In this episode Scott and Chris walk through the changes to the PPC interface and tell you exactly what the options mean, how to use them, and how to step by step increase your sales using Amazon Pay Per Click. It’s an amazing free resource for you today on this episode.
The 3 different types of keyword matches in Amazon PPC and how to use them.
The main changes to Amazon Pay Per Click that have come down the pike are the addition of some options for choosing the type of PPC campaign you want to run. Using these tools makes it much more likely you’ll get your target buyers to see and click on your ads. The types are “broad”, “phrase” and “exact”, with the option of adding negative keywords (things you don’t want to rank for) as well. Using these and a little bit of patience you can figure out exactly which of your keywords are working and increase your PPC on those, which ones are not working (and remove them from your PPC altogether), and increase the likelihood of your Amazon private label sales. This episode walks you through how to do that, step by step.
Once my product is up and running and making decent sales, can I turn of PPC?
Today’s guest, Chris Schaeffer is a PPC and marketing expert and he says that you should never turn off your Amazon PPC campaigns, and here’s his reason why: What’s the worst that could happen? You have two top listing on the first page of the Amazon search – they click on your ad instead of your organic listing – and you still get a sale (more than likely). That’s it. You always want to make sure that your products are being seen OVER your competition, that way you will have the ability to dominate the market when they don’t. Find out how Chris suggests you set up your entire PPC campaign by listening to this episode.
Why learning Amazon PPC is so vitally important to your Amazon Private Label business.
If you learn how to use amazon PPC you’ll have a huge advantage over your competition. It’s the only sure-fire way to get your products in front of those who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. Your competition is likely not going to take the time or make the effort to learn this fairly simple way of getting your products up in the Amazon rankings, so that means you’ve got a secret weapon you can use to advance your business ahead of theirs. Don’t be fooled into thinking that PPC on Amazon is too difficult to learn. It’s not. This episode can take you way down the road to learning PPC and getting on your way.
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Hi Scott – Excellent podcast – I am VERY grateful for the info you give us.
When you say we choose the winner keyword from the first campaign -> Clicks and Sales, About Clicks how many clicks i have to consider to say that is a winner keyword? and when i use the negative keyword?
Thank you
Hey John, the number of clicks wouldn’t be as important as the number of sales. If you see a keyword with at least 5 sales (as long as they are near your profitable ACOS), that’s most likely a winner.
Ok Thanks, but Scott when and how I use the negative keyword?
Hey John, you would use a negative keyword when you see a customer search term in your report that just doesn’t perform well for you. If you click into your advertising campaigns, you can add them at the campaign or ad group level!
Dear Scott,
I happened to stumble on this podcast purely by chance – extremely informative and really useful. I had a couple of questions if I may:
– What do you suggest as a CPC spend for an auto campaign, or a suggested keywords campaign to start off with? Any rough idea?
– Chris mentioned ‘competitor keywords’ – what does this mean, and where can I pick up competitor keywords on which to run a campaign?
– Would you say a 1 week time frame is sufficient to run the initial auto/broad manual campaign?
Keep up the good work, thank you!
Hey Horamk,
1. You can start off at $1 and go from there, if you check your impressions you’ll know if you need to adjust up or down.
2. If you go back and listen to theamazingseller.com/ppc I lay it all out, but basically you can use a few different tools to get lists of keywords your competitors rank for. You can use those to build campaigns (that often perform very well!)
3. 1 Week would be the bare minimum you would want to run it. Ideally you would let it run longer (3-4 weeks) but waiting that long is so darn hard!
Hey Scott,
I’m running 2 campaigns: one is AUTO and the other is MANUAL-BROAD.
I already extracted good keywords from a previous AUTO campaign, and I now added ALL KEYWORDS from BROAD campaign to the NEGATIVE KEYWORDS LIST in the AUTO; If I got this right, is good to keep an active AUTO campaign in order to come up with new keywords, being all the negative ones already bidding in the BROAD campaign. Is this correct? Thanks!
That sounds about right to me! Any time you add negative keywords it will stop them from running in that ad group/ campagin. The only problem I might see with the way you’re doing it is that you’re running two broad campaigns. You can only add negative keywords as phrase or exact. You generally would only want to add them when you’re starting a phrase or exact campaign, since a broad match campaign will use any variation of the keywords to run the ad.
Is it possible to request a text/image tutorial/article on PPC?
The podcast is great, but I am just finding difficulty in turning the audio knowledge into action because it doesn’t have the ‘watching over the shoulder’ feel to it.
Thanks, regards
Hey Phil, I’ll see what we can do!
Same here Scot, Any chance to have the podcasts in text form. For us “visual” people 🙂
Hey Scott,
Thanks for another great podcast!
I have 3 different campaigns (Auto, Manual and Competitor) for one of my products and it goes pretty bad.
ACOS’s are:
– Auto – 172%
– Manual – 91%
– Competitor – NO SALES
More details:
– The campaigns are running for 3 weeks now.
– The product’s price is 20$
– I have about 4-5 sales everyday (which is pretty bad for November) so I know my listing is converting.
– Daily budget for all 3 campaigns is 100$ and default bid is 0.75$ (For some of the strongest keywords that I want to rank for, the bid is 1.5$)
Here are the questions:
1. What should I do in order to decrease the ACOS’s percentage?
2. what should I do if I have impressions and clicks and the keyword is a strong/main one but I have no sales?
3. If I want to move the keywords in the funnel that Chris mentioned in the episode, should I first pause the keyword in the broad campaign and then open a phrase keywords campaign and add it to there?
how the funnel thing is working exactly?
Thanks and have a wonderful day!
Hey Chris, trouble shootin PPC can be a bit tricky without seeing all the numbers in context, but from what it sounds like you have two potential problems.
It sounds like you’ve got one of two problems:
1. A listing Issue
2. A Keyword Issue
or a combination of both. Since you’re getting clicks and no conversions, double check your title, photos, and number of reviews. If your product title and photos don’t match customer expectation when they see the bullets and description that may cause an issue with them when it comes time to buy. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure you’re competitive when it comes to the number of reviews. If all you’re competitors have more reviews, that can also cause issues when it comes to conversion time.
The second potential problem is something you can address easily. download your customer search term report and see where you’re actually spending your ppc budget. Double check that all the customer searches are relevant and remove the ones that aren’t!
Hi Scott,
I would like to ask one more question please. After creating your exact campaign you stop the broad campaign right? That’s the whole purpose of the exact campaign, right?
Did I get it?
Thanks so much Scott. You’re awesome!
Hey Isaac, you wouldn’t HAVE to continue the broad match campaign (and likely won’t for a while). Creating the phrase and exact campaigns free up your broad match campaigns to find NEW customer search terms, since the phrase and exact campaigns will be running for the ones you already know work…does that make sense?
Hey Scott! What is in your opinion an ok CTR? Thanks!
Hey Nico, CTR is going to vary greatly by keyword and isn’t something you have a TON of control over directly inside Amazon. You’d be better off using your ACOS as your guide metric here, especially since you can tie keywords directly back to sales!
When you view the report of a automatic PPC campaign there are two columns. Customer Search Term and Keyword. Scott, can you explain this and tell us which one you should use for your campaign and why?
Hey Thomnas, You’ll be looking at the customer search term in order to understand the word or words the customer is actually using. The “keyword” column is what you entered into Amazon in the Advertising section. The Customer Search Term column is where the keywords you would want to look for (in terms of what’s working and what’s not) are in order to utilize the strategy we outline here. Does that make sense?
Hi Scott – great podcast again – I am VERY grateful for the info and the confidence you give us all to believe we know enough about this business to allow us to handle whatever it throws at us! My question is, where on the ppc pages are you seeing “phrase” or “exact match”? Under my campaign screens I only see negative keywords and broad under manual targeting. Where should i be looking?
Thanks!
Hey Russ, when you go to enter your keywords (manually enter them), you should see a little box on the right-hand side that says “match type”. It will default to broad, but if you click on it…you’ll see the other options as well!
Got it – Thanks!
Hi Scott,
I currently have 3 campaigns running ( Auto Campaign, Suggested Keywords & Competitors Keywords campaign) . I have run search term report for these 3 campaigns. I noticed that although there are hundreds of keywords only 12 keywords have made actual sales in past 3-4 weeks. So should i take all these 12 keywords and start a phrase campaign with them? And what should i do about hundreds of non performing keywords that did not get me sale? Some of them have so many clicks but no sale. Should i remove those keywords and only focus on 12 keywords that have given me results?
What is your suggestion? You also said that keep running auto campaign. Whats the point of running auto campaign when we already got good keywords from it?
Hey Steve, yes those 12 keywords are the ones you would want to move on to the phrase campaign. Any of the remaining keywords that you’ve seen quite a few clicks on (it depends on your profit) and no sales, you would want to pause (or add as a negative keyword). The reason you would still let the broad (auto or otherwise) campaigns run is because there are OTHER keywords that you will start to see pop up to the top once you have moved the “already working ” keywords to the phrase match campaign. It frees up your original campaigns to spend time and money finding you OTHER keywords!
Hey Scott,
I have the same issue…
When we move the keywords with the impressions to the phrase campaign, we should pause them in the broad campaign.
correct?
You would add the customer search terms you move to the phrase match campaigns as “negative phrase” keywords in your broad match campaigns. Make sure you’re looking at the “customer search term” column in the report 🙂