Amazon Advertising Week 5, Newbie, Results & Screecap

[Bananas]

Having absolutely no clue how the campaign manager works on Amazon, I took action anyway and this is what I've got. My budget is a $1/day since this is a test run and my keywords are low competition. As you can see I am not even getting enough clicks to spend my budget which is both good and bad. Bad because can one really make the big bucks with so little of an audience, good because I have a chance to dominate in a niche and grow.

The top row (377.25) is MANUAL, I picked the keywords myself. Even though I felt like I didn't know what I was doing and a few of my keyword choices are a little out there. I tried to think what MIGHT a buyer search for, when looking for items like mine, what MIGHT a buyer search for, when looking for items similar who would buy mine if they saw it. Products are my own brand.

The bottom row (30.75) is AUTOMATIC, Amazon picks the keywords for you. I thought that campaign would be the winner because obviously Amazon knows more than me but as you can see it's returned little money and has a high % compared to the manual campaign - 8.5 versus 1.2.

I don't actually know if my advertising cost % is very good, just okay, or terrible, but I know both campaigns are supporting themselves, I'm not losing anything. Probably I will make another campaign when I have time that's manual with some of the keywords that are more out there. I also can't read the advertising reports - when you download them it's a mess of characters that make no sense but I haven't had time to investigate. I can probably learn a lot if I can manage to figure out how to see the reports.

 

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[funkj25]

Not that I'm an Amazon wizard by any means, but personally I'd love to have your ACoS. My campaigns tend to run 8-10% for my slower selling product and 20-25% for my faster moving product. I too have better luck on my manual keyword selections than Amazon's automatic for most months (6 months of data now).

It probably depends on what you're doing, but my products are not branded versions of generics like most private label stuff so I expect I probably run higher than most on my ACoS since buyer education kind of comes into play.

 

[James Fake]

Great work! Now jack that daily budget up.. milk the cow while bidding is still good for those keywords.

 

[Bananas]

Not that I'm an Amazon wizard by any means, but personally I'd love to have your ACoS. My campaigns tend to run 8-10% for my slower selling product and 20-25% for my faster moving product. I too have better luck on my manual keyword selections than Amazon's automatic for most months (6 months of data now).

It probably depends on what you're doing, but my products are not branded versions of generics like most private label stuff so I expect I probably run higher than most on my ACoS since buyer education kind of comes into play.

Thank you for sharing!

My products are also not branded versions of generics. I designed and manufactured something that no one else has.

Sales are neither fast nor slow for me. This morning I woke up with 4 orders. 1 item/3 item/8 item/9 item. Two great orders and two OK ones - one of the buyers clicked on an ad. Nothing stellar but not bad either IMO considering I basically made crap up and put it out there and people don't even know what it is.

I'm not sure what is considered "good sales" in these circumstances.

 

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[Bananas]

Great work! Now jack that daily budget up.. milk the cow while bidding is still good for those keywords.

The reason I haven't is because, in my understanding, it won't do me any good since I am not even exceeding my daily budget of $1 and .02/click. Even if I set it at $5, without the clicks, I'd never spend it, and therefore wouldn't reach more buyers or increase sales.

Am I missing something?

 

[JAJT]

At those ACoS I'd go ahead and test with $20-40 per day for a week or two.

Those are insanely good.

Edit:

.02/click

Oh, well that explains the seriously low ACoS.

Try playing around with high click bids and higher daily budgets. Say, $20 per day and 75 cent clicks. Just to see what happens. I've found I get sales in excess of what the ad spend numbers show when I advertise. Amazon is kind of weird like that.

 

[Bananas]

At those ACoS I'd go ahead and test with $20-40 per day for a week or two.

Those are insanely good.

Okay clearly there is some understanding lacking on my part. You're the second person who said increase the budget.

I'm not meeting $1/day so would $40/day really increase clicks? I'm not sure the customer base is there to click.

I am totally ready to increase the budget if I can grasp how it is beneficial. I want sales NOW and product reviews NOW (90% of my products are 0 reviews) so that by October I'm established and can rake in the money.

 

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[JAJT]

I'd still suggest testing.

Try bumping up your ad spend to $20 per day at 2 cent click bids. See if you spend more than usual. If not, bump up click bids to 10 cents, then 20, then 30, etc... see how sales and spend changes.

Likely the reason you aren't spending your budget is because there are a million people in front of you outbidding you on your keywords and you have to wait for them all to spend their budget before amazon even considers your 2 cent clicks.

 

[Bananas]

At those ACoS I'd go ahead and test with $20-40 per day for a week or two.

Those are insanely good.

Edit:



Oh, well that explains the seriously low ACoS.

Try playing around with high click bids and higher daily budgets. Say, $20 per day and 75 cent clicks. Just to see what happens. I've found I get sales in excess of what the ad spend numbers show when I advertise. Amazon is kind of weird like that.

I set the bid low because there is such low competition for the words I am targeting.

The way it looks to be set up on Amazon, I can run as many campaigns as I want to. I will leave the ones I've got going the way they are as my initial thought was to do a 90 day test run. Also they are paying so there is no reason to stop them.

I will start a new campaign with $20/day at $0.75/click and do a 10 day test run and post here when I've set up the campaign.

 

[Bananas]

I'd still suggest testing.

Try bumping up your ad spend to $20 per day at 2 cent click bids. See if you spend more than usual. If not, bump up click bids to 10 cents, then 20, then 30, etc... see how sales and spend changes.

Likely the reason you aren't spending your budget is because there are a million people in front of you outbidding you on your keywords and you have to wait for them all to spend their budget before amazon even considers your 2 cent clicks.

This is extremely helpful. Thank you.

I might actually set up several campaigns.

 

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[funkj25]

Thank you for sharing!

My products are also not branded versions of generics. I designed and manufactured something that no one else has.

Sales are neither fast nor slow for me. This morning I woke up with 4 orders. 1 item/3 item/8 item/9 item. Two great orders and two OK ones - one of the buyers clicked on an ad. Nothing stellar but not bad either IMO considering I basically made crap up and put it out there and people don't even know what it is.

I'm not sure what is considered "good sales" in these circumstances.

Hey good to see someone else attempting the strategy. It worked out well for my first product (generating a decent chunk), but the second product in the same niche I tried it out on I only sell like 10 units a month and has basically been a dud, so YMMV obviously.

I'd second/third the notion to bump up the bid and see what happens. It is not unusual to see Amazon promoting my faster product on product pages with keywords I didn't expect to see even (but could be relevant) when I don't have my automatic campaign running. This can be good/bad depending on how things convert for you, but there seems to be some Amazon A9 magic (A9 is their search algorithm) happening with the campaigns sometimes.

 

[Boo Blizzi]

Wow... those are insanely good numbers. Maybe by increasing your daily budget, you will get more impressions, which may mean more clicks and more conversions.

 

[JasonR]

Your ACOS is good, but you need VOLUME to make anything like this worth while.

Amazon has a hard time even hitting my daily budget - as their ad platform (at this stage) sucks.

I'm usually happy at an ACOS of 50% or less, but - I am usually using ads to boost my overall BSR so I really don't care if I'm at break even or losing a little.

If you do the math, Volume + decent ROAS/ACOS is better than high ROIS and low volume.

In other words, if you are doing:

$5 a day at 200% ROI - that's $10 a day

or

$200 a day at 50% ROI - that's $100/day.

Which one would you rather have?

 

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[Bananas]

Estimated Page One Bid / Keyword Bid / Impressions / Clicks / Cost Per Click / Spend / Sales / ACoS

I found the frigging reports. I don't know what the "View Advertising Reports" link is (see my original screen cut in the OP) but that gives you gibberish. You've got to click on the name of the campaign, then click on keywords from there.

I have 2 keywords paying off. You can see here that about two thirds of the money is on these two lines. You can also see my click through rate on that first one is horrible. At least I'm assuming 21k impressions and 100 clicks is bad.

If a first page bid is $0.04 for that keyword with $126.00 of sales on it for $1.44 in costs - does this change any opinions on raising my bids up to $0.50 or greater? If the page one bid sells for $0.04 I don't think me saying I'll pay more than that matters - especially when I can see I'm only paying a penny right now.

I think my best course of action would be to out bid the very few keywords that are going for higher than $0.02 on this campaign or else start an entirely new campaign with much higher bids on only a few keywords.

If I could go back in time, I would make one campaign for each keyword as I think it would be easier to monitor and adjust bids that way. Would take longer to set it up, but the maintenance would be easier.

@JasonR - I see the math and I want the volume. That's what the goal is - get this all settled and get myself trained on it and enough experience so I can gangbusters through the holidays. I moved 100 units in June but I'm only getting like $10 per unit so - not much yet.

 

[JasonR]

@JasonR - I see the math and I want the volume. That's what the goal is - get this all settled and get myself trained on it and enough experience so I can gangbusters through the holidays. I moved 100 units in June but I'm only getting like $10 per unit so - not much yet.

Yah well CTR is generally shit on Amazon PPC (you can't control your title or anything outside of changing your listing).

YES. Up your freakin bids and grab that number one spot. You want VOLUME now. Your ROI/ROAS is out of control good.

Expand your timeline - you want to increase your BSR and your natural rankings on Amazon. Here, listen to this podcast it has some genuine gold in here: http://theamazingseller.com/tas-019...ive-sales-and-discover-keywords-step-by-step/

Look man I know you aren't living off $1000 a month. In my opinion you should think about focusing long term and increasing your BSR. You won't be able to get massive volume on Amazon PPC - right now you live and die on Amazon KW rankings.

Here's a quick screenshot of my PPC account (stats are better now that I've optimized a bit)

 

[Bananas]

@JasonR, wow OK, so you are running multiple keywords on one campaign, and also your CTR is not great either and I know you make money. So I will not worry about CTRs.

As far as BSR, I don't think I will EVER see great success with that - what I am selling is so obscure there isn't even remotely a subcategory for it. I can't even get close.

Definitely not living off $1k a month! I do eBay and have published 28 ebooks. I wanted my own product so I started this project and right this second I am going to bump my bids on the keywords that are getting sales to a penny over the page one bids. Also just realized another great keyword that I neglected to put in this campaign so a few more minutes of brainstorming and I'll make a third campaign with this one keyword and anything else I come up with.

I really appreciate your time - I was surprised to see your post on here.

 

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[Bananas]

I've just went in and did "Match Bid" on anything that has sales and I outbid on the two screen capped ones above by a penny. No one matched me (yet) and I realize that since I've hit Match Bid on some stuff, I have to monitor this daily to see what the bids are in case they go above what I want to pay.

Then I realized about a quarter of my listings aren't being advertised because I started the ad campaign before I had finished making my listings. Including a $75 bundle (my cost is laughable - $4.04 COG, $5 - 8 shipping, and Amazon's cut so it's a huge profit margin) that has sold four times over the past three weeks. Imagine if I had been advertising for it! This problem has been corrected and hopefully I notice results fast.

 

[JasonR]

As far as BSR, I don't think I will EVER see great success with that - what I am selling is so obscure there isn't even remotely a subcategory for it. I can't even get close.

Well - you want to have a product in a BIG market. Check the Merchant Words and Google KW Tool to check volume. It might be a time waster if its too small, IMHO.

 

[Bananas]

Well - you want to have a product in a BIG market. Check the Merchant Words and Google KW Tool to check volume. It might be a time waster if its too small, IMHO.

If I'm not doing the volume by January I'm quitting this and moving on. Maybe have a website and can sell the whole thing to someone who has nothing and would love to start with a grand or two per month in place already. I have thought a considerable amount about the obscurity of what I chose and my chance of success.

 

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[Bananas]

Horrible Update:

Well I don't know what has happened.

I paused the original campaigns shown in the OP.

I started a new campaign with the five keywords that had sales.

This was on 7/2, so two weeks ago.

During the past two weeks, my paying keywords have stopped paying. So far I have spent $2.21 for $28.25 in sales. ACOS of 7.8%. This is a very dramatic drop as compared to June's advertising numbers. I am paying $0.02 on three words, $0.03 on one and $0.07 on the other - all for First Page.

My overall sales did not drop, just the number of sales from advertising has dropped. As of July 14th, I am on target to make 15 - 20% more sales in July than I did in June.

Next Steps:

1.) Implement the Ninja strategy I learned in the podcast Jason linked. The podcast was absolutely gold as promised.

2.) Pause my current advertising campaign & reactivate the previous ones. I don't see how this would matter, but I will try it and see. This is a learning process.