Amazon PPC: Advanced Tactics to Capture Low-Hanging Sales

Your Amazon PPC campaigns are running, but you’re not seeing the sales you expect. You’re probably leaving money on the table. You’re not alone. Many Amazon sellers miss simple strategies that can quickly boost sales without increasing ad spend.

The reality is, most sellers focus on broad keywords and overlook the “low-hanging fruit” – the easier, more targeted opportunities that can generate immediate sales.

In this article, we’ll cover advanced tactics and strategies to help you identify and capture these low-hanging sales in your Amazon PPC campaigns. Let’s dive in.

Advanced Amazon PPC Tactics for Finding Easy Sales

What are these low-hanging sales, and how do you find them? They come from opportunities like targeting competitor ASINs, optimizing for branded keywords, and leveraging long-tail keywords. Here’s how to capitalize on each one.

Target Competitor ASINs to Steal Sales

One of the easiest ways to steal sales is by targeting your competitors’ ASINs. This puts your ads in front of customers who are already looking at similar products.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Identify your top competitors: Find the products that directly compete with yours.
2. Create a product targeting campaign: Target specific ASINs of your competitors.
3. Monitor performance: Track ACOS and conversion rates.

Example: We recently helped a client in the kitchen gadget niche target competitor ASINs. Within 30 days, they saw a 15% increase in sales and a 10% reduction in overall ACOS.

Optimize Your Campaigns for Branded Keywords

Don’t ignore branded keywords. Customers searching for your brand are highly likely to convert. Make sure you’re capturing those sales.

Here’s why branded keywords are important:

• High conversion rates: Customers already know and trust your brand.
• Low ACOS: Branded keywords are typically cheaper.
• Protect your brand: Prevent competitors from bidding on your brand terms.

Here’s how to fix it: Create dedicated branded campaigns with exact match keywords. Continuously monitor and optimize these campaigns for maximum efficiency.

Example: One client wasn’t bidding on their own branded terms. After launching a dedicated branded campaign, their ACOS on those terms dropped to 5% and brand sales increased by 20%.

Leverage Long-Tail Keywords for Increased Relevance

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific search terms that often have lower competition and higher conversion rates.

Here’s why they matter:

• Lower competition: Fewer sellers bid on these terms.
• Higher relevance: They match customer intent more closely.
• Higher conversion rates: Customers know exactly what they want.

Let me break this down: Instead of just bidding on “coffee maker,” bid on “stainless steel coffee maker with thermal carafe.”

Here’s how to find them: Use Amazon’s search term report to identify long-tail keywords that are already converting. Add these to your campaigns as exact match keywords.

Example: A client selling organic dog treats saw a 25% increase in sales by targeting long-tail keywords like “organic beef liver dog treats” and “grain-free salmon dog biscuits.”

Use Category Refinement to Target Interested Shoppers

Category refinement allows you to narrow your targeting within specific Amazon categories. This helps you reach a more targeted audience.

Here’s what’s happening: instead of broadly targeting “kitchen appliances,” you can target “small kitchen appliances > blenders > immersion blenders.”

Here’s how to implement it: When setting up product targeting campaigns, use the category refinement options to narrow your focus to the most relevant subcategories. This can significantly improve your ad relevance and conversion rates.

Run Automatic Campaigns for Search Term Harvesting

Automatic campaigns are a great way to discover new keywords and search terms. Amazon automatically targets relevant products and search terms for you.

Here’s the kicker: most sellers don’t properly mine these automatic campaigns for valuable data.

Here’s how to fix it: Regularly review your automatic campaign search term reports. Identify high-converting search terms and add them as exact match keywords in your manual campaigns. Negate poorly performing terms to prevent wasted spend.

Example: We helped a client discover several high-converting long-tail keywords through automatic campaigns. Adding these to their manual campaigns resulted in a 18% increase in sales and a 12% reduction in ACOS.

Don’t Overlook the “Little Things” in Amazon PPC

Capturing low-hanging sales in Amazon PPC doesn’t require complex strategies or advanced tools. It’s about identifying the easy opportunities that most sellers overlook. By targeting competitor ASINs, optimizing for branded keywords, leveraging long-tail keywords, and mining your automatic campaigns, you can quickly boost your sales and improve your ACOS.

Focus on these simple tactics, and you’ll be surprised at the results you can achieve. These strategies, combined with the power of AdLabs, can help you take your Amazon PPC to the next level.

Key Discussion Points from the Episode

Here are some of the most valuable insights Andrew and Stephen shared during the full episode discussion:

Like, I’ve definitely heard people say like, oh, I want to increase spend, like, let’s increase the budgets, let’s open up the budgets. And it’s like, well, maybe that would work, but we got to check some other things first. So that’s a good point.

If your campaign’s been spending $10 a day and you raise your budget, your daily budget, from $100 to $1000, it’ll just keep spending $10 a day. Unless if there’s some weird conspiracy theory that Amazon suddenly starts spending more, which I have heard people ascribe to higher. Budgets, get like benefit algorithmically.

Yeah. Or if you just have really strong products with really high conversion rates, you know, it’ll be a lot more forgiving these things. But I actually don’t like to call them catch all campaigns for that.

For that very reason. I think catch all is typically a different strategy. Catch all is typically just like is, is you typically when I see people doing that, they’re actually trying to scale these campaigns.

Sure. They’re increasing bids more than you would. Yeah, they’re like, like yeah, yeah.

If they’re catch all campaign, if your target ACOS is 30% and you’re only at 10%, they’re going to start increasing those bids because like, oh, this one’s doing really well. It’s out of budget. Let’s keep it increasing and pushing.

With low bid lottery, you just, you kind of put it in the background. Anytime you’re optimizing bids, whether it’s on a bulk sheet or an ad labs, you’re just like excluding that campaign from the optimizations because the, the math formulas that will always kind of increase the bids on those because it’s always going to be super low bids to begin with and probably low ACOs. So yeah, like just kind of start it with like a 5 cent bid, crank that top of search, do dynamic up and down, dump all your products into it.

You could definitely segment it a little bit more probably. Like um, you could, within your ad groups you could put different, you could actually group your products a bit more strategically within the ad groups. But you were not trying to get too sophisticated with this like we’re calling it a lottery for a reason.

Have you found any like potential benefit to grouping those campaigns like that? Like having, I don’t know, it would vary by category or like how that account was set up, but grouping them by like product category or relevance. Like so like if the products are related and going to have related keywords like do you see that as like a, a good thing they people should do or is it just kind of like a personal preference?

This article is based on Episode 25 of That Amazon Ads Podcast. Subscribe for weekly Amazon PPC strategies.