Amazon PPC Management: One Quick Tip To Instantly Improve Your Campaigns

Your Amazon PPC campaigns feel like a never-ending fire drill. You’re constantly tweaking bids, sifting through search terms, and praying for a lower ACOS. It’s exhausting, and frankly, it’s probably not working as well as it should.

Most Amazon sellers get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks, losing sight of the bigger picture. Here’s a simple, but powerful tip that can instantly make you a better Amazon PPC manager: stop focusing on the small stuff and start prioritizing the high-impact areas.

In this article, we’ll break down this concept and show you how to identify and focus on the areas of your Amazon ad campaigns that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Let’s dive in.

Why You’re Wasting Time on Low-Impact Tasks

The reality is, most Amazon sellers spend way too much time on things that don’t move the needle. This could be obsessing over individual keyword bids that only account for a tiny fraction of your total spend, or tweaking ad copy that has minimal impact on your click-through rate.

Here’s what’s happening: you’re spreading your time too thin. The 80/20 rule applies to Amazon PPC. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. So, it’s crucial to identify that 20% and focus your energy there.

The High-Impact Areas to Focus On

So, what are those high-impact areas? Let’s break it down.

1. Search Term Mining and Negation

This is arguably the most important task in Amazon PPC. It involves regularly analyzing your search term reports to identify:

• High-converting search terms: These should be added as keywords in your campaigns, ideally as exact match keywords.
• Irrelevant or poorly performing search terms: These should be added as negative keywords to prevent wasted spend.

Example: We had a client selling coffee mugs. After analyzing their search term reports, we found that “funny cat mugs” was converting well. Adding this as an exact match keyword increased sales by 15% in 30 days. At the same time, we negated “coffee mugs with kittens,” which had a high ACOS and wasn’t performing.

2. Campaign Structure and Organization

A well-organized campaign structure makes it easier to manage your bids, track performance, and optimize your campaigns.

Here’s how to fix it: Segment your campaigns by product category, match type, and advertising goal (e.g., brand awareness, sales, profitability). For example, create separate campaigns for:

• Branded keywords
• Generic keywords
• Product targeting

This allows for more granular control and optimization.

Example: One client had all their products in a single, massive campaign. We restructured their campaigns based on product category and saw a 22% reduction in ACOS within 60 days.

3. Bidding Strategy

Your bidding strategy is how you tell Amazon how much you’re willing to pay for a click. It’s crucial to have a well-defined bidding strategy that aligns with your advertising goals.

Here’s what’s happening: Most sellers use the default “dynamic bids – up and down” setting, which can be too aggressive or too conservative.

Instead, consider using a rules-based bidding system or an semi-automatic bid optimization tool like AdLabs. With AdLabs, you can set specific rules based on ACOS, conversion rate, and other metrics, and let the software calculate optimal bid adjustments for you to review and apply for you.

Example: A client using AdLabs saw a 30% improvement in ACOS within 90 days by implementing a rules-based bidding strategy. They set a target ACOS of 25% and let AdLabs algorithmically adjust their bids to achieve that goal.

4. Product Targeting

If you sell complementary products, targeting competitor ASINs or related product categories can be a great way to drive sales.

Here’s the thing: Most sellers neglect product targeting altogether, focusing solely on keyword targeting.

Let’s look at a real example: If you sell phone cases, you could target popular phone models or phone accessories. This can help you reach a wider audience and drive incremental sales.

5. High-Performing Products

Not all products are created equal. Some products will naturally perform better than others in your Amazon PPC campaigns. It’s important to identify those high-performing products and focus your advertising efforts on them.

Here’s how to fix it: Run a product performance report in Seller Central. Identify the products with the highest conversion rates and lowest ACOS. Allocate more of your budget to those products.

Example: One of our clients discovered that 20% of their products accounted for 80% of their ad revenue. By focusing their ad spend on those products, they increased their overall sales by 18% in 60 days.

Stop Sweating the Small Stuff

Focusing on the high-impact areas of your Amazon PPC campaigns will give you the biggest return on your time and investment. By focusing on search term mining, campaign structure, bidding strategy, product targeting, and high-performing products, you can dramatically improve your results without getting bogged down in the weeds.

Ready to take your Amazon PPC to the next level? AdLabs can help you streamline these high-impact tasks and achieve your advertising goals faster.

Key Discussion Points from the Episode

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

Yeah, yeah. Well, just to kind of recap some of that. I mean, this is something I had never really, I, I’m not, I’ve never been to aviation school, except I am a licensed drone pilot.

Not, not a real pilot. But I had never heard this 2x halfback method kind of described or at least incorporated within Amazon. But it is something that I kind of intuitively did.

So when clients try to ask you to get things moving in a certain direction, better to kind of get your way there a little bit more quickly and course correct from there. I notice this a lot in product launches. Like when you’re launching new campaigns, sometimes those suggested bids can be way off.

Like I was just working with a new product launch and I initially looked at the suggested bids, they were like $3, 3, 3, 50. And we launched the campaigns kind of right around there and weren’t getting any impressions. So we had to like really crank up the bids.

Running multiple bid increases a day, trying to get things up. We didn’t start getting visibility until like $6. Now we did that over a period of like a day or two.

But if you can imagine only doing that like once a week as you kind of described, that could be a problem, especially with this particular client was very high, high pressure, high stakes kind of product launch. And it was important that we got the bids dialed in, got the spend going and, and really ramp this product up from the go. So this technique kind of allows for that and helping you kind of push things a little bit further, a little bit faster until you start getting some visibility and then you can kind of gauge and adjust as you need from there.

And the reason why I think this whole inertia principle carries over well to Amazon is because inertia is an object’s resistance to change. And Amazon’s algorithm, I would say, is very similar where there is things kind of settle in to a little bit of consistent state. And so when you were trying to create, creating a change there, like affect the BSR or affect the spend levels, whatever, that’s what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to quickly create an impact and that’s what we’re giving it. So if you’re, if your bids are currently at a dollar and you’re trying to increase the visibility on this product and get more spend behind it, increase the bids by twice the amount that you think you should increase them just to kind of overcome that initial like need to get that momentum up. And do not just stop there.

That’s very important here. It’s not just, we’re not saying, always do twice what you think you need. We’re saying and then cut back half as soon as you see the impact.

This article is based on Episode 111 of That Amazon Ads Podcast. Subscribe for weekly Amazon PPC strategies.