Launching your advertising campaigns is only part of the equation when it comes to advertising on Amazon
Any time you're running live advertising campaigns, whether on Amazon or elsewhere, they require regular oversight & maintenance to avoid wasted ad spend.
Even after launching over 500 campaigns on Amazon, I learned the hard way that a single keyword with a $0.20 bid could wreck your entire budget... but I was also guilty of not checking in on my campaigns often enough.
Granted, it was during Q4 and I had the vast majority of my time & attention focused on maximizing print-on-demand profits. Ultimately, it my laziness cost me just under $200.
$200 may or may not seem like a lot, but trust me the damage can easily be a lot worse when you're running campaigns for FBA products, where daily budgets are typically much higher than POD campaign budgets.
Here's some information on how I manage my Amazon advertising campaigns.
Amazon Advertising Campaign Structure
This is how I structure my campaigns for a single FBA SKU:
Campaign 1: Auto
- Ad Group 1: Auto
Campaign 1: Manual
- Ad Group 1: Broad
- Ad Group 2: Phrase
- Ad Group 3: Exact
In 2019, every FBA product needs to be advertised on Amazon. The current "state of Amazon" pretty much requires it - whether you're climbing the organic rank ladder, or in the top organic spot trying to protect that real estate.
Auto campaigns run themselves... but outside of them, if every single FBA SKU requires creating a manual campaign with 3 child ad groups that all have [x] keywords, each with their own bids... you can imagine how things can become difficult to manage.
You can lazily manage keyword bids at the ad-group level via the default bid function:
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But the truth is, you'd be doing yourself an injustice if that's how you bulk-managed keywords. Each & every keyword deserves individual attention if you want to run optimized campaigns.
It should be more common to see different bids, on a per-keyword basis:
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On top of keeping up with bid changes (increasing/decreasing them as needed), the equation gets more complex when you consider the additional maintenance:
- Negating keyword that aren't converting (negative keywords)
- Moving keywords that do convert from automatic to manual campaigns
- Improving targeting
I'm overwhelmed just typing about this stuff.
Fortunately, I found a solution for solopreneurs like myself that helps streamline & semi-automate managing my Amazon advertising campaigns.
Using Teikametrics To Manage Advertising Campaigns
Around the time I exceeded ~20 FBA SKUs, I started getting a little lazy with managing my PPC spend on a few advertising campaigns.
Fortunately one day I logged into Seller Central and saw an advertisement for exactly what I needed: assistance in managing my campaigns.
What intrigued me the most about it was that I didn't have to grant another person access to my account.
Instead, their software would attempt to make changes on my behalf in some cases, and in other cases I would just login and make the recommended changes.
Their software essentially assists us in doing logical PPC management. No one has to pay for software to help them manage advertising campaigns, but once you have enough products live, it will eventually make sense to consider options that save massive amounts of time & effort like Teikametrics.
Once A Week Emails
Teikametrics integrates with your Amazon seller account via API and essentially replaces Campaign Manager for campaign maintenance. If you need to launch new campaigns, you'll need to login - otherwise, everything can be done via their much cleaner & intuitive UI.
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As you can see, it updates you on your recent keyword bid changes which also includes automatic targeting ad groups as well (which can help protect your spending getting out of control on auto campaigns)
It also prompts you to login to their website and take action: negate certain keywords / move certain keywords from auto to manual campaigns / move keywords from broad to phrase or phrase to exact campaigns.
Start your Teikametrics free trial today »
It's good stuff! And it's especially useful for me since I manage both FBA & FBM print on demand products in my account (although most of my POD product campaigns are in AMS, which Teikametrics doesn't service as of writing this).
Intuitive + Informative Dashboards
Once a week (typically on Thursdays) I click the "View your dashboard" button and follow their advice for campaign maintenance.
You login to using your Amazon credentials (via API), and then you'll be presented a view of your data.
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The initial view is a very high-level insight into your overall campaign manager data:
- Total Revenue
- Total Ad Revenue
- Total Ad Spend
- 56-Day ACoS
- Wasted Ad-Spend
Teikametrics aims to improve all of these, across the board for your campaigns... and they try to make it easy for you, the seller, to maintain.
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This All Campaigns dashboard offers additional similar high-level insights into how much money you've spent & what kind of value it's returned, over a period of time.
The only issue with looking at data like this from such a high level is that you aren't seeing information at the campaign or ad group level - you're seeing the aggregate for ALL of your campaigns.
Your well optimized campaigns will be averaged against any poorly performing campaigns in all of the home page dashboard views.
Here's a list of the data points available in this view:
- Date Rage
- Total Revenue
- Total Ad Revenue
- Ad Cost of Sale
- Spend
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Cost Per Click
- Click-Through Rate
- Conversions
- Conversion Rate
It also shows you the net gain/loss for each metric tracked.
The third dashboard shows you your top contributing keywords (I had to blank mine out to protect my niches - sorry).
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That just about wraps up the views on the home page.
Ad Management: Keyword Actions
All of your weekly action items are found under this section - the remainder (Change History / Campaign Performance) are purely for informative / historical, tracking purposes
The Keyword Actions section has four sub categories:
- Negative Keywords
- Automatic to Manual
- Targeting Improvements
- Top Contributing Keywords
In pretty much every case, you check the boxes for keywords > click "Make Changes" & you're done!
Apologies for the censors! I am as transparent as possible without giving up my niches :)
Negative Keywords
Take action - negate the recommended keywords due to poor performance (negative keywords use the Exact match type)
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Automatic to Manual
Take action - move keywords that convert from automatic to manual (Phrase match) campaigns. You can set a conversion threshold as well!
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You can also set a conversion threshold so that it doesn't recommend migrating keywords with only 1 conversion:
Targeting Improvements
Take action - improve keyword targeting based on how they've performed in their current assigned ad group.
Most of the time it will automatically find the ad group you're migrating to, but if it can't, you can click the "Search for an ad group..." promp and it will dynamically pull in your ad groups.
Using good campaign + ad group naming conventions is pivotal as you grow.
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Top Contributing Keywords
No action required - this is here for informative purposes - a preview was available on the home screen.
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Ad Management: Change History
View historical information on your negative keyword migrations, auto to manual migrations, & targeting improvements on a per-keyword basis.
It includes metrics like prior sales + prior ACoS so you can track improving/declining performance.
You can also undo negative keyword migrations if you choose. Refer to the "Prior Spend" column - if you don't feel that keyword(s) were given a fair shot to excel, you can restore them to live campaigns.
Ad Management: Campaign Performance
Visit this dashboard every time you create a new campaign: Set the minimum bid floor + the ACoS target. Teikametrics will automate bid changes to help reach your goal ACoS, without dipping below your bid floor.
This is another dashboard that is similar to the information found on the homepage, except it breaks everything down by campaign.
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Data points inculde:
- Campaign Name
- Campaign Type
- Status
- Daily Budget
- Trailing 30-Day Sales
- Total 30-Day Ad Spend
- Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS)
- Set Min. Bid Floor
- Set ACoS Target
And that pretty much raps up how I use Teikametrics to manage my Amazon advertising campaigns.
It seems to be a popular option amongst Amazon seller circles and after using it for the past year, I can see why!
