The title says it all: HUGE. AMS. FAIL. (so bad, it's funny...)
It was a perfect storm:
- I bid $0.20 (which is nothing...) on a high-search-volume keyword
- The keyword had low competition, allowing my ad to be seen
- And I set a high daily budget ($10/day) for the overall campaign, thinking I lowballed bids enough that there's no way it would lose money
- It was during Q4, so exhausting a daily budget in it's entirety wasn't hard to do because of the traffic spike
- Oh and the most important part:
My t-shirt was NOT CONVERTING on that primary traffic-driving, budget-eating keyword!
Lets dig a little bit deeper.
Amazon Advertising Campaign Review
My lifetime AMS stats show over 700 campaigns launched.
That said, only once have I come across a keyword so powerful that it killed the entire advertising campaign single handedly.
Prior to launching this campaign I wouldn't have thought it possible... but apparently, it is!
If the keyword didn't represent a trademarked brand, I'd say it represents a massive opportunity given the low CPC & high demand, but unfortunately it is protected (my design didn't infringe, but it related to the theme of the brand).
See for yourself - $180.46 was spent on that single keyword with $0 return
Here are the full stats showing what went wrong for that 1 keyword:
- Keyword bid: $0.20
- Impressions: 16,493
- Clicks: 922
- CTR: 5.59%
- Spend: $180.46
- CPC: 0.20
- Orders: 0
- Sales: 0
Although it is worth nothing that pretty much every keyword I advertised on was a failure in this case.
The end result for the worst advertising campaign that I've ever run on Amazon (AMS or Campaign Manager) was a 1,096.69% ACoS!
It's so bad, I literally can't help but laugh.
In total, I lost about $194 on this single campaign. To make myself feel better about it, I'm going to file it away as a "learning experience".
Key Takeaways About AMS Campaigns
We all want to avoid this magnitude of failure:
There are a few things that we can all learn from my negative experience.
As a reminder, I found myself in this hole because I was overconfident in my ability to quickly launch new ads & I was way too laid back in my management of live campaigns.
Here is a list of one-off takeaways to save yourself the expense of replicating my mess:
- Set responsible keyword bids: $0.20 was actually pretty low - imagine what damage would've occurred if it was higher!
- Set responsible daily budgets: if I had lowered my daily budget, the bleed wouldn't have been as bad as it was
- Don't get too broad with your keywords: the keyword that cost me so much was too broad
- Check your AMS campaigns regularly!: it's not even hard to do! Just filter by active campaigns & sort by ACoS
- Be careful in Q4: I launched this campaign on 12/1/2017 & killed it on 1/1/2018, 1 month later. The crazy spike in ecommerce traffic that occurs in the holiday season can lead to overspending on advertising
- Product Display Ads are dangerous: The campaign I'm talking about in this article was a Headline Search Ad (now called "Sponsored Brands"), but in my experience Product Display (PD) ads are the most expensive
- BE ESPECIALLY CAREFUL WITH BROAD KEYWORDS: I (stupidly) targeted a single, broad keyword that was searched often enough to use up my entire daily budget on it's own in many cases. Leverage phrase & exact targeting to hone your keyword targeting on Amazon
Even after 700 Amazon Advertising campaigns launched, I'm still susceptible to "learning experiences" costing me a few hundred bucks.
And I'll be better for it in long term!
