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Structuring your campaign to maximize effectiveness

OldStreetMedia
Kennedell Amoo-Gottfried
Published
March 15, 2022
Modified
September 16, 2022
Structuring your campaign to maximize effectiveness

Getting a successful Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) campaign off the ground requires a number of things - the right keywords, the right bids and more - but a crucial aspect sometimes overlooked is the structure of the campaign itself. 

Having an organized, coherent structure is essential to executing on a cost-effective ad campaign. If you don’t, you can end up wasting a lot of money going after keywords that don’t help you sell and paying too much for clicks. 

The basic principle is to put relevant keywords to relevant products, but how do you do that? And how do you maximize the efficiency of your campaign? 

Do you go automatic to free up your time? Do you go manual for more control? How should you set up your ad groups? There are a number of routes you can take, but also a lot of pitfalls to look out for. 

Gather data, then direct it

The heart of the campaign, of course, is the keywords, and targeting the right ones is the name of the game. So how do you know which to go for? 

You don’t have to fly blind. To get a better idea of which ones to target, you could set two campaigns for each ASIN - first an automatic one then a manual one. 

Setting an automatic campaign and letting it run for at least a week or two will let you collect a good amount of data about the highest converting keywords to then feed back into your more tailored manual campaign. 

If you want to cover multiple bases down the conversion tunnel, you could have separate sets of keywords for different stages - throwing down keywords that cover broad matches, phrase matches and exact matches, respectively, to cast both a wide net and a targeted line in a single campaign. 

For example, Umbrella in the first, Compact Umbrella in the second, and Compact Umbrella Automatic on the third.

To maximise your capture of the narrower parts of the conversion tunnel, also be sure to keep an eye on your Search Term Report and look for the long-tail keywords. Not only do these have a higher conversion rate because they are more specific, but they also tend to be cheaper because there is less competition for them. 

You will also have something to gain from looking at your competitors - allocate some budget to targeting their keywords and putting yourself on their buyers' radar. Keep in mind they are likely doing this to you.

By a similar token, target the products you're competing against in your campaign in order to appear inside their listing, drawing their customers to you.

Taking the reins

Probably the most important question to ask yourself when determining your campaign structure is how much control do you want?

In simple terms, more control means more time. If you want to invest your time elsewhere in other parts of your business and have the campaign be automated to a larger degree, you can do that, but it means handing the reins over to Amazon to determine where your budget gets allocated. 

Having the three ad group structure is a solid solution, but creating a campaign with multiple ad groups also means you have little to no control over the budget allocation into each of them, that’s entirely up to Amazon’s discretion based on its algorithm.

If your campaign is set up to have, for example, three ad groups, it doesn’t mean that each will get the same amount of budget put behind it by Amazon’s system. 

You could have a $1,000 budget and one ad tier could get $500, the other $350 and the other $150. 

If you do want to have a stronger hand in your campaign dynamics, you can have just one ad group per campaign. Yes, this means slightly more time and effort on your part, but you know where everything is going ahead of time, focusing on the group of keywords you want to prioritize. 

Even when you go the single ad group route, though, you still don’t get to determine how much gets spent for each keyword. You could put all your eggs in one basket and put one keyword per ad group, but that would probably be overly tedious and translate into one keyword per campaign.  

A good middle ground tends to be around 10 words per ad group, a solid number that gives both the flexibility of having multiple keywords but also the likelihood that they each get decent spend. You can calibrate either way from there, though fewer keywords means less reach, while more of them may mean some get anemic spend. Use the same match type for these (broad keywords will attract search terms, for example, while exact matches will not), and experiment with which is the most effective match type to have for a given set of keywords.

Another important thing not to forget - make sure that any keywords you have in an ad group have search volumes in a similar range. If their respective search volumes vary, then what ends up happening is the ones with the higher search volume get the lion’s share of the budget and all the impressions, leaving the lower ones with next to nothing. 

Lastly, always keep an eye towards optimizing your CPC bids - making sure your actual average cost of sale (ACoS) stays in the same range as your target ACoS. If it’s bigger, you might be overspending, if it’s smaller, then you’ve got surplus budget that you could try deploying to get wider reach. 

Don’t waste time on keywords that keep coming up empty and not generating profit - sometimes they just won’t generate results even if you had a strong hunch, remove them if they’re not effective after a long period of time and put money into better options!


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