Amazon PPC Advertising Series, part 3: Manual Campaigns
In our last PPC post, we addressed Amazon Automatic Sponsored Product Campaigns. In this post, we dive into the power of Manual Sponsored Product Campaigns.
Manual Campaigns
What is a Manual Campaign? These operate at the Keyword and/or ASIN level and appear on the Amazon Search Engine Response Page (SERP) or can be found on Product Detail Pages.
It’s more common to see these Ads on the SERP. Manual Campaigns are most cost effective at the Keyword targeting level vs. ASIN targeting.
Therefore, we will review how to best use Manual Campaigns at the Keyword level, the various match types you can use to target, and strategies to help your business scale.
Automatic Campaigns are displayed based on your ASIN’s Product Detail Page Copy, Backend Search Terms, and Product Category. The goal is for the Auto Campaigns to give you converting Keyword data that you can use to guide your manual bid choices.
This is better than bidding on random keywords that you think your product might convert on, which is really just guessing.
Now that you've had an Automatic Campaign running for 2-4 weeks, you now want to launch your Manual Campaigns, right?
Here’s a PRO TIP: Only launch product-level Manual Campaigns if you have consistent and sufficient converting keyword data.
A Word about Keywords
In other words, if your XYZ Protein Powder has converted at least three times on a given keyword such as “protien powder” (yes, that was spelled incorrectly) at 40% ACOS, then add it.
If a keyword like “Protein Powder” came in your search term report once and converted once at 200% ACOS, then this is probably a bad keyword to include.
Why? Dependent on your ROAS/ACOS goal, you should only add keywords that are at/below your ACOS goal or slightly close to it. If you need a refresher on ACOS, you can review this concept in the first article of our series.
You should NOT be adding keywords that cost more money to convert than you’ll make long term.
We always tell our clients to use the search term report data from your Automatic Campaigns to make informed decisions vs. shooting from the hip.
Yes, we know you have your XYZ Protein Powder, but if customers never convert on the keyword “protein” but have clicked on your ad 100 times, that’s the market telling you that they won’t buy your protein on the customer search query “protein.”
It’s like walking into the store and asking a store rep, "Please show me where the shorts section is," and he points you in a general direction of all the shorts — men's and women's.
You’re probably not going to buy women’s shorts if you’re a man. So you go back to rep and ask, "Can you show me where the swim shorts are?".
That’s a segment of the shorts section, and being more specific aids conversion.
Remember, it’s ok if you don’t convert on “protein.” It’s not the end of the world, because you do convert on “protein powder,” so maximize your discoverability and buyability for those set of keywords. That’s your edge!
Getting Manual Campaigns Right
Manual Campaigns will likely be your best ad dollar spent within all of your campaigns and typically drive a majority of your Ad sales. That's why it’s so important to build these out correctly.
We’ll use the example of XYZ Chocolate Protein and XZY Lime Pre-workout to illustrate how.
Assume you ran two product-level Automatic Campaigns for the two products, XYZ Chocolate Protein and XZY Lime Pre-workout.
Both returned sufficient keyword-converting data to guide our manual campaigns setup. Each product had three keywords that converted 15 times. Now we need to build the Manual Campaigns to maximize the sales.
First, we’re going to add the three keywords that we converted on for our Protein and Pre workout as negative keywords from our respective Automatic Campaigns.
By doing this, we ensure the Manual Campaign doesn't compete with what's working for the Auto Campaign.
For example, Pre-Workout converted on “pre,” “per workout,” and “pre werkout.” We add all three keywords as "Negative exact" because they are the exact keywords we converted.
We cancel out (negative out) the keyword to properly display our Ad at the Manual Campaign level and not interfere with the Auto Campaign.
PRO TIP: You cannot control the keyword bid level on Automatic Campaigns; ONLY Manual Campaigns.
Second, we’ll add the three converting keywords of our Pre-workout into a Manual Campaign. We’re going to start by creating one Ad Group at a time for each match type.
There are three Match Types that Amazon gives us: Broad, Phrase, and Exact. Each Match type serves a different purpose in terms of bidding on a keyword:
Exact. Will always be your highest bidding Ad Group, as this was the exact keyword that you converted on.
Using the exact keyword match you can double down on the customers who are searching exactly for the keyword that you’re bidding on for your product; “pre” will only show for “pre.”
Phrase. Will be your second-highest bidding Ad Group, as this is the closest to Exact. The phrase match is where you double down on a phrase and keywords are matched with terms before or after.
The key component of phrase match is that it allows you to control the word order. Variations can include misspellings, singulars and plurals, stemming, like "pree workout," "pre workouts," abbreviations, and acronyms.
Broad. Will be your lowest-bidding Ad Group, as this is furthest from Exact. Your keyword(s) will be matched to search terms that not only match your keyword, but are also closely related to your keyword.
Your ad could display regardless of the order in which the keywords appear or what additional words are added.
This might include synonyms, misspellings, and variations of your keyword.
Broad match keywords help you get into a larger pool of searches for your product(s). However, your click through rate and ROAS could drop because it could get too broad.
The good news is that for our Phrase and Broad Ad groups, if we continue to get clicks and no conversions consistently for keywords, we can add them as negatives to prevent further wasted spend.
When creating these Ad Groups, you may be wondering how to set the bid. The best answer it to use data! When you pull a search term report from your Automatic Campaigns, Amazon gives you your AVG CPC conversion for that keyword based on a 14-day window.
We always recommend setting your bids a lot higher, which is relative for every brand and product.
For example, if you converted on “pre” at $1.84 CPC, start it at $3 for you Exact Ad Group. That may seem high, but you know you’ll have a better shot of getting prime Amazon real estate with a healthy bid price.
We’ve mentioned throughout this series that it’s better to bid high at the start of launching a campaign, because:
The higher you bid, the more likely you’ll get at the top of the SERP. That matters because 70% of all conversions are on the top four product placements of a given search on Amazon. Don’t miss out on the prime real estate.
You’ll discover what it costs to play on the prime real estate. Dependent on the overall retail readiness of your product and the market landscape, you could do very well or perhaps poorly. But, it’s better to start strong at the beginning to build understanding of the AVG CPC costs and potential sales.
Finally, the more sales you get on a given keyword, especially at the top of the SERP, the more this will boost your Amazon organic ranking for your product. And a strong organic ranking is a great asset.
After Launching a Manual Campaign
What follows launching a Manual Campaign? Here are additional PRO TIPS to continue driving more traffic and sales for your products:
Go through your Automatic Campaigns Search Term Reports at least once a month to discover if there are any new, consistently converting keywords that you can add to your Manual Campaigns.
Since Amazon is a demand capture marketplace, you never know what fads and searches can pop up at any moment that give you a unique opportunity as a small or large brand to take market share.
We’ve seen brands who converted on a competitor’s brand’s name, and they bid on that brand's name for years and made thousands of dollars off a brand keyword that didn’t even sell on Amazon!
In other words, a customer went to Amazon, searched for "Brand A" with intent to buy, didn't see Brand A on the SERP, so they bought "Brand B," our client’s brand, who DID show up on the SERP. You never know!
Just as you add converting keywords from Auto Campaigns as negative keywords in your Manual Campaigns, add your converting keywords from Manual Campaigns as negatives in your Automatic Campaigns.
You want full control of a keyword when advertising.
Keyword Research…do it! There are many third-party Amazon keyword research tools that give brands insight on keywords that are highly and lowly searched on Amazon.
These tools are not perfect, but they will definitely help as you continue to scale your ads.
Remember that these keywords are not keywords that you know have converted, but it’s definitely worth trying these keywords out as you scale to continue find what’s out there.