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You've just launched your first ad campaigns and you're ready to watch the sales rollin. Now what? In this video I'll show you five ad optimizations to make to your campaigns to get the most out of your ad spend without breaking the bank. When it comes to Amazon ads, it's not set it and forget it. Seasonal changes, new competition entering the market, rising CPC costs, there's a lot constantly changing you need to keep up with if you are to hit your ACOS goals. And the best way to do that is by fitting regular campaign optimizations into your routine. This video will be split into two parts. We'll start by going over each of the five ad optimizations in this video for part one, and then dive into three different ways you can perform each of the optimizations in part two, so make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a second part.
Before we start, you'll also need to be familiar with target ACOS or target A-C-O-S. If you don't know what that is, or you haven't set your own target ACOS, pause the video before going any further and check out the link in the description for choosing your ideal ACOS. Throughout these videos. I'll also be using the term targets. A target is the most granular level of your campaigns and where your bids are set. For automatic campaigns. These are the targeting groups close match, loose match, complements and substitutes. And for manual campaigns as your keywords, product targets and category targets. For most of these optimizations you'll be analyzing and optimizing at the target level, not the campaign or ad group level.
The first optimization we make is for increasing bids on high performing targets. This is any target with at least two orders that's also below your target ACOS and serve below our target ACOS we have some room in our cost per click to raise bids and win more auctions getting better ad placements, more impressions, more clicks, and ultimately more orders. For targets having ACOS that's close to your target ACOS the good idea to have a target ACOS buffer, so you're not messing with a good thing that's already working. You can subtract two to 5% from your target ACOS to act as your buffer.
If your target ACOS is 25%. You would use a filter for any targets that are less than 20-23% instead of your target of 25%. A 30 Day date ranges a good rule of thumb for most optimizations including this one. However, if your campaigns aren't generating much order data, you may need to extend this range out to 60 days. And if your campaigns are getting a lot of orders, you can use an even shorter range like seven to 14 days. And if you're in a period of really high sales volatility, such as right after the holiday buying period has ended, you may need to use an even shorter range such as three to seven days. Range targets that meet our high performance criteria, we want to slowly increase bids on those targets. A 10% increase per optimization is what we generally recommend. Small bit changes can still have a large impact on your ACOS and performance. So we want to make sure we're not going overboard on how often and by how much we're changing bids, and that we're still collecting enough data to reflect those new bid changes.
This optimization does have the possibility of runaway bids for any targets have a low ACOS they have CPCs that don't increase with an increased bin, you can actually add a filter to this optimization so that the only bids you're changing are ones that are below a max bid that you set for yourself. Next, we want to lower bids on a target to have an ACOSt that's above our target ACOS that also have at least a couple orders the same ACOS buffer from our previous optimization applies. However, this time you'll add two to 5% to your target ACOS the date range you'll use to look at the data is also the same with 30 days being a good rule of thumb and increasing or decreasing that based on your order volume and sales volatility. One difference with optimizing your low performers versus your high performers is that it can be a good idea to stagger how much you're decreasing your bids. Based on how far away the target is from your targeted ACOS.
The further away it is from your target ACOS, the more you'll decrease the bid. For example, let's say our target ACOS is 25%, any targets between 30 and 40% will decrease bids by 10%. Targets between 40 and 50% will decrease by 15%. And for interests that are above 50% will decrease their bids by 20%. Remember, small incremental changes are the name of the game. We don't want to make too many changes too fast or by too much so that we don't throw anything too far out of whack. These low performers are still generating orders just at a more expensive level than we'd like. So we don't want to lower bids by so much that we just stopped getting impressions on them.
This optimization has two parts, each with different filters, pausing targets with zero orders, and pausing targets with a single order. This optimization is to prevent wasted ad spend on targets that are getting clicks, but not really converting to sales. In order to get the most data points as well as ensure you're not turning off a winning campaign that's just in a temporary slump, we want to use a longer date range such as 90 days. This is the maximum date range that you can use inside of Amazon's ad console. If you're a Mecrh Jar user, you can use an even longer date range, including up to the entire lifetime of your campaign data. Or you can set up a recipe inside of Merch Jar that looks at both a recent date range and the lifetime order data of a target. That way you're guaranteed you're not pausing a target that you may be better served by lowering the bid instead.
This optimization a filter for 20-40 clicks without an order is a good rule of thumb for targets to be placed on the chopping block. The more clicks you get before turning off a target, the more confident you can be that you're not turning off a potential winner. Targets tend to have lower conversion rates, or that target hundreds or even thousands of search terms, such as your automatic campaign targeting groups or your broad match keywords, you'll want to lean on the side of having more clicks before you pause them, versus tighter targeting or higher conversion rate search terms like exact match and product targets. Additionally, if you want to reduce your potential spend while you're testing new targets, you can lower the bids on those targets before they reach your click threshold for pausing.
For example, if you normally pause a target once it reaches 40 clicks, you can lower the bid once that target reaches 20 clicks, and then again at 25, and so on, so that you reduce the amount you're spending on each click while you're testing. Pausing single order targets works just like pausing zero order targets, that for the higher click threshold before you pause, our goal is to find targets that are validated through getting multiple orders. And not just a fluke sale. We're halfway there on these targets so we want to make sure we're giving them enough of an opportunity to get that second sale. You should at least double the number of clicks for your threshold from your zero order target optimization.
That means if you normally pause a target at 40 clicks, you would wait until you had at least 80 clicks. If not more before you pause a target with only one order. You can also optionally add an ACOS filter to this optimization to account for your ad spend that we can collect even more data on any targets that have a low cost per click. You can also use the same strategy from your zero order optimization, where you lower the bids on a target with one order before it reaches your click threshold to pause and reduce your potential ad spend. In this optimization, you're looking at how your individual ads are performing, rather than how the targeting of your ads are performing. And then pausing any low performing ads. This is the only optimization that you won't be optimizing at the target level.
We recommend only performing this optimization on any of your campaigns that have multiple ASINs or ads inside it, such as your lottery campaigns, not on your single ASIN campaigns. Your single ASIN campaigns are effectively optimized for your bid adjustments and pausing of targets from the other optimizations here, so this optimization is not needed for those. Since all the ads inside of an ad group share the same targeting and bids, pausing low performing ads is our only option. If 15-30 clicks is a good rule of thumb before pausing and ad, leaning on the site of more clicks, the broader your targeting is.
The last optimization is increasing the number of impressions on low or no impression targets. In this step we want to get any targets that aren't being shown or shown often the win more auctions through increased bids. There's a lot of flexibility in how often you run this optimization and the filters you use for it. What would be considered low impressions for a target can vary pretty greatly from the product type to the search term targeting and the category. We recommend using zero impressions or a really low number like 25 until you can get a feel for the number of impressions you should be seeing for your situation or brand new campaigns. You'll likely want to use this optimization every few days and less frequently for established campaigns.
For example, if you're simply trying to increase your ad spend, no matter the filters and frequency you use, slow and steady is still the name of the game. Incrementally increasing your bids and till you start getting impressions on your targets run away bids are again a possibility for this optimization. For whatever reason some targets won't be shown no matter what you set your bid at. You can use an optional max bid filter to prevent never ending bid increases for this optimization. That concludes part one of the five optimizations you should be doing every week.
If you got any value out of this video, do me a favor and hit that like button. And the next part of this video I'm going to show you three different ways that you can make each of the five optimizations, so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss part two.
