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All right, I think we are live. Of course, we're on a little bit of a delay. So I'm like watching my side monitor like, Alright, please pop up. And please tell me the audio is working. But hey, guys, if you can hear me and you can see me do me a quick favor. Just drop a hello. In the comments. Let me know where you are tuning in from, by the way, I should introduce the guests tonight. What's up, Cameron, you've, you've been on our YouTube channel before? Yep.
Amazon advertising experts. And he's here to share his expertise. Thank you for taking some time out of your busy day to join me. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, a bunch of people have been getting access to AMS Amazon Marketing Services. Do we still call it is Amazon Marketing Services?
No, they rolled it into just everything in console. So they're kind of like, like centralizing all their different ad platforms. So yeah, everything's just an ad console. Now. That's what I call it. Okay, ad console call AMS. So I mean, I think most people know what we're talking about.
Its habit. Yeah. So ad console, let's just call it that moving forward. And yeah, I mean, it's great. More people are getting access to advertising, it seems like it's a little bit underutilized. And if you've never advertised before, it's for sure, like a scary thing. So I'm happy to have you here to kind of demystify what's going on and share a lot of your expertise with, with me and everybody else here that's here live. So I'm excited man.
Yeah, definitely. This is just intended to be kind of like a really beginner. Here's how to set up your first advertising campaign, I'm gonna show you a couple different campaigns that I like to use, that are just real simple, they're gonna be automatic campaigns which work really well. It's utilizing the power of Amazon's all their customer data on their algorithm to find buyers for increased traffic to your products.
And you can have a successful advertising account just using auto campaigns. So don't let you know the fact that you're not in there every day on a manual campaign, tweaking everything, so you don't have to, like you can't compete with the data that Amazon has. And just letting them do their own thing that's honestly for if you're want to be a lazy advertiser, you can do really well with them. That's exactly how I would describe it.
And auto campaigns are not sexy. But what and honestly, since the last time we chatted, like you helped me change my perception, because I was like buying into that mentality to where it's like, man, they're not sexy. And, you know, you know that every now and then it's spending your money on some keywords where you're not interested in like spending on but you know, you can get in there and you can kind of tweak them and touch them up. And yeah, really opened my eyes to that.
Yeah, you can make them really powerful through negative targeting. And I mean, just over the last couple of years, since I've been running the ads, they've changed significantly, where they're now have different targeting groups, you can adjust individual bids for you. It used to be able to do that with auto so they're getting better and better all the time too.
Cool, man. Great. We have a nice turnout, too. What do we got, as far as a live audience got over 100 people on YouTube 43 likes guys hit that like button, if you don't mind. And thank you for taking time out of your busy day to join us. It is about five minutes after the hour. So I think you know if you're ready Cameron, and I'm ready to jump right in. Cool. By the way, before we even get started as a thank you to Cameron, who is joining us today just because he wanted to help. He runs an expert level, well, what would you say?
Honestly, sorry, buddy. Yeah, that's Facebook. For anybody. It's Amazon Advertising University is what it's called. But yeah, it's it's for anybody's really engaged group, there's thousands of advertisers, not just Merch, there's also KDP, Seller Central advertisers, Vendor Central, all that good stuff. So a little bit for everybody. That's what's great for advertising, I'm actually kind of glad you brought that up.
Because even though this is going to be kind of like, geared towards Merch by Amazon, these same strategies work especially well for KDP, since they're very similar, right, you know, a lot of huge portfolios of different skews that you can advertise, but even Seller Central sellers as well. Or maybe you don't have that large portfolio.
Even if you just have one or two products, these strategies work work very similarly. And I'll touch on kind of what the two different campaigns that we're creating kind of what the difference is and who they're for. But yeah, that's for everybody. So if you're doing KDP, and you're not in Merch yet, this is still relevant. Cool. Yeah. And I said expert level, but let's just say that he has a Facebook group, Amazon Ads University that you can find a link to in the description if you guys would like to join and it'll help you get to the expert level. All right.
Yeah, there are advertisers in there, not just me as well. So great, man. That's awesome. So yeah, whenever you're ready to present I will shift over though. All right. Yeah, here we go. I'm gonna pop up your screen here. There we go. So it looks like we're up. So if you have access to advertising now on Merch by Amazon, they've been rolling it out to the tier 500-1000 we've been seeing the last week so you're gonna get an advertise link at the top of your Merch account. Now what we've seen is if you have a ad blocker, you may not be seeing this link. Even though you have access to it, so if you haven't seen it yet, and you have an ad blocker, definitely turn that off for your Merch account to see if you have it.
And then you, you'll get access to all the different countries, we're going to focus on United States. It's where probably most people are selling, but you can run ads in any country. And these same practices apply. But each Marketplace is a separate account. So you'll be setting having your own campaigns set up in each of those. So once you have access to this, if you've already launched a campaign, this is what your dashboard is gonna look like for the Amazon advertising console. If you haven't launched one yet, you're going to have a different screen, it's going to be the Create screen. But this is how you create a campaign here, if this is where you're at, we're going to create a campaign. And you're going to get to a page that looks like this, if you've never created one before, you're probably gonna be taken right here.
You might have different options for this, you're for sure going to have sponsored products, but you may or may not have a couple other options, depending on the platform you're at, and what you have access to, for example, sponsored brands, you may see sponsored display, Kindle, you'll see like lockscreen ads, and there may be some different for different platform. I'm not on every platform, but sponsored products is what everybody should be starting with ads, it's going to even for huge accounts, you know, the expert levels that know what they're doing, these types of ads probably comprise 70% plus of all their campaigns. So honestly, I won't even worry about the other ones for quite some time. So till you have quite a bit of experience with it.
Yeah, but shout out to the sponsored brands, though, man, those were my like bread and butter for a while because I had the I had like kind of the Vendor Central kind of backdoor into AMS and I could run the sponsored brands. So I would get kind of creative sometimes and like use my Seller Central account to create a dish. I did some kind of tricky things back in the day, I haven't been doing it as much. But the sponsor brand ads, guys, those are the ones that you see above the search results, like at the very top, you get the first visibility of the customer.
Yeah, those can work really well. What I really love about sponsored products over any of them is how easy they are to create. So they look just like any other listing on Amazon. But it will have that little sponsored, it's right in the search results. Wherever sponsored brands, some of the others, you do have to do more of the creative, you have put in headlines and some images occasionally. But any of their ad types can definitely work well.
But sponsor products is what we'll be focusing on where any beginner should start. And the first kind of campaign we're going to create is an automatic targeting campaign, which means Amazon's doing all the work for you, you're not plugging in what keywords they're going to be using, or what kind of search terms that you're trying to show your ad for. Amazon does all that for you. So they're super easy to set up. And this kind of campaign is a single ASIN campaign. So ASIN is like your product.
So like with Merch, it's your T shirt. So like this here is your product, one of my products back from 2018. So hot seller right now, your ASIN is up in the search bar. Can you see that? Yeah, you can on Yeah. Or down in the product details here? Yeah, it's a unique identifier for your product. So in each, like variation of color, and size has a different one, right? Shirts, I don't actually think so. So they changed products.
Yes, that has just one, I was actually looking for that earlier to make sure I didn't screw this up. But any kind of like shirts, hoodies, for Merch by Amazon, these are really easy, because you can just grab the asin that's in the URL or here. Other products like iPhones, totes, any other new products, you have to get the child ASIN. So with Amazon, and this is more tactical than even really want to get in here. But it's worth mentioning.
It's for the new Merch by Amazon products, you have so many products in the Amazon, you have a parent ASIN and then you have a child ASIN and the parent ASIN is the one that I don't know how to explain it, I guess it's just like, the highest level identifier for the product. And each child ASIN is an identifier for each variation. So each of these different iPhone cases, for example, has a different ASIN number, or a unique identifier. So with certain products, you actually need the child ASIN versus the parent ASIN like you would with a shirt.
So a couple of differences there. They used to structure it that way. And then they got smart because it was kind of a pain in the butt, you know? Yeah. So you just need the one we'll focus on shirts, and I'll show you what it looks like when we get it in here with those different ASINs. So we're going to create that first single ASIN campaign. So what that means is there's only going to be one product inside this campaign and ad group.
So it's one campaign, one ad group and one ad for that product. Now as far as like how the Amazon structures, their campaigns, the way I like to think of it is in buckets or boxes. So each campaign is a bucket that contains ad groups, which are smaller buckets that contain your ads. So are your different ASINs for your products. So one, one campaign bucket can have multiple ad group buckets. And inside each of those ad groups can have different ads, we're just going to be keeping this really simple and have one campaign with only one ad group inside it. And one ad for this particular example, just keeps it really simple.
And that's honestly my preferred campaign structure is just one ad group, there are people that like to have tons of different ad groups. I like to keep it simple with the way some of the bidding stuff works just to keep everything in one ad group. So anyway, that I got a little ahead of myself there. But so let's just start we're going to create a campaign, the first thing to start with is the campaign name. And this is actually pretty important.
The campaign name, ideally, you can just look at what you put in as a campaign name and know exactly what is inside of that campaign without having to open it up and see what ad it is. And there's a lot of different preferences on what that looks like. I'll show you what mine is, I like to start with the ASIN. So with this product, I'll put in the ASIN, which you can grab from the product page. And then I put in the type of additives, which is sponsored product. And this is an automatic campaign.
So I'll just put an SPA. So sponsored product auto, if it's a manual, I'll put an SPM anything that's part of the reason you do this, as anything in your campaign name is searchable on your advertising dashboard. So it just makes it much easier. If you want to look for a specific keyword. You know, if you have a certain niche, you want to look at all the campaigns or a specific product, like with a single ASIN campaign, I can just plug in the ACE and I'll be able to see what my all my campaigns for that one ASIN. I already like you're way better, I was doing like SP dash Auto, and it's like you can just There's a lot of lot of options, then afterwards, I'll usually put like what the targeting is from it.
So this one is an auto like all I'm just going to do all my auto campaigns. And I'll show you a little bit later what I'm what I do differently for some different segmentation options. So I'll do like the what I'm targeting or the campaign goal. So this might be like a testing campaign, if it's manual or performance campaign, or if I'm targeting competitors, it might be like priority competition or something like that, whatever that looks like. And then what I'll do is put in different keywords, usually, what I like to do is just grab the title of the product. If you've done your due diligence ahead of time, it should already be well keyworded, which honestly, before you're even launching ads you want to do anyways, because especially with automatic campaigns, it doesn't know what your shirt is, it only has the title and description to go by on who to show this product to. So tune in to what he just said sorry to cut you off.
But like Oh, so that's like important, really understand. So you really like we're distinguishing between manual, which is a little bit more advanced, and Auto, and we're talking auto and what Cameron just said there is important, like, the algorithm is just code written at scale. And it doesn't it doesn't see the shirt, right, it just sees keywords. And that's the keywords we provide. So really kind of the you said, do your due diligence, as far as the keywords you're providing, because you're gonna end up like spending money to bid on those keywords through the auto campaign. You know, because it's gonna happen automatically. Yeah, and it's if you have keywords that aren't relevant, it also means your your campaign will be displayed to people that are likely not likely to convert to a buyer.
So do you want to be I am a fan of having broad keywords in your descriptions because you want to get as much real estate as possible in your which search terms you're indexing for. But you do still want to keep it relevant. I'm not gonna go into how you know SEO that's a whole separate video series on its own. But yeah, Amazon is gonna use your SEO so advertising like step zero is having an optimized listing which with Merch that's you have pretty limited control over what you can do with the listing so that's pretty much just making it SEO optimized for Amazon if you're selling on like Seller Central, you have a lot more options with the images you can have on there if you're doing like A+ content, that sort of thing. So you want to make sure your listings already optimized to give your campaign the best chance of success for sure. Right.
You don't want to pay to pay to increase visibility and then like your conversion rates low because your listing is not you know optimized to the best of your abilities but I think this audience all the great subscribers, whatnot, I think we hammer that pretty regularly. So hopefully everybody's doing the best they can with keywords design, etc. Yeah, so this assumes that this is kind of like you've already done your due diligence there. So I just plug in the the title from the product there. So that's gonna have any of the keywords that I really need.
So if I do want to kind of search by keyword I have that. Typically I'm using the ASIN. These these single ASIN automatic campaigns comprise the majority of my campaigns, I do also a lot of manual as well. But you're still, this is kind of your, if you look at your campaigns as a funnel, your automatic campaign for your product is closer to the top of the funnel. And then you'll have like different manual campaigns, once you find search terms that work and so forth.
But this is where you want to start and just start collecting data and see what's working. So we got our campaign name. Now, start and end date, you can just leave this how it is we don't need to put an end date to any of our campaigns, we're going to base our end date on its performance. So just how it's performing. So as we're optimizing over time, whether that means like pausing different targeting options or keywords, that's how you set your end date for a campaign don't do just like an arbitrary date.
Even if you have if it's like a holiday shirt or something like that. You can keep an eye on it, you don't need to pause your campaigns because they sell all year round. I think anybody that's been doing this will see Christmas shirts. So all year round, you know, Valentine's Day, whatever it is. I'm not a fan of pausing ads, especially through sold pretty much ever so leave it no end date, keep it simple. daily budget, so this is one of those dealer's choice kind of thing. So anywhere from I would say, for Merch by Amazon, anywhere from one to $5 a day to start with is is a fine budget, I usually start with like three to $5. Same thing with KDP, I'd be in there something like Seller Central, I kind of separate Seller Central just because usually you have fewer products, you have a lot more invested in these products, you're going to spend more money on advertising of it too. So you're gonna want a higher, higher budget.
But if you want to be conservative, you can start with a lower budget, they will spend over your daily budget, now this is fairly new, they'll actually go up to 25% over what your daily budget is. So just keep in mind. Now even if you have 100, different campaigns all with $1 daily budget, if you're being conservative with your bids, it's unlikely you're going to spend all of that daily budget. Do you want to make that distinction real quick, like about how, you know, you could set the budget to like $300. But if you set really low bids for for clicks, you're never going to spend anywhere close to the 300. Right, you're under, You know, 50 cents, even 75 cents, you're probably just not going to be you're not going to be getting all the clicks, because you're not getting all the impressions because there's people bidding higher than you are in different categories. Merch is pretty low margin. So the bids tend to be lower.
But not every product is likely on Amazon, there's advertisers that can afford several dollars per click with the product margins, they haven't you are competing against those on some search terms. But yeah, you're not going to more than likely you're not gonna spend the budget. Now you can. And if you go crazy with your bids, and you get on some very broad, you know, funny t shirt search term, Amazon will spend will spend it as well. So, but we're going to talk about the bids here in a minute. But yeah, I wouldn't be too concerned. And if you do have budget concerns, just start slow with how many products you're listing. So we didn't even mention that. But what this what this campaign is good for is pretty much any of your products, that is your best sellers, for sure. Through regularly selling organically, they're a good candidate for this type of campaign.
Any products that have positive reviews, so like four plus stars, even other ones that have fewer reviews, but reviews is kind of your gold standard. That's what everything's about getting reviews. So when your products that have reviews are good candidates for advertising, because their conversion rates better, they will perform better than any products that you're advertising that don't have reviews. So that's also key. If you do have some best sellers, you want to run some ads for it. And they don't have any reviews. If your campaign isn't performing right at the start, like that's fine, you're the you're in this for your campaign goal at that point should be just getting reviews, and then optimizing it for performance better because it will get better. Like that's just fact.
Practice with reviews have higher conversion rates. Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. And then you get rewarded for high conversion rates by Amazon, you know. Yeah, it is it's that snowball factor sales velocity. Some people call it where just more sales lead to more organic traffic, better rankings, more reviews, which leads to more sales. It just snowballs so and that's why ads are so powerful, because it helps your snowball effect. It's not like every I should say every other platform but some other sales platforms where you're really just optimizing your campaigns like just for how the sales are coming in from the ad platform. They're not like if you're getting ad sales they're not also increasing your organic sales for example, like for running a Shopify store, running Facebook ads. Writing successful Facebook ads doesn't make your organic traffic go up on Amazon, it does. So it makes it that much more powerful. Even if you're losing money on your ads, they can still be a net profit positive and profit because of the organic lift that they bring.
So that is we... Should have led with that. And we should have opened with that, guys, you know, just real quick like reiterate that that what Cameron just said is seriously why I love Amazon advertising specifically, you know, we know Amazon is crushing in the organic traffic that's qualified people come, they already know Amazon, they trust it, probably a little bit to their disliking how easy it is to spend money on Amazon. And like. So we know if we can get that organic rank, which by the way customers also associate with, like, social proof, like validation, they know that the ones that rise to the top are the ones that are selling well, you know, and with Amazon, you advertise, you're facilitating the algorithms in learning faster, what keywords to associate you with organically assuming that your advertised keyword results in a click and a conversion. And again, it's like that feedback loop where you're generating sales. Even if they're from ads, you're going to start ranking better on those keywords organically. So it's a beautiful thing.
Also, I just want to mention to Eric pointed out something about political merch slash anything politics, even if it's not through Amazon Merch, just wanted to mention you can't advertise on that. So that is a good reminder. Yeah, there's I just looked at that list. Again, there's a whole bunch of thing things like swear words, I forget what they said it was but just needs to be for like a general audience, your advertising. But yeah, politics is out. There's a whole bunch of them. So you definitely like familiar. Familiarize yourself with what advertising allows. It's not like, they'll just turn your ads off. It's not like an Amazon Merch rejection, necessarily. Not that those are all like, necessarily super crazy. But if someone if Amazon ads turns off when your ads due to politics or whatever, it's not a huge deal. They're not going to like kick you off the platform or anything or accidentally do that. They want your money from the ads, trust me. Where were we here? So all right, so we got budget. Yeah, anywhere from $1-$5 in ways that if you want to be more conservative, just kind of launch your products a few at a time or one at a time and slowly launch new ones.
As you see how they perform. That everything advertising is all about testing, you'll hear me say that over and over, you know, any of the content I put out, it's all about testing, not just what works for Amazon, but works, what works for you as well, just because there's 1000 different ways to run ads. So let's keep moving here. So we're on automate automatic targeting, so we're gonna stay on that. Now bidding strategy here, we're going to slide down only this is the most conservative bidding strategy. What this means is, whatever you set your bids at Amazon will lower them if they don't think it's as likely that they're going to convert to a sale, versus up and down, they'll, they'll lower it, but they'll also increase what you set up to your bid up to double it.
But since we want a little more control over our bids, we're going to do down only for this, if you want to be aggressive and collect data faster, you might want to do something like up and down. And I'll touch on that the difference between being conservative and aggressive is the rate in which you'll be able to collect data and optimize your campaigns faster. If you start at really low bids, you're really conservative, you're not going to get as many impressions or views on your ad, which means less clicks and less orders. Versus being aggressive, your bids are higher, you're going to get more clicks and more traffic and you can optimize faster, because it's all based on the data you're you're that's coming in, if it takes you a month to get 10 clicks, there's it takes a lot longer to do anything with that data. So down on these, what I recommend to start for this campaign, we're going to do 0% across our placement adjustments.
So what this means is any of your top of search placements, so that's the top four, at the top of a search results page that say sponsored, that's your top of search, those are the most expensive bidding slots typically, because there are at the top majority of customers click the first three or four listings, and there's a lot of competition for them. So they do tend to cost quite a bit more. And Amazon allows you to increase your bid just for this specific placement. And this can be really powerful. I'll touch on that when we get to our next ad ad campaign. And same thing with product pages too. So these are ads that are on another person's product. If you see a section like you may also like you know whatever products and it says sponsored those are your product pages and you can I never had good thing. I never had good success with those. I don't know why really. They can work really well. Fantastic, for sure. Okay, so I want to shy away from that necessarily, you got to be careful with that because they can't spend money just like any keyword.
So there is due diligence to just keep an eye on your campaigns and what's working what's not. So we're gonna leave these at zero for now, it makes it a little easier to optimize to this adds a little complexity. Because this is done the bidding strategy, and your placements are done at the campaign level. So any of your ad groups and keywords are targeting inside that gets this multiplier applied to it. So if you have 10, different keywords, for example, a manual campaign, and you put 100%, each of those 10 keywords is going to be now doubled. If you have some keywords of those 10 keywords that don't perform well on top of search, they're going to be dragging the other ones down. So you got to be careful with that. Just in how it kind of waterfalls to everything inside of a campaign, if you are using multiple, a bunch of different keywords, or different ad groups makes a little more difficult to use your placement adjustments. So 0% ad group name, what I like to do here is just put in the targeting what I'm targeting, and this is just an auto campaign, we're just targeting everything inside it. And then our ASIN. This is where you can plug in your ASIN, and you can do a search here, you can enter a list, you can upload, I don't think I've ever done that. But we're just gonna plug it in here.
And we'll have to change this to all Amazon products. I don't know why. But you just do. And we're just going to hit Add for T shirts, hoodies, these ones don't add variations, because what that's going to end up doing is so you see here, we just got our one variation for whatever reason adds every variation, they're all like black small. So you don't want 55 ads in there, we're just going to do the one variation. If you want to do like iPhones, totes some of those, those, you may want to do different variations. So like the iPhone, here. So like if we have, if you just click on your get taken to your product page for an iPhone or some of these newer products, it's going to have the parent ASIN in the URL that we mentioned earlier, if you use that, you're going to get a warning that it's ineligible can't use parent ASINs, you have to grab the child ASIN , which comes from clicking on a variation. And you can grab it then from the URL or download or on the page. So if we use that, I get rid of this. This we can add all variations. And I'm just going to add all the different kinds of cases if you do, it's not probably not that big of a deal. Honestly, they're all going to target the same search terms more than likely anyways. And they all look pretty similar from a thumbnail perspective.
So but so kind of dealer's choice on that, you might just want to test and see what works better. So you can go either way with that. Cool, good to make that distinction, because I know that it can be confusing. So we're gonna go back, we're gonna add the shirt. And now we get to our bids. If you set a default bid, so each each automatic campaign is actually made up of four different targeting groups. So these are different kinds of search terms that your ad is going to be shown on. Based on your keywords and your description. So a close match, it's going to only show for search terms that really closely match what you have in your title and description, where loose matches can be a lot broader. So for example, if you're practicing cat tree, you're going to show up for things like wooden cat tree for close match or something like that, where loose match, you might show up for cat foods, like things that are a little bit broader. And then substitutes and complements are more product page placements, but not necessarily. But these will go to if you want to go I'm not gonna go through each description, but these will tell you what each one products a target different types of products. If you set a default bed, it's just gonna apply that bit to all of them. I don't love that practice just for a couple of reasons.
But I prefer to go in and set it for each targeting group itself. With close and loose match having a little bit higher bids than substitutes or complements, you could probably just turn off, quite frankly, if they don't work great. Either you don't get impressions or the ACOS is super high on that. If you turn that off, you're probably not missing out on too much. You can always test those later if you have successful ones. Yeah, I mean, honestly, guys, it's worth like. And if you don't go to this level of granularity initially, just remember to come back and check because you'll notice that the match types perform differently. And if you just have the same bids across the board, you're going to be wasting money on something that could have been used on the other that's more effective. So it is worth remembering. Yeah, and I'll show you once we create this kind of what that looks like to just go in and change some of these bids, but I honestly think That's one of the biggest mistakes that new advertisers make is that they don't look at this kind of granularity, when they're making decisions about their campaigns.
They're looking at the overall campaigns like, Hey, how's this is this working or not, and then make a decision to pause it, where you could have just one targeting group sucking up all the ad spend, that's not performing at all. And then you have another targeting group that's doing a little bit of span, and it's performing, but it's just being overshadowed by the poor for performing one and you could be turning off potentially winning products. So you definitely want to optimize these individually from each other, as far as starting bid goes. So this is another dealer's choice and space on how aggressive you want to be. If you want to collect as much data as fast as possible, you want to start with higher bids. And this depends on your product tech to where someone with a higher product margin, can afford higher bids, product margins on merch, and probably KDP, I don't really mess with it too much, much lower.
If you want to be super conservative, you can start as low as two cents as the lowest bid. But somewhere between two and five cents. And you can just slowly increases over time until you're getting impressions and clicks. That's the most conservative route. If you want to be a little more aggressive, I start these with a down only bidding strategy anywhere from 30-75 cents depending on what the product is, if it's one of my better selling products, I might have a higher bid versus one that's a little more niche, longtail. So, you'll want to play around with kind of see how fast your products are getting clicks and impressions, because everybody's are going to be different, how fast that kind of products I have, are gonna perform differently than Ryan's and his are gonna perform differently than anybody else. So you really need to get it just start testing, creating ads and getting a feel for everything how fast and you're collecting data.
You can, it's worth mentioning guys, like there isn't a one size fits all approach. Like if most of your like, let's just say you have a merch, merch standard t shirt $17.99 So you making like What $3.50 Something cents profit per sale, so your bids, if you're advertising, you're kind of hamstrung, you know, they're going to be low, they have to be right. But there's nothing stopping you from pricing a shirt. This could be the same design at $21.99. You know what I mean? Increasing that the the money you can basically play with per conversion, with with advertising and all of a sudden you can outbid your competition, you know, kind of suppress their visibility because you're ahead of them. And there's only so many advertising spots, and you got more money to play with. Because you have a higher budget, you know, as long as someone's willing to pay 22 bucks for a T shirt, which I can tell you they are you know, so you can play around, you can price the T shirts, 25 bucks, then even the non-prime people get free shipping. So you can you can play around, see what works.
Yeah, herps. And, yeah, to your point, the higher your profit is just the more room you have to outspend your competition. That's a huge point, especially if they're pricing their products low if you got someone at $14.99. If they are running ads, they're definitely, definitely losing money, almost for sure. And I can just get shown in more places on a product that's $19.99, I have a $5.23 profit margin of five bucks to spend on my acquisition. And like I mentioned earlier, if you're not profitable on a campaign, it doesn't mean that's not a net profitable campaign with your organic.
Right? It's always boosting that organic guys remember, he'd like what he just said you could be you could be break even. But you're training the algorithm to boost you organically. So even if your break even it's it's still, in my mind most likely profitable. The only thing is you can't really associate an organic sale that benefited from you advertising. You don't I mean, there's no, there's no dashboard that will show you that metric. So...
No, there's not I mean, you can kind of keep an eye on like your, how many orders you're getting and with ads versus just total orders. And then you subtract when you got your organic orders in kind of keep track of that ratio, which isn't a bad practice. In my experience, in general, for every one order that I'm getting with ads, I'm getting three or four organic orders. And that's been with every level spend from when I was spending 300-400 hours a month on up to thousands of dollars a month. So it seems to kind of fall in line with some some variance. So some higher competition, it might kind of be a little bit less, but in general, yeah, three to four organic orders for every pay order that I'm seeing. I'm seeing that across other accounts to not just mine. So yeah, let's get back in the bids. We'll keep moving. We keep going on tangents.
So yeah, bids are conservative. If you want to be conservative start low. You can increase those over time. If you want to be a little more aggressive, just start them higher, I'd say yeah. 30 To 50 cents is a good ballpark for close and loose substitutes. I'll usually start a little bit lower might start at like 25 or 30 cents. You're going to be optimizing this though like as doesn't set it, forget it. So anything we put in here we're going to keep an eye on how it's doing Ideally, you're doing that every five to seven days once a week, okay? And going into your ads see are they're doing making adjustments. So that's kind of...
Can I do one quick thing just because I mark, I was like, I sent a couple emails and I said, guys, regardless of your budget, you can use this. So if you want to scroll back down just to the bid section, just to like make one thing clear, guys, like if you have a low risk appetite, and you're just here like saying, Hey, I just want to like, you know, go baby steps, like put your toes in the water first, there's no pressure to start with bids at 50 cents, you don't even start under 10 cents, it may move extremely slow. But you will start to get some data most likely, I mean, again, you're under 10 cents, it's going to be tough, but you're probably going to get some data. And it may just be that you're spending a little bit of money and not generating sales, maybe you'll get lucky eventually make a sale, you know, low bids is going to be slow. But if you have a low risk appetite, you can still get in here, you can still hit that learning curve. And, you know, I want to make this available to everybody watching even the people that aren't trying to spend a lot of money on ads. This is your this is your introduction right here with low bids.
Yeah, 100%. There, yeah, no pressure at all to start higher, because you can increase those over time and slow increments. And that's that's the way to go. If you have a little bit less risk tolerance, or maybe this is your first PPC Pay Per Click advertising intro, I've done a lot of pay per click even outside of Amazon before this. So my risk tolerance might is probably quite a bit different than a lot of people's I like to be really aggressive in my advertising, you don't have to be, you can take it slow and steady and have a great ACOS. And be successful. That said, if you are being too conservative, you probably are leaving money on the table with advertising, if you're getting a 5-10% ACOS you could definitely be increasing your organic sales by increasing your paid bids and so forth up higher. Yeah, if you're if your campaigns are profitable, like like Cameron keeps reminding you, you can come back in here and optimize these.
So if you're seeing like a really profitable campaign, but your budget is $2 a day, you already know, double that budget to four bucks a day, see what happens, you know, So we're going to just launch the campaign. And now start running might take a little bit before you start seeing any action there, you're super soon go back to the campaign manager impressions is what you're going to see first. So that's anytime your ad is seen. You can just your columns, gotta have it on. So if you aren't getting impressions, after a couple days, you're gonna want to go in and adjust those bids. See, let me refresh here that hasn't shown up yet. Okay, they haven't shown I have a another campaign that I did for this reason, because it does take them a while sometimes to create them. When you click on a campaign, this is what you're going to see, we have our ad group, which I didn't rename, but that was called auto and our other one, we have our placements.
So if we didn't do anything, well, this one had some. But this would be like where you adjust your placement adjustments, we didn't really get into that too much yet. We'll talk about more on this next ad. And then you go into the ad group shows our ad, pause, which is fine. And then our targeting. So this is where you're gonna see your different match types that you can turn on and off, you have a different bid for each of them even shows you a different suggested bid, if Amazon has the data for it for what they think you should bid to get the, I guess most impressions for your money, it's kind of a, they give you a range.
But that doesn't mean you won't get any impressions. Unless you're at that even at the low you could still get impressions on a maybe not five cent bid. But if you're higher up with something like this 20, 30, 40 cents bid, you'll probably still find some impressions will just be pretty low. But this would be where you go in and adjust your bids. On kind of that weekly basis, you're gonna be able to look and see how they're doing. What you're looking at is typically ACOS your advertising cost of sale. If that's doing well, you're you're going to increase the bid if it's not doing great, you're going to decrease the bid. And that's that's pretty much as simple as it gets. I don't want to spend too much time talking about all that different optimizations that's probably another its own video as well. But that's where you'll you'll optimize this kind of campaign we're ready for that next one that showed up here.
Ask you something today believe twice a month or once a month on the ads that the bills you run up
My ID I think there's still a $500 limit for mine. So it's billing every few days, maybe okay, because I was saying at the end of the month, I see the emails at like random intervals and someone asked and I was like damn, I should know the answer. But like I don't even open them anymore. I just see the email. I'm like alright, billing me. Yeah, I honestly I could probably have the budget increase but it doesn't really matter. They're just Bill my card every $500 by So and then I believe at the end of the month as well, whatever, it's kind of leftover. So not a huge deal, you can't get that increase, it's just not, I don't know, never really cared, too. So that's the single ace and campaign, we already went over kind of who that's for pretty much any product that is selling, it's a good starting point for collecting your different search term data and so forth.
This next campaign that we're doing is also an automatic campaign, this I call a lottery campaign, what this is going to be as a single campaign with a single ad group inside of it still so same structure as the other one, but we're going to put every single one of your products every ASIN, inside of that one ad group and campaign. So just everything in it. What these work really well, for as anybody that's got a lot of products, I'd say more than, you know, a couple dozen products, even Seller Central sellers out there, if you have a big portfolio, you could still use this, or if you have products are kind of closely aligned. They don't have to be though, merch, these work really well, I have a lottery campaign with over 100,000 ASINs inside of a single campaign. But what the goal behind these is using low bids with put your placement adjustments in order to generate cheap clicks on across all the placements.
And it utilizes the power of, for one year, a large product catalog with all the different potential search terms that you can appear on an index on and the power of Amazon's algorithm and customer data. So you're just giving a lot of ammo to Amazon to put your ads in places with Cheap bids, essentially. And even in high converting places placements like top of search. So that's the goal behind this one. And they can perform really well. I think on mine, I last I checked, I was about 17% ACOS lifetime with hundreds of orders. And a lot of these are on never, never sold products. So another benefit of this type of campaign is just getting eyeballs on your products that's never been seen before, every time I create a new product.
Now about once a week or so we're going getting and getting all of our ASINs, new ASINs that we just uploaded and putting them in to this campaign. So we're keeping up with all our new products. And it's just ads are a shortcut to get your product seen. And that's probably the biggest challenge with any new product that you're listing is for one getting indexing it that takes some time and just getting enough traffic to it because of how competitive a lot of search terms are.
Yeah, and this is I really liked this strategy that Cameron is about to show you guys like this is something that like I would feel compelled to do, if you're watching this. It's something that I think advertisers should...
At least test this, there's no reason not to, you'll be surprised how cheap of clicks you can get with this. Some of the ads on there. I mean, obviously, you're gonna have a lot of clicks across a lot of different ads. But it's really fun to go in and see this ad had like four impressions with one click and an order. It's running something like point 3% ACOS and it happens across a lot of different ads. So it can be really powerful. There's a lot of variations you can do with it. And you can start segmenting them, which we'll we'll talk about once I create it here. But there's a lot of testing you can do. But I would start with just every single ASIN inside of a single campaign. So that's what we're going to do. So this lottery, I'm going to call this a lottery campaign. And just all ASINs we'll just call it that doesn't really matter a whole lot. But I have a keyword for like lottery.
So if I'm going to look at all my different lottery, because I'm running multiple ones with these, just with different types of niches and segments, you can type in lottery into your ad console and just filter it by all your different ones. So that's kind of the importance of keywords. Budget, so this is another one that was saying I do start these a little higher. If you have a large product portfolio, I would start these at $10-$20 a day if you have the budget. Otherwise, same kind of deal. Whatever budget you want, and you're comfortable with. These do take a while to spin up since especially since we are going to start these at low bids. It can take it took mine a month to really start getting going it wasn't spending very much and that's just part of Amazon's gotta learn kind of how where's going to place your different ads. So that's that's pretty typical. This isn't like an overnight, you're gonna start having successful campaigns. This is a long term game. So budget yeah, anywhere from one to I'd say $20 or so. But I'd say $10 Probably around the sweet spot.
If you got the budget. Automatic targeting again, we're going to do dynamic bids down only so we have the most control over this. And I'll come back to placement here in a second. Like you like that idea. Ad Group, whatever you want to call it all lottery are all ASINs nothing too crazy. So I'm telling you all ASINs there, then let me grab an ASIN here. So this is where we would put in all of our ASINs. So here, you can use a list, it'll let you enter up to 1000. At a time, if you have more products than that, which I know a lot of Merchers do, you'll have to when you first create the campaign, you're going to be able to only do up to 1000.
And you'll have to add in the other ones later, a thousand at a time. For Merch, if you're wondering where you can get a list of all your ASINs, I'm used productor to after there might be some other ones out there, too. But productor has an export of all of your ASINs. The caveat with that is the newer products that have that child ASIN issue that we talked about earlier, it doesn't give you the child asin of those, so it's only gonna work for things like standard T hoodie, tank tops, kind of the the main product still, though, phones, phone cases, are going to be a little bit more of a pain to add to this if you want to include that. But so just know that. So I'm just going to do one Asin. So just to show you, because this doesn't really matter too much. But you'll just put in all on. So if you have thousands, that's fine, you can put up to 500,000. A's Yeah, inside one ad group,
I just dropped the link to the product or Chrome extension, which is free, so you don't need to pay anything. And a lot of you guys are probably already using it. But I put it in the chat. And when you export, you just get like a spreadsheet. And so what I would do is just grab a bunch out of the spreadsheet and move it over, you know.
Yeah, it works pretty well, it can be a little time consuming, especially a lot with the 1000 limit, but it's worth doing so bids with our target groups, these were we are going to start low this one is I would start low with everybody's somewhere between four or five cents for each one. Because the whole goal is to find cheap clicks using all of your different products. So we're gonna do five cents on each of these. And I want to jump back up to the placements now. So this is one that I do heavily use placements on other types of campaigns I do a little bit but not near as much these, I the placement is my primary adjustment lever, instead of using bid where most other campaigns, I'll adjust the bid up and down this these types, I generally you're still going to do some bid adjustments, but the placements gonna be more of your primary.
So these I like to start at just 100%. With the planet, this is gonna go up quite a bit. I'll a lot of mine are anywhere from two to 400% for top of search, for example, and are still profitable at that. But what these placements do is multiply your bids. So if we put 100% in there, it's adding 100% of what your bid is to the bid. So 5%, 100% of that is five cents, it's adding to it. The max bid with that placement adjust with that placement is now 10 cents. So for top of search placement, our bid is now going to be 10 cents, not five cents for it. And if this goes up to 200%, it's now three times what your adjustment is. So a so 15 cent bid is now going to be 15 cents, and so on for that it's a little weird just because like 100% like, it's hard to have your bid. It's kind of additive, but...
Not a lot of people do this. This is this is like stuff that you guys that are still with us like this is something that you're gonna put you're like, I'm always thinking, you know, oh, I want to do something in E-commerce. Well, what's your edge? What are you doing that most people aren't doing? Hey, if you're doing this, you have an edge already right now. You know what I mean? We only what do we got? Like we have basically 200 people watching right now and the replay is gonna remain up. But I promise you, you're still in a minority of people running ads at all, let alone taking advantage of this strategy, which I can already tell you firsthand works on me and Cameron both can vouch for that.
Yeah, I was gonna show stuff. I just wanted to get something ready for just to show when there's data. But so I'm gonna get a little bit more advanced strategy, I guess I don't wanna say it's like advanced but something that I've started moving into, because I do use placements with these. And because it multiplies each of these different targeting so we mentioned earlier, each of these can perform wildly differently. That's why you want to go and look at your targeting and adjust each of these individually from each other based on their performance. Now, what makes what's difficult with that is you may have a plate here this I have some place data here just so we have some numbers to look at. It's not gonna work. Nevermind I'm in like two different browsers.
You want to turns off screenshare for a second.
Um, so let me see. Let me see if this will work. Here we go. So we got some data here, this is one of my lottery cubes. So you can actually see the the data, so lifetime 15% with 354 orders, and I have a couple of this isn't even my best performing one. But there's just to give you an idea of what's possible. And you can see each of these placements performs differently. From rest of search, product pages, top search, and rest of search, we don't have a way to adjustment, we can't do like a negative adjustment or positive adjustment on rest of search. So what we're kind of doing is optimizing for rest of search. And then using the placement adjustments to increase this to kind of control our a cost there, I'm targeting about 15% With this as my target a cost. So that's kind of we're right in line. But we're going to just as kind of where our actual a cost is versus what we want it to be. So if this was high 20%, it's not doing as well, I might want to lower my adjustment.
Now these adjustments, what ends up happening is in your In your targeting, sometimes the well a lot of times actually with this load up, you may have a placement that doesn't perform as well. So like my compliment here is had a super high ACOS my loose match didn't perform as well as some of my other ones. But so any expense when you're just the placement, that placement adjustment still applying to the loose match. And there's not really much you can do about that other than unless you're going to segment these out. So this is kind of where you're getting a little more advanced. What I like to do with anything where I know I'm going to be using a lot of placement adjustments, is creating a separate campaign for each of these different targeting options. You don't have to you can keep it all together. And you can do this later, which I can kind of show you here. So if we wanted to just have this going, we're just gonna launch our campaign, you did what you did, with your ASINs got everything in here, five cents real launch your campaign.
And you can run it just from here. And if you see anything kind of getting out of line, if you're using all of them, especially on the placement adjustments, let me go back here. If this isn't the case, but our relative search, which we don't have any way to modify, if this was high, say 20%, it's higher than I want it to be. And we have all these different targeting options open. We don't know which one necessarily is the culprit of that we don't have any more granular data that shows the rest of search on a per target option where that's close match loose match, we don't know what's causing it to be higher. However, if we do segment them out where we only have one target option. I'm going to open up both. So we have if we only have one targeting option here, we know that rest of search is for that one individual targeting option. So like here, I only have close match enabled. I know that obviously this was like old data, but I know that this placement adjustment of recent is only going to be applied to that close match. Does that make sense? Yeah, I feel like it was kind of a roundabout way to explain it. But you just end up having more control. If you remember back to our new campaigns if you end up segmenting those out.
And again, you don't have to to start you can just leave it just like this start collecting data. And the data you end up getting when you do see one that's just kind of lagging behind or it's not performing or it's something that's like sucking up all the spend, you can go in, turn that off and create its own campaign for it. So if I see substitutes as like, man, this one's like really not doing well, you can turn it off at that point, duplicate the campaign which you can do just show everyone just it's a copy button so you can end up just copying your campaign and changing some of those adjustments. Now if I do that, I'll make sure I'm not editing my own campaign to get rid of some of these. Now if you do that, you may want to change some of your titles like your campaign title, like if we're going to make this only a close match, you can go into your settings, all ASINs close close match and we're just going to target this overall just makes your adjustments easier because you know like your placement adjustments are only applying to that one targeting group. You're not going to have that kind of muddy data.
Yeah, and guys, the more granular you get, the easier this stuff is to maintain over well, I guess it's, I guess the clean like you have cleaner data and it's easier to maintain on one side. I guess maybe you'd like maintaining profitability is probably easier, but also I guess it's it kind of does make it hard. We're going to maintain in the sense that like, yeah, you're gonna have a lot more campaigns going on.
We're gonna have a lot more campaigns, there's, there's definitely like there's tools out there that can help you kind of optimize those in bulk. There's if you're into like Excel, you got different report options, you can do that even with placements. So there are some some things around that. But if you're just getting started, we only have a few campaigns using ad consoles totally fine. So we got our one here, let me just change these names a little bit, because we want to, if we're only targeting a close match targeting group in there, now we just want to make it a little more clear. So we now have just gonna refresh a rename to, we only have a close match targeting group in here. And now I'm just going to copy it, it's probably gonna take a little bit to end up copying it. But this is what I would do, I would just go in, make a couple copies of these. And once those show up, you'll just go in and kind of hey, I'm gonna turn on the loose match for this rename the campaign and ad group.
Then in the third one, you're going to do it for loose match. So you have one of each of the three targeting types and complements if you want to do that. But I skipped that out. So you can go either way, if you want to kind of just start right away with segmenting all of them, just create three from the start, have at it. That's kind of the direction I'm going with any new auto campaigns I'm creating is segmenting those out just so you have more control with your placement adjustments. But otherwise, those are the two campaigns are pretty easy to create the biggest hassle is just getting all your ASINs through to like productor. Otherwise, that's where I would start and then it's just wait for the data come in and start optimizing. Yeah, man, I love it. Dude, this has been seriously like a crazy good presentation and extremely useful.
And I hope that you guys that have access to AMS can find time to kind of follow the step by step that Cameron showed. And, like really implement it, you know what I mean? It's one thing to know about it, it's another to know how to do it, which now you know about it, and you know how to do it. So you know that step three is just to put it in practice, because it's gonna, I can't imagine it not helping further your business. We like I said, we both do it. We know it works. We're doing it ourselves. And it's passive, too. You know what I mean? Like you have an edge now, like I said to other people aren't doing. So you know what to do next. Right? I mean, you know, if you've ever seen your product that someone copied and put up as well, another great way to stay ahead of any of the copycatters, unless they're spending ads and you are, they're just not going to have a way to compete. I have bestsellers that have been I mean, there's thousands of copies of them by this point. And I just don't have to really worry about it. Because those are never going to generate the sales with the sales I'm generating through advertising. They're just not going to catch up.
Yeah, that's another good point. All right. So Cameron was there anything...? We're coming on one hour? Is there anything else that you'd like wanted to share before we kind of wrap up?
Um, I don't know if anyone has any questions like, I'm happy to answer them. But that's I mean, I, the idea was just keep this pretty simple. I think we got a little more in the weeds than what we originally planned, like a 15 minute, quick share and how to create some stuff. But yeah, I hope that's I think it should be enough. We still got a lot of live viewers. I think we did good. I think you did good. Yeah. I there's there's some questions. I mean, there was a couple that were good. I'm trying to think like I can pop them up on the screen. I was answering some in the chat. Did we miss any that like you guys might want to ask right now? Not really sure. I think we did. Yeah, I think this is probably about what where we want to keep it at anything else is going to be a little more complex. I said, I wasn't planning on necessarily getting all this like segmentation. But I mean, these lottery campaigns so that's just like one example putting all your ASINs in there. There's other examples like you could do that for a lottery campaign for just ASINs in a certain niche for example, like you'd have all your cat designs and just one lottery isn't that's its own campaign. Again, I like to keep those one ad group per campaign just the way those placement adjustments work, but keeps a little cleaner too. You don't have to go in and like go into each ad group, which can be a little bit tedious.
Yeah, cool. Well, hey guys, before we wrap up to I did just want to mention that in addition to the replay being available, that's going to stay on both YouTube and Facebook. So of course, you know, you don't have to worry about it disappearing or anything like that. I'm not going to do that to you. That's like a big marketing tactic. I want you guys to be able to reference this in the future. So of course we're gonna leave it on and just a reminder, like if you actually pop into the description of the video, you'll find a link to Cameron's Facebook group, which is Amazon Ad University basically like just a bunch of wide spectrum beginners, intermediate expert level sellers, sharing what's working helping each other out. So you definitely want to pop in there, check that out. Also, I did put a link in the description.
If you use that link and you're interested, I know some of you guys are already in my Amazon Merch course. But I did just want to also remind you guys that there's an entire Amazon advertising module included in there. And if you have like questions, and you need me to answer them, you can actually like communicate through the course for the students. And if you are interested in joining the Amazon Merch Course, if you do it today on 8:19 Thursday, because it expires tonight at about I think West Coast time midnight, you'll get 10% off and Cameron for being so awesome and being here with this presentation also gets a cut of the enrollment fee. So if you guys did want to join my Amazon merch course, the advertising module is included amongst along with everything else. And you know, Cameron gets some kickback, I get some kickback, and you get access to me directly. So just want to mention that there's a link in the description that that's the link you have to use, by the way. So to get the 10% off and whatnot. So all right, well, Cameron, yeah, thanks, man. Every time you come on, it's like I'm learning with everybody else from you, man. You're the You're the true advertising expert.
Honestly, it just comes from like getting in there and testing like that's I keep harping on it's like get in there just get start the most important thing and just test out see what's gonna work what works for me, there's no like, tried and true like, surefire advertise to anyone that tells you differently is full the all you can do is just get in there and start testing, see what see what works for you and your products.
Boom. Get in there and start testing. If you haven't launched an ad campaign and you have access, get up there, throw up your first one, let it ride for two weeks. Don't even touch it for two weeks. pop back in. Well, actually, you should probably check it just in case.
Just in case. You accidentally I actually had that one of my campaigns went crazy. I accidentally I have a tool that I adjust bids with and I set some that were some of the lottery ones I have from 5 cents up to like 17 cents accidentally. And does the spend like went crazy because of the placement. So we've all done that $3 bid kind of things. Yeah. wasn't as bad as when I advertised someone else's product on accident, though. I didn't realize it.
That's about as bad as it gets. Actually. Yeah.
That one yeah, they're getting orders too.
So that was a little more Merry Christmas to them. Guys, thank you for attending. I really appreciate you guys taking time out of your day to to be here and join us. Please. Like I said, just hit that like button at a minimum and subscribe if you're not. And thank you Cameron again for being here guys. Appreciate it. Thanks. Cool. All right, everybody. Have a great day.
