🔴Live: Step-By-Step Structuring Amazon Ad Campaigns

Updated
June 7, 2023

In this video, we review a single ASIN campaign structure that I'm now using for most of my products, how to automate it step by step using promotions and Merch Jar let's a few extra advertising tips and best practices to make it easier to follow along. Take a second now to download the campaign structure and rules cheat sheet from the description.

This video is part of a longer two-and-a-half-hour Facebook Live that I streamed a couple of weeks ago exclusively on our Amazon Ads University Facebook group, if you're not already a member, join now for free to get access to the entire video plus learn from thousands of other Amazon advertisers using the links in the description. If you're not a Merch Jar user, you can still use all the strategies and best practices in this video. But if you'd like to save hours every single month managing your ad campaigns, you can start your free unlimited 30-day trial at merchjar.com.

I have a product that has picked up during the holiday sale. It's an older product with over 100 reviews and it has sold fairly well over the last few years. But it's starting to pick up during the holidays, selling 10-plus units a day, which it hasn't done in a long time, if maybe ever.

And I set up the ad campaigns for it to build kind of that structure. So a single ASIN campaign structure, I've posted this in the group as well. This is kind of this is pretty close to what I use for most of my products. And what this is shown is your different campaigns, I have an auto campaign. And this is just gonna be for one ASIN. And then I have a manual testing campaign with three different targets, or ad groups, sorry. And then a performance campaign with the same three different ad groups and these lines here show you basically the rules that are used to move keywords from one ad group to another.

And the reason we do this is we want to isolate those keywords, get them into kind of you know, these ultimately the performance campaigns where you're putting your best keywords and product targets together, and then you using placement adjustments. These you can end up again, separating by campaign if you want to do placements, and placement adjustments, specific to each ad group or target. But this was pretty close to what I use. And so we can set up something like this for a product and I have one set up, the only thing we're going to be skipping is the broad match and performance, I'd say this is like kind of optional, you could just leave the broad match in testing, and I'll save you a rule as well. And these rules are set up to kind of correlate with Merch Jar.

So we're gonna go into our promotions, I have a few different ones, mostly for my best sellers. But this is one I do not have yet. Let me find the ASIN. So what I'm doing here is going to pull in all the ad groups that I'm working with, and I've already created those ad groups in AD console, Merch Jar doesn't lie to create campaigns and ad groups at this time. That's that will be coming down the road. But essentially, you're gonna create these. So in AD console, I have this product. And you can see I have my automatic campaigns. So how you name your campaigns was pretty important. Maybe I'll touch on that a little bit here.

For me, the most important thing is the ASIN you want to get the ASIN in the title because that's the easiest way to search for it to find only the campaigns that are specific to that product. So this one, these are all my different campaigns. You can see I've segmented out my automatic campaigns. So the SPA is kind of my naming that I use. So sponsored product, automatic sponsored product manual, and then kind of a description. And then I use keywords as well after that this is basically the product title after the goal behind how you name your campaigns is you want to be able to look at the campaign name and know exactly what's in that campaign without having to drill down into and see what's being advertised or what the goal is. And there's a lot of different varieties you can do here. But essentially, it's Ill go ASIN, what the targeting is, and I'll change this based on like, if it's a brand defense or product targeting, or I'm targeting specific competitors, I'll put that in as well. And then the keywords as well.

So if you want to like I don't know, do a search by like a niche or something, you're probably picking it up through the keywords if you did proper keyword research for your products. So I find campaigns that my close loose match substitutes. So these those are those segmented automatic campaigns, and they have a testing and a performance with all them running. So let's take a look at the testing and performance. So our testing campaign so What I ended up having here, this was an older campaign and I had it as an older structure. So there's already keywords in this, but I had, it was kind of mixed with your with exact match, broad match. So what I'm going to end up doing is just turning this into a broad match with this. Let's see, let's look at her targeting. So you can see I have broad phrase, and they all have order data, I probably could, like turn these off, and like put them into the other campaigns, but I'm just gonna let it go for now and just kind of run this will just be my broad campaign.

So I'm just gonna go broad, and I'll let's keep it and I even have a phrase match because I don't really do much. You can you can test it. But broad covers every possible target that a phrase match will, so I don't necessarily see the need. And in my opinion, when you have, if you're testing all three, it's gonna requires more testing. So anytime you add a keyword or a new campaign is like you need to be committed to spending the budget to collect enough data to test it. Because the worst the absolute worst thing you can do, and probably the biggest mistake I see new advertisers make is they test too many different things all at once. And don't give them enough time or, more importantly, enough data to be able to confidently make a decision. If you're turning a broad match off after 10 clicks. Because it hasn't sold and you spent money and you didn't see your return, you basically just wasted all of your spend and got nothing of value in return, those 10 clicks are probably across 10 different search terms.

So you got one click on each search term is it's just not telling you anything, if you had a 50% conversion rate on a potential search term, one click isn't enough to tell you that. Alright, so ran over on that. But that is one of the bigger mistakes. So make sure if you're if you're going to test something, just commit to collecting enough data to do that in the more data you have, the more confident you can be in that decision that you're making. If you're turning off too early, you could be potentially turning off a potential best seller, and you don't have the data know whether it is or not. So we got to okay, this is our testing we close out of here. So this turn that into our broad refresh that we got our exact we got our product. And then we have our performance campaign in our ad groups here exact same product. So I'm going to skip that broad match optional one, while we're creating this, so everything's set up. So I got my five campaigns here, let me flip actually, I'm gonna flip back that just so you can see what that looks like.

So this is what we're looking at. So we are auto harvesting. And the only difference between what I just showed you in this is that I have three campaigns for the auto harvesting, so three different ad groups. And then we have our testing, with the three different ad groups, and we have our performance with exact product targeting was given this broad match. Otherwise, it looks just like this. And you could do the same kind of structure, if you do just have a single auto campaign, you just have the one accurate, which I'll show you. So we're in Merch Jar I got I'm gonna search for this ASIN oops. So here's all the different ad groups available for this once we got, okay, here's my automatic substitutes, automatic close match automatic loose. So there's my auto campaigns that kind of first keyword harvesting level. And then we have our testing campaigns, we get those ad groups and that we had all three, we had our broad, exact and product, this one's called all matches now update, once it syncs, it syncs every six hours. So if you do create these campaigns, and you are a Merch Jar user just gotta wait for that sync to happen, we don't have a way to manually sync it at this time.

So we're gonna select those are product testing and are exempt. And then we have our performance, and exact and product. So you can see just by my campaign name, and my accurate names, I can tell exactly what every single one of these are. So we are using every single one of these, and you have advanced search in here, if you mess up your nomenclature or something, you can do a little more advanced, you can hide and show your paws and so forth. So we're gonna add these. So these are our basically ad groups that are part of this promotion group. So the next thing we need to do is add rules, there was only two rules that we can make all these adjustments. So I'm going to copy basically use those two roles. So we're going to create the first rule and what this is doing. I'm gonna call this auto testing. So what this is doing is taking any search terms that are in the auto campaign that get a couple orders, and we're gonna put those into our testing campaign.

We're gonna put it as an exact match or a product target. It'll go in as an exact match if it's a keyword, and it'll go When as a product target if it's an ASIN. So they require two different ad groups, you're an ad group is either keyword targeting or its product targeting. So keyword targeting is going to be your broad phrase exact match your product target is going to be any ASIN specific targets. So when you look at your search report, when it shows an ASIN, that's, you know, what you would put in your product, or it can be category targeting to which we haven't really talked about. But I think for most people, I would probably avoid that. Until you gain a little more experience, or you're looking at broadening your, or scaling your advertising out to potentially more product. So what we're gonna do here is, we're gonna set our trigger, so what the search terms need to what criteria they need to meet, in order to be affected by it, and we want to any order greater than one, so any search terms that have at least two orders, we're going to put into the testing, as an exact match or a product match. And that's, Merch Jar handles that for you, I'll show you how that's done here. And you can add additional criteria as well.

So if you want to like an ACOS filter to it, or certain number of clicks, you can do do that clicks is really useful for like negating certain things and how many days look back, so if you leave blank is just gonna be a lifetime data that's in Merch Jar. So Merch Jar is able to look back 60 days from the day you signed up, and we keep lifetime data. So in Amazon, the most data you can get is 90 days back, we can go further back than that with Merch Jar if you've been a user for more than 60 days. After that, we keep logging data. So that's really useful. If you need, you want to go back, once your user for two plus years or whatever it looks like you're able to go back to previous holiday season, see what search terms sold well, then. So a lot of advantages of that type of historical data, which Amazon doesn't give you, you can keep track of yourself by downloading reports every month essentially. And then, I don't know aggregating the spreadsheet, it's not easy, but we make it a little easier with our search from page and just we store all the data for you.

So we're going to look to a look back period, anywhere from 30 to 90 days, kind of depends a little bit on how much water data you're getting, I'd say 90 days is pretty good amount, I have a lot of data in Merch Jar, so about a year of data for this account. So I don't want to look at an entire year of data, I just want to look at kind of the last 90 days. But so and so what I want to do is find any search terms that have couple orders, and get those into our testing campaign as an exact match to continue testing. So this is kind of what I would set up, if you don't have that much to add, just leave it at lifetime and I'll keep going. And then when you're promoting a keyword, you can increase the bid or decrease it if you want to. So this is useful to try to get Amazon to spend on the new ad group. So in the testing or performance versus the old ones, or it's doing well or it's performing, so we're gonna increase the bid a little bit, so I'm going to increase it five cents. So that's our trigger. And then kind of what happens when it does it.

So this is moving on to the testing. So what we want to look at first, first, we're going to select the ad groups for us search terms from here. So what that saying is, these are the ad groups to look at the search terms. And every ad group that we select here is going to look at every single search term every day, and see if it hit this trigger. If it didn't, nothing happens. If it does, then it's going to do whatever we're selecting here. So we need to select our search terms, we want our we're looking at the auto campaign. So we want to see what's selling in our automatic campaigns, we got three of them. So we see performance performance testing, lose. So here's one we want, close, and substitute. So there's a three automatic campaign. So it's gonna look at all three of those ad groups every single day.

And then what we want to do is to promote the keywords to an exact match. In our testing, to exact match campaigns, we're gonna go exact match to our exact testing campaign, and then as a product target in our product ad group in our testing campaign, so any ASINs that header criteria have at least two orders are gonna get dumped into the product ad group and any keywords are you put into our exact match in our exact match ad group here. Now previously, I have talked about also indicating keywords, which is an option I've kind of moved away from that. And there's really two different camps I'd say on the Amazon ever sight ties inside of whether you negate a keyword when you promote it or if you don't, so there's there's one camp that is you should isolate all your keywords Have, you promote it to an exact match here, that search term should not be showing up? Or should it be targeting more envy automatic campaigns, so you would add it as a negative keyword. So let's say this one dog shirt sold twice. And now I'm going to have that in as an exact match as dog shirt.

I don't want dog shirt to show up for these campaigns. That is an option. That's something I did in the past, I've moved away from it. And the reason, the biggest reason for that is that a lot of times you'll you'll have a new campaign or a new keyword or target or whatever it is, that perform well, several orders will ACOS and then it gets put into a new ad group or campaign. And it doesn't even get any impressions, or it performs way worse than what it did in the originating ad group. So because of that, I don't want to mess with something that's already working. And in the case that this doesn't perform again, impressions, I'm not negating that, you could still do this, I would set it up as a separate rule with different triggers, I would want to make sure it's performing in these ad groups before negating it from the others.

Otherwise, it doesn't really hurt to have two different campaigns targeting the same search terms, Amazon doesn't let you compete against yourself. So you're not going to increase the bid on one campaign, because your other campaign has a higher bid, that doesn't happen, Amazon doesn't let you do it. So I'm okay with having different campaigns target, same search terms. Alright, so we got this role. So everything for automatics is gonna look at those search terms every day, anytime on hits, two orders, within that look back window of 90 days, is going to create those keywords.

So we're going to add that, that's our first rule, I'm gonna turn that on, it's not turned on yet. And we're going to test it before we go live. So and we got one more rule here, I think I'm gonna do a third one too, as a bonus. We're gonna call this testing to performance, I'm going to, this is pretty flexible at how many orders you can do, you can do like two orders, three, four, whatever that looks like, we're because this is an existing campaign. And I have a lot of search terms that do have maybe like one or two orders, I'm going to start kind of conservative with that. And I'd recommend that for any, if you're kind of converting a best seller to a campaign structure, and you're using something like this, or even if you're just doing it manually, I don't want to create 100 different keywords.

At the same time, I'd rather kind of do that a little bit slower. So there's a couple different ways to do that, I can start with a higher order threshold. So like maybe I just want start with 10 and test this, we'll maybe we'll do that. Or maybe I'll use a shorter look back window. So maybe I'll do like 14 days, like what do we have, that's got two orders that's not already in our performance ones in just a shorter date range. And as we extend that out, you're probably gonna have more keywords and product targets that meet that threshold. So I think I'm gonna do, let's just start with four, we'll see what happens, we can adjust that with doesn't create a new keywords name, we can lower that threshold, because it's really that initial time that you're creating all those for established campaigns, that it really matters if these are new, if this is like a new campaign, you set up the structure like right away, it doesn't really matter, because it'll just kind of be a rolling evaluation. A, we're not gonna do an ad cost target, these will, we'll bump it up another five cents.

So these here, what we want to look at is our testing, ad groups. So this is our, lets see, testing our exact match, we want to look at that. So we want to pull the search terms from there to evaluate them. And then our testing product, we also want to evaluate from there. And we also want to look at our automatic campaigns. If any of those, do, you have multiple orders inside the automatic campaign, we're just going to put those right into our performance campaign. So we're just gonna look at those. And then this is where we show which, where we want to put these ads. So we want to promote to an exact match in our performance. So exact, exact performance as a product ad group in our product ad group performance. So that's, that's the kind of simple way now, what I like to have is because these, these are search terms that are doing well and performing well or presumably and again, you can put an ACOS filter on it if you want to make sure you're not promoting anything that's like crazy high ACOS. I want to turn those exact matches into a broad match as well to access more keyword harvesting. So our automatic campaigns are broad keyword harvesting, and our broad match. Manual campaigns also functions in a very similar way. We want to find other similar search terms that can also perform well for this product to then put those into our exact match as well. So we're also going to put it into our testing campaign.

So the keywords omega, and that was our broad match that I converted it to, we're going to also add it as a broad match there. And the reason I like to do it here in the testing to performance step, rather than the auto testing step, so like at the same time you create an exact match on the testing campaign is because I don't want too many broad matches, because I'm using broad matches, where if you're just having a one or two orders before adding to an exact match, you can end up with a lot of very similar keywords as a broad match that are essentially targeting the same thing. So you might get something like dog shirt, that does well, okay, we're gonna, that gets couplers. Now, it's in our exact testing, and we had as it abroad in our testing at the same time, because it's got two orders, then dog t shirt sells two times, and that gets placed an exact and as well and abroad. So now you got two keywords that are essentially targeting the same thing. But you're splitting your clicks, and data across two different keywords. So you kind of want as much data consolidate as possible, because for testing purposes, so you can look at one keyword, and you have kind of your threshold to see how that's performing. If you have to Well, now you have twice as much data you need to collect in order for testing. So I want a little more validation out of those search terms for I'm turning them into broad, and it just kind of reduces the amount of broad match search terms that you're going to be targeting the same, same keywords.

So this is what our rule looks like. Or add that I'm gonna turn that on. And we can save it. And before I turn it on, I'm gonna do a dry run, this just is going to do a task we're going to see, it's gonna evaluate all like, take my rules, and by all the search terms across all those campaigns, and it's gonna tell you what it's doing. So this one, here's creating four new keywords. So it's creating one and testing couple and testing a product and our testing campaign actually has a broad sorry. So our testing performance rule triggered one for this keyword here. And it creates the broad as well at the same time in our testing. And then for targets. These came from our auto campaigns, these two ASINs because they got at least two orders over that timeframe. And those are going to add to our campaign. So that looks good to me, I'm just gonna leave that. As is I do have another rule that we could set up. And this would be our negation rule. So this is one of my favorite things about promotions, even if you're not doing like these crazy structures or anything like that. But one of the best things you can do to optimize your campaigns is negating any keywords or products targets that get clicks, but don't have orders, which is like the worst thing ever, but you want to make sure you get enough. So this is going to be a negation. So like any keywords or products, and this will depend how aggressive you want to be more aggressive, you might want you know, lower, I'm conservative on this, because I want to collect data as much as possible. And I'm just gonna do it for a lifetime. However much data I got, but let's uh, I don't know, let's do like 30 clicks. So what we can do is just look at what we want.

Let's do like auto looping, we don't really need to negate exact match. We do on the broad and products. I might do those separate though product, negation and keyword because those actually now let's just do them all. Right. So I'm just giving the exact because those are targeting a handful searcher and basically whatever the exact match keyword is plus like plurals or misspellings, so only a handful. And those are going to be basically optimized by our bids. So I had to worry about like negating those where our broad match stuff is going to be ASIN some keywords from all over the place where we do want to get those if one of them goes crazy and starts using our budget. So what we want to do is any No, that's worse, that's not what I want. I want clicks. So any target thats got greater than or equal to 20 clicks and equal to zero orders. So they're getting clicks or never got an order we wanted to negate those so they we stopped spending money on so this is reducing wasted ad spend. So this is kind of that optimization. So we want to negate them as an exact and product from each of these We have now with this.

So right now, promotions is not aggregating search from data across these. So I might actually split this up into a couple of different ones. Because if a search term isn't doing well on one ad group, like, say our automatic campaigns was doing well, in our manual testing campaign, I don't want it to not perform because it's not performing well here, it gets negated in your automatic campaign plus negated in your testing campaign. So it is a best practice to kind of split these up into kind of buckets. So I'm going to just do like auto negation. So I might call that auto negation.

So this is only going to affect my automatic campaigns and only indicate them in my automatic campaigns. The second I mess with my manual campaigns, on our roadmap, we got a feature where it will aggregate search term data. So we'll take the search from across all of your ad groups, and then evaluate based on the aggregate data against the trigger. So it kind of avoids that situation. So we're going to do that. And basically this is going to help take care of any keywords and products that are sucking up ad spend in our auto campaigns, which was mostly what's running so we're just gonna, I'm gonna end it here after this. We'll do another dry run and see if a yet new negative so there were three ASINs that while just one sorry, it was one ASIN that isn't getting across three of those auto campaigns.

So this ASIN had at least one close to him any orders over its lifetime. So that looks good to me. I'm gonna turn that on. And now I got promotion that's going to run every single night and move any keywords. And you can do that across all your products if you want. So I appreciate everyone's time. Let me know any questions, additional questions you have in the group? Happy to answer and let me know if you liked this format. This was something you would want to see again. Otherwise, I will talk to you guys soon.

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