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In this video, I show you how I optimize my lottery campaigns. Here we are back inside of ad manager and I'm going to go through and optimize my lottery campaigns to just kind of talk through so my thought processes as I'm going through.
So when I'm optimizing my lottery campaigns, I'm using a shorter date range seven days and you may need to extend that if you don't have the order volume to support that, that I'll just kind of hand on what you consider a good enough order volume.
I'd probably like to see at least double digit orders, ideally in the timeframe that you're selecting. So seven days works for me for most, most of the time. And when it comes to optimizing these campaigns, I'm doing this right inside of the native ad console. This is one area I don't use automations for at this time, but will be coming down the road with some enhancements we're making to Merch Jar in our recipes.
But as of now, I'm doing this manually by hand and generally about once a week, as is kind of the cadence that I'm using to optimize these lottery campaigns right now, I'll probably increase that. I'm definitely keeping an eye on them every day or two. During this time period, I tend to check my ads a whole lot more starting, you know, within the last few days to end of the holiday season.
And lottery campaigns will be no different. I probably won't make adjustments every single day about at least keep an eye on them. And if there's anything that goes a little crazy, what have you, I'll, I'll make adjustments. Otherwise, probably every two, three days or so I'll make some bid adjustments. So inside of ad console, what I do, I just close windows out, make this easier.
What am I to start with? I'm just going to go down each one and optimize it on its own. I do that by opening. I'll just start with the first one. Hoodie Loose. If you didn't see the video already, I did a video just reviewing my lottery campaigns. Kind of why I'm doing using these. So check that out over link the description there.
So I'm going to open up the first one to optimize in a new tab. So I'm middle click that and opens a new tab, brings up my ad group page and I'm going to leave this open. I'm not also open up the ad group in a new tab, and here I'm going to go to the targeting page. So I'll have the targeting page.
And this was turned on for my last video. Turn that off. That's supposed to be offices just loose by my targeting. And back to our campaign page. I'll have my placement. So these are the two pages that I'm looking for. And the placement page is where I start. At first thing I'm looking at is my rest of search. So, rest of search does not have any kind of placement adjustment. Whatever your bid is, jump over to this page. So our bid of $0.39, that's the bid of our rest of search because there's no modifier. So our 39 cent bid is our rest of search. You can see we're getting a 35 cent CPC with that and a cost is 29.68%.
So this is the first thing I will look at as the rest of search. How am I performing on the rest of search? And do I need to increase my bid or decrease it to based on that performance the ACOS here. Generally my target ACOS the ACOS I'm trying to hit with my lottery campaigns is about 20%.
I'm a little more lax on that with the holidays trying to get as many orders as possible. So I'm okay with that being higher in that 25%-30% range, maybe even higher than that. I'd probably be okay with like a 35%. But this is kind of in that target where I don't really need to change this. I the bid works kind of where it's ads getting orders.
If the other placements were performing better, I might increase it. But as it stands now, product pages and top of search are both higher than I would ideally like them to me, and they're both at a 0% adjustment, so there's nothing I can do. These are based on what the CPC is. So maybe actually based on that performance, I do want to notch this down a little bit, which I think I'm going to do.
I'm just going to do very small adjustment, very small. And most of these I'm only doing 1 to $0.03 at a time at most. Maybe $0.05 if there's a big gap between my cost and what my targeting cost is. So there's not a lot to do here. This isn't performing. This isn't performing where I'd like it. I can't adjust it.
That's how I'm optimizing it. I do want to touch on another area where I am optimizing these is through negation. So negating search terms and ASINs that aren't performing or that I do use Merch Jar to automate. So I'm not having to go through and manually add negative search terms. So for that inside of Merch Jar, I have promotion set up and if you're not familiar with promotions for Merch Jar, what it does is looks at the performance of a search term within an ad group and based on whatever criteria you set up, it will add that search term or product target if it's an ASIN to another ad group.
So this would be for moving a keyword from an automatic campaign to a manual campaign or adding it as a negative keyword to the ad group. So in the case of lottery campaigns, I am automating the search term negation. So for any search terms that aren't performing well. So these are all my watery ad groups and then my promotion rules.
So if each of these latter campaigns I use two promotion rules, I have one for keywords and I have one for products. And the reason for that is I'm more aggressive on product targeting to negate than I am on keywords. And the reason for that is if we look at our placements, you can see how many more impressions you get on product pages.
There's a lot of products that Amazon will stick your product on to, to advertise for. And if you look at your search from reports, even though I have 300 clicks, which seems like a lot those 300 clicks are going to be spread out across probably 300 different product pages, which means you would have to the following normal. If I'm following more of how I negate my single ASIN campaigns, it would take forever before a an ASIN and reach my normal criteria, probably closer to 15 to 20 clicks without a sale to negate it.
So you end up wasting a lot more spend. So I'm very aggressive with negating these assets in order to try to improve the performance on this as much as possible over time. And that's kind of one of the strategies with this is product pages, especially with like a new lottery campaign. They're going to perform worse than they will down the road because it does take time to generate those clicks on ASINs that aren't getting sales to remove that wasteful ad spend and then with keywords.
So going back to their promotion, so I have one for keywords, one for product targeting. I'm more aggressive on product targets, which is why I separate them. If you have the same criteria for both of them, you can keep them under the same rule to simplify things. But as it stands now, I do. I keep them separate because I'm more aggressive with the product targets. I'm still versus my normal negation on single ASIN and somewhere so that 15 to 20 click range.
I still am a little more aggressive on keywords. I could be a little more than I am now, but anything greater than 12 clicks, I'm negating. So this is showing what the trigger is of this rule. And what it's saying is over the lifetime of this of a search term, it has zero orders and more than 12 clicks.
It's going to get negated. So it won't show up anymore for your ads. And same thing with the products over the lifetime, a search term that has zero orders and more than four clicks, that one's getting negated. So this is automation that I do use for my lottery campaigns. But when it comes to the bids, I am doing this mainly.
Still, we have some enhancements coming to you, recipes that all take care of this, but we're just waiting on those and then we'll be able to have recipes that kind of do all this for us. We will have to jump in, so we'll save a lot of time there. Another lottery campaign optimization that Merch Jar makes quick work of is pausing any of your ads within lottery campaigns that are getting clicks but no orders.
So what I have and this is done inside of ad manager and under ads for any master users and this works especially well. If you have multiple lottery campaigns, you can do this inside of ad manager going campaign by campaign, but this combines them all together and I create a save filter for anything that's got zero orders and greater than 25 clicks.
We can actually bring this down if we want to be a little more aggressive to, I don't know, let's say like 17 and let's expand this out, extend the date range, the sure school year to date, we're going to plant a bunch of data and we have 35 AD. So these are products within a lottery campaign and these are only going to show lottery campaigns sky search for lottery and that's going to search all of our campaigns and anchors with that keyword in it.
So these are all active have at least 18 clicks and zero orders. So these are all good candidates to pause. And that's what we're going to do just across all of our different campaigns. And we can see some of them. I mean, some of these 56 clicks, zero orders, this is a good optimization to make while you're adjusting bids anyways.
And we're just going to pause those and let that run and I'm set up, I'm going to run again because I only selected this page and I need to select all pages. So again, I just do that again and pause. So that's going to pause all 35 of those ads, save some wasted spend there to make those lottery campaigns even more efficient.
Let's jump back to kind of how I'm optimizing this one. So this way I would say it's done. We've got rest of search. I lower the bid one set, so not very much. I'm okay with this percentage, but we're also trying to lower these two here. So just did a small decrease. So I'm going to close going to close those and we're going to loose.
So then I'm just going to open the close, open the new tab, jump over there, open the aggregate and a new tab right away, and then check out the placement. So I'm looking at rest of search first. I'm looking at the other data and we see 106% any costs that when you make a change, we need to make a pretty big change there.
So we're at $0.32 CPC if we take a look at our bid for a 35 cent bid. So I think with this we could probably make a larger adjustment. So again, $0.05 that's that's on the larger side for me for lottery campaigns. So I'm going to do that and kind of see and then that's kind of a waiting game.
On my next optimization, we'll see how it goes. So that takes care of my restless rest of search. Our product pages. We have a 0% drop and we're at 34% across. It's a little bit higher where we do want to bring it down, that's going to come down just from lowering our bid. It may not because the CPC is actually lower than what I should say.
Never mind. So this should come down on its own because our bid is now $0.30 where there's a $0.32 CPC. So we should see that drop ideally now our top of search, same kind of thing. It's a little bit high and we do have a type of search adjustment. But again, where we lowered the bid on the rest of search pretty decent amount and Amazon doesn't give you the math.
I wish they did within here, but this 40% adjustment that's based on the 30. So we need to to see what our new potential CPC is. The $0.30. I got a calculator open. I'm doing this here times 1.4 because this keeps your bid and adds 40% to it. So we're at $0.42. So that's actually pretty good. So it's lower than what the current CPC is.
I think we're just going to leave that these other adjustments where it's at. So this one is done as well and I just keep going down the line. I have these sorted by span is kind of how I sort most of my things just kind of at the top I see where I'm spending most of my money and over the next one same thing over in the ad group and you tab right away placements, rest of search another one that's pretty high $0.37 CPC hundred and 31.
We're going to lower this make another big adjustment of probably $0.05 and no wonder we're running out of budget. I might now we're going to no, I'm going to lower it more than I normally would. I'm going to go the full $0.10. And my reasoning for that is for when we're running on a budget. So it's too high, but our top of search is performing at a 39 cent CPC at 24% ACOS.
And we're getting it's got the highest volume of orders. So I want budget to go to that, but we just lower our bid. So our new 30% bid, we don't have any adjustments. So that's going to lower the CPC, which we don't want to do. If anything, I'd want to increase it a little bit. I'd be okay going up to close to 30% with that.
But if we want to keep it the same, so we're at 30%. If we did a 40, I usually just do like mental math. I don't normally boss our calculator, but just for purposes, there's probably a formula to make this easier. Yeah. 30 cent bid. If we put a 40% adjustment on at 1.4 times 30, that's $0.42. That would increase it a little bit less.
Probably so in that 30 to 40% range, I'm going to go higher. I just go to 40%. I want to keep pushing this top of search. Oh, great. Click through rate and then product pages. That's pretty high too. So we're just going to leave that. Obviously, we don't want increase it. We want to try to bring that down and see outperforms.
I would say this one is done as well because those for the next one. So you see it doesn't take a ton of time kind of once you get the hang of it and you can kind of eyeball in rest of search has not been performing this one's product page this one's all product pages so we want to probably maintain pretty close to that.
We have 15 orders from at the top of search and rest of search aren't really that applicable or at least they're not moving the needle a whole lot. So our rest of search will make the adjustment here. What we're at 86% another let's do another 5% increase. Well, you probably do more than that. Again, rest of search and this is what's kind of nice about the placement adjustment.
You could you could bring this all the way down to $0.05. If we just don't care about getting impressions on rest of search, I do want to try to get orders on that and get a decent ACOS. But I don't know if that will end up happening. We could lower this all the way down to $0.05 or this probably won't get any impressions.
But to maintain this, we could then increase this to get the same 34% what would that seven times. So we would want 600% because where I got one 0% is already 100% of the bids we need to increase it 600% to get seven times a five cent bids. We could do that if that's the route we wanted to go.
But I don't I do want to still try to get some orders from this. Again, this is a fairly new campaign. If you saw the last video of most of these lottery campaigns are within the last several weeks. So they're not super age. So there's still kind of go on under the new lottery campaign optimization, which can take some time, was another reason I'm being pretty aggressive with them because we don't really have time with the holidays.
So let's adjust this. What was it that canceled 33% or 30, $0.33? I don't know. Let's point to five. That sounds good. All right. That was at $0.38. So I was already we don't want to do that much. We're going to go to 30. So you see, there's not like some exact formula have to you can kind of just start eyeballing some of this stuff as you get the feel for it.
I'm going to lower this to this is kind of like a reset on the top search it's not performing I know I'll or the bid I could keep the 25% but I'm just going to kind of start over with that and see where it's at. If it starts getting not any impressions, I'll start increasing the percentage of the rest for the bid.
So for, for example, for getting impressions on rest of search and orders, nothing on top. So I'll start increasing the placement there. So on product pages we are getting order. So we ordered to a 30 cent bid and the CPC was $0.34. So if we did a ten cent 10%, we'd be at 33, 20% would be 36 and 25 feels good.
I want to go a little bit higher than what the actual CPC is because you know, there's going to be to make that CPC. There were clicks that were more and I'm okay with this many orders happening in the last seven days. I'm I'm okay with this being a little bit higher ACOS. I wouldn't want to see it go too much higher, but I can live with it for now.
And that's it for that one. So hoodie substitute now? We're on to all ASINs. This is the all ASIN ones are my oldest. I've been running the longest. All right. Saying that rest of search and you can tell these are ready to look a little bit better. And this is kind of frustrating sometimes with rest of searches where you only got one order, the ACOS is high.
So all in the bid, which I do want to do because it's higher cost, but it's not going to really help it with generating more orders, you know, but it needs to be done. So we're going to get 44 and do a two cent decrease just a little bit. So $0.21 and both of these are performing pretty well.
Let's start with the prior pages where we're at 20 that CPC, they're still within. I do want to increase this is because we did lower it and it was at $0.23 before plus two. I know I'm going to do an 25% adjustment. That's like it's a 25 cent bid for product pages and then our top of search also performing and sorry, got 100%.
So that puts us at a $0.40 CPC with effective bid with the bid adjustment. So that's half percent. So double our bid of $0.20. So 0.4 is where we're at now. Let's go 150. That puts us at a 50 cent effective bid. We're going to we're going to do that. So this one's done as well all ASINs close other never sold one so similar.
So this certainly looks similar. We need to lower the bid which will take care of the product pages as well. Let's go $0.03 and the amount you adjust to could vary based on how often you're modifying these campaigns. If you're doing it every month, you probably want to make bigger changes versus if you're going in and looking at this every single day making changes, you probably can do very small changes.
I do find the Amazon responds better to more frequent small changes versus infrequent large changes. You're better off going in and adjusting 1% a day versus after a week adjusting 10% at a time, for example. So we adjusted this. This is another I do want to point out kind of the power of using placement adjustments. If we were just going by the targeting ACOS which a lot of people do we see here, 40% ACOS is like this is not performing very well.
However, we can see top of search is performing well. It's got the most orders from it. So if we eliminate it, if we'd somehow had a way to eliminate product pages and rest of search, which again there is by lowering the bid a whole bunch and just doing top of search adjustment we could but if we just looked at that targeting group, this would look like an underperforming campaign and you could potentially pause and miss out on these top of search.
So this is why top of search works. This is why we segment into having only one target or keyword in inside of campaign. So for lottery campaigns, it's having just one targeting group active for single key single ASIN campaigns. It's why I also have single keyword campaigns. So your placement adjustments only apply to that targeting group and it makes it very clear where how to attribute the metrics for this.
So we are the bid. We're at $0.27, and this was our CBC getting $0.24. We want to increase this CPC. Let's see what's $0.27 time? What's a 25? We want more than 25%. It puts it at about $0.33. Let's point to seven times 1.4 a, puts it out to $0.37. I'm going to go with a 40. Let's do the 40.
That's about $0.37. We'll start there and see if it stays. Sometimes when you make an adjustment like this, it completely changes the performance. So just kind of one of the things you keep making these adjustments over time, product pages, we lower the bid, so that's going to be affected by it. It's really high. I mean, we should lower it more, but I'm going to leave it this way.
We'll just check in a couple of days, see the performance and keep adjusting. All right. Never so close. Now we're getting into some that don't have as many orders. This one's not doing well at all. This is one of the older ones, too. I think this used to be the best performing, but that kind of happens over time.
Wow. So this is this has been doing terribly, 332 clicks, only two orders, the click through rates, not terrible, 9.4%. It's about average. So that's kind of unfortunate. And we're not getting a whole lot of impressions and clicks on top of search. So we may want to increase that. So I'm definitely lower in the bid. Not sure what happened to this.
Let's we're just going to kind of do a reset on this one less or that pretty significantly. Let's go down to $0.15 and I bid I want to increase 50% increase to be about what, $0.22 from $0.15? I don't know. I like 60% at least like maintain around there and we'll see what happens with that. So something else is, not generating a lot of order.
So some of the other lottery campaigns have definitely taken this place. I think this used to be my best performing. Let's check out some of the other ones. Yeah, just a couple more active here or on the substitutes. We got four more to go. So no data here. We're getting clicks, not tons. Now, listen, seven days.
I'm going to increase the bid just a little bit. Right, 26. Let's go. I'll go $0.28 and back here. So, yeah, we don't really have the data. This is fine where it's at. Well, let's see what happens there. Just do small incremental increases up to you on this one scene or two, you lose match. This was one that actually looks pretty good across the board.
The rest of search, 20%. I'm going to say that's within my target. I'm not going to make any adjustments to the bid there. We're just going to stay on the placement adjustments here. I want to increase product pages where at 22%, I want it mind that going up a little bit. So I probably should look and see what the bid is.
Just I don't usually this would be this is kind of where I eyeball just do and we'll call it 40% and this is probably good. And then top of search I do want to increase it $0.27 CBC and we don't have a ton of data but so we're going to do another small this had a lot more orders and this was a more solid ACOS.
I would probably do a bigger adjustment or add more confidence in the adjustment I'm making, but as it stands, we'll just do small increases. That one order could have been a fluke. We don't really know. So this one's good. Couple more. This one is not getting much of anything, so we're just increase the bid. Pretty simple. Let's go.
Let's get more data here. So we're going to reset again, usually towards my higher end, especially with something like this, I'm not really doing more than $0.03 at a time. Back on our placements here, this is where I'd probably you increase. We're just not getting many impressions. I want more data, product pages. I'm a little more hesitant to increase this because that can increase impressions and clicks a lot, as I showed earlier, how many more impressions I can get our top of search.
We're just not getting a whole lot of click through rates. Okay. So I do want to see see, I want I want more data is what that boils down to. Then our last one on the newer actually these are all newer, same kind of deal. We're going to increase this $0.03, make a small adjustment on the top of search, start getting data.
So that's all of my lottery campaigns. So that's what I would do as I'm going through and adjusting these bids again, typically once a week or so, more often now during the holidays. Oh, this I do want to increase going back to this substitute. So this was one that we made change was out of budget and you can see the recommended budget especially with this performance is not going to happen.
But I do want to we're out of budget and I want to keep spending because we made some pretty big adjustments to this one. We review this, the top of search was performing and we were trying to get control of the rest of search, the product pages. I want to keep spending on that and keep pushing that. So increasing the budgets on that.
Usually I do budgets kind of all together, which I'll do another video. I want to do that while we're in here.
And that's it for the lottery campaign. So that's what I would do when I am scheduled to optimize my lottery campaigns. Just pop through those. It's usually a little bit faster process. I don't boss out the calculator kind of more, just eyeballing it, doing some mental math on what the bids would need to be or what the effective bids would be with those placement adjustments.
So you don't really need to overthink it, but that's kind of the process I look at, starting with the rest of search, making your adjustment to your bid because that is what the rest of searches and then adjusting your placements based on what that new bid is and the performance. And that's it for this video. If you got any value out of this at all, please subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
