Introduction
This was a recent post in our Facebook group, so I wanted to go over this because I think it's a good question and may help some other sellers.
Campaign Structure
I have this structure for my plus 500 review best seller. Most sales come from two manual campaigns and I also have promotions and recipes from Mercedar Setup. Any ideas of how I could improve my sales? I've seen a 30% drop in April for this design.
April Sales Drop
First, April can be a tough month depending on the category that you're in. It's tough for a lot of different products, especially in the apparel category.
Campaign Structure Analysis
Let's first take a look at the structure of the campaign. We have three automatic campaigns, a close match, a loose match, and a substitute, which I really like because you can take advantage of placement adjustments better for that. I do that as well on my best-selling products. If you're not getting tons of sales yet, it's fine to combine those into a single campaign and then segment that out later once you have the volume, then it makes sense. Then we have a manual testing campaign with a broad match, exact match, and a product targeting ad group in it, and then a performance campaign with an exact and a product. This structure so far is pretty much what I've shown really similar to what I still do with an auto campaign. Testing campaign and then a performance to move all your best-selling keywords and or best-performing keywords and products into it. We've got a couple other additional campaigns. One targeting the top 20 competitors and one targeting the single, his single biggest competitor is what I'm assuming that is.
Campaign Structure Evaluation
First of all, I think the structure is fine how it is. You could keep this and it could perform great. I like that you have the segmentation of the auto campaigns. You have the testing to harvest keywords from those auto campaigns and your performance want to funnel all your best-performing stuff in to give them more attention, better budgets, higher bids. I like that you're targeting competitors as well. You can get a lot of sales by targeting other products, but they don't just have to be competitors either.
Testing New Campaigns
Some additional things you could test with this campaign structure. If you're looking to cast a wider net, get more sales. The first thing I would mix in is testing some phrase match ad groups. Starting your testing and these can work in performance. I've been liking those lately. I've been preferring them over broad campaigns. I saw a lot of success over that over this past holiday season. I would definitely start testing that. You could start with your best-performing exact match and turn those into phrase match campaigns. Definitely, it's something that does take a little bit of a manual look at just to make sure you're not adding too many phrase where there's a lot of overlap with those. Figure out what your core keywords are and turn those into a phrase match.
Single Keyword Campaigns
Next thing you could look at adding is a step after that performance campaign and next level, which would be single keyword campaigns. You're taking your absolute best-performing keywords and you're putting those in a campaign all by themselves. There will only ever be one single keyword in it. This can be exact match. It could be phrase. It could be broad, but it's going to be your absolute best ones. You need to make sure there's still volume there. It's not going to make sense to have something like that. That may only get one sale every couple of weeks or whatever that looks like. You still want some volume, but the reason behind that is then you can really take advantage of those placement adjustments. The placement adjustments at the campaign level apply to everything. Every ag grouping keyword in a campaign. When you have multiple keywords inside, assuming your performance campaign has multiple keywords, any placement adjustments you do to that is going to affect everything. There's no way to attribute what the placement performance is of each of those keywords since it's all aggregated together at that campaign level. You just see that one. You could have one keyword performing extremely well at the top of search placement and all the other ones are just bombing and they're dragging that one down. You just never know it because it's combining all that data together.
Stat Campaign Search Term ASIN Targeting
Next thing you could test is something I call stat campaign search term asin targeting. This is another area you can target products, but they don't just have to be competitors. Like I mentioned, they could also be complimentary products to yours or ones that people also buy in a similar category and where I would start with these stat campaigns. What this is is taking a search term, cat tree, and you're going to target the top 10, 15, 20, 30 organic ranking products of that search term. So you take the search term like cat tree. If this is a term that you're ideally already ranking for, I would start this with terms that you're already ranking for to make sure there's relevance that those products are already relevant to yours. And then you're going to target those top products on that search term that you're already ranking for. You can use a tool like helium-10, cerebro, or any reverse asin search. So you can see which search terms you are ranking organically on. I would look at something you're already ranking in the top 20, 30, and then take that search term and target those top products for it.
Brand Defense Campaign
And the last one you could try out is a brand defense campaign. So this would be where you're targeting your best-selling products with your other products. So any on your product detail page, there's going to be all those ads at the bottom of your competitors targeting it. But if you're targeting it with your own products, that's one less ad spot for your competitors to take. So it's a way to sort of block them from that. And you're getting the sales instead.
Reducing Wasted Spend
That's going to have more to do with getting sales when it comes to you. I mean, if you see a drop in sales, you may want to also reduce wasted spend. Definitely make sure you're looking at your placement adjustments. Take a look at that. Everyone's especially for like the automatic campaigns, your performance campaigns, and your single keyword campaigns when you start those. Make sure you're still, I know you're using Mershara recipes, which is great that there's that automation where it's going to constantly adjust your bids based on their performance. But still a good idea to go in there periodically just to make a manual adjustment, especially if you're doing small incremental adjustments every day. Sometimes your performance can take large swings pretty quickly. So it's good to be on top of that, where you may need to make a larger manual adjustment every once in a while. Something like once a week, I think would be a good cadence for that, where you can make more of a 10, 15, 25% adjustment on those really poor performing campaigns if you're seeing things with really high A costs. And make sure your negative keywords are intact that you're adding negative keywords. You can use the promotions feature Mershara to do that, where it's automatically adding those. You may want to be a little more aggressive in that as well. A fewer number of clicks before you're negating them without a sale, for example. That'd be something to look at as well.
