Features
In this video, we're breaking down essential Amazon advertising terms. Through the building blocks of any successful Amazon sellers toolkit and armed with these, you'll be on your way to navigating your campaigns with more confidence. Stick around.
Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name's Cameron Scott. Amazon seller with more than 3 million in sales over the last five years. As Amazon sellers, we have a lot to juggle. And effective advertising is a huge chore. On this channel, we simplify and automate our Amazon advertising so we can focus on what matters most.
First up, impressions. Imagine your Amazon ad as a billboard on a busy highway. Impressions are like the cars passing by that billboard. They represent how many times your ad is shown to your potential customers. But here's the key. While impressions don't directly drive your optimization decisions, they are important for understanding if your ad is getting the exposure it needs to drive clicks and conversions. Impressions act as a pulse check for your ad's visibility and your bid's competitiveness. If you're not getting any impressions at all, your bid might be too low to win ad placements. So don't overlook impressions, especially for newer campaigns. They're the first sign of whether your ad is in the game or sitting on sidelines.
Next up, we've got CPC short for cost per click. Just like it sounds, it's the amount you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. You can calculate your CPC by dividing your ad spend by the number of clicks you received. But why is CPC important? Well, outside of being the primary cost component of what you pay Amazon for your ads, it also gives you insight into the competitive landscape of your keywords. A higher CPC indicates fierce competition for the search terms you're targeting, while lower CPC indicates lower competition or lower interest in those terms. So you can use CPC as a barometer for the level of competition you're encountering.
Next is click-through rate or CTR for short. You can think of your click-through rate as your effectiveness score of your ad. It measures the percentage of people who like what they saw enough to click on your ad. To get your CTR, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions, then multiply by 100 to get the percentage. A high CTR suggests your ad is hitting the mark. It's resonating with shoppers, it's relevant to their searches, and it's compelling them to click with an appealing product listing, imagery, and pricing. On the flip side, a lower CTR might be a sign that your ad isn't as appealing or as relevant as it could be. Maybe your targeting is a bit off or your product images and pricing isn't standing out in a crowded marketplace.
Now on to conversion rate or CVR. This metric is the bridge between interest and action. It tells you how many people who clicked on your ad ended up buying your product. You can calculate by dividing the number of orders by the number of clicks that multiply by 100 for the percentage. A higher conversion rate means more of your clicks are turning into actual sales, making your ad spend more efficient. It's a key indicator of your ad's effectiveness and the appeal of your product. And there's more. Conversion rate directly impacts your cost per click. How? With a higher conversion rate, you can afford a bit more on each of those clicks, knowing that more of those clicks are turning into sales. Conversely, if your conversion rate is low, you need to have a lower CPC to maintain the same level of profit.
Last but definitely not least, we have A costs. Advertising cost of sale. A-C-O-S. It's one of the most important metrics for measuring your ad performance. And it gives you direction at how to optimize your campaigns. Consider it as the thermostat of your Amazon ad campaigns. It helps you find the right balance between the ad spend and the revenue that ad spend generates. To determine your A costs, simply divide your ad spend by the revenue made from that ad spend. And just like temperature, it's all about finding your comfort zone. If your A costs too low, you might be under investing your ads and leaving potential sales and profit on the table. If it's too high, it could mean you're spending too much to acquire each sale. So it's not always about having the lowest A costs, but about finding the right setting for your specific goals.
That's it for part one of our Amazon advertising terms series. Make sure to subscribe for part two where we'll explore more key terms. See you in the next video.
The title has the most SEO juice that sends the strongest signal to Amazon and help you rank more for that title.
I could see that the keywords are crucial. So the title and the subtitle of a book really, really matter and you can't change them once the books come live, but you can change your backend keywords.
And that's where people go wrong.
First of all, they don't fill them up. So you've got a couple of 49, 50 characters for each one. And you've got seven boxes and Amazon mix and matches the keywords within each box.
So you need to fill them up. You can't just put coloring book. You've got to put unicorn coloring book for girls, kids.
We'll let you get all mix and match them all up so that you then you're listed for unicorn coloring book, coloring book for girls, coloring book for kids, unicorn coloring book for girls, unicorn coloring book for kids.
Having that broader search term so you're appearing on more search terms because more search terms you appear on, like we talked about earlier is the more opportunity, the more traffic you have available to your listing.
Once a keywords kind of in your listing somewhere you don't need to keep repeating it necessarily. The title has the most SEO juice. It sends the strongest signal to Amazon and help you rank more for that title.
And also, I think people do sometimes forget that we spell things differently in the UK. So if I write, you know, humor, I'll also write it with the UK spelling as well to get both words in. I don't know if Amazon works that out itself, but maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't.
They do like misspellings. I don't know if they consider it a misspelling or not, but I have a similar tip for the US. The US has a lot of Spanish speakers and where you can have Spanish in your listing to index for Spanish search terms with a lot of people don't do. So if you are looking to kind of increase some of that search term volume or number of keywords you're indexing for, that'd be an option as well is putting some Spanish in your listing.
The images in your A plus content, like the alternative text form. So it doesn't appear to the customers or on your page, but those index as well. So it's an area where, okay, maybe you don't want to like have Spanish in your listing. For example, you could put some Spanish in your image tags and still get indexed there.
I haven't tested this. So this is just kind of like passing on some things I've heard.
Maybe it's a rumor, but Steven Pope is pretty well respected in the space. So another option as well to increase your footprint for your product.
So if you're anybody watching this is new, that's, that's what it is. Amazon only cares about the customer, not the sellers.
Are you doing more of like low content? This is just based on my, like reading, because I'm in some KDP groups. I just try to say I have a KDP account. Just, I think I have one book on there just from testing. Are you doing more like low content? Or are you doing some more of the higher content? Are you writing books yourself? Maybe you should just share some information on what kind of products I suppose you're selling there since it's a little broader than just, hey, t-shirts on Amazon.
I started out with tangent templates and they've got very basic templates. So graph paper and lines, but that quickly became saturated. And what was interesting was in December, 2018, I went to, it might have in January, 2019, actually. I went to the Merch UK conference, the first and only one because the next one got canceled.
Covid, yeah.
And I asked everybody there, there was about 60, 70 people there. And I kept saying to them, you're doing KDP as well? And they were like, no, not doing KDP. This is strange because I'm doing quite well on KDP. But people haven't got into it from the Merch side. So I was following more traditional people that had always done KDP had never done Merch.
Okay.
So I started out with a very basic stuff, but as the Merch people came in, that became just so saturated. And a lot of it was just absolute rubbish. And one thing Amazon is big about, and I'm big about too, is that you give the customer value. I don't want to buy something off Amazon and get it and think that's a load of rubbish I'll just send it back. And KDP are not taking our returns off at the moment like Merch. But I think they will at some point because I've never seen a return in my dashboard ever. And yet it must be sending them back.
Let's like, I would imagine like, I can imagine Amazon not accepting your return. Like that blows my mind if Amazon just accept a return on basically anything since they're so customer-centric. I mean, if anybody has been that's watching this, has been selling on Amazon, they know the customer is the only thing Amazon cares about. So the sellers, they don't at all. So if you're anybody watching this is new, that's, that's what it is. Amazon only cares about the customer, not the sellers. So that's really interesting.
As creators, we have to care about the customer as well. Because sooner or later Amazon will crack down on that rubbish. They're bound to, they're bound to start charging for every book you upload like Etsy do. Or they're, well, they're going to start reviewing accounts where they've got thousands of books. Well, they're going to start limiting us on how many books we can upload.
So I do more and do quite a variety of books, whatever kind of fires my interest that week. Okay. And I tend to do, I wouldn't say they're low content, but I don't write reams or reams because I don't get interested in that. I quite like the visual side of things. So I enjoy the covers the most, but I also do a lot of research into the keywords.
And I try to do things that are a bit different or first to market. So not necessarily research when Amazon itself and following the herd. For instance, I like watching my local news and I live in quite a low crime area. I live in the Southwest of England. It's quite beachy, it's quite low crime. So they have to fill the local news up with what people are doing.
And they, they sometimes have the most interesting things on there. And I think all those people could do with a little book to help them along. That's it. I mean, magnet fishing, for example, I haven't done it because I don't think there's that big of a demand.
But apparently people are going with magnets to fish in rivers and see what they can pull up. And of course, they're pulling up, you know, a little grenade that somebody's left there for 20 years and having to call the bomb squad out. And bring that for that. But people are actually doing this as a hobby. They're going out with a magnet on a fishing line and fishing metal things out of canals and rivers.
The holidays may be over, but the search term data that you paid for with your Amazon Ads is still available for it.
That is, if you act fast, there are only two days left to download and secure this valuable information before it's gone forever.
In this video, we'll cover why your search term data is essential and how you can use it. Plus, I'll show you how to download your search term reports while automating the process, so this valuable information never slips through the cracks again.
Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Cameron Scot, and on this channel, we explore the tools and strategies to make Amazon advertising easier.
Today, we'll focus on the search term data you can gain from your Amazon ads, how to use it, and how to save it securely.
Search terms are the exact words that shoppers type into Amazon when searching for a product like yours. Each time a shopper searches using one of these terms, it's an opportunity for your product to appear in the search results.
So understanding which terms shoppers are using to find your products and how they convert for your products is critical to improving your ad performance and increasing sales. Amazon makes all of your search term data available inside of the ad console at the ad group level, or for your entire account using the reports feature.
These reports show exactly what Amazon customers typed into the search bar to find your product and click on your ad. They'll also show you all the associated data of that search term related to your ad. Impressions, clicks, sales, and even how you stack up against the competition.
This amount of data can be potent. While an exhaustive list of every possible way that this data could be used would require an entire video series, here's four ways you can use this report.
For example, if you sell activity books for children and you see many searches around activity books for seniors, you may consider adding new activity books that target an older audience to your portfolio.
This is another excellent way to increase your impression share for a particular search term.
Creating additional products tailored to a specific search term will help you capture more of the total impressions for that term rather than solely relying on increasing your share using your existing products.
As you can see from just these few examples, arming yourself with this data by regularly combing your search term reports is a massive competitive advantage over anyone ignoring them.
And it's data you're already paying for, so you should use it to its full advantage. As long as your ad received at least one click, not just impressions for a search term, it will appear in your search term reports along with all of its associated data.
But there's a catch. You can only see the last 65 days of search term data inside of your ad console or in the downloaded reports.
After that, there's no way to see this hard-earned data that you paid for and it's gone forever. If you ran ads over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, you only have two days to capture this data at the time of publishing this video. If you're a Merch Jar user, this data is already automatically backed up for you.
As long as you have an active subscription, your search term data is securely stored in our servers, starting 60 days from when you first synced your ad account with Merch Jar. This allows you to view your search term data beyond the 65-day limitation in ad console and in longer blocks of time without having to combine multiple spreadsheets.
In addition, Merch Jar aggregates all of your search term data across your ad groups. You can see at a glance when multiple ad groups are targeting the same search term and how they're contributing to their performance without having to create pivot tables or get bogged down with large spreadsheets.
Analyze your search term reports without wasting time generating reports or the hassle of spreadsheets by starting your free 30-day trial at merchjar.com.
Now that you know the importance of your search term data and how to use it, let's dive into how to download the reports and automate the process so it never gets away again.
From inside of ad console, first click on the measurement and reporting icon in the sidebar and then select sponsored ads reports.
Next, click Create Report and in the report category, select the type of report you'd like to download.
Search term reports are available for both sponsored products and sponsored brand ads. If you'd like to generate reports for both, you'll need to do them separately.
Then select Report Type. In the dropdown, you'll see a search term and a search term impression share report, along with several other report types. However, we want the search term impression share report.
This report includes all the same information as the search term report, but also includes the impression share and ranking data, so there's no reason to choose a search term report over this one. For time unit, the summary view is generally preferred and easier to read and analyze. The daily view can sometimes be helpful to debug ad performance, but can be large and unwieldy if you have more than a small amount of ad spend.
Next, choose the reporting period.
If this is the first time you're running the report, use the date selection to go back to the full 65 days available to capture as much search term data as possible.
In the reporting settings, you can rename the report as well as add an email for delivery. Since this is our first time running the report, this one will be a one-off and will leave the schedule time set to now to generate it immediately.
Click Run Report and it will start processing. Depending on the size of the report, this can take some time.
Once completed, you can download the report from the download column.
Next, we'll schedule this report to run automatically so we never miss out on our search term data.
Go back to Create Report, select Sponsored Product or Sponsored Brand for the category, the Search Term Impression Share, and we'll leave it at summary for the time unit.
For the reporting period option, this will depend on how frequently we want to have the reports generated. We want the report period and frequency to match to avoid any overlap with data. In the delivery settings, selecting Recurring will bring up the schedule settings. You have the option of Daily, Weekly, or Monthly Frequency.
I like to look at a longer date range for search term reports, so I'm going to choose Monthly.
Now back to the reporting period. Since I have the report generated each month, I want the reporting period to be one month, so I'm going to select Last Month. If you want to have the report generated each week, select Last Week for the report period instead of last month. This way you'll always get all search term data.
Next, set the end date. You can set the end date as far out as one year, so set a calendar reminder to update the report settings if you'd like it to continue past this. Once you have your report settings the way you'd like, click Schedule Report. Navigating back to the reports, we'll see our newly scheduled report that was last run today for December search term data, and we'll next run again on February 1st with January search term data.
To see all of your reports generated from the scheduled report, click on the report name, where you can download each of the reports from the History tab. In the report setting tab, you can edit the configuration and settings, including the end date, run the report immediately, or create a copy. And that's all there is to schedule your search term reports.
You can now rest assured you'll never miss out on this valuable data.
If you found the information in this video helpful, please give it a like and subscribe for more strategies and tools to make Amazon advertising easier.
The holiday sale season is officially over for me as all my products are now delivering after Christmas, which means sales have dropped and my advertising is all but cut off. And in this video, we're going to review the last week of sales for this holiday sales period.
We're going to jump right into looking at the results from the last week from Tuesday, December 13th at the end of our last update video, which you can check out in the description, to Monday yesterday when all of our products were officially delivering after Christmas, and as you can see from the graph, sales have dropped off a cliff.
In total for the week, we ended up with 6,565 total unit sales for $34,000 in royalties. And as you see from the graph, we were trending upward pretty nicely as our delivery dates still showed prior to Christmas. And it wasn't until Monday, late Sunday that delivery dates for my bestsellers showed after Christmas, but starting on Saturday, they started showing the 23rd or 24th. And that's what I noticed the conversion rates really started to drop.
And I'll be honest, it was a little bit of a disappointing last couple days of the holiday sales season, especially since they still were delivering before Christmas. I would have expected the sales to increase from Friday to Saturday and Saturday to Sunday still, however, that wasn't the case. So we just had to make the best of it.
Let's jump into showing the ad spend with that. So total ad spend for that week $14,600 with an ACOS of 23.6% and a cost per click of 90 cents. So versus our royalties of $34,000 to $14,000 in spend, we made a profit of a little under $20,000 for the week. And we'll just quickly go through each day,
If you watched any of the previous videos, you know, we're really aggressive through Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. And then that following week started to work on bringing our bids down to end up culminating in this week to try to get to that 25% ACOS goal. And for total ACOS spending between 20% and 25% on ads of what our total royalties are. So if we spent $4000 on ads, we'd like to be in that $1,000 ad spend range ideally. And then Friday we took an even bigger dip $3,200 in royalties and $1,800 in spend. And you can see the ACOS really started to go up at that point too. Once we hit Saturday, it was on a nice downward trend, went up a little bit on Saturday and then through Sunday and Monday just kept increasing. And on Monday, we kind of let our spend get away from us a little bit for a very short period of time.
It did show that delivery dates were December 24th still for one of my products. So I did increase bids again. And that didn't really pay off. So a little bit higher ACOS, I would have liked to see.
And after this date, pretty much from this morning on, we've reduced all of our bids and campaign budgets, no budgets over $20 per day for any of my campaigns. And all the bids are anywhere between 5 and 10 cents at this point.
In another future video, I'm going to do a recap of the entire last month of sales season. So from Black Friday, all the way through the holiday sales season, we'll do some recap for that and probably do some reflecting on what we could do different moving into 2023 to prepare for next holiday season, because preparation for that is really a year-long process. So we're going to start that in January.
And really, we're already starting it now as we move past this holiday sales season, we're going to be in that kind of sales lull. And then sales should start to pick up to their new normal of January and February, typically those slower months for a lot of sellers. And we're already starting that re-optimization process. For me, it's through using Merch Jar recipes to just really slowly start bringing those bids back up for anything that's not getting impressions anymore, which is going to be most of my campaigns with what the bids are.
So those are already starting and looking at recent results and increasing bids on things that weren't recently or were recently performing those would increase in bids faster. So I'm already using all of our new starter recipes. Check out the video I just did for the most recent recipe updates.
They're now easier than ever to use before. We simplified them and streamlined them. So if you're not using recipes or you're not a Merch Jar user yet, now is the best time.
We just announced our price changes that's happening on January 1st. The price plans are staying the same, but we're bringing up our minimum monthly from $25 to $50 starting January 1st. So if you're not already a Merch Jar user or you're subscribed, you can take advantage of our lowest pricing we're ever going to offer again by subscribing to Merch Jar by December 31st. You'll still get the full 30-day trial. If you just sign up now, you'll have 30 days from the day you signed up, as long as you subscribe to a plan by December 31st, you'll lock in the $25 per month starting point for life. As long as you maintain a subscription, you'll always be grandfathered into that plan.
As well as we're offering a holiday bonus for 10,000 coins added to your account, anyone that subscribed during the months of November and December, and that's a $150 value, good for $10,000 in ad spend or any spend above your subscription's included amount.
That is it for the last weekly update. Keep an eye on the next video for our 2022 holiday ride along where we will look at the entire sales season and from Black Friday through the end of it and do some reflections on what we can do better. So make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you are notified when the next video lands.
In order to better support the development of Merch Jar and reach our vision for Merch Jar to make advertising easier, we're changing our pricing effect of January 1st.
This price change will not affect current subscribers or anyone that subscribes to a plan by January 1st. All current subscribers will be grandfathered into their existing plan for as long as the subscription is maintained. On January 1st, our base subscription will change to $50 per month and now include up to $2,000 in ad spend per month for all of your ad accounts that are managed by Merch Jar.
This is a change from our current base subscription of $25 per month with $1,000 in included ad spend, which will no longer be available after December 31st. All other aspects of the plan and pricing will remain the same, including the current pricing of any ad spent above $2,000 now.
You can see our pricing for any level of ad spend using the calculator on our pricing page, which will be the same for any ad spent above $50 after January 1st.
New subscribers that subscribe by December 31st will be locked in to our $25 monthly price as long as your subscription is maintained. Plus, new subscribers will get a 10,000 coin bonus as part of our holiday sales promotion. That's an extra $10,000 in ad spend above the current plans included $1,000 in ad spend per month, a $150 value.
To subscribe, head over to the billing page of your Merch Jar account, add a credit card, and click the subscribe button.
And in case you missed it, we recently had some other updates as well to Merch Jar. If you're on Amazon Merch on Demand seller, the new Merch Jar Chrome extension syncs all of your Merch on Demand products to your Merch Jar account, making it easy to get a list of all of your ASINs for advertising or to add them to your lottery campaigns.
It's now easier than ever to get started with recipes and automate your campaign optimizations. We've rewritten all of our starter recipes to be more streamlined and easier to use, so you can automate your workflow in just a few clicks.
We're making a lot of improvements in 2023 to make Merch Jar a better experience and make your Amazon advertising easier - including more content, tips, strategies, and tutorials to get the most out of Merch Jar and your Amazon ads, as well as new recipes available in recipe world to download and automate your ads in seconds.
We also have many new features and enhancements to the Merch Jar app well underway, including new recipe enhancements and functionality, placement adjustment, bulk actions and automations, streamlined campaign creation, and better dashboards and analytics to better analyze and optimize your campaigns.
If you're looking to save time on campaign management while taking your ads to the next level in 2023, you can lock in the lowest pricing we'll ever be offering again while still getting every new feature that we release. Start your free 30-day trial at merchjar.com.
We've updated our starter recipes to make it easier than ever to get started automating your advertising workflow. Recipes give you a powerful way to automatically perform actions such as pausing a campaign or keyword, increasing bids, or lowering budgets based on the criteria that you set. We've simplified the number of recipes from 12 starter recipes down to 6, making it even easier to manage and make changes to your automations, while adding improvements and new functionality. In this video, we'll review what recipes are and how to get started with them, then review each of the new recipes, what they are, how they work, and how to modify them to fit your needs.
If you're not a Merch Jar user, you can still use all the recipes in this video by starting your free 30-day trial, no credit card required, at merchjar.com. All of our starter recipes are designed to work right out of the box for most sellers, so you can automate 90% of your routine campaign optimizations in just a few clicks. Each recipe can also be modified to further meet your needs.
To get started with these recipes, download each of the starter recipes from the links in the description. Once downloaded, we'll head over to Merch Jar to import them to our account. Inside of Merch Jar, we're going to navigate to our recipes page to get started with the import, and next we're going to import all the newly downloaded recipes by going to our create recipe and hovering over the drop-down arrow, and then import recipe. Next, we're going to find all the recipes we just downloaded by clicking the browse button, and then selecting all the recipes we'd like to import.
I'm going to select all 12 of these by shift clicking all of them, and then open. You can import up to 20 recipes at the same time. Next, you can choose if you want to import to all of your ad profiles that are managed by Merch Jar by clicking the switch, or leaving it off to just import them to the active profile. Next, click "Import", and all the new recipes will be imported to your account. You can use these recipes right away simply by enabling them using the switch in the enabled column, or selecting each one with the checkboxes, or by using the "Select All" checkbox at the top, and we're going to select all of our recipes, then use a bulk action to enable, and all of our recipes are now turned on, and will start automating your ad optimizations.
Each recipe is split up into two separate recipes, which is indicated by the A and B aside to each number, A for keywords and B for targets. They're exactly the same recipes, they just target different things. Keywords will target all of your manual keyword campaigns, such as your exact match, broad match, and phrase match, while targets will affect all of your automatic campaigns, such as close match, loose match, substitute, as well as your ASIN product targets, or category targeting.
Next, we're going to look at what each recipe does, and how to make some simple modifications to them if you feel you need to.
Our first recipe is our zero impression recipe, one for keywords and one for targets, which is used to increase bids on anything that's not getting any impressions within the last few days.
This first recipe is pretty simple, where what it's looking for is over the last three days, which doesn't include today's data, and anything that is effectively enabled, so this means the campaign is active, the ad group is active, and any of the targets need to be enabled and active as well. If a campaign is paused and the ad group and the keyword is active, this won't affect it because it's not effectively enabled because the campaign is paused, it's not delivering. So this will only affect any keywords that are currently delivering. And then next, we have our impressions threshold, which we have set to zero. So over the last three days, if any keywords are active and have gotten exactly zero impressions, it will meet this trigger criteria and then perform whatever action that we set.
There's also additional options included that you can enable to further modify the campaign, such as a max bid threshold. If you don't want to increase any keywords that have a bid greater than X amount, and you can do that by simply deleting the first two forward slashes, which, is a comment, and that removes the comment and now enables that for our recipe. You can also enable any of these other options such as a click threshold or a keyword exclusion. For example, if you don't want this to affect your lottery campaigns, you can enable this clause to say, and the campaign name does not contain the keyword lottery anywhere in it. And then at the bottom of each recipe, it does show recommended actions to take with this.
With this recipe, we are increasing the bid in small increments every day that they're not getting impressions. In this case, it's by default said to increase by 2% every day until it sees impressions. If it gets any impressions within the last three days, this recipe will not trigger for that keyword.
You can also change the frequency that each recipe runs by default to run once per day, but you can have it run after every data sync, which is four times per day, only manually when you set it, or on certain days, such as days of the week, or on certain exact days, which is useful if you want to affect certain dates of the year, such as a specific holiday.
Next, we're going to look at recipe two, which is pausing low performers. This recipe is used to pause any low performing keywords that are getting clicks and no orders or are not performing recently.
At the start of the trigger, we have our global options. So these will apply to the rest of our options, which we'll see in just a second. And here, there's a couple options you can include, such as if the campaign name doesn't include a keyword or anything else you'd want to add that would affect all the additional options. Next is the first option inside of this recipe, which is anything that has 0 orders over the lifetime of data that Merch Jar has collected, which is 60 days before you first sync to your account with Merch Jar. So this section here is saying that over the lifetime, the entire date range that Merch Jar has, if any keyword has 0 orders and it has greater than or equal 20 clicks, it will meet this trigger, including our global option. So it has to meet the global options plus this. You can also add additional options here, such as ad spend, or if you did want to add your own, you can do that as well.
Then next, we have an "or" operator. So what this is saying is this trigger will be met if it's meets this 0 order lifetime in addition to our global options, or the next option, which is our 1 order lifetime. And this section here, again, looks at the entire lifetime of data in your Merch Jar account. And this is going to affect any keywords that have exactly 1 order and at least 50 clicks. And then again, you have some additional options you can enable by deleting the first two forward slashes, such as an ACOS threshold, or if you want to add a spend threshold or anything else, this is where you would add it.
So any keyword that has exactly 1 order and 50 clicks and whatever additional criteria we set or meets our 0 order lifetime with greater than or equal to 20 clicks, meet this trigger criteria. And anytime the trigger criteria is met for that keyword, it will trigger the action, which for this recipe is to pause that keyword. Anything that's any keywords that meet our criteria, any of these options will be paused at the next recipe run for whatever frequency that you set. After our 1 order lifetime, we then have a recent poor performers option, which is used to pause any poor performers that are based on recent sales data. So this specific option within the recipe looks at the last 90 days of data, for any keywords that have 1 or 0 orders and at least 60 clicks, those will be set to pause once they meet this criteria.
This also has an additional clause to it as well, that over the lifetime that keyword doesn't have more than 1 order. So it looks at two different date ranges, so that it's only going to pause if over the lifetime of over the 90 days, it still only has 1 order. And recently, it also has 1 or 0 orders and greater than 60 clicks.
And finally, the last section is the aged poor performer section, which this is used to pause any poor performing keywords or targets for the target recipe that have a longer sales history, but don't perform anymore. And this recipe looks at the last 180 days, so about six months in anything that's got less than or equal to 4 orders, more than 60 clicks, and more than a 60% ACOS. And over the last 21 days, it has gotten 0 orders. You can further refine this again by enabling some options, such as if you wanted to have some sort of click threshold within the last 21 days, you could add that here as well to further modify this recipe to fit your needs. Otherwise, right out of the box, these are some pretty good parameters to have set for keywords you may want to have paused that aren't performing.
Next, we have recipe number three. This recipe is the start of our bid optimization. So this one is targeting any of our low ACOS keywords, which is used to raise bids on anything that is performing well. So anything that meets a criteria in this recipe is going to increase bids by 2%. It has to meet our different options in our trigger here.
These bid recipes are a little more complicated than some of the other ones because we're segmenting the bid optimizations by order volume. We're looking at different date ranges based on how many orders that a keyword or a target is getting with these bid change recipes. So what that means is if we have a lot of orders in a recent amount of time, such as the last 7 days, we're going to look at that date range. If we don't have enough orders to meet that, we're going to look at a little bit longer date range, which is the next one by default is 14 days. And if we don't meet enough orders for within 14 days, we're going to look at even longer, we're going to look at a 30 day window. And all this is modifiable if you need to, but these are pretty, by default, these are set to work for most sellers. So let's take a look at what that looks like.
First, we have our global options again. So this is going to apply to all of our low, moderate and high order volume. So it needs to meet our global options plus one of our low, moderate or high order volume options. And by default. The only option enabled in our global settings is our state. And we're just making sure that the keyword is delivering if we're going to make any bid changes to it. So if the campaign or the ad groups paused, that keyword, even if it's active is not going to have a bid adjustment made to it.
You can then further add other options as well, such as a click threshold. So this would be something where it would only raise bids if it's not getting clicks within the last couple days, or a keyword exclusion or inclusion like the other recipes such as excluding lottery campaigns or only including close match if that's in your ad group name. And you can change any of this information as well to fit your needs.
And then our first option, which in addition to meaning our global options is our low order volume. So this is going to look at any keywords that have at least 2 orders within the last 30 days, but has fewer than 4 orders within the last 14 days. And what this does is eliminates any overlap with our moderate and our high volume options that we'll look at in just a second. So this will only affect if it has at least 2 orders within the last 30 days, but fewer than 4 in the last 14.
And it also needs to have less than 25% ACOS over that 30 day date range. This is our ACOS threshold. And we recommend setting this to 2%-5% below what your target a cost is. So that means if you have a 20% target ACOS, we would want to change our ACOS threshold here somewhere between 15% and 18% for each of these options.
Next, we have moderate order volume. So this is going to look at a shorter date range than our low order volume option, because we have more data within a more recent time frame. And because we have more data within that recent time frame, we prefer to look at just that most recent data. Effectively, we just want to have enough data points to confidently make a bid adjustment using as recent of data as possible.
So this one by default looks at the last 14 days, and there needs to be at least 4 orders within that 14 day window. And again, meet our ACOS threshold. And in this example, we're going to change this to 18%. In the case we have a 20% target ACOS, and then an overlap exclusion here. So over the last 7 days, there's not it needs to have less than 4 orders, which if we look at our high order volume, this matches our date range here where our high order volume looks at the last 7 day window, and there needs to be at least 4 orders within that 7 days for it to only look at the last 7 days. Otherwise, if it has 4 orders within the last 10 days, for example, it's going to fall back to this more moderate order volume. And now it's looking at a 14 day window, and basing the data on that. And the same thing for our high ACOS, we're just going to change that to 18% in this example to match our target ACOS.
And then at the bottom of each recipe, we have our recommended actions, which in this case is increasing the bid because they're performing below our target ACOS. And what the percentage increase recommendations are based on how conservative or aggressive you'd want to be with the default being said at the moderate 2% for each of our recipes.
And our next recipe is recipe number four, and these are for our high a cost keywords and targets, which these recipes look almost identical to our low ACOS recipes. We're now just looking at lowering bids on anything above our target ACOS. So looking at these, these are again, segmented into low, moderate, and high order volume, starting with our global trigger.
The one difference between our low a cost and our high a cost is there is a click threshold set by default, which this stops lowering bids on high ACOS keywords that they're no longer getting clicks within the last couple of days. And you can modify this just to look at the last one day, or if you want to look at a longer date range, or disable that option entirely by turning this line into a comment with two forward slashes.
And this anything that's grayed out here, which it is, is now no longer part of this trigger. And we're going to scroll down to get into our individual options, which it starts at low order, which is the same 30 days with at least 2 orders. But now we're looking at anything greater than 30% ACOS by default. And again, set this 2% to 5% above your target ACOS. So this would be a good starting point if your target ACOS is between 25 and 28%. If it's different than that, just again, change it to 2% to 5%, whatever your target is. And again, same thing with our moderate order volume looks the exact same as our other one, just again, looking at anything greater than target ACOS and our high order volume. And then our recommended changes with the same conservative, moderate, and aggressive percent with the default at the 2% for decreasing the bid.
And next we have recipe number five. This is our brand new recipe that was not part of our original ones, which is we're now calling our booster recipes. So this is the first booster recipes. And these are designed to stack on top of your low and high ACOS recipes. If you use our original starting recipes, these replace the very high ACOS. And in this case, very low ACOS recipes make even bigger changes to your keywords and targets that are further away from your target ACOS. So these stack on top of your low and high ACOS recipes number three and four without having to make any changes to them. So what this looks like is these are segmented the exact same by order volume. We want to look at more recent data if we have the order volume, the data points to support that with very similar global options.
And it looks very similar to for this one, our low ACOS recipe. But with this, we want to set an even lower ACOS threshold. So in this case, we want to only affect our very best performers. And by default, that's set to 12%, where the low ACOS recipe is set to 25%. If a target or keyword has less than 12%, it's going to be adjusted twice, one by the low ACOS recipe, because it is less than 25%. And then again, by this recipe, our booster, because it has less than 12%, it meets criteria for both of them.
So there's gonna be 2 recipe runs where it's a 2% adjustment by default, unless you change this from the low ACOS recipe, and then another 2% adjustment by the booster. And you don't need to make any other changes. It's okay for those to stack. It's not quite a 4% adjustment, because it's 2% off of 2%, be there two individual optimizations.
So these work really well for increasing your bids more for things that are performing really well. And if we go through the recipe, they're going to look exactly the same with the same ACOS.
So you can make adjustments to this. If you want to only affect say less than 8%, or you want to bring up to 15%, whatever you would consider to be your really well performers, you want to make even bigger adjustments to than you want for keywords of targets are a little closer to your target a cost. And lastly, the high order volume, again, looks the same. So just modify this. And we have our recommended actions set to moderate by default.
And finally, our last recipe, which is number 6, our booster for our high ACOS. So this works exactly the same as our booster for our low ACOS, except it's going to boost our high ACOS recipe. This is going to affect only keywords and targets that are the furthest away from your target ACOS, which are your worst performers. So if we scroll down to our options, this is set by default to anything greater than 50%, which you can modify to what makes most sense for your campaigns, which you would then do across each order volume. And by default, it's set to a moderate 2% decrease.
So again, if anything is above our 50%, it's going to trigger both recipes, our high ACOS recipe and our booster high ACOS recipe. So we'll first make a 2% decrease to your bids from the high a cost recipe. And then another 2% decrease from our booster recipe.
Over the course of the week, what that would look like for a decrease in bids, because it's 2% off of 2% each day. Over the course of seven days, if it met both triggers each day, it would be approximately a 25% reduction in bid. If you wanted to then further segment these more, you could even add additional booster recipes to affect even higher, for example, you could duplicate this recipe and then change that threshold to 75% to where now you would have your high ACOS recipe, your medium booster and your high booster. So anything above 75% ACOS, those keywords and targets would have a 2% a 2% and then a 2% decrease on the same day. If you did want to duplicate a recipe, you can simply do that under the actions and then "Duplicate" and make any modifications.
Today is December 13th and in this video I'm going to give you an update on the last week of sales and ad spend as we head into this final week-ish or so of the holiday sales season.
You can check out the last video that I uploaded, that I recorded on December 4th, that covered about a week of sales or so. And in that video we were struggling a little bit with our ad spend. This past week that we're about to review has been all about bringing down our ad spend to more reasonable levels, targeting that 25% ad spend of our total royalties. And doing that through being really aggressive with our bit optimizations - specifically around keywords and targets that weren't generating large quantities of orders. Especially up until this point if they weren't already performing and really contributing to our sales or were performing at a really high ACOS. We were being very aggressive in bringing those bids down and focusing more on those keywords and targets that were producing larger quantities of orders.
So let's just jump right into the sales data from the last week or so. So here's the sales data for my account. We're gonna look at from Monday the 5th through yesterday, Monday. And you can see a total of 6,000 sales with $31,000 royalties. And if we look at our advertising data kind of overlaid with our sales data out of those 6,000 orders, 2,600 of those were from paid orders with a total of $15,791 in spend, out of the $31,000 and royalties giving us about a little over $15,000 in net profit. And compared to the previous video, ACOS has been a little bit better, especially as attribution kind of kicks in. There's a 14-day attribution window, if someone clicks on an ad and then comes back later to purchase, which does happen quite a bit during the holiday sales season. So some of these campaigns have definitely improved over time and if we just go quickly through each day, Monday the 5th, $3,073 royalties with $2,300 in spend for about $700 in profit. $3,500 on the 6th with $3,100 in spend. $3,600 on the 7th with $2,000 in spend.
You can see that my spend has slowly decreased over this time period, which has been the goal, this has been all about maximizing profit as we lead into the last week. And then Thursday $4,100 and $2,000 in sales. So now we're starting about mid last week we were starting to get more of that 1 to 1 ratio again with the goal to bring that down to about 25%. So, sales have continued to increase spend has continued to decrease, the cost has been a little bit all over the place depending on the day, but in general is an improvement over the prior weeks when we were being a lot more aggressive. $4,000 on friday $1,400 spend, so increase in profit there as well, closer to that $2,500 - $2,600. And that continues through Saturday $3,900 and $1,600. Sunday $4,500 and $1,591. And then finally yesterday $4,400 in royalties and $1,476 in spend. So that puts us at about $2,900 in profit. So getting pretty close to that 3 to 1 ratio. We're looking at or 25% of our ad spend compared to our total royalties.
And taking a quick look of our top-selling products out of that $31,000 in royalties and $6,000 orders, about three quarters of that is from our main hero product, pretty well dwarfing our next best-selling products over this eight-day window. And over this time frame, the real goal has been to become more profitable over this week as we move into this last week as sales continue to climb up until those shipping dates fall past Christmas when you kind of run into that sales cliff.
So we want to now maximize profits after being super aggressive through black friday weekend and that first week and really maximize that we really bet big on being super aggressive and ranking this hero product. Now it's been decreasing ad spend while the sales increase and trying to maintain the ranking of our product to.
Unfortunately, even though our ad spend has really decreased for the hero product and just across all of our products in general, the ranking on this still remains consistent with where it was when we were being super aggressive. So that's always a worry when you're reducing your bids, becoming more conservative - that your competition can still be putting their foot on the gas, or you lose rank, which can have that negative sales velocity where you keep falling down.
But fortunately I've been able to maintain that rank even with fewer paid orders contributing to that ranking. And again, we did this by focusing on the keywords and targets that were really contributing to our product that were performing well and the ones that were getting a lot of orders and even if they weren't performing quite at the target ACOS. In the previous video we were talking about 35% - 30% target ACOS. We're now I'm looking to bring that down to profitability or break even of about 26% across my product line. That's a matter of just taking those performing, when I say performing the keywords that are getting a lot of orders, and bringing those bids down to a level that they would still be profitable based on the conversion rates they're seeing and what our target ACOS is.
With those two metrics, we can calculate what our target CPC should be, which if you're curious about that and kind of what I look at when I'm adjusting bids, check out the live bid optimization video I did as part of the last update, which is similar to how I've been adjusting my bids throughout this whole week, taking stuff that's performing and trying to bring it down to the target ACOS, making little adjustments each day until we get to this point and anything that's not contributing sales, that's not getting orders were being fairly aggressive in lowering those bid consistently. At this point if it's not contributing sales or hasn't in the last couple of weeks. I'm not really looking to see if it's going to start contributing now as we approach that sales cliff when we're gonna be cutting bids just across the board.
That's it for this video. If you want to be notified when I drop the next update, probably after this week of sales, then make sure to like and subscribe and hit that notification bell and I'll see you in the next video.
Last night, many of my products started showing delivering dates past Christmas day, which means I'll be paying really high cost per clicks just for someone to show up at the product page to find out they can't get it delivered by Christmas, which means they're probably not going to be as likely to convert and I'm going to be paying these higher cost per clicks without the conversion rate - leading to lots of wasted spend.
As a result, I need to make some adjustments to my bids and budgets to reduce spending on those campaigns. In this video I'll show you what adjustments I made and how I did them using Merch Jar.
During this time of year, when delivery dates extend past Christmas and your sales start to fall off a cliff, it is necessary to make some pretty big adjustments to our ads and budgets. That way you're not going to waste so much money on these campaigns. You have a few different options at this point of the year - you can just pause all campaigns, reduce all of your bids and budget to an absolute minimum, or make a percentage-based decrease.
I'm not a big fan of ever pausing my campaigns. I would much rather reduce those bids greatly even setting those to a bare minimum, two cents per bid, instead of pausing those campaigns. It's okay if you do pause them, I would just prefer to keep them going. I don't want to come back later and try to figure out which campaigns I was running and which ones weren't. So I'd rather keep those enabled and at the bare minimum, just set them to a minimum possible bid which is two cents what I'll be doing instead there's just a large percentage based decrease. I want to have some kind of proportional changes there. So when I start re-optimizing them coming out of the holiday sales season, there's still those proportional bid. So I still have some higher and some lower based on if they were previously running at a much higher bid and higher CPC to get that optimization working a little bit quicker than having everything start at the absolute minimum making really small increases until we get back to that point.
You have a few options when it comes to adjusting your bids in your budget, you can either use the Native Ad Console where we're at now using the targeting page and management page or use their spread, bulk operation spreadsheets as well. Using Native Ad Console on the targeting page you can use to make bulk adjustments to your bids.
The one issue I have here is that I can't filter to exclude campaigns that are still delivering or still have delivery days by Christmas. The other big issue is if you have a ton of targets like here, I have over 13,000 different enabled targets and keywords, you can only make adjustments to up to 300 at a time. I've also had some issues lately where it hasn't been running bulk adjustments for whatever reason. So I'm not going to be using this.
Under the management tab this is a pretty easy area to make bulk adjustments to your budgets by selecting all the campaigns you'd like making adjustments. There is still that limit of 300 per page, you can only make adjustments to which I do have fewer campaigns than that. However, the issue I have is that I want to exclude certain campaigns that are still delivering by Christmas which there isn't an easy way to do here.
The other option for using the Native Ad Console is the bulk operations spreadsheets. You can download these for specific date ranges and make all kinds of filters to them to make any kind of adjustments you really need. I'm not going to walk through exactly what that would look like step by step, but this is an option as well that you can do. All the things I'm about to do in Merch Jar through the bulk operations spreadsheets. Merch Jar just makes that a little bit smoother experience and quicker to do. So we're gonna jump right over to Merch Jar and just run through all these changes. Okay, so we're over at Merch Jar now and we're just gonna be making a few changes.
This is pretty quick process now we want to exclude all of our products that are still selling and I have three right now that are still delivering by Christmas. So I want to keep those campaigns as they are. The first thing we're gonna do is reduce our bids on everything that is not those products. So we're gonna start on the target's page here. This is going to be all of our auto campaign targets like loose match, close match substitutes, compliments as well as our ASIN targets and any category targeting that we have as well. And we're going to go through and make an adjustment for products that aren't delivering by Christmas. I'm going to do a 90% reduction just across the board.
So the first thing I'm going to do is exclude the ASINs that are still delivering. So I'm going to do an exclusion in search which is -not:<asin>. So the way this works is excludes anything with a key word in the campaign or ad group name. And I've named all of my campaigns for a product with ASIN in it. So it makes it easy for me to just put in, don't include this ASIN any campaigns with this ASIN in the title, it's going to remove those. So I have three of those. So I'm gonna just paste the first one and I'm going to add another exclusion by doing the same thing. Just space then -not:<asin> paste in my other. And then my third, the same thing -not:<asin>.
So I have all three ASINs here and I'm just going to enter and this should exclude anything that has a campaign name with any of those three ASINs in it. And then I'm simply going to select all of my targets. I'm going to select all of them from all pages. So this is every target that's not one of the products that is delivering. And then I'm going to make a bulk action and change bid. Then decrease the bid by a percentage. I started with 90%. Now I've already made this adjustment, so I'm not going to run this but this is exactly what I did. And you can just put in the percentage you want to decrease it by. I used 90% and then click change bid.
Now this is where you have some options to, you could have this lower or smaller if you want to base it on any metrics. I just did a blanket adjustment across all of my bids that aren't still delivering by Christmas. The other option too is if you wanted to be even more conservative and still not pause campaigns, you can just set the bid to a specific amount, as low as two cents bid per target. You would just change bid and those would process to get changed to whatever you have set here.
Then I copy what I have in the search. We're going to go to a couple different pages to make these same changes. So just copy that. And then I'm gonna do the same thing on our keywords page. So I'm going to navigate to the keywords and then paste the search. I just copied. So it's the three ASINs I don't want to change bids on. I'm gonna do the same thing with selecting all of my keywords now in our manual campaigns, bulk action change bid and the same 90% decrease. And again here is where you can set it to a specific amount or decrease by a specific dollar amount. I like the proportional changes with the percentage. So I'm sticking with that.
So now that all those changes have been made, the last thing I'm going to do is make adjustments to my campaigns. A lot of the campaign budgets were increased throughout the holiday sales season. So now that that's over for most products, I'm gonna take the budgets on those products that aren't delivering anymore and just greatly reduce those as there's not really much reason for them to have as high budgets. I'll adjust those again over time as we re-optimize these campaigns over 2023.
So next we're gonna head over to campaigns and the same thing on our campaign page is just pacing our string that we copied of our actions that are still delivering. So we're going to exclude those. Then we're going to start making adjustments to our budgets. And I started by setting a filter to anything with a budget greater than $5. The reason I'm selecting greater than $5 is that I'm using a percentage adjustment of that 90% still. Then I go to bulk actions and click change daily budget. So again here this is where you can change by percent or set to a dollar amount. So I started with anything above $5 and made a 90% adjustment and that would be a pretty big adjustment on any campaigns are kind of in that $5 - $20 range or so where it'll be below even a dollar to for a budget. So next what I did, if anything was already below $5 I change it to anything with a budget between, we could just use $0 and $5. So this is going to be the whole range. I set all of these to just a $3 daily budget, which same thing, selecting all, change daily budget, and set to a daily budget. So anything in that small range, I just kinda took everything and brought to a $3 daily budget and I'm just going to run that again to make sure that everything is set to $3 and that I didn't miss anything and then I'll perform that action and update everything to $3 that was between the $0 and $5 range.
That's it for the adjustments I made for all the products that stopped delivering by Christmas, I keep it pretty simple just making blanket changes across all the products that aren't delivering anymore, excluding the ones that are. And I'll keep an eye on those delivery dates and do the same process on those products specifically when they extend past Christmas. I hope this video is helpful if you found any value at all, please like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video!
So, we need to make some changes here to our bids. I could do some of this in ad console. I'm going to end up doing a lot of this Merch Jar because it gives you some extra tools and filtering that's hard to do inside of ad console.
If you are not a Merch Jar user, you can just use your ad console to make some changes. You do this in your Targeting. One thing I don't like about the Targeting is that you can't filter by product if you're doing like single ASIN campaigns and be able to filter using a specific ASIN that can't really be done in targeting. You do it in bulk operations where you can do more of that so you can download your spreadsheets and so forth. I'm not going to do that. So, we're going to jump over to Merch Jar.
So, we're over in Merch Jar now on the dashboard, and we just did a recent dashboard update to add the CPC, Cost Per Click graph to our dashboard area. And the other big change we made is that the graphs now follow your date range so you can look at a longer day period if you want and update the graphs and you can track longer periods or if you want to react shorter, you can do that. You can also just click and drag to zoom into a specific area.
So, we're looking at just the last week of data that we've been looking at since last Sunday. And you can see our ACOS has been steadily increasing over this week as well as the Cost Per Click. Also going up, which probably has something to do with that conversion rate somewhat flat. But we need with how high the ACOS has been the last few days. Today is really high. That tends to become less as order data comes in. There's a little bit of delay with that, though, that tends to improve over the day or once the numbers start to finalize next day, 48 hours so that should improve. So, we're not actually at a 61% ACOS, but it's still higher than I'd like to be. And just based on how much we've spent in total versus our total royalties, we're receiving in as just higher than I really want to be. I wanna get closer to that kind of 1 to 1 ratio that I mentioned earlier.
So, before I make any changes to my bids, I'm going to adjust my target ACOS across all my campaigns because this can be used to help us figure out what our bids are with our target cost per click. Merch Jar has a field here that calculates what your cost per click should be based on what you have your target ACOS set and the conversion rate that you're seeing for your products over the time period that you have set.
So, you can see here with some of these having a 26, 24%, etc ACOS, it tells us what our target CPC should be based on the conversion rate we've been getting over this date range. And then it gives us kind of a, that's more of a barometer that we can use to see where our current cost per click is versus what that target cost per click is.
And that doesn't necessarily mean we want to set the bid to what the target cost per click is, especially if you're using things like placement adjustments or up and down bidding strategy that could modify what your bid actually is and in effect to what your cost per click is. But it gives us more of that barometer that we can say, okay, our target CPC is much lower than our CPC. We want to start bringing our cost per click towards our target CPC. So, we're going to lower our bids to be closer to that. And it just gives you some idea of how far away your current bid is versus where you need to be.
So, we're just going to change the target ACOS across the board for all of our products. I'm going to set it to a 30% ACOS which is a little higher than break even. It's on average about 25, 26% ACOS for my products. That's break even. I'm being a little more aggressive with the holiday season, so I'm just going to be 30% across all of my products. And then for my hero product, I think I'm going to set it at 35%. I still want to be more aggressive with that to compete with some other high competition, high converting products that I'm competing against. So, to change the target ACOS, I'm just going to select all of my campaigns, bulk action, target ACOS and we're going to you know, I could believe it. Let's just really just start it here. And I could set this on the account level. So essentially the way the target ACOS works is I can set it at the account level. If I jump into my settings, I can do that or I can set it for each campaign. So, what I did was just delete it. So, everything's taking the default account level target ACOS.
So, I'm just going to jump over to my settings. This will be the easiest way to change my default target ACOS. Let's just set it to 30%. That should update everything.
And if we go back to our campaigns, we'll see that it is at 30% across the board.
And if we want to modify that just for our hero product, I'm going to type just part of the ASIN into the search bar to bring up just the campaigns for that.
We're still at 35% and I'm just going to apply a bulk action to all of them. So, selecting the arrow and select all bulk actions, target ACOS. We're going to set it to 35% and let that run. All right. So that has updated and now it's 35% across the board for our hero products that adjust what the target CPC is again based on what our organic cost, conversion rate and the product price is, that gives us what our ideal cost per click should be to hit that number that we want.
And now that we've updated that, we can move over to start adjusting our bids. And I'm going to do all of this manually. And where I do most of that is in the Targets and the Keyword section of Merch Jar. We're going to start with the Target section. Targets are going to include any auto campaign target. So that's your close match, loose match, compliments and substitutes and any ASIN targets from your manual targeting campaigns. All right.
So, let's start making some optimizations. First thing I'm going to do is adjust our date range and I'm going to start our date range at Tuesday after Cyber Monday because this is going to be the most similar kind of sales and performance that's been happening that's currently happening where Cyber Monday is kind of that anomaly, big sales day. So, I want to exclude that sort of data. So, I'm going to start with Tuesday and just go through today and I have some safe filters that I can end up using. I think I'm just going to do this manually with our filters here and I'm going to keep this pretty simple. I'm not going to make this overly complicated.
Essentially, what we do is take stuff that's over my target ACOS and decrease the bid. I'll do that at a couple of different levels. So more of a decrease on the higher the stuff that's further away from my target ACOS has a really high cost and smaller adjustments or stuff that's pretty close to what my target says. And then just increase the bid on my Performers as well. So, anything that's has a really good ACOS, I'm going to make some adjustments to it and then we' ll do some other adjustments as well. Things like that aren't getting Impressions or have Clicks, but no Orders will take a look at that too.
Let's start with our high ACOS targets and adjust those. So, we're going to start with ACOS and let's do anything that's above. Let's do 75%. So, if there's anything really high and there's a couple different methods, we could do with this. We could start with anything above 35% and do a small, say, 10% adjustment. Then we move it up to anything greater than 45 to another 10%. I'm going to kind of bracket these where I'll make a separate adjustment to each one, but there's a couple of different ways you could do that. You could just kind of keep stacking adjustments on top of the same, but I might do more of a bracketing method, so I'm going to separate each one. So, if anything greater than 75%, then, for example, 50 to 75%.
All right. So, here's our target. We have nine targets that have ACOS of greater than 75% since last Tuesday. And they have at least one order because it has an ACOS. So, we want to lower these bids. And normally I would want at least two orders before I'm doing any kind of bid adjustments based on the ACOS. I want more points of data than just one.
However, these need to have some adjustments made because even though it only has one order, it's still spending quite a bit and with how high my bids are right now, I want to make some adjustments. And based on what this ACOS is and what our conversion rates are, again, we can see our target ACOS our target CPC compared to our current one and kind of see how far away we are and how big of an adjustment that we need to make. The most of these are pretty far apart.
I'm not going to make super drastic. I'm not going to do anything like a 50%, which a lot of these looks like at least a 50% decrease in target CPC. That's a pretty big adjustment. I don't want to just take all of these and just completely wipe them out where they're not getting impressions. But I am going to make a fairly sizable adjustment and I'm just going to select all of them and change bid and we're going to decrease the bid. I'm going to do a 30% decrease, so still pretty sizable and let that run. Now that the bids change, we can kind of spot check just see where it's at versus what the previous cost per click was and where it's at in relation to our target cost per click.
So, you can see most of these have gone closer to what our target CPC is. We're below on our cost per click. Our bid is below what our cost per click is. So that should help stabilize these and bring down that costs ideally in the next, we're just going to kind of move down the lines. We're going to do a in a cost between 50 and 75% now. So still pretty high. And we're just going to do a similar thing here. And if you want to exclude anything from here, you can use the search bar to do that. So, for example, if you want to exclude Lottery Campaigns, which may not be a terrible idea for me since I'm doing those manually, I can type in -not:lottery. And this will exclude any Lottery Campaigns or ad groups from this. So, you can see some of those were Lottery Campaigns. And if I had multiple keywords, for example, -not: ”exact match”, I could do that as long as I wrap it in quotes. And I could also do multiple negation keywords from here as well. But I'm going to stick to just the Lottery Campaigns.
I just did some adjustments on those yesterday, so I don't need to mess with those yet. I want them to start getting data based on the new bids. So, I'm going to keep it where it's at. So, these are campaigns that have between 50 and 75% ACOS. You can see our CPC versus our target CPC, and we're going to make a similar adjustment change bid, decrease it. I'm going to go 20% on these and let that run. And now that the bids have refreshed to what the new bid after that 20% decrease. I'm just going to just quickly spot check these make sure, see where the new bid is versus the cost per click and the target CPC. And you can make some small minor adjustments for that.
For example, these two here did not, they're still pretty close to what the CPC is that are getting 50 and 70%. So, we can do an adjustment. So, from 157 and this is just I'm just kind of decreasing more. I'm not really doing math and you can see what the bid history is too. If you want to get a little more data on that. I mean, you can see recently in the last several days, it's been a little all over the place as the bids have changed quite a bit.
So, we're going to bring this down and I think something like our target, CPC's $0.78 an hour, something like 110 on 15 is probably fine and we're going to do something similar with this. So, 135 and 93, you split the difference a little bit, but 110, that feels fine. Enter and let that save and then we're going to keep moving. So now we're going to do, oh, let's do we're going to keep 50% on the top end. And our target is 35, I think anything I guess 30 is our target. So, I would say let's do 40 and 50%. These are our targets that are at between 40 and 50% ACOS. And again, we can kind of spot check these real quick, see where we're at, but we need to decrease those. And I'm not going to do as big of a change. I'm only going to do a I think ten or 15% would be okay. I think I'm on to a 10%. And these aren't too far away from where we want to be. We're still being aggressive and I don't want to make too large of changes. I'm in here making changes daily for the most part, sometimes multiple times a day. Just as I check and see kind of where today's data is versus the last. And we might do that after this, because currently we're looking at the last, what, six or so days of data. We may also spot check that against the last two days of data, three days of data, just to see if there's any major differences there with the more recent cost per click. And that's something that's important with just this time of year how much things change. You need to be in here kind of often. And this is where a tool like Merch Jar really shines to be able to adjust these date ranges versus bulk operations where you're constantly having to download different reports. This kind of will can really speed up your workflow when you're constantly shifting your date ranges, your filters on the fly. But if your not Merch Jar user and you're kind of just using this to learn, you can sign up for your free trial. There's no credit card required, so it doesn't cost you anything. You can optimize your bids through the rest of the holiday season and the rest till the end of the year, at no cost to you. So, if you'd like to get started with your free trial and speed up your workflow, there'll be a link in the description to sign up for free. And similar process here is going to spot check these out that we've made our adjustment just to make sure everything's okay.
So, for example this one here, our target CPC isn't too far away, so I'm okay with just setting that to our target CPC and it's going to kind of spot check each one after that 10% adjustment. This one's too close to the CPC versus the target. We're going to change that to, I don't know, 125. This one needs to come down a bit. Let's just call this one $0.95 and this one as well. So, this is why I mean, one, it's just kind of a gut feeling, just kind of this is what you gain once you do a little bit more advertising, you can just go in, make some adjustments. You don't need to do math on each one of these to figure out exactly what the bit is, because it just doesn't matter that precisely as long as you're kind of moving that bit towards what your target CPC is based on what that current data is. And then our last decrease in bids for our poor performers, we're going to do a, let's see, 33 to 40%. We can even do maybe 35 the 30 threes. Okay, I think, however, I want to not include my zero product because I want a little bit higher ACOS with that. So, anything for my hero product, that's 40% higher. And you can see a few of them here that have the 35%. I can negate that as well by doing the same thing as the lottery by another not so forth. There's only one here. That's not so. I'm going to do this. I can just do a manual adjusting for out need to do any kind of bulk adjustments. This one's 35% a little bit. This one we actually want to bring up closer to our target, CPC. I'm just going to set it at what our target CPC is to hit that 30% across. And that's it for our poor performers that have at least an order. So, anything that we've done has ACOS or in this time period has at least one order.
So now we're going to move to our Performers and we're going to do a similar kind of bracketing system with this. And I think we're going to start on the top. And anything that's got a 24 or 25% ACOS, I’m going to do I think three brackets, something like 18 to 25%, 10 to 18%, and anything below 10%. We'll start with this one here. You see, I still got the lottery. I don't have another filter. So, these are ones that are performing well. And you see they're green here based on what the target ACOS is.
So, these will not increase bids generally. And I'm just going to spot check. We'll look at what the bid is versus our target ACOS per click. We can increase these and some of them, it's not going to really matter if we increase it or not, especially if there's a huge difference between what our bid is and what the cost per click is. There just may not be competition where it's you could set your bid at $10 if you wanted to, and there's just not competition at those higher bid levels that the cost per click is going to raise. But it is possible. So, we generally just want to still increase the bid across the board with all these so same kind of thing. I'm just going to select all these and these are the closest Performers to our target ACOS. I'm going to do the smallest increase in bids, make sure we got increase bid percent. You can do this by a dollar or so. It's a specific thing. I generally do a percentage increase because the bids are going to really vary across all my campaigns. Sometimes for a specific target or campaign, it's got, you know, 30% bid versus another one. It needs a $1.50 bid. So, a five-cent increase is a lot more proportionately for that lower bid one, and could have a lot more volatility or variance to it than a doing a five-cent bid on a $1.50 existing bid where it's just not going to really make as much of a difference. So, we're doing small changes across the board with these 10% bid should do it with where these are currently sitting out over the last several days of data. And we're going to keep moving. So, we're going to do now our 10 to 18% and do an increase here. This one was due 15%. So, we're going to going to stagger and do a little bit more because these are performing even better and a little bit further from our target ACOS. And you can spot checked the bid versus target CPC.
I'm just going to keep moving. That's something you can do. And now I'm going to do anything below 10% to do this with ACOS. You do want to type in in Merch Jar 0.1 or some kind of digit here because anything 0% is going to show zero orders as well, which we don't want to includes. We're going to do anything between 0.1 and 10% to make sure we're only grabbing stuff that has an order. And these are our best Performers. So, stuff that's getting orders from few clicks and it's not tons of data, but we want to push these as much as possible while iron's hot.
So, we're going to select all them and let's do a 20% bid. And you could be more concerned. This is kind of on the higher side. But if it's performing now. Let's try to get as many clicks and impressions and hopefully that conversion rate continues. And if you do want to be a little more conservative, you could limit this to at least two orders. So that would obviously really limit the number that we're increasing on or even have a click threshold as well to just have even more data. Make sure you're only increasing stuff on things that have been a little more valid. And at one point of data, one order in seven clicks isn't tons of data. And I'm being a little bit more aggressive. So, I'm okay increasing bids on these that maybe I want it normally through most of the year. I want more data. All right.
So now we've decreased bids on stuff with orders that isn't performing. We've increased bids on stuff with orders that is performing. Next, we want to take a look at stuff that doesn't have any orders, but it's getting clicks. So, we're going to get rid of the ACOS filter and we're going to add an Orders filter. It’s only stuff that has zero and we only want stuff that has clicks.
And this is where you could set a threshold or what we want to see is stuff that's getting a lot of clicks that maybe we just want to lower the bid down a little bit. Let's see how much we got with anything. It's got more than ten clicks and a ton and you can see in total this is only $11 and spend over that.
And based on what I'm spending in total, this is a whole lot. So, let's bring this down. Let's see anything more than six that's doing for us that's a little bit better and about $62 ad spend so still not a ton over this date range but it doesn't hurt to lower these so this is just another item to look at. I'm just going to do just a small decrease in bid.
They haven't really gotten sales. We're just going to do 10%. And then the last thing I'm going to look at for this date range is anything that's not getting impressions. We're going to take off clicks. I'm going to take off orders and anything that's getting, we could just do equal zero impressions. We can also set a threshold which I tend to like a little bit better, in which case I do want to also just aim is not getting, actually, you could leave off but you could add a click threshold if you're doing something like, listen, I don't know, 20 impressions over the last several days.
I mean, this is only on average or five impressions per day. So, we could increase this well as well to get more. The other consideration I'm making is I'm spending a lot in relation or at least yesterday I spent a lot in relation to what my current profit is today as well. So, you could skip this. What this, I should mention what this optimization is, but I'm increasing bit on stuff that's not showing very often. Yes. And this is something you want to check as well, especially as competition changes or increases throughout the holiday sales season, stuff that was being seen getting impressions and getting clicks and getting orders with a certain level of bid three days ago may not even be seen anymore today if there's more competition. But the entry price to compete for the bid has just gone up to where your bid is no longer competitive. So, you need to keep an eye on this to make sure they're still delivering. And this is particularly true for your best sellers, your hero products. Make sure those campaigns are selling. Right now, I'm just doing kind of blanket across the board optimizations or this now. So, I'm going to stick with 30 impressions and see how many targets we get.
And it's 969, so pretty high amount. But I'm going to just do a very small, I'm only going to do a 5% increase. So, we're not talking a lot and that may increase a little bit of spam, but shouldn't be too crazy. And this is just, again, across the entire account. So, I'm being a little bit more conservative.
All right. So that optimization is done. I'm going to clear the filters and change our date range. I'm going to spot check Thursday through today and I'm going to add a State filter, make sure it's only things that are enabled, and then just look at my targets that have a really high ACOS against. Let's just look at 50% or the last couple of days and we're just in a spot check me is make sure everything looks okay so this is anything greater than 50%.
And you can see just over the last couple of days I do have some that are pretty high. And if we look at again the target CPC, this gives us an idea of where we should be versus the cost per click. And this is more recent data which is always better, especially this time of year. And we're mostly going to be concerned about the ones that are really spending. We could just do a blanket adjustment. It looks like one is already close to the target CPC. Some of these other ones are quite a bit higher, but I'm really more concerned about this one spending $300 plus. So those single targets are spending over $100 a day. And I'm going to start just by doing an adjustment on all of them. I'm going to skip this one because that's the one that stands out to me. That's pretty close or it's already at the target CPC. So, I'm just uncheck that and skip it and I'm just going to do a, let's do a 15% once that syncs. That is the one that I will spot check again. All right. Bids have adjusted so I'm just looking through the where we're at in relation to our CPC and our target CPC and just kind of eyeballing if anything's so close to the current, the actual cost per click.
I'll just I think this is good again I don't need to necessarily match actually this one I might raise up just to be a little bit more between I don't want to be, I don't want to be making too large of an adjustment once where they just stop delivering it at all. And I still want these to deliver, especially ones that are getting 200 orders. I don't want to just take those out of the running, but I also need to start making a little bit more profit or heading in that direction. And if you want to keep going with this, you could do a similar thing where we can take a look at, again, 35 to 50% and we could remove anything. For example, my hero product, we'll just remove and we're just going to spot check CPC versus target CPC and you can make some. I don't need to do anything too crazy. We can some of these are a little higher. We could just do a small, another small adjustment decrease bid go 10%. All right. Bit have updated and we're going to spot check this. One's below our target CPC. Now, we're doing a little bit of manual adjustment there. This one could come down and I forgot to add in also not Lottery Campaigns which I have a feeling were part of this, but that's okay.
All right. So, we're going to look at that for our performance and we're going to do now look at our best performers. Let's start at bottom 0.1 and let's just go to 15%. We'll just do this maybe in two adjustments. Again, we're looking at small date range. So, I'm not yeah, again, really low amount of data with one order across all these or anything that's really performing.
Let's get rid of, let's include my hero product. Now with this, let's get rid of Lottery Campaign so I'm just typing in -not:lottery and again you can spot check this. Do you even need to make adjustments? Everything's already above what our cost per click is. This one is not, we can make a manual adjustment there or just do blanket, but I think I'm just going to do some manual. There's a couple like here, the $0.65 doing well. So, let's just pop this up to I don’t know and let's go $0.80 and this one here. We want to make sure, it's above the cost per click. You can see the target is $3. We're not going to just jump to $3. That's that's crazy. But we can do something like $0.95.
We don't have tons of data. So again, I mean, even these increases I made, I wouldn't normally make these I would do much more gradual. But I want to hit as many sales as possible. Right now, I can't stress enough I would normally be doing more of like a daily 2% bit increases kind of thing. But when you're in, you know, January, February, there's less competition. You just have more time to optimize. Everything's fitting into a few weeks here in the holiday sales period and it changes so often. You just need to, you really need to stay on top of it. Everything else looks okay. So, we're just going to change our brackets again. And let's go 15 to 24%. Sounds good and same deal. Let's just check out what the cost per click is versus what our current bid is. This one we can pop up and I think we're fine with the rustling there above the cost per click. Some of these could have been part of our last round of optimization, although it doesn't look like, would you have last bid change in here as well, which can be useful as well as a bid history if you overlay. So, another advantage to using a tool, we're starting to get a little bit more data as well as, you know, just some other columns. If you want to go by like revenue per click or conversion rate, there's just some additional pieces of data you can use and target CPC is one that I use quite a bit is again use as a barometer.
And then I think the last thing I'm going to do is get rid of our costs and I'm going to change our date range. You just yesterday and today, and then I'm going to filter down to just our hero product. Now I want to see anything that's not getting impressions, just for our hero product just yesterday and today. And this is again going back to keeping on top of bids, not being competitive enough. And I'm just going to do an increase across the board, small increase, probably get some impressions on these. And this being my hero product, I'm okay being a little more aggressive on this. I'm not impressions across the board. I'm going to go 15% and that's it.
So that's our last optimization for targets and to save time, I'm not going to do the keywords, but I would take the exact same optimizations over to the keywords and run them there.
So just to recap. Real quick, that's going to be a little longer date range. So, I'm starting with Tuesday and I'm going to keep using that date until we get a little further, probably maxing out at about the last seven days of data, again starting with Tuesday, because that's just Cyber Mondays, kind of its own thing. It's a bit of an anomaly compared to after that. So, we're starting with Tuesday post-Cyber Monday to current date and then we're decreasing bids on of our high ACOS, keywords, and targets and you can bracket those and stagger the bids if you'd like. So higher or bigger changes on those bids, the further they are away from your target ACOS, then we increase bids on our Performers, anything that's got lower costs. And then we looked at anything that had zero orders but was getting clicks and you can actually make a small just there to decrease bids. And then we looked at anything that wasn't getting impressions. It made a small increase there to start getting impressions on those. So, keep them competitive. And last, we used a more recent date range just to spot check our targets in keywords and most specifically your hero products. That's where you want to spend most time. If you're going to do any of that, you could limit that just to your hero products. And we did eliminate Lottery Campaigns from a lot of these optimizations. You could include those. I do prefer to optimize those manually at this time because of utilizing placement and just adjustments on those a little more heavily than I do on my other campaigns. I'm not going to walk through how to do that in this video, but I just did a video on how I optimize my Lottery Campaigns. That’s in the link in the description if you're interested in learning how to do that. And then the last thing, I'm going to do for just general optimization is check my budgets to make sure I need to increase anything.
They're generally pretty high and it's fairly early in the day, but is it going to be something else I'm just doing throughout the day and I keep this pretty simple. You could use the Budget tab, but just as throughout the day as I'm going through it, I'll just scroll down and see, is there anything out of budget? This one is, and I'll look at what the ACOS is and what the campaign is for. This doesn't make sense to increase. And I'm just kind of using gut feeling and based on the performance, what this looks like and I do have a longer date range, so I'm going to start there. I’m going to do some kind of similar process.
I'm going to have a little longer date range go through is like ad doesn't really make sense to adjust it based on this performance. So, this one had a 47% with nine orders. Maybe, maybe not. It's already out of budget, so there's a lot more it could do against pretty early in the day. So, I'm probably going to increase it, but I'm going to keep it where it's at for now. And I'm just going to scroll through. Is there anything else out of budget? Something else? They're not great and I am based off of what the campaigns are too, and I can't even see what they are just because they're blurred out. So, I will make some decisions on what the campaign is as well or what specific product it is. So, a couple of ways you can do this. You can start with the longer date range than move to a shorter date range, or you could do it in reverse. Like does it make sense based on short term data? I'll even look at just today's data as well when making these kinds of decisions. So, if we look at that, you can see Amazon is going to give you a recommendation. You can use that if you like. Sometimes, they are really high compared to what I think you would actually spend. Like today, they're only showing I've spent 265 on this campaign and it's already recommending 725. Does that make sense? I mean, not. Yeah, I'm going to make sure it gets closer to out of budget for making the decision to see where it ends up. This would be another way you can increase budgets as well. So, as they run out of budget, you can look at what the ACOS is, what the current ad spend is, and you can even compare that to what you're actually saying. Like, see, what you've sold today is like, okay, I've, I've sold at least one of these. Or as one gets closer to budget, if I've only made $5, for example, and this one's already spent $11 two, I want to increase it when I can see I haven't sold enough to make up in ad spend.
And that's where you can use some of these other date ranges to make that decision. Well, let's look at some additional data. Let's look at how it's performed over the last several days, because one day a data not just not a ton and there is delay in the orders. So, this could actually have three orders on it. And we just don't have that data yet. But all we can do is just based on what the data that's being presented. So, this one here as recommended of $3. Sorry, got an order today. So, I'm, I don't really care what's happened in the last several days. This is a small enough budget I'm going to go above. I mean, five, $6 would be fine. You need to get rid of pause. We only want enabled campaign and just scroll. Okay. So, nothing really out of budget. Yep. This is what I would do throughout the day on this one. The one that's already out of budget and you could go in as well and make some adjustments to the bid if that's, you know, again on the fly. CPC might be a little high based on, you know, what you've seen previously other date ranges. I'm essentially, I'm looking for a reason to increase the budget generally. I'm looking at multiple date ranges and when I increase we need to sort these different sort these by ad spend. I don't know how it was being sorted here to ah, here we go. No wonder I can't find it. This one's just been high over the last several days, so maybe this isn't something I want to increase.
I think I'm just going to let that one go. Based on just the last few days of data, it's high. I'm trying to lower spend. So, unless I have some good reason for it, I'm just going to. I mean, for example, if it's a Lottery Campaign, something like that and a couple other these other ones are on a budget. So, let's just kind of look through these $10, not great out there as well. I think we're good on the budget, but this I'll I'll do several times throughout the day this time of year. This is the not the only time of the year that I'll do this or I'm not going to my computer, but I am checking it multiple times a day, especially for budget is one of the worst things you can do is be budget cap with these ever changing competition, how much traffic there is to where your ads just stop delivering, especially the ones that are performing and they just stop delivering and you lose rank and you lose that sales velocity. So, it can have large ramifications and you do have more time that you can check this. You could lower your budgets each day. So, we're going to go through a day and at the end of the day, we're just going to kind of slash budgets and check those each day kind of as it goes and go through this process, I'm looking at the data. I don't generally do that slash budget, especially since it's just generally going to increase for me throughout the sales season. So, I'm really just looking at on the fly like once I increase something to like this one for 50, I'm probably not going to bring that down unless the performance is really bad. Where I want to micromanage a little bit more and then I might decrease the budget because then I can see go through the same operation of looking at different date ranges, look at all the data before it spends too much.
That's about it for the optimizations that I would make, you could get into a little bit more with your hero products and checking it versus the competition, which I'm not going to walk through it, but I am generally keeping an eye on my hero product versus a few of its known competitors that I compare it to. So, looking at things like it's BSR versus their BSR to see where they're at, you can also use tools like Helium ten.
Here, you graph the competition to see what your rank is on specific keywords versus others. And if you need to target or focus on specific keyword and you can even reverse engineer your competitors if you really want to dove in to the details for them and see how much they're advertising still as we move through the holiday season, and that can be based on, again, with a tool like Helium Ten here, using Cerebro where you'll look up a specific ASIN and it'll tell you what their sponsored rank is on a search term.
So, you can see one if they are advertising at all and get a sense of how aggressively they are as well. And that can help guide you on how aggressive you need to be with your product versus that competition as well. I think we're there with the optimizations. Stay tuned for more update videos and videos on tips and tricks throughout this holiday season and different strategies you can make. And if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and like below. If you found anything useful on this video and we'll see you in the next one.
In this video, we're going to review the last week of sales including Cyber Monday as well as the ad spend over that time period. So, let's jump right into the sales from last week. Here's the last week of sales since last Sunday to today – Sunday December 4th. If you didn't catch it already, I already did a video that covered my Black Friday sales and also the huge blunder that Amazon Advertising made that day and how it affected my personal account and ad spend. So, if you missed that, make sure to check out that video. If you're interested in seeing what Black Friday looked like, that will be in the descriptions that you can check that out. All right.
So, looking at the last week of sales, we have Cyber Monday. We ended up doing 695 units with $3,674 in royalties. This is the best day of the holiday season so far. Then we have that expected dip and you can see that slow increase back up where we should start hitting days bigger than Black Friday very soon. If we look at last year's sales season, we have Black Friday here, Cyber Monday here, and we're about right here in the sales cycle where we start. We should start seeing close to Cyber Monday numbers and then again, slow increase. As long as we can ship products by Christmas to customers, we should continually see increases up to last year more than double for several days what Cyber Monday was.
So, if we experience that kind of trend here, we should be seeing close to 1400, 1500 units sales days, which we're crossing our fingers for. And we'll just have to see. We're going to keep doing what we can to make that happen, including being aggressive, which I have still been aggressive through this week, maybe a little more than I intended to at sometimes just with the volatility of ads. But let's take a look at that with the ad spend with the sales.
So, I have the ad spend here trying to overlay this with our daily sales to try to make this a little easier to understand. But so, we got Cyber Monday, $3600 in royalties and ad spend $2264 with a 32% ACOS. So that leaves us about $1400 in profit. And you can see here, blue line is ad spend. So, we dropped and we've started to slowly creep up again. I've been a little aggressive with the ads, probably more so than I intended again. So we're going to end up doing some optimization so you can see as the sales have increased, ad spend has also followed and there's been a bit of a trending up in ACOS as well. And again, part of that could just going to be with how aggressive you are part of this. I don't mind being so aggressive during this part of the sales season because we still have about two weeks left. And if we take a look at this here again.
The peak is we're still probably at least about a week away from hitting closer to those peak numbers. So having the aggression now and maintaining that rank, especially with my hero product, where I'm competing at very high volume, high competition keywords, it requires that you have that aggression. So, we're getting close to that where we're going to start beating hopefully Cyber Monday sales yesterday, you can see just day after day, the last couple of days where we've increased sales by about 80, 90 units on the last couple of days, still pretty early in the day. Now on Sunday, close to a week after our Cyber Monday and Black Friday weekend. And if we want to take a look at hero sales and going to pick out like Cyber Monday. Let's take a look at that.
513 units and $2600 in royalties out of the 694. And with the ad spend for that $1816 at 33% ACOS just on the hero product. So about $800 in royalties or so on Cyber Monday from that product. And if we just kind of speed through some of these and I'll just go through the ad spend and royalties from each day.
Just real quick, I'm not going to spend too much time on this. But $1545 on Tuesday with $1359 ad spend so slightly profitable. $1752 on Wednesday $956 ad spend so a little more profitable. That's about $800. And then Thursday, $1840 in royalties, $1200 ad spend. So about $600. So, you can see here just that's kind of a little up and down. It’s going to be, you just got to stay on top of your ads with that. It is very volatile. So, we're making some adjustments and trying to be on that. And it's a very fine line trying to rank the products and stay competitive with these other ones. Friday, a couple of days ago, $2300, $1400 ad spend. So, another was at seven, eight, 800, $800 or so. I'm trying to mental math here. Then yesterday second-biggest day since, no, I actually I think by Friday was higher than that. That was in the 600s. $2700 in royalties and 19, we'll call it $2000 ad spend about $700 in profit yesterday. So now, we get to today and we're going to start looking in our ads, making adjustments. I did make some manual adjustments yesterday – increasing bids on the performers, lowering bids on non-performers. That's kind of the standard operation that you would make. But today so far, we're a little in the afternoon. I should have been checking this early kind of the cadence.
I'm looking to make now is checking it kind of early in the morning, see where the spends versus the incoming royalties. What I'm seeing kind of midday and then evening and then late evening. So really checking it often this time of year is the best thing you can do. I'm making a lot of manual adjustments right now just because of how up and down things are. A lot of on-the-fly adjustments as well. And I'll kind of talk through some of my thought process with it and hopefully it makes sense, but a lot of it is just me kind of on the fly, kind of gut feelings at times as well. And we're going to be looking at very recent data from Tuesday. It’s going to be the earliest date that we have, our date range that we look at it. And we'll also be looking at today's data as well. So today, so far, we have $1035 in royalties and $816 in ad spend already.
So we're pretty close ad spend to where we are in royalties and this is higher than I would like it to be at this point. I would say at this point in the holiday season, I'd like to be closer to a 1 to 1. So, whatever my royalties or profit is, about half of that in ad spend. And as we get with over the next week, I like the kind of starts lowering that down if possible. Down to about a third or so. So whatever royalties of about a third ad spend. We'll see if that's able to happen because I still have to be competitive with my hero product. And for the hero product specifically today, so far, $852 in royalties and $675 in ad spend. So, we need to make some changes here to our bids.
In this video, I'm going to tell you about the massive blunder that Amazon had on Black Friday a week ago and what the results were for me.
First, let's talk about Amazon's blunder. On Friday, at some point during the day, the Amazon advertising console stopped reporting the amount that you spent on ads for that day. However, they were still updating sales even after this happened, making it look like your ads were performing much much better than what they actually were. And on big sales days like Black Friday where there's a big change from one day to the next in buyer behavior, in sales performance, ads performance, how much you spend on ads, this couldn't have happened on a worst day of the year.
If it happened further into the sales season, we'd have more days that we could include in our date ranges that we're using to evaluate our campaign performance in order to make those bid and budget changes. However, on Black Friday, any data prior to that day isn't really relevant when evaluating that campaign performance with how big of a change there is in ad performance and the increase in ad spend starting that day. You're often needing to make on-the-fly adjustments to the bids and the budgets based on just that day's sales data. And while yes, there is a delay in Amazon's reporting and they even tell you at the bottom of the dashboard, that it's up to 12-hour delayed, ad spend has always been one of those metrics that's been pretty up to date all throughout the day. It's always been orders and the other metrics have had more of a delay than what your ad spend is.
So historically, your ad performance was generally slightly better than what the ad console displayed for that day's data as those orders got attributed to your campaigns. And there wasn't any reason to expect that it would be any different on this Black Friday. And it wasn't even until Sunday, two full days later, before that ad spend was updated and Amazon put a little banner at the top of the ad console acknowledging that they were aware of some issues with their reporting and also that none of your data was actually missing, but your ads were still delivering as expected. Thanks, Amazon.
So, what did that look like for me on Black Friday? I didn't take any screenshots or anything, so I'm just going to have to tell you about what happened and recounted events on by Friday. Throughout the entire day, my ads were performing absolutely gangbusters. At least based on the data that Amazon was displaying to me. So, as Amazon was telling me that I was running our budget on these campaigns that were performing super well, of course, I was increasing budget as that happened. This was probably the first mistake that I made throughout this whole incident. I did notice that Amazon was telling me that some of my campaigns were running out of budget, but the ad spend that showed they spent already wasn't really matching up with what those budgets were. But the performance on those campaigns was really good so of course, I raised them. The performance was good and I didn't want to miss out on any sales that could have happened if I didn't raise those budgets. I never suspected that the ad performance was anywhere near as far off as what it actually was from what ad console was telling me.
By the end of the day, ad console showed that I was running an 11% ACOS after a little over $500 in spend, which is much much better performance than I had been seeing leading up to Black Friday, but I just thought, you know, it's Black Friday and things are different, more shoppers and so forth. I didn't think it could possibly be anywhere near as bad as what it actually was. And at some point, during that day, towards the end of it, I actually made some pretty large bid adjustments to almost all my campaigns based on this crazy, awesome performance. I wanted to get a share of those sales with these higher bids. And why not? That's exactly what you should be doing when your ads are significantly under what your target ACOS is. In reality, I actually spent $2,000 in ads with an ACOS of 43%. Four times the reported spend in ACOS that they were telling me that day. The adjustments that I made that day then compounded the poor performance into the next day.
On Saturday, I wasn't checking my ads often enough to compare what it was telling me I spent on ads versus the actual sales performance that I could see in my Amazon account, how much I was actually making off the products I was selling. I tracked it pretty early on in the day, maybe a little too early, and the ad spend was a little high, but it wasn't anything too egregious but I didn't check it again until early evening on Saturday, and that was my second mistake.
I could have stopped the bleeding much earlier if I had just been paying closer attention to my ads. When I checked it again, I had actually spent more in ad spend than I had in profit which is not really where I want to be on Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. I'm okay being really aggressive especially this early on in the holiday season to rank our products, to get more sales and profit later in the holiday sales season, but not at the expense of actually being profitable. And at this point, this is when I decrease bids significantly and just blanket across the board by about 40%. And this isn't really ideal because it's a blanket approach where you're making changes across all of your campaigns, the ones that did perform well and also the ones that didn't perform well, which means now I could be missing out on sales that would have happened with higher bids on the ones that were performing.
We’ll walk through how I fixed my bids and how you can too if you ever run into this or if this did affect you. But first of all, just jump in and take a look at the sales results from Black Friday and Saturday. On Black Friday, I sold 624 units with $3,249 in royalties, which is about a 50% year-over-year increase from what I saw last year in 2021.
And jumping back to ad spend, I spent $2,000 on Black Friday.
So, with $3,200 in royalties, about $2,000 ad spend, I ended up with about $1,200 in profit. And if we take a quick look at the hero product, I sold 450 units out of that 623 so accounted for close to 75% of my sales with $2,300 in royalties just for that product.
And then on Saturday, I had a pretty big dip, a little bigger than I would have expected based on a couple of the previous years. But every year is a new year and I sold 306 units with $1,607 in royalties.
And then for ad spend, I spent $1,758 running at a 63% ACOS. Remember, I didn't catch those until way too late in the day so things ended up much worse than what they really should have.
So, with $1,600 made in profit and $1,758 spent in ads, I lost about $150, which I honestly can't remember the last time I lost money in a single day from my ads.
But make sure you check out the next video where I show you how I fix my ads from this Black Friday Blunder, which you can also use to reset your bids any time a major shift like that happens. And if you haven't already, make sure to like and subscribe. And I'll see you in the next video.
In this video, I'm going to show you how I reset my bids after last week's Black Friday Blunder. We're going to be making adjustments to our budgets and our bids and placement adjustments using primarily Merch Jar, plus a bit of bulk operations. The bidding budget resets that we do in this video will not only just be useful now if you are affected by this Black Friday Blunder, but any time there's a major shift in ad spend or performance.
I'm going to be doing the majority of this bid fixing in Merch Jar. While one of the optimizations could be done in ad console, Merch Jar gives you a few more tools to make this a little easier. And I've even created some brand-new recipes to help reset all of your bids and budgets that you can download and import to your account. That way, you can run them on your own campaigns super easily. And if you don't have a Merch Jar account, you can sign up for your free 30-day trial. No credit card required using the link in the description and use these recipes for your own account as well to fix your bids.
To fix our bids and budget, we're only going to be using the data, the date range that we look at our performance starting from Black Friday all the way through today's data. And we're going to be doing that pretty much all the way through the end of the holiday sales season. Starting our date range on Black Friday to whatever date we're on or maybe a little bit after that if we want to look at the last seven days, as long as Black Friday is after that last seven-day period. Whenever there is a big shift in sales and ad spend like at the start of a holiday sales period or at the very end of it when a sales shift happens, I only use the data from after that shift happened to evaluate my campaigns. Any of the data that happens before that shift isn't very relevant to the new advertising landscape that happens after that shift. And because of how much I changed my bids and budgets based on inaccurate data from Black Friday, we need to do a pretty big reset on these bids and budgets. Now, we could just slash bids, slasher budgets, and call it a day. But I don't want to do that and miss out on potential sales from campaigns that did perform well, especially for my hero product and so my other best-selling products.
So now that we've cut our bids across the board, we're now going to be raising the bids back up for our best-performing keywords and targets over the last few days to match what the cost per click is so that they're still getting the impressions and clicks and ideally sales that we want. Essentially, what we're doing is taking what this new CPC is the cost per click since Friday through. Now we're going to bring our bids from wherever they're at for our best performers, probably lower because I slash bids. Essentially, what we're doing is we cut all our bids and this would be a good way to start. You could just do a blanket, cut all your bids in half, for example. And then what we want to do is take this new CPC, the cost per click that we're seeing since Friday through today. And we want to get our bids to match pretty closely what that CPC is so that we can and then adjust our bids from that starting point based on their current performance. And since we're bringing the bid to match at least as closely as possible the CPC, we need to first before we do any of those adjustments, remove the placement adjustments that we have across all of our campaigns. The reason for that is if the cost per click is a dollar and you have, let's say, a 100% placement adjustment on your top of search, that CPC is taking that increased bid into account. So, if our new bid, we bring that up to what the CPC is, that top of search is now going to be even higher than what we really want. So, we want to get rid of those, or at least most of those, especially on the ones that aren't performing. And this will end up being kind of a true reset of our bids. We'll start redoing our placement adjustments on this new performance since Black Friday.
So, we're going to jump back into the ad console to get rid of these placement adjustments. And we're going to use Bulk Operations to do that. So, I'm going to show you how to do that. We're going to navigate to the Sponsored Ads section here and then Bulk Operations.
And then you're going to need to download your custom spreadsheet to make adjustments to so you can select a date range. And you could start just from Black Friday through whatever day you're doing this, or if you want a little bit more data for the performance, you can do that.
I started with Black Friday, so that's what I would select just Black Friday to up to, I don't know, seven or 14 days would be fine if this is a little bit later when you're watching this, it never hurts to have a little more data and then just make sure that your placement data for campaigns is uncheck. This is an exclude column. We want to make sure that the placement data is included and then just create spreadsheet.
Create spreadsheet here and then you will see a file start the process. It can take a little bit of time, but it will eventually show download and then you'll just download it and then once you download it, it'll open up. Here I'm using Excel, so if you have that, you can't. Otherwise, there's of course Google sheets you can use. I've already made these changes to my own placement adjustments, so I'm just going to walk through how you do it without actually performing on my own since again, I've already done it.
But we'll start by navigating to the Sponsor Products Campaigns tab at the very bottom, and then we're going to add a data filter by clicking Data and then Filter. And this will add filters to all of our columns we can use. And we're going to start by the entity column and just on select all of these and we're only going to include the Bidding Adjustment. You can add some other filters too, for example, if you want to create a filter for your campaigns. I excluded my Lottery Campaigns, for example, which you could exclude tax that contains lottery. If that's a keyword in your campaign names, there's portfolios you could use as well. So, there are some additional options. I'm again, not going to make those changes, but I did exclude Lottery Campaigns from this one. I did it and next step, we're just going to knock this out right away. But we need to make sure we add an update for any of the rows that we are going to actually update. And I'm just going to drag this all the way down now. Just make sure all the placement adjustments get updated. You could drag it. You could copy and paste it through all of them. And there we go. So, we just want to make sure that it says update or when you upload your spreadsheet, nothing's going to happen. And then as we scroll over, we'll see our placement and if there's any adjustments here.
So, this being an older sheet, there are some that have higher placement adjustments that I'm going to want to bring down like 100% here. So, I think what I'm going to do is start by filtering my worst performers, and I'm going to do that by ACOS and I'm going to create a custom filter and first include anything that is 0.00% for whatever reason it requires to be exact, and then or greater than 30% and you could use 0.3 there.
So, this is going to take any of my placement adjustments that aren't performing that great, and any of these I just want to zero out. So, we're going to do zero. I'm going to copy this row all the way down and we're going to just zero out all of these placement adjustments. Now we should see zero and every column. Perfect.
Now, let's get rid of that filter. Let's just clear filter and then let's take our Performers. Anything that's less than 30%. So, actually let's do that's including our zero. So, we want to do is Less Than 0.3 and Greater Than The this gives us our performance. So, this is anything that's performed fairly well. And here this is going to be kind of up to you what you want to do. You could zero these hours as well. If you just want to start from scratch, I'm going to filter out anything that's zero blanks. So just I just want to see what's what has a placement adjustment on it that is performing.
And if there's anything that's high, I'm just going to adjust it. So, it looks like 25 is the minimum I think we're going to do is just bring all these down to 25.
So, the ones that were like 50, 40%, we're just going to bring these down a little bit. These were performing before and I want to still give them a little bit of juice for the placement adjustments that they had and then next, we're just going to make sure we clear all of our filters. Actually, you can also just turn off the filter soon. It's going to go back to exactly how it was and then we're going to save I'm hitting control + s and save it. And then once it's saved, you'll just navigate to find your file, select it and import it.
And you should successfully process changes. And how many rows were processed depending on how many that you selected or put update for.
All right, so we've gotten rid of all of our placement adjustments. Now we can jump in and make a reset to our budgets and our bids. We're going to start with budgets now. I could jump into ad console that is possible, which I'll show you here what that looks like would be under your Campaign Manager.
And you can just select all your campaigns and adjust the budget and do something like a 50% reduction.
I'm going to jump over to Merch Jar though, because I want to exclude my Lottery Campaigns, which there's not a real way to do that inside of ad console without just deselecting those after selecting all of them. The other issue with adjusting budgets in ad consoles if you have more than 300, you're going to have to go page by page to do this. You only can select three rows at a time. I only have 285 so I could do this. But again, I want to exclude Lottery Campaigns, so I'm going to do that inside of Merch Jar. Here we are inside a Merch Jar inside of the Campaign page, inside of Ad Manager, which you can navigate to here under Campaigns, inside of Ad Manager.
And the first thing we want to do is exclude our Lottery Campaign. So we're going to negate that from our search results, which we can do by hitting -not:”lottery” and it works this way. And if you have multiple keywords you want to include, you would just put it in bracket. So, if you had a lottery keyword, you would do that and we just have the one. Or if you did have multiple different words, you would just add another, not whatever keyword we just have the ones, we're just going to exclude that. And now it's only showing our campaigns that are not Lottery Campaigns do make a bid adjustment. We're just going to select all of them. So, 274 in my case, by selecting the little dropdown arrow and then select all from every single page. So, you don't have to go page to page. Doesn't matter how many campaigns you have, whether it's 500 or 3000, whatever that looks like. And once we have selected, we're going to use a bulk action and Change Daily Budget. And here, you can do the same kind of thing, Decrease Daily Budget by whatever percentage of that you want to. I did a 50% reduction across all of my campaigns. I really mean that reduction. So, I'm not going to do it here.
And one other way we can do this is with a recipe that I wrote. So, we're going to navigate to the Recipe page and I'm going to import these new recipes. There's one for slashing the budgets on campaigns, which you saw how easy it was to do inside of the Ad Manager so you could do it there or you can use this recipe. And then I have four recipes for resetting all of our bids across our keywords and our targets for the performers and the underperformers. So, I'll show you how those worked. So first, we need to import the new recipes into our account. You can find all the recipes down in the description below. Just click on each one and I'll download the recipe file. And once you've downloaded all of them navigate to the arrow next to create recipe and import recipe.
And you can import up to 20 recipes at once and you can choose if it goes to just the current active profile that you're on or across all of your different advertising profiles. We're going to browse and I'm going to shift to select all five and open them in.
This should import and click import and we should get all of our recipes, perfect.
So we have our Budget Cuts recipe, Bid Reset on our Performers|Targets, Bid Reset on our Performers|Keywords. So, these are the same recipes. Just one targets your keywords, one targets your auto targets and ace targets and then ones that have a high ACOS. We're going to bring down to our Target CPC and same thing with keywords.
The performers increase the bids to match our CPC for anything that's performing well and anything that has a high ACOS where the bid's still above the new CPC that's happening, it's going to bring those down. So first, we're going to start with the Budget Cuts and if you want to see what it's going to affect with any recipe, you can go in here, see what the recipe looks like. And down at the bottom there's a refresh which I'm covering here, but just a little circle. You can click on it. It'll tell you how many items it's going to affect. And within our recipe here, we have an ACOS filter. So anything above 25% and has at least zero orders for the campaign. The campaign does not contain lottery as a keyword and has at least a $3 budget. So, you can make some adjustments to that if you want to not decrease budgets that are higher than $3 will make it five or ten where that looks like or if you want to get rid of this campaign name exclusion, you can delete it or add a simple comment line with two slashes and then I'll just grayed out and it won't count anymore. And that's it. So, I'm going to save this, keep it as is, and then to run it, all you do is go to Actions. Run now. Again, I already ran that one. I don't want to cut my budgets anymore. It's set to 25% by default, going back to our recipe, you can change that too if you want to do it.
Or the other option is you can just run this more than once. So, decrease by 25%. And if you run it one more time, it'll decrease the new budget by another 25%, which ends up 25% off or 25% is like 45% decrease. So, you have a couple of options there.
And then next, we're going to run our recipes for the Performers. These are kind of crazy recipes, the way they had to work out. But they work. So how these work is, these will reset those bids based on the recent data to match the bid to the current CPC for whatever date range you select. I have it set at three days, so that's today's Monday. It's going to it does not include today's data.
So, it's going to be Sunday, Saturday, and Friday, the last three dates excluding today's data, and then have an ACOS filter. So, I'm going to do this on anything that is less than 40% ACOS and you can make adjustments if we want to make that, let's say 30% I think would be appropriate. And anything that has at least one order and again, the watery campaigns are very kind of adjusted. My Lottery Campaigns, how I want to manually. So, I'm not going to let this affect those. But if you did want to change the days, let's say you're doing this when this video actually comes out, it's now four days. You could just change from the last three days to four and make sure you do that down here and it will count that. But essentially what this is doing is there's different brackets for CPC. So, anything between zero and five cents CPC, if that bid is less than $0.05, it's going to bring that up to that five-cent bid. Same thing with between five and $0.10, the bit is less than ten cents. It's going to make increases. You slowly bring that up in 10% increments. You can increase that if you want or even decrease it. It's set at a lower percentage so that you can run this multiple times so that a bid doesn't go way past what you actually want it to. So it's going to be slower increments at a time. And there's one for your targets and one for the keywords. These are the exact same.
So I'm just going to make it an adjustment to 30% there and save it. Now, one tip on these to make these run maybe a little bit smoother or faster is to change the way bids get rounded. And this will be useful mostly for small bids. So, I'm going to jump to our settings and for the recipes for our performers. I'm going to always round up.
Normally I recommend weighted rounding for everything in Merch Jar, but this is a specific case where we're going to round up. The reason being if a bid is too small adjustment, it may it's going to take longer to reach that next set with the weighted rounding. So, this is just a quick way to speed it up.
So, we're back in the recipes and all we need to do now is run our Performers recipes. We're just going to go to Actions and Run Now to run the first one and let that do its thing. And that one updated four targets. And we can just then keep running this multiple times until there aren't any more targets or you're kind of at a place where you feel pretty good with it and you can always click back into the recipe and see what else it'll apply to on the next run.
So still three that all apply to you with our current metrics, and you can make any adjustments here if you need to as far as like number of orders, minimum costs, that sort of thing, save that, and then we're going to run again. All right. So that one's been updated and I'm just going to kind of let that go for now. But you can run that as many times as you need to. Again, these are meant to stack on top of each other. And then we're just going to move to the next Performers with Keywords and do the exact same thing. We're just going to run it. Let's do its thing and keep running it until we're happy with how many items are left.
And we're going to run that again one more time. What that update did 12 the first time and what it update this time as well, and only three of that time. So it's I'm pretty happy with where that's at. So next, we're going to move to our high ACOS. So, this is going to bring the bid for anything above the CPC down to it. So, we're just going to go back into the settings and now we're going to change our recipe to Always Round Down just to make things a little bit smoother and then head back to recipes and run our high ACOS. But first, let's jump inside. Just take a look here.
So, this will decrease bids based on recent data, but here you can make adjustments to your ACOS, number of orders, how many days, so again, the number of days. I would say anywhere between three and seven would be appropriate with kind of that whatever shift happening being the start of that date range. And there's also one here for anything that's got zero orders and with more than zero clicks and you can adjust this too for the recipe. So, I might do anything more than four clicks in the last few days and we can see what this apply to. So that's going to be the majority. Maybe we'll drop this down there, see what's going to apply to you. Perfect and save and run that same way we did the other. This would be the same thing where you can run this multiple times until it's hit all of your different targets. So, we're on again. It's only updating one this time, so we're pretty good with that and we're going to do the same thing for the Keywords and I'm going to go in here and just suggest a click. So, anything greater than three, let's see what that does and save. Run this one as well and run again. All right. So that updated seven that time and I think we're pretty good with that. All right. So, we've made all of our Actions that we want to make after this big shift happened after Black Friday Blunder by resetting all of our bids and our budgets.
And just to recap what that looked like, we drastically decreased our budgets on all of our campaigns. We've decreased all of our bid to the tune of about 40% decrease in bids, and we removed our placement adjustments using the Bulk Operations. Then we increased our bids back on our performance to match the most recent CPC using recipes and reduce the bids on all of our non-performers to catching that were still above our CPC after making those blanket adjustments from the last few days.
I hope this video is useful for any of those of you that were affected by this Black Friday Blunder and need to make any adjustments to their bids. You can also use the strategies and recipes in this video any time there's another major shift, such as the end of the holidays or even now that we're past Cyber Monday, you could do a reset on your bids just from the most recent data after Cyber Monday.
Again, that's kind of another big shift from Hyatt's ad spend different performance down to lower ad spend right after Cyber Monday. There is multiple, multiple times you can use these kind of strategies and recipes. So not just after this Black Friday Blunder, but in the future as well. If you found anything at all useful in this video, make sure to give it a like and subscribe and I will see you in the next video.
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.
In this video, we review the lottery campaigns and I'm currently running. So here we are looking at my lottery campaigns that I have running on my Merch by Amazon account. This is over the last seven days, 1500 dollars in spend and 41% ACOS. This is another area that I'm being pretty aggressive this time of year, especially as we lead into this Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend to really get sales across as many products as possible and as many orders on those products as possible.
As I scroll down here. So here's all the different campaigns I'm currently running. I've done a lot of testing over time with lottery campaigns on how to segment them, and so for the ECF, I have a lot of pause and probably some more on these are archived lottery campaigns that didn't pan out as well. And for the longest time I was running just two lottery campaigns.
Up until a few weeks ago, my all ASINs closed and all ASINs loose campaigns. So the lottery campaigns I'm running I segment by targeting group. So these are all automatic campaigns. And if you're not familiar with lottery campaigns or what they are, I did do a video a ways back on lottery campaigns, what they are. I'll link that in the description, but ensure it's a essentially a campaign that has multiple ASINs or products within it, instead of a campaign that's targeting only a single ASIN.
And they tend to and in general they have lots of products. So especially with if you're a merch by Amazon seller or other platforms like KDP where you could have thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of products, these can work really well to get sales across the board. And the reason I have them segmented by targeting group is for placement adjustments.
So I use placement adjustments pretty heavily on lottery campaigns, more so than on my other campaigns for sure. And if you're unfamiliar with placement adjustments, that is done at the campaign level so you can make an adjustment to what your base bid is and affect what your bid is at the top of search or product pages. And I'll jump into that when we kind of get into the details here.
But they're segmented in order to take full advantage of placement adjustments when you have multiple targets or keywords, any placement adjustment is applied to every single target in keyword. So there's not a great way to tell which keyword or target is contributing to which placements you could have. Let's open this up to get to the placements, take a look.
So with your placements, you have your top of search, your product pages and your rest of search. You can't make an adjustment on your rest of search. This is your base bid. Whatever bid you set at the targeting level, that's what it's going to be for the rest of search. On top of search and product pages, you do have an adjustment to increase it.
You can't decrease it as much as we wish that could happen, but you can't increase it. So if you have are performing really well on top of search versus your rest of search or product pages, you may want to increase that bid where increasing just the rest of search could have negative ramifications on let's say, your product pages if that doesn't perform on what your top of search does.
So in this way, you can have a little more control over what your bids are with when it comes to your top of search and product pages. And for top of search, these tend to these are going to be the sponsored listings at the very top of the search resources first for products that, say, sponsored those are your types of search placements.
They tend to have higher click through rates, higher conversion rates and also higher cost just to show up for that. So the highest place you can peer for in the search results, so that comes with an expense back to our lottery campaigns, kind of where I've ended up at. So I had my all ASIN campaigns for the longest time and I wanted to kind of branch off from there and start testing new lottery campaigns.
So recently, within the last, I don't know, five or six weeks, I started new campaigns and I created a set of lottery campaigns for my standard tees. So these are my bestselling product by far that I would just put just standard tees and no other product type I have in my account. And then I've created a set for hoodies, same thing.
Just pull over hoodies in these campaigns and then I'm testing a never sold, just for standard tees, although I may expand that to hoodies as well. So what I'm getting to is there's a lot of different ways you can segment and test these is we're testing all sorts of different categories. You could also do by niche. So if you have like holiday specific ones, you put all your Christmas products in a single lottery campaign or if you have Thanksgiving shirts, whatever that looks like, you put them on in a single campaign.
So there's a lot of different ways you can segment these. And I'm doing it by targeting group and then by product you can see the the ones which are some of these new ones have taken over my longer running or Asian ones. If we look at last let's go back 30 days and see we go back further. So let's just take a look at year to date.
We'll look at the overall metrics too. So year to date, you can see those two have way more orders than all my other ones. They've been running longer. So it makes a lot of sense why that would be and have been running at 22% across lifetime. The reason I decided to segment hoodie out from the standard tee really comes down to the profit within each product where a standard tee of about $5 profit for each sale a hoodie is about $10 with the price that I sell them for.
So I have twice as much money per sale that I could spend towards ads, which means if you have them all grouped together, you could afford a higher bid on the hoodies than you could on the standard tee is given all the same conversion rates and so forth, and that could differ. And I'm not going to dove into that exactly.
But you could have higher bids for the hoodies because there's more profit in each sale than you do in the lower on. So if you do have different products or whether it's merch, KDP or whatever platform you're on, if you do have products with big differences in profit per product, not necessarily product margin hoodies and standard tees both have about the same profit margin for me.
But how much you make per sale after all your fees if you got Amazon fees, cost of goods sold excluding that what your actual profit is, I would recommend segmenting those into different lottery campaigns so that you can have different bids where hoodies might support a higher. And you can see it in my CPCs already, you know, $0.33, $0.36 where that might make standard tees unprofitable.
It's or more unprofitable, I should say. I'm kind of running these at a loss for the most part. Recently, again, as we were in the holidays, my aggressive advertising strategy, you're missing out on potential impressions and orders by having to have hoodies kind of sink to the level of your standard. TS So let's go back to recent data and the other category.
I have a type of lottery campaign that I'm testing is a never sold and this is just for standard TS Again, these are my bestselling product and the purpose behind that is to get kind of those first orders on products that have never sold for ideally pretty cheap. And these are running a little bit higher than I would typically target.
I typically target around a 20% or so a cost for these. And I'm kind of letting it go to get as many sales as possible across all my products. But inside, they're pretty simple. Inside of each campaign is just a single ad group and one targeting option turned on for each one. So we have just loose match with having it set up this way. I know that this ACOS when I look at this for my placement adjustments, these placement adjustment metrics are applying to this targeting group and that's it. If I have more than one turned on, there's no way to tell which targeting group or keyword if you're doing manual campaigns. This is all automatic though. So we're going to stick to automatic.
So if you're doing multiple or have all these enabled, there is no way to tell if you're close match is contributing to you know, might be performing really well on top of service and you might have your substitute that's just performing terribly and it might look like you have a terrible top of search cost. But it's really just that one targeting group pulling it down.
You could be missing out on opportunity when it comes to the other targeting group. So I do recommend segmenting that way for placements for most use cases. The caveat I will say is assuming you have the order volume to support it. So as you can see with with all these in the last seven days, I have double digit orders for most of these and some of these are new.
So there's still kind of optimizing and kind of figuring out the target and Amazon's figuring out the targeting and so forth and optimizing bids. But for the most part, I have enough orders to support being able to segment these. If you're only getting one order, two orders every week or somewhere in that ballpark, I would probably recommend starting a lottery campaign with all your targeting groups all inside of a single campaign, because you can always segment them out later.
So for example, if you do start with all these turned on over time, you can take a look at your metrics. And if there's one that's performing outperforming the other ones, you can turn it that campaign into, you know, this use only by turning the other ones off and then create new campaigns for these here. And when it comes to optimization, which I'll do a separate video for how I'm optimizing this, I tend to look at a seven day day-range.
I want to look at recent data for this when I'm making changes and I'll optimize them on a general schedule once a week. But probably more often in this time frame as there's more traffic and volatility as well, especially with the higher bid. So just keep more of an eye on it. But that's it. I just want to do a quickie on how I what lottery campaigns I'm currently running.
I would love to hear how you're currently segmenting your lottery campaigns as well and how they're performing. So leave that down in the comments and we'll see in the next video.
In this video, I'm giving you an update on my account and my hero product, some general thoughts on what my strategy and approach is, with the days leading up to this Black Friday, Cyber Monday and what I'm looking at when I'm making decisions on what to do with my ads.
My entire goal right now, with just days away from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, kind of that kickoff of the holiday sales season is strictly ranking, it's not about profit and trying to make money, it's about trying to put my products in as good of a position as possible. So that as we move through this holiday season, they can get as many sales as possible. So, making profit isn't the number one goal right now me in this is going to depend on how aggressive you want to be, of course, I am being extremely aggressive. And with my hero product, it is competing in some very high competition keywords. So, it requires to be aggressive just to kind of hit that level. So maybe this will be given you an idea of what it looks like it’s kind of those lower BSR as those high competition keywords that I do target with this product. So, and the whole reason behind this, that I'm so aggressive now, and I will be even through Black Friday Cyber Monday is because I know that based on my previous year’s sales history, that sales continue to climb after Black Friday, after Cyber Monday, all the way up pretty much till Christmas, if you can still deliver your products by Christmas Day. Once that shipping date passes December 25, sales plummet. So that's kind of the where the peak is at. And if we look at, we look at previous sales’ previous year, we can see Black Friday, Cyber Monday is here. So Black Friday, and then Cyber Monday. And it continues to climb all the way up through December 17. For me, and then 18th is when the shipping times for my products past December 25. And then there's that sales cliff, and we're in that post holiday season. So, my entire goal right now is to get my products in as good a position ranking, so that I can take advantage of these sales. I mean, you can look at a couple these days here. They are pretty much double what Black Friday, Cyber Monday days themselves, those days that are historically good sales days, the better best sales days are even after that the next three weeks or so again, if you can still deliver to customers by Christmas day, you're going to see sales growth.
The other advantage of that being aggressive with ads, and I will be aggressive even all throughout this time period is that if you can keep delivering products, when your competitors can't, that's a great opportunity to obviously get sales and increase your rank that way as well as if they start letting up on advertising. There's another opportunity that you can step in, they let off the gas are they run out of budget, and you still do have an advertising budget, it puts your products in a great position to make the most of out of the holiday sales season.
So, let's jump over to the account. Right now, it is November 21, about 6pm, Eastern time, so still quite a few hours left in the day. And you can see kind of how my weeks been. And what I'm jumping into the account and kind of what I'm first looking at is first is just my overall sales. I'm going to start yesterday, that's kind of like the first full day. We don't have complete advertising and sales data yet for today. But I will look at that. But first thing I'm going to do is just look at my total sales for yesterday. And this is merch by Amazon or Amazon merch on demand. If you're not selling on Amazon merch on demand, it's a royalty system. So, I get paid, it's about 25% profit margin off of each sale so that the royalties are just my profits. I don't have any other expenses outside of advertising when it comes to direct product costs related to sales. So, if you're selling another product or another platform, you want to keep in mind what your profit margins are minus the ads, as we'll talk about separately there. So, in your cost of goods sold, your Amazon, Amazon fees, make sure to take that into account when we're looking at this so that $1,100 yesterday is my profit before ads. And I'm just going to compare that directly to my advertising. So, if my advertising is below what my profit is, I'm fine with that. If it is below, I kind of see that as opportunity to be more aggressive with my advertising. So, if we look at our advertising, so this is the ad account last seven days, that follows the graph here yesterday, we spent $883 in ADS. And you can see just overall, the spend, the blue line here has been increasing, a cost has been increasing. And that's probably going to be the trend. Throughout the next few weeks, I will say I have been a little lack when it comes to eliminating ad spend. From not as from performers, I haven't done a whole lot of optimizations. When it comes to that, I'm kind of letting everything I'm trying to get as many sales as possible. And if I'm not losing money in an account, that's kind of where I want to be. So yesterday sold 880 or spent $883. And I have 1100. So, what is that about $200 in profit. So, there is a little bit of room, I could be a little more aggressive.
And when it comes to advertising, there's kind of two general there's kind of two broad actions you can take there's are different types of activities, when it comes to your account, there's expansion activities, and contraction activities is kind of how I like to think of it. So, expansion is anytime you're increasing you spend, where contraction is the opposite, where you're decreasing you spend. So, expansion activities would look like increasing bids or creating new campaigns, adding additional targets or keywords to your existing campaigns. So, you might target like new competitors, or whatever that looks like. And then with contraction, that's going to be kind of the opposite. You're lowering your bids, you're pausing keywords, targets or campaigns, or negating your search terms to kind of make things more efficient. So, I haven't been doing a whole lot of contraction in the weeks leading up to this. So that has probably hurt me a bit when it comes to what my ACOS is, and being you know, as profitable, that hasn't been as big of a concern. I do have automations running through my Merch Jar account, I'll cover some of those more detail in another video. But I have automations that run that automatically adjust all my bids, poor performers, high performers just every single day. So, there is some of that going on, it's probably not as aggressive as what it could be. So, I could make some changes there. But as of now, I'm just kind of like leaving that. And then more about those expansion activities. So, when I look here, so like, I'm seeing that I have a couple $100 in play that I could use to potentially increase my spend on my products to get more sales, increase the ranking for hopefully more organic sales later. Again, this is a very aggressive strategy. And you'll have to determine kind of what your risk threshold is with this because there is risk involved too. Let's say for example, with merch in particular, the platform I'm on, I don't control any inventory, that's all based on Amazon, if they run out of T shirts for me to print my designs on, they're going to stop selling them or if the shipping dates go after. So, if I'm not able to take advantage of this full cycle here, it could be it could hurt me where I may have been better off trying to be a little bit more profitable earlier, kind of throughout this whole process.
This is this video is more about kind of just reviewing where we stand right now. And what I may be looking to do so that's kind of the account wide, where things are at. Most of that is going to be with the hero product. So, our one product, you can see just far more sales and everything else. I have a couple other products that they do, okay, I mean in all together, they do. Alright, you can see the one product is $622 Yesterday in royalties. So, all the other products combined about $500 in royalties, and what comes to ad spend on that one product, we are at yesterday $399 spent on this one product. And I'm doing this just in I'm just typing in part of my ASIN. I use my ASIN and every single campaign name for any campaign that's specific to that product. So, it makes it easy to filter. So yesterday I spent $399 out of $622, so about $200 in profit, so most of the profit came from there. So again, that means I do have some room I can be a little more aggressive on some of these campaigns, which I would probably look at doing so what that might look like for this product is targeting more competitors. So, I have started a couple new ad groups and campaigns with getting competitors targeting specific competitors. So, I have three primary products that I kind of track for that that I have in a its own ad group that I'm kind of testing and it's just trying to one steal sales away from them and rank for similar terms that they are. Another area, I could have some expansion with this product is increasing bids. So, I can go through and increase bids across the board, if I like. Or I can be a little bit more strategic with which specific keywords, which is probably what I would do, again, I have some automations running. So that's kind of happening already in the background. But if I want to be a little more aggressive with those bid changes, I can go in and target just any of my keywords and targets that are selling multiple units a day or you know, within the last few days, and have an acceptable ACOS. And for me, I mean this you can see like this ad group is high. And in total, we're running about 50% ACOS across all these different campaigns that might be a little higher, higher than what I like, I probably bring it down to anything, I'm looking to increase closer like 30%, even up to 40%. Again, being aggressive. So that's kind of the first thing I look at overall, just kind of yesterday, sales versus yesterday has ad spend kind of its settled at this point, we don't worry about like a delay in data. Although spend is up to date that I've seen in sight of ad console, so it's not a bad metric to go from. And then I'll also look at today's just kind of keep especially like later in the day here just kind of get an idea of where my spend is at versus sales. So, today's sales $591, $339 of that to the hero product. And again, back to ads out of that $339, the hero product is at $149. So, it's doing pretty, decent, it's got profit and opportunity for expansion to be more aggressive, and total 347 spend for the account out of that 591. So, we'll probably end up close to where we were at yesterday margins. And then once I kind of get an idea of like where I'm at with spend, you know, I do I have room to increase is it getting a little high that I need to maybe consider doing some contraction activities, maybe going in and just making sure everything's okay, negating some additional search terms that might not be working, whatever that looks like, that's kind of like this is like your barometer for the account to give you some direction to go in. So, this where I'm at right now, it's probably a little bit both, it's creeping up there, I still have some room, I can be a little more aggressive. But I may want to look at creating some new campaigns, focusing on my hero product, and then maybe even some of these other products that are selling. You know, maybe if we look at the last seven days, some of these products that do have potential to increase rank and get some decent sales over these next few weeks.
Then diving into the hero product, itself, I want to kind of see how it's doing just overall against the category against my competitors. And to do that I'm looking at one of my main parameters is BSR, I want to see how it's doing. Overall, you'd see the BSR chart over the last seven days. So, we are decreasing in rank. And we were down towards the 6,000-7,000 BSR, which is great for this time period. It's about where it was last year, this timeframe. And I use this just again to get an idea of kind of where I'm at. And by itself, it's not super useful because your BSR and like how many sales you're getting for that BSR ranking is going to depend throughout the year, even year to year that can be different, you know, a 10,000 BSR this year could be completely different than what 10,000 BSR last year looked at like at the same time period. So, I also want to look at where my competitors are at in comparison to that, with their BSR. BSR is based on how many sales you're getting recently as your sales velocity essentially. So, you can see how many by comparing your BSR to your competitors. And this could be direct competitors. So, I have a few that are kind of tangentially related to my product or could be a substitute for my products and they make for good comparisons, they could be direct copycats, as well. So, for me, I have these three comparison products. So, I like to see kind of where I'm at in relation to them. And that's going to give me some direction as well. And usually, it points towards aggressive is kind of my mentality. If they're beating me in BSR, I need to step on the gas and if I'm beating them, it's kind of like I don't want them to catch up. Most things for me, I do tend to point to be aggressive, but again, it gives me a barometer to know where I'm at in line with the rest and comparing where I'm at with the three competitors I do keep track of. It's looking like it could be a pretty good, I'm happy with where this product is sitting at right now as we head into this time period. So, I do recommend having some kind of idea of what your competition is doing just so you know how you're doing in relation to that and then If you're doing okay on your advertising spend or not, the other thing I'm going to look at with this product, I use Helium 10 to track keywords. It's a little bit pricey of a tool but is really useful if you get the full suite where you can track specific keywords. So, this product again ranks for some very high traffic super high competition keyword, when you're looking at for things like gifts for men or gifts for Dad, those are keywords that I'm targeting. And this is one of the great things about Helium 10, and there's other ones are a reverse ASIN search. So, they're tool called Cerebro has a reverse asin search where you put in your ASIN, it gives you a list of all the search terms that you rank for, and what your position on the pages. So, I have a few that I've done that with and I'm really paying close attention to that I'm trying to rank and its ones that I have a shot at getting close to the top of the first page or as high up as possible, which is going to be anything kind of in that 5060 or below positioning, there's, I believe 60 products on a single page on the first page of Amazon. So, anything below that you're on the first page already. So, anything where I'm like greater than 306, I think that's the first five pages, I'm not going to be making a whole lot of headway with something like that with ad spend. So, I'm looking at more of a couple different so like this one here, where I'm rank 36, I want to make a push to increase my rank for that. So just kind of gives me an idea of like, how am I doing here. So, this one, I have increased rank recently. And then another one, this dad birthday gift. And I have things sorted here by my search volume, by the way, because I want to see what I could potentially, you know, most bang for your buck, I want to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible. This isn't 100% accurate, no one knows exactly how much traffic there is on Amazon but it's close enough for we're just compare I know gifts from is going to have a lot more search volume that's at some of these on the lower rankings. So, I have a couple of keywords that I'm looking at, see kind of where I'm at, make sure nothing's gone, you know to arrive in some of these. And it does look like I have dropped in a couple of these are already a little bit higher ranking. So maybe not as much of a concern. But these are the two I'm kind of focused on for now. And the ones I do have highlighted in red are ones I'd have specific campaigns for. So, these are my single keyword campaigns that I've started here. So, another way to kind of look at these and a single keyword campaign is it's one campaign one ad group, one keyword. And the reason for that is take advantage of placement adjustments, and just have the most granular data as possible rank as much as possible for it. So that's kind of my goal with these two now. And of course, I want to just rank across the board, I have other campaigns for them automatic campaigns, there's broad and phrase match campaigns, and so forth. So, for the two that I believe I can try to get to the or I want to make a run for the front page for like gifts for Dad, for example.
This is where I will jump to Merch JAr and just see kind of what my spend looks like for not just spam but just results. Who am I getting paid traffic for this? This shows that my sponsored rank is greater than 96. I'm not even showing up in the first several pages of advertising, which makes sense, it's a very expensive keyword. Let's look at some of the products. So, gifts for dad. And some of them are going to be more expensive product could have more profit margin that gives them more ammo to put into ADS. Again, some of these so it's kind of all over the board here. So, I'm competing for this keyword. And it is going to be difficult since my profit margin is on my product, my hero product $5.23. So, I have $5.23 that I can use to pay for each sale before I become unprofitable. And I am willing, especially on a keyword like this, I'm willing to lose money on this keyword and pay higher cost per click to rank for it. Because the organic that you can potentially see from this, especially as we get through the holiday season can more than make up for that. So, we have gifts for data here. And I just want to kind of look at and see inside a Merch Jar. So, I go to search terms, type in gifts for dad, and it's going to pull up any of those search terms and every single ad group and campaign as contributing to that. Let's do something a little more recent. Let's do last seven days. So, one thing to keep in mind is when you do an exact match searcher, I just want to call this out so we I could have an exact match search term for gifts for dad. But even with that you're going to appear for misspellings and more commonly plurals so gifts for dads could appear those will be separated into two different search terms in Amazon's data but be the same keyword that's targeting that. So, there are and I'm just looking through, there is a gift for dads. So that same thing, but it's only got a few dollars and spent. So, we're not going to pay attention to that. So, we have gifts for dad here in the last seven days I've spent $135, 75% ACOS, so it is not doing great and a high CPC of $1.83. So, I am spending here, let's go even like yesterday, but $7 and spend yesterday, not a whole lot. So, this may be a search term that I want to increase. So, I can do that through my keywords page and ad manager, it's going to pull up the search terms, and then the campaigns and ad groups that are associated with that. And I am targeting this keyword in a few different campaigns, which is fine, you can't compete against yourself. So, you don't have to worry about that your data is just going to be spread across different campaigns, I'm fine with that. These are the ones I'm really concerned about looking at the bid, I do have a top of search with an 85% adjustment already. So, I do need to keep that in mind. This is seeing this one campaign seen $2.38 cent CPC, so it is high, I think I still want to increase again, I got some room on this product to be a little aggressive. And this one does not have an adjustment. So, anything I place here is going to be what the beta, so let's go dollars. And I think that'll be okay, and those will get updated. So that'd be that's one thing I'm looking at. So that's one keyword I'm focusing on. And I could do that again for some of these others or find additional ones, but I'm trying to stick to just a couple main ones. And I'm letting the rest of my campaign strategy handle the rest.
Outside of that I would also I look at my lottery campaigns to see that's where a lot of my advertising dollars go to right now is the lottery campaigns to kind of pick-up orders across the board. And of course, I do have campaigns set up for a lot of my other products that do sell well, some of these other best sellers, non-hero products during this time of the year, I'd say. So, I already do have campaign structure set up where I don't need to necessarily like create new campaigns or new targeting. And I have automation set up that's already handling that not just with bids, but through keyword automations, where it's structuring my campaigns automatically by moving keywords from one ad group to another or pulling search strings from an auto campaign and placing it into a manual campaign automatically. That's all happening behind the scenes, I don't have to mess with that. So, it saves me a lot of time by using Merch Jar. So, you would probably have a little bit more to do when it comes to just doing everything manually if that's the way to go. But there's going to be some more strategies on jump into in other videos lottery campaigns, I'm going to jump into in a future video just reviewing kind of what my lottery campaigns are, and then another video on how I'm optimizing them as well. So, look forward to that.
If you're not already subscribed, make sure you do that if you found anything in this video useful and would like to be notified about all the future videos. And last thing I'm going to look at and I'll go into more detail or some of this is budgets, I typically use Amazon's budget console, I don't have any rule set up for budgets myself, I may look at doing some of those. But I don't mind jumping in here. As we go just swing your eyes on it to see if I do want to increase it. I'll go into more detail what this looks like. I'm not going to adjust these. But this is where I'm doing my budgets and I'm anything that's a filter for anything in budget less than 100. And it's still enabled. And I'll go through and kind of look at the ACOS and time and budget and some of that, so I'll do a video with some more stuff and actively go through that. But that's the other thing I'd be looking at is budgets. And as we get through the holiday year, I'm going to pay more and more attention on check this more often. So, I'm not running out of budget prematurely in the day, especially for some of my important campaigns like for my hero product. And that's it for my November 21 update and I'll see you in the next video.
We're only about a week away from Black Friday, the official start of the holiday sales season, we're starting a new video series where I'll be documenting the optimization my own personal and account, the 2022 holiday right along you'll see how I adjust my bids targeting and budget how and why I'm setting up my campaigns and the tools and strategies I'm using to get the most out of my advertising budget and outsell my competition.
Over the next month we'll be focusing on one of my hero products and Amazon merch on demand t shirt that sold 10,000 units, generating $50,000 in royalties between Black Friday and December 31. Last year, we'll be attempting to replicate that success this year with aggressive ad spend and campaign strategies.
We'll also look at how I'm managing and optimizing ads for all my other products including lottery campaigns, and documenting the results as we go so make sure to subscribe and enable notifications to stay in the loop as each video drops.
The first video of the series is available now a review of last holidays, sales and ad results my best selling product of all time. You can find that video linked in the description. Here's looking forward to another great holiday season and happy selling
In this video we'll review the best-selling product from my personal Amazon account as we head into the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend last year between Black Friday and the end of December it generated $50,000 in royalties, which we're going to be attempting to replicate again this year, we'll take a look at the sales from last year's holiday season. Compare that to this year's recent results, and review the ad campaigns and the campaign structures that I'm currently running for this product.
Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cameron Scot, if you're new here on this channel, we discuss the tools and strategies to help make Amazon advertising easier. Today we're reviewing the best-selling products of all time from my own personal Amazon account.
One that I would consider one of my hero products, which is any product that makes up a significant portion of your revenue is a t-shirt on the Amazon merch on demand platform. This is Amazon's print on demand platform where you upload your own designs to various products such as apparel or phone cases, which are then printed and fulfilled by Amazon on demand. Only once that item is purchased. This means there's no inventory to purchase, carry or go out of stock. Amazon provides all the fulfillment and customer support and then you're paid a royalty for each sale even if you sell on one of Amazon's other platforms or even completely different products. This case study will still be relevant as these advertising strategies can still be used on virtually any product.
My hero product is in what I'll call the dad shirt niche. It competes for some very high traffic, high competition keywords, and usually performs really well around Father's Day in the holiday buying season.
It sells for $19.99 has a royalty of $5.23 with each sale, giving it a 26% profit margin or a 26% break-even ACOS this is his third holiday sale season, and it has thousands of reviews with over a 4-star rating. This is a key factor as it's very hard to rank for some of these really high competition high traffic keywords. If you don't have a lot of reviews already last year between Black Friday and December 31.
This product sold 10,000 units for $200,000 in revenue, generating $50,000 in royalties. Looking at a BSR chart, this product peaked at the end of the holiday sales period on December 18th. Right before the shipping times went past Christmas and ended up with under a 1000 BSR and the clothing, shoes and jewelry category turning over to ads. during that timeframe. I spent 18,200 hours across all of this product’s campaigns, ending up with a 98 cent CPC and a 22.6% ACOS.
Since Amazon limits you to only the last 90 days of campaign data inside their native ad console, I'm using Merch Jar here to look at last year's campaign data Merch Jar stores all of your Amazon advertising data from the time you first sync your account, including search term and keyword data. So, you always have access to the data that you've paid for. With this product having a 26% breakeven ACOS, the ads and themselves were a net profit on their own, in addition to significantly contributing to organic sales through increased search term ranking. After ad spend this resulted in 32,500 hours in profit for this single product over the course of the 2021's holiday sales season.
Now we're going to take a look at this year's month to date results for November and compare them to the same time period for last year last year between November 1st and 17th. This product sold 1,700 units for $8,500 in royalties, compared to this year is 1,400 units and 7,100 in royalties this year has seen a lot of changes in advertising.
It's gotten much more competitive, requiring much more aggressive bids, and resulting in higher cost per clicks and less profit. While we're only a little behind in unit sales this year compared to last, the cost per click on this product has increased significantly to be as competitive as last year where we were at about a breakeven a cost last year. This year we're at 52% ACOS making the ads themselves unprofitable this year.
If we compare BSR charts however, we can see that we're in a very similar position ranking as last year with the aggressive spin that we've made, with both years following a very similar trend in sales ranking across the month in November with increased competition and costs and Black Friday following a couple of days earlier this year than last.
It's going to be interesting to see how profitable this product will end up this season compared to last how long of a holiday sales season this product will have before Amazon's shipping times reach past December 25 is also going to play a significant role in how profitable this product will be. So, make sure to subscribe and enable notification If you haven't already, so you can follow the results.
Next, we're going to take a look at the campaign's I'm currently running for this product. We'll start with an overview of the general structure that I'm using. The campaign's I'm using for this product are segmented into three different general categories, automatic campaigns for harvesting keywords, and ASIN targets, manual testing for keyword and ASIN targets that sold from auto campaigns, as well as any other manual tests that I might perform and manual performance for the best performing keywords and ASIN targets the automatic campaigns I've segmented by targeting group one campaign for close match, one for loose match and one for substitutes. That way I can take better advantage of placement adjustments.
Complements targeting generally hasn't worked for me, so I usually skip that one. Manual testing I'm now doing all under one campaign and those tests are segmented using different ad groups for each match type or other keywords and asin testing them performing, such as close competitors, I'm manually adding myself or any other kind of tests that I decide to run for this product.
The performance category is made up of a single performance campaign with an ad group for exact match keywords and another ad group for ASIN targets. And then part of this performance category are all the multiple single keyword campaigns for all my best performing keywords with each campaign housing only a single keyword. And this is again to get the most out of placement adjustments. If we look at the actual campaigns inside of the native ad console, you'll see the three automatic targeting campaigns one for close, one for loose and one for substitute. I have them underlined in the green there, the manual testing campaign underlined in blue and the manual performance campaign and one of the single keyword campaigns which I abbreviate SKC underlined in red. And you'll see I have multiple SKC campaigns as well. You'll also notice a couple other older campaigns like the SPM competing ASINs and the SPM priority product targets. These are a couple other campaigns that I still have active for this product that I haven't disabled since they're still getting sales, I may need to do a little bit of cleaning up which may be part of this video series here. Inside of the manual testing campaign, you'll see the exact broad phrase and asin targeting ad groups. And again, a couple older ad groups that I'm still running and that are still generating sales. And finally, inside the manual performance campaign are the exact match and ASINs targeting ad groups.
So that is the current state of my hero product as we head into the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Throughout the next month I'll be documenting my ad optimization for this product and all my other products as well including lottery campaigns.
I'll show you how I'm managing my bids and budget campaign strategies. I implement outrank my competition and the tools and strategies I'm using along the way. So, make sure to hit that subscribe button to follow along and I'll see you in the next update.
Cameron Scot
In this video, I sat down with KDP seller Janice Papworth , who increased her Q4 sales by 66% year over year with the help of Amazon ads. Janice, thanks so much for coming on our channel. Really excited to have you here.
Janice Papworth
Thank you for having me Cameron, and I'm really excited to be talking to the real person.
Cameron Scot
Absolutely. Let's just jump right in. Maybe it'd be helpful for everybody watching this, if you could just kind of tell us a little bit about your Amazon journey.
Janice Papworth
What happened was, I always brought up my children and didn't work work property work. And so when they got a bit older, and I had a bit more time, I decided to start a blog because I wanted to do something from home that were kind of make money. And I wanted to monetize it. And I thought, what can I blog about? What do I know about I'm obviously about mums stuff, but everybody's doing that. And my husband's, he's a railway expert, really, he's very big on railways. So we started a railway blog. And I did all the SEO, and the Facebook and the Twitter. And he did the actual writing the articles because he knew all about heritage railways and that sort of thing. And then I went on a Facebook course with Rachel Miller. I don't know if you've heard of her, but she's a big Facebook guru. Okay. And she had Jacob topping on as kind of as a guest. And he said, of the most easiest thing to sell anyone is a T shirt, and he started talking about Merch by Amazon. And I thought that's good. Southern Railway T shirts, because not many people are doing that. And it's UK. And, you know, it's not the same in America. So we made some railway T shirts. We got accepted into Merch, that was the first thing.
Cameron Scot
What about what time period? How long ago was that?
Janice Papworth
It was that April 2018.
Cameron Scot
Okay, we started about the same time I was, I think I was around March or April as well. So...
Janice Papworth
That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. That's, um,
Cameron Scot
I'm not on KDP, which will, I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit. So maybe, you know, probably some balance there.
Janice Papworth
So I started making railway shirts and selling them through the blog. And then I thought, What am I doing, you know, I'm waiting for him to write the next blog. And he's off doing something else or working or I could be doing T shirts on anything. So I started doing other T shirts, really. And that's how I got into Merch. And then I joined the Facebook groups, things like that. I do things quite thoroughly. And I joined the Merch Girl boss group. And Amy, I can't pronounce her surname, Amy, Tetsuka something like that.
Cameron Scot
I'm not familiar.
Janice Papworth
Amy, she was talking about KDP. So I started looking at that as well. And then I picked up on people like Kelly Publish and Richard Harrison sons really got into KDP. And that worked out better for me than Merch. But I still do Merch. I did them both. And then found out about Merch Jar because I've always followed RJ. And I think he did an interview with RJ on YouTube.
Cameron Scot
Yep, I've been on his channel a few times.
Janice Papworth
Yeah, so I've always followed RJ and Matt. And I was in their secret group for a bit but then they got a bit more Etsy based. And I didn't want to do Etsy because it involves a lot of customer service and everything and I'm not in the US. So I I didn't want to be with the time difference and having to deal with people wasn't the point of doing the passive income really, the passive income was so that I could cope with family issues. Or we could go and travel we could go away or whatever without having to worry about somebody's T shirts and arrived and they want it now.
Cameron Scot
Yeah, absolutely. I don't boy, I'm in the US and I don't want to deal with the people here at customer service. So that's that's pretty amazing. So you're you're on Merch, you're on KDP been selling on merch since 2018. And you started KDP was at the same year? Is that that come a little bit later?
Janice Papworth
I started in October of 2018. Yeah, okay.
Cameron Scot
So same year, so pretty close together. When it comes to KDP and Merch what marketplaces are you selling on? Is it UK and US? Are you in some of the other marketplaces as well?
Janice Papworth
Yeah. You US merch is definitely the biggest, but I find I can pick niches in the UK that are not being covered in the US. So that helps me quite a lot. And then I've done some European ones, but nothing major. Really. Okay, gotcha dappled. Some things I thought was suitable things that didn't have words on them. Okay. I've never got too involved with pop sockets or throw pillows or tote bags. You can't do everything. You've got to stick to what you know. Really?
Cameron Scot
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think most people find that you want to find a niche that works for you to just kind of, you know, accelerate that pour gasoline on that. And you said KDP was working. You had you had more success with KDP than with Amazon.
Janice Papworth
Yeah, much more. I did start splitting my time initially. And I had a big love the T shirts kind of fun I sort of almost resented how to get to KDP? But then I realized KDP I'm like, What am I doing? You know, I'm looking at my sales. And I've sold five t shirts today. But there's so many books before I woke up this morning. Because obviously, the sales come in overnight for me. So when I wake up, that's when I've sold stuff.
Cameron Scot
That's the best feeling ever is no one making money sleeping. That's, for me. That's like one of the best things just wake it up. And you see how much money you made? That's amazing. Yeah, as far as like KDP. Because KDP is kind of just a different beast than Amazon or Merch by Amazon all together, where I mean very, versus just very much a graphic, which you'd have that with KDP you got your cover, but then you have everything else inside the book, which you don't have to do with Merch. So it's a lot more involved. Could you tell us so you don't have to go into like detail of niches or anything like that whatever you want to share? Are you doing more of like, low content? This is just based on my like reading because I'm in some KDP groups, I just tried to say I have a KDP account. Just I think I have one book on there just from testing. Are you doing more like low content? Or are you doing some more of the higher content? Are you writing books yourself that you should just share some information on what kind of kind of products I suppose you're selling there. So it's it's a little broader than just hey, T shirts on Amazon?
Janice Papworth
I started out with tangent templates, and they've got very basic templates. So graph paper and lines. But that quickly became saturated. I mean, what was interesting was in December 2018, I went to, or it might have been January 2019. Actually, I went to the Merch UK conference, the first and only one because the next one got cancelled with COVID. COVID, yeah. And I asked everybody there there was about, I don't know, 60-70 people there. And I kept saying to them, are you doing KDP as well. And they were like, No, we're not doing KDP which is strange, because I'm doing quite well on KDP. But people haven't got into it from the Merch side. So I was following more traditional people that had always been KDP and never done Merch. And so I started out with a very basic stuff. But as the Merch people came in, that became just so saturated, and a lot of it was just absolute rubbish. And one thing Amazon is big about I'm big about to is that you give the customer value. I don't want to buy something or found this and that and get it and think that's rubbish. I've just sent it back. And KDP and not taking our returns office at the moment like Merch, but I think they will at some point. Because I've never seen a return in my dashboard ever. Yeah, it must be sending them back.
Cameron Scot
I would imagine I can't imagine Amazon not accepting your return. Like that blows my mind if Amazon just Yeah, except for return on basically anything since they're so customer centric. I mean, if anybody has been that's watching this has been selling on Amazon, they know the customer is the only thing Amazon cares about us as resellers. They don't at all. So if you're anybody watching this is new. That's that's what it is. Amazon only cares about the customer, not the sellers. So that's really interesting.
Janice Papworth
As creators, we have to care about the customer as well. Because sooner or later, Amazon will crack down on that rubbish they're bound to, they're bound to start charging for every book you upload like Etsy do or they or they're going to start reviewing accounts where they've got thousands of books, well, they're going to start limiting us on how many books we can upload. So I do more. I do quite a variety of books, whatever kind of fires my interest that week. And I tend to do, I wouldn't say they're low content, but I don't write reams and memes because I don't get interested in that. I quite like the visual side of things. So I enjoy the covers the most. But I also do a lot of research into the keywords. And I try and do things that are a bit different or first to market or so not necessarily research on Amazon itself and following the herd. For instance, I like watching my local news and I live in quite a low crime area. I live in the southwest of England it's quite beachy is quite low crime. I'm so they have to fill the local news up with what people are doing. And they, they sometimes have the most interesting things on there. And I think all those people could do with a little book to help them along. I mean, Magnet Fishing, for example, I haven't done it because I don't think there's that big of demand. But apparently, people are going with magnets to fish in rivers, and see what they can pull up. And of course, they're pulling up, you know, little grenade that somebody's left there for 20 years and having to call the bomb squad out. But people are actually doing this as a hobby, they're going out with a magnet on a fishing line and fishing metal things out of canals and rivers.
Cameron Scot
That's amazing. Yeah, and you could just let you know, I survived the grenade, whatever of 2020. That's, I mean, that's a really interesting approach. And I think, especially for anybody that's just getting started with these kinds of things is that using your own knowledge and interest to find products to sell, because there's, I mean, we you mentioned saturation, and there is a lot of that, especially with Merch, I'm sure I'm sure a lot of that was just, hey, take this teacher, all my T shirt designs, we're just going to throw these on journals and try to sell them and see what happens and sticks. But there's still so many different niches or what your boy you said, just like these small stories or whatnot, that can become products, and like that's infinite, there's no end to that. Especially if you can bring a unique spin to it. And not just what you said, just kind of follow the crowd and do whatever you think everyone else is doing just because you see it selling.
Janice Papworth
And the other thing is, if you make a book that's got more interior, it's very hard to copy. So on Merch all my designs have been just copied everywhere. And it's so disheartening when you go and look for something and your best sellers there and you report it, and they have to report it again. And again. It's just really disheartening. But on Merch on KDP it's much harder to copy an entire book unless they buy it and somehow scan it in.
Cameron Scot
I have okay if you buy it, at least you're getting something out of it, Merch, just a button to download.
Janice Papworth
I've seen it where they've copied my cover and front page. But the inside is just lines, which is not the point. And then I've also seen it where they've actually done the look inside pages. And they've copied mine. And then I found it they they'd actually pinched pages from other people's books, and mesh them all into one book. And so I was writing to Amazon and saying this is these two pages are from my book. But the other pages I bought their book in the end to see what mesh they've made of it. But the other pages are from so-and-so's book and the X pages from so-and-so's book. And I could reverse image search them or I could see other writing, I could search that and find which books they stolen the interior pages out of because they could only use them look inside pages. So consistent through the whole book, they'd have to use four or five books and mesh them together.
Cameron Scot
I haven't heard of that. But that's it doesn't surprise me I guess like any of that copying and stuff doesn't surprise me anymore. But that's you actually bring up a really good point is with just the barriers to entry were Merch has virtually none. As far as like stealing a product or copying a product versus somewhat something like a private label product that you might be selling on Seller Central, where you have a manufacturer designing a product that's kind of on the opposite end of Merch, then there's KDP kind of like in between there, where there's more barrier to entry, it's you're developing more of a product, but not quite as much as you know, finding a manufacturer and having to deal with shipments and so forth. So it's kind of KDP has a nice middle ground. Between that where you don't have to worry as much about, I guess, competition, I'd imagine there's less competition just because of it. And I know for me, I haven't gotten too much into KDP myself just because of those barriers to entry personally. It's a little more, I guess, intimidating.
Janice Papworth
Yes. I mean, the simpler your interior is the easier is to stay a listener.
Cameron Scot
So when it comes to your KDP and Merch, the Merch platforms, and your sales distribution, how many products do you have on each of them? You'd like to share that and do you see that most of your revenue is made comes from just one or two or a few products or is that more kind of evenly distributed across all of your products?
Janice Papworth
Why hasn't this look on Merch? I've got just over 2000 designs, which I mean I don't do a lot of work on my merch account at the moment. You know I'm more doing KDP so that's t shirt designs, not pop sockets or anything. On KDP I've got 1600 Your books, okay, less. But I've got only got 10 that have sold over a thousand. Wow. But there's 1600, I looked to see how many had sold in 1000 of them have sold. So 600 have never ever sold. And they're probably the ones I did at the beginning that when I was learning the process and learning about keywords and things like that, because I've never gone back and beefed him up, change the keywords or anything. Sure, I've got one hero product which sold over 100,000
Cameron Scot
Whoa, that's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. So, congratulations. When was that book upload? Is that one that's been up for a while? Or is that one that just kind of took off like gangbusters right away?
Janice Papworth
I did it in October 2019.
Cameron Scot
That's absolutely amazing. And I guess one thing I want to point out with, to our audiences, if you haven't had a product reach some of these higher ranks really low BSRs is how many sales the top rank products are getting versus the ones that are I mean, it's not just kind of a linear curve to it, where it's like, oh, there's probably selling you know, I'm selling like 10 A month or price on like 100 a month is like no, it's it's a hockey stick where it just goes straight up the top tiers are getting far more impressions and clicks and sales then just even products are ranking a little bit lower. And I think that really highlights it.
Janice Papworth
Yeah, I mean, the first year it's so the first quarter four and you just saw the most in quarter for it so well in America. And then I realized that he had reasonably good rank in the UK and Canada as well. And I started pushing it then in the other two markets too. But the thing is that if you can use ads to push a book in KDP then Amazon actually kind of rewards you because in KDP what you're looking for is also to get into the autobots and into the person who looked at this looked at this that's like free advertising from Amazon. And once you start getting into the charts as well and they also have Christmas gift guides that you can get into so you can get the Christmas gift guide badge and then you appear in the Christmas gift guides that Amazon run then then that's what you're looking for really. So you're out advertising is helping to sell them but what you're trying to do is get Amazon's attention get Amazon to notice that book and get it into the not just the best seller badge but your Christmas gift guide badge or your Amazon chart badge or your when person buys this they also buy this because then you're getting free advertising from Amazon they send emails out saying we noticed you looked at this How about buying this you want to get into those emails and once your book starts to convert and sell then Amazon push it as well. Um the advertising keeps it in that.
Cameron Scot
Feedback loop right we're just kind of snowballs just from you know the ads and you know that kind of snowballs into like those different badges and I haven't heard of some of those since they're not available and Merch pretty much get what Amazon's Amazon choice or whatever is the only ones I've really seen over on the Merch side so that's really interesting that.
Janice Papworth
Oh they're all there in that Christmas the southern Christmas gift guides only Christmas obviously. But if you go I looked on Amazon US is still there. I don't think...
Cameron Scot
Well I'm just not familiar I guess with books as much in general but it's it makes sense. I mean, books are kind of like the OG Amazon product right like that's what they started with and what's been up the longest versus Merch which is relatively new. You know all things consider it's only a few years old, compared to books they've been selling for since their inception. But I when it comes to the ads, just kind of throw this in how would you describe like your strategy? Would you say you're like pretty aggressive with ads? Are you more conservative? If Do you have like a? What does that kind of look like? Or how would you describe yourself when it comes to running ads?
Janice Papworth
I try and keep them in profits. The first thing to do is to know what your ACOS is for profit, where your breakeven is really okay. I tend to run the lottery campaign since I found out about those from you this year. So I run t shirt lottery. I've got a pop socket last lottery although I don't have many sockets. I've got a book lottery obviously and I' ve got to Amazon clothing not t shirts like sweat shirts and stuff, lottery. Okay, I've got those running in US, UK and Canada, kind of just any books, obviously, we haven't got.
Cameron Scot
Okay, so you're doing lotteries for the KDP products as well. Yeah. And then you'd have to segment those by market, it's not like you can have like your Canadian and US into one campaign just waiting Amazon ads works, they split that up. And for anybody watching this not familiar with lottery campaigns, that's essentially just a campaign with a single ad group with all of your product segments or some segment of product. So like, if it's just t shirts, so there's a lot of different varieties, we have a video on lottery campaigns and how to get those started and what those are, I will link that in the description of this video. So you have that as well.
Janice Papworth
Once they start to sell, if they're selling for something seasonal, so the shirts are often seasonal. Sure, I'll run their own campaign, choosing your method I'm not very good at so you have to tell me what to do Cameron, and but I watched the videos and I study it very carefully, I make notes. And I think, oh, I should be doing that. And if it's really complicated, I think I can't cope with that I just, um, just on the light version, you know that keep it simple. So I do the three ads, I run the auto first on the individual product, if that's stopped selling, then I run the testing and the performance ads. And I use Merch Jar to take the keywords from the auto ads into the testing and performance. Now that's new for me this year, I haven't done that before. I knew it should kind of be doing it because our...
Cameron Scot
Work it's so much work to do by hand.
Janice Papworth
And RJ kept banging on about it, the shirts and I really can't face that I just leave the automatic running it be fine. And...
Cameron Scot
When you work, I know a lot of people are kind of or some people are with auto ads some they can have that stigma. It's like, well, it's Amazon doing it. It's their algorithm. So they must not work. It's all manual all day. And maybe some of the like older school PPC advertisers, it's always better like with Google ads, like no, you don't want to auto it's all manual. And that's kind of carried over from what I've seen. But auto ads work right. Like they've that's how I started with Amazon ads and just seeing that success and especially with how easy they are to to run, especially versus other platforms like a Facebook ads, for example. But so you mentioned your auto ads you've seen success with right?
Janice Papworth
Yeah. And then I didn't realize things like you shouldn't turn them off. So I would turn them off each year and then start a new one the following year. Okay, I've learned this year to just turn them down and not turn them off. So nothing has been turned off. They're all still there.
Cameron Scot
And are you seeing a difference in that over the last year? Because it kind of these changes in strategy that you've had? Have you noticed a difference in your ad performance?
Janice Papworth
I think it's the turning them off thing has got to come round again. Because things mostly are the things that take off a seasonal rather than evergreen. Okay, particularly with the T shirts. So I'm looking forward to I started about May was Merch Jar, okay. But what I think has made a difference is because I'm harvesting the keywords now. I'm getting much more, the sales have increased. And that's the the only difference I can see.
Cameron Scot
That's the one that matters, right? For sales, the sales, that's at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters.
Janice Papworth
I can see that on the T shirts, you know, some of the things I've done on the T shirts this year where I've harvested the the key words using the auto the test and the exact, just as you told me and I've got my little card here, I make little notes on how to do it. This is my crib sheet. If I lose that I'm stuffed, I've got to watch your video again. And I did it on the hero book this year as well. So I actually increased my sales like that 60s Well, I increase my profit actually by 66%.
Cameron Scot
Year over year. Wow. Oh, just Okay, over so Q4 this past 2021 versus Q4 2020. Oh, that's amazing.
Janice Papworth
The hero book. Yeah.
Cameron Scot
I'm looking forward to Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly in the same boat, like I have hundreds of thousands of products but like 95% of my revenue comes from two products. And that's same same boat where it's because of when you rank a product and it's at the top of the rankings. It's just such a massive difference where it's out sells, uh, you know, hundreds of 1000s of other books or in my case t shirts, but just because of that sales volume. So it's it's crazy. So I'm looking forward to hearing your results Q4 This year, and maybe another 60% increase.
Janice Papworth
I'll be in the Bahamas, but then
Cameron Scot
we'll do another video you'll be on the beach.
Janice Papworth
Unless Amazon was scoping me for some reason, somehow I didn't know how
Cameron Scot
We won't talk about that. So knock on wood. Did they think so you said that set up this campaign structure, the auto testing performance. And I'll link a video to that as well to alive I did pretty recently that kind of goes over that structure. And kind of my current structure that I'm using that Janice is using as well. Did anything surprising come from that hero product that any keywords that came up that were surprising to you that were selling and working that you want to have thought of?
Janice Papworth
Oh, I thought of an example for you, because he doesn't give away what I did. So if you imagine you're the person who's got to buy Christmas presents, I mean, I am that person in my family, you might be in yours. But there's some people that are really hard to buy for. So my dad, he's 87, and he's really hard to buy for, he doesn't leave the house. But every year I buy my tin of biscuits. And every year I buy him a sudoku book. And what was happening was people were searching for tin of biscuits on Amazon. They weren't, I mean, this is just a sample. And then they were finding my book because Amazon was serving it to them somehow. And because they were buying it, tin of iscuits was showing up in my keywords. I thought that's weird, because I'm not selling tin of biscuits. But everybody who's buying the tin of biscuits is buying the Sudoku book. And so it's worth advertising against the tin of biscuits, even though it's nothing to do with the book, nothing to do with it. People are buying these things together, on enough of them are buying them together, that Amazon put that into the auto campaign. And then it got picked up by the keywords. That's quite, you know, it's quite, it's quite good value to advertise against the tin of biscuits, because nobody's thought of it.
Cameron Scot
Yeah, 100%. So that could be I mean, depending on the other competition for tin of biscuits, it could be a low cost per click for that search term.
Janice Papworth
And also, if it converts, as well, I understand that Amazon, you don't have to bid so high, because it's converting well, Amazon don't make you that it's not solely on bid where Amazon shows you, the, shows the advert it's also on conversions, because it's converting and gets to biscuits, you're not having to pay so much.
Cameron Scot
That's so that's actually a good point. And no one really knows how the Amazon ad or any of Amazon's algorithms work, I don't even think most people that work there. And work on these algorithms know exactly how they work, because there's so many different moving parts to them. But it is pretty well speculated that there is some sort of hidden quality score to your ads based on conversion rates and how well they convert similar to like a Google ads, which is a little more documented, but it's again, heavily speculated the Amazon ads works. Very similarly, with having some kind of hidden metric where you don't have to pay as much when you have relevancy and convert high conversion versus someone that doesn't, they're going to have to pay a little bit more for the privilege of getting their ad serve. That's a really interesting point. The other thing I want to point out is with this tin of biscuits example where it's like something you never even thought of is every single search term on that customers are typing on an image that has some level of traffic on it, that is coming through that search term. And the more search terms that you can appear for whether it's, you know, incredibly relevant, you know, or hyper relevant to your product, or it's not, it's like the tin of biscuits, that's just more traffic going to your product, and the more traffic, the more orders and sales generally. So having that broad approach, even if it's something you might not expect, or even is maybe something that doesn't convert as well, as you know, maybe this tin of biscuits example that sounds like it does convert really well, even if it doesn't, as long as you're getting some kind of conversions off it, you can do that profitably at whatever bid pricing. You're just increasing your sales overall, across all these different search terms that are just focusing on just a couple.
Janice Papworth
And it makes me think that next year, I might actually run ads against those products. So I might look at the fancy tins of biscuits that you're going to buy your dad for Christmas, and run that.
Cameron Scot
And just like Merch Jar or handle all that because that's all you can automate that whole thing with the product ads and and that's one of my favorite things about automatic campaigns. So if anyone's still on the fence about using automatic campaigns, it's full or the product targeting. So whenever you see in your search terms that ASIN, that appears, means you're you're showing up on this product, and getting impressions and clicks for it. So that's just more traffic and you're stealing sale, especially if it's a competitor. There's also the complementary products and so forth. So it's just more ways to get traffic. And from what I've seen, just with how many different products are on Amazon, if you look at your placements on your automatic campaigns, I would bet most of those, the product placement, so when your ads on those products is getting far more impressions than your rest than just your search result, rest search are top top of search results. That's why it's been in my case. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case for most automatic campaigns. So definitely, I would recommend product ads and they can work extremely well. One of my best in this past Q4 for my hero product was competing products to mine, and not just directly related to mine, especially with gift giving holidays like Christmas, people aren't necessarily looking like, Okay, I'm looking for a fishing shirt. And then I'm only I'm only looking at fishing shirts. No, they're looking at kind of like a bunch of different stuff. Because people do have a lot of different hobbies and so forth. And then when they see something they like, they purchase, you can watch like the tin of biscuits, you can sounds like a sale. I don't know how annoying it can really get because it means you're making money. So it's...
Janice Papworth
My aim was to get to the point where my husband came in and went, that was really annoying. Can you turn it off? And I'd be like No, sorry.
Cameron Scot
So even if it's not relevant, so like my hero product, product targeting did prefer it was one of my best performing campaigns, it was targeting products that weren't even related to the product I was selling. They were just other products that were also selling pretty well. And they performed and you know, I'm taking sales from these other ones. And you know, that leads to your ranking versus taking down some of their ranking and all those different parts. So product targets is definitely something to explore, I would say for everybody.
Janice Papworth
So I need to know how to do that on Merch Jar, Cameron, please, can I have another video?
Cameron Scot
It's in video in the live that I did has the product targeting in there. So the product checkboxes that you'll see in the promotions feature? That is the product targeting ads, so it isn't that live. So definitely check that out. And I'll link that in the video for everyone else at home as well. So how long have you been running ads for when did you get started with that for each of the different platforms?
Janice Papworth
Well, I started as soon as they allowed us to. They gave us a code, didn't they? And we...
Cameron Scot
For Merch?
Janice Papworth
Yeah.
Cameron Scot
Okay. So you're one of the first it was bad. It was 2018 I believe because that's when I got started with the little code at the bottom of your dashboard. Yep. Okay, so you probably have two accounts now.
Janice Papworth
I have quite a lot of accounts, because I've got one for each country and each products each, you know, so I've got Merch, you know, UK? Yep. US. What have they got? And then I've got the European ones France, Italy, Spain, Germany. We haven't...
Cameron Scot
You might find an extra US account in there if you take a look. And I have to okay, yeah, I do too. Which is good, especially if you end up scaling out because I'm actually running into campaign limits and or more ads limits now with lottery campaigns, but having a backup ad account for that for your Merch products isn't the worst thing. So getting in early has its perks for sure.
Janice Papworth
That's one of the things when I got Merch Jar I tried to link them all in get them all into Merch Jar. But I did that, that you did answer all my questions at that point.
Cameron Scot
We don't know what the deal is with. We've we've tried working with Amazon I don't know what it is with. It's it seems to be the the European markets or the I guess the non-US ones for whatever reason have trouble syncing. So we got to do some fiddling to kind of force that sync to the the APIs so we can read all that data. But for the most part, I haven't ran into anybody that hasn't been able to get them to sync at the end of the day. But so if anyone is watching Merch Jar user that is having problems syncing them, just shoot us a message in our in app support, and we'll we'll help you out with that. So we've we've kind of nailed down some weird troubleshooting networks for some reason, so we don't know why. But so you've been running Merch by Amazon ad since end of 2018. I think I think it was like October November, I think was when I started. So I would imagine you were probably around that same time. KDP What about when did you start with them?
Janice Papworth
I think it helps out straight away soon as I started. So I must have I must have put automatic campaigns on. Once I saw stuff selling.
Cameron Scot
Probably around the same time then. Okay, awesome. And that's another benefit for anybody that's not is interested in KDP or hasn't heard of it, you get access to advertising right away, you're not waiting for tier ups that could eventually happen with Merch by Amazon as well. No one really knows. But they have been rolling out advertising to where I've even seen people at tier 100 on Merch getting access to advertising. And Seller Central gets it right away too. So it's pretty much just Merch that you have to like, move up in order to get that. So every other platform I've seen right away, so you can start promoting your products and launching them.
Janice Papworth
One thing I did was some I did advertise on my own books. My hero books got two other books that kind of sometimes get bought alongside it. So I advertised all three books on the other...
Cameron Scot
Like within the book itself?
Janice Papworth
No, against I have a product case, because I got annoyed because every time I looked at my page, I could see other people's books on my sponsored, you know, the banner? Yeah. And I was like, I can't quite read my book there. Thanks. So I advertised in there as well.
Cameron Scot
That's actually that's a great that's. So that's actually a strategy. I call them blocker campaigns. But it's basically you're targeting your own products, with ads with your own products to block competition from having those slots, and they work really well. So it's the kind of the opposite of like trying to steal competition away from by targeting competing products, you're blocking your competitors from stealing your sales. So with just coming out of Q4, and kind of like how big of a deal Q4 is for I would say I would say the majority of sellers, what would you say is the biggest challenge you face and achieving the success that you did in Q4. And what what were the biggest takeaways that you're gonna bring into this next year's holiday season,
Janice Papworth
Q4 was really important because I didn't realize that my first Q4 that it because what it does is it gives your all your products you sell in Q4 get rank, and they get reviews. And it kind of a rising tide floats all ships, you know, it kind of carries it through into the following year, it gives your book kind of credibility or your T shirt credibility. But the one problem I hit this year, and it's kind of being a victim of your own success was the cash flow. Because I had quite a lot of money in the business, I you know, operates a limited company, I had quite a lot of money in the business, I thought I'd be fine. And in the end, I had to pump in savings. Because you're paying for adverts in November and December. I mean, honestly my billing me pretty much daily in the end and...
Cameron Scot
Or multiple times a day depending on your limit.
Janice Papworth
And you know, coming in from different countries as well in different blooming currencies. And then, of course, you're not getting the sales coming into these two months delay on KDP as opposed to one month on Merch. So the bulk of it's not going to come into the end of February. And I've you know, had to fund that. And I'm gonna have to have more money next year to get through that. Otherwise you don't you're not making the profit are you. But what I think is providing your own direct ACOS, of course, you're getting organic sales as well. It's like an ATM a cash machine. If you had a cash machine where you could put five pounds in and they're spitting 10 pounds back, you're gonna keep putting five pounds in aren't you got to have the five pounds to put in, you can't run out of five pounds, otherwise you can't get you 10 pounds back.
Cameron Scot
I love that analogy. And I have a very similar viewpoint on advertising. Where if someone asked me what my advertising budget is, I don't have one, I don't have any sort of advertising budget whatsoever. It's how as much as needed, because if you as long as you're hitting profitable ads, or breakeven, at worst case, I'm gonna put in an unlimited amount of money or as you know, far as reasonably I can do to get those sales out of it due to ranking and so forth. So I love that analogy because that 100% right. Like if, if I said I was gonna give you $2 For every dollar you gave me, you're gonna find every dollar you possibly can to keep making that happen. But for those of those of you that haven't gone through a Q4, or I guess, like not even just Q4, but maybe more. So like having a product that really takes off where you need to keep pumping in ads because one of the worst things you can do especially during the last couple of weeks of that holiday sales period before Christmas, is to stop running ads. That's the last thing you'd want to do and let you know your competitors outrank you and so forth, which then leads into the new year and not achieving the rank that you possibly could have is to keep those ads going and the amount in ad spend increase those last few weeks compared to you know, this time I mean, you're more of a normal sales period is many multiples higher. In my case, personally, and you can speak to yours if you'd like to, as well, I spent in a 30 day timeframe over that, from that Cyber Monday to end of the holiday sales period, probably six or seven times as much as I would in a normal 30 day period. With so it's something you need to account for. When it comes to that cash flow with those delays, which merge is 30ish days, I guess. 30 or 60 from the start of the month to kind of at the end of the month payout. But sounds like KDP is a little bit longer even so even more of a cash flow challenge.
Janice Papworth
Yes, another month. And also there's a delay isn't there. So there's a delay in so with Merch, we know when we've sold a t shirt. That's it, you get that to Ching. But with KDP, you don't find out you've sold it until the book actually ships. So every day what I was doing at the same time, every day from my hero product, I was writing down the BSR in Canada, UK in us. So I could check that my sales was still improving.
Cameron Scot
Interesting. Do you get the data through your Amazon ads? Do you see that that that order data is pretty much why...
Janice Papworth
I think there's a delay there as well. They're known to be unreliable, and there's a delay. So I was checking my BSR to check that because they were still going down. I knew I was selling more than the day before. Checking ACOS as well. But you've got to, you've got that delay.
Cameron Scot
Yeah, that's interesting. As far as like the cash flow challenge, I don't know that I have like great advice for people. I use credit cards for all my Amazon advertising. So just the built in delay with a credit card itself kind of helps offset that. But it can still be challenging for sure, depending on, you know, I've hit credit card limits in the past, and it's something you want to be careful of, and make sure you have another card ready. If that's the case, if you don't have limits that can, you know, hit that high spend if you're expecting it. I don't know if you have any advice, saving up throughout the year to make sure you have kind of a stash for that expected ad spend. But I don't know, do you have any tips or maybe something you'll do different next year?
Janice Papworth
I've never thought about using credit cards. I've only run the business as a limited company in the UK. So we've got a business bank account. My husband, he does a completely different thing. But we're both in the same business account because that's how we started. I'm so we ran out of money. And I had to say to him, you know, we've run out of money, we're gonna have to pump some personal savings in Is that okay with you? And he used his? It's not that I've got to ask my husband before I do things because he trusts me. But it's just respectful, isn't it to say, just about to raid the joint account and pump it all back into the business and we're not going to be paid by Amazon for two months? And he's like, okay. You know, I was just lucky I have the savings that I could do it.
Cameron Scot
Sounds like you're paid off so far to February for sure. I mean, I know everyone on Merch is probably looking forward to the end of this month. I know I am.
Janice Papworth
But my normal ad spend times 10-15.
Cameron Scot
Wow. Okay, so even a bigger increase. So which which happens at those when you have especially like a hero type product that just kind of goes gangbusters because especially during the holidays, the traffic is just so much more immense than what it is during the normal year. So being prepared for that. So yeah, I'd say I guess my two cents be like saving throughout the year. Credit cards can help with that, if that's something which I really like credit cards, I don't know anything about like UK how that works if there's differences with credit cards, but with the cards I have through the businesses, I get up to a 4, basically, it converts to 4.5% back on all my Amazon advertising spend for the first $100,000 I spend every year so it is a significant cashback opportunity as well, depending on what's available, you know, with the banks in your country and so forth. So for anyone here in the US is Chase Sapphire reserve. And it's a personal Chase one I got to do some transferring stuff but ends up working out my buddy turned me on to because he's an Amazon seller and he was doing that but somebody that checkout and consider if you're if you're already spending tens of thousand dollars, tens of thousands on Amazon ads, you know it doesn't hurt to get a few points back on it.
Janice Papworth
So that's interesting. Yeah, cuz I have a personal credit card I do that on. I didn't think of doing it with the Amazon that's that's very interesting.
Cameron Scot
Yeah. And some of it the the way the one I have works, I'm sure it's gonna just be different with depending on what's available, but it's 3% Back on the ads, and then when I transfer it to my personal it's a one and a half percent multiple, so it's like four and a half percent total. So it Definitely an extra four or $5,000 on almost a free vacation per year just from the money I'm spending no matter what. So, something to check out.
Janice Papworth
Yeah. Well, that's a very good tip. Thank you.
Cameron Scot
What impact do you think your success is key for we kind of touched on this a little bit already, we'll have for this year,
Janice Papworth
I'm definitely going to make another book that goes alongside my hero book. And I've got the idea for that. I used A+ content as well to display the other books on the hero book. So I noticed that I was selling probably one in 10. We're buying one of the other books as well,
Cameron Scot
I so I wasn't actually familiar, A+ content was available for KDP. Would you be able just like briefly explain what A+ content is for anyone that's not familiar, doesn't have the option and KDP yet?
Janice Papworth
Yeah, we've we've only just got it actually, we got it around September, October time. So you can display other people had it but not KDP. So traditional publishers had it. And I think people who were doing fulfilled by Amazon had it. But basically, you can add content to your description page for your book. And you can choose what to put on there. So you can put photos on, you can put more text on, you can put photos of the interior of the book, but in the end, and they have another series of books that I do do that in to show what the inside of the book looks like. And I use some mock ups as well with place it. But in the end on this hero book, I put, I literally put the other products on so you can add products on and you can have a little comparison chart between below them. Like this book, Scot, it's hard to say without, I don't want to give my niche.
Cameron Scot
Don't do that. Don't do that.
Janice Papworth
Supposing it was a coloring book, you could be this book's got coloring pictures in and then the next book, Scot hustles in and you put little ticks on what they've got in them, so that people can compare products.
Cameron Scot
That's a great idea is Yeah, so like the A+ content, if you've ever been on anybody watching, if you've ever seen a product page, and you scroll down and their description keeps going, they have really nice pictures and all the different infographic type stuff. That's your A+ content. Now I want to ask with because with if you're selling on Seller Central, so like the FBA, FBM, you need to be brand registered. So you need a trademark and be brand registered to give access to that A+ content as well. Some other benefits as well to be brand registered, but that's one of the bigger ones is having A+ content is that a requirement with KDP?
Janice Papworth
No, you put them in books. So if you wanted to sometimes people like collections as well. So if you had, say a notebook with the floor or cover, you might also choose to do your graph paper with the floor or cover. And then you could put your on your A+ content, you can put the other book alongside. So you have your two books together. And then once you've made your A+ content for one book, you copy, you basically take the book she wanted to appear on. So it's the same on all of them. Or supposing we had a book for kids aged two to three, and then you had a bit of follow on. But for kids aged three to four and one for kids aged four to five, you could make A+ content with all three books going across the bottom of your page, and then display it on all the all the books.
Cameron Scot
That sounds great, so that you get the cross marketing. And yeah, that book is something that or something that they're not quite looking for. But it's close, they got other options. So you're still getting the sale or buying multiple as well. I would point out with the A+ as well. One of the big benefits there is how much more room in it for description and keywords, specifically that you have for this for SEO purchase purposes. So you, you just have more opportunity to fill your product with even more keywords to appear on more search terms because Amazon does index, which what I mean by index is that you appear for a search term, that means your index for it if you're appearing for it. So you have an opportunity to appear for even more search terms than you would just because you don't have as much room. So you can do a little bit more. I don't wanna say keyword stuffing, but just you know, more opportunity.
Janice Papworth
Or you might know more than me, but I think Google indexes the A+ content as well,
Cameron Scot
That I'm not sure of, I would assume so I would be surprised if they didn't.
Janice Papworth
Well, we're on keywords. I was going to say of course with KDP. We get seven back end keywords that we can throw out as well. And I think they're absolutely crucial for your auto ads because Amazon's using those to determine who to show your auto ads to in the first place
Cameron Scot
You beat me to it. So I was actually going to ask a question if you could share your best practices when it comes to SEO and kind of how that impacts your advertising. So we'll just kind of jump right into that. So sorry to cut you off. But yeah, let's, uh, well, yeah, let's talk about that. Because I agree like SEO, not as not everybody thinks of advertising and SEO together. And they're very much connected.
Janice Papworth
Well, I've done I've done a free SEO course, when I did the blog, you see, so I had some inkling about SEO. I mean, I wouldn't say I'm an SEO expert, but I could see that the keywords are crucial. So the title and the subtitle of a book really, really matter, and you can't change them once the books gone live. But you can change your back end keywords. And that's where people go wrong. I mean, I think, first of all, they don't fill them up. So you've got a cut, remember, 49-50 characters for each one, and you've got seven boxes, and Amazon mix and matches the keywords within each box. So you need to fill them up, you can't just put a coloring book, you've got to put unicorn coloring book for girls, kids will, it will mix and match them all up so that you've then you're listed for unicorn coloring book, coloring book for girls coloring book for kids, unicorn coloring book for girls, unicorn coloring book for kids.
Cameron Scot
Having a broader... Yeah, search term. So you're appearing on more search terms, because the more search terms you appear on, like we talked about earlier is, the more opportunity the more traffic you have available to your listing.
Janice Papworth
And then there's another putting unicorn coloring book as well, in the second keyword term, you've got to think of something else, which can be tricky depending on the book.
Cameron Scot
Not duplicating your keywords. Because Amazon once a keywords kind of in your listing somewhere like you don't need to keep repeating it necessarily. I guess the one thing I will point out is that the exception would be the title of your what pretty much whatever product, the title has the most SEO juice, it sends the strongest signal to Amazon of hey, this is what this product is. And even further is that first half of the title, whatever comes first is going to have that strongest SEO signal to Amazon and help you rank more for that. Those keywords that you have in that title.
Janice Papworth
I know. So I think people do sometimes forget that we spell things differently in the UK. So if I write you know, humor, I'll also write it with the UK spelling as well, to get both words in. I don't know if found this on works that out itself, but maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
Cameron Scot
They do like misspellings, I don't know if they consider a misspelling or not. But I have a similar tip. For the US, the US has a lot of Spanish speakers, and where you can have Spanish and you're listening to to index for Spanish search terms, which a lot of people don't do. So if you're looking to kind of increase some of that search term volume, or number of keywords you're indexing for, that'd be an option as well is putting some Spanish in your listing. This was from a podcast, I'm gonna give a shout out to the ad badger podcast even though they're a competitor to us, but they do have a great podcast and I'm a big proponent of just learning from everybody you can just kind of absorbing it and doing what you can with that information. And it was Steven Pope, I believe was on there from My Amazon Guy. He's a Amazon consultant. But according to him the images in your A+ content, like the alternative text form, so it's not a doesn't appear to the customers are on your page, but those index as well. So it's an area where okay, maybe you don't want to like have Spanish in your listing, for example, you can put some Spanish in your all image tags and still gets indexed there. I haven't tested this. So this is just kind of like passing on. Some things I've I've heard, maybe it's a rumor, but Steven Pope is pretty well respected in the space. So I another option as well to increase your footprint for your product. How much time would you say you spend per week managing your campaigns? Or what was your frequency look like when it comes to optimizing your campaigns or bids? Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Janice Papworth
I use smart bid for my testing and performance ads. Although I have a little delve every now and again to check there. Okay, so what I do is I usually run through my ads on once a week on a Monday and I changed the bids myself on the auto ads depending on whether they are within ACOS or not. If the cost is profitable or not basically, then I tweaked them. But I don't use Merch Jar to tweak the auto ads because I was running into problems where it kept turning them down or turning them up, it didn't know when to stop, if that makes sense. Yeah,
Cameron Scot
Yep, it does. It does for smart bids which frame on not using Merch Jar or not using smart bids, smart bids is an automation where it adjust bids really slowly for any target. So like keywords or your auto targeting groups, and for targets that are getting at least a couple orders within a certain timeframe. And regarding like we have ran into, we actually have a pretty big change coming up with this smart bids, just our the way bids are adjusted in general, because we did run into it, where it would keep adjusting low bids, for example, when there wasn't necessarily enough data to make those changes. So we have some upcoming changes that that won't over optimize them so much. So it sounds like once a week, on average, you're jumping in and maybe making some manual changes, and then kind of have some automations with Merch Jar are going with the smart bids for the bid optimization, okay,
Janice Papworth
I've got the smart bids going on the keywords, just not the auto ads, because I knew, you know, in electrical, they weren't doing quite what I wanted. And it could have been the way I set them up. I mean, I you know, I might not have done it, right. But it just wasn't quite working for me. But it is on the keywords. And then as we get nearer to quarter four, that's all I do is ads, really I just check them because if you're spending a lot of money a day, and I, I was spending a lot of money a day, you need to check the shipping times every day to make sure they've stopped shipping, or to wake up in the morning, they'd have run out of money overnight. I was checking them just before I went to bed and to see if they were still in budget. Also to you know, just to make sure they were still profitable. And that Amazon sometimes it picks something very, very generic, you know, Fox stuff or something like that. And then you're thinking, oh my god, it's bidding 31 cents on Fox stuff, I think I might either turn that down or turn that off. Because that's just way too generic. You know, it's costing me a fortune on that one keyword. And then smart bid is not turning it down fast enough. Because it's not this doesn't realize it's just like gift for men or something. It's just bidding way over high on that. Because...
Cameron Scot
Yeah, there's no context to it, right, like, it's not going to know is like, oh, that's broad, you know, very generic, you know, funny t shirt kind of thing. There's no way to program that. Um, but I think you highlight a good point is like even when you're using automations. Like there's they they can work really well and save a lot of time where you're not having to do all this, like tedious stuff. And they can get you close to kind of what your targets are your tech target ACOS. But I still even if you're running automations, you should still be going into your ad accounts. Once a week is probably pretty similar I do I'm doing maybe a little bit more now with kind of like the restarting of ads in January, just pop in and maybe every few days. And I'm still making some manual adjustments, kind of just kind of correcting the ship a little bit. And making helping kind of speed up that optimization. Because if something's like way off, even if you haven't automation, generally, we recommend any kind of changes to be pretty small, incremental changes. But if you can see you're like way off on something or it's something is like, Hey, I got 5% A costs on this target. And it's got 15 orders, let's bump that bid like up, you know, 30% and just kind of see what happens because it's obviously converting well, or whatever, where that might have taken maybe a couple of weeks to happen with an automation. And the other thing is just kind of like getting familiar with your ad account and what's being targeted for your different products, looking at your search terms, just kind of get a feel for what's going on, the more you get it in into your ad account, you're just going to have a better grasp of just hey, here's what's going on with my Amazon account. And here's what's what's working, here's what's not search terms that are not to mention just the product research opportunities as well, especially for Merch or KDP, where we can create products kind of on the fly and on demand using your search terms to see what people are searching for. And I know I've been able to find search I've seen search terms and there's like oh, I've never thought about that. Let's let's create some products around the search term.
Janice Papworth
Biscuit tins next quarter 4 on Cameron...
Cameron Scot
Yeah, T shirts. Yeah, it's 10,000 other people. So but that's yeah, that's, that's one of the better way. One of the best ways these are search terms as well as Yeah, just like your product research. Like we're in print on demand. So take advantage of that in any way you can and use those search terms like you're paying for that data you're using use it in every way possible. So yeah.
Janice Papworth
Merch Jar did the heavy lifting for me. I was only looking at the outliers really? And then the brilliant thing oh my goodness, Cameron. You saved me so much time because you getting nearer to Christmas. So I've got 101 other things to do, you know, apart from KDP and Merch. And then of course, the shipping stops, I've got to turn the bid stuff fast. Otherwise, we're just spending money because people are clicking on it, and then realizing they're not going to get it in time. And that's costing me money. And so the minute that we got to the shipping, I was able to go into Merch Jar, and dial the budgets down to dial all the keywords down. Just like in seconds, really, I could have been saved for days, I think.
Cameron Scot
Yeah, using if you're using. Yeah, and I did the same thing go in and just an 80% drop in all my bids just across everything, except my hero products. Because what ended up happening with Merch, I don't know if this happened with KDP. But there's almost different prioritization based on your sales volume. So with Merch had, if you had better best selling products, those were selling for almost a week longer than every other product. And I had two that that ended up for, so I could remove. So even though I was kind of doing 80%, across the board, I didn't want to reduce bids on or bid budgets on stuff that was still selling. So I was able to just hey, don't, you know, let's remove these ASINs from our results. And we're going to just cut everything else.
Janice Papworth
I did think it went on later this year, I'd I've kept a note of the BSR last year. And when they stopped shipping, and I also kept I also marked on that because like I said, I checked the BSR every morning, and like marked when I'd got badges and things like that. And everything I said to to my husband, you know, I'm working. I think that was two weeks earlier on everything this year, because of the ads, I think because I was harvesting the keywords. So when I hit, you know, and got a certain badge on it last quarter four I was doing that two weeks earlier this year.
Cameron Scot
That's amazing. So that's another good point. As far as like the way you're doing is pretty manual. I don't know if there's really a great way to track like badges and stuff. Other than that, I do want to point out just with Merch Jar, that we do store all of your search term data on our servers, where on Amazon, if you're just using an console, you can only see the last 65 days of your search term data. So when it comes to this next Q4, you want to be able to go back and look at the Q4 we just went we're in and see what was performing. Because the search terms are going to be different, there's gonna be like kind of holiday specific search terms that aren't performing throughout the whole year that you want to focus on in target this upcoming Q4 in 2022, the things that we're working in Merch Jar makes that easy to just go back to whatever date range you want, and see what the performance was of your search terms or your campaigns, the keywords, and you can take those performing keywords and run campaigns against those are coming as well where they may not perform all year, but they do in the holidays. And the reason I point this out is because of kind of timing with the API is we're able to look at the last 60 days of data. So once we get 60 days out, Mercer can't bring in that data anymore. That's all Amazon gives us. And we're still in that 60 day range for this past holiday season. So you can we can grab all that data for you. We'll save it and we'll just keep adding to it. So you'll always have that data to go back and reference. And not that you can't do that all with Amazon, you there's ways you can do it's just not super easy at the download reports that come in Excel spreadsheets. So there's a lot of manual work that we just take care of for you, which is kind of the whole idea with Merch Jar just saving time. But I was going to ask you, you've actually been one of your one of our earlier Merch Jar users since we were in beta earlier this earlier this year, or last year, I should say. And you've kind of already talked about already, how Merch Jar has helped save you time. Is there any other areas that helped you save your time or manage your campaigns? Or do you have a favorite Merch jar feature?
Janice Papworth
I think the brilliant thing was that I was allowed to try it for 30 days before I had to pay any money because you know there's so many things out there and sometimes I try them I think it's just not working for me or it doesn't you know I don't understand it or doesn't fit me and you know, you can try it for 30 days can't use see how..
Cameron Scot
You can, yep, absolutely free no credit card required. So to make sure absolutely.
Janice Papworth
You've got nothing to lose really. And I've that really you know did like that. I don't think I use it properly. I don't use recipes. I probably don't use any of the fancy features because I need I need some more videos Cameron to explain it to me.
Cameron Scot
It's in progress.
Janice Papworth
I can make myself another little crib sheet because that's what I've got. And I've got you know, I can't do it without that. And I'm just using the basic that I understood what I meant to be doing because you told me you specifically do this and I finally got to Q4. And you were like, This is how to turn down all your ads. I thank goodness for that I show me so and then I'm doing and following along, I've got two monitors, I've got you on one of them. And I'm doing it on the other one. Because otherwise, I haven't got time to learn at to that extent, I do try and learn from traditional authors as well, because when I started KDP, there was the matches weren't doing it. And so I had traditional authors that I followed on YouTube and Mark. And I also found this guy called Robert J. Ryan, who's written a book called Amazon ads unleashed. And although a lot of what he said doesn't apply to people who are KDP is some of its ebooks and where they release a series and that sort of thing. But some of what he says on that is extremely interesting, and not things I've heard before. So for example, he says that Amazon don't take a lot of notice of your ads until you're spending $100 a day. And he talks about if you're targeting a lot of keywords that you need to be spending a reasonable amount of money because otherwise Amazon can't target all those keywords with the budget you've set. Because nutshells let me target a lot of keywords have had to up the budget, which probably doesn't answer your question. I don't tend to use the dashboard very much in Merch Jar because it kind of goes up and down and it looks red, it looks green, I don't know, looks reasonable to me.
Cameron Scot
Honestly, it sounds like you're using like the most important features. Because I mean, we have all these like features and recipes, is our big flagship feature that we're building out that that is a newer one, that we're still building out that functionality. I don't do a ton with recipes, I have a few that I run, but you're kind of using the most important ones like the promotions where it's automatically moving those keywords from one campaign to another, I would say that's probably the most time saving feature in Merch Jar in my opinion, just because of how tedious it is to do that in AD coms. Because I have done that before we even we had that feature, because when we watched your beta that didn't even exist. To do that it was pretty much just bulk, your bulk actions of changing your your bids, but yeah, it sounds like you're doing all the right things already. So you don't have to complicate I think that speaks to the like, you don't need to do like the most complicated things with Amazon ads to find success with it.
Janice Papworth
I'm quite interested in the recipes, because I don't really understand what I'm doing with them. But what you're letting people do is people who do understand what they're doing with them, you're letting them create recipes on those that I can then use.
Cameron Scot
Yep. So recipe worlds, we just launched that a week or two ago, not too long ago. But that's exactly that where people can submit recipes. And I'll put a link to where you can submit recipes through we're actually running a contest as well, which I'm going to bring up until the end of the month for everybody that submits a recipe and every one that we publish, because we're going to review to make sure it's not something we've duplicated, or it's something that's functional works. Everyone that we publish, you're going to get credit to your Merch Jar account. And whoever's recipes, they submit that we like the most, by the end of the month, we're going to give you a 25,000 coin credit, which is $150 value.
Janice Papworth
People who know more about us than me who are clever in that aspect, that I can use their knowledge. And this is what, what I enjoy about this is you can take knowledge from different people. So I'm hoping people will have some YouTube up that says this is my recipe, this is how it works my recipes on that show. And I'll say, oh, that's exactly what I need, I can use their recipe from Merch Jar. And I don't have to think it up myself.
Cameron Scot
That's 100% what we envision is kind of that collaborative, and social sharing. So you know, someone like an RJ that you mentioned, can have their own recipe collection that you can download right from our recipe world is what we're calling it. And you can import those right into your account. So that's 100% what we're doing.
Janice Papworth
It's like having your own advertising manager who's an expert in advertising without having to pay them so much, you know.
Cameron Scot
That's honestly a great point hiring someone to run your ads usually it's off of some percentage of sales and it's really hard to justify when you're not spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month and advertising so for and that's that's 100% what we wanted to build his hat and base our pricing off of is just having it accessible to everybody, no matter their budget.
Janice Papworth
I mean, it's worth it, isn't it because I think that sales have increased enough to justify the cost of well easily to justify the cost of Merch Jar.
Cameron Scot
We appreciate that. Yeah, that's 100% of all everything goes right back into Development every single dollar we get to development and servers to make the best product that we can and to provide the value that, you know, that we're asking for. So if we're asking for money, we definitely want to, and you're paying for our service, we want to make sure that service over delivers, that's 100% our goal at this point site can be right for everybody, depending on what exactly you need. But that's why we give the 30 day free trial to make sure it is. But if you do want to support Merch Jar, or subscribing buying or coin bundles, definitely the best way to do it. And that's going right back into the developments, we can keep building out these features and make it more flexible, and more powerful.
Janice Papworth
It's not just something that's selling, you know, thousands a day, it's some of the T shirts that I've used and harvested the keywords on the ones that have particular occasions, they've sort of doubled their sales as well. And so if you're making, I don't know, $200 on it, but then you make it $400 It's worth it, isn't it? Because all those extra dollars add up?
Cameron Scot
They do. Yeah, that's the kind of aggregate and kind of where a lottery campaigns kind of the idea with that comes in as well. It's just kind of having, you know, a large product base that sells you know, on an individual level, one product only sells maybe once every three months, every six months or whatever, but in aggregate, and you're running ads to all these, it really adds up.
Janice Papworth
And that was interesting in quarter four, because you see something sell, but it's on the T shirts and the books. And I say, well, goodness, that's never so before I forgotten, I made that. And then I said, Oh, it must be that lottery campaign. And again, have a look at it was.
Cameron Scot
For those people that are just getting started. For the first time? What advice would you give them?
Janice Papworth
I think you have to start small, I would pick a product that's already selling and preferably one that's already got reviews. And start with that you start with an auto campaign at $5-$10. You don't start big by any stretch of imagination, because you've got to see what works and what doesn't. It is a learning process. And it's a testing process. Really, you can't just jump in with 100, at $100 a day ad, can you? The lottery campaign, I would say to start with those as well, because they are low cost. And they're low bids as well. We start at five cents, don't we? That's what you told me to do. That's what I did.
Cameron Scot
Yeah, it's exactly what I would say, you've definitely watched my videos.
Janice Papworth
So I just do what I'm told, because I'm making books, really, and you're my advertising manager aren't you. So we start the five cents, we start at the $10 a day or whatever, and see what happens. And then those products that do sell that have got reviews, or you know, you know, in your head, if you've already got an established account, what your best sellers are, you must do. I mean, I know I've got one coming up for Valentine's Day and and so I've already got that one on the auto the testing under performance campaigns. That's how you start and you start even those you start low with a with a budget, and then see how it goes. And once you've got it into profit below your your ACOS is below your what it should be, then you wrap your budget.
Cameron Scot
Last question for you. How was your success on Amazon changed your life or your plans for the future.
Janice Papworth
I've got, I've got Well, young adults now. And you know, I've been a stay at home mums. So as they've got older, when I used to do contests actually to keep my brain going when they were younger. You know, you couldn't contest and even America competitions, I used to win things. And we didn't pay tax on it in the UK. So that was quite good. But it just kind of put a bit of icing on the family cake. And so I was looking for something I could do from home that will keep my brain going, that will put a bit of icing on the family cake. But this is like really put a lot of icing on the cake. And so I'm able to help help my son's more and I'm also but I'm able to work when I want and that's the thing. If you know if it's a sunny day and I want to go to the beach, I can do that. Or if you know my dad's got problem and I've got to go and help him then I I'm not having to explain to somebody or can I have an hour off this afternoon to go do so and so I didn't have to do that and the money is still coming in. I don't have to worry about that. And it gives you such freedom in your life to live your life the way you want to live it really want to be able to help your family around you. And that's what this has given me Merch and KDP and I'm so grateful and every Christmas I email KDP and I email Merch and I say thank you for giving me this opportunity because it's amazing. And you can't learn about Amazon really because, you know they've given us this amazing chance to earn money from home as and when we want working as someone we want. And that's incredible.
Cameron Scot
Well congratulations on Your Q4 success. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this with me. I think this is going to be incredibly valuable for our audience. I look forward to doing this this time next year and hear about your Q4 success this year and just blown it out of the water seeing you on the beach to do that, again. Thank you so much.
Janice Papworth
Thank you, Cameron for having me. It's been very interesting. And I really love Merch Jar. I'm going to keep on using it because it's helping me loads.
Cameron Scot
Thanks so much.
Cameron 00:00
In this video, I sat down with merch by Amazon Seller Andrei Morant, who more than tripled his merch by Amazon royalties in just one year with the help of Amazon ads. All right, Andrei, we got Andrei on the channel today. Andrei, thanks so much for coming on. It's great to have you here. Andrei posted in the group a week or so ago about his results in last year 2021 versus 2020 and had some incredible results. So here to pick his brain a little bit and ask some questions about his success last year and advertising goals for this year, and so forth. So, Andrei, thanks so much for being on.
Andrei 00:47
Hey, man, thanks for having me.
Cameron 00:49
Absolutely. I think it'd be helpful, we just kind of jumped right in. And if you could just kind of give everybody an insight on kind of what your Amazon journey looked like, and how you got started, how long you been selling on Amazon, all that good stuff.
Andrei 01:02
Okay. Um, so I guess for me, I really was spending like, way too much time playing video games. And that wasn't making me any money. So, I kind of decided that I would take that time, and figure out a way to make like, some extra money online, like, you know, like a lot of people do, did a lot of searching, you know, YouTube videos and all that stuff. And basically, came to the conclusion that there's not a whole lot unless you want to try to teach other people how to make money online. Because that's pretty much what everybody is selling, you know. So, I just happened upon a POD thing. And I think it was something like Teespring, or something. And this was, like, I think, May 2016, something like that. I had no idea how to do any of this. No Photoshop skills, no Illustrator skills, and nothing like that. Never, never had done it before. And then just started using some rudimentary designer, like online designer thing. Decided I would start putting shirts on Teespring, which, of course, I never got any sales, because you don't really get many, unless you're advertising through Facebook, then I just happened upon, I don't know where it was, I don't know if it was a YouTube video or something that mentioned Merch by Amazon. And I was like, hey, you know, this sounds really cool. And at that point, to get on the program, you had to send in an email. And it could be anywhere from six-to-six months to a year to get sure to get accepted. And back in the day, Chris Green was really like, involved in it. And he had set up this webinar to where if you watch the webinar, and submitted your email, saying that you did watch it, then they would automatically approve you. So, I got approved in like six days, which is ridiculous. And started my actual merch journey on September 1, 2016, at tier 25.
Cameron 03:07
So, a little bit of a head start compared to these days.
Andrei 03:10
Yeah. And actually, I gave myself a hell of a head start because I bought my way to 500. Immediately. I just bought 100 shirts at because they were, I forget what the price was, I forgot what I spent. It was something I don't know, just over 1200 bucks, something like that. Okay, but it was September 1, you know, and you're coming into the fourth quarter. And Merch by Amazon was, you know, basically a brand-new thing had been one year. I think it started in 2015. And, you know, people were telling me, that's the wrong thing to do. And you don't do that. And I was like, no, I'm doing it. So, you know, that fourth quarter I ended up sell, I don't know how many shirts, but I made like $2,000 So, you know, I went ahead and made my money back. And then I was set up for the next year, you know, just to start really focusing on it. So, I had to watch YouTube videos, teach myself how to use Photoshop and do all that stuff. I basically do all my own designs. I enjoy it. So that's very cool. I continue to do it. did really well say you know 2017 was really surprised and you know, really pumped and then I guess more and more competition came on it and then I started like, you know, just kind of pushing it to the backburner and all that. But have always continued to work on it never really left it completely. I forget, like I got teared up to like 1000 I think probably in July of 2017 or something like that, which was really cool. And then pretty steady up to then but my sales every year were 2500 Something like that, you know, not a huge amount and then you know the royalties were going down Every year too, so we're making less and less and less. And it just, you know, begins to be kind of almost not worth it. But like I said, I enjoyed doing it. So, I kept doing it. And I mean, who doesn't like an extra 500 bucks a month or six months anyway, so
Cameron 05:14
Absolutely never hurts.
Andrei 05:16
Yeah. So, again, it's either that playing video games or doing that. And so, you know, I chose that instead. And then I dabbled in some advertising, I think what year was that? 2019?
Cameron 05:32
Like the code in the bottom that you had to like, yeah, register or whatever it was back?
Andrei 05:37
Absolutely. Yeah. And then, so I dabbled in in that didn't know what I was doing. It was just doing auto ads and did it through the fourth quarter. I saw some results on it. But you know, I wasn't entirely sure if the results had anything to do with the ads, or it had to do with just fourth quarter. Because you know, everything is just traffic's crazy. Yeah, way more traffic than and then. So, the following year, I guess. 2020. You know, 2020 was it was kind of a crazy year. Yeah. I don't want to cuss but yeah. So
Cameron 06:14
We kind of thought we'll do it; we'll add some beliefs or something.
Andrei 06:17
But, yeah, I had free time, like everybody else is you weren't doing much, but then didn't really do any advertising kind of backed off of it, because I didn't understand it. And I just like a lot of people, especially new people who get into it, they just think that they're wasting money doing it. And then I saw a post, right, January 2021, from Mark Shaggy. And he was showing his results, just from January. And it was basically his sales were double what he spent on his ads. And there was a lot of people saying, that's crazy. He spent way too much money on ads. And I'm like, wait a minute, you know, if you give me say $5,000? And I give you 10? I mean, would you not do that every day?
Cameron 07:06
You'd find all the money you could like, um, Brian brought that up, because I actually got a lot of flak with that as well, when earlier on in my merch career where I was posting some numbers, and yeah, always got flagged for how much I was spending. And I was like, well, I mean, even if I'm losing money on ads, it's still it's more money. Yeah.
Andrei 07:23
And that's one of the things that I'll always try to tell people on site. It's not what you spend on the ads, or, or it's not the sales that you get from the ads directly. It's, it's, it's the culmination of everything. And it the evidence is, I mean, for me, it's, you know, just right in my face. I mean, it's crazy.
Cameron 07:47
Yeah, it’s really very much an investment. And yeah, I, in my opinion, Amazon advertising is really unique in that fact, versus other ad platforms, where it's very much just the return on ad spend that you get. And that's it where Amazon, that not only do you have that return on ad spend, but you have a return in ranking as well, that increase in ranking, where you get more organic traffic versus something like Facebook, you're not going to get more organic traffic, just because you're spending more on ads. It just doesn't work that way. No, it does. Yeah.
Andrei 08:19
Yeah. So very obvious. I mean, you go to Amazon to buy something, you don't go to Facebook to buy something. And so, if you're going to put ads somewhere, you put them where the people are shopping.
Cameron 08:30
Yeah. 100% like that buyer intent versus Facebook. You're not there whatsoever. That's annoying side of things.
Andrei 08:38
Right. Right. Right. Absolutely.
Cameron 08:40
So, you're in 2020. So how 2020 Go, and then we'll get into 2020.
08:44 2020 was it was down from 2019. And I think it was down for everybody, I think in 2019, and they're like 22,000 in sales. I don't know that the total number of shirts that I sold in 2020. I did 15,340 total sales with 3,531. I average like 430 for sale. Most of my shirts that sell our kind of shirts, and I've had it for quite a while. So, you know, I'm comfortable keeping the price at basically 19.99. Let's see 2021 Now, but I started advertising, I think like right around February 1 Right after because like I said Mark had posted that, that screenshot of his January results, which are crazy January results,
Cameron 09:43
Really, you know, slowest month of the year.
Andrei 09:46
Yeah. And I was like, I got to get on this. So, I opened up the app platform again and started, you know, dabbling in that. And the clunky bulky Amazon ads platform, especially for a beginner, is, there's way too much clicking going on. Because you're moving from page to page to page to page, just to do you know, these simple little tasks that should just be one clicks.
Cameron 10:16
It was not designed for merch, the typical merch seller whatsoever. Yeah, it's like FBA, or something that maybe has, like six products. Right? Exactly. Six products are like, hardly anything for a merch seller. That's like, three minutes of uploading. Yeah, absolutely.
Andrei 10:32
Um, and so I was doing well, and, um, but basically just running auto ads. And I had, I was too scared, really to do any negative keywords or a negative product or anything, because I didn't understand it enough, especially like phrase broad and exact, and all that. Not that I didn't want to start just cutting out, you know, search terms that possibly could get me sales. And I still didn't know the say, like, like, how many clicks on some search term? Should be when should I turn it off for you know, I didn't know I didn't want to mess anything up. So, I just kind of left them going. And some weird and you probably experienced this, but I think it was like May 15. There was some strange like, algorithm change or something to where all of a sudden, nothing was working. And a lot of people were mentioning something like something happened. Like that day, you can see your traffic from your ads, like impressions. Were down, sales were down. And then I got freaked out and did the rookie mistake of just archiving all my campaigns. Yeah, yeah.
Cameron 11:47
So, what have you learned? Yeah, you'll do a one time..
Andrei 11:53
Never do that. Yeah. So, I basically had to start over, and, like, I left it like about a week and I was like, What the hell am I doing, you know, went back and restarted all my campaign. So. So essentially, I don't want to say all this success that I had from advertising was only in six months, but all of the ads that, you know, that ran me through the fourth quarter. Were only, you know, five and a half, six months old.
Cameron 12:22
Wow. Yeah. Well, that goes to show how quickly they can make a huge difference. So, what do you end up doing in 2021 versus 2020 then?
Andrei 12:34
So, in 2021, royalties were 48,444.37.
Cameron 12:41
48,000. Yeah. 2020. You said it was about 5,340? Yeah. So, 300% increase year over year? Yeah, I think well, we'll take those numbers.
Andrei 12:52
Yeah. Well, so my ad spend was 15. But okay, so that left me more than 100 100%. Right. After Yeah, after the ad spent in a costume. Right. Which if you don't take that, you know, you got to be crazy. I mean, it just blew me away. I mean, I was thinking, you know, maybe I'll maybe 30,000 Something like that. But nowhere near 50. I mean, I was really close to 50 with the UK and all that. But sure. I don't really focus on that too much. US market
13:30 Pretty much. Yeah, same here. I mean, it's it blows pretty much every other market away and not saying that people
Andrei 13:37
do really well. And I don't understand how they do it. But I think that's really,
Cameron 13:41
you know, knowing the Yeah, and you know, us being in the United States probably helps us know, the US audience better just, you know, it's all about creating a product that people want. Yeah. That's amazing. So as merch by Amazon, pretty much the only platform that you're selling on Amazon, are you dabbling with any other?
Andrei 13:59
So, have Etsy and my Etsy store? I think in 2019, actually, in 2019, did about 8,500, or something like that. This year? did. I didn't focus on it at all this year. And most of my listings, you know, they kind of come off after a while. Most of your former on Yeah, yeah. And so, most of them came off. And I think for most of the year, I had about 170 on there, and I did about I'd say about 6000 Okay, so in royalties, yeah, that's not bad, but.. It's worth the customer service. side of things that's always turned me off, I guess from Etsy is or is it you know, some of these other platforms as you're much more involved with the customer versus Merch by Amazon? It's as hands off as you can possibly get. Yeah. So, another thing about Etsy and like, people give me hell for this, but I turned my score off of on December 8th. And I do that every year, because all these other people who are like December 9th and 12th, and 15th, and they're all their customers, you know, our email on him and screaming at them and giving them, you know, one-star reviews because their stuff isn't showing up. Sure. And you know, their stores are getting shut down. And I'm like, look, this is just side money for me. And I understand if that's your only gig, but I'm not dealing with that headache. You know,
Cameron 15:27
You don't need another job to..
Andrei 15:28
Yeah, absolutely.
Cameron 15:30
So, after the holidays, especially, right?
Andrei 15:32
Right, right, right. Absolutely. So, you know, and even turning it off on December 8, because I use Printful as my fulfillment. Okay, I had one shirt that they have a print facility in Canada, but they chose to use the one US to send to Canada, and it got ordered on the eighth and made it on the 23rd. Just like, please, please just let that one gets there. That's the last one. But it's not. That's not for me, man. So, I just focus on merch, you know, 99.9% of the time?
Cameron 16:07
Yeah, it's done well for, and I mean, just I think that speaks kind of that growth engine that comes with just Amazon and having those you kind of brought up your best sellers, which Yeah, in 2021. Were your best sellers, some of your older listings as well as that primarily.
Andrei 16:21
Yeah. So, what I did was I went through with productor, and then sorted by review, count, and then used review count to make ads for, you know, everything that had I mean, over one or two? I mean, if it had pretty much, I mean, made an ad for it.
Cameron 16:41
That's a great way to start. That's what I'd recommend to for anyone just getting started with ads, you know, you're not really sure. Hey, what should I even start advertising for? That's perfect. Start with your best reviewed products. Yeah. Because that's like the Holy Grail, in my opinion, is reviews and the number of reviews. And until you reach, you know, a certain threshold, your products just aren't going to rank as well. Customers are not going to convert as well. To have those higher rankings.
Andrei 17:06
Right. All right. All right. So funny enough, so I was watching one of your live streams, and you were talking about like your best seller, which pretty sure I know what it is. Yeah, I'm not saying anything.
Cameron 17:23
If people knew honestly, like, it doesn't really matter, there's 1000s, it doesn't matter.
Andrei 17:28
Right. So, I mean, that's exactly what you were saying. And I'll be the first to admit that, hey, I've done that shirt. And there's a reason my shirt never got traction. And it's because of the number of reviews that you had and the ads that you've been running to it. And the tailor ads and you know, it..
Cameron 17:47
It adds on your product to this.
Andrei 17:49
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's the advantage. And it's just a boost that you can't get with just regular SEO. I mean, some people can, I'm not that good at SEO so..
Cameron 18:03
Well, even that your kind of putting it in the hands of Amazon. And at the end of the day, Amazon only cares about what's selling, right. So, if ads are selling, that's going to still boost it. Sure, you're getting in front of customers and with how many products are now merged. I don't even know how many there's got to be 50 plus..
Andrei 18:22
It's insane. I mean, years ago, I was boggled by how many had to be on there. But today, it's I don't know. It's just crazy.
Cameron 18:35
Yeah. And every move they've made that just kind of speaks to kind of the direction. Amazon's going, at least in my opinion, where I mean, they've recently gone through and tiered tons of people up the recent change where how they change how they count, like, what your tier is where it's now on. Yeah, he designs versus total products. I mean, that increase it was by like, 64 times overnight.
Andrei 18:59
I wish they would have let me tear it before they did that.
Cameron 19:02
Same same.
Andrei 19:05
Yeah, because I'm actually like, I think two years ago, I had, like 18,000 live designs or something like that. I was just a design machine just putting things out. Oh, well also, yeah, because every product counted is a design as well. So, I'm on tier 20,000 And I was at something like I forget, I was like 2,000 sales away from being able to tier up and I had my threshold over 80% And then they decided to change the whole thing.
Cameron 19:46
To see, I don't know that like there's been enough time to see kind of what the direction which I've never really shared, how the tier up system works. So, this is all speculation you have your 80% of slots filled and sales like that's been, it seems to seem to have been the case. Historically, but we really don't know what that's going to look like going forward will surely change. So, it'll be interesting to see kind of what...
Andrei 20:07
And also, a thing that doesn't really matter to me anymore. Because I've got, I have 4,100 designs, and you know, I've got 20,000 design slots, and design slots aren't as important to me anymore with the ads, because you're not just firing in the dark now, you can you can make an ad, a design, you know, that is good, and run ads to it and tailor that and get that momentum. I'm not so focused on the number of things that I upload, this year, I've uploaded the least amount that that I ever have, I'd say maybe, maybe three or 400. This year, and a decent amount of them have gotten traction, just through running ads, everything I uploaded this year, I ran an ad to okay, you know,
Cameron 21:11
How are you running ads to that? Were you doing like a single ASIN type campaign or more of a lottery campaign?
Andrei 21:16
Yeah, so I never did a lottery campaign until like, mid-November, which Okay, probably a mistake to wait that long, but I didn't really know anything about it. And I think I saw something in some of the Facebook groups talking about it, and then ran it. One of the hard parts about that is one of my big niches is the beer niche. And so, you can't really run ads to that. So that's true. I have to export all my products, and then go through the Excel sheet and delete each one individually. And of course, you miss them, you know, and so I had something like, I forget 24 I don't want to say strikes, but they just said Hey...
Cameron 22:05
Yeah, like were they ineligible or what? Yeah, I don't know, I guess, in my opinion, and, you know, take this with a grain of salt, of course, because Amazon's such Yes, locks, but right, right. I don't think they're as harsh on what those strikes is like, compared to like, merch by Amazon. Right. Right. And for sure. I don't think they're going to close your count. Like you're giving them money. Yeah, keep giving them money.
Andrei 22:27
Yeah. But you know, it's..
Cameron 22:29
I wouldn't go crazy. I would do, I would still do like your due diligence, kind of. And I can't say we do have some things on the roadmap to help with that. So, no dates or anything yet. But yeah, that's definitely a focus is, you know, I'm in there everyday too. And I have the same kind of challenges. So, it's something we, you know, pain points, I feel as well that we're right to tackle. So. Just a heads up on that. So can't wait. Yeah. So as far as like, so you kind of mentioned how many products you have? What would you say most of your sales come from just a handful of products? Or is that kind of more evenly distributed across your whole product line?
Andrei 23:07
Well, so in Q4, 60, products made 80% of my sales. And like I said, I've 41 Not products, I have 18,610 product live products, but almost all of them are. Anything that sells really is basically a standard tee the other products don't really sell that much. I have a few hoodies that do pretty well. But pretty much everything's a standard tee and like I said 60 of them made 80% of royalties in Q4, which is I mean, that's good for advertising because it's a little bit easier to intros.
Cameron 23:49
That's another good point. To bring up. I think some people are intimidated as well, well, I have 20,000 products, or whatever that number is like, how could I possibly create an ad for every single one? Like just think of the management of that, right? And don't like that's like, as simple as that is like, don't focus on your top sellers, the 80-20 rule. Right, and you know, start with your best sellers or best reviewed products, your most mature products, it just started going down the list, like as you have the time to do it.
Andrei 24:18
Yeah, absolutely. So, the lottery campaign works really well for that as well. Because you can just throw everything in there. And you just say, hey, look, I got ads for everything now. But then you just focus on your top sellers. And then when you start getting relatively consistent sales from the lottery campaign from something that that you hadn't sold in a year or two, then hey, maybe that's an, you know, a good idea to grab that and start running ads to that specifically.
Cameron 24:48
Have you seen any and maybe I'll just quickly for anybody that's watching this that isn't familiar with a lottery campaign? We I'll link a YouTube video that we did previously on just kind of what a lottery campaign is, but just so you're aware what we're talking about, it's just a single campaign with one ad group, and then you just put every single one of your products, every single one of your ASINs in a single ad group, and you just start with low bids, and you kind of increase those slowly over time. But the idea there is just to kind of get those cheap clicks and impressions across your entire product line. And they they've they work really well, in my experience, and from the experience, I've heard from a lot of other people. Have you had any surprises from lottery campaigns that you just didn't expect? I just sold from, you know, a couple years ago.
Andrei 25:32
Yeah, well, I'm really surprised that anything sells at a five-cent bid. And so, when, when I heard about the lottery campaign, if you were going to do in five cent bids, and I'm just like, ah, whatever, like, guess I mean, I'm not going to spend much so what, you know, what's the risk? And then, you know, consistently, it's just, you know, pumping in things. And it is funny, I don't check my lottery campaign that much, but just looking at like, say daily sales, there's stuff on there, that's like, you know, a surprise. It's, they really forgot it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's great. I love it. I will sort by, you know, sales, let's say, oh, every week or something, and check out something that is selling a lot and move that to the promotions format. And
Cameron 26:30
Okay, like, single ace in cam, yeah, you're more focused on that. Okay. Which is a great way. That's a great point with lottery campaigns as they act, not just to, like get sales really cheaply. Which one that my favorite thing is just going through the ads within a lottery campaign and then seeing like a 0.005% ACOS. Yeah, yeah, that's like free money practice. That's ridiculous. Yeah. But using it as like product harvesting to determine what your what ads to run. So not only like going by your best sellers, but just to be able to pick up say, hey, this is like this could be on to something or this product could have some opportunity here for additional sales. If we pump a little more ad, or little more ads spend into it with high bids and so forth, what you don't want to do necessarily, and you don't want to crank up your bids too much on lottery campaigns. That's that applies to everything.
Andrei 27:26
I've never gone above five cents. And it's just because there's so many ads in there. It just it just scares me a little bit. So
Cameron 27:34
Just one or two cents at a time. That's honestly, yeah, that's the approach I take. I started with, like four or five cents, and just like every five, seven days, and you know, oh, this one's doing pretty well. Let's bump that up, like one or two cents, and we'll play it by ear and so worth experimenting with you might be surprised.
Andrei 27:53
Yeah, so the funny thing is, I never even I've never opened up really that much. I've gone into the ad groups, and I've just sorted. I never even realized that I can just bump up each individual one, the bid. So, you just gave me a great idea. I just like blanket, bid everything at five cents and just left it at that. Is it possible?
Cameron 28:20
Within a lottery campaign the bid does apply to every ad because at the ad group level, so anything within a single ad group with an automatic campaign. Well, I guess manual to like the targeting is done at the ad group level. So, if you have five cent bidding 1,000 ads in it, the All 1,000 of those ads are going to have that five, five cent bids. Okay, that's it. Yes. I thought, well, that's why we pulled those out to kind of put in their own campaigns. So, you can you have that more focused. There are some other reasons too, like your search terms that your search term reports. So, seeing what a customer typed in and clicked on and bought with a lottery campaign or any campaign that has multiple ads in it, you can't tie that search term to what that ad was or what the product was. So, make assumptions. Like, if you're like, really pay attention, hey, that sold and you know, I made one sale that day. Yeah, right. Yeah. Hopefully, like we want to scale this up to you know, we're doing dozens and dozens, of course. So that's it's really hard to make that connection. Where if you have one ad and a campaign, well, every search term from that campaign is obviously going to that specific ad. But cool. So as far as with coming out of Q4 and kind of like obviously Q4 is like a huge deal for I'd say majority of sellers, anybody selling you know, any kind of gift or pretty much everybody? Yeah, what was the biggest challenge you would say you face during Q4 and achieving the success that you did and what would you say your biggest takeaways were to bring into this year before
Andrei 29:51
I really think what scared me was the ad spend, how quickly it ramps up. It's very easy. To shoot yourself in the foot by just like blanket lowering your bids, because you see you spend going up so quickly, I think I lost quite a few sales doing that. And that's a rookie move. And I think most people kind of when they see that happening, they, they kind of have the same reaction, when you're playing with ads so much, I think it kind of messes up the algorithm a little bit. And if I would have left them alone, I think I would probably increase sales at a pretty good amount I'm trying to think of when I started messing with him, it was probably about a week before Black Friday, because I could just see it ramping up and ramping up and ramping up. And I was so worried about how much I was spending, I was still making money, you know, and I don't, I don't think I was doubling what I spent. But say I spent 200 on ads, I was selling like 375 in royalties, something like that. And still, we had this conversation earlier. You know, I should be trading that all day every day. But you still have the like, you look at it at eight o'clock and your ad spend is this much and you're thinking I don't want to go to bed, and then wake up and say I spent $700 or something like that. And then you end up losing money. But..
Cameron 31:26
You got to stay up till 2am Central time as well. Right? Yeah. So, for us, it's 2am. Right, which is when kind of the new day starts over new budgets. But yeah..
Andrei 31:37
Well, I get up at four. So, I don't I don't stay up till two, I used to stay up and check my sales, you know, on my phone all the time. But yeah, man, it's let the ads do what they do. And the algorithm typically will figure it out, as long as you don't, you know, mess with it so much. And I think that was the hardest thing for me to do is just kind of just let it ride. Right after Black Friday, I was just kind of like, look, you know what, I've set them up, I'm just kind of going to leave them alone, and let them do their thing. And it. It was crazy.
Cameron 32:16
It's kind of amazing. If anybody's watching it hasn't really experienced a Q4, especially with products that are ranking a little more mature that have that sales potential. I mean, it's a massive increase. I don't know what you saw as far as a Q4 increase or versus kind of like normal months. But for myself, I would say it was probably around six or seven times what I would spend in a normal month in that 30-day window from Black Friday. Yeah, that you know, week before Christmas,
Andrei 32:45
Right. Yeah, I don't remember my it's been for say that timeframe, I think it was around probably around 4 grand, something like that. But my world days were, I did like 11 and a half for December, which is by far my best month ever. And almost eight in November.
Cameron 33:13
That's a big milestone first 10,000 royalty month. Yeah.
Andrei 33:17
So, I think it was 2020 Q4, 2020, like December 10, or something like that. I had a 97-sale day. And you know how that goes. You see the 96? Yeah, I'm getting 100. And then you don't and it's like, Come on,
Cameron 33:37
You go and buy three or four more shirts. I don't want those 100 shirts.
Andrei 33:43
But um, so you know, and then after that, it just, it never quite got there. And I was like, man, you know, really, I really wanted that 100 day. And so..
Cameron 33:51
Yeah, wait till next year, more than likely just the way the season goes. Yeah,
Andrei 33:55
yeah, absolutely. And then so like, I got my 100 days pretty quick this year. In Q4, I think I don't know when it was it was. It was before Black Friday. And I was just like, yes. You know, you're just like, yes. And then like, first week in December, I was having like 200 days, like, wow, relatively frequently, you know, and I was just like, oh, this is great. And, you know, where's my 300? You know, and all that. I didn't get that. Yeah. But still, it's common, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so, my highest month ever was like it was actually December 2018, which was a great year, and I think we royalties were higher at that point. And I had like us that December was like $6,700 for royalties was fantastic. This November, like I said, I think it was like 7,500 and then you know almost 12,000 For this December. Extremely. Yeah, you know, I'm trying to cut down on..
Cameron 35:05
I don't know if you're doing Where are you located at by the way? Houston. Okay. I'm on the other opposite end in Wisconsin. Both good beer, beer areas. Were in Wisconsin, Madison,
Andrei 35:18
Madison, New Year's Eve, a DJ at a New Year's Eve party there in I think it was 2001.
Cameron 35:25
Really? Okay. Where at?
Andrei 35:28
It was at some college Campus.
Cameron 35:31
UW?
Andrei 35:33
Man, I don't know. It was how long..
Cameron 35:35
That's the college I got. So, there's a couple of probably was okay. It was really cold. Yeah, we just got out of some cold today it was 40 degrees, and it felt like a heatwave after some like negative 20-degree weather the last few days. You probably don't get much of that down there. But no, not too much. We live for the summers here. But yeah, I'm sure you do have a beer. In the cheese. Yes. Yeah. Cut all the all the stereotypes you've heard are 100% True. So, congratulations on the Q4. It sounds like it was everything you could have possibly wanted with it. Yeah. What kind of impact? Do you think having that success this past Q4 is going to have on your sales this year?
Andrei 36:19
So um, you know, like, like everybody who's running ads, or most people who are running ads. We all turned them off right around the same day. Not turn them off but turn them down. Yes,
Cameron 36:31
I do. Yes. Yeah. Archiving. Yeah, no archiving.
Andrei 36:34
No turning them off. One thing I do want to say, I really wish I had downloaded a bulk Excel file from the Amazon platform before I made all those changes. Because I think that that would really help me get them back to where I want them to be again, because the..
Cameron 37:02
That's interesting. So that just kind of gave me an idea. I wonder if like, we might be able to do something like that, like take snapshots. I don't know. I don't want to like throw out any time like cursing at me.
Andrei 37:12
Like, yeah.
Cameron 37:15
Right, right. One thing you can do with so you kind of bring up a good point, because you can't go back to within the Amazon ad cost. So, you can't go back to last holiday seasons. He was like, well, what was I you know, what were the search terms working? And how much was that you know, or the CPC is on those is probably the metric you'd be looking at? Yeah, absolutely idea. Unless you're downloading those reports and saving them. You know, like, who does that but you're in, you've been with us for quite some time now. Where we do save that data so that all of the data that you have, this year, this holiday season, you'll be able to go come October, probably when you start thinking about your Q4 Holiday ads, you can go back and look at this year, and see hey, what are these CPCs and use that? Right? That does give me some ideas for..
Andrei 38:04
What might actually be a good idea is to maybe answer just for people doing their ads, just on the ad console. Maybe I don't want to download an entire one for like, just before Q4. You know, so before you start ramping up your bids in your ad spend and something like that. I'm just a because I have no idea what I had things that you know, and going back, I think I have like thousand ads, and I started kind of working on them. Really just kind of moving them around portfolios and making a bunch of new promotions and stuff. Just after Christmas, when I was at home, during kind of, you know, Christmas break. And really wish I had that data. You know?
Cameron 38:56
Yeah, so I mean, definitely some things we I think we could implement by next holiday season for sure that that could definitely be helpful. So that gives me some idea. So, this is this is really helpful for our science. And that's what I mean, we I mean, I'm a seller myself, but I mean, I've only come up with so many things. And there's a lot of things I don't think of so having these conversations with people, yeah, software, just, you know, advertisers in general, just having that experience and pain points that we run into.
Andrei 39:24
We have all of us poking around in it, of course, you know, people are going to come up with different ideas and stuff. And yeah, it's great that we can just bring those ideas to you in the Facebook group. And yeah, we can..
Cameron 39:37
We, we try to implement you know, what we can we have a vision, of course of what we want to do. So, we can't like to do everything, or you know, it might kind of interfere with some things. But yeah, we definitely take feedback very seriously. And I'm sure you've seen because you were part of our beta when we initially launched and I'm sure you've seen kind of how much has changed us in that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
Andrei 40:00
so, every new thing, I'm just like, you know, this is fantastic man, you know. And it's funny because every new thing is like, oh, this is exactly what I was just thinking about, like, a few days ago. You know?
Cameron 40:11
That's awesome. Yeah, I love hearing that.
Andrei 40:14
Let's get, I guess back to the original question. Yeah, yeah.
Cameron 40:19
Yeah. So how do you what do you what do you think is going to happen this year, basically, because of your Q4 sales? Or what kind of impact do you think that's going to have?
Andrei 40:25
So, January 2021, my total sales are like 284. Right now, I'm hovering around 175 per seven days. And that's basically with no ads running, you know, that they're running, but they're running with not much spend going on. So, you know, it's..
Cameron 40:47
What do you think you'd attribute that to? It's got to be sales rank, from products that sold during Q4, and you said, you started lottery campaigns really recently? Yeah. So, products that are probably first-time sellers. I would imagine, that never sold before.
Andrei 41:05
No, most of it is. I think just most of my it's most of my best sellers. But there, they're selling more and stuff. So, like, last year, you know, I, I would have 767 sales a day or something like that in January, and I was just like, last January, you know, that's just kind of how it goes. But I think running the ads the whole year, even though I did stop them halfway through the year and restart them. I think the sales rank, and obviously the reviews that I've gained, yeah,
Cameron 41:46
yeah, that's the other thing I was going to mention. Yeah. And it's kind of...
Andrei 41:49
The, you know, the algorithm learns how to sell your stuff. And so, the more you sell it, the better it gets at selling it. And so that's got to be what's happening. And yeah, I mean, I'm super happy with how January's going. And, you know, a lot of people are complaining, which they always do. But if you're not running ads, I bet. Yeah, probably not. And look that and they may be, and they may be losing money. But you have to realize that this is this is where you start. That's where you build it.
Cameron 42:23
It's a learning tax to I mean, everybody's going to lose money. But I think the way to look at it, I think you did very early on as an investment is this, you're investing money, not just to learn you know, how advertising works, but just investing in the products themselves? Because you don't know what's going to work. I don't know what's going to, what structures are going to sell for this product? I've been surprised at times, like this search term, like got a sale for this product. Like what?
Andrei 42:48
Yeah, I have some of those things that I was looking at yesterday, and was like, I have no idea like, how this is even related at all. But still, it moved it from my auto through promotions to testing and performance. And I'm like, why? You know, I don't I don't want it there. But...
Cameron 43:05
If it's selling that's like, at the end of the day, that's yeah, all that matters. It doesn't matter if it's relevant. It's relevant enough, at least customers are in means they're typing that in and, you know, hey, this could work with, you know, maybe a complementary product or whatever it is. So, yeah, very, so I'd imagine like, with the success you're already having year over year, this January, that's just going to kind of continue every month. versus last year.
Andrei 43:31
Yeah. Yeah, it will. And I'm just, yeah, one thing I do want to mention is people, again, with advertising, people aren't treating this like a business. And so, when they're complaining about it, typically, they're not treating it like a business. And they say, well, I'm not going to advertise and it's like, well, what business doesn't advertise? You know,
Cameron 43:53
I love that you said that, because that's, that's I've had those same exact thoughts through because I'm very early on. I mean, I've always treated this as a business. I've outsourced things pretty much everything since the beginning. Because it is a business it's an investment, I've sacrificed profits to grow this business. Yeah, I think that is one of the biggest mistakes people new to this do make Yeah, is not having that investment. They want you know, the car payment money coming in. Or not putting that back into the business.
Andrei 44:25
Well in so the thing is, is that they're, I get it they're looking at it like a car payment, but how come I can't be an everything payment? You know? I mean, if you treat it right,
Cameron 44:38
At your job payment... Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. I love that you brought that up. I 100% agree with that. You've kind of touched on some of the campaign structures, how you structure different campaigns. So, you're doing the lottery campaign. Is there any special anything special you do with ads? Just kind of the standard lottery campaign everything all in one? Yeah. Nice and easy. Yeah.
Andrei 45:00
I spent a while, so I didn't know anything about campaign structure until I watched your campaign structuring video. Using promotions. The first one, okay. And because I told you earlier, I was worried about I don't know what to take, where to put it, you know, how to make ads what why I would do an exact or abroad or anything like that I didn't know any of that stuff. Like I said, I was just running auto ads. But the campaign structure that you explained in the promotions video really made everything clear. And anytime anybody asks a question in the Merch Jar user group, hey, how do I structure my day, I always just post that video. And I'm like, just do this.
Cameron 45:41
There are more updates. One of the lives I did, which the whole life didn't get posted, it was exclusively for the Amazon ads University, right click Group will be links in the description for everybody watching this. But I will pull out the section where I did talk about the updated campaign started was really similar, but kind of added in some new features with merch jar, like the product of the products and stuff. Yeah, so I'll link that video. But I do have a slide, I'll just pull up the kind of. So, this doesn't show like the rules and so forth. But this is kind of what we're talking about. Maybe I'll make this full screen really quick. But we got our lottery campaigns, where you are how I mentioned, it's kind of your product harvesting. And then we're putting them in your automatic campaigns with just that single ASIN. And then we have our testing campaign, and then our performance campaign. So, everything is kind of like a funnel where everything moves from the lottery campaign to automatic testing performance. And you've you have mentioned these, these, each of these different types of campaigns. So, you're using this pretty much this structure.
Andrei 46:50
Yeah. And it's time consuming to do it, obviously, but it's way less time consuming than building all these things. And then going through every day and transferring each key word I use. He said, Yeah, you know, thankfully, I didn't. I think maybe I did it a few times, but a full-time job. Yeah, absolutely. I don't see how you could manage. I don't know, what 20 a day. I mean, it's just it's ridiculous.
Cameron 47:25
Yeah, and it to your point with it, it is time consuming, even within I mean, the Merch Jar software is designed to facilitate this, it automates kind of that whole process of adding keywords from one campaign to another based on their performance. So, the ones that sell and the ones that don't, the ones that don't sell, it gets rid of them too. So, you're not wasting money. So, kind of does all that. And it is a little it is time consuming to setup, it's probably our biggest pain point in feedback that we get. So, we're definitely like aware of it. And it's pain point for me too.
Andrei 47:53
But it would be the pain point, even if you weren't using the software, because typically you should be doing that yourself. So, it's not a pain point within Merch Jar, it's a pain point with just run the entire platform.
Cameron 48:10
I like the optimism. Yeah. So, we do have some plans to kind of like facilitate that and kind of be able to apply these different things to all your different campaigns and one serves, there's definitely some challenges with it. So, it's definitely it's very much on our radar. So yeah, I'd be on the lookout for some ways to make that a little bit easier. But yes, so huge pain point. How much time would you say you spend managing your campaigns? And how often are you jumping into ad console or Merch Jar and kind of optimizing bids? Or what's that kind of cadence look like for you.
Andrei 48:47
Like I said earlier, I'll wake up around four in the morning. And it just seems to be getting earlier and earlier every day. And it's just because I'm so focused on this, I just come downstairs, and I get I get right into it. And I have a day job. So, I work about three hours in the morning and then go to work and I come back, and I don't typically work much after work. Just kind of relax and enjoy the family. But then on the weekends I'll spend you know I wake up at five and then work till
Cameron 49:26
Sleep and a little bit so...
Andrei 49:27
Yeah, it's a tiny bit if the dog lets me and then typically work till about one or two but that's normally a mixture of product research and designing that.
Cameron 49:43
Yeah, this isn't all like I'm just doing all my ads and that's pretty much it
Andrei 49:47
Yep, but like during the week it's mainly ads, but again, so I'm relatively new to it. Like I said, I've only been doing it a year, which sounds like a long time, but we really aren’t, and especially when, like I said, I have close to 1,000 ads. And that's a lot of data that you get constantly. And so, there's so much to look at that you're never finished looking at it.
Cameron 50:12
It's also like the seasonality to you almost need to learn just well, how does the seasonality, you know, affect your advertising? So, your kind of have like, one year under your belt now with ads, right, this next year, you'll be able to compare to the last year is like, okay, is there going to? Is there any, like patterns now? Right? But yeah, there's always more to do. There's, there's never, there's always more to do with advertising. And so, I don't want to, like scare anybody off. And, you know, I was like, well, I don't got time for that, why, you know, I'm not going to run ads, you don't have to put in a ton of time into this, you can, and there are benefits, the more you put into it, the more you're going to get out of it. Just I mean, I, I don't know, like, diminishing returns a little bit, depending on kind of where you're, you're focusing out. But...
Andrei 50:56
There's another thing like, so what we talked about earlier, like 60 of my products made 80% of my royalties. So potentially, I could be wasting time, but I'm down here working anyway. And so, I'm making ads for other things and other things, you know, because I want other things do to gain the sales rank that those 60 products have? Now, you know, I could be fine. If I just said, Alright, look, I'm just going to have my ads for my 60 products that are doing, you know, 80% of the load, and then that would make it a lot easier. And I'd still do pretty well. But I mean, who, who wants to do that, you know?
Cameron 51:37
I kind of I do, I'm kind of like on the lazier side of advertising. I'll be honest. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrei 51:42
I mean, that's I built a million ads, don't you?
Cameron 51:47
Yeah, yeah. Like that. But it's Yeah, within lottery campaigns, I focus on my best-selling products. Yeah. And that's why I would say to anybody that is like, well, I don't want to spend like all this time, you don't have to, the more time you put into it, the more you'll get out of it. And Andre, I'm sure you're going to kind of the fruits of your labor are going to become very apparent over time, just because of all the time we're putting into it. And all you know, all these additional products you're focusing on,
Andrei 52:14
The reason I'm putting so much time into it is because of the results I'm getting. And that's exciting. And then again, that's just like, hey, man, you know, just the more you put into it, the typically the more you get out of it. Now, obviously, potentially there, there could be a point to where I'm just advertising in building promotions for things that aren't selling, which is, obviously that could be a huge waste of time, but I'm not there yet. So, what I've done after Christmas, and in through the New Year has been building the promotion structure from my best sellers through q4. And basically, that's it because like I said, it is time consuming, but not on the Merch Jar side. It's just building each individual ad.
Cameron 52:59
And I think you're taking the right approach. And it's kind of the same way as like to just even design what you start to advertise like with building these promotions and stuff. Same kind of thing. Just start with, start with what selling like whatever time you have, do that like to start at the top and work your way down. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So, so pretty structure that we've talked about. Again, I'll link that in the description. So, you'll be able to build the exact same structure. And even if you're not using Merce Jar, which you can check it out 30 days, it's free to try for 30 days, no credit card required. So, you can see if it's right for you. But if you're not,
Andrei 53:35
It's amazingly cheap, by the way, too,
Cameron 53:37
should be raised prices, and it's our price. Not anytime soon. So yes, it's the lowest price, I mean, down the road, I'm sure we will, but anybody that gets it now will never raise your price for you. So, you're still on our beta pricing, which was the cheapest will we ever offered. And then we came up with their launch pricing. And I'm sure down the road at some point, we will raise pricing. So, get in now everybody, if you want to get the absolute cheapest pricing, we'll have a little sense of urgency to throw in there. But yeah, even if you're not using the software, though, and you're just getting started and you don't have the budget or that looks like you're only spending $10, $15, $20 a month on ads, that's fine, you can start with that you can set up these promotion structures and the rules in that video, you can still do, you'll have to do it manually. So, it's going to be a little bit more time consuming than just kind of a one-off setup. And then it's automated. After that you'll have to go in and you know, weekly or whatever, move your search term from one ad group to another, but you can do that. And that's how I started that's how a lot of people start until it becomes too much, and you need a software solution. And that's where Merch Jar comes in. Could you share any best practices you have when it comes to SEO for your listings and how those impacts or relates to your advertising?
Andrei 54:55
Unfortunately, I'm very lazy with SEO. I'll Always try to get the most relevant longtail keyword in the title. And then you know, just come up with a saying it's really hard, everything becomes so formulaic with this because you end up kind of creating the same paragraph with just different keywords placed in, you know, different places, most of my listings pretty much have the same structure. Like I said, I've really been doing, like the same brand name pretty much the entire year, which I know a lot of people are like, oh, don't do that. But I was like, well, you know, again, I'm not real worried about copycats, because of the ads. And then if I can get the title and a longtail keyword, or if I can get the wording of the shirt and a longtail keyword in the title, then I'll do that, like I said, pretty much just use one brand name, and then
Cameron 56:04
find that you’re the I would say like auto ads, if it's like a new product, you still find that at Target search terms that don't contain the keywords in your title. I haven't
Andrei 56:15
really run into a whole lot of that. Like I said earlier, I've noticed in the last few days, that there's two particular shirts that have product title, and two bullet points full of keywords and stuff. And like they're just targeting these random things. And I don't know if it's just like a weird glitch in the ad and I need to like just to turn that ad off and do another one. I don't really notice much of that like just like out of left field things. And those things seem to be pretty irrelevant.
Cameron 56:46
And I think that speaks to just the algorithm itself is like it's pretty good. I know, there's I don't know where people that think like, oh, it's an auto ad. So, it's Amazon's not going to like that. How's that work? And so manual is the only way to go. There's kind of like a, I don't know, pride thing, almost like I'm setting up manual ads, and those work best. But in my experience, maybe you can speak to this too, is auto ads work really well. Like the algorithm is pretty smart with Yeah, yeah, they do know their customers and who's going to buy and getting new sales for, you know, a rate that's profitable, or at least break even in a lot of cases?
Andrei 57:27
Yeah. And I think another thing that people forget is that Amazon makes money when they sell something. So, they want to sell it. They're not just taking money from I mean; they're taking money. Right, but they also want to sell the stuff because they make money then too, you know?
Cameron 57:42
Yeah. 100% I'd mentioned that earlier. Amazon only cares about selling stuff. They don't care about anything else, right selling stuff. So, we've kind of talked about Merch Jar, and you've been with us since our beta, kind of how it's kind of helped you and save you time. Do you have a favorite Merch Jar feature? I feel like I know motions. Okay.
Andrei 58:01
Yeah. And I'm really looking forward to using recipes more, I just, so...
Cameron 58:09
We got some work to do on him like just straight up. It's a pretty brand-new feature. But it's got a lot of potential with it. We're really excited about what it's going to bring to the table. Once we get some tweaks. And I'm even waiting myself to really get recipes going. I do a couple but there's some big changes coming up, they're going to make them a lot more flexible to use as well. Yeah, easier to use with our recipe world if you've seen that where yeah, I have download recipes from other users. And I'll mention it here too, we're actually running a competition, if you will, through the end of the year or a year end of the month where anyone that submits a recipe to us, I'll link that to where you can submit them. And we publish it. So, we're going to do like a review. Just make sure it's like a recipe that actually functions and isn't like a duplicate will give you a bonus coins, which is at ad spent it's $500 in ad spend towards your subscription costs. And the person that submits the rest recipes that we like the most kind of, you know, unique and well documented. We're going to give $25,000 in coins or 25,000 and coins, which shows $25,000 in ad spend to use towards your account. So, we'll be doing that after the end of this month. So just want to plug that yeah, a lot a lot on the way.
Andrei 59:30
That's cool. Yeah, it's just it's for me right now. It's hard to use recipes because there's so little traffic that I don't want the recipes start triggering things based on impressions that I'm not getting and start raising bids to things so I'm just I have a few but they're turned off right now. And I think actually both of them I downloaded from recipe world and slightly edited them but I'm waiting till I started getting a little bit more traffic. I still haven't really raised my bids that much after the end of Q4. For but gotcha, slowly ramping that up.
Cameron 1:00:02
Yeah, same boat. And that's why I recommend her, but it's just kind of like and that's just kind of a best practice in general is just making small incremental changes, we're not waiting, you know, a month between optimizations a nominal rate, you know, double my bids or anything. From what I've seen with the Amazon algorithm that responds really well to very small, frequent changes, the more frequent you can do them, it responds very well to that. So, you know, changing at a penny per day versus, you know, 10 cents in a week seems to respond to that a little bit more, it's just kind of those granular changes. So, for those that are just getting started with Amazon ads for the first time, what advice would you give them? Or what would you do different? If you were starting all over again?
Andrei 1:00:49
Build a naming structure for your ads and use tags in your naming structure. And I think you mentioned something about possibly adding that feature to Merch Jar.
Cameron 1:01:01
That's on our roadmap, we'll have a tagging system. Currently, we're internally we're calling it smart tags, we got some kind of automations and stuff with it will automatically tag items like campaigns just based on you know, certain factors, but that is that is in the plan. So, it'll be some cool stuff that will be implemented with that with recipes as well. So, other heads up. For anybody watching this, what's on our on the table?
Andrei 1:01:27
There's lots of things that say like, in the ad console. In targeting, you can't filter through portfolios, which, you know,
Cameron 1:01:42
I started using portfolios, are you using portfolios totally?
Andrei 1:01:45
So, what I did is, I put all of my promotion’s campaigns into a single portfolio. And then I added a tag to the title of every one of those. So, I can on the targets page on ad console, because I like to apply suggested bids, sometimes like bulk, and then say, decrease those in bulk by a percentage. Okay. And so, to do that, I couldn't do it through merch jar yet,
Cameron 1:02:19
not yet. You're right. roadmap, I
Andrei 1:02:22
think that we will. Yeah, it was a huge pain in the butt. Going through, I think it was 415 ads, and oh, wow, adding a tag to every single one of them. And I tried to do it.
Cameron 1:02:40
What do you use as your tag? Is it liking the ASIN? Or?
Andrei 1:02:44
Well, that's so I created a specific tag for any campaign that was in a promotion. Okay, so it was just, it was just for numbers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So good. Yeah. Yeah, that's not bad.
Cameron 1:03:02
Never hear that. Yeah.
Andrei 1:03:04
And add structure, not add structure, a naming structure is huge. Because when you first start out, I mean, I have no idea. I mean, I would type in like the first, say, four letters of the title, and then just call it that, and then just run it, you know, and then you forget what you're looking for, you know, that sort of stuff, obviously, let like, you know, put the ASIN in that naming structure, a tag also, and obviously, you know, auto or I'm doing everything testing and performance and products now.
Cameron 1:03:41
For naming structure, I'll just add on something while you're looking at the other. My, like two cents on that is just name it in a way where you know exactly what's inside that campaign and inside that ad group, just by looking at it without having to open it up. So, whatever you need to know. So asin, you called out already, I think that's probably the most important so you can just especially when you want to go back and filter it and you want to see every campaign that an ASIN has to it, you're just typing that ASIN in or copy and paste it from your product. And there you go, I'd say that's the most important but otherwise, yeah, like you’re targeting and what the goal is of the campaign there's so many different ways to do it, but that's just like overall best practice. Just know what it is based on what that title is.
Andrei 1:04:27
So, another thing is start slow. And I like he, like you said small changes over time. And really, you need to kind of let the algorithm figure it out the ads like I said, the ad spend starts you know, I think people give up before can actually figure out how to sell your stuff. And I understand it you know because you see, you see look okay on Merch by Amazon, I made $500 this month and my ad spend was 400. And the previous month I made $300. profit. So, like I'm losing money, but it takes, sometimes it takes a little bit of time for it to figure out what sells and what doesn't. And I did a lot of that, turn the ad on, run it for three days, and then turn it off, you know, and just doesn't work. And you see a lot of that in the groups. And it's like, I had this ad running. five clicks on it five clicks, I turned it off. Yeah, yeah.
Cameron 1:05:35
Clicks were probably on five different search terms this like, Right, right, right. So, I would say it's like, that kind of boils down to make sure you're collecting enough data. Yeah, before making a decision, which is something I've harped a ton. And what that is, like, everyone's going to kind of have different thresholds for that. But the more you collect, the more data you have just the better decision you can make on those campaigns.
Andrei 1:05:59
The amount of data that you get is incredible. But the if you can spend the time to go back and just study the data, like, what selling what keywords are selling, you know, that's the stuff that obviously shouldn't be moving through promotions to a manual campaign, but you can find great keywords for SEO, they're great ideas for new T shirt designs.
Cameron 1:06:24
So that's one of that's something I think a lot of people aren't aware of, is all the different search term data you get. I mean, thousands I mean, if you're spending the money on it, that's what you spend the money on. And I've been able to create products. I see a search, I was like, didn't even think about that.
Andrei 1:06:40
Yeah, yeah. So, like, some of my best sellers are like my, my best seller is... You don't have to give it away. No, no, I won't. It's not a huge niche. And it does have copycats and stuff. But then like this another thing I want to talk about, and I wanted to get your what do you call it opinion on this? So, the niche isn't huge. And it's doing really well. But I got some search terms. I was like, Hey, that's a good idea for another one. But then what happens there? Do I delay diluting my, like compete ales, yourself? Yeah.
Cameron 1:07:22
I mean, there is a chance of like cannibalism, I suppose. But I think it's such a small amount that I wouldn't be concerned with it. I think one of the interesting new reports that Amazon has come out with, and they show a part of this in AD console, but it is the impression share report. So, I don't mean download, search for imports, mostly because I'm using Merch Jar. But if I want this data, which isn't available in the API yet, so we're waiting on it. As soon as it's available, we're going to be pulling into Merch Jar because it's really useful. But it tells you for a search term, so let's say it's, I don't know, beer t shirt, how what percentage of impressions your account is capturing. So, if you're only getting 5% of the total impressions on this search term, you know, there's a lot of room to work with, you got to its very eye opening, it's very eye opening. So yeah, this is in your report section. So, when doing this, go into where you download all your search term reports and stuff. And search term impression share, it's pretty new. And it has all the same data as the search term. I don't think there's any data that's missing. But it gives you your impression share, but it also gives you your rank versus every other advertiser. So, you'll be able to see I'm ranked number one. So, for the search terms, I'm getting more impressions than anyone else. I'm getting 50% of the impressions. So even someone that's like number one, you're still not getting every impression that's delivering, right, right, right. Right, right. So that's, that's, I think, a useful way to see like, hey, there's room to grow here, by increasing bids on this search term, like I'm only get 5%. Let's try to capture more of this market share here. And I'm only ranked 20th, or whatever that looks like, right? Or if you're like ranked number one is like, well, I don't really need to increase bids, I've already got it with the other way you can capture market share, is just by creating more products to target that search term, you can get more impressions across your entire product catalog. So as far as like that cannibalism, I think that's a pretty small, like, I wouldn't be too concerned with that. And when it comes to like bids, if you have two different campaigns targeting the same search term, Amazon's not going to let you bid against each other. You're not going to have an $11 bid here and $1.20 bid here, but you know, it's 20 cents, so they're just going to keep you know. Yeah, they won't do that. And that's pretty easily attached if you want to test it out for anybody but yeah, you don't have to worry about that. So that kind of reminds me to like just this whole impression share for anyone that isn't advertising and or is pretty new to it, and it's kind of just getting started and impression as the first thing you get, that's kind of like the highest level of data type of funnel. And that's an impression is anybody that sees your ad, like they type it in, like your ad appeared. That's an impression. And I think what's really eye opening and it was for me, is just how many impressions it takes just to get one click on your product. And it's an average click through rate. So, which how many clicks it takes for its clicks divided by impressions as your click through rate? It's around like 0.3%. So that means for every 1,000 people that see your product, right, only what 30 people are clicking on it. Yeah. Is that right? Like? Is that okay? I'm going to pull up my calculator. I'm always like, bad at this stuff. 1000 x 0.003. Right, that's 0.3%. Three, that's only three clicks. So, I was off by an order of magnitude. out of 1,000 people that see your, your product, your ad, and this goes for organic too, you can relate this to organic too, because it's going to be the same, probably less, because if especially if you're like down further on the page, you're not getting as many clicks, only three people clicked on it. Yeah, out of out of three people clicking on your ad, like how many people are actually going to buy out of that or not those three people, when you look at like conversion rates, which that's another eye-opening thing, someone that's not running ads, you don't have this data available to you, you don't have at least for merchant KDP I think Seller Central have some ways to calculate that. But a good conversion rate probably I would say 10% is a good conversion rate. And you can be profitable lower than that, of course. So that means it takes 10 clicks to get one order on average. So, 1,000 people, you need far more people seeing your ads. So that was eye opening for me and my kind of your Facebook groups here I see is like, well, I can't find my product, or you know my product show him but I'm not getting sales. It's like, you need a boatload of people to see this to see it and click on it. Yeah, and click on it. Like there's a lot of hoops to go through just to get that one sale. And the other eye-opening side of that is just how much freaking traffic there is on Amazon. Yeah, how many shoppers? There are. It's mind boggling. And that's why search term to your like really? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then all those different search terms that your products targeting like that you're indexing for. So, like what your products appearing for all adds up.
Andrei 1:12:33
It's just said, like, you have the search term showing up a funny fishing shirt. Right. And so, you got, I don't know, 3,000 impressions that day. And you got a minuscule amount of the traffic. Searching that term that day. But you still got 3,000 Your ads shown that 3,000 people I mean...
Cameron 1:12:59
I still get a sale. Impressions. But yeah, it's pretty. It's pretty broad. But that's yeah, how much traffic and because in your also like because you an impression like there's other people getting impressions, too, you're showing on a page of how many are on a page like 20, 38, 48. And you got your four ads at the top that are probably getting half of the clicks. Yeah, because more people click on the top and it just goes down. It's exponential. Just how many more clicks that has to but yeah, just some really eye-opening things when you start paying for this data, because it is pay to play like Amazon's not just handing this out for free. But they give you a ton of it when you're paying for it.
Andrei 1:13:40
Well, it's I mean, gives you a roadmap. That's true. Because it's just like, hey, this is this is working. This isn't working. It gives you two different roadmaps it gives you or for me a design roadmap, because I'm just like, hey, these, this type of design is getting this number of impressions, but this many clicks and sales, as opposed to this other type of design. Yeah. And then it also gives you like the keyword search term SEO roadmap as well. It's, it's crazy.
Cameron 1:14:17
Or you might see that it's appearing for search terms, like man, I don't have any of these keywords in my listing, right. Let's get some of those in there and maybe kind of do that. Do you? I do I have Yeah, I do. Usually towards my best-selling product. I'm not going through every single, you know, hundreds of 1000s of products to do that. But I have updated some of my best sellers to put in keywords to rank for specific search terms where if I'm trying to rank for, you know, something that I'm and I use tools like Helium 10 does kind of see where I'm ranking at. So, there I will do that as I if I want to. There's a specific search terms like hey, I'm trying to bump that rank. I'm going to put it at the first half of my title which your title has the most SEO juice sends the strongest signal and Amazon to rank this product? But so that title is even more.
Andrei 1:15:09
Just say you have one of your best sellers that's been selling well for, you know, two years. And would you guys have I have changed the title? I have. Yep.
Cameron 1:15:20
So, and Amazon, and now there is risk with this. Yeah, be very careful specifically with Amazon just the way you know, it takes down. So, I am I don't do it a ton, I will say. So, it, you'll have to weigh the risks. And you want to be very careful that you're not triggering any of the rejections. So yeah, depending on the time of year what's happening with the rejection? Or is going on. So, but yeah, it can that is a strategy I didn't. I mean, I love free merch to have a little bit more transparency with sort that sort of thing where you know, before you're submitting, because I don't think Amazon wants to take down a product that's making them hundreds of thousands of dollars, either it doesn't make any sense. No, no. So yeah, it's kind of a, you know, weigh your risk. But if you're selling on other platforms, maybe it's not as risky, with Seller Central or whatever, to get a product listed again, and not lose all your reviews and so forth. But...
Andrei 1:16:14
I've been very wary of touching anything and your five best sellers.
Cameron 1:16:20
No, I will say I was outside. Yes, not. I'm not worried about losing rank on stuff I'm already selling for Amazon's going to Do rank your product. Cuz now that keyword is not in your title. Because same things as there, you're sending the other signals, they only care about the sales. If you're getting sales, you're getting conversions on the search term, just because it's not in the title, it's not going to just like, well, we're going to take this down, because the same way that you get sales on search terms with keywords in it that don't appear in your listing whatsoever, because he figured that out through that algorithm or whatever.
Andrei 1:16:51
Well, I think it comes from before me running ads, you really kind of feel powerless to put your shirt in front of people. And so like, if I had a shirt that was getting in front of people, I was pretty much like, I don't know why, you know, it's getting in front of people, because it's the same kind of keyword structure that I use pretty much for everything. But you know, some of them, some of them just work. And then...
Cameron 1:17:20
The black box, yes, on black box, for sure. And no one knows. And it's same thing and like we're talking about, like how many impressions and clicks it takes to get like sales. Amazon's not showing the same product list to every single person that shows up. So, like when someone typed, I typed in my title, and it doesn't appear, it's like, okay, you're one data point out of thousands. They're going to base it on the device, you're on time of day, all this data they have about their customers and their users. And there, you know, there's probably some kind of product rotation and that's highly speculated that they do. You know, especially when a product is new, they have like a honeymoon period, no one really knows what merch and so all this is speculation. So, I mean, that that doesn't you won't get your product in front of people run out to it. You're going to you will for sure. Get it in front of people.
Andrei 1:18:07
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, that's kind of like what I was saying before is, I don't really care about a tear up now because I have 12,000 slots that I can fill and run ads to 12,000 new right things and it's it, it's, it's just a boost. It's invaluable. Really. And before you just kind of I mean, I really felt like yeah, I'm just throwing stuff at the wall, see what stock and sometimes you get lucky. And most time you don't. But yeah, lose,
Cameron 1:18:35
you know, or you do get lucky and hey, this is doing well then all of a sudden doesn't anymore. You can't you don't have a way to protect, right or ranking Yeah, at all. If it goes through a slump. Okay, Amazon is going to replace it with something else, even though Amazon only cares what you've done for them lately. They don't care about a month ago. And there's probably some like waiting and stuff like that, again, Amazon black box with the algorithm, but they care about what you sold in the last day, couple hours, not last week, last month last year, right? If you start losing rank, there's a snowball effect. And sales velocity is what a lot of people call it, it works both ways. So that's kind of where like, the more sales you get, where Amazon rewards you with a higher rank, which gives you more traffic, which gives more sales and more traffic. That's that snowball effect. Yep. And it has it works the exact same way in the other direction to where if you start losing rank, it can just fall off a cliff very quickly. So that's where another area that ads can really help protect your listing against your competitors, especially as more people more and more people run advertising to, I mean, as much as I mean, people hate to hear it. We're in the world of pay to play with Amazon just straight up and it's not going back, and this isn't new, like every other platform Seller Central. All these other products sellers. It's been played a pay to play for years. And merch is now in there. Same bow, and there's no sense of pride of like, well, I don't run ads, like I got this without ads like this is a business like there's no pride, right? Not making money.
Andrei 1:20:07
Yeah, again, but so they've given you the opportunity to put your product in front of people. And you...
Cameron 1:20:16
It's the easiest way to do it, like you use. You said it earlier, every single business has to advertise and market their products. There's very few that can get away with not doing that. And if they aren't, honestly, you're just leaving money on the table. I mean, if you're selling a good product, why wouldn't you invest in that to get in front of people? Well, I will say, I guess that ties in to is like, advertising doesn't make up for a bad product, too. If you have a bad product, it's not going to, you know, perform miracles.
Andrei 1:20:45
Right. All right, absolutely. Another thing is you can get your new design up, and you can get it getting sales within you know, a few days sometimes, you know, which typically, you know, it's what, like three months or something.
Cameron 1:21:02
Suddenly on average. Yeah, the average like time the first sale kind of thing is what that looks like these days. Yes. It's probably getting longer and longer than yeah,
Andrei 1:21:09
I'm sure, I guess. Yeah, yeah. But it's just so you can confidently research something designed something, put it up value, wait the few hours and then run, start running ads to it and then validate it, like you said, almost...
Cameron 1:21:26
Right away. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, one last question. You had a lot of success last year, and you've grown considerably? How has your success on Amazon changed your life or just your plans for your future?
Andrei 1:21:41
Um, you know, realistically, it showed me that I don't really have to rely on like, a day job completely. I do. But I don't have to. And before this, it was, you know, well, obviously, I'm going to work till I'm 65 and then retire and do that. Well, that's not really the American dream anymore. You know, you know, I'd like to, like a lot of people been saying this year, semi retire in the next few years from my day job and just do this full time. And like I said, I love it, it's a blast for me to do it. I enjoy the designing. I enjoy, I even enjoy, like going through the ad data and stuff, just, you know, just reading all that stuff.
Cameron 1:22:36
I'm a data nerd, too. I love it. So, all the graphs and charts and excel sheets, I love it. I think that's amazing. Like that's, that is like very much a goal for a lot of people and like be able to see that light at the end of the tunnel, almost like, hey, this is possible, like putting in the work to keep growing this business until you can get to that point. And just the growth you've had in over year over year has been incredible. Do you do you think that's still possible for anyone getting into, I guess, merch by Amazon just on the whole? Amazon itself? Is that still possible to make that happen?
Andrei 1:23:14
They, the worst part is they don't give you ads at the beginning. So, it's I don't think I could do it. I mean, starting out. What are they give you 10 designs? Yeah. And then what are your 100?
Cameron 1:23:31
Yeah, not bad idea. That's pretty good advice, I'd say. Or hustling to sell them somehow not relying?
Andrei 1:23:38
Well, I looked at it like this. So, I can spend 1,200 or say, what is it now 1,307?
Cameron 1:23:49
I have a price one at bat for time.
Andrei 1:23:52
So, I can spend 1,300 bucks, right and sell 100? And then you're like tier 500? Right? And people always say, oh, they don't tier you up right away? Well, for the most part they do. And then you're at tier 100 as well, like nowadays tier one hundreds really low. If they gave you ads at 100 That would really help.
Cameron 1:24:14
Yeah, true. People at tier 100 getting access to ads. So, it's I mean, my prediction. So, this is a Cameron Scot prediction. They're going to roll out ads, I think to everybody at some point. Yeah. KDP and Seller Central, you get access to ads right away. Right. So, I don't see why they want to do that. They're leaving money on the table. And I think everyone knows Amazon doesn't leave money on the table. Not for very long anyways.
Andrei 1:24:39
Sure. But so, the like, like I was saying, in my experience, I started September 1st, and I wanted to have as many designs as possible up for Q4. Because I didn't want to wait a whole another year. And then what where was I going to be in that whole other year whereas it was going to be at tier 25. You know, When I came around, and so I was like, look, Austin, it was cheaper than it was like, because the I think they were cheap. Yeah, they were cheaper because we made more money, per se, um, back then. We made like, $7.07 Yeah, it was before I
Cameron 1:25:14
jumped on it was. I mean, they were like 550, or whatever it was, I've only done one price decrease. I was I started in 2000, early 2018. So, it was just one price decrease that I ended up going through. So, they've maintained it at least for Yeah, no, it has been.
Andrei 1:25:30
Yeah, I would hope that they would keep it like this. But um, so you can sit at tier 10 for a year, that how much money are you losing at that point?
Cameron 1:25:40
Yeah. You know, the cost? Yeah.
Andrei 1:25:42
I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's like you put up your 10 designs, and then what you just wait for a year to get to
Cameron 1:26:35
Right? Like, that's, like, incredible. Yeah, so like, people are talking about wanting to have a car payment or whatever. It's like, why don't you just buy a car, like that right kind of money you could have and much more. I mean, the potential is enormous. And not just with merch, but just the potential of selling on Amazon in general. It's not like just merch, like we do merch. But all this stuff we're talking about applies to every single product on Amazon, all these strategies, advertising, but I think you hit on a really good point, just by buying the mouse's a lot of different ways. You could hustle and sell T shirts locally to you know, sports teams, or, you know, local clubs, or that's actually how I got out of it was to t shirt to school with a bunch of teachers but bought it and got teared up to 500. So same result, but at the end of the day, is we didn't rely on that organic traffic. Yeah, to get those sales, because we just talked about how many eyeballs you need on a product to get one click to get one sale. I mean, you're talking about hundreds of 1000s. And, and when you only have 10 products and products, you don't even know if they're probably good products at that point. Because you just don't have you don't know it. Maybe you do. Like if you're a designer with my firsthand, and we're not. Even if you're a designer or whatever, I'm going to make amazing artwork. You guys still don't know what sells on Amazon. Because when you don't have the data, you just don't until you're getting the advertisements. The only way to get that data.
Andrei 1:27:53
Yeah. One of the things that you touched on there, you know, we're all worried about losing our accounts, right? Or Merch by Amazon accounts and learning advertising gives you hope for if, unfortunately, that day does come, you can take everything that you learn to sell something else.
Cameron 1:28:11
Yeah. 100% That's a really good point. I'll sleep at night finally.
Andrei 1:28:16
Yeah, I'm good about that. Right.
Cameron 1:28:18
But yeah, I mean, I'd say the other point too, with it is like, like treating it as an investment. And not just like hoping and praying that you get the sales but treat this as an investment. We've kind of talked about that throughout this interview as well. Andrei, thanks so much for coming on. This has been absolutely amazing. I think a lot of insightful topics. We have come up here so thank you so much for being on This was absolute pleasure.
Andrei 1:28:46
Hey, man, thanks a lot. I enjoy it.
Merch Jar recipes are a powerful way to optimize your Amazon ad campaigns allowing you to create complex automations for each your campaign goals, saving you hours of time and maximizing your profits. Now we've made recipes even easier to share and use across all of your different ad accounts.
Introducing Recipe World. Recipe World allows you to browse and download recipes shared by Merch Jar users from across the globe, filter by recipe type and view recipe descriptions and the number of downloads.
With our new recipe import, you can add your favorite recipes across all of your ad accounts and automate your campaigns in just a few clicks. Simply click download and your recipe will be downloaded to your computer as its own recipe file. Use the Create recipe drop down inside your Merch Jar account to import the recipe and click Browse to find the recipe file you'd like to import. You can import the recipe to just the ad profile you're currently working with, or select Import to All Profiles to add it to all of your Merch Jar managed ad profiles. Click Import and your new recipe is ready to run.
Once imported, you can also customize any part of the recipe to fit your campaign goals. You can export an existing recipe to share or import to your other add profiles. Simply click Actions for the recipe you'd like to download, and then export. This will download the recipe file ready for sharing and import.
Recipe world is a big step towards our mission to make Amazon advertising easier. But we need your help. Sharing your favorite recipes to recipe world for others to discover. Submit your own recipes for Recipe World, and for each recipe that we publish, you'll get 500 coins added to your coin jar. Plus, we'll be giving away one 25,000 coin bundle to the Merch Jar user that submits our favorite recipes by January 31. That's $25,000 in ad spend a $250 value to use towards your Merch Jar subscription. You can submit your recipes by uploading your own recipe files using the link in the description or by filling out the rest of the recipe form.
Expect to see more updates coming soon for recipe world including easier ways to share and discover new recipes.
Me and the rest of the Merch Jar team couldn't be more excited for what Recipe World will bring to the Merch Jar community and we can't wait to see all the creative recipes that you come up with.
No transcript available yet
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.
Today I'm gonna show you a type of campaign I call lottery campaigns that nearly every advertiser should test and is the perfect first campaign for beginners. My name is Cameron Scot and on this channel, we give you the tools and strategies to make you a better Amazon advertiser. Lottery campaigns work alongside your already existing campaigns and have a very simple campaign structure. If you're just getting an Amazon ads and you're thinking about launching your first campaign, this campaign is a great one to start with. Lottery campaigns leverage the power of a large product portfolio, and Amazon's ad algorithm to find cheap placements and clicks, getting you low cost conversions, and a low ACOS. At its simplest, a lottery campaign is an automatic targeting campaign with a single ad group with every single one of your products as an ad. That's right, every single one of your ASINs inside a single ad group inside of a single campaign. You can have up to 500,000 ads in one ad group.
Lottery campaigns work using low bids with a focus on using your placement adjustments at the campaign level to get low cost high converting ad placements. These campaigns are for and should be tested by anyone that's got at least a couple dozen products in their portfolio. The larger your product catalog, the more ammo you're giving Amazon to find ad placements for a long tail search terms and product pages with low competition,. And even sneak in impressions and low cost clicks on normally high competition and high cost search terms and product pages. You'll be surprised how many cheap clicks and conversions you'll get using this strategy with a large product portfolio. I've been testing several variations of lottery campaigns over the past few months, and they're quickly becoming one of my favorite campaign types.
In just a few months, I generate nearly 800 orders across all the different lottery campaigns I tested with an average ACOS of 18% and 19 cent cost per click with a large portion of those orders being first time sales for many products. I first posted about lottery campaigns in our Facebook group Amazon ads University a few months ago, so if you're not already a member, you can join for free using the link in the description. When I first started testing lottery campaigns. I started with two automatic targeting campaigns, each with just one ad group one lottery campaign for all of my ASINs and another lottery campaign for only ASINs that haven't yet sold. Both of these campaigns had all four targeting groups enabled close match, loose match, substitutes and complements.
I also tested several variations of lottery campaigns with different structures and product segments. For example, lottery campaigns with a different ad group for each product niche, lottery campaigns with only specific product type and lottery campaigns with up and down bidding. Some of these campaigns and ad groups performed okay, but not as well as my all ASIN in zero order ASIN lottery campaigns I started with both of which use down only bidding strategy and without any niche or product type segmentation. A big part of this is do the heavy focus on placement adjustments versus bid adjustments for optimization placement adjustments take place at the campaign level and apply to every ad group and target within that campaign. So when you have some ad groups or targets are performing well, and others that aren't, it can be difficult to dial in your placement adjustments.
This even became an issue for the all ASIN and zero order asin lottery campaigns that had all four targeting groups enabled, even though both campaigns performed well overall. When looking at your placement metrics, there's no way to tell which targeting group is contributing to which placement when you have more than one targeting group enabled for a campaign. And when you're looking at your targeting groups metrics, there's no way to tell how each one is performing in each placement when there's more than one, which can lead to some tricky decisions to make around your placement adjustments and your bid optimizations across all of your targeting groups. The solution of this is segmenting your automatic campaigns by targeting group so that you have one campaign for each of the targeting groups. One campaign for close match, one for a loose match, one for substitutes, and one for complements, although I consider complements very much optional as they don't tend to perform well in most circumstances.
Now when you're looking at your placement metrics, you know exactly which targeting group is responsible and can easily make placement adjustments and bid optimizations accordingly. As I continue testing new lottery campaigns, I'll continue to use a structure of one ad group per campaign with a separate campaign for each targeting group. So I have more control over my bids and placements.
When you first launch your lottery campaigns, you can start with all of your targeting groups enabled and segment later once you see there's a big difference in performance between them or you can just segment them right away and launch multiple campaigns, one for each targeting group right from the start. When launching these campaigns I recommend starting with a very low bid and placements, so you don't quickly blow through a lot of spend and slowly increasing your bids and placements over time. For your bids, you can start as low as just four to five cents. And for your placements 100% on your top of search and 0% on your product pages is a good starting point.
It can take a while for these campaigns to ramp up when you're starting with low bids and placements. So be patient and make adjustments every few days. It took about a month of incremental bid and placement adjustments for my first lottery campaign to really start seeing traction. If you're already running some form of lottery campaign, let me know in the comments how they're working for you. If you got any value out of this video, do me a favor hit the like button and subscribe so you don't miss out on any future content.
You've just launched your first ad campaigns and you're ready to watch the sales rollin. Now what? In this video I'll show you five ad optimizations to make to your campaigns to get the most out of your ad spend without breaking the bank. When it comes to Amazon ads, it's not set it and forget it. Seasonal changes, new competition entering the market, rising CPC costs, there's a lot constantly changing you need to keep up with if you are to hit your ACOS goals. And the best way to do that is by fitting regular campaign optimizations into your routine. This video will be split into two parts. We'll start by going over each of the five ad optimizations in this video for part one, and then dive into three different ways you can perform each of the optimizations in part two, so make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a second part.
Before we start, you'll also need to be familiar with target ACOS or target A-C-O-S. If you don't know what that is, or you haven't set your own target ACOS, pause the video before going any further and check out the link in the description for choosing your ideal ACOS. Throughout these videos. I'll also be using the term targets. A target is the most granular level of your campaigns and where your bids are set. For automatic campaigns. These are the targeting groups close match, loose match, complements and substitutes. And for manual campaigns as your keywords, product targets and category targets. For most of these optimizations you'll be analyzing and optimizing at the target level, not the campaign or ad group level.
The first optimization we make is for increasing bids on high performing targets. This is any target with at least two orders that's also below your target ACOS and serve below our target ACOS we have some room in our cost per click to raise bids and win more auctions getting better ad placements, more impressions, more clicks, and ultimately more orders. For targets having ACOS that's close to your target ACOS the good idea to have a target ACOS buffer, so you're not messing with a good thing that's already working. You can subtract two to 5% from your target ACOS to act as your buffer.
If your target ACOS is 25%. You would use a filter for any targets that are less than 20-23% instead of your target of 25%. A 30 Day date ranges a good rule of thumb for most optimizations including this one. However, if your campaigns aren't generating much order data, you may need to extend this range out to 60 days. And if your campaigns are getting a lot of orders, you can use an even shorter range like seven to 14 days. And if you're in a period of really high sales volatility, such as right after the holiday buying period has ended, you may need to use an even shorter range such as three to seven days. Range targets that meet our high performance criteria, we want to slowly increase bids on those targets. A 10% increase per optimization is what we generally recommend. Small bit changes can still have a large impact on your ACOS and performance. So we want to make sure we're not going overboard on how often and by how much we're changing bids, and that we're still collecting enough data to reflect those new bid changes.
This optimization does have the possibility of runaway bids for any targets have a low ACOS they have CPCs that don't increase with an increased bin, you can actually add a filter to this optimization so that the only bids you're changing are ones that are below a max bid that you set for yourself. Next, we want to lower bids on a target to have an ACOSt that's above our target ACOS that also have at least a couple orders the same ACOS buffer from our previous optimization applies. However, this time you'll add two to 5% to your target ACOS the date range you'll use to look at the data is also the same with 30 days being a good rule of thumb and increasing or decreasing that based on your order volume and sales volatility. One difference with optimizing your low performers versus your high performers is that it can be a good idea to stagger how much you're decreasing your bids. Based on how far away the target is from your targeted ACOS.
The further away it is from your target ACOS, the more you'll decrease the bid. For example, let's say our target ACOS is 25%, any targets between 30 and 40% will decrease bids by 10%. Targets between 40 and 50% will decrease by 15%. And for interests that are above 50% will decrease their bids by 20%. Remember, small incremental changes are the name of the game. We don't want to make too many changes too fast or by too much so that we don't throw anything too far out of whack. These low performers are still generating orders just at a more expensive level than we'd like. So we don't want to lower bids by so much that we just stopped getting impressions on them.
This optimization has two parts, each with different filters, pausing targets with zero orders, and pausing targets with a single order. This optimization is to prevent wasted ad spend on targets that are getting clicks, but not really converting to sales. In order to get the most data points as well as ensure you're not turning off a winning campaign that's just in a temporary slump, we want to use a longer date range such as 90 days. This is the maximum date range that you can use inside of Amazon's ad console. If you're a Mecrh Jar user, you can use an even longer date range, including up to the entire lifetime of your campaign data. Or you can set up a recipe inside of Merch Jar that looks at both a recent date range and the lifetime order data of a target. That way you're guaranteed you're not pausing a target that you may be better served by lowering the bid instead.
This optimization a filter for 20-40 clicks without an order is a good rule of thumb for targets to be placed on the chopping block. The more clicks you get before turning off a target, the more confident you can be that you're not turning off a potential winner. Targets tend to have lower conversion rates, or that target hundreds or even thousands of search terms, such as your automatic campaign targeting groups or your broad match keywords, you'll want to lean on the side of having more clicks before you pause them, versus tighter targeting or higher conversion rate search terms like exact match and product targets. Additionally, if you want to reduce your potential spend while you're testing new targets, you can lower the bids on those targets before they reach your click threshold for pausing.
For example, if you normally pause a target once it reaches 40 clicks, you can lower the bid once that target reaches 20 clicks, and then again at 25, and so on, so that you reduce the amount you're spending on each click while you're testing. Pausing single order targets works just like pausing zero order targets, that for the higher click threshold before you pause, our goal is to find targets that are validated through getting multiple orders. And not just a fluke sale. We're halfway there on these targets so we want to make sure we're giving them enough of an opportunity to get that second sale. You should at least double the number of clicks for your threshold from your zero order target optimization.
That means if you normally pause a target at 40 clicks, you would wait until you had at least 80 clicks. If not more before you pause a target with only one order. You can also optionally add an ACOS filter to this optimization to account for your ad spend that we can collect even more data on any targets that have a low cost per click. You can also use the same strategy from your zero order optimization, where you lower the bids on a target with one order before it reaches your click threshold to pause and reduce your potential ad spend. In this optimization, you're looking at how your individual ads are performing, rather than how the targeting of your ads are performing. And then pausing any low performing ads. This is the only optimization that you won't be optimizing at the target level.
We recommend only performing this optimization on any of your campaigns that have multiple ASINs or ads inside it, such as your lottery campaigns, not on your single ASIN campaigns. Your single ASIN campaigns are effectively optimized for your bid adjustments and pausing of targets from the other optimizations here, so this optimization is not needed for those. Since all the ads inside of an ad group share the same targeting and bids, pausing low performing ads is our only option. If 15-30 clicks is a good rule of thumb before pausing and ad, leaning on the site of more clicks, the broader your targeting is.
The last optimization is increasing the number of impressions on low or no impression targets. In this step we want to get any targets that aren't being shown or shown often the win more auctions through increased bids. There's a lot of flexibility in how often you run this optimization and the filters you use for it. What would be considered low impressions for a target can vary pretty greatly from the product type to the search term targeting and the category. We recommend using zero impressions or a really low number like 25 until you can get a feel for the number of impressions you should be seeing for your situation or brand new campaigns. You'll likely want to use this optimization every few days and less frequently for established campaigns.
For example, if you're simply trying to increase your ad spend, no matter the filters and frequency you use, slow and steady is still the name of the game. Incrementally increasing your bids and till you start getting impressions on your targets run away bids are again a possibility for this optimization. For whatever reason some targets won't be shown no matter what you set your bid at. You can use an optional max bid filter to prevent never ending bid increases for this optimization. That concludes part one of the five optimizations you should be doing every week.
If you got any value out of this video, do me a favor and hit that like button. And the next part of this video I'm going to show you three different ways that you can make each of the five optimizations, so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss part two.
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.
Yesterday, we revealed Merch Jar as official launch on May 1. Today, we've been listening, we've always taken your feedback to heart not only to make Merch Jar, the best advertising tool possible, but one that is also fair and works for all of our users. A number of you have reached out to us with feedback, highlighting challenges and confusion in our pricing strategy, as well as critical missing features in the product. We hear you and we have adjusted.
We're massively simplifying things. For the next two months, the beta plan will be billed at the base rate of just $20 per month, regardless of your ad spend. We're also completely reexamining our ad credit packs, expect to see a name change, clear messaging, and updated pricing. Tom and I really appreciate all your feedback and criticism, and we will continue to use that to make the best product possible.
Today, Tom and I are excited to announce Merch Jar's official launch on May 1st. First, we'd like to thank each of our beta subscribers that provided testing, bug reporting and valuable feedback over the past few months. And we're really excited to share a special offer for all of our beta subscribers over the course of our beta we've grown rapidly.
Merch Jar has managed over $1 million in ad spend, and we're now processing over 1 billion data points every single day. We're performing hundreds of thousands of bid changes, keyword promotions and bulk actions, saving advertisers hundreds of hours in time, and making it easier than ever to manage your campaigns. To handle this amount of data, we've made significant investments into our servers and our backend architecture to continually improve performance and stability for all of our Merch Jar users.
And we have a lot more on the way. More powerful bit in keyword automations, easier ways to launch and optimize your campaigns, new ways to analyze your data, and a whole lot more. While we're proud of where Merch Jar is today, we're incredibly excited for everything that we have planned. We envision Merch Jar not only as the leading platform for advertising automation, but also as a tool to make high performance advertising easier and more accessible to everyone, no matter their experience.
With our official launch, we're introducing our new Merch Jar subscription plan. This paid plan will allow us to bring on additional developers and support, launch new features faster, create more educational content, and make Merch Jar the best tool for managing our Amazon ads that it can be. We thought long and hard about how to create a pricing model that works for everybody from those just starting out, to you advertising rock stars are spending hundreds of thousands per month. We've made our subscription as simple and fair as possible. Just one plan for everyone, regardless of how many different ad accounts or campaigns you have. With your Merch Jar subscription, you'll get unlimited access to all of Merch Jar 's time saving tools and automation features, starting at just $25 per month. Every Merch Jar subscription includes $2,000 in ad credits that resets at the start of each new billing cycle.
Every $1 an ad spend equals $1 in ad credit. Each dollar of ad spend from your Merch Jar managed ad accounts is deducted from your ad credit balance each day. If you need more than $2,000 in ad credits each month, you can either pay as you go at the end of each billing cycle for any additional ad credits used or pre-purchase ad credit packs.
Either way. We offer the lowest rates in the industry with our pay as you go option. You'll simply be billed for any additional ad credits use at the end of the billing cycle. Or you can save even more with ad credit packs. Ad credit packs allow you to pre-pay for your ad spend at a discounted rate. Ad credit packs never expire and are available in 10,000, 25,000 and 100,000 increments, offering significant savings over the pay as you go option.
As a way to thank our beta subscribers. Anyone that signs up for a Merch Jar subscription plan before May 1st, will get our lowest pricing that we will ever offer. All beta subscribers will get a lifetime 20% discount off their monthly Merch Jar subscription, including any additional pay as you go ad credits. This gives you enterprise grade advertising tools starting at just $20 per month, while our prices will go up when we launch on May 1st,
you will stay locked into your special beta price plan for as long as you maintain your subscription. You'll also continue to receive every new feature and update as Merch Jar continues to evolve. But that's not all. You'll also save up to an additional 30% on all of our already discounted ad credit packs for any ad credit packs are purchased before May 1st.
Ad credit packs not only give you the best value on your ad spend, but it's also the best way to support the Merch Jar team. As we launch Inside Your Merch Jar account, you'll see our new billing page where you can subscribe to a Merch Jar subscription, manage your payment methods, estimate your monthly subscription cost based on ad spend and purchase ad credit packs.
Anyone that signs up for the special beta pricing will have their first billing cycle start on May 1st and will see their first monthly subscription charges on June 1st. If you haven't yet created your Merch Jar account, you can sign up for free at merchjar.com to take advantage of our lifetime beta pricing. Tom and I are so grateful for everyone that's been on this journey with us, and we're incredibly excited for what's next.
We hope you'll join us as we continue our journey to make advertising easier.
What's up, Merch Jar gang! Cameron Scot here and today is April 13th and I have some updates for you for Merch Jar since our last updated video. Let's jump right in. The first new feature is our live chat bubble here in the bottom right corner where you can click on this and get any help to any questions or troubleshooting that you may have to simply start a new conversation and type in whatever you need and me and the rest of the team will be able to respond directly to your troubleshooting ticket and keep track of it and just overall be able to provide a better customer support experience.
The next feature update is our new bid history. This is the first version where you can see the last ten changes to any of the bids just by simply hovering over any of the bids in any of the Merch Jar tables. And the last new feature is around our Smart Bids. A lot of people have been asking for a way to enable Smart Bids in bulk for their campaigns, as well as filter by the Smart Bids status.
So now you can do both using the filter there. There's a new Smart Bid metric that you can switch to enabled or disabled. So, if we search by disabled, it'll show us all of our campaigns that do not have Smart Bids enabled. And you can turn all these on at one time by selecting all the campaigns you would like to enable Smart Bids for and then book actions for Smart Bid and enable Smart Bid.
We've also made a number of performance upgrades under the hood that decrease load times by up to 99%. So, as you're applying filters or searches, data loads nearly instantly across all your different pages. We've also made a number of bug fixes that affects the sinking of data between Merch Jar in the Amazon API, so that you'll receive far less errors when you're making any campaign or bid changes.
Another bug fix is in the settings page under the profiles where the ad spend across the different accounts weren't showing. This is now showing accurately, and you can turn on and off your accounts that you would like to manage. So, this is an easy way to see where you spend is happening across all of your different ad profiles, across all of your accounts connected to Merch Jar.
We also fix a bug in the products table under dashboard where items weren't showing if there was no performance data such as impressions. Those will now show even if there is no data as well as other miscellaneous backend bugs and performance improvements. That's it for this update. We have a pretty exciting announcement coming out in the next couple days regarding our official launch and new plans and pricing.
So, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that.
This is the first of our update videos where we provide you transparency with everything going on behind the scenes of Merch Jar And we'll do this with periodic updates, which will include things like new features, bug and bug fixes, and any other relevant information that could be useful to you as a Merch Jar user. All new update videos will be added to this Update's playlist on YouTube.
So, make sure to subscribe so you get all the latest updates. The first feature update is Smart Bid Settings Changes in your Smart Bid settings, you'll now find tooltip recommendations for ACOS threshold and max bed adjustment, which will tell you how conservative or aggressive your daily max bid changes and give you a warning if you're too conservative or aggressive. As well the threshold gives you a warning if it's too large or small and will have a negative impact on the Smart Bid's effectiveness. Next four features, additional marketplaces are now in beta and should start sinking your campaign data to your Merch Jar account. If they're not syncing, make sure you have the marketplace enabled in the settings underneath the manage field.
If you don't see your account, make sure to follow the missing an account instruction here in the settings to link your account to your existing ad account. I would also like to point out that each marketplace has its own Smart Bid settings, so make sure you are adjusting those settings accordingly. For bugs and fixes, earlier this week we had a bug affecting some users promotions where they would not trigger on live campaigns.
All the bugs affecting promotions should now be patched up at this time and promotions running as normal for all users. And one other bug fixes this week affecting a small number of users in cases where there are tens of thousands of ads inside of a single campaign. There were instances where some users weren't able to sync their campaign data, and this has now been patched.
That's it for this update. Let us know what you think of this new update format and what else you'd like to see in the comments.
Promotions automate adding positive and negative keywords to your ad groups based on their performance. Promotions are based on one or more ad groups that they monitor or add positive and negative keywords too. Based on one or more rules you can customize to your campaigns. Using multiple rules, they can work with even the most complex campaign structures removing the most tedious parts of managing your campaigns and saving you hours of manual work.
Promotions are often used to automatically move keywords from one campaign to another, such as moving a search term from an automatic targeting campaign to a manual targeting campaign once it's sold or automatically negating keywords in their source ad groups that have been added to other ad groups preventing overlap in search term targeting across your ad groups and campaigns. And automatically negating poor performing keywords like this one across multiple campaigns and ad groups.
To create your first promotion, navigate to the promotions link in the menu at the top of your Merch Jar app. Here, you'll be able to see all of your existing promotions and whether they're active or disabled, the number of rules they have and the number of ad groups they contain. To add a new promotion. Just click add promotion, then give your promotion a unique name by using the name field.
Each promotion is set up by choosing the ad groups that the promotion will monitor and add any positive or negative keywords too. To add your ad groups to your promotion just click the Add Items button, then use a search field to find the groups you like to add, which uses the campaign name to filter your ad groups. Click each add group you'd like to add to the promotion and then click add items.
Any ad group you'd like to remove, you can do so by clicking the minus button. To create your first promotion rule, click Add Rule and give your new rule a descriptive name using the name field. Each rule is made up of three components the search term source or the ad groups that will have their search terms evaluated, the trigger or conditions that need to be met for the action to be executed, and the action or which ad groups a positive or negative keyword will be added to if the trigger is met.
We'll start with the search term source, which is the used search terms from here column. Each group that is selected will have every one of its search terms evaluated each day by the trigger. If more than one ad group is selected, the search term data for all selected ad groups will be aggregated together.
So, if the same search term appears for two or more ad groups that are selected, all the impressions, clicks and orders from all the selected ad groups will be added together. Merch Jar also combines the search term data together if they would share the same targeting, such as with singular and plural forms of the same search term, allowing actual decisions to be made on search terms even faster.
Once the search term data from all the selected groups is aggregated together, every search term will be evaluated by the trigger individually. The trigger determines whether the action is performed or not. The trigger consists of a set of conditions that must be met and a date range or look back window for the data that will be evaluated by those conditions.
If all the conditions during this look back window was met for a search term, the trigger is met and the actions are executed, meaning the search term is added as a positive or a negative keyword to the selected groups in the action section. If any of the conditions are not met during the lookback window, no action is performed.
This process of checking the conditions for the look back window is done every single day for every search term in the selected ad groups. For the trigger, you can set conditions for the number of orders, ACOS and clicks and the number of days to look back at the data. For example, using a 30 day look back window, only the search term data between today and 30 days ago from the ad groups that are selected in the search term source will be evaluated by the conditions set in the trigger.
If left blank, the rule will use a search term data between today and 60 days prior to the date you first sync your account with Merch Jar, which is when Merch Jar begins logging all of your campaign data. If our trigger is met, all of our actions are performed. The actions are the ad groups that the search term will be added to as a positive or a negative keyword.
Select the match time for the positive or negative keywords for each ad group. You'd like them to be added to. When promoting keywords, you can also increase or decrease the bid of a newly created keyword using a fixed dollar amount or a percentage change. When you have your search term sources, your trigger and your actions click add to save your rule.
Each rule is turned off by default to enable promotion rule. Click the switch next to the rule name so that it shows blue. You can disable it simply by clicking the switch again so that it shows Gray. To save your new promotion, click Save in the top right.
By default, your new promotion is turned off, but before turning on your promotion, we recommend using our dry run-on testing feature to ensure your promotion is working as intended before it affects your live campaigns. To use the dry-run feature, just click the dry run button for the promotion you like to test and all of your promotion’s rules will run, and you'll be shown all the changes that your promotion would make without affecting your live campaigns.
Once you've ensured your new promotion is working as intended, you can enable it using the switch next to the promotion name so that the switch shows Blue. Once enabled, your promotion rules will start running once each day. To disable promotion, simply click the switch again so that it shows Gray.
To see any actions that your promotion rules performed navigate to the logs page in the menu at the top of your Merch Jar app. The logs page will show you the date and time that an action was performed, the campaign and ad group that a keyword was added to and the type of keyword that was created.
Target ACOS is the ACOS goal that you set for your campaigns in ad groups. The higher your target ACOS, the more aggressive your bidding will be. Merch Jar uses the campaigns target ACOS to color code, the accost and the rose fields in all of its data tables so you can easily see how you're performing at a glance. If you're within your target ACOS they'll show as green,
if you're outside of your target, it'll show as yellow, and if you're way outside your target, it'll show as red. Merch Jar also uses your target ACOS to automatically dial in your bids with its smart bids feature. When a keyword or target's actual ACOS is above your target ACOS smart bids will slowly lower your bids to get closer to your target ACOS.
And when your actual ACOS is below your target ACOS, smart bids will slowly raise your bids to get closer to your target ACOS. For more information on smart bids, see our Smart Bids video in this playlist. Target ACOS a set from the campaign level and can be set from the campaign page. All ad groups, keywords and targets within the campaign will inherit the campaign's target ACOS. To set the target ACOS for a campaign,
navigate to your campaign page and then simply click on the target ACOS field for any campaign you'd like to change, enter your new amount and press enter. Any campaign that doesn't have its target ACOS set manually like shown here, will show in a lighter color gray. Once we enter a new target ACOS, it'll be a little darker. So, you know that it was manually entered.
Any campaign that doesn't have this manually set, one here the default target ACOS that you set in your Merch Jar settings. Any change that you make here to your default target ACOS settings will be applied to every single campaign that's not had their target ACOS manually set.
The first step after signing up for Merch Jar is connecting your Amazon accounts to begin syncing your campaign data. To do this, click the login with Amazon button to be taken to Amazon's login page. Here you'll login to Amazon using your Amazon advertising credentials.
Once your Amazon account has been linked, you'll need to turn on the ad accounts that you'd like Merch Jar to manage in your account settings under profiles, you'll see all of your Amazon and accounts that have been sent to Merch Jar, and you can turn on the ones you'd like to manage with Merch Jar under the managed field, by just simply clicking the switch, so that appears blue.
This will now appear as an ad account that you can access in Merch Jar and see all the campaign data. If you're missing an ad account, click on the missing account banner here and you'll have instructions on how to create a manager account within the ad console to get it sync up with Merch Jar.
From the profile section, you can also nickname all of your accounts to make it easier to manage. Once you've turned on all the accounts you'd like to manage, that data will start to sync, and you can view it now under your dashboard or all of your campaigns and targets and start optimizing your ads.
You can sign up for your Merch Jar account at merchjar.com using one of the signup links on the page or using the link provided here in the description to find the registration page. From here enter your name, email address and choose a password. The email used for Merch Jar does not need to be the same email that you use for your Amazon advertising account.
Then click register. You've now successfully signed up for your Merch Jar account. The next step will be connecting your Amazon ad account to your Merch Jar account so you can start sinking your campaign data, which we'll cover in the next tutorial video.
With Merch Jar, you can adjust all your keywords or targets bids at the same time. To adjust your bids, navigate to the ad’s dropdown at the top of your Merch Jar app. In the dropdown, you will see the options, keywords and targets. This is where you'll just the bids for all of your campaigns, keywords and targets. The keywords page includes all of your broad, phrase and exact matches from your manual keyword targeting campaigns.
The targets page includes all of your automatic campaign targeting groups which are close match, loose match, complements and substitutes as well as all your product targets from your manual product targeting campaigns. In every Merch Jar table, you can use the search box to narrow the search results, which searches by campaign and add a group name or with filters to narrow the results based on a target's performance, targeting, state such as enabled or paused and the bid amount.
To make a bid adjustment, check the box for each row you'd like to adjust, then click bulk actions and change bid. Use the dropdown box to either increase or decrease your bid by a percentage or a dollar amount. Or you set bid to change the bid of all selected targets to a specific bid. Enter the amount you'd like to change your bid. In this case, we're going to decrease these two by 10% and then click Change Bid.
To adjust the number of rows on a page, use the record number selection dropdown at the bottom of the page. To select all rows from all pages in your filtered view, click the dropdown arrow next to the select all checkbox and then click the option. Select rows from all pages. All of your keywords or targets within your filtered view will now be selected, and you can make both changes to all of them at the same time, using the same process of change bid and then choosing the bid amount you'd like to adjust and clicking change bid.
In your master settings under smart bids, you can set the minimum and maximum bid for your bid adjustments. If a bid adjustment would increase your target's bid above your max bid in your settings, it will instead be set to the bid you've selected in your max bid. Likewise, if a bid adjustment would decrease a bid below your minimum bid, it will instead be set to the bid selected in your min bid settings.
Occasionally, when making a bid adjustment, you'll receive a warning that one or more items were out of sync. This happens when there's a mismatch between the data in Merch Jar and the data that's in your Amazon ad console. When this happens, your bid adjustment is not executed, and Merch Jar immediately resyncs the data from Amazon for any records are out of sync.
You can then reapply your bid adjustment you just made, and your adjustment should now execute across all selected targets. Now that the data is synced.
Smart Bids feature automatically adjust your bids each day based on its target ACOS. Smart Bids works for both automatic and manual campaigns using the target ACOS and conversion rate data of a keyword or target to calculate its target cost per click. Smart Bids then make small daily adjustments to your target's bid to bring its actual cost per click to its target cost per click.
In your Merch Jar settings, you'll find options to adjust how your Smart Bids optimizes your keywords and targets. The default target ACOS is the target ACOS that all of your campaigns will inherit unless overridden by a new target ACOS set at the campaign level. The minimum bid sets the lowest possible bid your keywords and targets can be set to for both Smart Bids and manual bid adjustments.
If Smart Bids or a manual bid adjustment were to decrease a target's bid below the minimum bid, it will instead be set to the bid selected in your minimum bid settings. The maximum bid sets the highest possible bid that your keywords and targets can be set to for both Smart Bids and manual bid adjustments. If Smart Bids or a manual bid adjustment were to increase a target's bid above the max bid, it will instead be set to the bid you've selected in your max bid settings.
For example, if you have a target ACOS of 24% and a target ACOS threshold of 2%. Any targets that have an actual ACOS between 22 and 26% will not have their bids changed by Smart Bids. The max bid adjustment is the maximum amount that smart bids will increase or decrease a keyword or target's bid each day.
Smart Bids will adjust any keywords and targets that have at least two or more orders in the last 30 days. Not including today's or yesterday's data. The percentage change that Smart Bids makes to your target bids is based on how far away its actual ACOS is from its target ACOS the further away the actual ACOS is from its target ACOS, the larger the adjustment will be up to the percent that you set for your max bid adjustment in your Smart Bids settings. Smart Bids is enabled at the campaign level and will monitor and make adjustments to any keywords or targets within a Smart Bids enabled campaign.
To turn on Smart Bids for a campaign, navigate to your campaign’s page and use the Smart Bid Switch to enable Smart Bids for that campaign. To turn off Smart Bids for a campaign, simply press the switch again to disable it. Before turning on smart bids for a campaign, you can use the Smart Bids dry run feature to see every bid adjustment that Smart Bids would make if enabled but without impacting your live campaigns.
In the logs page, you'll be able to see a history of every bid adjustment that Smart Bids makes to your keywords and targets, showing you the amount of the bid adjustment and the reason why it was adjusted using your actual ACOS and target ACOS.
Today, I'm going to show you one of my favorite ways to structure your ad campaigns, which works for almost any product and budget. This is the first video in our series of structuring your ad campaigns. And in each video, we'll go over a different campaign structure you can use for your Amazon ads.
How to set them up and automate them with the help of Merch Jar. If you're not a Merch Jar user, you can still use the strategies in this video to structure your own campaigns.
You'll just have more manual work to do. If you want to save those hours of time managing your own campaigns, you can sign up for a free Merch Jar account at MerchJar.com. One of the most frustrating aspects to managing and optimizing your Amazon ad campaigns is the time it takes to structure your campaigns.
Analyzing search term reports, downloading spreadsheets, moving keywords from campaign to campaign, adding negative keywords. It's a never-ending process, and it takes a ton of time to stay on top of even just a few campaigns. And as you scale your business to hundreds or thousands of products, it becomes nearly impossible.
Or, you sacrifice good campaign structure practices, combining all your products into a few campaigns just so it's easier to manage. Which muddies your data, makes it difficult to optimize effectively and wastes your ad spend. Now you can have your ideal campaign structure without spending hours managing them, introducing promotions from Merch Jar. Champions allow you to automate the most tedious parts of managing your ad campaigns, and works with even the most complex campaign structures. With promotions, your keywords are automatically moved from one campaign to another based on their performance.
And when it comes to managing your campaigns, it's generally a balance between the time it takes to effectively manage a campaign and a campaign structure that provides useful data and optimal performance. On one end of the spectrum, we have a structure with a single campaign with all of your ads in it. Easy to manage, but doesn't give you a lot of control over your ads, which isn't great for ad performance.
The data you're paying for isn't very useful either, since it's hard to attribute which search terms are working for which ads. On the other end of the spectrum, we have a structure with a separate campaign for every single keyword for every different product. This gives you a ton of control over your bids and budgets, letting you dial them in perfectly. But with thousands of campaigns, this is incredibly difficult to manage without tools for more than a few products.
This type of granularity with your ads also doesn't make sense if your campaigns don't have the budget or aren't getting enough orders, as you won't collect enough data for it to be actionable. So how much you're spending and the amount of data you're collecting should also be a factor in choosing an appropriate campaign structure. With a tool like Merch Jar, we can create more complex structures without spending the time to manage it. This means you can make a choice based on the effectiveness and what's best for your spending budgets, not the amount of time it takes to manage. We're going to start this series with my recommended structure, which works for nearly any product or budget.
It uses three campaigns, each with a single ad group and each ad group with a single ad. So all three campaigns are advertising only one ASIN. First the pros, it isolates your keyword bids, provides accurate data reporting, gives you budget control for different campaign goals, has harvesting campaigns to find new search terms, and has great all-around performance for most advertisers. Now the cons, your placement adjustments will get applied to multiple keywords. It doesn't have a separate campaign for testing your exact match keywords, and it can be time-consuming to manage manually without tools.
This structure will be made up of three campaigns. One auto campaign for harvesting new search terms, one manual testing campaign also for harvesting new search terms, and one manual performance campaign for dialing in your bids for exact match keywords. You can create new campaigns for this, or convert any of your existing campaigns are already running to one of these campaigns. I'm going to create all new campaigns for these.
First we'll start by creating the campaigns and ad console, then we'll jump into Merch Jar to set up our keyword automation. If you're following along without Merch Jar, you'll just need to move the keywords around manually, rather than Merch Jar automating it for you.
Okay, so we've jumped into ad console. The first thing we're going to do is create an automatic targeting campaign for our product. We're going to be using sponsored products for all of these campaigns. The first thing we need to do is name our campaign. I have an ASIN that we're going to advertise. I like to put the ASIN at the start of the campaign name.
Now anything that you put in the campaign title here is searchable and filterable in Merch Jar and an ad console. Next, I like to put the product type, so an RK sponsored product ad, so SP or you could do SPA. Then next I put the goal of the campaign. This is our automatic targeting campaign, so I'm just going to put auto in the title so that we know what type of campaign it is.
Next, I like to add keywords or even just the product title itself, so that if you do want to do any searches or filters based on the keywords in your product titles, you'll be able to do that through the campaign name. So I'm just going to add cat tree because that's what we're advertising, but you could add additional keywords if you'd want.
Most important for me is having the ASIN in there with any single product campaigns, making it really easy to find exactly the campaigns that you're looking for and be able to see all the campaigns that belong to that ASIN. Next we have budgets. This is really going to depend on your product and market.
If you're launching a lot of different products or they're not necessarily validated, you're testing them, you may want to start with a lower budget where if you have fewer products or a lot of money invested into sourcing and getting the products delivered and now you're launching the products, you may want to have a higher budget.
So for this case, I'm going to start with $5 for the low margin products or launching a lot of products somewhere in the $2 to $5 range. For example, if you're immersed by Amazon seller, if you have fewer products and you're an FBA or an FBM seller, you might want to have a higher budget in the $20 to $50 range for each of these campaigns.
For the targeting, we're going to keep this at automatic targeting since this is our automatic targeting campaign. Next is bidding strategy. For auto campaigns lately, I've been using the dynamic bids up and down. Amazon claims that this bidding strategy has historically delivered more sales for the same ad spend.
And since this is a harvesting campaign, we want to find as many sales as possible. It's not necessarily about the cost of those sales since we can control the bids in our other campaigns. I'm going to stick with the up and down bidding strategy. But you could also use down only if you want to have a little more control of what your bids are instead of letting Amazon control that. Next for the ad group name, I like to put the targeting or match type of the ad group. Typically I only have one match type per ad group.
So if this was a manual campaign, I would have all my broad keywords in one ad group. If I had a second ad group in the same one with, for example, exact match, I would have a separate ad group for those. So this one, I'm just going to name auto. And for our product, we're just going to paste our ASIN right in here, which I already have copied.
So I'm going to paste that in, change to all Amazon products. And we have our cat tree here that we're going to advertise for. It's not my product. This is just for demo purposes. And we're going to add it here.
And onto our bids. This is another area that's going to really depend on your product and market and how aggressive you want to be with your advertising. One thing I do recommend no matter what product you're using is not to set the default bid, but instead set your bids by targeting groups for your automatic campaigns. This lets you set each of the auto targeting match types to a different bid than for all of them to use the exact same default bid.
So again, you have a little more control over your bids. I want to be aggressive with our product launch with this advertising. So I'm going to use the suggested bids for each of these just by clicking on the suggested bid. If you did want to be a little more conservative, you can start with lower bids, even extremely low bids, like five or 10 cents and slowly move those up over time. So it's a little bit of dealer's choice here and how aggressive or conservative you'd like to be the negative keyword targeting.
We're just going to leave blank for now since we don't have any data for this product. If you did have historical search term data and you had search terms that you know, don't convert and you don't want this ad to be seen for, you can add your negative keywords here to prevent that. And then we're just going to launch our product. Next we're going to launch our manual testing campaign. This is another search term harvesting campaign, just like our auto targeting campaign. Search terms that sell will be added here as a broad match so we can find other similar search terms that will sell as well. For the manual campaigns, it's going to be a very similar process as our automatic campaigns. For our campaign name, we're going to use the ASIN again, the type of ad so sponsored product and this is our testing campaign. So we're going to put testing there so we know what campaign or the goal of this campaign is.
And our keywords budget, we're going to stick with $5 and we're going to change our targeting to manual targeting for our bidding strategy on manual campaigns. I do leave this on dynamic bids down only for more control over our bids for naming the ad group. We're going to be adding broad match keywords to this campaign and only broad match. So we're going to name this ad group broad so we know what this ad group contains. And then we search for and add our product. And for targeting, we're going to use keyword targeting for the keyword targeting. We only want to have keywords in here that have already sold from our automatic targeting campaigns, but Amazon won't let you create a new campaign without at least one keyword in it.
So we're going to add one keyword and set the bid to as low as we can. And we're going to end up just pausing this as soon as we launch it so we don't waste any spend on a keyword that hasn't already been validated. You can again add negative keywords if you have data to support this. And then we launch our campaign from here, we can go into edit our campaign to pause that keyword that we don't want to be shown to pause that campaign. We're going to go into our ad group, which shows our keywords here and we're just going to pause it. Now that won't be shown, and we have our campaign set up ready to start adding keywords to it when they sell from our automatic campaign. And finally, we're going to create our performance campaign. Any search terms that get an order from our automatic campaign are also going to be added to this performance campaign as an exact match keyword. That way we can have precise control over our bids. So each search term that gets an order from our auto campaign will be added to both our testing campaign as a broad match keyword and to our performance campaign as an exact match keyword.
To create our performance campaign, instead of going through and creating a whole new campaign, since we're using the same settings as our testing campaign, we can just make a copy of it and change our campaign title. We don't want to have our campaign pause when we launch it. So we're going to uncheck pause and copy campaign. We've now copied our campaign. All we need to do is go into our campaign settings so we can edit the title. We're going to change testing to performance and get rid of this copy one and save. Next we're going to go into our ad group and change the name of this since we're going to be targeting exact matches in our performance, not broad. So all you have to do is click on your ad group and then go to your ad group settings. And we're going to change this to exact. Let's take a quick look at the targeting and make sure that keyword is still paused, which it's not.
So we want to also pause this. Moving back to our campaigns, we now have all three of our campaigns, our auto, our testing and our performance campaigns. Before we jump into Merch Jar to set up our keyword automations, let's look at how this campaign structure works from a high level. We have our three campaigns, our auto campaign, our manual testing campaign and our manual performance campaign. When a search term gets in order from our automatic campaign, we want to add that search term to our manual testing campaign so we can find other similar search terms that also sell.
We also want to add that same search term as an exact match to our performance campaign so we can dial in the bid to hit our ACOS goals for that term. So when a search term gets one order, it's getting added to both the testing and performance campaigns at the same time. Our trigger that causes the search terms to be added to those campaigns is one order. That trigger can be adjusted. For example, if you wanted more product validation before adding the keyword to a performance campaign, you could wait until you had two or three orders. You could also set other parameters for the trigger, such as needing to be under a certain ACOS before the search term gets added to another campaign. In this way, you can create some pretty complex systems, but for this one, we're going to keep it pretty simple.
Our trigger will be when a search term gets at least one order. And with our manual testing campaign going, we still want to be able to pull out any search terms that get an order from our broad match keyword and stick them into our performance campaign as an exact match. Once a search term from the auto campaign is added to the manual campaigns, that search term can still be targeted and bid on by the auto campaign, meaning we'll be targeting and bidding on the same search term in the auto campaign, the testing campaign, and the performance campaign.
While Amazon won't let you bid against yourself, it's not ideal to bid on the same keyword in different campaigns and defeats the purpose of this structure, which is to have more control over our bids for specific search terms. But we can get around this through negative keywords. When a search term is added as an exact match keyword to our performance campaign, we don't want that search term to also be targeted by our auto and manual testing campaigns. If we add that search term as a negative exact match to an ad group or campaign, your ad is blocked from being shown for that exact term.
So anytime you add an exact match keyword to your performance campaign, we also want to add that search term as a negative exact match to both our auto and manual testing campaign so only our performance campaign can target it. However, one caveat with exact match search terms you should be aware of is that they target both plural and singular versions of the search term. So the exact match keyword for cat tree will also target cat trees and cats tree. When you negative exact match a search term, it also blocks both the singular and plural forms.
If you have a product that performs well with the plural version of a search term, but not the singular version, you can't block the singular version without also blocking the plural version. Similarly, if we're bidding on a broad match keyword in our manual testing campaign, that keyword will target search terms that our auto campaign is also targeting. We want to eliminate as much of this search term overlap between the two campaigns as possible by blocking search terms our broad match keyword is targeting in that auto campaign. Since there's not a way to add a keyword as a negative broad match, negative phrase match is going to be the next best thing to block as much of that search term overlap as possible.
This will block any search term that has extra words before and after the keyword, but the keyword has to be in the search term and in exactly the same word order. So a phrase match for cat tree will also include big cat tree and cat tree for kitten, but not tree for cats, since it doesn't include the keyword in the exact word order. There will still be some overlap in search term targeting between the campaigns, but this will help isolate your keywords, giving you more control over your bids. And just like our keyword targets have triggers, so do our negative keywords. In this campaign structure example, our negative keywords have the same trigger as when we add keyword targets since they're happening at the same time. So we're adding the keyword as a negative phrase match and as a negative exact match when it has one order, which means the trigger is one order. The trigger for negative keywords doesn't need to be the same as your keyword targets trigger and you can set additional parameters such as using a cost or the number of clicks for more complex systems.
But for simplicity, we're going to keep the same trigger for our negative keywords as our keyword targets, which is one order. So this is what our entire campaign structure looks like at a high level. Now let's jump into Merch Jar and set up these exact rules with promotions. If you don't have a Merch Jar account yet, sign up for your free account at Merch Jar.com. You can have your Amazon ad account connected to Merch Jar in just minutes and be on your way to smarter ad optimization. If you create new campaigns for this structure, you'll need to wait for the next Amazon API update for your new campaigns to sync to your Merch Jar account. This happens every six hours and you can see when the last update was at the top of your Merch Jar app.
If you have more products you need to create campaigns for, now's a good time to do that so they're all ready to sync when the next update happens. To create our keyword automations for our new campaigns, we're going to create a new promotion by clicking on promotion at the top of the app. This page shows you all of your create promotions, the number of rules and ad groups that belong to that promotion and whether that promotion is enabled. To create a new promotion, we're going to click add promotion in the top right of the Merch Jar app.
Next we'll name our promotion. I like to use the ASIN, but you can also add other keywords or metadata as well. Each promotion is made up of one or more ad groups and one or more rules that apply to those ad groups.
We're first going to add all the ad groups that we want this promotion to manage. To add the ad groups, we're going to add items and then search for our ad groups. You can search by campaign title or ad group name. Since we use the ASIN and all of our campaign titles, we can search by that and it'll pull up all of our ad groups that we want to work with. You then select all the ad groups you want to be included in this promotion group and in this case we're going to select all three and then add items. Next we'll create the rules that will apply to these ad groups by clicking add rule. Each rule has three parts, the search term source, the trigger, and the actions. The search term source is determined in which ad groups the rule will evaluate search terms. This is the use search terms from here column. Any ad group that is selected will have each of its search terms evaluated by this promotion rule each day.
If a search term appears in more than one ad group, for example in our auto ad group in our broad match ad group, both targeting the same search term, the search term data for both ad groups is aggregated together and then evaluated by the promotion rule. So if the search term big cat tree got 10 clicks in our auto ad group and five clicks in our broad match ad group, it would aggregate all those clicks together to 15 clicks and then the rule would evaluate it. Next we have the trigger. This is the criteria that is evaluated by the promotion rule for each search term. If the search term doesn't meet this criteria, the rule isn't triggered and nothing happens for that search term.
If a search term meets the criteria that is set here, the rule is triggered and the rules actions are performed. This section here is the actions. It's the ad groups that the search term gets added to as a broad phrase or exact match keyword target. Or the ad groups that the search term will be added to as a negative phrase or negative exact match keyword.
You can create multiple rules for a single promotion group to create some pretty complex campaign structures or combine multiple actions into one rule. Recalling our campaign structure, since all of our actions have the same trigger of one order, we can create all of these actions using just a single rule. First, let's set up our criteria for the trigger, which is orders equal one or more. So we're going to change this to greater than or equal to one order. Since our trigger is going to be set as soon as there's one order for the search term, we don't need to set up a look back period. This sets the date range that this promotion rule will look at when it's evaluating search term data.
Leaving it blank will use all of your campaign data in your Merch Jar account, which is logged beginning with 60 days prior to your sign up day. If you don't want to use your entire campaign history, a 30 to 60 day look back window should suffice for most rules.
However, if you're running new rules for an existing campaign with lots of order data, you may want to start conservatively with the look back period as low as just a few days, as it can create a lot of new keywords the first time it's ran depending on your triggers. You can start with a look back period of just a few days and then extend that out over time as your promotions run.
Once we finish setting up our first promotion, we'll touch on how you can test your new promotion rules and the keywords it will create before you ever run them. Next, we're going to set up our actions. These are the actions we want to happen whenever a search term meets our trigger criteria. In this case, one order.
When a search term gets an order, we want to add it to our testing campaign in the broad match ad group as a broad match. So we're going to select broad match for this ad group and campaign. We also want to add that same search term when it gets an order to our performance campaign in our exact match ad group as an exact match keyword. So we're going to select exact match. Next, we want to add this search term as a negative keyword to the correct ad groups. Looking at our campaign structure again, we want to add the search term as a negative phrase match to our automatic campaign so our new broad match keyword won't have as much overlap and targeting.
And we want to add it as a negative exact match for our manual testing campaign since it will now be targeted as an exact match in the performance campaign. Search terms that get orders from our broad match keywords in our testing campaign may also be targeted by our auto campaign. So we also want to add the search term as a negative exact match to our automatic campaign when we're adding it to our performance campaign from our broad match keyword. So for our auto campaign, we're going to add it as both a negative phrase and a negative exact match keyword, the negative phrase for the search terms moving from our auto to testing campaigns and exact for search terms moving from our testing to our performance campaigns. Our testing campaign, we only need to add it as a negative exact match to block the search terms we're moving from our testing to our performance campaigns. So now we have our trigger and our actions for our rule.
The last step is determining the search term sources for this rule. This tells the rule which ad groups to evaluate search terms from. Since we're creating keywords in our manual testing and performance ad groups from the search term data in our auto targeting ad group, if they meet our criteria of one or more order, we need to evaluate the search terms from our auto campaigns ad group. So we'll check the box for search terms from here for the auto targeting ad group. And since we're creating keywords from the data in our broad match ad group for the exact match ad group, we need to evaluate the search term from our broad match ad group as well. So we're going to check the box for broad match include its search terms for evaluation as well.
Now we have all three parts of our rule, the search term source, the trigger and the actions. Now what we have to do is add it by default, the rules turned off. So we're just going to flip it on here with this switch and then save our promotion by default, the promotion group itself will be paused. So you can enable that with this switch here. If you're creating rules for an existing campaign, it's a good idea to test it with our dry run feature before you enable it.
Once a rule runs and performs live actions on your account, there's no one doing it. So it's important to test it to make sure it's working just like you intended it. When you click dry run, all the rules in your promotion group will run and will show you all the new keywords and negative keywords that would be created, but without actually making any live changes to your account. This allows you to go back and edit your rules if it's not creating the keywords you expect, or if it's making too many changes all at once. We recommend using a short look back period as low as just a few days or being more conservative in the triggers that you set.
For example, requiring more orders than one before moving a keyword. You can then modify your look back period or triggers to be less conservative over time. When you're ready to turn on your promotion, simply flip the switch and your new promotion rules will start running once per day.
As a bonus for sticking around to the end of the video, I'm going to show you one more rule you can add to your promotion group that will help you cut down on wasted ad spend. We're going to go back into our promotion group we just created, and we're going to create a new rule by clicking add rule search terms that are getting clicks, but zero sales. We want to add as negative keywords to our ad groups so that we don't waste any more money on them. So for this, we're going to set our criteria for the trigger to equal zero orders. And for clicks, I'm going to set this for any search terms that are getting greater than or equal to 30 clicks.
So it's gotten 30 clicks, but no sales. Any search term that gets 30 clicks without any orders, we want to remove that so we don't spend any more money on that search term by adding it as a negative keyword to our campaigns. The look back period for this one, I'm going to leave as blank, but you can change this to have a set date or change the number of clicks if you want to be more conservative or more aggressive.
For our search term sources, we're only going to look at our auto and our broad match campaigns. Since our exact match performance campaign is only targeting exact match keywords, I'm not as concerned about wasting spend there. Again, if multiple ad groups are selected as the search term sources, search terms from those ad groups will have their data aggregated together. So with this role, if you have a search term that has 20 clicks and zero orders in the auto campaign and in the manual testing campaign, the exact same search term has 15 clicks and zero orders.
The promotion rule will combine that data. In our case, this search term will have 35 clicks combined between the auto and the broad match campaigns, in which case it would meet our criteria of 30 clicks and zero orders and would trigger our actions that we set for the actions we want to have happen. We want to add this as a negative exact match to both our auto and our broad campaigns. So we're going to check exact here. We don't want to use negative phrase match keywords because that could potentially block keywords that we do still want to show up for. The last thing I'm going to do for this rule is rename it so we don't get it confused with our other one.
I'm going to call it keyword negation and then add it and then we would just want to make sure that we turn it on and it's ready to go. While we're in here, let's jump into our other rule and also name that to give it a little more descriptive title and I'm just going to call this one keyword promotion. And with our new promotion rule now running, Merch Jar will automatically promote and negate our keywords, giving us more control, better ad performance and cutting wasted ad spend without us lifting a finger. That wraps it up for our first video in our campaign structure series. There's several variations that could be applied to this campaign structure, like multiple products per campaign or multiple ad groups in a campaign, which we'll cover in future videos in this series, so make sure to hit that subscribe button so you're notified about all of our future content.
Understanding the Amazon Buying Journey is the foundation for successful advertising on the platform. Let's take a step-by-step look at what happens from the moment a shopper enters Amazon to the point they make a purchase, and how your ads play a role in this process.
First, a shopper goes to Amazon and begins their shopping experience by entering something they're looking for into the search bar.
This is the search term, the exact words the customer typed into the Amazon search bar. The shopper is then taken to a page filled with products relevant to that term, known as the search results page. Think of it like a virtual shopping aisle where the top shelf products are at eye level, and nobody really looks at the bottom shelf.
These results, or product listings, offer a short preview of each product, including an image, rating, and title.
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Amazon ranks these listings based on various factors, analyzing billions of data points, like the product’s historical sales or the customer’s previous interactions. Generally, products that Amazon deems more likely to be purchased are placed nearer to the top of the page.
Why? Because shoppers click on products at the top of the page far, far more frequently than those at the bottom, or on subsequent pages.
Once the shopper sees a product that they like, they click on the listing to learn more about the product, and they land on the product detail page.
This is the product’s landing page that contains all of the detailed information for that particular product, including the buttons to buy the product. The product detail page includes product images, description, customer reviews, model numbers, pricing, product variations, and more.
This is the page the shopper learns more about the product, reads reviews, and decides ultimately whether to buy it or not.
Here, our mystery shopper adds the product their cart, finalizes their shipping and payment information, and places the order. This completes our Amazon customer’s shopping journey.
Let’s quickly review.
Now that we've understood the general buying journey, let's see how advertising fits into this picture.
Just as before, a shopper types in a search term and is taken to the search results page. And of all these product listings, many are ads, also known as paid listings. The listings that aren’t ads, are called organic listings. They show up naturally with Amazon’s ranking algorithm. No artificial ingredients or paid shortcuts. The farmers' market of Amazon, if you will
Paid listings are ranked similarly to organic listings, but with an additional key factor: the amount the advertiser is willing to pay to appear on the page.
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In the blink of an eye, as the search results page loads, an entire auction unfolds, similar to the fast-paced bidding at an art auction, but without the fancy hats and gavels. Amazon uses the bid you set for your ad to determine where your ad ranks in this auction. Well… sort of, but we’ll cover bidding mechanics in more detail in later video.
An impression is counted each time your ad appears on a search result page. Even if it’s at the bottom of the page and the shopper doesn't scroll to where they can actually see it. If the ad was rendered on the search results page, it's still counted as an impression in your ad console.
Up until this point, none of the advertisers on the search results page have paid any money for their ads to be seen. The advertisers have only said what they’re willing to pay if someone clicks on their ad.
This is because Amazon uses a Pay per click, or PPC model for their ads. In PPC advertising, advertisers are only charged when some clicks on their ad. It's like a free billboard that only charges you when it works. There’s other advertising models that exist, but Amazon almost exclusively uses the pay per click model for their advertising, with only a couple exceptions, so we’re only going to focus on the pay per click, or PPC model in this series.
Let’s get back to our shopper -
They land on the search results page filled with both paid and organic listings. The listing that catches their eye has a small “sponsored” label above it, and they click on it. Now we’re getting into some significant metrics
Amazon now charges you for the clicks, triggering that click to be added to your clicks metric inside the ad console, and the click cost to be added to the ad spend column.
The metric that shows the percentage of shoppers that clicked on your ad after seeing it is known as the click through rate, or CTR. It’s calculated by dividing the total clicks by the total impressions, and multiplying by 100 to get the percent.
The click through rate can be a useful metric to gauge how well your ad is standing out from the competition.
A high click through rate means your ad is attracting a lot attention and enticing shoppers to click to learn more about your product, while a lower click through rate might mean that it needs some optimization, such as better product images, a different title, or more reviews.
After the click, we know the drill - they land on the product detail page, and possibly buy the product. If they buy the product, this is known as a conversion. They converted from a shopper, to a buyer.
The percentage of clicks that result in a conversion is known as the conversion rate, a crucially important metric when it comes to Amazon bidding.
With the purchase, an order is attributed to the ad in the ad console, and the revenue from the sale adds to the sales column. If these terms seem overwhelming, don’t worry. This introduction is just the beginning, and we'll cover them in more detail later.
With their new product on the way, our shopper has completed the Amazon buying journey. Like a modern-day fairy tale with a happy ending for both the shopper and the advertiser. With this understanding of the Amazon buying journey and how it relates to your advertising, you've grasped the essentials.
A bid for your Amazon Ads may seem simple at first glance: it's the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. But this is just the surface of a more complex system. Every time a customer searches for a product on Amazon, an unseen auction springs into action.
Your bid is your entry ticket. But winning this auction is not as straightforward as having the highest bid. Settings like placement adjustments will modify your bid depending on where your ad is being shown. And with Amazon's dynamic bidding algorithms, your bid might not even be the one Amazon brings to the auction.
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Amazon prioritizes two things: the customer shopping experience and maximizing product sales. They don’t just care about how much you're willing to pay; they want to show ads most likely to result in a purchase. Ads that resonate with shoppers by showcasing relevant products they want to buy.
This brings about a sort of hidden quality score for your ads influencing whether or not they’ll be shown.
But a bid is more than just a dollar figure. It’s your biggest strategic lever when it comes to Amazon Ads, affecting the success of your campaigns and determining whether you meet advertising goals, or blow through your budgets without results.
The perfect bid is an equilibrium between your conversion rates, profit margins, and business goals. It symbolizes how important a specific keyword, product target, or placement is to your overall objective. And it’s a reflection of the competitive landscape you’re part of.
So, while a bid may seem like just a number, it's a number that carries substantial strategic weight. A catalyst affecting how, when, and where your ads get shown.
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