Amy Wees is all about planning – naturally so, being an expert military planner for 18 years in her previous career. This fact about our CEO here at AAH is relevant to today’s topic as we believe that every successful endeavor always begins with the right plan. Today, thanks to Amy’s expertise, we are sharing another great plan – one that will help you transform your eComm business into a conversion-focused machine from the first time you set up your listing. We’re talking about your Amazon product’s first PPC campaign.
Yes, we know. PPC may as well be a foreign language – and does it really even work? The answer to that is: yes it does work – and it works like magic – but only if it’s done right. If your PPC is not done right, it will work against you. And it will turn into an expensive, complicated, and headache-inducing mess that may bury your listing further down in the rankings.
So let’s do it right, shall we? Tune in to today’s featured video as we feature Amy and her tried-and-tested optimization tips for your Amazon product’s first PPC campaign:
Is Your First PPC on an Auto Campaign Setup? If Yes – Abort. Now.
We don’t mean to make you panic – but you seriously need to know – your first PPC campaign will not do well on an automatic setup. In fact, there’s a 90% chance that it will tank. Here’s exactly what will happen:
- A new listing on Amazon will not have any page visits yet – and because of that you won’t be relevant for any keywords yet.
- You’ll notice that the suggested keywords for PPC on a new listing will be all the wrong keywords – mostly too broad and general terms. No niche and nothing is streamlined for your most specific target audience.
- So because your PPC is set up for broad keywords – there’s a poor chance that your listing will convert. There will be too much competition – in other words, the odds are against you.
- And because your listing won’t convert, your ranking will stay low. You won’t get to page 1. And it will cost you a lot of money to rectify the mistake (that is if you figure out what you were doing wrong – FYI, a lot of Amazon sellers don’t).
Start With A Manual + Exact Match PPC Campaign
Your PPC setup will need extra attention before you can let it run automatically. Because just like any algorithm, in time it will have a life of its own. A newly-launched listing without guidance and on an auto campaign will waste your advertising money on the wrong keywords. That said, automatic PPC campaigns are still considered excellent tools in a seller’s toolbox – when set up with proper guidance.
If there’s one major strategy we keep drilling into our audience’s heads over and over – it’s that one of the first things you must do as an entrepreneur is identify your niche. And when we say niche, we don’t just mean your product category. Niche is not “water bottle”, “earphones”, or “pet toys”. It’s “stainless steel water bottle with spout”, “wireless noise-canceling earbuds for gym”, or “non-toxic rubber chew toy for medium-sized dogs”. Your niche targets your most specific buyer. These are the buyers who are looking for the most specific product to address their specific needs. These are the buyers most likely to convert.
The bad news is – auto PPC does not automatically detect your niche in your listing’s early days on Amazon. The algorithm won’t know that you’re selling a green insulated water bottle that keeps drinks cold for 24 hours. When the algorithm sees your listing – it can only see “water bottle”. And we all know how many different types of water bottles are selling on Amazon. You can bet you’ll never rank high on page 1 for that broad a keyword.
But there is good news – because you can tell the algorithm what your niche is. That’s where a manual setup + exact match campaign comes in. Do your keyword research, merge relevant and high-ranking keywords together, create a medium to long-tail keyword phrase, and use that for PPC. Voila! Trust us, if you do this, it won’t be long until your conversion rate starts rising.
And the best news of all is that once you start ranking in your niche, once you get your positive reviews, and once Amazon begins rewarding you by bumping you up on the rankings – then you can go back to setting up your auto PPC campaign. Because you told the algorithm what exactly your product is – now Amazon will be linking you with the exact keywords you identified in the beginning. Now you got your PPC working for you – not the other way around.
Try Amy’s advice. See how it improves your Amazon PPC optimization. We look forward to your feedback in the comments section.
See you next week for another Tips Tuesday!
Transcript
Amy Wees: Hey, I hope you guys are having a great q4. I wanted to take a moment and go live and answer a poll question that I posted the other day in the amazing at home Facebook group. So I asked the question, when you’re first launching a product on Amazon, what kind of PPC campaigns should you use? That was the question. So when you’re first launching, not after a product is launched, and you’re making sales, and everything’s good, when you first go live, what kind of PPC campaigns should you use? Should you use auto campaigns? Should you use manual exact match campaigns? Should you use a combination of both? How should you do it? Well, the reason that I wanted to go live and talk about this is because it is something that I see people making mistakes on over and over and over again. And running an auto campaign, when you first launched a product can actually cause your your listing to tank and to rank for all of the wrong keywords. So let’s just walk through the steps really quick. All right, why you don’t start an auto campaign. And I actually have seen programs teaching this. I’ve seen coaches teaching this. I’ve seen PPC service providers do this. And it’s it’s, it’s not a good thing, right. So when you first launch a listing on Amazon, right, it’s just gone live. It hasn’t had that many page visits yet. So people haven’t really found it in search, and they haven’t clicked on it yet. And what ends up happening is even though the search engine does kind of like a cursory crawl of your, your listing text, you’re not relevant for that many keywords, yet, you’re not indexed for that many keywords, and you’re not relevant for those keywords yet. So you’ll notice if you just launched a listing, and you start an auto campaign, the suggested keywords Oh, sorry, if you started a manual campaign, the suggested keywords would be all wrong. Right. You know, Amazon, when you’re started PPC campaign, you look at the suggested keywords, and they should be pretty related to your product, right? Well, if you’ve just launched the suggested keywords, are we all wrong. And that’s because you haven’t gotten enough page visits yet. So what I’ve seen people doing is Bill newly launched a product, they haven’t gotten those page visits, yet, they haven’t set up a manual exact match campaign or even phrase match. Depending on what keyword it is.
They haven’t set up those campaigns to tell the search engine exactly what their product is, and be able to show up for those exact keywords. And that way customers when they search and find them, they get marked as relevant for those keywords. So I tell my people in our launch sequence, we don’t start with an auto campaign. We start with a manual exact match campaign for our top three to five keywords that we really want to rank for. And these are medium to longtail keywords. And then once we start to get impressions and we start to get visits, and everything’s looking good, and we also try to get at least one product review during that timeframe, then we know okay, we’re far more relevant, we’re good to go. Now we’re very indexed. Now you can start an auto campaign, but do not start an auto campaign. So this is what happens if you start one, if you start an auto campaign, I was on a client call the other day. And this client had a very specific shelf like a shelf, a home decor item that is sold to a very specific niche for very specific keywords. And the program that they were in taught them to do an auto campaign from the very start of their listing. And so I took a look at the search terms in that auto campaign. And sure enough, they were getting that that auto campaign was just spending so much money. And sure enough looking in the search terms for that auto campaign, that it was showing them for very broad shelf keywords like things like wall shelf, floating shelf, which their product was none of those things. So because they set up that campaign before they indexed for anything. Now all of a sudden the keywords that their product is relevant for are totally incorrect. And you know, they’ve got to now kind of make up for it by creating those manual campaigns and trying to rank for very relevant keywords. And this really hurts their ranking over time and it hurts the the overall keywords that they’re indexed for because you really want to indexed for those super relevant keywords so that you can make those sales, right. So that is the detriment that could happen, it could actually cause you far to spend far more money to index for keywords that aren’t even relevant for your product. And it could hurt your search ranking for keywords that are relevant to your product. So not that auto campaigns are bad. I love auto campaigns, okay, especially if you just put one targeting group in each auto campaign. Oh, man, that is just crushing it, it is crushing it. So definitely try that. But when you first launch, I want you to make sure that you’re only doing a manual campaign, either phrase or exact match, depending on the keyword right, some some keywords are going to be better as a phrase match than they are as an exact match depending on that, right? If people are typing in words before or after that phrase, when you do your keyword research, you want to do a phrase match versus an exact match. But the point is, you want to tell Amazon you want to tell them what you are first for that first, like week to two weeks of launch. And you want to get those visits those page visits so that you become relevant. And that way when you start your auto campaign, they’re showing you to the right audience. Amazon’s algorithm is great at targeting and as long as you’re relevant and your index for the right keywords, it’s going to perform far better than a manual for example product targeting campaign. So that’s really, really great. It’s not to not use auto campaigns, but don’t use them at the very beginning of your lunch. So I hope that this is super helped you guys. I would love to hear your opinions on this and and have a great holiday season and a great rest of your q4. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye
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