You need to monitor your keywords and optimize your bids to make your ads run profitably. If you can automate all these processes, you can save a lot of time and effort, can’t you? 

Advertising automation can really help you streamline your Amazon ad management.

Besides, automating your campaign management will also give you precise results. 

This article tells you everything about how automation can benefit you as a marketer and helps you with techniques that can make you stand out in the competition. 

What to consider before beginning with automation

The problem with Amazon PPC campaigns is you constantly need to test and track them. But automation allows you to be productive and save a lot of time and effort – more about that later. 

You need to know all the aspects of your Amazon ad that you can automate. 

Here are the three key aspects of your Amazon campaign that you can automate:

• Bids
• Keywords
• Campaigns

Along with that, we’d suggest you track your campaign budgets so you can effectively automate your campaigns. 

Why should you automate your Amazon campaigns?

Amazon advances every day, and so does the competition. Therefore, any advertising efforts demand quick and precise results in an unprecedented way. And, automation helps you achieve just that. Besides, instead of monitoring and optimizing manually, you can focus on other activities, including product research, inventory management, and other activities of your business.  

Advertising automation can benefit Amazon sellers in multiple ways. 

Automation saves time

This is a no-brainer. Automation allows you to save time for engaging yourself in other productive activities that may help boost your business, apart from ad management. If you have a large portfolio of products and run multiple automatic and manual campaigns, you need to spend more time managing and optimizing ad campaigns. 

It reduces effort with built-in features

When you leverage automation and tools that can optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns, you can find insightful features that give you actionable data on existing campaigns. Let’s say these advanced Amazon optimization tools can suggest negative keywords depending on your target ACoS, help you find top-performing keywords from automatic campaigns, and suggest you take necessary actions. 

These built-in features help you launch, optimize, and scale your campaigns seamlessly.

Automation Improves scalability

The campaign’s scalability increases if you run and manage multiple campaigns without spending much effort and time. This would save you time in strategizing your advertising efforts.

It helps in documentation and data collection

Analyzing historical advertising data is helpful for creating campaigns. The search term report and targeting report are very helpful to advertisers. But, Amazon only allows access to advertising reports for 65 days and 90 days respectively. That means you should download all the data periodically or you will lose the historical data. 

On the flip side, if you use third-party advertising automation tools, you can access all your data from the time you sync your account to till date.

It operates based on a set of rules

There are two cases that arise if you change bids manually without automation. You lower the bid beyond a limit so that you no longer deal with many important keywords. The second case is where the bid goes higher than expected. In this scenario, the ACoS increases unimaginably.

When you automate the process of optimization, the system decreases or increases bids based on several pre-set rules. This helps you maintain an optimum ACoS and ensure that you do not omit relevant keywords. 

Optimizes round the clock

The automation mechanisms work round the clock without any break so that the reports and analyses are available at any time. 

Lowering the scope of human errors

When you are doing the PPC management manually, it is quite natural for mistakes to creep in. Unlike manual PPC management, automation does away with mistakes and false interpretations. 

Things to keep in mind before you automate Amazon ad campaigns

Before you automate the campaigns, there are certain steps you should follow to ensure your automation process runs smoothly. 

Fixing the goals

Setting a clear goal for your campaigns will help you create the right PPC strategies. These goals may include, increased brand visibility, more brand awareness, better organic ranking, improved market share, etc. 

Set the ad budget and closely watch the metrics

Keep in mind the budget. You also need to possess an understanding of the metrics you want to watch. Watching the metrics for some time will help you find what’s working for your campaign. This will lead to the refinement of your PPC strategies.  

Choose the right way to automate your campaigns

There are two ways in which you can automate your campaigns. 

Use an advertising tool like SellerApp to automate some of your PPC tasks. 

You can either optimize manually or go for automation. If you choose automation, you can also decide if you want to go with the defined rules or the machine learning algorithms. 

Difference between rule-based automation and machine-learning automation

A step-by-step guide to automating your Amazon PPC campaigns using SellerApp 

Now that you know the many benefits that automation brings to your Amazon ads, let’s see how to automate your PPC campaigns. Here is the step-by-step guide. 

SellerApp’s automation rules work based on pre-defined rule sets. You can automate your PPC using these rules. To begin with the automation, you need to:

• Log in to the Dashboard
• Navigate to “Advertising”
• Click “Automation”
• Select “Automation Blueprint”

You can either “Create from Blank” or “Choose from template”

Choose from Template

If you click “Automation Blueprint,” it will show three rule templates to choose from. They include:

• Increase visibility
• ACoS Optimization
• Budget Management

You can increase your product’s visibility by incorporating search terms that will gain you more impressions. You can use Keyword Harvester and ROI Optimizer to achieve this. 

ACoS optimization allows you to adjust your ad spending according to the performance of your keywords. It helps you boost your ROI while maintaining your ACoS. You can curb the wastage of money by optimizing negative keyword targets in your campaigns. You can use the feature called Money Saver to attain optimum ACoS. 

The third rule is Budget Management, which helps you use dayparting to optimize your campaign budgets. Dayparting helps you run your ads at the most optimal times of the day. You can use dayparting at the campaign and account levels. 

Create from Blank

Apart from choosing from the pre-set rule templates, you can also create your own rule from scratch. The “Create from Blank” option allows you to create your own rules or set different conditions for your campaign. 

Click “Create from blank” and add the relevant information about your new rule.

Final words

Automation minimizes your workload to a great extent. But you can not lean back imagining that automation will bring the desired results. It is always a good idea to review your campaigns at least once a week. Also, give the right suggestions to the automation system at the right time to gain maximum benefit. 

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About the Author:

Arishekar is a multi-faceted marketing professional with a proven track record of success in the highly competitive e-commerce industry. As the Senior Marketing Director at SellerApp, Arishekar has been instrumental in driving the growth and success of the company. With over ten years of experience in digital marketing, he has specialized in areas such as SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing, making him a multifaceted marketing professional.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arishekar/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arishekarn

However, if done the wrong way, it can prove costly and reverse your marketing efforts. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the mistakes that sellers make with Amazon advertising and what you can do to avoid committing them. 

What is ROAS?

In the world of Amazon advertising, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is one of the key metrics used to measure the performance and efficiency of a campaign. It is the metric by which you can calculate the amount of money generated or lost from the amount of money invested into a campaign. It is the inverse of ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales).

ROAS is calculated using this formula:

ROAS = Total revenue from ad spendTotal ad spend OR ROAS = 1/ACOS

Top PPC Mistakes to Avoid for a Good ROAS

Using the right ad types according to your objectives

Launching PPC campaigns should always align with your business goals. Sellers use various strategies to ensure the success of their campaigns. But choosing the wrong ad type can be detrimental to improving your campaign ROAS as well as your long-term profitability. 

Amazon has 3 different ad types – Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Each of these serves a different purpose and helps you achieve different goals. 

For example – if you’re looking to build brand awareness and visibility by achieving more impressions and are less focused on increasing sales, then Sponsored Brand ads are better than Sponsored Products. Sponsored Brands should be used to target customers at the top of the sales funnel, whereas Sponsored Products work best for improving conversions. 

Remember, it is important to have a well-planned long-term strategy. This lets you understand and analyze which customers clicked on your ads and at what point of their shopping journey, along with the right ad types. On the whole, this helps improve your ROAS overall. 

Regular bid optimization

Your bidding strategies need to be constantly checked on as it is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of concept. How much you bid changes according to the time as well as during peak shopping season when you will have to bid more aggressively for a particular keyword because of high competition. If you bid too low or moderately, you can lose out on important sales to your competitors. At the same time, if you’re bidding too high, it means your ACoS will be very high, and your ROAS will be low. Optimizing bids need to be done frequently along with monitoring them, preferably on a weekly basis if not daily. 

Measure the right KPIs

When it comes to measuring the performance of your ads, there are several important ad metrics – impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, CPC, etc. However, analyzing all these metrics for all campaigns will do you no good. You need to measure KPIs depending on your campaign goals. You may see high numbers, but if they’re for the wrong performance indicators, you’re not going to know if you’re on the right track in terms of your business goals or not. 

So how can you know what KPIs to focus on? 

Many sellers think that a high conversion rate and clicks are good. But if you notice that your CTR is low, it is an indication that you’re missing out on optimizing several other crucial factors. On the other hand, if you’re looking to increase your brand awareness and exposure, then a high CTR and clicks are good indicators. 

Ultimately, many advertisers want to achieve a high ROAS. While you may have achieved this, if your ad spends, on the whole, doesn’t take into account the profitability of your product, it is an indication that your overall profitability and revenue are moving on a downward trajectory. 

To ensure a good ROAS overall, you need to always ensure that you’re looking at the bigger picture and focusing on your brand/company’s long-term goals.

Targeting the right audience and relevancy 

Amazon Sponsored ads are known to be useful in reaching a wide audience. However, targeting a wide audience is not always as fruitful as targeting the right audience, however large. Your ads have to be relevant to the shoppers you’re trying to attract. Otherwise, you’re spending your precious ad dollars with the chances of a low ROAS. To remedy this, what you need to do is define your goals, as this will help you define the right kind of traffic that is guaranteed to convert better. 

Amazon Sponsored ads allow geo-targeting so that you can target your ads to specific regions where you’re most likely to get high-converting traffic instead of targeting an unnecessarily large audience. Another method to ensure a good ROAS is with dayparting so that your ads run only at times of the day when your target audience is most likely to shop. 

In terms of keywords, make sure you focus your research on forming a list of negative keywords because they help you cut down on wasted ad spending. Also, for a good RoAS, many sellers often forget the importance of long-tail keywords. These have better conversion rates as they bring in shoppers who are searching for a very specific product and hence are high-converting. 

Strategy, structure, and Sponsored Brand ads:

While optimization and automation are important, sellers need to focus on sustainable profitability and adopt ad structures and strategies that facilitate this. While running PPC campaigns, sellers need to remember that they need to drive their profitability without spending a lot of money on making a sale profitable. 

Another important thing is to focus on improving organic ranking and traffic side by side with PPC. Keeping this in mind, after a thorough analysis of different ad types and structures, Sponsored Brand ads have been noted to generate a ROAS that is higher than the other two ad types. 

Automation with SellerApp for a good ROAS

The SellerApp advertising suite comes with automation features that allow you to optimize your campaigns for a high ROAS. With the ability to create custom rules from scratch by defining the conditions for which you want to set triggers, you can optimize your bids and control ad spending. 

You can also choose dayparting for your ads or choose from pre-defined rule templates for automation. The three rule templates – Keyword Harvester, ROI Optimizer, and Money Saver help you. The Money Saver helps with negative keyword targeting by optimizing bids for keywords that bring in low conversion. 

The ROI optimizer lets you set a target ACOS and ROAS so that your bids are optimized for the most potential campaign keywords so as to help you achieve your goals easily. The Keyword Harvester allows you to optimize your bids in such a way that you reach relevant customers and increase conversions, impressions, and visibility for your products. SellerApp automation is a safe way to ensure your campaigns are on the right track to achieving a good ROAS. 

Final thoughts

As stated earlier, Amazon PPC offers a range of benefits to sellers but make sure you tread carefully, especially while structuring your campaigns and optimizing your bids. While automation software may be slightly pricey, it can help you save your money by ensuring that you don’t make costly mistakes. 

Don’t lose sight of your brand and company goals and structure, and deploy your campaigns accordingly. Regular monitoring and optimization are important. As long as you are on top of your campaigns and don’t forget to check on their performance and progress regularly, you are sure to be on the right track to PPC success. 

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About the Author:

Arishekar N, Director of Marketing & Growth at SellerApp, is a specialist in digital marketing, in addition to website keyword optimization for search engines. His areas of expertise include enhancing the organic & paid ranking of web pages on search engines with innovative SEO & SEM strategies and online promotions.