Advanced PPC Strategies for Amazon: Advanced Rules Configurations

Prestozon has now added advanced options to customize your new keyword rule triggers. In the past, new keyword rules were triggered by a single sale in any of the source ad groups. Now, you have the ability to customize this trigger by setting the number of sales before the rule triggers and setting an ACoS threshold the search cannot exceed. You can add new rules with these advanced options or add advanced options to your existing rules by clicking the eyeball next to a relevant campaign in the campaign manager:

When you can then click the pink positive button to add a new keyword rule or click the rule text or pen to edit an existing rule:

You’ll see the advanced options at the top of the rule edit window:

On the surface, these customizations allow for more flexible traditional promotion rules.  This is going to help our software cater to different account needs; most notably, accounts that have high sales volume where a single sale just isn’t enough to justify promoting a search term.

Once you explore deeper, these rule customizations do much more than merely expand the flexibility of the traditional rule structure.  Trigger customizations open a whole world of complex strategic options to account managers. A lot of our most experienced account managers already employ some of these strategies, but now they’ll be able to integrate them into the Prestozon ecosystem and, most importantly, automate them to save valuable time.

Base Case: Flexible Traditional Rules

The original concept for these customized triggers was devised in order to supplement our current suggested rule structure.  Most managers familiar with Prestozon will be familiar with our suggested search term isolated structure:

With the default settings, any search term within the source ad groups (ad groups in the rule that have the check box checked in step 3) will be promoted when they get their first conversion.  So if there is a single sale on the search term “magic hat”, Prestozon will make a suggestion with 4 actions:

• Create a Negative Phrase Match keyword in the Auto Campaign
• Create a Negative Exact Match in the Research campaign
• Create a Positive Broad Match in the Research campaign
• Create a Positive Exact Match in the Performance campaign

Prestozon will automatically check for duplicates and equivalences.  Where relevant, we will only create these entities if they, or an equivalent entity, do not already exist.

A single sale is great for many accounts, but some accounts are exceptionally high volume or very ACoS sensitive.  For those accounts, Prestozon’s original rule structure was still effective, but not a perfect fit. Now, Prestozon allows for the customization of these triggers:

These advanced options allow you to decide how many sales should occur before a rule triggers.  The rule aggregates the data across the source ad groups, so deciding your sources is an important choice in rule optimization, especially when using these advanced options.  Similarly, the Max ACoS threshold will only allow for the rule to trigger if a search term has an ACoS below that threshold for the data aggregated across the source ad groups.

Advanced Strategy: High-Volume Campaigns

Some account managers already make use of high-volume campaigns devoted to search terms that drive the majority of their traffic. In the past, managers had to pull these search terms manually and handle them outside the Prestozon software infrastructure. Now, you can create dedicated rules to routing high volume search terms into their own, isolated, campaigns:

High volume will be defined differently depending on the account.  This rule will be most effective in conjunction with the traditional Prestozon isolation rule.  Note that the negative in the traditional performance campaign will ensure these high-volume search terms remain isolated.  Also note that in this example, I source from the auto and research campaign. This means that I will take the sales from those campaigns into account for the search term, some may choose to only use the performance campaign as a source.

Advanced Strategy: Cascade Rules

Some account managers want to immediately promote out of the auto campaigns in order to gain control of search terms quickly, but they don’t immediately want to put untested search terms into their performance campaigns.  Account managers that want to set up a tiered promotion structure, can use what I like to call Cascade Rules. This is a set of two or more rules that sequentially promote up to the next tier of specificity.

Auto to Research:

Research to Performance:

Note that the secondary cascade still sources from auto but requires 2 sales.  This covers the situation where a search term gets a sale from a broad match keyword, but it wasn’t the search term that originally received the first sale for promotion into the broad campaign.  This ensures all search terms will require at least two sales before they are promoted to the performance campaign.

While the structure above is a 3-tiered cascade rule, I can imagine some accounts might want 4 or even 5 tiers.  Consider an account where the tiers go: Auto > Broad > Phrase > Exact > Exact High Volume. It could even get more complicated than that.

Advanced Strategy: ACoS Stratification

Most account managers have to deal with the conflicting goals inherent in Amazon PPC: visibility and efficiency.  Often, optimizing for one leads to the deterioration of the other. For many accounts, different search terms can be categorized as efficiency terms or visibility terms and it can be helpful to manage these terms in separate campaigns.  Prestozon’s advanced options will allow you to create rules to effectively separate these terms by using a modified cascade structure:

No ACoS, Traditional Promotion:

Medium ACoS Rule:

Low ACoS Rule:

This is an example of a three-tier ACoS ruleset, but you could make as many (or as few) tiers as you would like.  This would essentially partition by each ACoS level based on your rule parameters. Note that I set the secondary rules to a 3-sale threshold in order to make sure the ACoS was fairly settled before a promotion decision was made.  ACoS for search terms does have the potential to change, so it will be important to keep an eye on the ACoS partitioned campaigns to ensure the search terms are maintaining their ACoS

Advanced Strategy: The “Dierk and Ben, I think you’re totally wrong” Strategy

Prestozon has long believed in the idea of Search Term Isolation and the importance of a search term-centric approach to managing Amazon PPC.  While we’ll probably never stop touting Search Term Isolation because we believe it’s the best way to effectively manage your only direct touch points with your customers, we also want to stress that Prestozon is a tool, not a strategy in and of itself.  Prestozon’s rules engine is flexible and within its framework, any number of effective strategies can be developed. I want to highlight a few rule structures that I probably wouldn’t pitch to anyone directly, but that fully work within our rules engine:

Full Overlap Keyword Blast:

Some accounts prefer full coverage with multiple keywords firing on every search term.  Either within the same ad group, or in multiple ad groups (as in the example above), you can easily set up full overlap keyword structures.

Phrase and Broad Research Overlap:

Users often have strong feelings regarding Broad vs Phrase, but some account managers prefer to use both.  Above is an example of a partially isolated standard rule, but this could also be turned into a cascade structure using multiple rules! Note that the Broad and Phrase ad groups are in separate campaigns.

Auto to Exact, no research:

Amazon’s suggested baseline structure is just one auto and one manual campaign.  Here is a pared down isolation structure.

Phrase as Performance:

In certain situations, Phrase match will be superior to Exact match as performance keywords.  You can create rules using Phrase Match Keywords as your performance campaign if you so choose.

Putting it all Together

While all these individual strategies can be used in isolation, they can also be used in conjunction.  Let’s look at a few holistic strategies that some accounts may benefit from:

High Volume Performance Campaign Segmented by Efficiency and Visibility:

Some accounts find themselves having to balance their bid strategy between two disparate sets of search terms.  Search terms that drive the efficiency of their advertising, and search terms that run inefficiently, but drive significant visibility.  In the past, an account manager would have to separate these out manually, but now, an account manager could set up a traditional promotion flow to a low-volume performance campaign and then two individual pipelines. One high sale, low ACoS rule to isolate the efficient search terms; and one high sale, no ACoS restriction rule to isolate the visibility search terms.  From there, you can set your ACoS targets at different points for these two campaigns and more effectively manage bid on each; now, all of this is completely automatable.

Messy Account Inherited, easy wins:

If you’re an agency, you’ve definitely experienced this.  You inherit an account that is a complete mess; but your client wants results, “Now.”  These advanced strategies can be applied to get easy wins and immediately show value to the customer with minimal time investment.  You could create a rule with an aggressive ACoS threshold funneling into a high-efficiency campaign (which will likely end up mostly containing branded terms) in order to isolate those terms.  You can then funnel high-volume terms from each vertical in the account into their own campaign, giving you the ability to immediately identify and optimize the most important search terms for the new account.  An experienced Prestozon user can get rules up and running in just a few minutes, and remember that the rules will go through the past 90 days of data. This would give you incredible insight into the account history and help you shape your long-term strategy.

All of these promotion structures and many more are fully supported so long as you create them with the sales triggers in mind. We at Prestozon live and breathe Amazon PPC Advertising strategy, but you live and breathe your account. Ultimately, our goal is to provide you with automation software powerful enough to enact any strategy that you can dream up! Be sure to also check out Helium 10’s Amazon PPC tool to help with your Amazon advertising strategy!