#612 – Amazon PPC + Adtomic Masterclass

Join Bradley Sutton, as he navigates the complexities of Amazon advertising strategies, with this special Seller Strategy Masterclass focusing on utilizing Helium 10’s Amazon PPC tool, Adtomic. Throughout this episode, you’ll discover effective PPC optimization techniques that can be applied whether or not you are using Adtomic. From keyword harvesting to streamlining campaign processes, he shares actionable insights that can help you identify opportunities for profit maximization. Adtomic simplifies PPC management, making it accessible even for those who might feel overwhelmed by the process. 

Listen in as we explore the role of AI in Amazon PPC with Adtomic’s new Advertising AI feature. Designed to simplify campaign management for both new and seasoned sellers, this tool automates the creation and optimization of campaigns. For those launching new products or looking to refresh existing campaigns, the AI-driven approach offers a strategic edge. Experienced sellers can also benefit from resetting underperforming campaigns, with the AI making gradual optimizations to improve ACoS over time. With clear steps to set up your AI-managed campaigns, you’ll be equipped to start seeing results in about 60 days.

Discover advanced strategies for Amazon PPC campaign management, including manual campaign creation and custom bid rules using Adtomic. By leveraging tools like negative matching and target audits, you’ll learn how to prevent wasted spending and enhance campaign performance. We’ll discuss how to make campaigns communicate with each other to maximize visibility and explore the intricacies of bid strategy management, ensuring your campaigns are both efficient and effective. Whether you’re an Amazon advertising novice or an experienced seller, this episode provides the strategies you need to elevate your Amazon PPC game.

In episode 612 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 00:00 – Amazon Seller Strategy Masterclass: Adtomic
• 02:41 – Introduction and Overview to Helium 10 Adtomic Advertising
• 08:41 – How to Create Campaigns in a Minute With Advertising AI
• 13:25 – The First Thing Existing Sellers Should Do In Adtomic!
• 18:53 – How To Make Existing Campaigns Work With Each Other
• 21:58 – How To Manually Create New Campaigns in Adtomic
• 28:49 – How To Set Up Custom Amazon PPC Bid Rules
• 34:41 – How to Set Up Keyword Harvesting and Negative Rules
• 37:34 – How to Review Adtomic Suggestions
• 43:00 – Get A Demo For Helium 10 Adtomic

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today’s another Seller Strategy Masterclass where I’m going to be going deep into my Amazon advertising strategy with the help of Helium 10 Adtomic. But whether you use Adtomic or not, you are going to learn a lot of PPC optimization techniques that you can use in your own Amazon business. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today is another installment of our Seller Strategy Masterclass where I take a Helium 10 tool and dive deep into how I use it for my Amazon business and how you guys can make money with some of the strategies.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, a lot of you might not have ever used Adtomic. Some of you probably use it every day. It doesn’t matter which bucket you fall into. You’re gonna get value out of this because all of us are doing Amazon Advertising, PPC, right. So the strategies I’m going to show you. Sure, it’s going to be how I do it with Atomic, but it doesn’t mean that this is some special strategy that you only have to use Adtomic to use. No, I’m going to be showing you guys you know, like how to harvest keywords, how to have your campaigns talk to each other, how, like how to harvest keywords, how to have your campaigns talk to each other, how to streamline some of your processes, how to audit your account in order to get like low hanging fruit that can make you money. So it doesn’t matter whether you use Helium 10 or not. Make sure to stay to the end on this episode so you can learn all of my strategies. Now how I’m going to do this, I’m going to have like kind of like nine different main topics that we’re going to be going over. We’re just going to take it one at a time. I’m going to do a lot of screen share for those of you listening on podcast. You know, a week later you’ll probably be able to see this episode on YouTube, but if you’re taking a jog right now, hopefully I’m going to describe it well enough where you can get the picture.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those Sponsored Ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic

Bradley Sutton:

All right, here we go with the first topic Introduction and overview to Helium 10’s Adtomic advertising software. Now I’ve actually personally been using Adtomic as an Amazon seller since it first came out. Even before it was called, atomic used to be called Ads. I used to be scared of Amazon PPC maybe like some of you are right now and in my old Amazon businesses I was like man, you know what? I just want somebody else at the company to do this. I don’t want to have to deal with this. I’m good with keyword research and launch and things like that. Now, when ads or Adtomic first came out for the first time, I was able to actually understand what was going on without having to download all these spreadsheets from Amazon, without having to run pivot tables and things like that. All right, so let me just give you guys a broad overview of Adtomic so you’re going to know where you’d want to start, if you so desire to.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when you first sign into Adtomic, you’re going to see a dashboard. Now, if you already had your token connected, make sure to connect your token to Helium 10. If you haven’t done so already, whatever software you guys are using, you’re not going to be able to use it, guys, unless you connect your regular token and your advertising PPC token. And if you already have been doing Amazon advertising, you’re going to see a lot of data up here, including some data points that maybe you won’t see very clearly in Amazon, such as tacos. Right here towards the bottom. I’m going to see even something detailed like hour of day. I can actually see campaign performance by hour of day. I can see some of my highest ACoS campaigns, my highest spend targets, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

Now one of the key parts of how Adtomic can save me hours and hours per week. By the way, guys, I can actually run all 200 of my campaigns in about 20 minutes a week. That’s how fast this does, but the reason is because of the suggestions page. So if I click into that, I have a whole bunch of bid suggestions. We’re going to dive deep into how these suggestions come about. Now, again, this is something that, whether you use Adtomic or not, you have to be doing. You have to be monitoring your ACoS if that’s one of your goals. You have to be monitoring different data points and where you’re wasting spend so that you can take action. And so we’re going to go deep into how, right here, I’ve got 120 bid suggestions and how, with just a couple of clicks of the button, I can actually implement these across 30, 40, 50, or even more campaigns, so that I don’t have to, one by one, be editing campaigns and editing budgets and negative matching keywords, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the next part of Adtomic is the analytics page, and this is just gold. I’m going to do a strategy coming up where, in just a few minutes, something like this for somebody new, this is like the first thing that you guys should be doing. Make sure to check out the strategy where I talk about the first thing that you should do when you connect your existing campaigns, but I’m going to show you how to audit your PPC account, where you’re instantly going to see hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of wasted spend that you can immediately take action to, thanks to this analytics page. This analytics allows you to look at your campaign level, your ad group level, target, all the way down to the search term level of all of your campaigns. Next thing you see here is the Ad Manager. So, if you have never done Amazon advertising, you’re not going to see anything here. But if you’re connecting Adtomic for the first time, all of your existing campaigns are going to be showing up here, whether you had made them in Adtomic or not, and you’re going to be able to see some high level information on it.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we’ve got the rules and automation. So this is for, like, advanced users. A lot of you maybe have your own rules that you have been doing on your own Amazon advertising accounts, right, like you download the search term reports and then you run some pivot tables or VLOOKUPs and say, hey, if I have search terms that have more than 20 clicks and no sales, let me see which ones those are, and then and then you take action on that. Right, everybody’s got their own rules. Whatever your rules are, you’re going to be able to program them right here into atomic on this rules and automations page. And, for example, I’ve got a whole bunch of bid rules here, right, like this.

Bradley Sutton:

This might seem over some of your head, but don’t worry. Uh, we’re going to teach you how to do these and I’m going to show you in a couple of seconds we have a tool that allows you just to do a couple of clicks of a button and have everything be taken care of. But I know there’s some data geeks out there, like I am, and so let me just show you how cool this is. Like want to go ahead and take whatever I’ve been paying my cost per click and I want to multiply that by whatever my target ACoS is Like. Let’s say, my target ACoS is 20 and divide it by the ACoS I was paying. In other words, make me lower my bid so that I can get closer to what I want my target ACoS to be. How would you have done that? If you’re downloading search term reports, you probably not only have to do VLOOKUPs and pivot tables to even get to that data, but then you have to do some advanced formula every single time that you’re trying to hit a certain goal. You don’t have to do that with Adtomic. You set this all up once and now. From now on into the future, Helium 10 is going to go find where this exact situation is happening and we’ll let you know what you have to raise or lower your bid to get to your goal.

Bradley Sutton:

One of the last main sections of Adtomic and this is probably one of the best for some of you guys is AI Advertising. It’s the newest thing that we have. If you are new to advertising and advertising is something that’s overwhelming to you, this is something that I’m going to show you, a strategy on where, in seconds maximum, maybe one minute you are going to be able to set up multiple campaigns that are going to be geared towards whatever goal that you are trying to reach. And guess what After that? You’re not even going to have to make rules, like I was showing you before. You’re not going to have to go to the analytics page and try and find certain scenarios of where your ACoS is high, where your ACoS is low. You don’t have to harvest keywords. Helium 10’s AI advertising is going to do it all for you. So that is in this tool called AI advertising, where all you’re going to do is set your budget, set your goal. Maybe you could add a few keywords here or there, but I’m going to show you how to use this. Where people who are completely intimidated by PPC can no longer have to be worried or scared of it, because we’re going to take all that heavy lifting for you. Even some advanced users might want to go ahead and switch to this form of advertising if they’re, like, fed up with having to work so much in advertising. So, make sure to check out that strategy. All right. Strategy number two how to create campaigns in a minute with Advertising AI.

Bradley Sutton:

Advertising AI is Helium 10’s newest tool within Adtomic. That really takes the guesswork and all the grunt work out of creating and maintaining and then optimizing your Amazon advertising campaigns. Now, who is this for? All right, so that’s a great question. A lot of people ask that. Number one it is for newer sellers. I would say, like, if you are completely struggling with advertising and you’re just not sure what to do and you want a fresh start, I would go ahead and do this. Maybe you’re launching a new product and maybe you’ve already done some of the campaigns that I’ve talked about in the Maldives honeymoon strategy in episode 600 of this podcast and you’re already ranking, but you’re like, I don’t want to have to create a whole bunch of campaigns. I’m new to Amazon. Is there any way that Helium 10, you can just take the wheel for me. Guess what Advertising AI is for you.

Bradley Sutton:

Experienced sellers, though, there’s nothing wrong with using Advertising AI. Maybe you’ve been running campaigns for a while, but your performance is not great and you want to start dialing back your spend on those targets and kind of like start fresh and see what the AI can do for you. You can also use Advertising AI. Let me just show you how it works and how you can set up these campaigns in a matter of seconds. You access it from the main Adtomic window here AI Advertising on the bottom left. Once you get there, you’re going to get to this main AI Advertising page, and I’m going to want you to hit add a product goal Once you get to this page. This is how easy it can be. You’re going to want to select the product for AI Advertising to manage, and obviously this has to be a product that you already have active in your Amazon account. Let’s go ahead and pretend that I want to do this macrame stuffed animal hammock. All right, I want to do this macrame stuffed animal hammock, all right. I set now an eight-cost goal, all right. What do I want my advertising cost of sale to be. Let’s say, you know I want it to go ahead and be 25%. Next, I’m going to set my total daily budget. Now, keep in mind, this is not a daily budget per campaign. This is going to set up multiple campaigns for you. You know, maybe some broad match campaigns, maybe some exact campaigns, maybe some product targeting campaigns or auto campaigns down the road. This is going to be your whole daily budget of how much total you want to spend for this product, and then Helium 10’s AI is going to decide how much to allocate per campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up here you can go ahead and say, hey, I want to add up to 10 keywords that are relevant to your product. So here are some suggested keywords that we’re pulling from the product itself. You can add it from one of your keyword lists that you might have in Helium 10, or you can just enter some keywords, like if I know, hey, I have to rank for the keyword macrame, stuffed animal hammock, I can go ahead and add that here. Or I can leave this completely blank and it’s okay.

Bradley Sutton:

The AI is going to go ahead and find keywords for me. If I want to do advanced targeting, I can hit the settings button and I can also add some product targets. Product targets would be ASINs, all right. So let’s say, I know there’s a really terrible product out there that’s getting sales. I want to make sure I advertise against that product from day one. I can go ahead and put a couple ASINs there. But guess what, guys? You don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to do anything here. If you don’t want to, now I suggest entering at least your main keyword. Let’s go ahead and put that main keyword that I mentioned macrame stuffed, animal hammock. I’m going to go ahead and add that. I would put at least one. Now, if you’re a power Helium 10 user, maybe you have like a list of your five top keywords. Go ahead and drop those in there and then add it right here to the right, and that’s about it, guys. Once I do that, all I have to do is hit this launch button and then boom goes the dynamite. Helium 10 is going to create multiple campaigns for me to start trying to find new keywords that are going to be able to perform potentially for my product.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how long does it take to see results? Don’t expect to make a million dollars overnight. That’s not the way Amazon advertising works. Helium 10 is not controlling, like your auto campaigns, for example. You’re at the mercy of how, what Amazon decides to show for you right Now. If you’re in a big competitive niche and you set a daily budget really high, you might start seeing results right away. But the ACoS might be high in the beginning, as it is whenever you’re starting with Amazon advertising, especially in a newer product. But then, as time goes and as Helium 10 AI starts learning what works for your product and what doesn’t work well, we’re going to start optimizing it so that your ACoS will go down right, but give it, you know, maybe about 60 days and you’ll be able to start seeing some results from it.

Bradley Sutton:

So, guys, this was kind of like the long way of how to do it, but you saw there there’s only like two or three steps Add one keyword, put my goal, hit, launch and that’s it. That’s all you have to do Now. You could take a little bit extra time, like I said, and put some extra keywords, some extra ASINs and things, and it will go ahead and handle it for you, but it’s all up to you. You can do it in as fast as 30 or 60 60 seconds. So what is holding you guys back from starting your first campaigns with AI advertising, the first thing that sellers should do in Adtomic.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, if you have been advertising on Amazon for any amount of time and you are just getting into Adtomic for the first time, and this is one of those strategies that it doesn’t matter if you’re using Adtomic or not, guys, everybody should pay attention to this, but especially those who are using Adtomic, because what I’m going to show you is only going to take you maybe two to 10 minutes, but it could potentially get you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in a matter of weeks by cutting out wasted spend. All right, basically, I’m going to show you right now how to audit your PPC account. If you have not been paying too much attention to it, let’s go ahead and hop in. Make sure to go to the analytics page first, and I like to go all the way to the search term level. Now, this is only for those of you who have been running auto or broad campaigns. We are going to look for ones to negative match. Now, I’m probably not going to have too many here that are going to show up, because you know obviously I’ve been optimizing most of these campaigns. So hopefully nothing much comes out.

Bradley Sutton:

I would go ahead and take a look back at either 60 days or 90 days or even more, depending on if you’ve never done this before, but at least I would do it 60 days if you’ve been advertising for at least two months, right, I’m going to go ahead and say I want to view the ad group right here and now. The next thing is I want to see what search terms did I get zero orders from? So I put here under PPC orders minimum zero, maximum zero. And then let’s say, hey, of these, which ones did I get like at least 30 clicks, but with zero orders? Now take a look here as a total in this account I don’t have too much here, but it’s still pretty significant $125. You guys may maybe the first time you see this you could have maybe a thousand or even $5,000 worth of search terms that have gotten all these clicks but zero purchases. What does that mean? If I get 30 clicks or 40 clicks or 50 clicks on a certain search term, what are the odds that the 51st click are going to get a sale? Probably not very high.

Bradley Sutton:

So what would you think you should do on advertising keywords that are wasting money like that, you’re going to want to what we call negative match it. Remember this is like if it’s an auto or a broad campaign. Personally, I do not negative match keywords or search terms. I should say inside of manual campaigns, like exact manual campaigns or ace and targeting campaigns, because I like visibility into how many active targets I have. This is kind of like a just general knowledge here. Has nothing to do with Helium 10 at all, just my personal strategy. I only like negative matching search terms inside of an auto campaign, broad campaign or phrase campaign. That’s just my personal strategy. I only like negative matching search terms inside of an auto campaign, broad campaign or phrase campaign. That’s just my personal preference. It doesn’t mean that if you negative match an auto or a manual campaign, you don’t know what you’re doing. To each their own. That’s just what I’m doing. So that’s what I’m looking for. Are there any broad campaigns that I had going on ad groups or auto campaigns where I had at least 30 clicks and zero sales? Let’s take a look here. Here I’ve got one where I had 24 clicks. Let’s just say that my threshold was 24 and it was an auto campaign. I spent 11 bucks.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s going to happen if I just keep this going, if I never had negative match it. What is probably going to happen is Amazon’s going to keep showing me for this. I’m going to keep getting clicks. I’m going to get another $10 of spend in a couple of weeks and then another $10 of spend all going down the drain. How do you stop this keyword from showing up, or this search term from showing up in this auto campaign? I’m just going to hit this negative match button right here and then I’m going to choose that campaign. As you guys can see right here those who are watching this on YouTube, I already have obviously had done that before. That’s why it’s grayed out. But all I let’s just pretend it was this one right here. I just hit this button and then I hit apply and that’s it. It is done. Now I am never going to show up in that campaign for that search term again. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, once you have done that audit, the second audit you should do is at the target level. Now, the target level is almost in any of your campaigns. You’ve got targets in an auto campaign. You’ve got targets in a broad campaign. You’ve got targets in an exact manual campaign. You’ve got targets in a video ASIN targeting campaign. Whatever campaigns you have, you are going to have targets. So how do you audit that to make sure? Again, this is something you should do from day one when you have Adtomic, to instantly make sure you are saving hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go back into Adtomic in this analytics page. Go to the target tab now, and I like to do the same thing. I’ll be like hey, show me where I have zero orders and at least 30 clicks. This is not a magic number, by the way. The zero, yeah, that’s kind of a magic number, all right, but the 30 clicks? You guys decide what threshold you want. Now, as you can see, I’ve already paused so many of these targets. But look at this overall, there was actually $300 of spend in this account where I had been getting at least 30 clicks on a target and I was getting no sales. Now, as you can see, I already took action here. But imagine if this was your account and all of these targets were enabled. What do you think you should do on these? You’d want to do exactly what I did here and pause it. So then, this $300 of spend maybe that I paid in the last month. I don’t want to have to pay another $300 without any return at all. This is how valuable this can be, guys. This would take you maybe two to three minutes to pause these targets and instantly you are saving hundreds of dollars of future wasted spend. So, make this the first thing that you do if you’ve been advertising for any amount of time, and as soon as you get into ad talking, before you get into the AI, before you get into creating new campaigns, run this audit and you are going to save tons and tons of money.

Bradley Sutton:

How to make existing campaigns talk to each other? Now, that might sound a little silly, but basically, I don’t care if you guys are using Atomic or not. You need to make your campaigns that are advertising the same product. You need to have them kind of like talking to each other, if it were. If you have an auto campaign, let’s say that auto campaign finds a great keyword right. A great keyword is very subjective, but let’s just say your definition of a great keyword is if it gets at least two sales right and maybe it’s below a certain ACoS. Well, do you want it just to keep showing up only in that auto campaign whenever Amazon decides to show you for it. No, you want Amazon to show you 24, seven if possible. So what kind of campaign would you put it in? Well, you probably have, for the same product, another PPC campaign, that is, an exact manual match campaign, or an ASIN targeting campaign. If we’re talking about ASINs, so you want to move that keyword from one campaign to the other. That’s what I mean by having your campaigns talk to each other and feed each other.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I’m going to show you in a future strategy how, as soon as you set it up in Helium 10 Adtomic, it automatically all talks to each other already. But what if you come into Adtomic with existing campaigns? Do you have to stop all those campaigns and start over from scratch in Helium 10? Actually, that’s not recommended, unless your campaigns are just piss poor, awful and you don’t have one good target. You should never just go in and just pause all your campaigns and start from scratch. That’s probably not a good way to do it. Well, if you’ve got some good campaigns, you can go ahead and start programming them to talk to each other so that they’re helping each other out.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me show you how you can do that let’s pretend that these campaigns I have come from just one of my regular accounts. And let’s say I have a or actually I don’t have to pretend I do have a naming structure for my campaigns. So let’s say I had a whole bunch of coffin letterboard campaigns. I’m going to go ahead under this campaign filter and type in coffin letterboard, because I know that’s what I named all of my coffin letterboard campaigns. And now it’s going to go ahead and show me all of the campaigns that I have for this one product. Now, obviously, they’re already talking to each other, as you can see here, because you can see I have rules.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m going to get a little bit deeper into the rules, but what you would do if not, you would go ahead and add a rule here and let me show you how those rules are working. The first one is the keyword harvesting rule. Right, I would add the rule here and then make my promotion or keyword harvesting rule. I’m going to go deeper into how these rules work and how to create your rules from scratch, but what you want to do is put all of your campaigns that have to do with the same product in this rule group and then now you are going to tell it hey, this is what I want Helium 10 to do. If I find a good keyword in this campaign, move it to this campaign. If I find a good ASIN in this campaign, move it to these three campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s really simple. You just you do not have to stop your campaigns and start brand new ones, right. You can just create rules and then tie your existing campaigns that you made in other software or in seller central by yourself and make them start working off of each other the Adtomic way. Central by yourself and make them start working off of each other the Adtomic way.

Bradley Sutton:

How to manually set up new campaigns in Adtomic. I showed you in a previous strategy how you can do that in 60 seconds using AI Advertising. Let’s say, you’re not that much of an AI fan or you’re somebody like me who wants real control over your PPC campaign. You want to know exactly what’s happening. You want to program all of the rules. You want to say which campaigns you want, et cetera, et cetera. That’s me. Is that you? This is how you’re going to set up your campaigns in Adtomic. First go to the ad manager and then hit the button that says ad campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Now there’s different things that you can do here. Let’s talk about the guided way. All right, I would suggest using the guided if you are an experienced seller. If you’re a new seller, you could do the quick one, but if you’re a brand-new seller, I recommend just going ahead and going straight to AI advertising. But let’s say you’re an experienced seller, hit guided. Now the very first thing you’re going to have, you’re going to want to do, is call your product group name for what you’re the name of the campaigns is going to be. Let’s just call this test campaign one.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now I like to do custom rules. All right, I’m going to show you in a future strategy how exactly to make those custom rules. Let’s say you don’t have custom rules yet, or you’re not ready to go to that level. Uh, you can just take a bid algorithm and say, hey, you know what, I just want to do something old school Like. I want to have a target, a cost. If you have this selected, uh, you’ll have that. You can just set whatever your target ACoS is. Say, hey, 20%, 30%, and then, if you do that, the suggestions that Helium 10 is going to give is going to be based on whatever your target. ACoS is Okay, let’s just go ahead and keep that here for now. We’ll save these custom rules for later.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step is hey, pick which product you want to be advertising. Right, I personally suggest just advertising one product per campaign, but you know, maybe you’re the kind of person who wants to do multiple products. You’re able to do that right here. Hit next on the browser and then next up you’re going to put which campaign types do you want. Do you want to do sponsored display? Do you want to do sponsored brand like a headline ad? Do you want to do sponsored products? Select all the ones that you want to keep going. Let’s just go ahead in this situation and do sponsored products. By the way, guys, like I said before, I’m showing you how to do it in Adtomic, but this is kind of like the structure you want to do, even if you don’t have Adtomic. All right, so make sure you’re paying attention.

Bradley Sutton:

Once you have chosen which campaign types you want to create, go ahead and hit the next button, and now all those campaigns are going to show up right here. You can see I’ve got four campaigns an auto campaign, a research campaign that I’m going to choose as a broad campaign, performance campaign, that means an exact manual campaign. And then a product targeting campaign. That’s an ASIN targeting campaign. You’re going to want to select, hey, the default bid. What do you want it to be? 68 cents a dollar, 50 cents, you just choose whatever you want. What do you want your daily budget to be? Make sure to set that.

Bradley Sutton:

Once you do all that, go ahead and hit next. At this point you’re going to want to add your keywords. This is the first section is adding research keywords. Now, for research keywords, I highly recommend choosing broad or phrase. Now, this is important. This again has not much to do with Helium 10, but this is just my general strategy. It’s good to have at least three keyword targeting campaigns an auto campaign that can target both keywords and ASINs. A broad or a research campaign that is going to kind of like discover other keywords. Now we have a lot of detailed training about as far as what is broad and phrase, so make sure to check our training in PPC Academy for that. But basically, these are good campaigns to do because Amazon might show you for keyword, long tail keywords that you didn’t even know you were indexed for and that you might not be indexed for, but Amazon can show them for you if you have the broad or phrase on. And then, of course, auto campaigns. Amazon can show you for whatever it wants, right? So go ahead and choose maybe some couple keyword roots that you know are super important for your listing. Go ahead and throw it right here.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll go ahead and say coffin shelf as a broad match and then add it to the right-hand side and it’ll go ahead and add that as a broad match. The next one is performance keywords. Performance keywords are your exact match. All right, that broad keyword for coffin shelf. It might show me later on for coffin shelf for men. Coffin shelf for women. Large coffin shelf, pink coffin shelf. Those are like broad and phrase matches, right? If I say an exact match for coffin shelf, usually that means all right, coffin shelf or coffin shelves, you know like it’s taking that exact keyword, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So if you have done keyword research in Helium 10, make sure to put those top keywords you’re trying to rank for into your performance campaign. After you’ve done that, go ahead and type in coffin shelf. Go ahead and hit next on the browser. Next put your product targeting ASINs. This is ASINs, not keywords. So if you had done some research in like Black Box product targeting. You’re like, hey, I want to target this product because I think I can steal some other sales. Put those ASINs in here, add the target and then hit next. Now you are on the final page that shows all of the settings that you just set up. I don’t suggest right off the bat doing negative targeting. Just let the data show you when to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

But now here is the rule group. All right, and, as you can see, it already has highlighted how the campaigns are going to talk to each other. So it’s looking for search terms in any of these campaigns you create. And again, this goes for if you use Adtomic or not. This is a good strategy to do, all right. So now it says, hey, if I find a keyword in my auto campaign that hits a certain performance criteria and, by the way, if I want to go ahead and set that performance criteria, I can do that here. I can say, hey, I want if it gets two PPC orders and it has to have a less than or equal to 40% a cost. This is not a magic number, guys, I’m just making stuff up here. You guys do whatever rule you want it to do, then create a new target in the selected ad group. So you see what’s going to happen here.

Bradley Sutton:

All of these four campaigns I just started; they’re going to start talking to each other. So it says if I find a keyword in auto campaign that gets two orders, go ahead and create a B for not Bradley, b for broad match target in my broad campaign, my research campaign. At the same time, if I find a keyword that gets two sales, go ahead and also put that as an exact match in my performance campaign. What happens? If I find an ASIN here in my auto campaign that hits this criterion of two orders, I’m telling it you know what, go ahead and tell me to put it into my product targeting campaign. So this is what we call keyword harvesting rules. And this is my very first keyword harvesting rule that I’m setting up so that all of my campaigns can talk to each other. Once I’m happy with these results, I just have to hit this button at the very bottom right that says launch campaigns and boom goes the dynamite. I am ready to go with four, five or six campaigns, depending on how much I had set up.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, if you want hands-off approach to advertising. Choose AI advertising. If you are one of those kind of control freaks like I am, you’re not gonna to use AI advertising. You want to use the Helium 10 manual campaign creation so that you can set up your own rules about how you want your campaign to talk to each other and what kind of suggestions you want Helium 10 to give to you how to set up custom Amazon PPC bid rules. We’re getting a little advanced now.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me tell you, I only did my first custom rules in Adtomic, like just maybe six months ago. For years I let kind of Adtomic’s algorithms do it for me and I maybe just tweaked a few things. But now that Helium 10 allows you to set your own custom bid rules, I went deep into it and it takes a lot. I’ll be honest. It takes a long time to set these up, but these are things that you have to keep doing over and over and over again If you’re just using Amazon search term reports. But here in Adtomic, the only time-consuming thing is to just decide what your rules are and set them up, and now you can apply it to all of your campaigns.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me just show you an example of what I did. I went in here to rules and automation and then I created a new rule, and this is just a target ACoS up and down rule. Basically, what this is a set of rules that either is going to increase my bid or decrease my bid, based on what my ACoS is. You know, not everybody uses ACoS, that’s totally fine. I happen to use ACoS on some of my campaigns and so that’s why I set up the rule. Now, this is I don’t have to set up this rule for every single one of my campaigns. I choose which rule or which campaigns I want to apply to this rule, and then I go ahead and move it here to the right-hand side and then now, under the criteria this is where the magic happens. I can choose any one of these things to have criteria. I can be like hey, if my clicks are greater than this, if my impressions are less than this, if my conversion rate is greater than this, if my PPC orders is this and that and I have tons of things here that I can make a rule off of. I mean, you can go so deep into this, guys, and add rules.

Bradley Sutton:

I kind of made some simple ones. I put everything in groups. So, for example, I said hey, if my ACoS on a certain target is greater than 200%, you know what I want helium 10 to do? I want Helium 10 to tell me to just go ahead and pause that. Like, if it’s over 200%, I’m like it’s probably not going to happen where I’m going to get this to a decent ACoS. So you know what? I just want to go ahead and pause that target and be done with it. All right, so that’s the rule that I set up right here. And then I said you know what? I want to look back at the last 60 days without the last three days. All right. So I like, in the last three days, sometimes not, you know, Amazon hasn’t given you all the data of what’s been going on, so I like to exclude last three days. So this is not a magic number. You guys do what you want.

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s another criteria. I’m like you know what? If the ACoS is greater than 60% or less than a hundred percent, then I want Helium 10 to suggest to me to lower my bid to get me closer to 50%. All right. And so, like, this is a formula that bases my cost per click times by my target ACoS divided by my ACoS. I know this sounds like a whole bunch of crazy mumbo jumbo by my target ACoS, especially if you’re not even watching this on YouTube. But, guys, this is what you probably have been doing yourself, right? So, in other words, what have you been doing yourself, right?

Bradley Sutton:

If you look at your search term reports or you’re just looking in Seller Central and you see you’ve got a 50% ACoS and your bid is $4 and your cost per click is also $4 and you have 50% ACoS. Now, let’s say you wanted a 25% ACoS. Let’s just keep it really simple. Well, what would you do? Well, you’d have to have a formula like all right, at what bid can I get closer to that 25% ACoS? Maybe you don’t want to. You know, take that bid down. You know, theoretically that might be a $2 bid. Right, you got to go down from four to two in order to take your ACoS down by 50%. Maybe you’re like I just want to go a little bit, you know, uh, let me times this by. You know 0.7. And then now, all right, let me go ahead and put a bid of $3. Let me go from four to three and let me see how that brings me closer to that target ACoS of 25%. You’re doing that one by one, every single target that you might have in your search term report or in your campaign reports.

Bradley Sutton:

Here in Helium 10, we’re allowing you to just set those different brackets of what you want bids to be if they’re ACoS based, and we’re going to let you know exactly what bid you have to be at in order to go ahead and get closer to that campaign goal that you’re trying to reach. So, as you can see here I have it going all the way down to if my ACoS is between 30% and 40%. But then on the flip side, what happens if I have an ACoS between 5% and 10%? Do I want to lower my bid more? No, I actually want to raise my bid. You guys should probably want to raise your bid too, because if I can still make money, even at 15%, it means I could be leaving money on the table. If I have a 5% ACoS and I want to go ahead and experiment with raising my bid, and that’s exactly what I programmed right here. You guys can take a screenshot and try and figure this out later on.

Bradley Sutton

I’m not going to go too deep into this, but every single scenario I thought of in this rule group and this is how the campaigns I’m controlling by ACoS, this is how I am going ahead and having this kind of automated where Helium 10 is going to do all these calculations for me. My favorite criteria here, my favorite rule in my group and I suggest you guys do this to almost everything, even if you’re not doing ACoS is I want a pause rule. Basically, I’m saying that, hey, if clicks are greater than 25 and PPC orders is zero, suggest to me that I pause this target, all right, so that I stop the bleed and stop wasting money on a target that is doing nothing for me. That’s my favorite part. I would highly recommend putting that rule, even if you don’t do the other ACoS rules, towards the bottom. Here I can choose how often I want it to run. I say you know what? I want this to go weekly on Thursdays at 11 pm Pacific time, and now I know every week when I go in to see if it has any new suggestions. I highly, highly, highly recommend guys, do not do automate.

Bradley Sutton:

Do not do automate if you’re just starting, always start with manual, all right, guys, don’t be lazy, don’t be like oh, I love the word automate, I’m going to hit automate. You don’t even know. If you set up the rules right, what if, you like, screwed up the rules and you did something wrong? Well, you’re telling Helium 10 to automate it regardless or based on what you put into it. So we’re just going to do what you say right, always start with manual and then go through a few cycles to make sure that you did all of your rules correctly, or else things could go really haywire.

How to set up keyword harvesting and negative rules Again, this is a general strategy that doesn’t matter if you’re using Adtomic or not. You should be, hopefully, setting up your own rules about how you want to harvest keywords. We talked about that a little bit in our earlier strategy. I’m going to just review that a little bit. Let’s go ahead and hop into it. For negative targeting, let’s talk about that first. We didn’t talk too much about it. You’re going to want to go to the negative targeting section of rules and automation and then add a rule and then now add all of the campaigns to this rule that you want, or the ad groups to this rule that you want. To go off of this criterion and basically, it’s looking in these campaigns and then you set the criteria here. Now, remember or negative matching.

Bradley Sutton:

This is not pausing targets, like we talked about in the last strategy. Those aren’t exact targets. Right, if it’s an auto campaign or a research campaign. I like doing negative matching because, remember, in the auto campaign you could be showing up for hundreds of random keywords and maybe there’s like four or five. They’re just really terrible search terms. Those are the only ones. You want a negative or negative match. You don’t want the whole entire campaign to be paused just because of those three bad ones. Same thing in the research campaign just negative match the ones that are terrible for you. All right, so set up this negative rule and that’s what it says right here. It says, hey, look for search terms in these ad groups and then, like for an auto campaign, I select both the E and the product and what that means is, if it finds a exact search term or an ASIN that has zero sales but at least 20 clicks, it’s going to suggest to me to negative match it. And then I select my look back period. Personally, I like doing 60 days, excluding the last three days, and I say, if I want this to be daily or weekly or whatever, and then now Helium 10 is going to give me suggestions if anything hits that.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what if we were talking about the keyword harvesting rules? I showed you a little bit about that before. Let me just open up one of my keywords harvesting rules here. I could have just added this as a new rule, but put any campaigns in here. This is for campaign groups. It’s not like those negative ones where maybe I can just throw all of my campaigns into one because it’s just looking for the same criteria. These keyword harvesting rules, this should be all of your campaigns that are targeting the same exact product, because, remember, this is how your campaigns talk to each other. All right, guys. So take a screenshot here. This is my exact formula for how I have one of my product groups. I’ve got an auto campaign, I’ve got a sponsored display product targeting campaign, I’ve got a research campaign, I’ve got a performance campaign and a sponsored product targeting campaign. All of them are looking at each other to try and find new keywords. And then, right here is where I have the rules. That says what I want to happen, depending on what is going on, if you don’t use Adtomic guys, you still have got to do this. You have got to set up your negative match rules in your own spreadsheets, like have your criteria run through it every week, and you’ve got to have your campaigns talking to each other how to review Adtomic suggestions.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s pretend we didn’t do AI advertising in Helium 10. We did our regular campaigns. Or we set up the rules we have bid rules maybe or we use the atomic rule. We set up keyword harvesting rules. We set up negative match rules. Now what happens once a day or once a week, depending on the schedule? Helium 10 is doing all of the heavy lifting for us, so that I don’t have to download any of my search term reports. I don’t even have to go into seller central advertising to look at anything. Helium 10 Adtomic is just going to tell me hey, based on the rules that you gave us, here is what we have come up with that is going to help you hit your goals. Take a look at this. This is super cool.

Bradley Sutton:

First up, if I was just choosing one of the Helium 10 algorithms, all of my bid suggestions are going to be in AI bids. For me, I actually did custom rules, so all of my bid suggestions are going to be here in the bids part Now. Do you remember how I put rules based on my ACoS? Take a look at this one. Here is something that I spent $293 and I got $583 for the sales on this one target. That’s a lot of sales, but what kind of ACoS is that? 50%? That’s not great. Do you remember that I had set up some rules that were for pausing a target if I got a whole bunch of clicks with no sales?

Bradley Sutton:

Take a look, here’s one here. Here’s my performance group campaign on my large coffin shelf. Here’s a keyword that I spent $10 on, got zero sales, but it got over 26 clicks. Well, I set a rule here, as you remember, that if I got over 25 clicks and zero orders, I want it to be paused. Now take a look right here. It’s saying do you want to pause this? And all I have to do is just hit this check mark and it’s going to say yes, and if I, if I go ahead and hit apply one change, it’s going to go ahead and find that campaign and do it for me. I don’t have to find the ad group, I don’t have to pause this campaign or nothing. Helium 10 is going to do it for me.

Bradley Sutton:

But let’s say, you know what, ah, this is an important keyword. Like I know I got 26 clicks, but you know what $10 of spend wasn’t that much. I want to let it ride for one more week and see what happens. Well, in that case, I want to snooze it. All right, this X button here in the middle, this is the snooze button. So basically, I’m saying you know what? Don’t do anything for right now. Take a look next week and see what happens and let me know if it’s still in the same situation right now.

Bradley Sutton:

What if this was like a super important keyword? Like what if this is my most important keyword? I’m like you know what, yeah, I’m not doing good in this keyword, but I absolutely am positive I’m going to do better. Uh, just, whatever happened, or I can’t give up on this keyword because I know it’s going to turn around, or I’m going to optimize it, and I never want Helium 10 to ever tell me to negative match or to pause this. Well, that’s what this pause button is, all right. So this if I hit this pause button, I’m telling Helium 10, you know what, never give me the suggestion ever again. So again, check mark means go ahead and do the suggestion, the suggested action. Uh, x means snooze and pause means never show this to me again.

Bradley Sutton:

Here are all of my rules here. That is going to help me get to my goals with my ACoS, and one by one, or I can just select all of them and go ahead and process it, and what would have taken me maybe five hours or 10 hours is going to take me five to 10 minutes. The next tab here is for my keyword harvesting. Remember, I set up keyword harvesting rules in a strategy where I’m like, hey, if I get maybe two orders and under 30% ACoS, suggest to me to go ahead and put this to another campaign. Well, look, here I found a keyword egg holder for fridge wood. I spent $10. I got $40 for the sales. So now it’s telling me you know what? You should probably go ahead and put this in your performance campaign and your research campaign. If I just hit this check mark, it is going to do it instantly. What would I have had to do if I was just running my search reports?

Bradley Sutton:

I got to find and do a whole bunch of criteria. Hey, where did I get two orders? Where did I get four orders and under this ACoS, ooh, all right, I want to put it in my broad campaign and my manual campaign. Let me go into seller central. Let me find these campaigns. Uh, let me make sure it’s not already there. All right, let me, let me hit add campaign. Let me select a budget of how much I want my bid to be. All this that would take 10, 15 minutes just do that. Here it takes me one click because the suggestion already is here. I just say yes or no and it’s going to take care of it for me. The last one was the negative matching. I set up rules for that too, where I say, hey, if I get X number of orders, um, then I want you to go ahead and negative match this. And so here I got, let’s say, 20 clicks and zero sales. I can say yes, negative match it, and it’s going to instantly happen. Or I could say no, you know what snooze and let’s just see what happens until next week. Or I can pause this and say you know what? I never want a negative match. This keyword Never suggest this to me again.

Bradley Sutton:

So, guys, this is what all the strategy, a lot of the strategy we’ve been talking about today. This is what it culminates in. This is how I am able to save tens of hours a month on running my PPCs, because I set up all my rules. I have all my campaigns talking to each other and then once a week, I just go into my suggestions and take action. Helium 10 did all the hard work for me. All I have to do is decide yes or no. Do I want to act on those actions?

Bradley Sutton:

All right, there you have it, guys. We just went over eight, nine different strategies here that can definitely help you level up your Amazon advertising game. Don’t forget, Helium 10 Adtomic is now available in almost all Helium 10 plans, definitely available in Diamond. Before, you had to buy it separately. You don’t have to buy Helium 10 Adtomic separately. We’ve got all of these features available that I went over today in the Diamond plan. So if you’ve got the Diamond plan, hop into doing it, because you’ve got full access to it. If not, maybe get a demo. Go to h10.me forward slash Adtomic. You can use a Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast discount SSP10, to save 10% off for life on this. I am an Amazon seller, guys. I use this every single week to manage all 200 plus of my campaigns. I highly recommend that you guys do it too. Hope you enjoyed this video and we’ll see you in the next one.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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