Find Out Where You’re Making and Losing Money in Your Amazon PPC Campaigns

Of all the careers in the world, there are many reasons why one chooses to venture into the world of entrepreneurship.

For some, the draw is the freedom to work when you want, how you want, and on things that you’re excited about. For others, it’s to impact or leave a legacy as they work towards resolving an issue for their consumers with a product or service. 

But let’s be real. 

No matter what business you own or for whatever reason, it is likely you also want it to be a vehicle that can generate you a lot of money. 

Data Matters

When it comes to selling and scaling on Amazon, AND maintaining or expanding your profit margins, tracking your data and evaluating it consistently is crucial. 

Yet, tracking those same metrics can be wildly confusing. With Seller Central only offering 90-day overviews at a time and 60-day reports for your advertising campaigns, you can be left feeling like you are hitting a plateau as a seller.

Downloading reports can feel tedious. Not to mention, the data is dispersed all over the place on the back-end dashboards can easily make you feel anxious and question if you’re really tracking the metrics correctly. 

So, what can you do when you absolutely need to make sense of the data without spending increasing amounts of time downloading and analyzing Seller Central reports? 

An Amazon PPC Tool Makes a Big Difference

I am someone who had sold on Amazon for nearly a year without any kind of additional software, and I can confidently state the confusion you might be feeling is not only normal but easily resolvable with the Helium 10 ADS tool.

The full version is only available for Helium 10 members at the Diamond level or above; however, Platinum members do get access to the analytics side, which is still extremely beneficial. 

Let’s walk through a little bit about what you get when you access ADS as a Platinum member and how it can change the playing field for you.

Access to ADS with Platinum

First, the areas available to all Platinum members for ADS by Helium 10 are the dashboard and analytics pages.

Once you click ADS located in the tabs at the top of the member’s dashboard page, you might see a warning if you have yet to activate your PPC token. That’s because ADS only works if your Helium 10 account has a connected PPC token. (In the case you receive a warning, just follow the instructions listed on the page to add your PPC token).

When the PPC token has been added, and you activate ADS, the software pulls up to 60 days’ worth of data. The dashboard is inclusive of data like PPC Spend, PPC Sales, ACoS, Total Sales, and Total ACoS (TACoS). TACoS is your total sales (PPC + your organic sales/by your PPC spend) and is an important metric that is currently not even provided in Seller Central. The metric differs from ACoS, which is your PPC spend divided by your PPC sales.

Though the visibility of your product’s total sales and TACoS is only available to you if you add your MWS token, both numerics are essential data pieces, so I encourage adding the MWS token even at the Platinum level.

There is a period drop-down menu, located in the top right-hand corner, presents the option to select a custom period.

How ADS Can Offer More than Seller Central

Additionally, the ability to analyze a broader view in one snapshot is advantageous when attempting to optimize your listing and make quick decisions for your advertising campaigns.

Scrolling down, you can identify your highest ACoS campaigns and your highest spend keywords in one spot without sifting through loads of pages and data as you would have to do on Seller Central. 

One glance at this section will immediately give you actionable insights into the campaigns and keywords you need to optimize in Seller Central.

Similarly, hovering over the icon to the left of the keywords or campaigns reveals more specific details associated with a particular keyword or campaign.

Two charts are listed below the highest ACoS, and highest spend keywords.

You can control which metrics you see, whether it is spends, sales, conversion rate, ACoS, click-through-rate, clicks, impressions, or conversions by day.

Want to identify contrasts of your expenditure and sales between the current versus previous periods? You can see information at the bottom of the graph and quickly gain an idea of how your business is scaling.

ADS Analytics

The analytics page is the second page you can see at the Platinum level. You can navigate to Analytics by clicking that category on the left-hand side panel and look at your data.

It’s great to be able to see your campaign set up at different levels: at the portfolio level, campaign level, ad group level, keyword level, search term level, and product level.

Generating profits is also about optimizing your advertising and marketing expenditures. You want to generate more sales at the most minimal, efficient cost for your business.

Keywords and Your PPC Tool

There is a helpful function at the keyword level of the analytics page for that exact intent. Click on the show duplicates toggle to identify how many times you have a keyword across your campaigns. The toggle feature is useful when you want to evaluate the performance of your selected keywords and/or make a decision on whether or not you need to pause specific keywords based on past performance.

Just be sure to double-check if the duplicates listed are phrase or exact matches because there could be varying intent associated with the listed keywords.

Drifting into another sublevel in analytics, exact match is the same as search term. When you select the search term level, you receive insight into what users are really typing into the Amazon search bar and how Amazon is connecting those searches to your different keywords and campaigns.

Seeing campaign data in one spot like in the screenshot below saves so much time, energy, and confusion. All you would need to do to identify the worst ACoS search terms is click the ACoS category heading to filter the keywords in descending order of highest to lowest ACoS.

To illustrate, you can see the keyword “knee scooter rental” is the worst, with an ACoS of 169.54% because the product is neither a knee scooter, not a rental, and clicking campaigns would let you see where that search term is associated.

The knee scooter rental is doing poorly in a storefront or sponsored brand campaign and has not spent as much in the mobile video storefront campaign.

If you want to make a keyword a negative, you can do so easily by clicking the clipboard next to the search term to copy it. All you would need to do is go over to Seller Central and add that as a negative to the campaign.

The Same Data, Just One More Step

Now, paid subscribers (Diamond level and up) have access to a negative button feature that will make it a negative to one of the campaigns right away. 

Still, it does not really take away from the usability of ADS in Platinum. Even as a Platinum member, you can distinguish keywords that need to be added as a negative by scanning, checking for the highest ACoS, copying the corresponding keyword to the clipboard, and manually adding it in on Seller Central.

The filter located to the right of the period drop-down menu is a great, additional way to check on things.

You can filter keywords based on exact numerics of clicks, PPC orders, sales, etc., to keep track of your search terms and keywords that have clicks on them but are not making any sales making it wasted ad spend. 

Now, the product level is the only other area in ADS that depicts your total sales and TACoS metric.

Campaign type allows you to filter into which kind of campaigns (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display) you are viewing at the highlighted level. You can also view the results by sponsored brands or sponsored display if you choose to. 

As you can tell from the image above, of all the sponsored product campaigns the “hands-free crutch” is in, this product is doing pretty well.

In December, it spent a little over $12,000 for a total of $99,708 in revenue. Because the MWS token and profits were activated, we can see the product generated $200,000 across the board of this particular product last month at a 6.14% TACoS. Having the MWS token and profits activated offers a much better picture of the overall effectiveness of your campaigns as related to organic sales growth.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, if you have been having difficulty discerning what data is important, how to interpret the data you have or just overall been struggling to access data in one place, ADS can be the monumental play you need.

ADS will save you time, energy and effort as you evaluate your currently running campaigns EVEN if you only have a Platinum account. Opting-in is simple. Click here to sign up for Platinum.

Of course, upgrading your account to Diamond comes with its own set of benefits too such as:

• Automated keyword discovery
• Automated bidding strategies 
• Automated negative targeting
• Data based suggestions to optimize your ACoS 24/7

And if you wish to auto-optimize your PPC to save time and money instead, you can learn more about upgrading to Diamond here.

Not quite ready for Platinum yet? Begin to get an overview of some of your potential pain points by running our FREE Amazon PPC Audit tool. Just click here!