#617 – Q4 Amazon PPC Strategies

Could your e-commerce sales soar this Q4 with the right PPC strategy? Join us for a captivating session as we tap into the expertise of Jocelyn Jeffries, an account director at Pacvue, who enlightens us on the art of day parting and the transition to hourly bidding. As we gear up for peak shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Week, we dive into setting actionable sales and customer acquisition goals. Jocelyn shares her valuable insights on leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud for Amazon sellers, offering precision in optimizing your ad spend during these crucial periods.

Our discussion unfolds with a deep dive into the intricacies of campaign optimization, focusing on consumer behavior alignment with tools like Pacvue and Helium 10. We share strategies for product launches, transitioning smoothly from auto to manual campaigns, and the tactical use of long-tail keywords. The nuances of using negative, exact, and phrase-match keywords in broad campaigns come alive as we explore how these strategies can enhance ad performance through the extended shopping season and beyond.

We round off the episode by unpacking cost management strategies for PPC advertising during high-traffic events. Jocelyn offers her expertise on adjusting bids post-Black Friday to prevent overspending, the advantages of ASIN targeting, and competitor strategies. Lastly, we also spotlight the strategic advantages of leveraging AMC to optimize campaigns and increase your market share. This episode is packed with practical advice and expert guidance to refine your PPC strategies and make the most of Q4’s high-stakes holiday season.

In episode 617 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Jocelyn discuss:

• 01:35 – Optimizing Amazon PPC Strategies for Q4
• 07:37 – Day Parting for Ad Campaigns
• 12:05 – Optimizing Ad Campaign Strategies and Goals
• 16:14 – More Amazon PPC Strategies and Competitor Targeting
• 23:42 – Influencing Rufus AI Through Campaigns
• 25:05 – Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for PPC Growth
• 27:28 – Increasing Market Share Through Aggressive Marketing

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions live, as well as talk about day partying, hourly bidding, what sellers can do to take advantage of AMC and how to optimize your ads for Q4. This and more.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and this episode is our monthly live TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon, Walmart, PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today’s host is going to be Shivali Patel. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:

I don’t really want to waste any time. I’m going to actually bring up Jocelyn and have her kind of share a little bit about her, if you don’t know her already. So with that, hi, Jocelyn, how are you? 

Jocelyn:

I’m great, how are you?

Shivali Patel:

Wonderful, thank you so much for being on today.

Jocelyn:

It’s great to be here. This is my second TACoS Tuesday that I’ve joined, so some of you guys may recognize me but others may not. I’m an account director here at Pacvue, which is obviously the other side of Helium 10. I focus on some of our largest enterprise brands, covering Amazon and Omni retailers, and manage the full strategy across search DSP as well as involvement in content, retail, etc. Everything that really goes into the growing of an enterprise business. So happy to be here.

Shivali Patel:

So I guess we’ll just kind of start off with talking a little bit about Q4, then maybe we can jump into some of those newer announcements from Accelerate or anything that you want to kind of dive into. So, with Q4 being here, are there any sort of high level tips that you would want to make sure that our viewership really knows about?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean I think we’ve been in Q4 planning for a long time. Obviously, we had Prime Big Deal Days last month and then, of course, we have Cyber 5 coming up next week, and so there’s been a lot of planning going on. I would say the best advice I can give is to really identify the goals for each of the 10 polls. What are you trying to accomplish as far as a sales goal, a new customer acquisition goal, et cetera? Really grounding your strategy in that first, and then, of course, expanding out to the what the tactical implications are of all of that. The best advice, I would say the, the piece that we have the most success with across the board, no matter how large or small or medium the brand is really executing day partying effectively and making sure that you’re showing up when you should be, especially during these tentpole events. We know behavior can be slightly different during a tentpole versus an everyday Tuesday, for example, and so really understanding the consumer behavior during Cyber 5, of course, during Private Deal Days, day in July, etc. It does vary a little bit, and so taking a look at day partying now, before we get into next week, and making sure that you’re accounting for that into your campaigns is definitely a big tip for any of the temples, but especially heading into Q4 and a very important timeframe for almost every brand out there.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, definitely. And when would you recommend that somebody kind of starts to look into day partying, like, let’s say, they’ve been around for a while outside of just the seasonal aspects of the season?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think it’s something that everyone can be adopting as far as it’s an easy way to make sure that you’re reducing any wasted spend. We typically have ideas of how our consumers shop for our brand, but if we actually look at the data, it can be slightly different. And so, really understanding where your consumers are shopping and when as far as we know, health and wellness is usually in the morning and then household is usually in the evening after work but really making sure you use any kind of day partying optimization to really really zone in on some of those levers and hourly, daily, etc. I think anyone can benefit from it. So if you are at the point where you have significant and sufficient data to make those decisions, I would definitely start implementing that even outside of Q4.

Shivali Patel:

I see Fred says worst time to launch. Would you agree with something like that, Jocelyn? I’ve actually launched before during Q4, and I was not paying necessarily three times. I do think it’s quite niche dependent, but what are your thoughts on this?

Jocelyn:

We have a couple of clients that are launching a new product now. I would say maybe not the week of Cyber 5 is a good idea, but it is definitely. I think category dependent CPCs are going to be definitely more expensive during these 10 polls, of course. So I would try and look at what are some of the keywords that you can win outside of the most expensive category terms that are going to be where you see most of that CPC inflation. So identifying pockets of opportunity that you can slowly scale outside of the incredibly competitive terms is going to be a way to launch within this time period without it being, you know, exorbitantly expensive. But it is a tough time to launch a product, no matter what. But just making sure that you are keeping a close eye on things so that you are not overpaying or wasting any of your launch budget Because a lot of people obviously have a certain amount that they want to spend at the start and making sure that doesn’t run away from you is important.

Shivali Patel:

I see a lot of people like this conversation topic because there’s been a lot of follow up questions. But then he said the best I’ve seen is hourly bidding. Day partying is in the past and there were some questions on what hourly bidding is, so maybe you could elaborate for our viewers.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so hourly bidding is the next iteration of day partying. When I speak about day partying I am talking about the hours, even within a day. So a lot of the tools within Pacvue are hourly and daily and you can set rules to adjust to every campaign, specific performance for every hour for every day. So just you know, pausing or enabling at certain days, or bidding up by 25% in the afternoon and 25% down in the evening. That is very rudimentary day partying. But there is of course the next iteration and that is hourly bidding. So commenter is definitely right, it has evolved quite a bit over the last few years and there are a lot more capabilities around hourly specific bidding. So that’s what I mean when I say day partying encompasses all of the really intraday day partying as well.

Shivali Patel:

I do want to come back to this topic, but let’s go ahead and answer Mike’s question here as well. He says Hi guys, my product launched on Amazon US six weeks ago and I’m really struggling to get any sales. Have been advertising with auto and manual campaigns and monitoring, updating daily spending between $30-50 per day on a $20 product and getting just a handful of sales in total. Have successfully launched in another territory, so I feel confident about the products in the listing. Are there any suggestions?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean I would say, if you’re really struggling to get something off the ground, looking at what is driving sales you know, I know you only have a handful of sales I would look at what’s driving engagement as far as click-through rate. Getting more people onto the page obviously increases your chances of a conversion, and so identifying what the KPI is that can help you outside of sales that are going to lead to sales. So I focus on what’s giving the highest click-through rate and the highest engagement with your ads, Investing a bit more there, upping your chances of getting someone to an actual page and making sure that you are optimizing what you can, even within. You know you have six weeks of data that should be sufficient to make some changes. Spending $30 to $50 a day Again, you should have some pockets to identify around what are the engagement drivers for your campaigns, whether they are auto or manual and really I would say letting auto have a good chance of generating data and leaning in there to make sure that you’re really understanding where your product is surfacing on Amazon, just automatically.

Shivali Patel:

Hopefully that helps you answer your question. Here we have what is the most efficient way to use day parting to optimize exposure. I’ve used it before and found that I lost sales and exposure.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so another kind of side of Pacvue is you can adjust your day planning rules based on different KPIs. So, for example spend ROAS, conversion rate, click-through rate, CPCs I think they all behave slightly differently. If you are optimizing for ROAS, that can sometimes deflate your spend because it’s only focusing on the most efficient timeframes. I like optimizing towards conversion rate because it’s optimizing towards consumer behavior. It’s less influenced by competitor activity and so identifying what is converting versus the cost and the spend and all that usually helps better align your day partying schedule for a consumer’s actual behavior versus relying on CPC inflation for competitor challenges, things like that. So, understanding the role of your campaign whether that’s discovery through auto or it’s truly generating sales around category or brand and aligning the KPI that you’re adjusting your day partings schedule off of is gonna be the best way to really optimize your day parting strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool listing analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, we have Scott here that says launching my first product in a few weeks early December. What’s the best strategy campaign setup? Why should I start with auto campaigns, then transition over to manual? Can I spend around a hundred a day? This is a $25 or $30 product.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I would say any launch strategy. I would start with using Helium 10 to really understand the keywords in your category first. Auto campaigns are a good tool to understand where Amazon thinks your product should be surfacing. So utilizing those to get some learnings around what is actually doing well as far as keywords for your specific product and then also launching a couple manual campaigns around keywords that you think you have the best chance of winning. I would steer at first launch away from some of those very, very high level category terms. You know toothpaste, for example, is going to be very competitive. It’s gonna be very hard to break into that space. So looking more at some of the longer tail keywords and using some of the auto campaign data that you get from the launch is going to kind of ease the ramp up for a new product. Especially with $100 a day, you should be able to get a decent amount of data to start making decisions off of in a few weeks.

Shivali Patel:

Definitely. And, Jocelyn, maybe you can elaborate a bit on what Pacvue is because I see we have that question as well and how it might differ from Helium 10. Because, for this question in particular, I could tell you to go inside of Cerebro and, you know, find the longer tail keywords, because we have a word count filter where you can put in a minimum for two or three and find those keywords or phrases that have higher buyer intent, which is exactly what Jocelyn is talking about. So you can find keywords that way, sift them down and then do maybe exact match campaigns or even find ASINs that have higher price points than your product or maybe offer some sort of incentive over your competitor products and run ads on those products instead as you’re launching. But yeah, going back in, let’s just kind of reel it back and explain a little bit about what Pacvue can do or how it’s different from Helium 10.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so Pacvue is more on the enterprise side of the business and it is almost entirely focused on ads. As far as an execution standpoint, we have commerce, which is really understanding, like the seller behavior. It connects to the seller API and the vendor API. That’s really more for an operational management. But Pacvue itself, at its core, is the ad side of the business. We do have a sprinkling of Helium 10 features within the Pacvue tool and then AdTomic is similarly based on Pacvue data as well. So there is an interweaving between the two. We are sister companies and we serve two halves of the pie. So we’re a little bit more focused on the ads side of things. Less so like the seller, research and all that that is still Helium 10 for sure. And really where a lot of those amazing features lie from a research and launch, that that is still Helium 10 for sure. And really where a lot of those amazing features lie from a research and launch execution standpoint.

Shivali Patel:

So continuing on the ad questions, because obviously that is something that Pacvue does really, really well. We have Michael McKenzie asking hi. I always get confused on when to use negative, exact and negative phrase and auto exact phrase in broad campaigns. Can you please assist?

Jocelyn:

 Yes, Um, negative exact I would use if there are very specific keywords that you do not want to be surfacing for negative phrase we use for um, you know, our own brand term or a competitor term. If I have a category campaign and I want to make sure that these uh ads are not surfacing if someone’s searching our brand term, because I wanna make sure the brand keyword bids that I’m placing are what’s surfacing when someone’s searching that, I may do a phrase match of my brand name to make sure it includes every single iteration of that, to make sure that we are completely excluding any brand searches. And then, similarly with competitor terms, if I don’t wanna have any competitor terms surfacing for a category or a brand campaign, I would use that to make sure I’m encompassing all of those iterations. But again, negative exact are if you have historical performance you know this three word keyword does not perform well and you want to negate that, I would use that as your negative keyword list. And then phrase really can encompass broader general themes that you don’t want to make sure, that you want to make sure you’re not showing up for in certain campaigns.

Shivali Patel:

Here I see we have for Christmas products. What date should be your peak spend? Great question.

Jocelyn:

It’s a great question Christmas products if that’s gifts, you know now is obviously the time to do that.

If it’s decorations and things like that, I would say right now. You know I, like many people, wait to put up my Christmas lights until after Thanksgiving and so we obviously have, you know we could have for that. And so I would say, for Christmas, specific products as far as like decor and all that, say it’s right now, but obviously for gifts, amazon’s extended delivery, which has really evolved, I think over the last you know five to ten years that some of us been Um, but obviously for gifts, um, amazon’s extended delivery, which has really evolved, I think over the last you know five to 10 years that some of us have been working in the industry. You know the cutoff date used to be December 10th, 15th of oh, it’s not going to make it in time and now it’s obviously much closer to the actual day of the holiday and so it does extend a little bit closer to, you know, december 20th, december 21st, 22nd, et cetera. So the shopping season has definitely extended, of course, with additional tentpoles like private deal days and everything, but it’s also extended deeper into December as well.

Shivali Patel:

I’ve actually heard really interesting strategies for Christmas. I know people, or sellers rather, who run Christmas campaigns year round for giftable items, and that way they’re always ranking at the top. So I think it also is quite dependent on what your budget is or how long you want to run it. But here we have this question that says can we use Atomic for these strategies? There’s quite a bit of things that Atomic really does, so I would even recommend going into Atomic and at the top of all of our tools we have these video buttons and so if you click those, you’ll be able to just kind of follow through things like AI. You can actually use and have AI, basically management of your ads. You can have suggestions. If, let’s say, you’re getting 20 clicks but you know no conversions maybe that’s something that you want to negative target you can go in and set up some rules for that, so that way it’s automatically finding and harvesting new keywords. So it really kind of depends on what strategy you’re talking about, which one you’re looking for. But I do think the best way to learn is by just going in and taking a look at those videos and trying it for your own products. Kim is asking there’s a niche category competing directly with direct China sellers and have a 6% TACO’s goal to hit margin targets. What would be the best hourly bidding and or day parting strategy to set rules and goals?

Jocelyn:

I would say definitely a conversion or a return focused day parting strategy that’s really going to make sure that you’re maximizing sales as well as efficiency. So I would focus more on that, less so around CPC’s or impressions or spend, which is more so going to adjust spend numbers versus actual conversions. So if you have a TACoS goal specifically, I would make sure that your budget set for each month is aligned roughly to what you expect your total revenue to be. But focusing more so on conversion and efficiency tactics versus exposure and engagement tactics is going to be where you see a lot more of that efficiency for your total TACoS goal.

Shivali Patel:

Definitely. I think you need a great listing to go along with a great product and great asset. Mike asks when do ppc costs generally reduce after black friday period? Will it be in early December, post cyber Monday or through into January time?

Jocelyn:

yeah, it’s definitely category dependent. As far as we talked about, you know what is the consumer behavior? Um, I think the post black friday period is going to be really like that week after Cyber Monday. I think it’s good to stay on top of things and make sure that you’re reducing your bids as well. Immediately following Cyber Monday it’s kind of like the CPC hangover. We say a bit of people forgetting to reduce their bids, forgetting to kind of lock things back down after a huge tentpole. So making sure that you stay on top of that so that you’re not overpaying is going to be helpful. But generally it’s going to be like immediately after Black Friday and then again, certainly as we get to the close of December December 20, and onward, it’s really where we’re going to see things kind of start to normalize, unless you are in like a new year, new you category, which is, of course, when it starts to inflate.

Shivali Patel:

Here we have James Pavely hopefully I pronounced that right asking ASIN targeting against a direct competitor, is it worth overbidding against them, even if it causes me to take a bit of a loss, simply to stop them gaining as much traction? Do you have examples from your own experience?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting question. I think, as far as competitor targeting, ASIN targeting is much more successful than just keyword of targeting on your competitors keyword. So showing up on their page, at least to your point of stopping them from getting traction, is a good option. I would look at ASIN specifically, that your option is either cheaper or has better reviews or it’s better price, et cetera, to make sure that you have a good chance of winning, If you want. As far as like overbidding if by overbidding you mean spending kind of at a loss just to stop them from gaining traction I think that’s something you need to make sure like aligns with your you know TACoS goal, your profitability goal, et cetera. But they are probably not going to be gaining so much significantly more traction without you on their page versus if you were, because a portion of traffic obviously comes from the product detail page. But if they’re investing heavily in the search result et cetera, then your bidding on their page is going to help, but it’s not going to be what is going to stop that traction in its tracks. So I think when it comes to overbidding, you just need to make sure that fits for you and your financials, but it’s not going to completely stop the ball from rolling down the hill, I would say.

Shivali Patel:

How often should you adjust day parting schedules once they’re set? Can some run indefinitely, or are there seasonal differences?

Jocelyn:

I would definitely say there’s seasonal differences, Like I said, around tent poles, prime day, et cetera, back to school. There’s a lot of micro seasons, even within the year outside of, like the Amazon own tent poles. So I think, definitely letting them run for a little bit and then making sure that they’re adjusting and changing a bit to the seasonal strategies. We definitely have certain specific day parting strategy. You know rules that we create for different temples as well as different times of the year If we are trying to spend aggressively in the end of December heading into January for the new year, health and wellness season, for example. So I would say most rules should not be set indefinitely and never reviewed and never touched, Especially for day partying. There are seasonal nuances throughout the year that you should be taking into account.

Shivali Patel:

David asks. I have different types of campaigns that are excellent 10% ACoS, 10% ROAS or $10 ROAS excuse me, crv of 50% generating 10k per week. My campaign has three to five ASINs with 30 keywords with exact and broad types. When should I segment the campaign with one ASIN with five top keywords, with each type broad and then exact, and then do the same for the other ASIN and so on.

Jocelyn:

I would say broad if you have enough data. You should be moving away from those and moving into more phrase and exact match. If you have sufficient data which it sounds like you do as far as you know 10k in sales a week, etc. I would say any kind of campaign should kind of be moving out of this launch phase and moving into more refined strategy where you’re identifying what are the top performing keywords you know the top five, as you said and shifting more of your spend to those so that you can control how you’re spending, control how you’re bidding and making sure that you’re investing in the places that you should be. So I’d say at this point it’s probably good to start migrating out of kind of that launch and learning phase and into more of the refinement phase of I have sufficient data and I want to start making changes to optimize this, towards efficiency and conversion, et cetera.

Shivali Patel:

Okay. Haras asks is there a way to know if the competitors raise the bid on a specific keyword?

Jocelyn:
This is a great question. You know. We’re always asked what are our competitors spending? There are certain ways to kind of back into that. Obviously, some of the key indicators that they’ve raised their bid on specific keywords is your individual CPC for the term if that starts to inflate without your changes, as well as share voice so paid share voice if they’ve gained share voice specifically on that individual keyword, that’s a good indication that there are competitive changes that they’re making. So looking at your impact to your spend, as well as share a voice for a competitor as well as yourself, is a good way to understand how the competitors are changing their spending patterns for any specific keyword or general category.

Shivali Patel:

I’m in a category where there’s lots of window shopping, as it’s a visual and therefore very subjective product, and these window shoppers are costing me. Long tail keywords have low traffic and the keywords with higher search volume are both expensive and saturated by my competitors. Are there any suggestions of other strategies to consider?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, it’s definitely a good question. I would say looking at like cost per acquisition. I don’t know exactly what the category is, but if it is window shopping it usually takes you know a lot longer to make a decision and make a conversion. So looking at what the cost for each of those orders is and if that’s something that you want to play in, and really kind of identifying the goal cost for acquisition would be a good place to start. As far as other strategies, I would say competitor product targeting is a good one here. If they are window shopping those are typically cheaper than the search result keyword searches and more aligned with kind of the window shopping. If they’re on a competitor’s page they may also be looking at you know similar products et cetera that are ads. So I would say expanding into product targeting is going to be helpful to kind of reduce some of the cost, especially if you’re bidding and playing its most very competitive keyword term.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, and there’s a lot of ways that you can also go about keyword research as well. If you go watch the keyword research master classes that Bradley does, I mean there’s ways that you can take a look at relative rank, which essentially tells you how you’re stacking up with a competition inside of Helium 10. Or even if you say that you want to find your ASIN is ranked somewhere between positions 15 to 150. And then the you know competitor ASINs at least one or two of them are ranking somewhere in the top 10. You can find those keywords where maybe your competitors are beating you on and you can try to change strategy. Or vice versa, right Like you can end up finding the ones where you’re top 10, but your competitors are, or you’re not ranking at all and none of your competitors are. So the opportunity keywords, really, and that might help save you a little bit of money and hopefully find the, the space where you can meet demand but your competitors aren’t yet utilizing because very unlikely that they’ll change their strategy overnight. Okay, is there a way to influence rufus ai via the campaigns? I love questions about ai because I’m also very, very curious.

Jocelyn:

We’ve been asked it a lot.  It’s a great question. As far as anything on Amazon, no, the only thing I would say is to make sure that your product detail content is as up-to-date as possible with the best information you have. As far as where it sources from, it does source from other sides of the internet. It sources from Google result, your website, et cetera. So, understanding like if you have a presence elsewhere making sure that everything is fully optimized. Our prediction is that eventually you’ll be able to optimize it and probably influence it through advertising, because Amazon, you know, usually monetizes almost everything. In its current state. There is nothing you can do from like an ad strategy. It’s really focused on SEO and the content that you do have, again on Amazon as well as off Amazon. So those are the pieces that you can influence, but there’s very little ish information on where Rufus is pulling from outside of Amazon information, Google SEO websites, etc. So making sure that your whole digital footprint is where you want it to be and optimize as much as you can through the most current content is the only way to positively influence that. But again, it’s probably going to be an ads opportunity somewhere.

Shivali Patel:

I did want to ask how do you feel like sellers should really be taking advantage of all this new access to AMC?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think it’s been a great development. Obviously, when AMC first rolled out, it was very exclusive to someone that had SQL data, someone that had the time and the resources to activate it, and so it has definitely been democratized a lot more, especially for sellers that do not run DSP. So, AMC for search there’s a lot to take advantage of as far as what are some of your new to brand ASINs to look for, what are the best paths to conversion as far as a combination of sponsor brand and sponsor product, etc. And then there’s, of course, the AMC audiences for search, which has been a very hot topic and a big topic of discussion as far as how do we execute it. It’s, of course, a bid up feature only, not bid down, and so really identifying what are the highest performing audiences whether those are people who have engaged with your ads before or they are lookalikes from repeat purchasers, things like that layering that on to primarily your category terms Again, some of those terms are very broad and very competitive, and so making sure that you’re winning the consumers that you are really adamant about winning and have the best chance at winning, is going to be kind of the key of weaving AMC into search and then, of course, really like additional insights that you can pull with AMC for search only, which is also a new development.

Shivali Patel:

And for those people who don’t know what AMC is Paul is asking what is AMC? Maybe you can elaborate there.

Jocelyn:

AMC stands for Amazon Marketing Cloud. It’s a data clean room that allows you to pull in multiple data points. It’s a fancy way of saying. It’s basically Amazon’s analytic platform. It allows you to get a deeper understanding beyond just you know return, click through it, etc. More so behavioral insights and consumer path insights. So it’s been very helpful to understand what is the optimal investment across different ad types, as well as who are the audiences that are really successful and have converted really well. And so it is again really just kind of the data extension of Amazon that other retailers do not have. I would say probably more retailers are going to eventually move to that model, but it is really quite a differentiator for Amazon to have access to all this extra data.

Shivali Patel:

Our campaigns are well optimized. Like mentioned above, our ROAS are 10 to $20. It costs us five to 20%. I’d like to increase and dominate my market share. What should I do?

Jocelyn:

Well, if you want to dominate, it’s obviously more aggressive spending, more aggressive bidding. If you already have, you know this 10 to $20 return. Understanding what is a range that you’re comfortable with in order to capitalize on more market share is going to be where you’re able to start taking away some of that from competitors. So, really understanding what is the budget that you have and how low the range of return that you’re looking to get in order to gain share, understanding what those parameters are and then going forth and executing. But it’s going to be more aggressive and more aggressive spending and more aggressive bidding.

Shivali Patel:

Let’s say that we have somebody who is kind of optimizing last minute Hopefully you guys have all already optimized for Q4, but do you have any sort of like top tip that you think people can go in and do right now that they might not be aware of but would be helpful? Top tips to go do right now that they might not be aware of but would be helpful.

Jocelyn:

Top tips to go do right now, I would say creating any kind of if you don’t have an optimization rule set up for anything, that would be the easiest thing to get off the ground, along with the day party, like I mentioned. I would say again, aligning to what the goals and objectives are and making sure that your campaigns are reflective of that. Making sure that, if you are participating in T12, which starts in a couple of days, you’re ready for that, your campaign budgets are open, your bids are changed, making sure that you are ready to take on the extra traffic or make sure that you’re refraining from taking on too much traffic, etc. But making sure that you have a plan of action of day of whenever your 10-pole really starts for you is going to be important as far as the planning and execution, to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Shivali Patel:

Great answer. Have you seen more efficiency through a certain kind of ad type?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, like I said, the product targeting is definitely been something that we’ve explored a lot in the last few 10 temples because it is the cheaper alternative than the general search results. You’re kind of piggybacking as well on the extra traffic that other pages are getting, and so it is a good way to surface in other areas. It’s gonna have slightly lower conversion because it’s not the general browse page, but it’s gonna be cheaper and if you do still get decent conversion from it, then you will see an efficient return from those campaigns.

Shivali Patel:

And I know we talked about optimizing, because that was the question I asked. But what about somebody who is launching? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the campaign setup or what you recommend. Should somebody start with auto broad right from the get go, before they even have any reviews, or do you recommend waiting? What’s your stance on that?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, it kind of depends on how much you want to pay at the start. Reviews, like we talked about earlier, are one of the hardest things to get on Amazon. They make it very difficult, which is it’s kind of funny, because it’s supposed to be easy. That was one of the new unboxed announcements was that new product package, basically to get things off the ground. It’s very expensive and most people aren’t going to have that as an option for them. So I would say, starting with auto low and slow to make sure that you’re not overspending, and then, as those reviews come in, ramping up, spend more aggressively. There is some, you know, variation strategy that you can play with, as far as if you have existing products that are similar or you know this is an extension of a current product line, varying those together so that product also gets the benefit of those reviews is one way to kind of boost everything at the start, but that’s obviously contingent on if that’s applicable. But variation strategy is definitely something I would play around with at the start.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, David asks for a branded keyword campaign. What should be the top of search percentage?

Jocelyn:

It depends. It should be very, very high. Obviously, it’s going to depend on your competitive activity, though I would say it should be something 90, 90 plus. But if you start noticing that going down, you can definitely, I would say, look at, share a voice and see what competitor is causing that. You may have to, you know, fight fire with fire and start going after their brand terms, but your branded term should be very high and if it starts going down or you notice that it’s lower than you would expect it to be, that’s definitely something to look into and make sure that you’re shoring up your brand offense if you need to.

Shivali Patel:

Circling back to James’s question for the gold pan targeting campaign, he says it’s essentially a very, very wide reaching, vague campaign with a very low bid, a few cents to mop up the occasional win, typically a convert conversion of 1% or less.

Jocelyn:

Um, it’s definitely a fine strategy as far as rounding out a fully fleshed account, I would not rely on that by any means because, to your point that’s, you know an occasional sale, an occasional win. So if there’s extra places that you just want to shore up and see if you get a win from a very general term, I think that’s definitely fine. But I would focus on more specific strategies around what’s going to lead to more sustainable conversions. But it’s not detrimental in any way. It’s just how additive. This is more the question.

Shivali Patel:

Thank you so much, Jocelyn, today for being here. I know you’ve added a lot of value and you’ve contributed immensely to all these questions that are being asked, so we appreciate your time and those of you that tuned in. Thanks for being here. We look forward to seeing you on the next TACoS Tuesday.

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