I will reveal the 3 best Amazon advertising strategies I’ve been using right now. These are three strategies that you can implement in your business, and they will have an immediate impact. I came up with these strategies after working on my brand and over 140 other brands that Trivium manages.
STRATEGY #1: INCREASE PROFITS BY REDUCING WASTED AD SPEND
This strategy revolves around reducing keywords that are underperforming.
Here’s what you’re going to do:
- Go to CAMPAIGN MANAGER
- Go to REPORT
- Download the SEARCH TEAM REPORT for the LAST 30 days.
Once you download the search term report, you’re going to highlight everything, filter, and then you’re going to sort and filter again.There are two types of filters.
- SPEND AND NO SALES
- HIGH ACOS
Now, before doing anything, you want to make sure that you only select:
- Auto
- Broad
- Phrase
- Expanded
We won’t select Exact and Product Targeting because Exact and Product Targeting are individual keywords, so you can just lower the bids or pause them – you don’t need to add any negatives.
SPEND AND NO SALES
For me, I consider anything above 50% of my product sale price and no sales to be too much. Think about it: let’s say my product is $30 and I spend $15 with no sales. If I spend $16, that means my ACOS is going to be over 50%, which is already not that profitable for me.
Since this keyword hasn’t generated any sales despite spending money, it’s time to cut it loose. We’ll add it as a negative keyword. In the filters, simply set ‘Orders’ to zero and ‘Spend’ to greater than $14. This will show you all the Auto, Broad, Phrase, and Expanded Phrase keywords that have burned through more than $15 without a single sale. Highlight everything in yellow for easy identification.
Now, let’s tackle keywords with a high ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale). This threshold depends on your product’s profit margin, but for now, let’s say it’s 30%. In my case, anything above 85% ACOS is quite high and unprofitable. These keywords are draining your budget without generating enough sales.
However, make sure that you are not selecting any keywords with a lot of sales so if it has 85% – 100% – 120% AOS but it’s generating a lot of sales. You don’t want negative those keywords at least not yet because they could end up killing your sales. So what you want to do is mainly select keywords that have 1, 2, 3, 4 orders and not generating that much sales => the AOS is too high.
So again, you’re going to highlight all of those in yellow. Then, you’re going to highlight everything and you’re going to only show the things that you’re highlighting in yellow. Then there are two ways that you can add them as negatives.
- The first way: Go into Campaign Manager -> Open each campaign , and Copy that keyword and Add it as a negative in that campaign. It’s pretty simple – you can do it right in Campaign Manager.
- The second way : Utilize a sheet with a MACRO -> Input all of that information -> It will spit out another sheet -> Upload to Amazon in the bulk sheets.
STRATEGY #2: SCALING THINGS THAT ARE ALREADY WORKING.
- AKA – LAUNCHING CAMPAIGNS BASED ON PROFITABLE SEARCH TERMS.
We’ve utilized the search term report to identify wasted spend and keywords that weren’t converting properly.
We want to find search terms that are converting very well. It’s the same process as finding negatives: you’re going to highlight everything and then set a criteria based on your ACOS. Let’s say between 1% to 20% ACOS. The reason I say 1% is because you can’t set zero, so maybe you want to do something like 0.1% to 20% or 0.1% to 30% ACOS. These are keywords you want to launch in their own campaigns.
So again, you’re going into the filters and clicking on the filter for ACOS, setting it between 0.1% to 20%. It’s going to show you all of those keywords between 0.1% to 20%. You can highlight them in green.
The next step is to identify which match types those keywords are already running in, or which search terms are already running in (because keywords and search terms are a little bit different). Search terms are keywords that showed up when you’re targeting, you know, different keywords. Keywords are keywords that were actually targeted.
Suppose that I have the keyword ELECTROLYTE POWDER (BROAD).
That means it’s triggering for ‘electrolyte drink,’ ‘electrolyte supplement,’ ‘electrolyte powder with no sugar,’ ‘electrolyte powder for women’ – all of these different keywords. If I find a search term like ‘electrolyte supplement’ that was profitable, and I want to figure out if I should launch it as a separate campaign (yes or no), the first thing I have to do is check: do I already have it launched in any of the different match types? Because I might have it launched as an exact match, but not as broad or phrase match.
I will take that search term and launch it in the other match types – broad and phrase. You can also include exact match, because BROAD, PHASE & EXACT will perform very differently. Broad is like a bunch of keywords (maybe 50 different ones) that are running at different times. Phrase is like 20 different keywords, and exact is one individual keyword. Their performances are completely different. You can have a very bad performance in an EXACT match and an amazing performance in a BROAD match, or vice versa. There’s no rule – you have to test every single time.
There are two ways to check existing match types for profitable search terms.
The first method is manual. Simply download your bulk sheet and use the search function (control-find) to locate the specific search term. If the term appears under a particular match type (exact, phrase, or broad), you already have it covered and don’t need a separate campaign.
However, if the search term isn’t present in any match type, that’s your chance to launch new campaigns targeting it in broad, phrase, and potentially exact match (remember, each performs differently). Finally, if you find it in just one match type (e.g., phrase but not broad), you can create additional campaigns targeting the missing match type (in this case, broad).
For those who prefer automation, there’s a quicker option! My duplication macro streamlines this process. Simply upload your search term report and bulk sheet, set the criteria (like 1% to 20% ACOS), and click a button. The macro then identifies profitable search terms that aren’t already targeted in specific match types, saving you valuable time and effort.
I developed these macros because I’ve been there – manually checking match types can be tedious. Now, I’m sharing them with you to make your Amazon advertising journey smoother!
- CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE
It’s very important to discuss campaign structure because different structures can affect the performance of your campaigns. So, when you’re launching these campaigns, here’s how we launch it: 1 campaign -> 1 adgroup -> < 5 keywords
The reason I don’t use more than five keywords is because I’ve noticed that after five keywords, there’s a significant drop-off in impressions, spend, and sales that the keywords get. Amazon’s algorithm is optimizing to get you the most sales. When you make sales, they make money obviously – the fulfillment fee, the referral fee, all that kind of stuff.
You’ll notice this when you jump into campaigns with, let’s say, 20 keywords. Look at the spend and sales per keyword from highest to lowest. The first five will have decent spend and sales, and then they just start dying down.
In the bottom, there’s no spend, no sales – there’s no point in those keywords being in that campaign. Think about it: those keywords at the bottom could be long-tail, very profitable search terms. If you had them in their own campaigns, yeah, maybe they’re not converting 30 or 50 sales a month, maybe it’s five or 10 sales a month, but they’re very profitable!”
Instead of having a bunch of keywords with scattered sales, focus on profitability! Regularly audit your campaigns by sorting ad groups by sales. Ruthlessly pause any keyword that hasn’t generated sales in the past 30-60 days. Don’t be tempted to move them – just pause them! Here’s the golden rule: Never move a keyword that’s working! Don’t sacrifice a performer for a non-performer. Instead, pause all the underachievers. Remember, a good keyword is a hands-off keyword.
Now, why do I do one ad group instead of multiple ad groups? What you’ll notice is when you launch multiple ad groups, the budget will split unevenly.
Suppose you have a $100 budget. One ad group will have $55 ; $45, $80, $20. It doesn’t make any sense! I don’t know why (I haven’t figured it out), but because we don’t have control (and I hope that one day Amazon allows us to set ad group level budgets), so we have to use that structure of one campaign, one ad group, and then five keywords. This way, the ad group has all of the budget flowing through it, not to a bunch of different other ad groups unevenly (and all that kind of stuff).
Imagine you allocate a $100 budget across multiple ad groups. Frustratingly, the budget might split unevenly – one gets $55, another $45, and so on. The reason for this is unclear (hopefully Amazon will offer ad group budget control someday). To ensure optimal budget distribution, we use a structure of one campaign, one ad group, and limit keywords to five. This way, the entire budget flows through the single ad group, avoiding the uneven allocation across multiple groups.
If you increase the budget, even if you’re not spending the entire budget every single day, your sales and your spend will go up, and you’ll make more profitable sales. Now, this is a bonus hack that I’m going to leave right here: go to your Campaign Manager, sort by ROAS (highest to lowest), look at your budgets and look at the spend.
- MINIMUM CAMPAIGN BUDGET
When launching campaigns, I recommend starting with at least $100. Now, you likely won’t spend the entire $100 depending on your bids. If you have very high bids, you might use the full amount. However, starting with low bids and gradually increasing them helps you avoid maxing out your budget too quickly.
Here’s an interesting observation: let’s say you have campaigns performing exceptionally well, with ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) of 5x, 6x, or even 7x. This indicates they’re generating a significant return on your investment. In such cases, consider increasing the budget for these top performers to capture even more sales.
BONUS HACK: In Campaign Manager, sort by ROAS (high to low). Analyze budgets and spend to identify optimization opportunities.
Ever noticed your campaigns underspending their budget, even with a good ROAS? It’s a common Amazon quirk! Let’s say you have a $100 budget only spending $35 a day. Bumping it up to $200, $300, or even $400 might just push your daily spend to $70, $80, or even the full $100 – all while maintaining that stellar ROAS. It seems counterintuitive, right? Ideally, Amazon would utilize your entire budget from the start. But hey, that’s the platform we work with! The key takeaway? Don’t be afraid to experiment with higher budgets to see if you can unlock even more sales without sacrificing your return on ad spend.
SEARCH QUERY PERFORMANCE REPORT
For those of you who don’t know what the Search Query Performance Report is. You can access this through Brand Analytics. If you don’t have Brand Registry, you’re not going to have Brand Analytics, so make sure that you have Brand Registry.
Go into the menu, then go to Brands -> Brand Analytics
It will automatically open up the Search Query Performance Report.
Once done, select the Search Query Performance Report by ASIN (don’t like to look at the whole brand at once, I want to see per ASIN because each ASIN is individual).
Now, in that Search Query Performance Report, you can find : all of the keywords that people are seeing you with or coming into your listing with – so all of the different keywords that you’re indexing and ranking for. You will see the search volume of those keywords, how many total impressions those keywords are getting per month, and what percentage of those impressions are you getting? What percentage of the clicks of those keywords are you getting? What percentage of the add-to-carts are you getting? And the percentage of the purchases that you’re getting?
So, you can literally see the funnel – impressions, clicks, add-to-carts, purchases – and you can see what percentage you’re getting of the number of people that come into the listing you’re converting on.
So, you can actually see conversion rate on a keyword level for each keyword (this is paid and organic combined now).
This is obviously incredibly valuable because it allows you to understand user behavior through each and every keyword. Unlike PPC, where you only see paid search results, you can see the full picture here. It’s important to remember that PPC results can be skewed, as they can influence organic rankings, but this gives us a more holistic view.
I’m looking for keywords with a high purchase share and a low impression share. What does that mean? Out of the people that come into the listing from a certain keyword, there’s a high percentage of them that convert on that keyword. But, out of the total impressions of that keyword, I only have a small percentage.
If the keyword gets a million impressions, I’m getting 1% of that, and out of that 1%, I’m converting like 15 or 16%. That’s very good! Because out of the people that come into the listing, a lot of them are converting. So all you have to do to get more sales is just show up way more for those keywords, get more impressions, a bigger impression share and then more click share.
Because if you’re getting a lot of click-through rate (like a high click-through rate), it means people are coming into your listing from that keyword. They want to click on your listing – I searched the search term, this is a very relevant product.
We quickly sort by conversion share, starting with the highest and working my way down. Then, I’ll focus on keywords with both a low sponsored rank and a low organic rank. This indicates room for improvement – my position could be much higher! Impression share will also be a factor; ideally, it should be low. In this scenario, I have options: increase bids to improve ranking, allocate more budget to the keyword, or (if it’s not currently targeted in a campaign) launch a dedicated campaign for it. By increasing bids and budget, we can expect a higher ranking for the keyword, leading to a greater number of impressions and, consequently, more potential sales.