The one thing that seems to get neglected, in my humble opinion, when it comes to the Amazon PPC conversation is the power of campaign, ad group, placement, and targeting structure. How we organize our budget around our placements and targets can make traction far easier to come by in stubborn and competitive niches.
Auto campaigns tend to get a bad reputation from amateur PPC professionals because they haven’t had enough experience and seen enough accounts to witness how powerful an Auto campaign can be. We must avoid rookie mistakes like dismissing things before we test them, as we can leave money on the table in our businesses.
Auto Campaigns
Auto campaigns are more than just a means to harvest keywords. They can also be potent revenue engines when tuned correctly for the competitive climate of the ad auction. In older accounts that pre-date 2019, it’s not uncommon for an Auto campaign to be in the account’s top 1-3 campaigns. In less congested niches post-2019, Auto campaigns can be effective if deployed correctly.
The Basics – Researching Ad Auction Competitiveness
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The first thing we need to look at when structuring the Auto campaigns is to take a general view of the search real estate on the top 10 keywords. Are all the TOS sponsored placements taken (3-4)? Is there a relevant HSA placement? Do we see a video placement on the page? Are there mid-page sponsored ads placements?
Assess this in private view. Then refresh the browser or search in another device to see if the placements rotate on a new session. Ultimately, we are trying to figure out how congested the ad auction is. Based on that observation, we will decide what Auto build to start with.
Low Competition – Standard Auto Campaigns
While it’s generally a bad idea to give Amazon free reign of where it delivers impressions, if we observe that the PPC landscape is not super competitive, it can be advantageous to provide Amazon with a longer leash. This longer leash will lead to a more robust sales volume if the placement conditions are right.
Format: Set the budget to a 40 click daily threshold based on the average CPC of the placement recommendations. Next, create an ad group for each variation if there is parentage. If not, just a single ad group for the single ASIN. Adjust the bids on each placement (close, subs, loose, comp) to the top range of the recommended CPC.
Ops: It is without saying that we want to reduce the bids if the ACOS is high per placement, and that should be common knowledge at this point. There are caveats here, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. Ultimately, we want to determine which variations are winning and which ones are not. Then we pause those ad groups, so the budget only gets to the winners. It’s also best practice as time wears on to add negative keywords as needed.
Moderate Competition – Segmented Auto Campaigns
Mina Elias has endorsed this build structure in a few of his videos. From my experience in testing lots of various formats of Auto, it tended to be more reliable than most other builds in low-med comp niches. Long-standing segmented Auto campaigns can even be successful in more crowded spaces. But that’s usually a greater function of campaign longevity than the efficiency of the campaign structure to create conversions in high comp spaces.
Format: Set the budget to a 40 click daily threshold based on the average CPC of the placement recommendations. Next, we will be building each campaign for a SINGLE ASIN. Each variation will get its own campaign with this format. In terms of ad groups, we will be creating one for each Auto placement (close, sub, loose, comp). In total, the campaign will have four ad groups, one for each Auto placement type.
Ops: Business as usual here. Reduce bids if the ACoS is stubborn – add negative targets as needed. We want to cut the bleeders as we did with the standard Auto. The difference this time around is that instead of pausing by variation, we are pausing by placement. In most instances, not all placements in an Auto campaign will be profitable. So we only want to keep the solid ACoS targets running – then pause the others. If a close match is troublesome, but the substitute is doing reasonably well after five optimizations, pause the close match ad group so that more budget can get to the substitutes ad group and so on.
High Competition – SPAG Auto Campaigns
In highly contested niches, it’s a little more tricky to leverage an Auto campaign to reap its rewards. As a general rule of thumb, the more crowded the space, the more granular the targeting to budget ratio will need to be to control spending relative to growth. You might be wondering, ‘what the heck is a SPAG’? Just like there are ‘SKAGs’ single keyword – single ASIN campaigns, we can adapt that same strategy for Autos.
Format: Set the budget to a 40 click daily threshold based on the average CPC of the placement recommendations. Next, we will have a single ad group inside each campaign, with a single ASIN. Inside that ad group, we will only target one placement type. Essentially, we will have one campaign for a close match, one for subs, one for comp, etc.
Ops: More of the same here. Reduce bids if ACoS is high – add negatives as needed. The only difference is that after five ops, if the SPAG is not behaving, we just need to pause the entire campaign because there is only one placement type in it.
Wrap Up
Chances are good a lot of us have not had good results from Auto Campaigns in the past, and if that’s the case – we need not fret. Utilizing a more granular campaign structure in Auto Campaigns can give us the control we need to create harder-hitting revenue engines in our accounts.
For more specific questions on how to tune your Autos for better results, visit our Facebook page.
About the author
John Serafano is the Owner & Founder of Ascendance360, a full-service Amazon marketing agency. John and his agency specialize in private label branding strategies for small to medium-sized sellers.
