#485 – Amazon PPC Extreme Makeover Workshop
Audio version above. Video version below
Bradley goes live from London for an “Amazon Ads Account Extreme Makeover Workshop,” bringing in PPC expert Vincenzo Toscano of Ecomcy to audit Helium 10’s real Project X Amazon Ads account. The twist: Project X has been run more like a testing playground than a growth-focused brand, so while it’s still producing sales, there’s a long list of modern PPC levers that haven’t been fully pulled. Together, they break down what’s working, what’s outdated, and what changes could quickly improve both sales efficiency and profitability.
We begin with Bradley’s rule-based PPC management within Helium 10 Ads, utilizing ACoS “bands” to incrementally adjust bids, pausing targets with repeated non-performance, and establishing keyword harvesting rules to transfer proven search terms into high-performing campaigns. Vincenzo confirms the logic and adds key guardrails: add minimum click/spend thresholds before rules fire, keep campaigns tight, and avoid overreacting to small data. They also dig into keyword harvesting best practices, why immediate search term isolation can backfire, and why conversion rate benchmarks matter (because you can’t “pay your way” into a keyword if your listing can’t convert).
From there, the makeover focuses on high-impact upgrades, including dayparting and budget scheduling based on historical performance, placement optimization (top of search vs. product pages), and why placements become far more powerful once you transition to single-keyword campaigns. Vincenzo then highlights the biggest “new-school” opportunity, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) audiences, so you can bid more aggressively only when shoppers match high-intent behaviors (like past purchasers or add-to-cart users). The episode concludes with actionable advice on Sponsored Display retargeting, refreshing video creatives to prevent burnout, utilizing storefront landing pages to minimize competitor distraction, and a plan to implement changes on Project X and report back with tangible results.
In episode 485 of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley and Vincenzo discuss:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 02:03 – Project X Account Backstory And Purpose
- 06:39 – ACoS Bid Rules And Logic
- 09:47 – Minimum Click Thresholds Recommended
- 13:36 – Keyword Harvesting Rules And Flow
- 15:24 – Keep Five Keywords Per Campaign
- 17:12 – Avoid Search Term Isolation
- 19:52 – Dayparting And Budget Scheduling Tips
- 22:33 – Placement Optimization Quick Wins
- 31:42 – Amazon Marketing Cloud Audience Targeting
- 40:04 – Sponsored Display Defense And Retargeting
- 52:22 – When To Use Product Video Ads
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
A masterclass at upping your advertising game, bid rules, day parting, bid placement, keyword harvesting, negative matching, campaign structure, and more will be covered. Hello everybody and welcome to the AM/PM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton and I’ll be your host and this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, TikTok shop, and Walmart private label, and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM, hence the name of the show. Get it? AM PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, a couple days ago, I traveled for the first time to Israel. And as I was touring the ancient city of Jaffa, I was still making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Hello everybody. Welcome to this live workshop. I’m actually here in London, right here in Vincenzo’s hometown or his hometown currently where he lives. He set up this room for us and it’s kind of weird. I’m looking behind this camera. There’s a big screen TV here. That’s me. There’s Project X going on the camera over here.
Vincenzo:
The feelings fire.
Bradley Sutton:
There we go. Yep. All right. So a little bit of backstory about what we’re going to be talking about today. A lot of you guys know the Project X account. That was actually what he had going on in the screen over here where we had found a coffin shelf and egg tray years and years ago and launched it. And we’ve been kind of running it somewhat as a normal account. Now, the reason why I say somewhat is I’m not getting any money from that account. The money goes to Helium 10. And actually, we probably lose money on the account. And that’s because we mainly use it as kind of like a test for new Helium 10 tools and different advertising things. And I test things with the algorithm and stuff. So, we treat it not as something that needs to be a brand that we’re trying to exit and grow and make super profitable. But hey, we just need to keep some products going. And yeah, it’s still a six-figure account.
Bradley Sutton:
But that being said, I have not really treated it on the advertising side as a real growth mechanism. I’ve been using it to test Helium 10 ads. And I’ve tried to maintain profitable or decent ACOS and I’ve tried to harvest keywords and negative match keywords with bad spend. But for the most part, me and also our engineering team and other teams all use this account as kind of like a playground. They’ve messed it up so many times, oh my goodness, you guys don’t even know. But that’s kind of the point of the account. But now we’re starting new kind of like test accounts at Helium 10 because they’ve messed up my accounts so much. Like one time a few years ago, they paused my most important keyword or archived it actually, not even pause, it’s worse, archived it. And I didn’t know for like three or four months because again, I’m not checking this much. And then like I can never get back the momentum, you know, we had. So because of that, we’re like, hey, let’s start a new test account. And let’s try and treat this, the coffin shelf and the egg trays a little bit more like a real brand that we’re trying to grow. And I think one of the first things that you need to think about when doing this is your advertising. And so I touch the advertising weekly, but just like the simple stuff with ACOS and things like that. But I haven’t really touched the these accounts in years as far as like starting new sponsored brand ads or new videos. I haven’t leveraged new things like AMC. I’ve barely done brand tailored promotions. Maybe I don’t even think I’ve done it at all. Haven’t done any new video ads in years.
Bradley Sutton:
And so I will say, hey, let me bring in an expert and let us get his opinion on how the account looks, what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong. And we’ll go from there. And then a lot of you guys might be in a similar situation. Maybe you’ve had your advertising on set it and forget it. You’re checking it here and there, but maybe you haven’t really done a lot of the new innovations that Amazon has released. So Vincenzo, you just got into this account a few days ago, right? First impressions of what you saw in there.
Vincenzo:
I mean, the first thing is this connects a lot with me because I have to say like Project X is something that I remember watching so many years when I was getting started with the agency, with my selling journey. I remember seeing how you guys were creating this pretty much from scratch and now having the opportunity to finally be inside the account and give you my insights, my experience of everything that we’ve been learning with all our clients and me personally. It’s a pleasure. And I think one of the first thing that I can see is a bunch of opportunity, which is what I really want to discuss today. I see a lot of untouched things in terms of things that we’re not doing with type of campaigns, optimization, things like Amazon Marketing Cloud, Daypart, and there’s a lot of things that we are really not implementing. I’m very confident that if we implement that with the data, because that’s another thing, this account has a lot of data. And for me, when it comes to PPC, if I have data, that’s the best thing because that means I don’t need to start from scratch. I can see what worked, what didn’t work, and now double down and build on top of that foundation. So yeah, I’m very excited.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome.
Vincenzo:
I think there’s going to be a lot of things that you guys can take from today’s webinar and hopefully you can implement it on your PPC campaigns as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Now, first of all, I should have mentioned this before, but you’re wondering why do I have tacos on my shirt and hat? This normally is what we call our Tacos Tuesday show, but we’re doing it on a Monday because on Tuesday tomorrow, I’ll be flying back to the States. But TACOS is a total ACOS. That’s advertising term that many use to kind of measure how are you doing? How is your advertising doing for you relative to your overall sales on Amazon? And so that’s why I’m wearing this taco thing. Now, the first thing I’d like to do is maybe if we can bring up Helium 10, and I want to go into the rules that I have had, and let’s have you go over it.
Bradley Sutton:
So if we can go first into the bid section and then hit the target ACOS up and down. All right. And then scroll down a little bit. And basically, let me just explain to you what I’ve done in the audience here. I set up a whole bunch of rules and this allows me, I don’t have anything on automation. I don’t, even though Helium 10 provides automation, sometimes humans know better than a rule because like there might be a main keyword where my rule says, hey, lower the bid, but I’m doing it for branding purposes. I’m like, no, I have to show up at the top. So anyways, I don’t have rules. So, what I did here was basically, I have different categories of ACOS and this is only for advertising campaigns that I go by ACOS, which is everything right now, which I know you shouldn’t do. But I set a 200, as you can see here as pause. In other words, hey, if ACOS is greater than 200, you know, I’m like, there is no amount of optimization that’s really going to get me to where I need to go. So that’s my personal cutoff. And then after that, I have different groups of ACOS. I have between 100 and 200. And then I set the rule here where I’m like, hey, I want it to actually go down to 60.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, my target ACOS on this account, I think is like between 20 and 25%. But first of all, test my logic here. I don’t want to go from like 180 ACOS to 20 ACOS because sometimes isn’t it true that when you do that, your impressions might go to zero if you try and cut your budget too much?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, of course. Like that’s always a conversation we have to have even with our clients. Like at the end of the day, of course, we all want to reduce our ACOS, right? And overall the TACOS. But we have to understand that sometimes strategically, you want to have certain campaigns and certain kiosks with a high ACOS and TACOS overall, because those are essentially what drives the traffic in the first place to your pro details pages. And then of course, you’re going to have kiosks where you’re profitable and overall the account is profitable. But if you try to, for all your terminologies that your product is relevant for, try to have an ACOS of 15, 20 or even 10% very aggressive. Most of the time it ends up happening with these very aggressive rules. You’re going to have leads that are never going to be competitive enough. You’re never going to essentially display on these keywords. And remember, if you don’t get sales through advertising, your organic sales essentially are also going to be zero because your organic ranking won’t improve over time. So you need to strategically understand when sometimes you have to make the sacrifice of having a higher ACOS with the goal in mind that that’s a long time is going to make you profitable.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And so I have it go down to 60 because I figured, hey, a bid that would take me down to 60. But because then I figured, hey, my other rules will pick it up and then continue to take it down, you know, more gradually. And so basically I have that. I’ll have it now between 60 and 100. I’m like, bring it down to 50, 50 and 60, bring it down to 40. Now, the very first thing I want to ask you about, something I don’t have here is I don’t have a minimum like threshold for this. It’s like, so basically if I had one click and it was this, it would do it. So like, should I put like a minimum spend or minimum number of clicks before it goes into this rule? Or is it okay like this without that minimum?
Vincenzo:
Usually I like to put a minimum, but the, to answer your question, if you choose the spend on the amount of clicks, it also depends on how expensive the click is, right? Because it’s not the same. For example, let’s say you’re advertising for vitamin C, a click is going to be eight to $10, right? Compared to a cure that might be 70 cents. So first define what is your average cost per click. If your cost per click is very high, that means you want to be very strict on how many clicks you want to allow, right? In the other scenario, if the click is only 50, 70 cents or max $1, you want to have a bigger window of allowing for more clicks to be essentially accumulated. So that’s the first thing. And at the end of the day also goes very personally to your budget. Some people is willing to allocate more clicks and more money to that research phase. So that’s also something that goes case by case. But to finalize and give a conclusion, yes, I will say a minimum is always good. And as a rule of thumb, something I usually put is anywhere from as a minimum between 10 to 20 clicks is the minimum I usually wait.
Bradley Sutton:
For the bidding or are we talking like if to negative match something?
Vincenzo:
For both.
Bradley Sutton:
For both.
Vincenzo:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So I can do that later. So what I would do is I would hit this end and then I would say number of clicks greater than, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20, something like that.
Vincenzo:
And the reason for that is me coming from an engineering background. You a validation. Because what I mean by validation, you want an event has to be repetitive. And that’s where the minimum is in place. If the event only happened, as Bradley say, only once. And as a luck, you had a very good ACOS. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have that good ACOS moving forward. If maybe it was your lucky day, all people was out of budget and you had an amazing ACOS on the queue. And now you’re going to go very aggressive on the queue and you’re going to lose money. So wait for consistency. When the consistency provides validation, you make it All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So going down here again, this is pretty much all the way down to 20, but then I have it going the opposite way. So first of all, test me here. Like if my target ACOS is above 20 or like 25, if it’s between 15 and 20, I’m like, Hey, I’m not going to just go celebrate. Oh, my ACOS is so low. I could be leaving money in the table. If that 15% click is showing up on the bottom of page one. Well, who knows how much more, you know, I could be doing. So then I have it going up.
Vincenzo:
That’s correct.
Bradley Sutton:
So hey I have it between 10 and 15, I bring it to 17. And again, once it gets to that 17, the other rule will pick it up. Okay. So we’re looking good there. It goes all the way down to like one here, but then I have one for if I get something, I just put 25 clicks with zero sales.
Vincenzo:
That’s like the minimum.
Bradley Sutton:
Hey, go ahead and pause this targeting.
Vincenzo:
Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So my rules there are good. Now, again, I don’t treat this as a normal Amazon account. And one of the reasons is because I don’t even have time to do this. You know, I work at Helium 10 full-time. So that’s where really Helium 10 ads is helping me as well, because there’s nothing here that I can’t do with a spreadsheet, you know, but it would literally take me how long to make formulas every week or every two weeks and then see, all right, which has greater than this number of clicks, but in between this, all right. And then another formula with what bid do I have to change it to, to get to this percent? I mean, this would be a crazy, even if you’re an Excel spreadsheet wizard, it would take maybe one hour to do what takes me three minutes or two minutes because I have these rules set up. All right. So that’s my bidding rules and let’s see. Oh, keyword harvesting. Let’s take a look at some of my keyword harvesting rules. This is one of my templates here. I don’t even have this product anymore, but basically I usually start with three main, actually five main campaigns, which is an auto, a broad campaign, and what I call research campaign I use, or the research is the broad, and then the exact campaign, which I call the performance. And then I have an ASIN targeting campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Sometimes I’ll have an ASIN targeting sponsor display. And then if I have a video for it, I’ll have some sponsor brand video. And I have this harvesting setup where, well, let’s see what rule I put here. I put, but hey, if I get two orders and under a certain ACOS, go ahead and suggest to me to test it out in some, in my exact campaign, in my broad campaign, if it’s an ASIN that was found in the auto campaign, go ahead and throw it in my product targeting campaign, throw it in my sponsor display campaign. But my threshold of two sales, is that good? Do you, do you think it should just go on one sale just in case I find a straggler?
Vincenzo:
I think two is a good starting point. Me personally, I usually try to stay anywhere between two to five. This at the end of the day also depends on the volume of sales in your category.
What I mean by that, if let’s say your category is a category that on average, you do a hundred sales per month because a high ticket product, then two sales is pretty good, right? But if you’re in a category where you’re talking 500, 1000 units per month, I will then increase it to four to five, because again, going back to the validation, right? That’s why you have to use that kind of judgment and make adjustments.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now what threshold do you start new campaigns as far as number of targets? Obviously, if I just let this go, I’ll have 50 targets in one campaign, but my budgets are only like $50. So do you cap it at 5, 10, 15, 20?
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So usually this is something we see all the time when we order the accounts. You never want to have more than five keywords per campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Vincenzo:
And this is something that I invite everybody even live right now, go to your Amazon account. And actually I’m going to show it once we go on the account live here. If you go on accounts where you have more than five to 10 keywords, I invite you to order by spent, and you’re going to see that after the top five to 10 keywords, the spend diminished significantly. And the reason why we see that phenomenon is because a lot of time when you put more than five to 10 keywords, Amazon will just prioritize the keywords that have the highest search volume and the one that historically have converted the best for your product. Therefore, if you put 50, 100 keywords, which we have seen, Amazon won’t have, first of all, especially if you have a low budget, enough bandwidth to make that happen. So my recommendation is keep it to five keywords per campaign. And an extra advice I give is make sure when you create these campaigns, you also take into consideration the search volume. You don’t want to have a campaign where a keyword search volume of 10,000 isn’t the same campaign with a keyword of 100, because 10,000 is just going to completely shadow that little keyword. And that little keyword could be your hidden gem, the one that gives you an extra few sales per month. But because it’s competing with these big monsters, it’s never going to have any opportunity to show. So take into consideration that number of keywords in the campaign and also the search volume segment.
Bradley Sutton:
I like looking back at, as it says here, the 60 days. And I exclude the last three days. I think sometimes people are like, oh, let me just look what happened in the last seven days or look too far. So there’s that. And I personally don’t do search term isolation. That’s an option here where basically what search term isolation means is if you discover a keyword that converted for you in the auto campaign, and then you’re going to head and copy and put in your exact campaign, now you negative match it in that auto campaign. Personally, I don’t do that. What’s your thoughts on that?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, I also recommend that you don’t negate when you move from an auto phrase or broad campaign, because usually what happens is that Amazon takes a lot of consideration on the history of the campaigns. And what is going to happen if you’re having a keyword that performed very well on your auto campaign and you move it to exact, you’ll be surprised that sometimes the same keyword doesn’t perform as well as it used in the auto campaign. So therefore, my recommendation is move the keyword from your auto campaign to exact. And then what you want to do to provide more authority to the exact match campaign, put a bid that of course is higher than your automatic campaign, because that means by nature the exact match is going to have in the hierarchy a higher prioritization to show. But you don’t want to negate it because a lot of times if you negate that keyword and then you move to exact and you find yourself not achieving the same performance, it’s going to be difficult for you to come back. It’s like Bradley was giving the example of if you archive a keyword or you delete a campaign, trust me, most of the time you’re never going to be able to achieve that performance again. It’s just based on history, just how Amazon algorithm works. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Anything else here that you saw when talking about keyword harvesting that I need to think about?
Vincenzo:
So another thing I would like to add here in terms of keyword harvesting is another thing I take consideration is also overall my conversion, right? Because the thing is when you’re running PPC, I see this mistake a lot. Unfortunately, when it comes to Amazon, you cannot pay your way into success by just saying I have $1 million, I’m going to invest all this money in this keyword, even if my conversion is 0.000001%, I’m going to put all the money in that keyword. Because what is going to happen is if you send a lot of traffic through a keyword and your conversion is just very bad compared to what is the standard of your category, Amazon is just going to penalize you, penalize you in the shape of essentially not showing organically. And over time, even impressions might potentially go to zero for that keyword, because just Amazon keeps showing you and showing you your conversion is very bad. So you want to have a very good understanding of what is the conversion on your category.
And that’s something that you can achieve with Helium 10 or even with analytics. You can have a look at what is essentially the average conversion. And you can use that as a benchmark to know if you’re doing well, or you’re just burning money effectively to not reach and go just ranking organically.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So that is the keyword harvesting. Let’s take a look at what else I have going on here. I do have some day parting schedules here. I don’t have budgets going. Now, here’s the thing. I just put a blanket, a blanket day parting for everything because my bids weren’t high and I was just kind of lazy too. And I did bring it down. Like if you look maybe like eight months ago when I didn’t have it, you’d see like in the middle of the night, my ACOS was just out of control and it’s a little bit better now. But then again, my spend is going down. But I imagine this is not the best way to do it when I just give the same schedule to all of my campaigns because I could have had some campaigns that were doing well in the nighttime. So give me some advice here what I should do.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So, day parting is something that can be very beneficial. But at the same time, I recommend that in order for you to implement day parting, you need to have an update on an account such as this is a no brainer. This account has been running for years. There’s consistency on the data. Therefore, it’s a goal. But if you’re just launching on Amazon, I wouldn’t say day parting from day one is a good strategy because most of the time you’re just guessing. You’re guessing that, yeah, people show more in the evening, during the morning. Leave it at least, I will say bare minimum one to two months, at least the minimum. And once you start seeing consistency, as you can see in the screen, then you can make a judgment in terms of when the schedule should be. Like if you see here on the screen, you can see very clearly that it’s on the afternoon when most of the PPC orders are happening. You can see how during the mornings you’re still making some sales, but bulk is after midday. We can see that. And that’s where you can start being very strategic. You can essentially start making the decision that, okay, I need to allocate the schedule to essentially run my PPC campaigns more during the afternoon compared to the morning because clearly here I’m not being as profitable. And this is something that, also answering Bradley’s question, this is something that you can also be very specific. It doesn’t have to be for all your campaigns. It could be only your main keyword or your top five keywords. Like try to make sure you go inside the data, find the consistency, and then the good thing of Helium 10 and overall is the rule makes it very easy. Like you just click here, as you can see, you select the campaign and you just make sure you double down on what is working for you.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So that’s pretty much my main rules. I do have some negative targeting rules, but I use the same kind of idea that I do when I pause a target. In the negative targeting, actually for my auto and broad campaigns, where I want to negative match, I don’t have negative targeting for my exact campaigns. I like to pause those. That’s why I have that rule over there. But one thing I’m not doing at all here in Helium 10 is budgets or placements.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. That’s a big one. Placements especially.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. The placements, here’s my reasoning here, and I know there’s not an exact right or wrong, but if I didn’t use Helium 10, which is opposite because we’re talking about Helium 10 ads, but if I didn’t use the rest of Helium 10, I think I would definitely be using the placements as far as top of search, rest of search. But in my opinion, the reason I personally don’t is because I like to control a little bit more my placement myself instead of relying on Amazon because I use Helium 10 keyword tracker and I turn the boost on. So, if I set a $1 bid, six hours later, I’ll see where that bid is getting me. And then I’m like, all right, I’m at position 10 because Helium 10 is telling me that, all right, if I need to be in the top four, let me go to $1.25. And so, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I have trust issues with Amazon. I don’t want to just say, hey, Amazon, sure, whenever you want to increase my bid a hundred percent, go ahead. But what are your thoughts on placements? Like, do you always use placements even with Helium 10?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, I would say placement is a no brainer. And in fact, when we do audits on accounts, that’s usually the low hanging fruit that as soon as we start working with somebody and we start touching that, the performance will get the fastest kind of outcome, right? And the reason is very simple, because at the end of the day, there’s so many case studies to prove this, like most of the sales at the end of the day happen on top of the search, okay? And when you start identifying which are the keywords by which you are performing consistently on top of the search, it’s a no brainer for you to then make the decision to put most of your money on that placement on that specific keyword. But I can’t tell you how many times I have audited accounts, $50 million, $70 million accounts. I go on the placements and it’s zero, zero, zero. When I say zero, it’s a percentage adjustment. And it’s like, guys, you guys are spending millions of dollars. This is something that just by me putting from zero to 50%, I will improve the profitability and I will say Vincenzo is the best guy in the industry. But it’s something as simple as just changing that percentage. It’s such a low hanging fruit and I don’t understand why people don’t do it. I feel sometimes people it’s not even a word.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me ask you this, since I don’t have experience ever using placements, how does it affect my bidding rules and stuff? Because obviously the bidding rules I have, like on ACOS, it would be, it’s based on your main bid, like let’s say it’s a dollar. But what happens if I have 100%, you know, placement for top of search, that means I could potentially get, I have a $2 bid, but will this affect my bidding rules where it might make it messed up or it still kind of works out, the average will work out fine still?
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So what happens is let’s say you have bidded $1 across the keywords that you have on that campaign and you put 100% on top of the search. What is going to happen is Amazon is willing to increase the bid up to $2 to make sure that you show on top of the search. Now, it doesn’t mean all the time that by you reaching that cap you’re going to show because there could be people putting 200%, 300%. You can go up to 900%. So that’s where you then have to split test and see what works for you. But the goal here is that you’re giving essentially the green light to Amazon to say, I’m willing to spend more money as long as you prioritize me to show on top of the search. And this is something that is very similar to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Then we can cover it on today’s webinar. Amazon Marketing Cloud does just that. It’s just giving to a specific campaign saying if people matches this audience, I’m willing to pay X percentage more for you to prioritize this audience. So it’s something that there’s not a perfect percentage here. It’s like bids. At the end of the day, you have to split test. I wouldn’t recommend go crazy. Start with a 20%, 50%, 100% and see how it performs.
Vincenzo:
But another tip I want to give before I finish this point is make sure you don’t play with placements on campaigns that you have too many keywords because the placement adjustment happens at the campaign level. So this is a big mistake I see happen all the time. You have a campaign with 100 keywords, you go to your placement, you put 100% adjustment. All those 100 keywords now are going to have that 100% boost. And suddenly you can’t spend all your money in a matter of minutes because you were not aware of that. That’s why placements optimization becomes the most powerful when you start doing a term isolation. That means single keyword campaigns. Because at that level, you can be very surgical in terms of only for this keyword, I want to bid as much as possible to keep dominating top of the search.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s say for people like me and maybe some people out there who have not used placements before, we’ve been doing without placements for a year and we’re happy with where we’re showing up. But would you suggest then that, let’s say I’m going to use a 25% top of search. Would I take my regular bids down by 25%? Otherwise, my bid is going to be higher so that it’s just going to bring me up and then it’s going to make me maybe less. Or do I just keep my bids as is? I would think that would make me unprofitable because it’ll take my 50 cent bid and all of a sudden it’s 75 cents or something.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So another thing you have to consider is let’s assume also you have the $1 bid on the keyword and you see on your report. In fact, I can put maybe a quick example here. In this campaign, this is a campaign I was analyzing for the coffin shelf and you can see the same thing here, like zero, zero, zero. But you can see how on top of the search, in fact, let’s actually also add return on spend. So we have all the stats. We can see how on top of the search is where we are the most profitable, right? But look at the distribution of spend. We keep spending on locations, on placements that we’re not as profitable. So we should start there.
Bradley Sutton:
And it’s almost even, the spend there.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. And even sales. For example, if we have a look at here that is called product pages, we’re spending almost the same and doing half the sales on top of search, just to give an example. So what do we need to essentially do here to answer your question on the bids? If you have a bid of $1 and that bid is competitive enough for you to keep showing on top of the search, rest of the search and product pages, a good strategy is you lower that $1 bid to 50 cents or to a level where it’s not any more competitive to keep showing on rest of the search and product pages. And then by using the percentage adjustment, you force the campaign to only prioritize top of the search. Because at that level, the default bid is not competitive enough to keep showing here. And eventually these bids are going to go, these impressions and metrics are going to go to zero. And the prioritization is only going to be on top of the search. So that’s why you lower the bid until their placements are not having any visibility anymore.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Let’s see. Anything else in Helium 10 we can talk about before we talk about the stuff that I haven’t been doing? We talked about rules. We talked about my keyword harvesting. We talked about bid placements. We talked about day parting. Let me ask you one thing. I do have sometimes about 15 keywords or even 20 in one or targets. And is the best thing to do to take the 5 or 10 with the lowest number of impressions and put those in a new campaign and keep the high ones as I try and get my targets down?
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So that goes back to the point of history. When you’re doing optimization and you’re working on a campaign that you have a few terms that are working profitable for you and the other terminologies are not, what you want to do is the ones that are not working are the ones that you’re going to move, not the other way around. Why? Because it’s very difficult, as I mentioned, to replicate the same success on a new campaign because Amazon will take into consideration how the history of that keyword was performing on a given campaign. So yes, let’s say you have a campaign of 20 keywords, only 5 are performing, you remove the other 15 and those 15, I would then create another two or three campaigns to test these 15 on isolation on a new environment.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. All right. Now, if we’re done with the Helium 10 stuff, what are the basics, what you saw like campaign structure, types of campaigns I’m not doing? Hit me with some hard truth here.
Vincenzo:
Some juice. So I would say the first thing that we can, of course, just double down is on the placement optimization. That’s a big area that we should definitely leverage, like just as you guys can see in the screen, there’s essentially no leverage of this functionality. So that’s a thing I would recommend everybody to, even at home, to check out. The other thing I actually was having a look at is when it comes to Amazon Marketing Cloud. So essentially you guys are going to find this on their audiences within any given campaign. And Amazon Marketing Cloud is something that’s been game changing for all our clients and even myself personally. Why? Because essentially what Amazon Marketing Cloud allows you to do now is to create audiences based on behavior. Now, this campaign has a lot of data. Amazon Marketing Cloud now allows you to go back up to 25 months. Imagine like answering your question that you felt like there were periods of the time you were very busy. You feel like you lost all those insights, but actually you didn’t.
Vincenzo:
Now, with Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can go back in time. You can create audiences of people that have converted the most, that are repeated customers, that are engaging with certain competitors, and then they purchase from you. And by creating these audiences, what you can do is you can create an audience and you can put it into this campaign. Now, the campaigns that you’re seeing here, everybody on screen, these are templates that Amazon already has done for you. As you can see, it’s products that have been added to the cart. So this is people have added your product to the cart. People have bought products from the brand before. And also people that have a high interest on this product potentially based on the behavior. Maybe instead of shopping for a coffin, they were shopping for any other items related to that. And the beauty of that is once you start adding these campaigns, you can say when somebody that has, for example, added this product to the cart in the past, is typing for one of my keywords, such as coffin shelf, make sure you increase the bid by 20, 50, 100%. Now, just as an example of placement, now this goes an extra layer. This is now based on behavior. That means when the persona that is likely to buy from you is engaging with your ads, you are willing to pay double, three, as many times as you want. So now essentially Amazon is giving you the key to make sure you only spend money where you’re more likely to spend. I mean, here with the amount of data, this is a no-brainer because by doing so, we essentially stop all experimentation that’s been done on this account, which is the purpose initially of this account, to now going to essentially doubling down on what has worked in the past.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, before we move on, we got one question from here. Rachel says, how does Vincenzo use budget schedule rules? So that’s something that I’m not doing in Helium 10.
Vincenzo:
So essentially the budget rules, right? So, on the budget at the end of the day, what you also need to define is how you want to essentially distribute your budget across the day. The difference between this and the part and the part is more than on and off, right? It’s just a switch. And budget is more to say, I actually want my budget to last the whole day, but I’m willing to only, let’s say I have $100, right? I’m being this $100 distributed randomly. I only want to locate $20 for the morning and $80 for the afternoon. That’s essentially the different way in the day part. Now to answer your question, the way I will use is very similar to in the part. I will go to my dashboard. I will have a look at my historical data. And for example, let’s say I’m focusing on profitability. I want to know where my ACOS is essentially the lowest, right? I will have a look at here and I can clearly see that my ACOS start to essentially become stable after midday and during early hours of the day. ACOS is essentially not as good. So what I will do is say, okay, I’m willing to allocate more money after 12 until then you can define a max 10 PM, right? So that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re saying my budget is $100, but rather than allocating, because at the end of the day, if you don’t do budget rule, it’s just random. You’re saying only between two and three, release $30 or between five and seven, $20. And there you go. But you have to essentially on my first point based on historical data.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. You talk about the audiences. What else should I be doing that I’m not yet?
Vincenzo:
So the other thing I also was having a look at is for a lot of the campaigns I see here is they are based on kind of research phase. You have, for example, your research campaign here, which I’m going to open by the way so people can see. So on this campaign, what you guys were doing is they were broad keywords, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Yes.
Vincenzo:
You’re trying to identify new terminologies. But if I go back to my campaign dashboard, at this level of the account, I shouldn’t be having essentially, if I order by spend, a research campaign as one of my highest spenders after video because I already know which are my keywords. So that’s another thing I would recommend to take action as soon as possible is start already doing isolation of single keyword campaigns because I can already see on this account, it’s five to 10 keywords max that keep driving the sales. And at this level of the account, I would like to see one keyword campaigns having that isolation to control, not only budget but placement.
Bradley Sutton:
The history is very important as we know. Sometimes you take one keyword and you put a new campaign; it might not do it. So how do you determine like, all right, what do I do here?
Do I take all of the other keywords out? And then now I leave the hero keyword in there. Now I have a single keyword campaign. Or when do you take the, I guess you can call it a risk and put it in a new campaign by itself knowing that it might not get the same traction? Or do you do it and just keep the other one going? And if it doesn’t give you traction, you’re just like, oh, let me stop that. Tell me what I should do there.
Vincenzo:
So in this case, what I will do is I will have a look at all my campaigns in here and see if there is some kind of a campaign where already one or two keywords are the dominance. And if that’s the case, I will use that campaign as my starting point for my new single keyword campaigns and move the other ones to a new campaign. If the scenario is the opposite, which means there is a campaign where 10 keywords are consistently making sales, at that point I would move the keyword because the thing is you don’t want to sacrifice the success of the online keywords for the second one. So those are the two scenarios you’re going to encounter. But ideally, regardless, long time, you need to achieve some level of single keyword campaign structure because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to exploit and take advantage at the end of the day of the placement optimization. So the other thing as well is I was having a look at the type of campaigns. So for example, if we put a filter here and we put by type of campaigns, sponsored products, we can see that, for example, sponsored products, we spend $200. Then if we do sponsored brands, we also spend around $200. That’s already, it’s kind of like a semi red flag because sponsored brands should never match what you spend in sponsored products. That’s already doubling down on my initial point that we’re not leveraging exact match campaigns as they should. And the other one, if we go to a sponsored display, we’re investing very little.
Vincenzo:
Now, why a sponsored display at the end of the day is an important campaign to utilize?
And I’m going to show you here live. So if we go to the listing, once we are here on the listing, at the end of the day, what we have to consider, especially for product like this, now here is not loading because we are from London. So sometimes based on where I’m logging from, it’s not going to show. But here they show under the buy box and also under the bullet points and at the top, that’s mainly a sponsored display. And the reason why those kinds of ads are very important is because it’s not only from a defense point of view, but also from an attack point of view. Like I saw these other competitors having that kind of backdoor, I call it open. We should be exploring that more. And the second thing is that we’re not having any kind of retargeting. Like the fact that most likely we’re having a lot of abandoned cards means there is a lot of engagement already happening with the page, but we’re leaving that money on the table by having zero engagement after all. So that’s why by combining Amazon Marketing Cloud, which you can do with Audience and Sponsored Display, you can make sure you keep engaging with them to then eventually convince them to buy your product.
Vincenzo:
So this is something I wouldn’t put a lot of budget into because sponsors should still be the priority. But again, if we go back to the filter, the fact that we only spend essentially $7 means there’s zero kind of defense attack or retargeting strategy. And that’s something I would like to see more. And the other thing as well is when it comes to sponsored brand, this is something actually very important I would like to pinpoint. The campaign that is spending the most amount of money here is essentially video campaigns. Now, this shows that for this type of product, clearly people like to see how essentially the product is being used, like how many things you can put on the shelves here and there. And when I go inside this campaign, the first thing that I start to identify if we go to this kind of ads, so essentially when it comes to this video, I see that we are not really split testing a lot of videos in the sense that we’ve been using the same video over and over again. And this is another thing that especially with AI nowadays is a no-brainer. What I will do is I will take this video, I will create another three or five variations, and I will start refreshing that because over time videos get what we call like burnout, especially a video like this has been for years now. So that’s another opportunity I would put there. And the other thing is I see no leverage of storefront, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yes.
Vincenzo:
So for example, we’re not really running ads to what we call a single product landing page. And that’s something that’s a hidden opportunity as well because where do you think you lose most of the sales? It’s when people land here, they scroll down, oh look, another competitor, another product, and then you lose them. But if instead, which you can do with your storefronts, you have a single product landing page and you can drive traffic with your sponsor brand campaigns, essentially you remove that kind of comparison effect and you can add to the cart front here. That means look here, there’s no competitor. So that’s something that I usually will do in my top three to five keywords because at that point my brand is already strong and I will double down. So those are some of the, I’m going to make a pause in case you have any questions, but those are some of the recommendations I have in terms of ads.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. This is great. Now I think I’m going to maybe even propose to you if you would be bold to say what you think you could do in like three or four months, like if your team took over this account and maybe another one, like what we do. And then, hey, if it works out good, we’ll bring you back on. But before we talk about that, I just want to, you know, there might be some people who have to bounce here. How can people find you out there if they want to get, you know, help with their own advertising like you’re giving me here?
Vincenzo:
Sure. So feel free to find us at ecomcy.com, E-C-O-M-C-Y.com, where you can book a call with me and my team. More than happy to have a conversation about how we can help you with Amazon. That’s why we do at Ecomcy. We’re a full service agency. We specialize in scaling brands by doing their PPC, DSP, listing optimization, brand management. We also do Walmart and TikTok. So we are a omnichannel when it comes to that. And if you want to find me, Vincenzo Toscano. There’s only one Vincenzo in the industry, luckily. So you’re going to find me very easily on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook. Feel free to reach out, send me a DM. I’m always open, regardless of the size, you know, like even if you’re doing $100, you’re making $10 million, like I’m open to have the conversation. And I’m sure like hopefully I can give you some tips to help you scale your brand forward.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And, you know, we showed you guys a lot of Helium 10 ads. That’s how I’m able to pretty much, you know, manage his whole entire account in just minutes per week. If you guys want to use Helium 10 ads and have the same rules, I recommend getting the Diamond Plan with Helium 10. If you want to upgrade, if you’re on the Platinum or you’re just a free user right now, use the coupon code SSP10. That’ll save you 10% off for life. But that, you know, more than pays for itself within just like a couple of days of the amount of time it saves you in managing your ads and the ability to do the budgeting schedules that he showed, the day partying schedules, the keyword harvesting, all of that. So, it’s Helium 10 ads with rules is available in the Diamond Plan upgrade now. So, guys, thank you so much for tuning in and hope you guys are going to implement some of these things that we talked about today. And we wish you the best in your advertising journey. See you guys later now.
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