So you are doing everything you can on Amazon. You’re monitoring bids, making placement adjustments, pausing poorly performing products and keywords, and everything in-between. Despite all of these efforts, however, your Amazon account is underperforming.

If you have done these things and are still not seeing the results you want on Amazon, don’t worry. We will discuss some additional campaigns and ad groups you can quickly set up that will help you achieve the results you want.

Product and Category Targeting Campaigns

If you are having a hard time utilizing your full ad spend, or are just trying to grow sales volume and revenue, two established types of campaigns can greatly help in this regard – Product and Category Targeting Campaigns.

Advertisers and/or online retailers who aren’t using product and category targeting ad campaigns may be at a strong disadvantage to their competitors.

Product Targeting Campaign

Have you ever downloaded your search term report and found many ASINs in the search term column? Often, advertisers will disregard these ASINs in favor of the actual search terms and keywords in the spreadsheet. 

Unfortunately, by overlooking these ASINs, advertisers are often missing a golden opportunity to reach shoppers on product detail pages of competitors – or sometimes their own products.

Example: Let’s say the fictional company of ABC Nutrition uses Amazon to advertise their organic protein powder, which comes in multiple flavors and bag sizes.

After some time of advertising, they decide to run a search term report. When they do this, they find that they get a lot of orders from both their keywords and various ASINs. There are multiple ASINs giving them many orders. They decide to narrow down their list of potential ASINs to target those based on items which have gotten them multiple orders, have high conversion rates, and manageable ACOS.

After setting up their product targeting campaign and targeting their list of great ASINs, they can help ensure that their products’ ads are triggered when people look at those specific targeted products.

Category Targeting Campaign

Similar to targeting specific ASINs, Amazon also provides a way to target products by category and sub-category. Your selected categories can then be further refined by price range, brand, review rating, and shipping method.

Continuing with our previous example, ABC Nutrition can set up a category targeting campaign for highly-relevant categories to get more of the right people to view their protein powder.

By monitoring and adjusting the category targets as well as the bids within this campaign moving forward, they can also increase order volume while maintaining the ACOS that is right for them.

Single Keyword Campaign

Do you get a large number of your sales from a small group of keywords within your existing ad groups and campaigns? If so, it is a great time to set up single keyword campaigns for those terms. 

While it may seem like a waste of time because you already have that keyword in an existing campaign, a single keyword campaign will allow you to have the most control over their bids and overall daily spend.

Let’s say ABC Nutrition notices that they get the majority of their sales for their fish oil chewable vitamins from 2 terms – fish oil and omega 3 vitamins. In addition to high sales volume, they notice that these keywords have great conversion rates and ACOS. Knowing this, they want to maximize their opportunities for potential sales by bidding aggressively with these keywords.

There are two main ways these can be set up. The first way is to have an overarching single keyword campaign with the individual keywords in their own campaigns. Alternatively, they can set a single dedicated campaign to each keyword.

Whatever way in which they decide to build their campaign(s), they will place their keyword in all three match types (broad, phrase, exact) within an ad group. Depending on the products within these campaigns and your company goals, you can bid aggressively to ensure your product appears high within results. 

Root Keyword Ad Groups

Within your manual campaigns, you may have great long-tail keywords that you have accumulated through extensive research and/or using search term reports from Amazon. These may get you some sales at an acceptable ACOS, but are not generating the sales volume you desire. What can be done?

One of the simplest and most effective ways to increase sales volume in a situation like this is to set up an additional ad group within your campaign. Keywords that are the essence of your advertised product will be placed within this new ad group. 

The benefits of this ad group are tremendous:

  • The generalized nature of these short-tail keywords will enable ABC Nutrition’s protein powder to show up for more searches and generate more sales than ever before. 
  • New keywords will be discovered that can be added to their other three ad groups within the campaign which focus on the three match types. This increases the volume of proven, quality keywords that are being bid upon.

Due to the generalized nature of the keywords themselves, the search terms that can trigger these ads may be less relevant and have higher ACOS at first. With this in mind, bids in this ad group should be set at a lower amount than the rest of the ad groups running within the campaign. In addition, it is important to monitor the search terms for new negative keywords.

Price Point Ad Groups Within Campaigns

Finally, a price point ad group may be right for those who are trying to advertise products with multiple prices. This layout may work best would be in items that come in multiple product variations or sizes. It will enable the advertiser to have more control over bids and ACOS than almost any other campaign layout.

ABC Nutrition has been advertising on Amazon for some time. Their goal has always been to have high sales volume with an ACOS of 10%. For simplicity, let’s also pretend they maintain a constant conversion rate of 20%. They have been advertising their brand of organic protein powder in four flavors and three sizes.

Many times, Amazon advertisers such as ABC Nutrition will lump their products into campaigns or ad groups solely based on the product type. For example, ABC Nutrition may decide to throw all of the ASINS into a single campaign, with each ad group being a different match type for their keywords. Maybe they have their protein powders broken down by flavors:

  • Campaign: Organic Protein Powder
    • Ad Group 1: Chocolate Protein Powder ASINs
    • Ad Group 2: Strawberry Protein Powder ASINs
    • Ad Group 3: Mint Protein Powder ASINs
    • Ad Group 4: Banana Protein Powder ASINs

 Or maybe they only have one ad group for all of the ASINS for organic protein powder:

  • Campaign: Organic Protein Powder
    • Ad Group 1: All Organic Protein Powder ASINs

ABC Nutrition’s campaign is organized simply by match type, flavor, or by simply having a single ad group instead of by price point. Because of this, their bids will almost always lead to one of two issues that will limit their advertising effectiveness:

  1. High bids to maintain competitive placements and high sales volume, leading to a very high ACOS on lower-priced products.
  2. Low bids to maintain a 10% ACOS goal, which would have led to non-competitive bids, forcing placements lower on Amazon and reducing sales volume.

With this in mind, a great alternative to these campaign structures above would be like the following:

  • Campaign: Protein Powders
    • Ad Group 1: Chocolate – 1 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 2: Chocolate – 5 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 3: Chocolate – 10 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 4: Strawberry – 1 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 5: Strawberry – 5 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 6: Strawberry – 10 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 7: Mint – 1 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 8: Mint – 5 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 9: Mint – 10 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 10: Banana – 1 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 11: Banana – 5 Pound Bag
    • Ad Group 12: Banana – 10 Pound Bag

By building the campaign this way, they will have much greater control over just how much they bid on each variation of their product, while also having better control over the ACOS of each one.

What Happens After You Fix Your Amazon Campaigns?

By incorporating these campaign types and layouts into your account, you can help ensure that your Amazon ad account remains a very strong asset for your e-commerce sales. However, building and maintaining Amazon PPC campaigns remains a very involved process. These campaign types laid out today are just some of the many ways in which advertisers can maximize the effectiveness of their Amazon campaigns.

If you are interested in learning more about Amazon PPC or need assistance with maintaining and optimizing your Amazon ad account, please get in touch with WTM Digital or ask about our free Amazon evaluations.

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