At PPC Ninja we take the approach of incremental development based on customer feedback. A lot of you have been generously sharing feedback, ideas and feature requests with us. Many of your requests required a complete overhaul of our architecture and we've made it happen. It took a bit of time and we thank you for your patience. We are happy to announce the release of our blazing fast, highly efficient platform with features designed to help you 10x your productivity. Here we go... 1. Support for Targets within Sponsored Brands Targets stand for ASIN targets or Category targets. So far our Sponsored Brands ads reporting was limited to keyword based ads alone. You had to switch to Seller Central to view Target performance data. Not anymore. You can now drill down to your ASIN and Category Target data right from the Targets view. 2. Support for Video Ads Reporting Video ads have shown to have some of the highest click-through-rates for any ad type on Amazon and we wanted to quickly bring support for this ad type in our UI. To access your video ads data, simply click on Ad Types -> SB - Video in the Campaigns view. [If you aren't running video ads, you should be! Access our start to finish video ads course to get started on video ads here.] 3. Change your Product Level Target ACoS in Bulk Our Bid Recommendations requires product-level target ACoS values in order to calculate the right bid value. You can set this value either at the account level or at the product level. Often you will want to change your target ACoS in bulk across a product line. You can do this via our Product Settings page. Let's say you want to set the target ACoS for all your Dog food SKUs in one go. Simply type some the common characters of the SKU name in the search field and this would filter out every other SKU. Next you can use the Bulk Operator and Set Target ACoS for all SKUs in the selection. 4. Improved Views We love our unique, draggable columns! They just makes it so easy to rearrange your workspace based on your needs. A lot more views now have drag-and-drop style columns. Here are our new and updated views: Manage Bleeding Search Terms Move No-Impression Keywords PPC Sales by Product ASIN Campaign Map 5. Bid Change History You can now view the history of bid changes across every ad type by visiting the Bid Change History view. This is a log of all your bid changes over time. If you aren't sure of when you last made a change you can simply type the keyword in and see all the changes you made by date. You can also access this Bid history through our charts at the keyword and target level. 6. New Markets We now support a lot more Amazon Marketplaces! Here is the complete list of supported ones: North America: US, CA, MX South America: BR Europe: UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, NL Middle East: UAE Far East: AU, SG, JP 7. Bid Recommendations for all supported Ad types! We now provide daily bid recommendations for all these ad types: Sponsored Products Manual - Keywords Sponsored Products Automatic Sponsored Products Manual - Product Targeting Sponsored Products Manual - Category Targeting Sponsored Brands - Keyword Sponsored Brands - Product Targeting Sponsored Brands - Category Targeting Sponsored Brands Video 8. Faster Sync between Seller Central and PPC Ninja Our new architecture allows us to sync with Amazon much faster. Any changes made on PPC Ninja are reflected on Amazon within 2-3 minutes. Any changes made on Amazon will be reflected within PPC Ninja within 10 minutes. This is a huge improvement over the earlier 6 hourly sync rate. This means that your dashboard will be more up-to-date than ever before! 9. Charts for Target Bids Being able to see bid changes on a time line is a game changer! We now have bid charts for Targets as well. This was previously limited to keywords. So there you have it! Lots of enhancements to help you be 10 times more productive with your PPC. We can't wait to have you explore each of these releases. Don't forget to continue sharing feedback and feature requests with us. We're listening! If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us at support@ppcninja.com.

There are no shortcuts to success on Amazon. You've got to be on top of your game if you want to stay in the game. We recently teamed up with the 7 Figure Seller Summit to discuss some game changing opportunities with Amazon PPC and how smart sellers are able to be SO successful on Amazon. What are the strategies and mindsets they embrace to win the game? The 5 winning strategies that we found based on surveying the hundreds of sellers we've interacted with boil down to these: Mimic the big fish Ride on competitor success Diversify your ad types Train the algorithm Be obsessed with Data Let's talk about each. 1. Mimic the big fish Everyone starts small. Those that rise to success are the ones that have their eyes on the big fish in the pond. Always try to mimic the big players. Find out what they do better and go beyond. This example shows how this year old company is crushing it on Amazon by mimicking the big players with excellent branding, a beautiful store front and many techniques to boost sales such as virtual bundles. With some high quality graphics and messaging it's easy to do this. Amazon provides modular store front layouts that can make any store look professional and established. 2. Ride on competitor success Virtually no product on Amazon is truly unique. If you look at your own niche, you are likely to find a page full of search results that look just like you. With tools you can find out which of these competitors are selling higher quantities per month. You then want to target those competitors with ASIN targeting ads. What this does is that it gives you access to their traffic, because you can show up in close proximity to their listings or ads. This is a great way to lure customers into your funnel, especially if you have a great product. 3. Diversify your ad types If you only focus on Keyword based ads, you will miss out and quickly be replaced. The only way to establish yourself on Amazon is if you show up in multiple placements targeting keywords, categories, brands and products. Using Video ads can help you gain real estate on the top page of search results. While video ads have a higher starting CPC, because the click through rates and conversion rates are so good, they work out to be more effective, and give you the added advantage of appearing to be an established brand. Use every ad type you have access to, test each placement and double down on your successes. 4. Train the Algorithm Amazon is a machine learning based algorithm. If someone searches for something, finds your product and buys from you, it's a signal to Amazon that that search was relevant for your product. If this pattern repeats a few times then you start establishing "relevancy" for that search. Why wait for Amazon to figure this out over an extended period of time when you can take things into your hands and advertise on the exact same keywords and targets that you have already started establishing relevancy for. Smart sellers do not stop at keywords. They will also accelerate the relevancy by targeting Products, Categories and Brands. All of these targeting options are available to you. Use them to train the algorithm. 5. Be obsessed with data You don't have to pay for expensive tool to learn what the data is telling you. There is also a ton of data that you can get for FREE from Amazon. Your Business Reports and Advertising reports are gold mines of shopper behavior. In addition you can use Chrome based tools like Helium10, Jungle Scout and Merchant Words to learn about the competitive landscape. Advertising is not a one time setup effort. It requires you to constantly be monitoring all the data you are seeing to adapt, improvise, let go, double down and leverage. Want to learn more about the fundamentals of PPC and become a smart seller that advertises their way to success? We invite you to join a LIVE PPC workshop conducted by PPC Ninja and the 7 Figure Seller Summit. Sign up details are here. https://www.8020sourcing.com/ppc-workshop If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment down below or email us at support@ppcninja.com!

The problem with Seller Central Campaign Manager is that it is clunky and disjointed. You often need to click down several levels of a hierarchy and multiple tabs to access the data you want to analyze. In addition, you also have to schedule report downloads and then piece together disparate csv files to build up the full picture for your data over time. By the time you are done with these tedious, preparatory steps for analysis, you've lost a lot of precious time. We want to make it easier for you. Here are some time savers you can count on within PPC Ninja. 1. The 10,000 Foot View Your PPC Ninja Dashboard gives you all the vital stats you need to audit your PPC performance. Select multiple KPIs and chart them simultaneously. While KPI tiles and graphs are accessible on Seller Central too, the one thing you will not get is Conversion Rate. (Such an important metric to miss!) Goes without saying that you can adjust date ranges and All-SKU vs Same SKU results from convenient drop downs. Plus, you can change your data aggregation from daily to weekly or monthly. Also, switch between all your markets easily with a drop down market picker. All your settings in one market are preserved across market, so no matter which view you are on, simply switch markets and land in the exact same view for the other. Campaigns view to Campaigns view, Keyword view to keywords view. You get the drift. 2. Bulk Operations PPC Ninja provides 50+ Bulk Operations to help you save time. For example, if you want to change the Bidding Strategy of all your campaigns that have a favorable ACoS, you can simply select them and apply an Adjust Bidding Strategy bulk operator. You can also change the Top of Search and Product Page Modifiers in bulk. This is impossible to do with Seller Central. 3. X-Ray Your Data Like an X-ray machine, we cut through hierarchies and structures to uncover and flatten out all your data into convenient list views. The fancy technical term for this is 'normalization'. So you can see all your Keywords, Search Terms, Campaigns, Campaign Negative Keywords and Ad group Negative Keywords in their own searchable, sortable lists instead of being spread out across a complex hierarchy of Campaigns and Ad groups. Imagine how many clicks you save! 4. Multi-layered Search Filters Most of our search fields now support 2 Excel like filters. For example if you want to search for ACoS values that fall between a range, you can do so easily. For a complete list of filters we support visit our other post: Ditch the CSV 5. PPC Sales by Product (Yes!) The most important thing you want to know from your PPC data is how many sales you made. Nowhere on Seller Central does Amazon give you a breakdown of PPC sales performance by ASIN. Campaigns yes, but these days we all have multiple campaigns targeting a single ASIN, so it's hard to extract product level sales data. If you haven't noticed it yet, go check out 'PPC Sales by Product' at the bottom of the left nav-bar. Type your product's name and data range and see daily PPC sales performance. Easily export this view to then plot a time series sales chart in Excel! To sign up for a free trial of PPC Ninja, click here. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 4-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 4-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Amazon recently rolled out a new type of report for Sponsored Brands ads called the Category Benchmark Report. We were both intrigued and excited by the data contained in this report but also disappointed by the lack of documentation in Amazon's help pages. If you don't have this report yet, just know that it is slowly being rolled out. While there is a lot left to interpretation, we've done our best to explain what the report contains and more importantly, how you can use this data. Ready? Here we go... Category Benchmark Report: What is it? In a nutshell, the Category Benchmark Report tells you how your Sponsored Brands Ads performed within a category or subcategory. Not only can you see how your Ads performed, you can also tell how you compare to your peers. KPIs provided are: Impressions CTR ACoS ROAS Amazon provides data for the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of your peers, although they have recently renamed these columns, completely dropping the use of the word 'percentile' which was part of their earlier version of this report. The new terminology is: Peer Impressions - bottom 25% Peer Impressions - median Peer Impressions - top 25% Impression Share Let's break this down a bit. Say you have 10 sellers advertising within a category (that's 11 including you), and you arranged all the impressions each received in ascending order of the number of impressions. The median here corresponds to the mid-point above and below which there are an equal number of sellers. In this case, the seller at position 6 represents the median, seller at position 3 the bottom 25% peer and the seller at position 9 the top 25% peer. Like so: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 As per our sample below, a brand received 1,927,755 impressions for Category 1. Although we do not know how many competitors there are in total, what we DO know is that the competitor at the median received 1,875,690 impressions. This means that our brand is clearly receiving more impressions than half the competitors but less than the top 25% quartile. This is great to know. Unfortunately, it's hard to guess how many impressions the top advertiser is receiving. But we do know that they won at least 5,271,866 impressions, which is indicative of the size of the opportunity and market. We can also calculate the difference between the 75th percentile and the 25th percentile to gauge how wide the variance between the largest and the smallest sellers is. In many cases, it will just prove the theory of winner takes all. Good to know so you can adjust your marketing budgets accordingly. Performance based on ACoS We found the data about ACoS extremely interesting. It's easy to see how advertisers above and below you are doing. Category 2 of our sample below looks like the best category for this brand to advertise because they seem to be extremely profitable. Much better than the bottom 25% peers. Actionable Insights While it's always intellectually stimulating to see new reports from Amazon, it's more important to focus on actionable insights. Here are some we listed: 1) If you are winning more impressions in a category than the median or top 25% peer group, concentrate on that category 2) If Impressions are high but CTR is lower than your peers try to improve the messaging on the ad 3) If the CTR is high and ACoS is poor, try to lower your bids to the point that you can still maintain your peer band and still be profitable 4) If CTR is high but impressions are low, then increase bids and budgets to take advantage of your ad quality Have you downloaded this report yet? Tell us how you are using it! Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 4-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

When looking to diversify your markets on Amazon, you may consider looking into Amazon Japan. It is the third-largest market for Amazon and is a fairly stable market established about 10+ years ago. However, there are a few things that you’ll encounter along the way, especially when you are working on your listings. Creating your listing in the Japanese language may seem to be a straightforward process with the help of a translator. But, if you want your brand to excel in this market, there are a few elements that you must consider. We recently held a webinar and have a new blogpost outlining our discussion with Amazon Japan Sellers. Here, we introduce you to the Japanese language and explore keyword research fundamentals for Amazon Japan. Enjoy! To start, there are four language scripts in Japan. Namely, Hiragana - the basic Japanese phonetic script that spells out Japanese words. Kanji - it is a set of Chinese characters that represent whole words. Katakana - a Japanese phonetic script that spells out foreign words. Romaji - the representation of Japanese sounds using “Roman” characters or more commonly known as the 26-letter western alphabet. Although there are four separate scripts, the Japanese actually love to mix-and-match them. For instance, below, you will see an example of a foreign product listing using a mix of the language scripts. Having to work with these four language scripts may feel intimidating. That’s why, here, we will share the Keyword Research Fundamentals when working with listings for Amazon Japan. Let’s begin with these few steps. #1 Start with seed keywords in English This is a very straightforward step where you simply list down all the seed keywords you will need for your product listing in English. Just like how you choose your seed keywords for your non-Japanese market. #2 Use Google Translate to translate them into Japanese #2 Use Google Translate to translate them into Japanese Here, we introduce the Google Translate + Thesaurus Tool. (Note: You can scan the QR included in the image to easily redirect to this online tool.) In this tool, you can translate English words into their Japanese equivalent. Below its most frequent translation, you will also see some possible translations for the term. This makes it easier for you to determine whether you are using the one fit for your product. #3 Find the most popular usage and save to spreadsheet Other than checking whether the translation is the correct one for your listing, you can also see in the tool the frequency of the word usage; level three with the highest frequency and level one with the lowest. It is also a good practice to save everything to the spreadsheet. #4 Double check with Japanese to English The stored terms in the spreadsheet can be double-checked in the software itself. Just use the formula: =GoogleTranslate(text, source_language, target_language). For example, =GoogleTranslate(A1 , "ja", "en"). #5 Search them on Amazon.co.jp to confirm you see your kind of products Example: Searching the word 匙 (spoon) in Amazon Japan. Another way to confirm if you are on the right track is by visiting Amazon Japan and typing the term in the search bar. If you see results that are the same as your products, then you are doing great so far. #6 Open up Brand Analytics and find the SFR (Search Frequency Rank) Search term: “Kids Mask” You may also visit Brand Analytics and check out the Search Frequency Rank of your term. Remember, the smaller the SFR, the more popular the word is. #7 Check ASIN images of top matches Also, make an effort to check the ASIN images of the top matches to make sure that the term is indeed for products like yours. #8 Sequence in priority of Lowest to Highest SFR As mentioned, the lower the SFR, the more popular the term is. And the more popular the keyword you use in your listing, the more traffic you will get. Therefore, sequence your terms according to lowest to highest SFR, so you will see which will be a more appropriate and effective part of your listing. THINGS TO REMEMBER: Good and Bad Keywords. 1. Each character in Japanese Scripts is considered a “word.” Consider the example above. If you search the term “たな” (tana), meaning shelf, you may notice that the results show the two characters far from each other. To avoid this from happening during your research, here are a few best practices you can follow: People mix and match alphabets in searches, so make sure to research all four alphabet words where applicable (be prepared for 4x the number of keywords). Avoid Broad Match for 2 Character Hiragana Words. Instead, use Phrase Match for this case. Pass your keywords through Brand Analytics and actual check before you pass on to the translator. Use software for ongoing keyword discovery. Add newly discovered keywords with substantial conversions (e.g., 5 over 30 days) as Exact Match. Keep campaigns small (no more than 10 keywords). 2. Each character in Japanese Scripts is considered a “word.” Here are some steps to follow when using software to discover keywords for languages that you don’t know: Start an auto campaign to discover long tail keywords. Start a manual campaign with the smallest number of keywords for best results (1-2 is ideal). SEED keyword buckets, one for each alphabet: Hiragana Kanji Katakana Romaji English When using the PPC Ninja software, for instance, you can go straight to the Discover Keywords section. Here, we publish your newly discovered keywords from your search terms every week. All you need to do is add these keywords to your campaign or reject them instead. Check out our video about this too: Ready to deep dive into creating the best product listing that will excel in Amazon Japan? Just remember to follow the steps on how to do Keyword Research for Amazon Japan above, make sure to remember the tips, and you are good to go. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment down below or email us at support@ppcninja.com!

Don't take keyword bids at face value. Depending on the bidding strategies you deploy at the campaign level, a $1 bid can turn into a $20 bid in real time. How so? Watch our webinar to get a step-by-step breakdown of Bidding Strategies and Placement Modifiers. Or if you are pressed for time read the high level notes below. In this webinar we will help you solidify your understanding of the following topics: Bids by Placement Dynamic Bidding Strategies and Best Practices What does "Bids by Placement" refer to? Bids by Placement is the ability to change your bids depending on where your ads are shown. So, this is a way for Amazon to say that if you like to bid more for certain placements, then we can show your ads in those placements. Moreover, it is through bids placement that you can win a bid when there's competition. You'll be competing for opportunities, and the higher you bid, the more likely you'll be picked. 3 Types of Bids Placement Top-of-Search Rest-of-Search Product Pages WHY IT IS IMPORTANT: Bids by Placement gives you a chance to: Increase Bids by Specified Amounts Change Default Bids Dramatically What is Dynamic Bidding? In comparison to Bids by Placement, wherein you focus on your competition, Dynamic Bidding puts emphasis on the likelihood of conversion based on buyer behavior. Here are the 3 Bidding Strategies Dynamic bids - down only - Amazon will lower bids in real-time if ad may be less likely to convert to a sale. Dynamic bids - up and down - Amazon will raise bids by a maximum of 100% for Top of Search and 50% for other placements in real-time if ad may be more likely to convert to a sale, and lower bids when less likely to convert to a sale. Fixed bids - Amazon will use the exact bid and won't change bids based on the likelihood of a sale. Combining All the Different Bidding Options The example below shows how you can use Placement Bid Modifiers and Dynamic bidding strategies using the Dynamic Up/Down strategy and Top of Search (TOS) and Product Pages (PP) as placement bid modifiers. Let's take a look at the Product Pages scenario first, which is in red. So, if you have a $1 bid on a dynamic 50% with no change to the PP, your bid will increase to $1.5. However, it can go up to $5 if you don't see a likelihood of change for the dynamic, but you have the option of other competing products, which is 400%. And lastly, if you have a PP increase to 400% and a dynamic 50%, you'll get $7.5. In the TOS scenario, if you have a dynamic 100% and no change in the TOS, your $1 will become $2. In contrast, if you have a dynamic 0% and TOS with an increase of 900%, you'll get $10. And if it's an increase of 900% for TOS and 100% for dynamic, you'll get $20. 3 Strategies to Follow When Bidding by Placement Strategy #1: Measure and Modify Look at the placement data for every single campaign and determine how to adjust your modifiers. You can also download the placement report, which is more convenient. Or you could simply look at PPC Ninja's Campaign Placement View that allows you to view, filter and edit modifiers at each modifiable placement. Strategy #2: Segment your Keywords by Campaign We've been seeing a shift in the number of keywords that go into an ad group going down to a thousand. But, keep in mind that even if you fill thousands of ad groups with keywords, not all of them will make an impression, and that is such a waste. Amazon will usually favor those that continue to show results. That's why the trend nowadays is to segment your keywords so that all of them will get more attention and budget allocation. 4 Ways of How to Separate Keywords: Single Keyword Campaigns - Pick a few keywords that are super relevant and go aggressive on those with Top of Search modifiers. Make sure to allocate a specific budget and separate those keywords from the other ones. Volume Based Separation - Keywords that have many volumes actually eat up a lot of the budget. If you mix up high and low volume keywords, the low ones won't get many impressions. So, separate them, and you can have a more intentional use of your bidding strategy. Relevance Based Separation - Focus on relevant keywords and keep them in buckets. It will give you more opportunities as far as placement modifiers go. Branded vs. Non-Branded - Branded keywords get more attention, so separate them from non-branded keywords. Make sure to allocate a certain budget and bidding strategy. Strategy #3: Change Bidding Strategy After Launch When it comes to launching your product, you need to make the most out of the first two to three weeks. This is when your products get more exposure, so you want to make sure that it takes off. You can call this the honeymoon phase, where a lot of historical data is ignored. In this strategy, you also have to make sure that you don't have sparse data. This won't allow a dynamic up and down activity. We suggest at PPC Ninja that you decide how much you'd like to bid and go for it. You can choose the fixed bids strategy instead. You also have the option of Dynamic Bidding but keep Dynamic Down bidding. Make sure to have the max default bid you're willing to spend and watch it for 2 to 3 weeks. Once it settles down, you can look at the ACOS. If it's high, you need to contain it by sticking to the Dynamic Down. But if the ACOS is good, you can use the Dynamic Up/Down bidding strategy. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Updated: Oct, 2020 If you've been advertising on Amazon for a while, you've probably noticed that Amazon changed the structure of their Automatic campaigns in November 2018. And if you didn't know this, don't worry, this post will catch you up on what you need to know and how this change affects you. Read on. Automatic vs. Manual Campaigns One of the basic differences between Automatic and Manual campaigns on Amazon is that the former matches buyer search terms to your ads automatically without the need for any targeting inputs from you, while the latter requires you to specify targets manually for the algorithm to match search terms to your ads. Well now, the scope of the term targets has been expanded from implying only keywords to implying both keywords and products. Both Manual and Automatic campaigns can now target ASINs in addition to just keywords. Examples include competitor ASINs, complementary ASINs, loosely related keywords and closely related keywords. New Automatic Campaigns - What's Changed? Any auto campaigns that you created pre-November 2018, are now marked as "legacy" by Amazon in all their reporting. Any new auto campaigns you created post-November 2018 simply default to the new type. Your previously created campaigns continue to function as before, with no need for any change from your side. While the new auto campaign is structurally very different, it shares the common goal of casting a wide net to help buyers algorithmically discover your products. Just know that even if you wanted to, you cannot convert one campaign type to the other. Is the New Auto Campaign Better for Advertisers? The short answer is "Yes!" These campaigns offer way more granularity of targeting and reporting. Specifically, their targets are broken down further into "Automatic Targeting Groups." Here's the anatomy of the new auto-campaign. There are 4 targeting groups: Close match, Loose match, Complements and Substitutes. The first two, "Close match" and "Loose match," target keywords, whereas the next tw "Compliments" or "Substitutes" target products. 'Close match' and 'Loose match' targeting groups represent the degree of closeness to keywords found on your listing. So if you sell dog beds, a close match search term could be "bed for pug" while a loose match term could be "cat bed" Having a well written listing goes a long way in impacting the effectiveness of this targeting group, because ultimately, Amazon's algorithms will pick seed keywords from your listing. Products that the algorithm deem as similar or competing with yours are matched through the 'Substitutes' targeting group, whereas products that complement your product could get matched through the 'Complements' group. An example of a complement from our dog bed example could be a dog bowl. The good thing about this new structure is that each target group can be individually enabled or disabled. They can each have separate bids, as well as separate reporting of impressions, clicks, sales, ACoS and more. 5 Creative Uses for the New Auto Campaign More access to granular data is always a good thing. It helps you make better strategic choices that can impact the bottom line. We've listed 5 creative ways to take advantage of the increased access to auto campaign data. 1. Take charge of your spend across automatic targets groups One of the characteristics of AI based algorithms is that they will respond more favorably to early data points, rewarding those targets that had early movement in the form of impressions, clicks, or sales with even greater exposure, and hence, an opportunity to perform. If you give your campaign a few weeks to run, you should see data rolling in on impressions, clicks, spend, orders and ACoS. Notice how in the screenshot below the "Complements" targeting group got zero impressions over a 30-day period, whereas the other groups did get clicks and sales. If for some reason, the algorithm did not cause any movement or worse, caused the wrong kind of movement, you can always go in and tweak the individual bids for each target group. 2. Disable poorly performing targeting groups You could even choose to entirely disable poorly performing targeting groups in order to stop the bleeding, and indirectly channel your budget to spend more on better performing ones. If you are analyzing campaigns at scale, we recommend downloading the Sponsored Products Targeting Report (note: this is not the same as the Search Term report) and look for underperforming targeting groups under the "Targeting" column. Alternatively, you could save time by using a PPC Automation Tool like our very own PPC Ninja. 3. Exclusively target a group (there's a caveat) Let's say you want Amazon to exclusively focus on a specific targeting group like 'Complements'. You could set up a campaign with the singular purpose of collecting data about complementary ASINs that led to your products, and potentially use this information to design manual campaigns with Product Attribute Targeting. You can easily do this by disabling all the targeting groups other than the one you want. Clean, uncontaminated data! The caveat here is that Amazon might still go ahead and match keywords for products or vice versa. This is annoying behavior but there does not seem to be a way around it. If you use a software tool like PPC Ninja, you can actually see which buyer searches matched to your target groups. This information is NOT available in any of Amazon's reports as of September 2019. 4. Harvest new keywords The search term report continues to provide data on keywords and ASINs that brought buyers to your listing. However, the only way to get a further breakdown of a buyer search terms matched through Close Match or Loose Match is through an API based search. This is something that PPC Ninja's Amazon PPC Software already provides. 5. Block poorly performing keywords and product targets Luckily, Amazon allows negative keyword targeting on Auto campaigns for keywords. This functionality is unchanged from its previous implementation. However the ability to block off negative ASIN targets can only be done programmatically via the advertising API. Summary The new auto-campaigns are the way forward if you want well optimized auto campaigns. While we do not recommend pausing any of your legacy auto-campaigns that are doing well, it does make sense to set up new ones for poorly performing auto campaigns. Take advantage of more data and better targeting that Amazon is providing! Interested in our Amazon PPC Consultancy services? We offer flexible, short term engagements on an ASIN or task basis. Find out more about our micro services pricing here. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details. Watch this video for a detailed explanation of the 4 Auto Targeting Groups:

eCommerce has achieved explosive growth this year. Just try to visualize what the online shopping scene for Q4, 2020 is going to look like. Not only are people shopping more online, but there are now more people shopping online. Countries like Italy, Spain and India that have traditionally been slow to accept online shopping are now quite comfortable, maybe even a bit addicted to the new conveniences of doorstep deliveries that they've discovered as a result of the pandemic. This poses both challenges and opportunities in the weeks and months ahead until the end of this unprecedented holiday season. What does being prepared look like? If the events of March this year were any indication, we know that even a giant like Amazon will likely be stretched to its limits in terms of fulfillment and logistics. There are bound to be shipping delays just like the ones we saw earlier in the year. Anticipating chaos and congestion, Amazon has already put several measures in place including extensive hiring and instating restrictions on inbound inventory into its warehouses. Here are some steps that we as sellers can take to participate in an unprecedented sales season spanning four mega events - Prime Day (Oct13-14), Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the Holidays. Lead-up to the Events Listing Optimization: With the multitude of choices that shoppers have access it, your ads or listings have only a few nano seconds to make an impact. It goes without saying that your listings need to be fully optimized and your offer attractive. This includes your main image, title and description. Keyword Selection: Use Brand Analytics and other keyword research tools to pick the most popular keywords, making sure they are in prominent places on your listing (Title, Bullets), while retaining the phrase order. This will bring you the traffic you need. Backend Optimization: Make sure your backend fields are optimized. A lot of sellers tend to leave these blank and that’s a mistake. Amazon dynamically constructs customized shopping experiences for shoppers based on choices such as color, size, weight etc. If you don't have these fields filled out, you lose out on opportunities for visibility Keyword Flywheel: In order to have a great flywheel effect between your listing and your advertising, make sure you bid on all the important keywords that are present both on your listing and your backend Create Video Ads: Take advantage of all ad types, but especially Video Ads. With a fantastic conversion rate and low CPCs right now, these are low hanging fruit to allow the power of visual persuasion to lead shoppers into your funnel. [Note: PPC Ninja runs a deep dive start-to-finish masterclass on creating video ads. If you are interested please message us at support@ppcninja.com.] Sponsored Display Ads: Use Sponsored Display ads to target competitors and related categories. Sponsored Display ads offer prominent placements right under the bullet points/buy box areas. Use these to lure shoppers into your funnel. Stay in stock: With the 200 unit (or 3x of 30 days sales) restriction on inbound inventory at FBA warehouses, make sure to keep sending in stock as soon as you are eligible to send even a bit more based on your sales rates Merchant Fulfilled: Set up FBM/3PL options if you can. Amazon is going to be pretty swamped with deliveries and FBM offers will get plenty of opportunities to win the buy box based on Amazon's ability to handle the increased demand Watch the Data: In the days leading up to each event you will notice a drop in conversion rates as people will be window shopping and researching quite a bit, but putting off purchases in anticipation of deals. Be prepared for that! During the Holiday Event Budgets: If you sell giftables or impulse buy items, then make sure to allocate 2x to 3x the amount of budget on campaigns that have proven to be high converting. Broad Match Types: We recommend turning off or considerably lowering bids on broad matches and auto campaigns as these are likely to see high traffic and low conversions Bidding Strategy: Consider switching your Dynamic Bidding strategies from Dynamic Up/Down or Fixed to Down Only Placement Modifiers: Evaluate campaign placement performance to tighten the multipliers or turn them off completely in case of under performing campaigns. With PPC Ninja making this change in bulk is as easy as 1-2-3. Ads + Coupons: Run ads for items that you have already picked for coupons and deals. The combination works well in terms of great visibility and conversions. Lead-off and beyond Last Minute Shoppers: We know from historical data that post-event purchases continue for a few days after the event. There will always be last minute shoppers! When to Ease off: Watch when data begins to indicate a downward trend in impressions, clicks and sales, and use those as triggers to pull back on bids and budgets. Post Event Slump: Be prepared for a drop in sales after the event is over. It's sad but good times cannot last forever! Post Season Recovery: Amazon has data on shoppers that visited your product detail pages. These audiences can serve as inputs to Sponsored Display or DSP ads to remarket to shoppers that have already indicated an interest in your products but did not buy. Use this data for post season recovery! An unprecedented event We are about to witness an unprecedented online event; one that can cause our sales to skyrocket. Our CEO, Ritu Java, recently spoke at the Virtual India Sourcing Summit about Q4 preparedness. Watch the entire video recording here. Good luck on Q4! Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Guest Post by AMZ Advisers Back in March, the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread and businesses, including those online, had to take action. Amazon set its first inbound shipping restrictions during that time and has continued to make changes to adapt to the ever-changing scenario. These limitations took a lot of sellers by surprise, and some of them are still struggling to comply. Here's a short run-through from AMZ Advisers on how things have changed in the past months, and how sellers can use Amazon’s features to their benefit during these trying times. The First Shipping Restrictions Through FBA, Amazon provides warehousing and shipping services to third-party sellers and its larger vendor shipment services. Everything started with Amazon partially suspending its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program from the middle of March to April 5th. This decision came from the boom in online shopping after quarantine started. Many buyers turned to Amazon and other online marketplaces to shop for necessary goods. Online orders increased, and thus, a few marketplaces started to become overwhelmed. Amazon was not an exception. These restrictions would prioritize the restocking and delivery of essential products in high demand. Amazon decided to prioritize the shipment of “essential items,” like groceries, household and medical supplies, baby products and other high-demand products. On the other hand, sellers were no longer allowed to create inbound shipping labels unless the products they were sending belonged to one of the permissible categories. What happened to sellers with non-essential products? Sellers whose products fit into the “essentials” category didn’t have to worry much about restrictions, since online orders continued to rise. Essential sellers experienced some shipping delays, but it wasn’t a major issue. Sellers with non-essential FBA inventory were most affected by the restrictions, with customer deliveries pushed up to a month. Amazon announced it would hire around 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers to keep up with the demand. Around the same time, Amazon announced that on May 15th they would waive long-term storage fees as a way to deal with delays. The pandemic was and still is unpredictable. Many sellers left out of the FBA program and started to look for alternatives. Diversifying FBA operations with a combination of internal warehousing and outsourced providers turned out to be one of the solutions. Other sellers decided to help their business by including essential goods in their catalogue. That way, sales would continue to come in, even if not at the same rate they did before. Amazon FBA Latest Announcements and Promotions You might be wondering what to do with excess inventory, especially any items that were deemed nonessential and couldn’t be sold due to recent restrictions. Q3 and Q4 are important times of the year economically and you may be seeking an inventory supplier. One thing you can do is determine which of your products might fall into the Prime-Exclusive or seasonal categories. (Through Prime Exclusive you can sell your items at discounted prices.) As part of the overall effort to regain customers’ trust - and as an opportunity for merchants to sell their remaining inventory- Amazon brought into place its Summer Sale 2020, which secretly kicked off on August 6th. Another opportunity at the moment is through Amazon Fresh and delivery from Whole Foods Market. Amazon continues to up the amount of grocery deliveries, which translates into new customers coming to the platform. Consider whether any of your products could be sold in this capacity. In the US, Amazon is preparing early for the holiday season to ensure they’ll be able to cater to both sellers and buyers during peak. Therefore, on July 13th, the tech giant released an announcement to let sellers know that “Most products will have enough space available for over three months of sales”. These are the most important takeaways of their most recent communiqué: Beginning July 14th, Amazon will waive fees for any removal order submitted for inventory thanks to the Free Removals Promotion. This means that sellers are allowed, for a limited time, to remove products that have not been selling to avoid paying storage fees for them. Visit Inventory Age to create a removal order. The IPI minimum threshold requirement is 500 (400 in the UK). Sellers below this limit will be subject to this new norm effective August 16th, 2020. Click here to learn how you can improve your sales, reduce your excess and stranded inventory. For over three months of sales, Amazon will introduce ASIN-level quantity limits on products in FBA. View the quantity limits for your products here. These alternatives could help move products and give you a bit of time to plan next steps. Alternatives to Amazon Inbound Shipping Restrictions Due to the current situation, many sellers have been forced to practice their patience and resilience when it comes to shipping their products to customers. Sellers are aware that expedited shipping, same day delivery, and one-day or two-day shipping options with any trackable carrier are extremely costly, thus there’s no other choice than to adapt and diversify their options. Non-essential experienced sellers, have acted as quickly as possible so that their order fulfillment didn’t suffer major disruptions. These are some actions they took to try to minimize the imminent impact: 1. Fulfilling orders from their own warehouse. For starters, FBM is something most sellers should consider doing if they plan to sell big on Amazon. This can also come in handy in case you ever go out of stock on FBA. While it sounds like a master plan, keep in mind that it involves a lot of effort, time, personnel and money---but it’s definitely worth it in critical situations like this. 2. Turning to 3PL and 4PL providers. Third-party logistics (3PL) and Fourth-party logistics (4PL) are both on-demand warehousing options that have helped merchants staying afloat during these difficult times. The great thing about 3PL providers is that they have their own warehousing and transportation procedures in place. Some examples of 3PL providers are XPO Logistics, C.H. Robinson, Coyote Logistics, and Expeditors International. This model works perfectly for smaller companies. With 3PL providers you only pay for the warehouse space you need, so it’s pretty convenient. However, many of these providers do not specialize in eCommerce order fulfillment and do not offer customer support. Which can potentially impact your performance metrics. Fourth-party logistics (4PL), on the other hand, serve as the main point of contact for manufacturers and are better suited for medium-to-large businesses. 4PL’s take charge of the whole operation: packaging, warehousing, and delivery. Additionally, they take over the analysis of carrier performance, management and planning of inventory, project management, and consultancy. Some examples of 4PL providers are UPS 4PL Services, Accenture 4PL, and Deloitte 4PL. 3. Taking advantage of ecommerce shipping software solutions to refine their current shipping strategy. Ecommerce shipping companies have benefited greatly from this unfortunate situation. Many of them offer cost-effective shipping management options to provide sellers with the best solution for their business needs. Many of these platforms offer integration with Amazon and allow sellers a wide variety of features such as: Order fulfilling performance metrics tracking Custom views Automated tagging Reporting tools Inventory management Shipping and handling Some examples of ecommerce shipping software - which can also act as 3PL providers - are Ship Bob, Veeqo, Veriship, and Deliverr. How can you manage your FBA products with Amazon? Now, there are tools for managing your inventory in real time and getting it shipped to an Amazon fulfillment center. Options include “Send to Amazon,” “Send / Replenish Inventory,” generating a “Shipping Plan,” and options for medium to large shipments. Depending on the size of your shipment, partnered and non-partnered courier, these services can help get your products to an Amazon fulfillment center. Here are the shipping options in detail: Send to Amazon (beta) Streamlined workflow for single-SKU boxes sent as pallet shipments through a non-partnered carrier or small parcel shipments using either Amazon or a non-partnered carrier. This option lets you create reusable packing templates to save box content information, box weight, dimensions and labeling for your SKUs. This is a time saver. Send/replenish inventory This shipment option is for single-SKU pallet shipments shipped with an Amazon partnered carrier and for shipments of boxes that contain more than one SKU. For all other shipments, try Send to Amazon, which is an easy way to streamline workflow with fewer steps to replenish inventory. Shipping plan file upload tool You can upload a .csv file of the inventory created using a template provided by Amazon for medium to large shipments. The shipment is created automatically for you. Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) Also, for medium to large shipments. Integrate your own inventory systems using Amazon APIs. To learn more, visit Amazon Marketplace Web Service overview. Avoiding procedural issues means avoiding delays and rejected inventory. You can now prevent refused shipments by following the requirements and using the tools mentioned above. Whether creating dock appointments or ensuring proper labeling, the resources made available to sellers by Amazon can help your processes run smoothly. If you do not yet use FBA Inbound Shipment, you’ll need to enroll in Fulfillment by Amazon, afterwards, you will be able to generate shipments in the streamlined manner detailed above. Creating FBA Inbound Shipments By creating FBA Inbound Shipments through Seller Central, you are letting Amazon know that you are sending inventory at their fulfillment centers--from wherever you are shipping them. Here’s how inbound shipping works: Add items to FBA inbound shipment: The quantity of goods is reserved in the regular warehouse. Mark shipment as shipped: Inventory is moved to the interim warehouse. Amazon fulfillment center receives shipment: Inventory automatically moves from interim warehouse to FBA warehouse. Final Thoughts: The onset of COVID-19 has presented new challenges for many, especially for sellers who had to rapidly adapt to Amazon inbound shipping restrictions to cater to the needs of millions of shoppers around the world. Luckily, things are slowly getting back on track and sellers can take advantage of Amazon’s tools and platforms to keep sales moving, while we all work together to figure out next steps and thrive in a changed landscape. Guest Author: AMZ Advisers is a full-service eCommerce consultancy focused on creating growth opportunities for brands, manufacturers, and private labels across the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia. The AMZ Advisers team has been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts and creating in-depth content marketing strategies. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

If you type ‘Gatorade’ into Amazon’s search bar, what do you expect to see? Gatorade, right? I did a little test to see if that was true, and thankfully it was. I also noticed that all the choices I was given above the fold were advertisements, not organic listings. Which means Gatorade is paying ad dollars to defend their branded keywords. Amazon’s search results page has started to look more and more like this image, where the entire space above the fold is taken up by Sponsored Ads. What this means is that a busy shopper will be more likely to simply click on the first result that meets their needs regardless of whether it is paid or organic . Visually speaking the two are barely distinguishable except for the letters “Sponsored” written in tiny, light-grey font. So the question is, should you throw money at your branded keywords to win prominent ad spots on Amazon? Read more on our guest post for the AMZ Advisers blog. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Advertising is quickly becoming an indispensable way to gain visibility on Amazon. While organic reach is still important to build, launching new products almost necessitates the use of Sponsored ads to reach customers. One of the MOST prominent placements on Amazon's search results page is the Sponsored Brands banner ad (previously known as headline search ad). Not too many sellers make use of this spot, and that's precisely why you should. Why use Sponsored Brands Ads? The simple answer is that they are prominent and can give you an opportunity for exposure especially if your competition has not invested in being there. You need to be visible and grab every chance you can get to be seen in the market. While there may be some truth to the image of Sponsored Brands being more expensive than Sponsored Products, there are ways to set these up so that you not only build brand awareness but actually help boost sales and improve visibility. A lot of sellers are focussed on reducing their Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) way more than on growing sales. A pitfall of this mindset is that it influences your ad choices too. Most sellers in this category would go for conservative budgets and make do with just Sponsored Products Ads. The smartest sellers, however, will utilize ALL of the tools given by Amazon and know the strengths and weaknesses of each to leverage them in the right amounts. These tools can be used to get sales that you won’t otherwise have. Smart sellers will also use these tools in ways beyond what they were intended to be used for. Let's see how. How to create effective Sponsored Brands ads 1. Understand the Costs - Here is a chart comparing minimum costs across ad types. While on the face of it, Sponsored Products ads are "cheaper" than Sponsored brands, don't be intimidated by those floors. The minimum bid for keywords on Sponsored Products ads is 2 cents, while the lowest that you can spend on Sponsored Brand Ads in the U.S. is 10 cents. A good strategy to prevent wasteful spending on Sponsored Brands ads is to avoid using too many broad keywords. Instead, capitalize on the long tail. Long tail keywords attract people lower in the funnel, which in turn creates more conversions and better ROI. Be laser targeted in your keyword strategy and try to use the main keywords in your ad copy. Fortunately both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are based on the CPC model, so you only have to pay when someone actually clicks. 2. Pick messaging that reflects your Avatars and their intent If you know your avatar and "read their mind" by doing a little bit of thinking, you can have a much better success rate. At PPC Ninja, we routinely brainstorm a list of avatars for our products through competitor research, market research, and more. Another important thing we do is that we list our all possible buyer intent. To read more about this strategy refer to our post on Web Retailer. We studied 42 different Sponsored Brands ads to identify different types of messaging brands use. Click here to download our swipe file. 3. Split test your creative Don't just stick to one image creative. Do invest in split testing using services like Pickfu. Within a few hours you can gauge what might be most appealing to customers. Using attractive lifestyle photos to grab attention. 4. Test Out Landing Pages - There are two landing pages to consider: the product listing page or the storefront page. The product listing pages perform better because they are closer to what most customer avatars want. These pages will also help in more conversions. For those with general search terms, storefront pages are better landing pages. Read more about our study on this other blogpost. Do the hard work! Sponsored Brands ads invariably demand some spreadsheet work. You'll need to carefully plan a set of ads in batch mode to save time. Factor in multiple avatars, messages, images, landing pages and choice of 3 products that will tie everything together. Being vague and unplanned in your targeting and ad design can make your Sponsored Brands ads expensive. As they say, if you target everyone, you end up targeting no one. A little bit of planning can help you meet shoppers where they are. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

It goes without saying that if you want more visibility in search results, you need to run ads on common search terms that people use to describe and find products like yours. Since you are competing with many similar products on Amazon, your goal is to bid competitively so you can show up as often and as high as possible in search results. These days ‘higher’ refers to ‘sponsored ads’ since that is what Amazon chooses to show buyers first. Most purchases happen on page 1, and even more of them happen at the top of the search results page. It’s a no-brainer then to bid on as many relevant keywords as possible. But should you be bidding on the keywords that you literally own - your branded keywords? Let’s try to define what branded keywords are. Branded keywords Unicorn Kidz sells children’s clothing, and one of their product lines is unicorn-themed hoodies called a UniHood. In their case, “Unicorn Kidz" and “UniHood” are both branded keywords. Theoretically speaking, no other company has that name or that product on Amazon. Unicorn Kidz runs sponsored product ads to attract people looking for cute children’s clothing. What happens when repeat buyers specifically search for their product name, brand name, or a common misspelling of their brand (say Unicorn Kids). Since advertising on Amazon is based on a pay per click model, does it make sense for Unicorn Kidz to run ads on their branded keywords when organic traffic is free? Ad strategies for branded keywords While this looks like a decision to prevent wasteful spending, it’s more than just that. We put together 4 possible approaches that Unicorn Kidz might take, and studied the reasons, merits and demerits of using each. Here they are: Bid high on branded keywords Bid low on branded keywords Don’t bid on branded keywords Add branded keywords as negative exact match keywords Let’s discuss these in some detail. Approach 1: Bid high on your branded keywords Every sale and conversion trains the Amazon algorithm about relevancy. Amazon learns that UniHoods is relevant to the Unicorn Kidz store. Over time, branded keywords train Amazon’s algorithms to send traffic your way. If that is true then one would think that you need not bid on branded keywords, because you are getting organic traffic anyway.  However, there may be competitors, who steal some of the traffic looking for your branded keyword. You should avoid that if you can. The best way to find out if that is happening is to open an incognito window and search for your branded keywords. Do any competitor ads show up? If they do, then bidding on your branded keywords is actually a good idea. How much depends on your testing. Set up experiments and measure to come to your own conclusions about how much to bid. Approach 2: Bid low on branded keywords Even if there is very little competition for your branded keywords, you might want to set up ads to bid low on your keywords - say 2 cents a click. This is a small amount, but the benefits are far greater. Not only will you show up for organic search results but also for sponsored ads. This means you have doubled your real estate on a crowded search results page. Well worth it. Approach 3: Don’t bid on branded keywords If you are fairly confident that people who look for your brand will find it, you may decide to not bid on your branded keywords at all.  This approach will save you pay-per-click spend, but you will not be able to avoid losing marketshare to competing or similar products. Approach 4: Add branded keywords as negative exact match keywords This approach is for brands that do not want to pay for clicks that lead to their products since they have a strong organic presence. For example, if Unicorn Kidz decides that they would rather not waste any clicks on loyal, targeted traffic, they might think of making “Unicorn Kids" a negative exact keyword in all of their campaigns. This will stop the bleeding right away. However, we have a suspicion that keywords marked as negative keywords will train Amazon’s algorithm to believe that this keyword is not relevant for the brand. In fact, we have anecdotal evidence to believe that words marked as negative keywords, if found on listings, will be not be indexed. This is dangerous, as you run the risk of slowly losing your brand authority with your most identifiable words. Our recommendation Amazon's ranking and PPC algorithm can be a bit of a black box and any recommendation could be tricky. However, we strongly believe that keywords marked as negative will train Amazon’s algorithm to slow down relevant "referral" traffic coming from similar product that Amazon associates with yours. This is especially true of Auto campaigns that have now opened up to more than just keyword targets with Close Match, Loose Match, Complements and Substitutes. Our recommendation is to start with approach 2 - bidding low on your branded keywords to gain greater real estate on search results as a strategy to play defensive. If you find that competition is outbidding you on your own keywords (which, by the way, is totally acceptable by advertising platforms in general), you might want to slowly increase your bid value to retain your brand leadership. We do not recommend approach 3 or 4, as these can weaken rather than strengthen your brand. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

At PPC Ninja we have a bias for efficiency. Our goal is to help you ditch clunky .csv based operations, and we are getting closer to this goal with every feature release. Why deal with these file-based operations that are so error prone and so hard to use, when you could match all of their powerful benefits through simpler, time-saving alternatives? How to Ditch the CSV? There are a few reasons why sellers and agencies have traditionally turned to Amazon's .csv files: 1) Downloading Advertising Reports 2) Discovering new keywords and targets from search term reports 3) Making bid adjustments at scale with bulk files 4) Creating new campaigns, keywords and ads Let's see how we can be MORE efficient at achieving these goals with time-saving UI based operations that PPC Ninja provides. 1) Advertising Report Downloads While Amazon's advertising reports contain some priceless information, having to download clunky .csv reports on a regular cadence is a chore no one really has the time for. But there is this constant pressure to grab your data before Amazon locks it away, forever. Thankfully, signing up for a PPC Ninja account instantly solves that problem. Your advertising report data is automatically pulled in from Amazon on a daily basis, cleaned, stitched together (normalized) and available for analysis across flexible date ranges, through a powerful Excel-like UI. Moreover, your data is available for posterity, easily exportable for the keeping should you ever decide to move on. Using PPC Ninja for this purpose alone can more than pay for a VA that you might have hired for this task. But there is more... 2) Data Discovery and Segmentation Where would you go to look for good keywords to harvest? The Search Term Reports, right? This report helps you find keywords that meet a few different criteria such as Sales greater than some amount, Clicks greater than some number and ACoS less than a certain value. These filters are easy to construct with PPC Ninja's powerful Excel-like query operators. Excel-Like Filter Operators With PPC Ninja's new tables, you can create up to 2 rules per data column with an AND or OR clause. For numeric columns your choice of operations include: Greater than Not equal Less than Less than equal to Greater than equal to In range For example, you could easily find all the campaigns with an ACoS > 50 with 2 clicks. 2) Text Based Filter Operators For text fields, you can easily locate keywords or campaigns using text pattern matches with precision. Text based operators include: Contains Not Contains Equals No Equal Starts with Ends with For example, let's say you want to file all long tail keywords that contain the words "garlic press" AND do not equal "garlic press." You can do it easily with this simple filter. The most powerful aspect of filters is that you can cut across ALL campaigns and AdGroups if needed, or can be applied to pinpointed campaigns only. If you are following a campaign naming convention you can even filter based on parts of the name that you know very well. (Read more about good campaign naming conventions) 3) Bulk Operations Once you've built a filter, the resulting data set can be exported for offline work. But the more interesting use-case is making sweeping bulk changes right within the UI. For example, you want to manually implement day parting and reduce your bids or budgets across the board every Friday because your conversions are the worst over the weekend, you can apply these bulk operation easily in under 30 seconds! PPC Ninja's Excel-like UI mimics the .csv bulk operations and at scale, helping you adjust bids, budgets, bidding strategies, placement modifiers with a few simple clicks, cutting across structural hierarchies such as campaigns or ad groups. Here is an example of the available bulk operations at the keyword level. And here is the list of bulk operations you can carry out at the Campaign level. Wrap Up The reason why agencies and consultants have traditionally opted for csv bulk operations up until now is that this was arguably the fastest, most efficient way available for making bulk changes. But PPC Ninja's powerful UI is disrupting all of that. When it comes to creating new campaigns, keywords and ads in bulk, we still don't have a great way of accomplishing this at scale with just our UI, and .csvs might still be your best bet. But this is on our roadmap and we are getting there! If you are not a user yet, definitely sign up for our 14-day free trial to check out these powerful features first hand. Sellers and agencies who do not want to give up control to a fully automated AI software, are loving our new features. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

As a newbie seller on Amazon, your visibility should be on top of your list. Launching your first product on the market can be challenging, especially if you're just getting started on your career. You would often find yourself stuck in the bottom where a lot of other similar products are on top of yours. One way to increase your visibility and opportunity to sell your product is by optimizing your PPC. In this summary post, we are going to talk about the importance of optimizing your PPC and campaign strategies that would help sellers, especially the new ones, to increase their visibility. We want you to decide which campaign suits you best and what makes more sense to you. 1. Setting Up Your First Campaign (Campaign Structure) There are a lot of steps that you can follow online when it comes to finding the right campaign structure. Amazon provides guidelines on how to set up your first campaign. The most effective campaign there is on the market today is the auto campaign. A lot of sellers use it nowadays just to run auto campaigns for a few weeks and extract essential keywords. Once you got the matching keywords right, you can now create manual campaigns and work with it until it fully develops. You might think that auto campaigns in Amazon only attract keywords, but it has changed over the years. It is now equally powerful to match products as well. Amazon has changed the structure of auto campaigns. There are four target groups on the Add group tab that Amazon added on the structure, which are: Substitutes Compliments Close Match Loose Match A lot of sellers are confused about which structure they should bid. We are currently in the process of having separate campaigns for the four structures. In this way, sellers will not only control their bids but will also have power over their budgets. Experimenting on which structure you should follow makes it easier for sellers to decide on what to do based on their collected data. 2. Don’t Negate Harvested Keywords There can be several reasons why the strategy of blocking keywords from the source won't increase your product visibility. Here are our two reasons why you should not negate keywords that you have harvested out through your auto campaigns. Bringing in Sales - These extracted keywords from auto campaigns are the ones making it possible to actually bring in sales compared to the manual ones. It maintains the flow of sales so you don’t have to negate and block those keywords from the source. Other products become negative too - When you decide you deny keywords to block off well-performing keywords, you are also saying that other products on that keywords are harmful as well. As mentioned above, Amazon is now capable of product-based matches, so other products will show up to become negative too, and potentially be blocked from the market. 3. Product Targeting Ads There are a lot of product targeting ads that you can set up for you to find the ideal products to target. Brand registered sellers can access brand analytics which has three related product sources: Market Basket Item Comparison Alternative purchase These related product sources allow sellers to know which products to target best. They are in three separate campaigns as well to let sellers choose the amount to bid on each. 4. Category Targeting Ads These targeting ads work just like auto campaigns. The targeted products are grouped into categories, so when you set up a new category targeting ad, Amazon automatically links the product's category. It is not only limited to one category. You can also target other groups that you think has more products. Either way, this targeting ad brings in results the fastest. 5. How Much Time To Spend On PPC When you are launching your first product on the market, you might want to monitor your campaigns every single day until it reaches a stage of maturity. When you enter a particular stage of maturity on your campaign, you can then go automatic. Several sellers out there don't have the time to look at their PPC now and then. That is why it is only practical to go automatic for sellers to not spend too much time on every keyword they have for your products. When you are just starting your business, and you want to have what is best for your products, you don't have to hesitate to go with Amazon PPC. To learn more about this summary post, click the link here to view the full interview with Regina Peterburgsky: http://www.womenonamazon.com/29/ Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Let’s not take Brand Analytics for granted. The data contained in this valuable collection of reports wasn’t always available to sellers and now that we have it, remember that there is no guarantee that it will be always free or always available. So make use of it while you can! Amazon Brand Analytics Reports At the time of this post, most brand registered sellers and approved vendors have access to at least 6 types of reports, with valuable data going all the way back to 2018. Here is a brief description of each type along with tips to get started. 1. Search Terms Search Terms is an interactive space where you can discover the top 3 products that are winning the most clicks and conversions for keywords that matter to you. This is a great place to start your keyword research. It's way more accurate than any other keyword tool out there and is based on real shopper data provided by Amazon themselves. To get started, enter any seed keyword - shorter the better - and Amazon will reveal the following details for each buyer search term variation that contains those words: Search Frequency Rank - A measure of keyword popularity. The smaller the number, the more popular it is. #1, #2, #3 Clicked ASIN - These are the most clicked ASINs for those searches in the selected time frame #1, #2, #3 Click Share - This is the percentage of clicks that an ASIN received in comparison to the total clicks for the search #1, #2, #3 Conversion Share - Not to be confused with Conversion Rate which is specific to your own products. This value gives you a percentage of conversions that the product achieved in comparison to the total conversions for that search. Another way to use this report is to enter your own ASINs in the ASIN field to see which terms you are ranking for the most click share (#1, #2, #3) within the first 1.99 million or so terms. Find competing products above your rank to target in Product Targeting ads. Also, try to boost bids on those keywords if you want to outrank your competitors. So much data can you access? Here you can get an idea of the typical number of results Amazon shares for each of the following date ranges. This number fluctuates daily but is within the ballpark. Daily : 1,596,410 Rows Weekly : 1,990,765 Rows [The most rows] Monthly : 1,374,714 Rows Quarterly: 1,048,200 Rows You can schedule a report download, but remember that Amazon will limit the number of rows to 750,000. 2. Market Basket Analysis A term borrowed from Data Science, this indicates the relationship between the combination of products that are purchased together and purchased often. For example, if your Product (A) and another Product (X) are frequently bought together, and say there were 4 orders in the selected time frame, of which 50% contained your product A and competitor product X, then Amazon will tell you that percentage! Order 1: Product A-D Order 2: Product A-B Order 3: Product A-X Order 3: Product A-X Having this information is almost too good to be true. Put this data to use by creating cross-selling and bundling opportunities or Product Targeting ads. The higher the percentage the more confidence you can have in targeting that ASIN. Related Articles: The Funnel in Funnel Strategy for Amazon Product Targeting Ads 10 Ideas for Amazon Product Targeting Ads Should I target my own products on Amazon? 3 & 4. Item Comparison & Alternate Purchase With Item Comparison you can gain insight into products that are most frequently viewed together with yours. These could be products within your own catalog or from that of a competitor’s. This data can be used to understand shopping behavior further up in the funnel as compared to the data from Market Basket. It represents shoppers in the “Consideration” phase of the sales funnel. The Alternate Purchase Behavior report indicates the shopper’s final choice after viewing your product. If the patterns suggests that they bought a competitor’s product and not one of your own, this means they fell off your funnel. You might want to use this data to study those competitors to see what they are doing differently or better. Here is a visual for putting the data from Brand Analytics to use, based on report type and correlated with stages of the sales funnel. 5. Repeat Purchase Behavior This report helps you better strategize and assess your marketing campaigns to drive repeat purchases and acquire new customers. The reasons for a repeat purchase could be any of the following: You have business customers that buy more than one unit You have happy customers who came back for more What’s unclear is if this report includes cross sales from other products in the catalog. 6. Demographics This report gives you per-SKU insights into the demographics of your shoppers over a given time period. Use this to identify customization opportunities with each SKU. This view provides data about the following details: Age Household Income Education Gender Marital Status This is great to understand at a high level, and good to revisit once a quarter to see if there are any shifts, but you’re not going to find any earth shattering revelations each time you do. Put Brand Analytics Data to Use Brand Analytics can help you advertise better and smarter. This is free data that at one point used to cost thousands of dollars or only available through black hat techniques. Given how accurate and valuable it it, include it in your process for regular analysis and strategy and for advertising better. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

A lot of so-called Global Amazon businesses have a hard time finding success in more than one marketplace. Much of this has to do with poorly crafted international listings that they just don't have time for. It's hard to get listings right in another language, especially when you layer in cultural aspects of buyer behavior. If you find yourself with more time on your hands with the stay-at-home situation, now might be the perfect time to focus on your listings, improve your products' visibility and increase your chances of making sales as soon as markets opens again. Luckily, we have experts to help us do just that. To help you become more familiar with how you can avoid making mistakes in the localization of your listings, check out this special webinar we hosted to learn from our partner Jana Krekic, the founder of YLT Translations. Here is the executive summary for those pressed for time. #1 Hire Expert Translators The first thing you need to do is to hire an experienced translator who knows and understands how listings work in the Amazon world. A lot of sellers underestimate the value of investing in expert translators. The hard truth is that when you hire someone who only knows about translation but doesn’t know anything about Amazon listings, keywords, and algorithms, your listings will still end up at the bottom of a stockpile with no visibility. If a potential customer tries to buy a product that you are selling online, and your translated listing is devoid of the main keywords shoppers are likely to use, your products will not show up. Period. You have to understand that hiring expert translators are not just about translation quality, but also other factors such as keyword optimization, that can affect the sales of your international listings. #2 Know Your Marketplaces In order to improve your listings, you'll need to know the right audience to target, and the best way to do that is to know your markets. There are 6 top markets listed in Amazon Europe, and if you target these main markets, then you are targeting a large number of audiences as well. Here are the top 6 marketplaces: Germany UK France Spain Italy The Netherlands If we consider Amazon Global, the Japanese market comes after Germany, which means that they have as large of an audience as the German market. Growing a business online and aiming to find a vast marketplace that can increase your sales is only natural to do. However, you also need to remember that you are about to face audiences from different countries, which necessitates the observance of cultural sensitivity. There are a few big brands in the market that have been forced to take down products that sound inappropriate and disrespectfully negligent of cultural values in other countries. #3 Presenting Your Business Values The translation of your product listings plays a prominent role in pitching your message, the right way. If you are targeting a marketplace like Germany, you'll need to know the right words to use, that are not only ethical, but also and convey things effectively. The Germans are known to react condescendingly to over-the-top, ra-ra, emotional verbiage or metaphoric language. Boastful, exclamatory pitches will fall flat on their face. The way you describe your products in this market is to focus more on presenting facts and details and letting the target audience make their own judgement of their perceived value. Getting the right translation services for your listings and ads is a must-have for every Amazon Seller out there. Investing in reliable translation services like YLT Translations will help you in the long run. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Campaign Structure for Amazon PPC There are so many ways to structure your campaigns. How do you decide on the most appropriate structure that works for your business? Here are 4 key elements of good campaign design. 1. Naming Efficiency Advertising on Amazon these days involves setting up a lot of different types of campaigns. A good campaign naming system can save you tons of time. Conversely, not investing in a consistent naming system can quickly get you confused and overwhelmed. Think of a name as a bunch of well thought out 'tags'. Include all the tags that will help you to: Segment Identify Aggregate data easily. Here is a structure that we follow with our managed services clients at PPC Ninja: Here are some examples, so you get the idea: 2. Structural Efficiency Next, think about what your chosen structure accomplish? Does it: Support a specific PPC management methodology Allow for an appropriate amount of data separation Revolve around the keywords that matter? Create a structure that meets these goals. 3. Performance Efficiency Is your campaign structure designed to take advantage of levers like: Bidding strategies Placement modifiers Budget optimization These advanced techniques are for leverage. Sometimes, you want to segregate a bunch of focused keywords, such as the ones you want to rank for, into their own separate campaign so that you can manipulate their performance with the extra levers you have at your disposal. 4. Maintenance Efficiency Finally, does your structure over-complicate your life or is it overly simplistic. Both these extremes can cost you. Be realistic when you pick! Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Guest Post by: Emma Schermer Tamir, Founder of Marketing by Emma You’ve strategically chosen your product, sourced it, and gotten everything ready to start selling. But what do you need to do to make sure it doesn’t just sit there in an Amazon warehouse collecting dust and incurring storage fees? No matter how much care, effort, time, and money you’ve invested into your product development and prep, none of that matters if you’re not getting in front of and exciting your dream customers. Serious sellers know succeeding on Amazon requires more than wishful thinking or simply finding the “perfect” product. Instead, they focus on four powerful points that send their sales soaring past the competition. 1. Robust Keyword Research It’s hard to sell anything if no one knows where to find you. Keywords are the link that connects a customer’s desire with your product. Customers feel a need that’s generated by a problem they have, and they type their search terms into Amazon to initiate a search to solve that problem. So a properly optimized Amazon listing is what will either lead you to credit-card-in-hand shoppers or buried on page 100. And an effectively optimized listing starts with properly executed keyword research. It can be tempting to run a couple of top competitors through a reverse ASIN search on your favorite keyword research tool, take the top 30 phrases based on search volume, and call it a day. Smart sellers know that this is just the beginning, since sloppy keyword research not only exposes you to risks, but it also passes up significant competitive advantages. As you conduct your keyword research, be sure to do the following: Diversify your tool kit. Don’t put all your eggs in one tool’s basket. Compile more data, compare your results, and minimize your exposure to bugs and faulty software. Dig into the research. Consider things like relevancy, misspellings, competitor brand names, and level of competition as you sort through and select your star search terms. Rinse and repeat. A strong keyword strategy is one that regularly reviews the data, keeping an eye out for new opportunities, changing search trends, and more. 2. Emotionally Intelligent Keyword Integration Resist the urge to keyword stuff. Amazon’s A9 algorithm doesn’t just automatically favor listings that use the most keywords. It’s a sophisticated system of equations meant to match potential buyers with the product most likely to make the sale. If people aren’t purchasing, no amount of keyword stuffing will satisfy Amazon’s appetite. The right keywords enhance your chances of being found. How you use those keywords impacts your chances of making a sale AND how you’ll rank in the future. And all of that comes down to whether you’re thinking about the human on the other side of the screen. If they’re not convinced your product is the one for them, no amount of keywords will make them think otherwise. While it’s important to incorporate keywords into your listing, they shouldn’t detract from your copy’s ability to do its job: Convert. As you consider the keywords to use and where to put them, be sure to keep the customer in mind. Do the keywords read naturally? Or are they distracting? Do they work to enhance the customer’s understanding of the product, or convolute it? Remember, the listing the customer sees isn’t the only real estate you have to integrate keywords. If a phrase seems awkward, out of place, or forces you to make big grammatical or spelling errors, put it in the back end. Integrating keywords seamlessly takes more of a sophisticated effort than it may appear, but when done well, it makes all the difference. 3. Picture Power-Up Every part of your listing should help facilitate a sale. And compelling images are one of the most important factors that customers consider when looking at your product page. However, many sellers are passing up a golden opportunity to make their images even stronger sales tools. Picture quality, angle, and content all have impact. But integrating text turns pristine photos into powerful sales machines. Here are some of the ways incorporating text into your photos can positively impact your bottom line: Amplifies excitement. Reiterates key points. Connects with visual shoppers. Conveys important product features and details. Build trusts through reviews given, certifications held, and more. Emphasizes key benefits. Ensures you control the message—not your customers. 4. Conversion-Spiking Copy Many sellers incorrectly assume that visual content such as photos and videos are enough for a customer to make a purchasing decision. Others assume that visual content is all a customer cares about when shopping. In reality, the written content of a listing – from the title, feature bullets, to the description – can decide whether a customer stays and learns more about your product or swiftly exits out of your listing! Similarly, error-free and crystal clear copy can encourage even the most skeptical customers to click “Add to Cart”. EBC / A+ Content descriptions are particularly great opportunities to capitalize (literally!) off of textually compelling selling. By combining iconography, media, and enthralling text, these upgrades can make a huge difference in conversion rates – possibly by more than 400%! Thoughtful listing copy can do more than generate immediate sales, it can also build brand awareness and create repeat customers for your business. Rather than traditional gimmicks and grabs that only turn customers off, sophisticated copy generates excitement for your product and your business. As you create the copy for your listing (packaging, website, or any other marketing writing!), be sure to: Make every word count. Is there a shorter way to say it? Can you be more direct? Attention spans are short, so don’t give people a chance to let their minds wander…or they just might wander to your competitor’s page! Cater to your customers. You’re great, but customers care about themselves way more than they care about you or your brand. Rather than beating people over the head about how innovative you are, put your customers at the center. Benefits, benefits, benefits! People purchase products to solve problems. Help your customers understand how you solve those problems, and purchasing your product becomes the obvious next step. Perfect it. Errors impact your perceived trustworthiness, reliability, and care. Lack of attention to detail isn’t a good look for any listing. Following these four steps can boost your conversions, but that’s just the beginning. From capturing more of the traffic you generate to lowering your return rates, putting these principles to work can have a serious impact on your bottom line. Whether you’re preparing to launch your first product or looking to optimize your fiftieth, now’s the time to secure your competitive edge. Want to know whether your listing checks all four boxes? Get a FREE listing analysis from the Emmazon Team at Marketing by Emma! About the Author Emma Schermer Tamir transforms her insatiable curiosity into conversion-spiking copy. As co-founder of Marketing by Emma (www.marketingbyemma.com), she’s helped over 700 businesses from around the world boost their sales and build their brands. Create conversion-spiking Amazon listings and website copy that will excite your dream clients and make them click "Add to Cart" with the Emmazon team! Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 has shaken us all, setting off a series of chain reactions that are rocking the entire supply chain. Temporary Halt on FBA Inbound Shipments As of March 17th, Amazon has announced that it will suspend any new inbound shipments to its warehouses in order to prioritize logistics support for medical supplies and essentials, until April 5th. Some experts speculate that this date could potentially get pushed out even further. This means that many of us that rely solely or heavily on FBA will eventually run out of stock at Amazon. The first reaction for most has been shock and panic. Loss of sales, rank tanking and the inability to place purchase orders predictably - everything is at stake. This comes as a bummer to especially for those of us who were actually experiencing a huge surge in sales because of the new work-from-home reality. Now we are left unsure of what to expect. How are we going to respond to this? As a solution provider for Amazon PPC, we've been talking to customers and industry experts to help us come up with the best strategies for dealing with this tough situation. As many of our products at Amazon warehouses head toward the inevitable stock-out, what should our approach be as far as advertising goes? Should we stop advertising? Should we slow down sales? Should we increase prices? Here are the 5 key steps we've decided to follow with our managed services client accounts. Feel free to adopt, make note of, or disagree with what we're about to share. #1: Keep the ads running Sellers are terrified of going out of stock. Why? Because they know they will lose the sales rank that they worked so hard to build. So they resort to tactics such as artificially slowing down sales by pausing ads, cutting out traffic or raising prices. Each of these choices come with consequences. What we have learned, is that an artificial slowdown in sales just to stay in stock, could potentially give Amazon a different signal about the popularity of an item. Since sales velocity is one of the most important ingredients that goes into calculating BSR, you probably don't want to mess with that. There is a way to maintain sales rank even if you go out of stock (point #2 of this article), so we've decided not to halt any of our sponsored ads for products that are on their way to a stock out. Our tests have shown that a hot selling item, one that has a good track record, almost invariably bounces back to the same sales rank as before in no time after stocks are replenished. We have been running these experiments for a while now and have some evidence to back this up. Here is one product (orange line) that recovered right after it was back in stock after a month. The Sales Rank had dropped to 374 right after stock out. But it bounced back to position 108 the day after stock in and went on to an even better sales rank within a month of being back. Even keyword rankings have shown to bounce back to pre-stock-out levels if the product has kept up a good sales velocity historically. Here is an example of the main keyword for another product that ran out of stock several times. You can see that it quickly recovered its keyword rank after we were back in stock. If this is so, we believe that it is better to keep advertising, keep the sales velocity high, and let a product run out of stock on a "high note". This gives Amazon all the right signals about how successful this product is and you are likely to recover very quickly once you are back in stock. This is the approach we plan to take with our clients. #2: Close your listings once you stock out The one thing that could potentially help you preserve your rank after you come back in stock is if you close your listing. We do this routinely for any product that goes out of stock. You can close a listing by accessing the SKU from your Manage Inventory tab on Seller Central. Click on the Edit tab and chose Close Listing. You will get a scary warning when you hit that button, so don't freak out! Note, that Amazon won't let you close a listing as long as the "Business Price" field is populated. So you have to delete your business price, wait ~15 minutes for that change to apply on the Amazon side, then you close it. For sellers facing this issue in Europe, closing the listing in one marketplace doesn't automatically propagate out to other EU marketplaces. So you need to go through this delete business price, then close the listing process for each SKU in each European marketplace. #3 Monitor the data more closely We're observing an elevated number of clicks for a lot of categories right now. Not all of these are good clicks. The two notable trends at this time are closely tied to the increase in a work-from-home workforce. 1) Increased clicks on products that are lockdown essentials, or that support our new work-from-home and/or kids-at-home life. 2) Increase in clicks that won't result in immediate sales. People are bored and the social distancing is forcing us to spend more time online. We are being careful about clicks that are resulting in poor conversions at this time. We are obviously continuing to monitor performance very closely to prevent any signs of bleeding, bad clicks, as well as to discover new opportunities. While this is part of the normal optimization process, we're switching to doing this more frequently, looking at CTR, conversions and spend more closely. #4 Make sure to run Product Targeting ads If your business is somehow benefitting from the COVID-19 outbreak, and if you haven't yet started advertising with Product Targeting ads, this is the time to do so. A lot of your competitors will be running out of stock soon and you should have funnels targeting their products in place. Read our previous posts here to get caught up on ways to set up these ad types. In addition to the regular product targeting ads, we are also targeting ASINs from within an account's own catalog that are predicted to go out of stock. This is a great way to channel traffic, and prevent ourselves from losing sales to competitors. #5 Switch to FBM/3PL alternatives for distribution and logistics The next best thing to having Amazon lift the inbound shipment freeze sooner than the April 5th date, is to focus on your non-Amazon distribution channels. Look for 3PLs or other delivery channels that might be willing to hold your inbound stock that might be on the water before April 5th. Or partner with FBM resellers that are open to selling your stock through their channels. Having access to an Amazon Advertising account (previously AMS) might allow you to advertise items that lost the buy box because of going out-of-stock. Our approach is to advertise ASINs if they are available for sale through channel partners even if we don't have them in stock. Conclusion These are unprecedented times for all. Hopefully some of the PPC strategies we shared can help you see positive outcomes from the constraints that we are all being subjected to. Keep calm and carry on. Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.

Targeting on Amazon is no longer JUST about keywords. Amazon has already switched its targeting options from being Buyer Search Term centered, to now include Product and Category targets as well. This is clear from the way the new Auto Campaigns are structured and the fact that we can actually place our ads in front of other ASINs. How cool is that! Are you taking advantage of these powerful advertising options, or are you STILL on the fence? If you are unsure about Product Targeting (ASIN targeting,) and all their benefits, we’ve talked ad nauseam about the topic on our blog. We highly recommend getting caught up on these other articles as well: Should I target my own products on Amazon? Target Your Competitors with Product Targeting Ads The Funnel-in-Funnel Strategy for Product Targeting on Amazon Expand your Options This post is dedicated to those who are willing to take the next step with Product Targeting ads (aka ASIN targeting or Product Attribute Targeting). You know who you are. You get that the expensive tactics to rank on Page 1 have diminished in value especially because of how crammed Amazon has become with Sponsored Ads. Amazon was smart to make them look just like native listings, so they could hide them in plain sight, and collect more dollars for each click from shoppers who can’t tell them apart. As of 2020, you not only need to worry about winning organic keywords, you’ve also got to win ad placements, wherever you can find opportunities! The good news is that there are plenty of placements to show your ads and we will show you exactly where. Below we talk about 10 different ideas to identify ASINs to target, so you can show up in their funnel and catch attention in ways that keyword targeting can’t. Here we go. Idea #1: Auto Targeting Search Term Reports ASIN targets You are already running Auto Campaigns, so this one will be easy. The Search Term report for Auto campaigns shows you ASINs that people clicked on before they landed on your listing. Now it’s your turn to use this valuable data to intentionally target those ASINs with Product Targeting ads. There is a relevance association that Amazon already established algorithmically between your product and that one, so half your job is already done. If you are a PPC Ninja user, either click on the Search Terms report tab (for legacy Auto campaigns) or the Targeting Reports tab (for new Auto Campaigns) and discover ASINs that were click-through conversions from Complements, Substitutes or Category targeting. Idea #2: Brand Analytics - Market Basket Analysis report Market Basket Analysis in Data Science is based on a theory that if you buy a certain group of products, then you are more likely to buy another group of items. This is what guides aisle design in retail stores as well as digital shelves on Amazon as well. The Market Basket Analysis report in Brand Analytics is a free report showing all the different ASINs that are typically purchased together with your ASIN. Extremely powerful data directly directly from Amazon that can be used to create ads that show up in the “Sponsored Products Related to this Item” carousel on Amazon. Idea #3: Brand Analytics - Item Comparison Report Next on the list is the Item Comparison Report that shows all the different ASINs that were viewed and compared against your ASIN. These are your direct competitors! Why wouldn’t you target their products? Shopping behavior already indicates evidence of interest. Idea #4: Brand Analytics - Alternate Purchase Report Clubbed together with the list above is the Alternate Purchase behavior report. This shows all the different ASINs that were purchased instead of your ASIN. This means these are super relevant targets and with a low bid you could attract shoppers that are on the fence. Idea #5: Reverse ASIN tools for Competitor Discovery A lot of reverse ASIN tools like Helium10 can give you access to competitor ASIN lists. Use these to create low bid product targeting ads. This is a set of 10 campaigns I created for a SINGLE advertised product based on competitor lists. Don’t be afraid to set up multiple campaigns at a low bid per target. With PPC Ninja’s easy cut and paste ASIN target list, this process of Product Target creation is super easy, taking no time at all. Idea #6: Frequently Bought Together Carousel on Amazon Let’s say you aren’t Brand Registered, don’t have access to Brand Analytics, nor do you use any reverse ASIN tool. You can still do some manual research by spending some time examining what Amazon is saying about products purchased together with yours. Idea #7: Amazon’s Category Targeting Suggestions At the time of setting up a Category Targeting ad through Sponsored Products, Amazon makes it super easy for you to target the most relevant category for your product. Don’t just stop there! Be creative. Explore more related subcategories on your own. You’ll be surprised how many sub-categories there are now on Amazon that you could potentially target. Idea #8: Amazon’s Product Targeting Suggestions When setting up Product Targeting ads, Amazon already provides a list of target ASINs. Many of these might seem irrelevant, but bid low on them and test anyway. Amazon has access to a LOT of data that we cannot see. You will be surprised at how valuable this ASIN recommendations list can be, and this is getting better by the day! Idea #9: Related Products in Your Own Catalog Target closely related products in your own catalog! Not everyone will agree with this strategy, but I consider this a great way to play defensive and also simulate upsells and downsells by placing related products in close proximity. See my post on the Funnel-in-Funnel Strategy for Product Targeting Ads for more details. Idea #10: YASIV.com - Visual Product Mapping Tool When I discovered Yasiv.com, I was overjoyed. Not only is this tool fun to use, it’s also very useful because it scrapes “Frequently Purchased Together Items” in real time. While this tool might be going away soon, you can see how useful this can be in terms of visually identifying product bundling patterns for your Product targeting ads. [UPDATE: This tool by yasiv.com is no longer available. For yasiv alternatives please refer to this post] Conclusion Most advertisers never go beyond 1 auto and a few manual campaigns for their products. Now is the time to claim your early mover advantage with Product Targeting. I hope these ideas were useful in getting you thinking about more ways to expand and scale! Did this post spark your curiosity or trigger a question? Comment below or email us at support@ppcninja.com. We'd love to hear from you! Amazon PPC can be complex, but once you master it, you are going to have fun! PPC Ninja is now offering a FREE 6-week PPC Mastermind to all Amazon sellers. If your monthly ad sales are above 500 USD, we invite you to join us on this 6-week deep dive into Amazon PPC. Click here for details.