Note: We have updated this popular post with even more in-depth information and perspective as on March 1st, 2020. Today, there are as many Amazon PPC strategies floating around, as there are gurus, consultants and PPC tools. While everyone is entitled to their opinion and we trust that's based on experience (data), for someone who is just trying to catch their breath from the constant barrage of Amazon PPC updates coming at them, all these theories can cause much confusion and misdirection. In this post we present 5 highly contested approaches that are practiced and preached by gurus and tool vendors. We decided to lay it all out for you guys in as neutral a way as possible, for you to pick what makes the most sense to you. Read the description, the theory and the counter arguments and then form your own opinion. Ok, let's jump in.. 1. Add Negative Keywords to Block off Well-Performing Keywords Description of strategy: Once a search term has been converting well in a certain campaign (especially auto, broad, or phrase), you harvest it and move it ("graduate") to an exact match campaign, then block it from the source. A few different names to describe this technique by various authors include "Search Term Isolation" and "Keyword Graduation". Theory behind the strategy: Auto and Manual-Broad campaigns should be used primarily for research. Once you find winning search terms you should exact match them into a new campaign, and simultaneously block them from the source campaign, so that you can control the bids appropriately, only paying what that keyword is worth. The focus here seems to be keyword profitability more than ad generated sales. This technique also assumes that "closing off the floodgates" in the source campaign will now somehow automatically divert traffic to that keyword in the destination campaign. Counter argument 1: Why touch something that is performing well in the original spot? Look at it another way. When a new keyword is introduced into a campaign, (let's say an exact match campaign), it starts a brand new life cycle. It's not as if any previous good karma from a previous campaign is going to follow through to its new home. Amazon's algorithms will subject it to the brutal tests of conversion and this keyword will need to prove itself before it can start operating at peak performance. But there's a worse scenario that most people don't think of - that this keyword may not perform well at all because of the dynamics of the existing set of keywords sharing a campaign budget. It's hard to predict precisely how Amazon's algorithms actually work. Counter argument 2: Why should you block something that is bringing you good sales? An additive approach is smarter. Have more horses in the race. Keep the search term in the source, even after extracting the best search terms. Counter argument 3: Negative keywords, especially the ones that are actually relevant to your product, will train Amazon to not bring you relevant traffic from similar and related listings. This chart below is from Amazon. It describes the algorithm used for auto target matches, that match not only keywords but also products. Imagine what would happen if you negative keyworded the term "300-count". Expect a drastic cut in traffic from ASINs that include that term. 2. Bid on Your Branded Terms Description of strategy: Bid on your branded terms so that if someone types your brand name, your ads always show up alongside the organic listings, and take up maximum real estate. Theory behind the strategy: Amazon is becoming more pay-to-play. The top 3 placements on the SERP are sponsored (headline followed by 2-4 more ads above the fold). "Play defensive" here and don't allow competitors from stealing those spots and mind-share by causing attractive distractions. It's a small price to pay for staying top of mind. Counter argument: Why pay for bids on your branded name when a buyer has expressed specific intent through their choice of words. They will find your organic listing even though it is embedded somewhere below the fold. Counter counter-argument: How many times have you, as a buyer, typed a certain brand name and ended up buying some other brand? Think about it. 3. Separate Your Campaigns Based on Match Types Description of strategy: Build a campaign structure based on keyword match types. Theory behind the strategy: You have better control over budgets and bids, as well as ease of viewing and analyzing data. Counter argument: Fair enough, but there are any number of alternative ways to structure your campaigns like so: Structure 1: Create campaigns such that you can separate keywords based on search volume. Don't mix up high volume keywords with low volume ones because the higher volume keywords will fast consume your budget, starving the rest. Structure 2: Create campaigns such that you can separate keywords based on phases such as "Discovery", "Research", "Winners". Keep moving keywords across these campaigns. Structure 3: Create campaigns based on keyword groupings such as "branded keywords", "competitor keywords", "keyword themes" etc. 4. Cut Ad Spend if you are Likely to Run Out of Stock Description of strategy: If you are likely to run out of stock because of supply chain disruption (say, on account of the #coronavirus) then slow down your sales by increasing prices or cut off traffic by reducing ad spend to reduce the number of visits. Artificially drop sales to hold on to inventory. Theory behind the strategy: Amazon will punish you for going out of stock, and you will lose your sales rank. So it's better to never run out of stock, keep Amazon happy and maintain sales rank. Counter argument: While it's better to never run out of stock long term, artificially slowing down sales will negatively train the algorithm into believing that the sales velocity is trending DOWN, and that this is no longer a hot seller. So when you do eventually replenish stocks, you will FIRST have to make Amazon unlearn what it's learnt about your sales velocity, by really cranking up sales. It's an uphill task either ways. A better way might be to run out of stock on a high note (high sales velocity), then turn off your listing to preserve sales rank. 5. Bid Differently on Different Match Types of the Same Keywords Description of strategy: Broad match should have the lowest bids, followed by a slightly higher bid for phrase match and then the exact match bid is the highest of them all. Theory behind the strategy: Since broad match keywords cast a wide net, they will attract a very broad set of search audiences, some that may only be remotely associated with your product. On the other hand, exact match keywords are more precise expressions of intent, hence paying higher for them is valid. Counter argument: Bidding differently on keyword types makes sense, but it shouldn't solely be a function of match type. Instead, you need to factor in tail length and general buyer intent. Let's say, your product is a garlic press. "Garlic press" might be worth way more as a broad match keyword than as exact match because of the variety of potential keyword variations that it can attract, especially with Sponsored Brand ads where broad matches will also attract synonym phrases. Why would you limit the bid here? Keep it higher than exact match if it is serving the purpose. Besides, the best strategy for bidding differently depends so much on the keyword itself. Don't get fooled by a cookie cutter approach. In some cases bidding the same to start with and letting the data guide you might work just fine. Conclusion So there you have it. 5 highly contested Amazon PPC strategies that are out there. If there is one thing that you might want to take away from this post, it is that you have to do your own testing of what works and what doesn't for you. This means that you must be wary of tools that bake their own strategies right into the way their tools work, so you have very little say in how your ad dollars are spent, and basically get stuck with them. When you are starting out, it might be best to go with a tool that does not bind you to any particular PPC strategy. Also, be wary of tools that claim that they are "AI-Based" which might just a hyped-up way of glorifying if-then-else logic statements. First, learn the ropes and be a ninja. Did this post spark your curiosity or triggered 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 good salesperson knows that if a prospect isn’t entirely “sold” on one of your products they need to be offered an alternative one from your catalog that meets their needs better. You don’t just let the prospect walk away, because that would be a disservice to everyone. After all, your prospect spent a fair amount of time researching, sifting through tons of alternatives and gave your product a share of their attention. In the traditional sales and marketing world, one can offer upsells, downsells and cross sells to keep shoppers in the consideration phase of your brand, and hopefully close the deal with a product that they love and one that meets their needs perfectly. While advertising on Amazon may not provide the same kind of opportunity to suggest an alternative product, what it does provide is the ability to target your own products though Sponsored Products - Product Targeting campaigns. We call this the “Funnel-in-Funnel” strategy. What is the Funnel-in-Funnel strategy? Imagine your best traffic source, a product that has a great conversion rate on Amazon (let’s call this SKU-A). You could strategically design a Sponsored Products Product Targeting Ad, (ASIN targeting,) for one of your other closely related products on the same page (SKU-B). This could be a higher priced item with better features, just like how conventional sales people would “upsell”. Or, you could decide to showcase a cheaper, related product (SKU-C) with fewer bells and whistles, that might satisfy the user’s original intent on the detail page for SKU-A. Guess what, this is like designing a “downsell” offer. With either approach you are essentially placing a funnel for alternative products within the main product funnel. Hence the name funnel-in-funnel. Imagining things this way helps you be more creative, strategic and intentional in your ad placements, and go beyond the mere mechanics of product targeting. Note that this type of ad is shown on the detail page of the product you target. Does the Funnel-in-Funnel Strategy Work? Yes! This strategy works great for a variety of reasons: It’s the perfect setup for a steady stream of pre-qualified leads. Visitors who clicked through to the ad were already interested in the target product higher up in the funnel. You know this because you strategically placed related products in close proximity. You capture a greater share of the real estate on a page. Imagine someone seeing all of your related products on the same page. The buyer has a lesser likelihood of getting distracted by other brands. You get to play defensive. You save the shopper from time spent researching your other offerings, because you make it super easy for them to find them close by. Sure, you can argue that there are other places where all your products are showcased in much nicer ways, like your store page or a website, but guess what, those places are several clicks away. Why would you lose the opportunity right when you already have their attention?! Our job is to make it easier, not harder, for shoppers to find the best solution quickly and not stray away. Why should I pay for the clicks? That question is understandable. And the other related one is - Would I be stealing from sales that would have come to me anyway? On Amazon, you have NO guarantee that a sale will be yours. There are so many cheaper Chinese alternatives waiting to steal your sales, you’re much better off playing defensive on this pay-to-play platform. Here’s an example of what we mean: Notice how many carousel pages comprise the The "Sponsored products related to this item" band on this detail page. A whopping 206! Amazon is slowly becoming a jungle of distractions. And shoppers always have the option to click away. And, yes those clicks can hurt especially if the shopper is “just browsing”. You can always keep the bids low. What does the data say? We conducted several multi-month experiments to see how this strategy plays out, and our conclusion is that it works absolutely great. Here’s an example: We were able to sell products worth 93,684 USD at a 10.64% ACoS. And the upper funnel SKU continued to perform well without losing sales. This means that these were sales that we saved that could easily have gone to a competitor! Conclusion: We give the funnel-in-funnel strategy a big thumbs up. Go ahead and conduct your own experiments and let us know what your experience was like! 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.

Sponsored Brand Ads, or Headline Search Ads, as they were previously called, are Amazon’s way of encouraging shoppers to learn more about a brand by clicking anywhere on a banner across the most prominent and valuable real estate on the search results page. Clicking on your logo in a headline ad can lead to a landing page of your choosing -- your Storefront or a curated Product List page. A third option of “custom URL” is also available as a landing page destination, but for all practical purposes, it is just another type of product list page. We were curious to test which of these 2 click-through destinations was better for advertisers and shoppers. Both landing pages offer shoppers drastically different experiences. As for advertisers, they can expect very different conversion rates. Do you waffle about the choice? When setting up your campaigns, do you ever waffle about which landing page to send traffic to? It’s such an important decision, and does require some thought. Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of pointing customers to one of these destinations. Amazon Store Front as a Destination for Headline Ads Advantages: Offers a rich visual experience and a chance to make shoppers fall in love with your brand. Picking a store subpage as a destination allows you, as the advertiser, to control the landing page experience. Disadvantages: Suddenly switches “engaged shoppers” into “window shoppers”. The store page has that effect. Lots of choices = lots of distractions. Dropping shoppers on a page that has a lot of products to pick from has the effect of being a distraction and may endanger the postponement of the purchase decision to a different time, day or never. Danger of losing the sale since the Ad does not lead to the familiar Product detail page. Expectation mismatch. Shoppers see these headline ads in response to a keyword that they typed. There is an expectation that clicking anywhere on the ad will lead them to the product that solves their problem. But we know that based on where they clicked on the ad - Logo, Headline, Product Images - that the expectation may or may not be met. Cost per clicks tend to be slightly higher than Sponsored Products and you need to do some upfront planning before you can launch them. Both of these reasons might scare some advertisers away. ​ Product Lists as a Destination for Headline Ads Advantages: Offers a list view of relevant products in the collection that you can bundle. This list can include more than the 3 main products featured on the ad itself and you can also reorder and present the list as you like. The experience is very similar to when they interact with native, organic listings or Sponsored Products Ads. All the important details, such a title, price, star rating and main image, that are essential to making a purchase, are right there. This allows shoppers to stay focussed on the purchase and not get distracted by unrelated products. Disadvantages: : No major disadvantage that we could think of other than this page looks a little plain. Shopper behavior is slowly getting influenced by other brands sending them off to beautiful store pages. In a sense, there may be some behavioral expectation mismatch in the opposite direction. What does the data say? While Amazon’s representatives might advise you to use your Store Page landing page as your default destination, to enhance the ‘buyer experience’ and increase your ‘brand exposure,’ the fact is that for most 3P sellers, “brand loyalty” on Amazon is a myth. No amount of brand building matters, since shoppers mostly care about the lowest price and a decent looking listing. Your choice of landing page needs to be based on data. Compare the performance of Store Pages versus Product List pages for sales and conversion rate. This is especially important because you are paying for these clicks. To measure your performance, go to your Store’s Insights tab. Click on Sources and locate the Amazon Sponsored Brands source. Compare the sales here to the total sales that came from Sponsored Brand campaigns that sent traffic to the storefront. In our experience managing PPC Ninja’s clients, on average, Store Pages drive less than 30% of Sponsored Brand ads sales. For this reason we almost always default to using the Product List page as our choice for landing page. However, your numbers could be totally different for your account and niche, based on any number of reasons. So do your data analysis and then decide. Note, that in concluding that the Product List is a better destination for conversions, we do not mean to in any way, undermine the importance that your storefront has on your brand image on Amazon. You absolutely need to keep polishing and priming your storefront for organic traffic. Just don’t throw ad dollars at it if it does not make sense. 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.

Amazon Brand Registry feels safe. It's the armor you need against hijackers in Amazon's cut-throat world. While it may not protect you entirely against bad actors, it does come with a growing list of some darn good perks. Lucky you, if you are Brand Registered Here is a partial list of benefits of the Brand Registry program, along with a short description of each from Amazon. Of the many perks listed above, the one that is probably the most underutilized, is the ability to run Sponsored Brand Ads. They are like a banner that you see across the top of search results page in most categories. Some Sponsored Brands ads might show on other placements as well. Previously available exclusively to Vendors, these ads help to increase brand awareness and brand recall, if designed right. The average seller will ever only run Sponsored Products ads and pay almost no attention to Sponsored Brand ads. Perhaps its inertia? Or maybe worse, ignorance. HUGE Mistake Does that sound like you? If so, it's a HUGE mistake and missed opportunity. Your Chinese competitors are already taking advantage of these ads to slowly dominate ad inventory and basically knock you out. They know that Sponsored Brand Ads (or Headline Search Ads as they were previously called,) occupy the MOST prominent real estate on the Amazon Search Results page. You need to invest in learning all about Sponsored Brand ads before it gets too late. If you need help creating Sponsored Brand ads, message us at support@ppcninja.com Kill Many Birds with One Stone Headline Search ads are like the stone that can kill many birds all at once. With a single headline search ad, you are literally able to showcase 3 products, or 3 store sub-pages (also known as Store Spotlight), a creative message of your choice, your logo or a lifestyle image that does not need to be a white background plain-and-boring image, and offers great targeting for keywords and products. Being in the business of creating Sponsored Ads for our managed services customers, we know that it requires a bit of work to get results. And we're constantly watching the trends. Cost per clicks tend to be slightly higher than Sponsored Products and you need to do some upfront planning before you can launch them. Both of these reasons might scare some advertisers away. ​ Recently we studied 42 headline search ads from 12 categories with the goal of analyzing headlines alone. We found that most sellers, do not know how to write good copy and are too cheap to hire someone to the job. That might be good news for those who are willing to put in the work and do a good job with their headlines! We put together a swipe file for those who are interested. This is a mix of good, bad and ugly ads. See how others are using their creativity (or not) to design ads that speak to buyer intent. Study the ad copy, images used, choice of product groupings and ad layouts that you may have never seen before. Hopefully by critiquing these you will see where others are failing, and do even better. This has only been available to our managed services clients, until now. ​BONUS: If you want to learn more and want to get on the waitlist for an upcoming training by PPC Ninja on ‘How to Design ads that Speak to Buyer Intent’ please fill out this form to indicate your interest. Need help creating Sponsored Brand ads? Message us! Happy Advertising! 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.

Amazon's Placement Reporting has come a long way. From showing only 3 options under the Placement column in their csv reports at the end of 2018, to 4 options in early 2019, to 5 options in late 2019, these reports provide a way to dig deeper into your data and ultimately allow better control over campaign performance. The Placement Report can tell you a LOT about where your ads are being shown and how well they are performing at those placements. You get all the standard performance reporting like Impressions, Clicks, Sale, Orders etc. Some placements are only available to certain accounts and you may not even see them (such as "Remarketing off-Amazon"). We are super pumped about the latest addition to the placements breakdown, which is "Detail Page on-Amazon". Specifically for Auto campaigns, this breakdown reports performance when your ad was shown on a detail page. Now this seems very similar to the "Product Pages on Amazon" placement, but we have a theory that this actually might refer to the case when the placement is one of your own products. It's still all very new. Let us know if you had a different theory, we'd love to hear about it. How to locate these reports? There are two ways to find these placement report types: 1. Seller Central UI: Placements Tab 2. Amazon Reports: Placement Reports How to use Placement Reports? Amazon offers the ability to modify bids by placement from 0-900%. To learn more about this technique, be sure to read our other post: How to the best placement for your Amazon ads. 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.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are around the corner. Are you prepared? How will you make sense of your PPC data this time? We are here to tell you about a nifty little tool on your Seller Central and Advertising Console UI called Portfolios. Portfolios to the Rescue Housed in the left pane of your campaign manager (both Seller Central and AMS) portfolios are particularly easy to miss, especially since they don't perform a mission critical role in the advertising process. But if you are one who geeks out on PPC, you will appreciate how portfolios can be a powerful and effective way of organizing campaigns by type, purpose or buyer intent, giving you an edge over others. Portfolios can add a level of sophistication to your overall measurement and reporting. Campaigns grouped into portfolios also have the advantage of having their data reported in standard Advertising reports such as the Search Term report or the Advertised Product report. How to use Portfolios for Black Friday/Cyber Monday Measurement If you want to measure the performance of products you're running Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) deals on, or even if you have your own coupons running during BFCM Day(s), bucket them all into a separate portfolio and label it BFCM. This can help you easily track that set of products before, during and after BFCM, saving you tons of time. Visually Track Results Combing campaigns this way helps track the collective metrics on those products. Easily track numerical data and watch for spikes along a visual timeline. While a campaign can only belong to one portfolio at a time, it can easily be moved between portfolios with just a few clicks. Combine Sponsored Products and Brands One nice thing about a portfolio is that you can combine Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand campaigns within a portfolio. Measure New-to-Brand Metrics on BFCM Day(s) With Sponsored Brands you also have 4 additional tracking dimensions available to you. These are New-to-Brand Orders, Sales, % Orders and % Sales. Once you have isolated BFCM Day deals into a portfolio, you can watch these metrics in isolation and measure the %age of BFCM Day shoppers that are repeat customers vs new-to-brand buyers. Budget Cap by Portfolio A cool feature of portfolios is that you could either let it run on unlimited budgets, in which case it picks up whatever budgets you've already set at the individual campaign level, or assign a budget cap at the portfolio level. Now that you know how to combine products this way, you can also customize this idea to use it for other holiday events or periods when you are running deals on a subset of your product line. Is anyone using portfolios in other creative ways? Share your opinion in the comments below! 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.

Did you ever wonder why SO many of your keywords never get ANY impressions? You might think it's to do with indexation, but that can never explain the disproportionately high number of keywords that are never given any love despite being super relevant. There is a reason for that, and it is deeply rooted in the AI-based algorithms that find match buyer search to keywords. Here's how we Suspect it Works Amazon treats all your keywords as a pool to pick from. Based on your max daily budget it begins to serve impressions to a few keywords at first, that may have some likelihood of conversions based on typical search volume, your sales history and a variety of historical data that Amazon obviously, has access to. It serves impressions to a few keywords at first, spinning up their little flywheels, rewarding results with more visibility, continuously learning how each performed, and over time favoring more of the ones that did and less of the ones that didn't, until you are left with a few keywords that performed well and a whole bunch of keywords, that never got any love. Think of it as a spiral that grows outward and may or may not ever reach the peripherals. These may be PERFECTLY good keywords that you spent a lot of time researching and you certainly don't want to throw them away. How to deal with Zero Impression Keywords? ✔ Create highly targeted Campaigns and Ad Groups with fewer keywords, so that all your keywords get an opportunity to perform within the budget. ✔ Say goodbye to 1000 keyword Ad Groups permanently. ✔ Clean up older campaigns, moving zero impression keywords out to their own campaigns (not Ad groups within the same campaign), so that they get new budgets and a life of their own. ✔ Don't try to keep raising the bids on low or zero impression keywords. It won't work. ✔ Segment keywords smartly. Here are some ideas for keyword segmentation The idea of separating these zero impressions keywords out into their own campaigns, and not ad groups, is to allocate a new budget to them. If you simply create new ad groups within older campaigns, you may see some movement because Amazon detects a change and will try to serve them impressions, but it may not be as much movement as you'd want. This is the reason why we recommend separating them into new campaigns. Also, if you combine low volume and high volume keywords into one campaign, the high volume keywords will eat up the budget. So it's better to segment based on similar keyword volumes. How PPC Ninja can Help PPC Ninja highlights zero impression keywords over the past 60 days, and makes it easy for you to move them to new campaigns that allows them a second chance. We provide an easy way for you to MOVE your zero impression keywords into their own campaign and pause them in existing campaigns. This gives them another chance to perform. We encourage you to try this out and see how it impacts keyword performance. Let us know how you like this new feature! And if there are some annoyances that get in the way of you being a super productive PPC Ninja, let us know! Our team would be happy to see how we can make your ninja life 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.

You can now duplicate a campaign in Seller Central and make edits such as add a different set of keywords, change budget etc. What This Means for Advertisers ✔ Multiple Campaigns per Product: Amazon has finally recognized the need for MULTIPLE campaigns and ads for each product. Gone are the days of 1 auto and 1 manual campaign. ✔ Keyword Segmentation: This will be the trend going forward. More keyword segmentation will be the norm. If you've heard of the term 'SKAGs' (from Google Adwords) which means 'Single Keyword Ad Groups, you'll notice that there is a similar trend on Amazon to create AdGroups with fewer keywords for better targeting and budget utilization. ✔ Zero Impression Keywords need to be moved: Because of keyword crowding, a majority of keywords never get any impressions. Our belief and observation is that the phenomena of zero impression keywords happens not because these are not relevant keywords, but that they simply did not get touched by the learning algorithm early enough. PPC Ninja provides an easy way for you to MOVE your zero impression keywords into their own campaign and pause them in existing campaigns. This gives them another chance to perform. Let us know how you like this new feature! And if there are some annoyances that get in the way of you being a super productive PPC Ninja, let us know! Our team would be happy to see how we can make your ninja life 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.

Who here gets annoyed, or at least baffled by how ASINs infiltrate your search term reports? Amazon's algorithms combine ASINs within Search Term reports so you can tell which ASIN a buyer visited before they ended up on your listing. The combined reporting however, creates more work for PPC Managers, who would rather see them filtered out. ASIN based Customer Search Terms Don't get me wrong. The knowledge of which competitor or other ASINs led to your listing is super useful for advanced tactics such as Product Targeting based on ASIN data. However, the most common use-cases for Search Term reports are: New Keyword Discovery Negative Keyword Discovery I typically have to filter my Search Term report to first hide all ASINs starting with "B0" and then apply additional filters to slice and dice keyword data to determine their worth. PRO TIP: In case you did not know this, ASINs cannot be blocked out as 'negative keywords'. This is because the negative keyword functionality of keyword targeting campaigns (as opposed to product targeting campaigns in 2019), will simply treat your B0xxxxxxx strings as plain text keywords. Even if you find that same ASIN traffic is causing clicks but no sales, or if a particular ASIN traffic is not converting too well, there is unfortunately, nothing you can do to block them out with keyword based campaigns. Introducing the ASIN Filter If your goal is to identify customer search terms as new or negative keyword targets, we've just made your job a little easier. Introducing... the ASIN filter! Now, your Search Terms view inside PPC Ninja comes with a Hide/Show button for 2 scenarios: Buyer Search term report with ASINs Buyer Search term report without ASINs This is a one-click implementation that will allow you to quickly filter out ASINs from the Search Term report and allow you to carry out further analysis. Simply click the Hide ASINs button to hide ASINs. Let us know how you like this new feature! And if there are some annoyances that get in the way of you being a super productive PPC Ninja, let us know! Our team would be happy to see how we can make your ninja life 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.

Everybody recognizes that Orders divided by Clicks, in other words, Conversion Rate is a metric that must not be ignored. It is a metric that tells you about the rate at which your clicks convert into sales. And you want that number to be high, so you can get more (orders) for less (clicks). The Magic Metric This metric can take on different meanings at different levels - keywords, Ad Group, Campaign, Product and Account. And it always varies based on the chosen time frame. The longer the time frame, the more ironed out the outliers will likely be. At the most atomic keyword level, conversion rate tells you how relevant a particular keyword is for driving sales. A high converting keyword is one you can bet your horses on. You can bid aggressively on it and be confident that it will bring you results. A low converting keyword on the other hand, is one that will likely spend without bringing great results. At higher levels of aggregations, conversion rate can help you analyze how well your collection of keywords drives sales and how well your campaign types achieve their respective goals. And at the account level, you can decipher whether you have a good product-to-market fit overall. Ignored By Amazon For most of us, KPI measurement and tracking lies at the heart of business success, and conversion rate is definitely an important one to track. But does Amazon think that way? Perhaps not. Among all the metrics that Amazon makes available in Campaign Manager, conversion rate, sadly, does not have a place. It is the missing metric that Amazon forgets to pay attention to. What's funny is that even within Business Manager, they do not refer to the organic conversion rate as such. It has a rather strange title of "Unit Session Percentage". Ugh. PPC Ninja Cutting Through Inefficiencies At PPC Ninja, we cut through the inefficiencies of Amazon's data presentation and make it easy for you to analyze your numbers. All of our views - Keywords, Campaigns, Bid Recommendations, come equipped with the Conversion Rate metric. You can reveal it from the Select Column dropdown in the top right. And because we are such data nerds, you will notice two flavors of conversion rate that we provide - Conversion Rate All SKU and Conversion Rate Same SKU. The 'All SKU' numbers include all the conversions (in other words sales) even for other SKUs that this keyword or campaign drove. This can give you further insights into how effective and relevant your keywords are. Here is a screenshot showing a side-by-side comparison of Same-SKU and All-SKU numbers. We hope you find tracking the conversion rate metrics as useful and important as we do. And while Amazon might be out of sync with what sellers need, the team at PPC Ninja is committed to give you all the Ninja powers you need to sell profitably on Amazon. If you want to track your overall conversion rate you can do this in Seller Central or with a specialized Amazon Seller Tool, e.g. AMALYTIX. Want to see any new metrics in PPC Ninja? LET US KNOW! Our team would be happy to see how to make them available to you. 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.

Bidding correctly on keywords lies at the heart of a good PPC strategy. Bid too high and you risk increasing your ACoS. Bid too low, and you risk being starved of impressions. We are beyond stoked to announce that PPC Ninja has just rolled out access to the Amazon Recommended Keyword Bid Range for your keywords. This bid range is dynamically calculated from incredible amounts of competitor data that Amazon has access to. The bid range reveals how much your competitors are bidding on your winning bids. For example, if the bid range for a keyword is 0.54 ~ 1.7 and your bid is 0.43, it means you are bidding below the market rate, and you may not get any impressions at all, unless other people's budgets run out. If you bid higher than the upper end of the range, it means that you are substantially increasing your chances of winning the auction, although Amazon will also consider other factors such as past performance. As an aside, the maximum you can bid on a keyword is $49 for the US. With PPC Ninja, you can now access the Amazon Recommended Big Range right within the Bid Recommendations view. This helps you make better decisions about new keyword bids, based on the current market value of the keyword, thus greatly increasing your chances of conversions. Sign up now to unlock your 14-day free trial, and access cutting edge PPC automation tools that no other software provides. 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 geek out on sales funnels as much as we do, you will appreciate the fact that ANY traffic you receive from a competitor’s product page is likely to be comprised of highly qualified, middle to bottom-of- funnel leads. You know this because the shopping intent is very clear. These shoppers are ‘in-market’ for a certain type of purchase, they are already primed to be shown your product and ready to be converted. Amazon's new Product Targeting ads (ASIN targeting) help you do just that. They can be placed on specific product and category pages that YOU pick. Any traffic that channels through these competitor pages, is shown your ad, allowing you to tap into the opportunity to fill their needs. Product Targeting ads are like "mini funnels' you set up on a competitor’s detail page. Imagine a rubber plantation with hundreds of rubber plants being tapped for rubber latex, drop by drop. Your product targeting ads are like those collection funnels strapped to those trees. It’s not a lot of traffic, but once you set it up, there’s not a whole lot more that you need to do. You get the picture. So, if you haven’t set up any product targeting ads, it’s time you do! What exactly are Product Targeting Ads (or Product Attribution Targeting ads as some people call them) Product Targeting ads are a type of Sponsored Products Manual Targeting ad, that allow you to target shoppers who are browsing detail pages of products or exploring categories on Amazon. With product targeting ads, you can target: - Specific products OR - Specific categories For Categories, you can even refine your targeting to only show your ads on pages that have a worse offer in comparison to yours, for example, if they have fewer reviews, higher price, or are not Prime eligible. Depending on your category, there are a few additional refinement filters that Amazon supports: Brand - Pick from a drop down list of brands to target. Your ad will only show up for shoppers on those brand pages. Price range: Pick a price range to be close to your own or higher, so you can be sure that shoppers were already mentally prepared for that price range when browsing. Age range: In certain categories like toys, you can even specify an age range, so that your ad shows up for products that have age range attributes. Review rating: This is a slider that you can adjust the review rating range to. If you pick products with reviews 0-1, it means you are targeting newer products with perhaps no reviews. Obviously your product will look better Shipping (prime eligibility): If you are either FBA or have Seller Fulfilled Prime you could potentially target only products that are not Prime eligible. Why would you decide to show ads on pages that have a poor offer? Because your offer looks better in comparison. You could also create ads that target brands that are likely to have very high traffic, such as named brands. These listings are likely to provide you with more exposure and therefore a higher chance of conversion. Since this is all a pay-per-click advertising model, you have nothing to lose! Who is eligible to use Product Targeting Ads? Both sellers and vendors with an advertising account on Seller Central or on AMS can use Product Targeting ads. Simply create a Sponsored Products campaign, select Manual as your targeting type, then fine tune by selecting Product Targeting instead of Keyword Targeting. Why bother with one more type of campaign? “I don’t have the time or energy to create and manage more ads.” This is no longer a good enough argument to ignore new advertising opportunities. Here are 5 reasons why you should care: Reason #1: Competition Amazon has become more and more competitive and it’s often a challenge to scale PPC with stale strategies. Gone are the days when one auto and one manual campaign would suffice. Unless you are prepared to lose a lot of money on higher bids, we strongly recommend adding more, not less to your arsenal of ad types. More horses in the race will bring you more sales. Reason #2: Buyer Behavior Also, do realize that not every buyer starts their search by typing a keyword. Some people get enticed into buying a product just by browsing Amazon’s categories, suggestions and recommendations. So far you have targeted keywords, it’s time now to target the whole product. Reason #3: Real Estate Any reason why you wouldn’t want to get more real estate on product detail pages? The more exposure you get, the better off you are. Especially when that extra exposure is coming from highly relevant products and categories of your choosing. Letting that inventory go means you are ok with giving up that space to a competitor - probably even a Chinese brand with higher margins. Reason #4: Saturation When you simply target keywords, you are faced with competition and many of the keywords you know are relevant for your product are already “taken”. Many keyword markets are getting saturated and crowded. On the other hand, product targeting is still a green field. Reason #5: Highly Targeted These ads are highly targeted, since they bring traffic coming from products or categories YOU picked, and know are relevant. In a sense this traffic is pre-vetted at the time you designed the ad. Positioning them on heavily trafficked competitor pages can help you ride on their coattails. The only downside to these ads is that they have a considerably lower CTR as compared to other ads that show up in more prominent locations. Which might be an OK tradeoff given how little you need to invest in them in terms of adjustment and management. Think of this as a way to accumulate steady, extra income on the side! Need help setting up your Product Targeting ads and don’t know where to start? PPC Ninja can help you! Our Amazon Accredited experts can help you get started in no time and see results like these below. 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.

How many of us regularly use Bulk file uploads? I would assume that over 90% of Amazon sellers are either unaware of bulk uploads or are intimidated by them. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Bulk Operations tab sits right in the middle of Campaign Manager UI on Seller Central and AMS. It allows you to download all your advertising data, covering all your campaigns, adgroups and keywords in spreadsheet format, make bulk adjustments and then upload it right back to Seller Central (or AMS). Super convenient if you know how to use it and manage to get past all the errors and warnings that are invariably generated. But today’s post is NOT about the bulk file uploads feature. It's about performing bulk operations without using any spreadsheets. Read on.. Campaign Manager has a handy little button called Filter. I use it to filter on a certain condition, then use the select all check box to carry out certain bulk operations. This combination of Filter + Select works in all list views and is indispensable for making sweeping changes to large data sets fairly quickly and effortlessly. Here are 5 uses for Campaign Manager bulk operations: 1. Adjusting Budgets You can increase or decrease budgets for all campaigns based on whether your ACOS is less than or greater than Target ACoS. For this you need to filer on Advertising Cost of Sale and select the operations modifier to > an ACoS value. For example, in this case, I set it to 60%. Next, I click on the Select All checkbox, and apply a $ or % change to budgets. Click save and Boom! You’re done! 2. Adjusting Bids You can also drill down to the Keywords view, and accomplish the same thing with bid adjustments. Before you do so, make sure you have a long enough look back window. I tend to pick >90 days of data in order to make a judgement. 3. Pausing Campaigns Now let’s say that there are some campaigns that are running amok with unacceptable ACoS over extended periods of time. Say you want to just pause all those campaigns till you figure out how to improve the offer, the listing or add more relevant keywords. You can do that from the Campaign Manager. Simply select ACOS > say 80, select all and just Pause. 4. Pausing or Archiving Keywords Again, you can pause keywords too. Let’s say you want to pause bleeding keywords that have repeatedly had clicks and no sales. Set the filter to Orders = 0, Set Clicks > 10 (or some number you are willing to live with) and simply pause those keywords. And while you are at it, do an export of that pre-filtered view so you can also examine those for potential negative keywords to proactively add to your Auto-campaigns. 5. Customizing for Prime Day Every year Prime Day is a huge event where we want to proactively increase our budgets on high converting campaigns to 2x or 3x. And when Prime Day is down you might want to bring those budgets back to baseline values. Simply use the steps for #1 above, just make sure you pick campaigns that have an acceptable ACOS and good sales history before you change budgets by a %age value. So there you have it - 5 Nifty operations you can try today with Campaign manager and zero excel skills. I have merely scraped the surface with the use cases there are so many. For inspiration, check out all the different options your can filter on. The possibilities are practically unlimited. Eager to know if you used this feature or knew about it. Comment or reply if this post sparked your interest. Bulk Operations WITHOUT Seller Central Want to learn how to make EVEN faster bulk changes at scale? Then, you've got to check out PPC Ninja. Our unique UI will help you save tons of time every week enabling you to act across ALL your campaigns in one go, without having to drill down to each campaign. Also check out our other blogpost about making bid and budget adjustments with PPC Ninja software. PPC Ninja provides a suite of Amazon PPC Tools to help you efficiently manage your Amazon Advertising. 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.

There are several placements on the Amazon platform where your Sponsored Product Ads are served. Try doing a browser-based search on the word "Sponsored" and you'll see at least 16 ads any search results page. But that's not all, your sponsored ads can show up on the add-to-cart page, the right rail under the buy-box, on non-search result pages such as detail pages, as well as off-Amazon. Up until 2018 we had very little insight into how placements worked. But starting January 2019, Amazon started providing a little more insight into placements. Essentially they started sharing performance metrics on 3 placements: 1. Top of Search 2. Product Pages 3. Rest of Search In addition, they provided the ability for advertisers to bid differently on the first 2 of these placements. Specifically, you can provide Amazon a placement bid modifier to increase your bids by 900% (wow, that crazy number) on a placement IF Amazon sees an opportunity for a conversion. This may be good news for advertisers with deep pockets who can now bid aggressively on certain campaigns, but mostly this is Amazon's way to encourage more ad spend. Does Amazon explain the criteria by which they determine if an Ad would win an auction at a certain bid multiplier? No surprises here - they don't! Amazon's lack of transparency is rampant and as advertisers we are left to conduct our own tests to determine what really works for us. We, at PPC Ninja were keen to understand the impact of placement on the effectiveness of an ad so that we can allocate the right bids multipliers and as a corollary, the right campaign budgets. So we sampled approximately 1000 campaigns to study ad placement effectiveness based on several KPIs, namely Sales, Conversion Rate and ACoS. We were blown away by the results of our findings and shared it on a webinar. Click below to watch it now: 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.

What is a good campaign budget? How should you manage bids? How to set a reasonable target ACoS? We explore these questions and more in this product demo / webinar for PPC Ninja. In this webinar we cover the following topics: Bid Management : How to manage bids Target ACoS Management : How to manage Target ACoS Budget Management : How to calculate a good minimum daily budget 1. Bid Management Bid management is the core of PPC management effort. How much should you bid in a keyword? Ever keyword is battle ground when bidding it right as we want our keywords to show the right ad. WHY IT IS IMPORTANT Our goal in bid management is to: • Prevent wasteful spend • Leverage Opportunity • Maximize ROI This 2-by-2 grid helps you visualize keyword bids versus the ACoS they are at. For example, high ACoS and high bid values are not sustainable. You might want to use the strategy when you are launching but over time, you do want to bring your bid down. 3 ways to adjust bids in PPC Ninja Keywords View Direct Override Keyword View Bulk %age Up/Down Bid Recommendations Override 2. Setting Target ACoS In the previous section we talk about high ACoS and low ACoS. How do you set the threshold for high/low ACoS? There is no place on Seller Central to do so. PPC Ninja has the ability to generate recommendation based on target ACoS. We compare your current ACoS with target ACoS and recommend step down or step up. WHY IT IS IMPORTANT ● Investment threshold - Set up a maximum investment limit ● Break even ACoS - Be aware of the absolute maximum you are willing to spend in promoting a product before it becomes unprofitable. ● Reasonable Recommendations: Set your ACoS targets at reasonable levels The example below shows by dropping the bid to low value by 80% would result in low impressions and sales. Work with reasonable step by step approach by dripping the bid slowly and testing it at each phase till you reach your target ACos of 15% 2 WAYS OF SETTING ACoS IN PPC Ninja Settings - Profiles and Markets Settings - Products 3. Budget Management When it comes to deciding on a minimum daily budget for your Amazon Sponsored Products, you want to base it off of your conversion rate history. WHY IT MATTERS: • Limit daily spend - The most common reasons for setting a budget • Encourage sales - The more optimized approach to allowing PPC to work for you After you have have a budget, don't forget to test, test and test again. 2 WAYS OF ADJUSTING BUDGETS IN PPC NINJA Campaigns View Direct Override Campaigns View Bulk Adjustments If you like this content, you might also like our other webinar on how to pick the best placement for your Sponsored Product Ad. 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.

While most sellers who run PPC campaigns actively download and examine their Search Term reports, many probably don't know the existence of the Targeting Report available for Sponsored Product Ads. In this post we are examining some of the key differences between the two reports and how to interpret the data contained in each. Search Term Report vs. Targeting Report Search Term Report Arguably the most important advertising report for Sponsored Products on Amazon, the Search Term report provides valuable insights into buyer searches that led to a sale of your product. The report provides 7 day attribution for sales of advertised products as well as other products purchased as a result of the 'Brand Halo' effect as Amazon calls it. Targeting Report The Targeting report looks pretty similar to the Search Term report and has ALL the same columns as the Search Term report (in a slightly different order), EXCEPT the "Customer Search Term" column. This makes this report much smaller, as it only contains the keywords, ASINs and categories that you are targeting and not the matches that led to it. When to use which report? If you want to check the performance of your keywords and match types and are more interested in aggregates, then go for the Targeting Report. This will have way less rows and is more manageable. This is also the only place that you get an at-a-glance view of the new targeting options for Auto-campaigns namely, Loose-match, Close-Match, Substitutes and Complements. You can also see the performance of ASINs and Categories you targeted through the new Product Attribute Targeting and Category Targeting opportunities with Manual Campaigns. Use the Search Term report to harvest search terms, block them or optimize bids on keywords that are performing well. Ideally you want to identify the best buyer search terms that brought in the most sales, and add them to manual campaigns where you can bid aggressively to maximize your sales. You also want to identify poorly converting keywords and either disable them, lower their bids or block them entirely by adding them as negative keywords at the campaign or adgroup level. Finally you want to examine how your keywords performed overall as compared to your target ACOS. Keywords performing below your target ACOS are good candidates for increasing the bids on, whereas keywords that performed at higher than target ACOS should be down-bid. How often should you pull each type of report? It's a good practice to look at you PPC performance at least once every other week, if not weekly. Targeting Reports have a look back window of 90 days while Search Term reports are only available for the past 60 days. This can be a limitation because sometimes you need more data for slow moving products and 60 days is too short a duration to make a good decision. One of the unfortunate things about getting these reports is that they need to be requested from Amazon for download. If you wanted to look at your data from a year ago you cannot access it anywhere on Amazon, unless you made the wise decision of requesting and saving your reports regularly. With tools like PPC Ninja, you can have a perpetual look back window with no need to download and piece together multiple csv files. We do it for you programmatically from the day you start open your account, and your data just builds up over time, ready for you to slice and dice for analysis. We even help detect new keywords and bleeding keywords for negative keywording. Amazon Advertising Reports To learn about other types of Amazon reports, head on over to our other blogposts: Interpreting Amazon's Advertising Reports Amazon Placement Reports What's inside the 'Performance Over Time' Report? PPC Ninja Mastermind 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘮𝘢𝘻𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 $1000 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘗𝘊, 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘶𝘱 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘍𝘙𝘌𝘌 6-𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘮: 𝘩𝘵𝘵𝘱𝘴://𝘸𝘸𝘸.𝘱𝘱𝘤𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘫𝘢.𝘤𝘰𝘮/𝘱𝘱𝘤𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥 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. #AmazonPPC #AmazonAdvertising

Ever noticed Portfolios? Housed in the left pane of your campaign manager (both Seller Central and AMS) portfolios are particularly easy to miss, especially since they don't perform a mission critical role in the advertising process. But if you are one who geeks out on PPC, you will appreciate how portfolios can be a powerful and effective way of organizing campaigns by type, purpose or buyer intent, giving you an edge over others. Portfolios can add a level of sophistication to your overall measurement and reporting. Campaigns grouped into portfolios also have the advantage of having their data reported in standard Advertising reports such as the Search Term report or the Advertised Product report. How to use Portfolios for Prime Day Measurement If you want to measure the performance of products you're running Prime Day deals on, or even if you have your own coupons running during Prime Day(s), bucket them all into a separate portfolio and label it Prime Day. This can help you easily track that set of products before, during and after Prime Day, saving you tons of time. Visually Track Results Combing campaigns this way helps track the collective metrics on those products. Easily track numerical data and watch for spikes along a visual timeline. While a campaign can only belong to one portfolio at a time, it can easily be moved between portfolios with just a few clicks. Combine Sponsored Products and Brands The nice thing about a portfolio is that you can combine Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand campaigns within a portfolio. Measure New-to-Brand Metrics on Prime Day(s) With Sponsored Brands you also have 4 additional tracking dimensions available to you. These are New-to-Brand Orders, Sales, % Orders and % Sales. Once you have isolated Prime Day deals into a portfolio, you can watch these metrics in isolation and measure the %age of Prime Day shoppers that are repeat customers vs new-to-brand buyers. Budget Cap by Portfolio A cool feature of portfolios is that you could either let it run on unlimited budgets, in which case it picks up whatever budgets you've already set at the individual campaign level, or assign a budget cap at the portfolio level. Now that you know how to combine products this way, you can also customize this idea to use it for other holiday events or periods when you are running deals on a subset of your product line. Is anyone using portfolios in other creative ways? Please share your wisdom in the comments! 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. #AmazonPPC #AmazonAdvertising #AmazonAds #AmazonSeller #AmazonFBA

Even if you are not a data nerds, you do want to get your hands on Amazon's ad reports. Amazon provides a variety of useful reports to analyze the performance of your ads. As of July 2020 Amazon provides the following types of Advertising Reports: Sponsored Products Campaigns (7 reports) Search Terms Targeting Advertised Product Campaign Placement Purchased Product Performance over Time Sponsored Brands Campaigns (5 reports) Keyword Keyword Placement Campaign Campaign Placement Search Terms Sponsored Brands Video Campaigns (4 reports) Keyword Campaign Campaign Placement Search Terms Some of your might have access to a third type of campaigns called the Sponsored Display campaign. This last type does not have any reports at the moment since it is in Beta. What's inside the Performance Over Time Report Among all of Amazon's great reports, there is one report that befuddled us. With a very pompous title of "Performance Over Time", this report really needs to step up its game. Have you noticed it amongst others in the Advertising Reports section of Sponsored Product Ads? If you haven't, it's ok, you didn't miss much. The reason why we dedicated a whole post to it, is that we get asked about it a lot. All it contains is 5 columns with not much data, (and that's an understatement). Here are the columns: Start Date End Date Clicks CPC Spend Wow! Notice, that even the most basic metrics such as ad generated Sales are not present, to say nothing of ACoS. The only additional dimension you could add to this report is data aggregation, where Amazon allows you to pick from either 'daily' or 'summary' aggregation. We would have loved to see this report providing metrics like revenue, ACOS, CTRs on a monthly or quarterly basis, maybe even by product. So far, it's one report with not much use. We hope Amazon is reading this. Other Types of Amazon Advertising Reports To learn more about all the other types of reports available from Amazon, head on over to this other post on Amazon Sponsored Products Ad Reports. PPC Ninja FREE Mastermind Are you interested in learning more about Amazon PPC? Have you tried and failed and wish you could talk to an expert? Well, here's your chance. For a short time, PPC Ninja is offering a FREE, live 6-week PPC Mastermind program to Amazon sellers and agencies. The only criteria to sign up is that you have at least 6 months of experience running Amazon PPC. Want to learn more? Click here to learn more and apply for the PPC Ninja Mastermind. 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.