How to Optimize Your Sponsored Products Strategy for Amazon Prime

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Amazon Prime Day Strategy

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Q&A Throughout the Presentation

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Resources In the Handouts Section to the Right

Today’s Resources

OVERVIEW

•Founded in 2007

•Recognized as an Official Google Shopping Partner

•300+ Active Retail Clients

•Top 50 fastest growing company in San Diego 3 years

CLIENTS

SOLUTIONS

• Retail-focused Paid Search (PPC)

• Google Shopping Management

• Shopping Channel Management

• Amazon Sales Acceleration

About CPC Strategy

Upcoming CPC Strategy Events

June 23rd 11am-12pm (PST)

Register: Link in Chat Box

Today’s Speakers

Jeff ColemanDirector of Account management

David CooleyLead Marketplace Channel Analyst

Poll For The Audience…Which describes you best?

A. Third Party Reseller

B. Third Party Brand Manufacturer

C. Vendor to Amazon (Access to Vendor Premium Services)

D. Not currently selling on Amazon

Overview

•Amazon Prime Day Overview

•How to take advantage of the ‘halo effect’ prime day traffic

•Manual vs. Automatic campaigns - which to choose from?

•Refining & Sculpting your target audience with negative keywords

•Controlling Sponsored Product campaigns with Advanced match types

•ROI vs. Rank-Driven Campaigns

•Bulk Operation Bidding

•LIVE Q&A

Amazon Prime Day

What is Amazon Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is a shopping event held annually around July 15th and is likely to be one of the biggest sales days of the year for a majority of sellers.

Exclusively for Prime members, the sale offers more deals than Black Friday on a variety of products including electronics, toys, video games, movies, clothing, patio, lawn and garden, sports, outdoor items, and more.

The shopping event provides special offers including “Lightning Deals” and “Deals of the Day” on products to new and existing Prime members as often as every 10 minutes.

Last year, Amazon Prime U.S. memberships grew by 47 percent, offering thousands of deals to its database of an estimated 54 million members.

Pros Vs. Cons of Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day was a great way to spike numbers as sellers enter Q3

Additionally, it was a chance for sellers with inventory sitting on FBA shelves to liquidate and make room for their Q4 inventory investments

Regardless of your take on Prime Day, there was definitely a steep increase in traffic.

The con is that many sellers experienced a dip in the ratio of overall traffic to qualified traffic due to the fact that many shoppers were engaging in more browsing than actual purchases

Also, there was a higher advertising cost of sale (ACOS) in Sponsored Products, as many competitors sought to capitalize on the interest of purchase hungry consumers.

Prime Day | Inventory & Pricing

Inventory Planning

Sellers should stock-up on inventory and treat it similarly to Q4 holiday sales. Especially for imported goods, you want to make sure you are prepared and allow enough time for FBA shipments.

Effective inventory management will ensure you don’t run out of products to sell when customers are looking to buy and your cash is properly invested in the right products so you can keep turning inventory over for a profit.

*Pro Tip* If you think your lead time is going to be 30 days and it’s actually 45 days – then you have a high likelihood of having a 15 day stock out- which can be very expensive for a seller.

Price Planning

Before jumping the gun and offering the lowest price on the market, sellers should take a step back and factor in a holistic view of their total costs.

Discounts and promotions are encouraged but it’s important to remember Prime Day isn’t a race to the bottom - although many sellers have made the mistake of offering pricing well below what they could offer - leading to a disruption in overall revenue.

A lot of high volume sellers and resellers will be using repricers to their full effect on Prime Day, so if you aren’t using one, closely monitor your hero ASINs.

Price Planning: Experiment with price drops ahead of Prime Day to measure impact on sales velocity & profit in order to find the optimal price to sell at on Prime Day. Measure price elasticity & profit fluctuation at different price points to establish optimal price (can do that outside of Prime Day as well)

Amazon Prime Day - Promotions, Discounts & Lightning deals

Lightning Deals & Deals of the Day

An Amazon Lightning Deal is a promotion with a limited number of discount offers on an item for a short period of time

These premium deals can be found throughout Amazon.com, including the Gold Box page and are available one per customer, until either the promotional period (typically 4 hour blocks) for the deal expires or all the available promotional discounts are claimed

When a Lightning Deal is available, sellers will see:

The item featured in the deal. Any available variations of the item (for example: different sizes or colors). The promotional discount amount and final price. A status bar indicating the percentage of deals currently in customers’ carts or purchased. A timer showing how long you have to add the item to your Cart and claim the promotional

discount. An “Add to Cart” button if there are available promotional discounts. Whether or not Prime

members get early access to the deal.

*Pro Tip* - Products that are featured in Amazon’s Lightning Deal spaces typically enjoy a significant bump in sales throughout the duration of the deal.

How to Approach Your Sponsored Products Strategy on Amazon Prime Day

How sellers should approach Sponsored Products for Prime Day

As competition continues to grow on the Marketplace on Prime Day, sellers will need to tap into high level resources and marketing tactics to ensure they are optimizing and utilizing the most sophisticated practices to stay ahead

In our experience as an agency managing a variety of product verticals for many sellers, we’ve seen consistent success from using Amazon’s dynamic advertising platform―Sponsored Products

The goal of Sponsored Products is to create an advertisement that is compelling enough to capture the attention and convert a shopper. The more customers that discover your products, the more sessions, clicks, and purchases are likely to occur

This leads us to a question many sellers are now asking: On Amazon Prime Day should I bid up to leverage higher traffic?

“On the PPC side, we consider breaking out separate Sponsored Products and AMS campaigns specifically for Amazon Prime Day with elevated bids on key items. That way the variation in data you’re likely to see doesn’t throw off the data for your other campaigns,”

- Jeff Coleman

Manual vs. Automatic campaigns - which to choose from?

Manual Vs. Automatic Campaigns?

Automatic Campaigns

Once, you’ve registered for Sponsored Products, we recommend sellers build out Automatic Campaigns first, to help them better understand which ASINs they can and should run for Sponsored ads.

Automatic campaigns are designed to drive more impressions and traffic of your products by casting a “wider net” than Manual Campaigns.

With Automatic campaigns, Amazon will serve your ads to all relevant customer searches based on your product information.

Pro Tips:

Tip 1: Give All Your Products a Chance to Perform

PRO-TIP: For Automatic Campaigns, we recommend sellers start with an initial bid level of $.15 to $.25 per product. Let the winners rise to the top and remember to let the data do the talking. Don’t try and select your top ASINs before hand.

Tip 2: Listen to Your Search Term Data

PRO-TIP: Sellers should also keep in mind that the keywords their customers are using to search for their products now might not be the same popular keywords in 6 months. It’s important to keep Automatic campaigns up and running (even after you’ve built out your Manual Campaigns, Phase 2) - so you can continue to harvest new popular search terms and other valuable data.

Tip 3: Allow Sales Metrics to Catch UpPRO-TIP: Typically you’ll see a 48-72 hour delay in Sales metrics compared to Click and Spend metrics to catch up in the sponsored product campaigns.

Manual Vs. Automatic Campaigns?

Manual Campaigns

Unlike Automatic Campaigns, Manual Targeting is based on keyword(s). This is why usually recommend sellers start off with Automatic Campaigns before building out their manual campaigns

We recommend selecting a name for your Ad Group(s) that you will easily recognize, for example “bath towels” or “phone cases”. Amazon will prompt sellers to scroll or search to select all the relevant products to include in this Ad Group

Pro Tips:

Tip 1: Goals Will Determine Ad Group Differentiation

PRO-TIP: Segmenting your products is just one of the ways sellers can start to dissect and optimize their catalog. This ultimately can reduce wasted ad spend and increase the opportunity for your products to be found organically

Tip 2: Build a Relationship Between Your Keywords & Custom Bids

PRO-TIP: It behooves sellers to have a human analysis of their products to gauge how customers are actively searching for and finding their products in the Marketplace (for example recent seasonality or popular trends).

Refining & Sculpting your target audience with negative keywords

Negative Keyword Sculpting

Negative keywords allow sellers to refine and sculpt their target audience to improve the performance of their Sponsored Products campaigns.

The goal for Negative Keywords is to make sure sellers are getting their products in front of search terms that are actually relevant to the products they are advertising, while at the same time avoiding allocated spend to keywords which are generating clicks without conversions.

Example: Excluding Weak Search Terms• Negative Keywords can have a positive impact on campaigns if implemented properly. • For example, a seller that manufactures a stress relief toy was serving ads to customers based off of the search term

“cool stuff”. • Unfortunately, the product never saw a conversion from a customer using that search term. We saw an estimated 3480

total clicks in a 60 day period with about $760 in spend across a few campaigns related to the term “cool stuff”. • This is a good example of how “cool stuff” was identified as a negative keyword.

Example: Refine Product Targeting• You can also use Negative Keywords to refine your targeting to exclude less relevant terms or terms you do not want

associated with your products or brands. What this means is, you may use Negative Keywords to keep your ads from displaying to less relevant customer search terms or terms that you simply do not want associated with your brand.

Prime Day Relevancy: Many Shoppers are “Just Browsing”• A lot of the traffic on Amazon on Prime Day will be unqualified customers just browsing for deals with little to no

purchase intent. They may be using search terms like “cool stuff” or “hot deals on Amazon” that clearly indicate they are nowhere near the bottom of the conversion funnel

Controlling Sponsored Product campaigns with Advanced match types

Advanced Match Types

● Advanced Keyword Match Types help control which searches can trigger an ad to show.Amazon offers 3 Match Types, including:

Broad Match: ● This match type offers your ad broad traffic exposure. A shopper's search query will match it if it contains all the

keyword terms or their synonyms. The shopper's search query can contain keyword or synonyms in any order.

Phrase Match:● The shopper's search query must contain the exact phrase or sequence of words.

Exact Match:● The shopper's search query must exactly match the keyword in order for the ad to show, and will also close

variations of the exact term.

Broad Match Type

Summary: ● Maximize volume and visibility on Amazon. Ads triggered by words in your key phrase

regardless of the order.

Impact:● Provides the biggest opportunity to get in front of the most people. Great for “new” products on

the Marketplace.

Prime Day Strategy:● If volume is your goal, bidding up is a great way to increase traffic.● If you want to remain ROI focused, bid down slightly

Phrase Match Type

Summary: ● Only triggered when the user types in the exact string of words, however there can be other

words “before or after” that exact string of words

Impact:● Not as restrictive as Exact Match, but can still filter out searches that might not be relevant

Prime Day Strategy:● Use similarly to Broad Match as this match type will probably perform similarly ● Good way to increase visibility while still refining target audience

Exact Match Type

Summary: ● The most specific and restrictive match type. Ads will only be triggered when shoppers type in

the exact string of words

Impact:● Less volume, but if you select your Exact Match keywords properly, high ROI

Prime Day Strategy:● Bid up on Exact Match Type Keywords that have proven performance in the past to take

advantage of additional Prime Day traffic

Nick Cotter

Be sure these examples are accurate.

Example of Match Types

Amazon Seller: ● Premium hiking gear manufacturer

Issue:● Large number of clicks and spend based on general searches for “all purpose consumer backpacks and camping gear”, which

was making their ad spend extremely inefficient.● Customers searching for a generic backpack and some mid level hiking gear are not likely to invest and purchase premium

tactical hiking gear

Implemented Strategy:● Instead of just using Broad Match, we implemented Exact and Phrase Match to filter out searches like “cheap backpack” and

“discount camping gear”.● Used Exact Match around performance hiking gear and other similar terms more related to the intent of the seller

Results:● What this did was help funnel more relevant shoppers, likely to convert and shorten the gap between the intent of the search

query and product on market.

Using Phrase or Exact Match for Each Negative Keyword

● Sellers can also apply advanced match types to their Negative Keywords● However, sellers may also use Phrase Match to exclude that term in additional contexts● Sellers can add their Negative Keywords at the Ad Group or Campaign level● Negative Keywords are available at the campaign or ad group level for manual and automatic

targeted campaigns

ROI vs. Rank-Driven Campaigns

Setting Goals – Direct ROI vs. Visibility

ROI-Focused Campaigns• Every $ spent needs to bring $X back in revenue• Lower volume, but higher ROI• Focus: long-tail keywords• Primary KPI: ACOS

Ranking-Focused Campaigns• Goal of the campaign is to maximize sales velocity• Higher volume, but lower ROI• Focus: popular keywords• Primary KPI: Organic Ranking

Why are these competing goals? Let’s use an example for Keyword “XYZ”• Bid level: $1• ACOS: 100%• Monthly spend: $1,000• What do I do?

ROI-Focused Strategy Rules of Thumb

✓ Start with Automatic Campaigns ONLY

✓ 1 product per Ad Group

• Search Term data only exists at the campaign & ad group levels

✓ Keep bids low & scale up slowly as ROI allows

• $0.10 starting point

• $0.05 - $0.10 increments per week if ROI is positive OR if bid is too low

to rank

✓ Harvest keywords as necessary to move into Manual campaigns

Keyword Harvesting from Auto Campaigns

✓ Start with Automatic Campaigns

• Only source of On-Amazon keyword performance data

• Safe way to harvest keywords at a positive ROI

• Amazon won’t give you SKU data in this report so it’s important to limit your ad

groups to 1 product each

Keyword Harvesting from Auto Campaigns

✓ Columns To Pay Attention To For Keyword Harvesting:

• Campaign Name (Only look at your automatics)

• Customer Search Term

• ACOS

• Orders Placed

• Ad Group

Ranking-Focused Campaigns

✓ Manual campaigns to target key terms you know you want to rank for

✓ Keyword Sources

• Automatic campaigns – high-volume search terms

• Common-sense terms

• Tools like Merchant Words or AMZ Tracker to identify best variations to rank for

• Use existing organic rank to qualify keywords to target

Ranking-Focused Campaigns

Using Existing Organic Rank

✓ If Rank > 300, SP alone probably isn’t going to impact your ranking for that term in a meaningful way

✓ However, it can move products that rank well for the target keyword farther up the SERP

✓ VAVA Voom speaker highlighted here currently at position 45

Bulk Operation Bidding

Bulk Operations Bidding?

What is Bulk Operations?

Hassle free way of downloading SP metrics over a given time period as well as a scalable way to upload changes to existing Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords

Also allows you the ability to create campaigns and edit Campaign through an Excel file in bulk

Benefits of Bulk Operations Bidding?

Scalable Can adjust just a few bids or several thousand with a single uploadPrecise No longer a “guessing game” as to how much you increase or decrease a bidCustomization Pull data from customized time periods, up to 60 daysEfficient Get more done in less time

Poll For The Audience…Would you like to speak with one of our Sponsored Products analysts about your current strategy?

A. Yes, Please.

B. No, Thank you.

Questions for the Experts?Submit your questions in the chat box on the right

www.CPCStrategy.com | 619.501.6138 | contact@cpcstrategy.com

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