March 15, 2023
10 Reasons Why Your PPC Campaign Amazon Stopped Working
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Do you remember when you had a successful Amazon PPC campaign, and after a while, it just stopped working for you? Have your profits shrunk from your campaigns? Are you wondering why they may not be working? Perhaps you are doing something wrong in the campaigns that prevent you from achieving maximum profits.
Anyone who has worked with PPC campaigns on Amazon understands the difficulty of the task. Amazon's algorithms and marketplace is changing constantly, and the environment is competitive because of the rivals. Naturally, campaigns are not something you can set up once and let go without checking to make sure it still works.
After years of experience in this field and working on many campaigns, we've noticed a number of patterns that reduce a campaign's effectiveness either short or long turn. In this post, we look at common problems you may face that make your campaigns stop working.
Trying to reach various targets with mixed-match campaigns is challenging, to say the least. Different ad campaigns have different targets, and your keywords should reflect that.
When you choose a broad keyword or a phrase, many words may precede or follow your core keyword, complicating the process of interpreting the data and finding out which word or phrase worked best. Exact matches work better since you know exactly how it performed and can pinpoint its strengths and weaknesses more easily.
As one might expect, broad keywords are usually cheaper for bidding and exact keywords are more expensive. That may be the reason why some people choose to go for broader keywords instead.
Another reason may be that sellers want to reach all their targets too quickly and try to be everything to everyone in one campaign. Needless to say, their campaign will yield unsatisfactory results since they choose many keywords.
The solution to this problem is to be clear and concise whenever possible. Try to build campaigns around limited keywords, so you can analyze the results better. By slowing down and gradually moving forward, your campaigns or top-performing keywords do not lose momentum.
Many advertisers already know that there are various Cost-Per-Click keywords available on Amazon and every keyword has its own niche, but they still don't understand what they should do with them. They do not consider the effect of broad-range keywords on their sales volume.
You may have to work hard and spend a lot of time segmenting out everything in your campaigns. However, the effort is well worth the results. When you choose to test different parts of the market, you can allocate various budgets to your keywords. Keywords that are performing better receive a higher budget, and those that are not performing well may go to your negative keyword list.
You cannot do the same if you have chosen to start with a lot of keywords in a single PPC campaign. If that is the case, you will not be able to understand the data, which will prevent you from growing your business. It may seem daunting to fine-tune and separate everything from the start, but you will truly be satisfied with the results if you do.
Usually, branded keywords convert at a much higher rate than your non-branded terms. Many marketing experts recommend choosing non-branded keywords to increase brand awareness and branded keywords as an engagement tool for those who already know your brand.
Note that campaign-level performance reports can lead you to make incorrect assumptions. Imagine that your campaign-level performance metrics show a 30% ACOS, but when you look deeper through your search term reports, you may find out that your non-branded terms are 90% ACOS and your branded terms are 10% ACOS.
You may ask yourself, why not keep them in the same campaign? As we mentioned above: by segmenting keywords, you increase your understanding of their performance.
You might think branded keywords would convert, with or without an ad. But as a strategy, you should consider segmenting your branded keywords, too.
There are several benefits to that:
Each brand has its own unique characteristics and requires constant optimizing and checking. It is a common mistake to not check the amount of money that non-converting keywords are using up; a mistake you can easily avoid if you frequently check on your campaigns.
It doesn't matter how optimized your Amazon PPC campaigns are, you should make a habit to check your campaigns every month to find out what is working and what is not. As an example, you might find out you are not converting for a particular category.
In most cases, understanding non-converting keywords requires extra effort. But it helps if you start doing this at the smallest level. You may have a keyword that you receive orders from, but you still need to dig deeper to filter out keywords that have orders equal to zero but are greater than zero.
Once you do that, you get the best results for non-converting keywords, which makes your campaign more successful.
You may choose to set up manual PPC targeting in order to have total control over your campaign. But it is a good idea to include automatic campaigns to test the market. Afterward, search the terms derived from these campaigns to improve your manual campaigns' visibility. How can you do that?
One way to get data for your manual campaigns is to let an automatic campaign run for 10 days. Then, you can analyze the data by downloading search term reports to find out about the keywords your buyers are using to find your products.
Note that automatic campaigns do not consume a large portion of your budget since they are only test campaigns.
An analysis of your campaigns may reveal products that you lose money on but weren't aware of it. Since the money is coming, you look at your entire campaign and think everything is doing well. But sometimes you forget to dive deep into your database to see if things are going as well as they look on the surface.
As you gain more experience with your PPC campaigns and understand how the mechanism works, you need to utilize the ad revenue and organic revenue information together. This helps you stay transparent about what is happening in a campaign. Getting detailed information will also enable you to stop wasting your future advertising budget.
Some people even look at the entire account ACOS and decide on their next month's budget. How? By looking at the ad metrics or finding a campaign with a high ACOS and adapting it.
Making such decisions without considering per-product ACOS and product total ACOS (or TACOS) is a common mistake. PPC campaigns are always about looking at the numbers and figuring out where to spend more and where to spend less. And if you are making your decision based solely on your account and not on a deeper level, your campaigns will be less profitable.
If you have a broad campaign structure and not a separate one, it is extremely risky to change the structure of your campaign when you are not sure how your results are being affected. As a rule of thumb, when your campaign is working well, do not tweak it too much.
Therefore, if you want more control over your campaign but aren't sure if shifting keywords or products around is a good idea, you shouldn't do it. You always need to set a structure to control every aspect of a campaign as much as possible. This is even harder when you have a campaign with multiple ad groups when you want to control one of them.
A common example is having a broad ad group for an exact keyword or finding underutilized keywords in the current structure. So if there is a bad campaign structure, changes can negatively affect all other ad groups and bring down your whole camping performance.
Here are other signs of an unproductive campaign structure:
According to HubSpot, 68% of shoppers prefer to learn about new products via video. About 84% of the shoppers say that they are convinced about buying a product or service after watching the brand’s video, while 66% prefer watching a video instead of reading boring descriptions.
It is of utmost importance to leverage all ad types in your campaigns. Sometimes great accounts with strong ACOS forget that they can even do much better with Sponsored Video Ads.
People may believe Amazon forces them to use these services when it promotes and recommends them. But that is not true. Not using any of these ad features is just as detrimental as overusing one and neglecting the other. Failing to correctly use these creative ad types may also affect your rankings.
Sponsored Display Ads with low ACOS make people feel they have an excellent campaign mainly because of their low ACOS. But when we look at these campaigns and check their CPI, it is evident that their ACOS are their views and clicks.
So that low ACOS only meant the visitors loaded the page, but the conversion rate was much lower than expected. Relying on your Sponsored Display impressions to decide on your account level ACOS or your campaign ACOS is wrong. Understanding the mechanism behind why a number is good or bad allows you to create more successful ad campaigns.
Conversion rates must be the best part of your reports. By analyzing conversion rates, you can decide if your products resonate with the market or if your customers are moving from a click to a purchase. But what should you consider when assessing conversion rates?
Firstly, track your conversion rates over time. Examining your conversion rates over monthly periods will provide you with more insights than doing it over shorter periods. And if you do it for a year, you'll be able to predict your product's seasonality.
Here are other mistakes people make about conversion rates:
You must optimize your campaigns every day. This does not depend on the number of products you have on Amazon. You may need to optimize and adjust your bids also. The three metrics you need to optimize are:
Amazon algorithms are constantly changing to grant sellers the best possible chance to reach their target customers. But occasionally, Amazon PPC campaigns do not achieve the goals you set.
Many reasons can cause a PPC campaign to stop working, from being inactive and content with your automatic campaign results to neglecting important metrics or modifying campaigns without enough data.
The list we mentioned can even go longer. Optimizing your campaigns is an ongoing process. Apart from that, keeping your eyes on the market and the competition is just as crucial as it is time-consuming.
Whether you need a high-level overview of Amazon Advertising, an in-depth analysis of current market trends, or in-depth insights into particular product categories, we can help.
JM&co has a successful track record with numerous brands and specializes in SEO, social media support, email & sms marketing, and web design; aside from paid ads services. We have a talented and knowledgeable team that can support you in every aspect of your project.
Contact Us if you want our team to assist you in making the best decisions possible.
The art is building the right growth campaign. The science is in the results.
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