3 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Campaign and Reduce Your ACoS

Amazon advertising is a double-edged sword. If done right, it can propel your Amazon store into a profit machine. If not done right, it can eat up your entire ad budget in no time. Optimizing your Amazon PPC, specifically Sponsored products, is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your products and boosting sales. But how can you make sure that you are winning the advertising game?

Start with your ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale). It is a reliable indication of how cost-efficient your campaigns are running. A high ACoS means that you are paying a lot of money for each sale, whereas a low ACoS signals a good ROI on your advertising spend.

Here are 3 easy ways to effectively optimize your PPC campaigns and reduce your ACoS in no time:

1. The easy way to find relevant keywords: let automatic campaigns do the hard work for you.

The success of your PPC campaigns with keyword targeting is heavily dependent on keyword research. Since your ad only appears when a customer types a search term that matches the keywords you have assigned to your campaign, it is of utmost importance to cover all relevant terms.

Manually searching for keywords is a time-consuming endeavor. Here’s a more efficient and effective strategy to discover relevant keywords for your Amazon PPC campaign:

1. Do an initial short keyword research using a handy keyword research tool like Sonar.
2. Run two campaigns for the same product at the same time: an automatic and a manual one.
3. Use your keywords from Sonar in your manual campaign. The automatic campaign will do keyword research all on its own, finding more profitable terms.
4. Evaluate the performance of your automatic campaign after a few days/weeks and check which search terms have generated the most sales. These are the ones you will want to shift to your manual campaign for better optimization and higher bids.
   Repeat this process on a regular basis.
   

2. The easy way to turn impressions into clicks and sales: optimize your product listing for SEO and conversion

Each Amazon sale happens in three steps: (1) A customer uses the Amazon search function to find products, (2) the customer selects a product from the search results, and (3) the customer puts the product in his/her cart and makes the purchase.

PPC can help with the first two steps – campaigns make your products more visible and increase the likelihood that a customer clicks on your product. After this, it is up to you to make the sale.

Amazon SEO is the easiest way to bridge the gap between impression and click/sale, thereby driving down your ACoS – for all your ads. The basics include:
● Include a high-quality product image
● Pay attention to readability — keep in mind that it is humans who are purchasing your product, not search engines
● Optimize your title, description, bullet points, and backend keywords
To market your products effectively on Amazon, you therefore need both, Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO.

3. The (relatively) easy way to meet your target ACoS: continuously optimize your CPC bids

Your target ACoS will depend on the outcome you want to achieve with your PPC campaign. For example, increasing brand visibility requires a higher ACoS in the short-term than a profit motive.

Once you know your target ACoS, you need to continuously track and adjust your cost-per-click (CPC) bid to hit your goal:

● Keyword ACoS > target ACoS → lower the bid until you reach a desirable ratio
● Keyword ACoS < target ACoS → test if raising your bid would increase reach and
sales
● Low impressions → test if raising your bid would activate more impressions
● No conversions, even after a longer period → pause the keyword

To achieve the best results, you need to optimize the bids for all your keywords on a regular basis. Doing this manually can be tedious and time-consuming. Using a software such as Sellics for Amazon PPC bid automation significantly reduces the hours you spend optimizing your bids.

If you implement these three PPC optimizations you are in the best position to stay on the safe side of the double-edged sword that is Amazon advertising.

Author: Franz Jordan

Founder & CEO of Sellics
Franz has been active as an entrepreneur in the space of software and e-commerce for over 5 years. In 2014, he founded Sellics as one of the very first Amazon SEO tools. Today, Sellics is the leading Amazon software in Germany and Franz is a well known speaker and expert in the field of Amazon. He earned a Bachelor and Master degree from the University of Mannheim and HEC Paris.