#113 - Amazon PPC: Managing Really Big Accounts (Without Wasting Spend)

#113 - Amazon PPC: Managing Really Big Accounts (Without Wasting Spend) Speaker 1: How many products is too many products on Amazon advertising? Speaker 2: There's no such thing. You can never have too many products. Speaker 1: A hundred products? Speaker 2: No. Speaker 1: A thousand products? Speaker 2: Even better. Speaker 1: Over 100,000 products? Speaker 2: Okay, that might be too much. Speaker 1: Or is it? We're breaking it down today on That Amazon Ads Podcast. Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing that Amazon ads podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to that Amazon ads podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 1: All right, you guys, I hope you are thoroughly confused from our introduction, having absolutely no idea what we mean by, is 100,000 products too much or is it? But we have gotten this question quite a bit from our community. We did a whole episode on campaign structure. You should definitely go back and watch that one, episode number 75, where we talk about different campaign structures for different account types, which one would be the best for you. From that though, we have had endless questions on these really massive catalog scenarios when people have hundreds of thousands of SKUs and which campaign structure is best for them. I felt like we kind of answered that a little bit in episode 75, but we figured it would be really good to just dive into a completely dedicated conversation to these massive catalog accounts so that we can address a lot of the nuances involved there. So, Andrew. What types of accounts are those that end up having these massive catalogs? Speaker 2: Products, like it definitely falls into particular categories. I think the average is probably somewhere around like 100 to 200 if I had to guess and most of the accounts that I've worked on are within that range. But there are some accounts out there that have hundreds of thousands and they usually fall into a handful of categories like apparel, you've got car parts, art, decor, that type of stuff where You just have a whole lot of variations of products. I actually have one client that's like this. They sell apparel. They have different sizes, different colors of all of the different products that adds up to like 30,000 different SKUs. Yeah, there's definitely accounts out there that have very large skew counts and they can be a little bit difficult to deal with at times. Just understanding what needs to be promoted, what doesn't, what are you advertising, what are you not. And most people might be thinking like, why would you not just advertise everything, right? Because it's It makes sense. You want to get all of your product exposure out there. But Stephen, why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the reasons why you wouldn't necessarily want to just advertise every single product in these really large SKU accounts? Speaker 1: Yeah. With a lot of decisions that you have to make on Amazon as an advertiser come down to essentially a... I don't know if... Risk-reward is the right way to phrase it, but like a cost-benefit analysis of, you know, the more granular you try to get with your campaigns, you know, how much more actual value are you getting out of that additional granularity versus how much is it costing you to maintain it, to create all kinds of workarounds. And sometimes it can also actually just hinder performance. So the benefit is actually negative. So when it comes to these massive catalogs, I've seen some people where they try to get crazy with it. They try to do single product campaigns for hundreds of thousands of SKUs. And that's just going to create a lot of complications on your end for managing bids and budgets efficiently. Your data becomes extremely thin spreads. You never really have any good data confidence on any individual data point, which is just a nightmare to deal with. But even if you're trying to consolidate some things a bit, and let's just say you have 500,000 SKUs and you're just going to do like one auto campaign, that's maybe a catch-all, and then one manual campaign, that's also like a catch-all. So you're trying to keep things simple. Well, even with those 500,000 SKUs in just two separate campaigns, That's going to create in your advertised product reports 1 million rows of data because every single product in each campaign is going to get its own row. And when you start to get to millions of rows of data in these Amazon reports, Amazon is frequently going to break when you're trying to generate an advertised product report. If it is able to successfully download that report for you, your Excel or Google Sheets is going to crash on trying to open that. It's possible. I've opened Excel files with over a million rows of data, but Amazon has split it out into two tabs because I think the limit is 1.2 million on one sheet. So it's going to create a second sheet. So the data is already starting to get broken up. You can't see it all in one thing. And even on those sheets, a lot of times they're breaking, they're crashing. You've got to have a super powerful computer to be able to handle it. And then if you're using something like AdLabs, which is meant to show you all of your products in a single view, just like Google Sheets would, A lot of times, your browser is going to crash when you try to open that because it's too much data that's being cached in the browser. And so even we've had to limit the number of rows that we can display for some of these accounts, just because it's just things start to struggle to process all that data. The other thing is that you just don't really need it. One of the people we were talking to lately had 120,000 products that had like five campaigns per product. So they had over 500,000 rows of data and they were spending $2,000 a month. $2,000 divided by 500,000, 500,000 rows is an average of half a penny per advertised product. And bear in mind, when we talk about the number of advertised products, it's not the same as the SKU count. It's your SKUs times how many ads you have. So if it's in a manual campaign, an auto campaign, another manual campaign, that would be three. You have all of those problems that make it extremely complicated to properly manage and analyze the data. And then you can also run into this problem that we call death by thousand cuts, which is just when you have a ton of really low data, there's nothing with enough data confidence to optimize on its own. You just never have that data confidence. But cumulatively, it all adds up to some really big wasted ad spend. So you can watch episode 91 on that, which is the Death by 1,000 Cuts episode, which is more talking about having way too many keywords. But that same principle and concept can certainly apply here to having way too many advertised products. Speaker 2: 100%, all very insightful details and thought-provoking things that you have to think through as you're I started to strategize how you can actually set up these accounts with this mini-SKU. So we have a few rules of thumb. We have a few tips for you to help you think through exactly what's going to work best for accounts like this. And number one, I would say you just really got to be organized when you're dealing with 500,000 products, 100,000 products. You have to be really diligent about keeping a cohesive structure in place. You can't have inconsistent naming conventions throughout the account. You can't have different products showing up in all kinds of different campaigns. Without a real strong organization to the account, it's going to make it really difficult to deal with. It's going to make it hard for you to really understand what's going on in the account without that. You got to make sure that you're really consistent with the naming and the structure of the campaigns. And just understand that you don't necessarily need to use the maximum aggregated structure. I've seen a lot of people who always advocate for just using single keyword campaigns for absolutely everything. And in this scenario where you have this many products, that logic and that practice really starts to break down because you're going to, again, run into that issue where you have way too many rows of data. There's even softwares out there that promote just single keyword campaigns for everything. And this is really where it starts to not work super well. So whenever it comes to setting up your campaign structure for large product accounts, you really have to deploy what we would call a hybrid structure. You shouldn't be solely setting up your campaigns with single keyword campaigns. You shouldn't solely be using single product campaigns, even though we really advocate for those and they're a great practice. You should be mixing and matching what structure works best for different segments of the catalog. There are products within every single catalog that sell more, have a lot more visibility and do better than the others. That's just the nature of it. You're going to have 20% of your SKUs delivering 80% of your revenue and you really need to divide your campaigns up in a way that supports those core products at the top. I'm your host, Andrew Bailiff. We're here to help you get started with a more refined structure, have a little more control. And then as you get down to your lower sellers, have a little bit more aggregation across them. So you're kind of using single product ad groups instead, where you're having different segmentations throughout the catalog. So you don't always have to stick with one campaign structure or another. That's something we've talked about on the podcast before is being flexible with that campaign structure It's going to be best for certain segments of the catalog. Stephen, anything to add to that? Speaker 1: Yeah, Andrew, you said it well, what I would kind of propose as a general rule of thumb. So, you know, Take it, adapt it, don't just, this is not gospel, but it's a general rule of thumb. You should probably not have more than 100,000 rows in your advertised products report. And even then, that would kind of, you should really only have that many rows if you have a massive budget. So just to like, You know, maybe, yeah, to dive into that a bit more. First of all, when we say rows in those advertised product reports, what we mean is products times the number of ad groups each product is in. So if you have a product and So yeah, if you have a product and you're putting it into multiple ad groups, you have like your manual campaign and you're doing an exact match ad group, a broad match ad group and a phrase match ad group. Okay, you now have three rows of data in these advertised product reports. And that's just, you're going to have to start aggregating some stuff because If you do have 100,000 advertised product rows, and let's just say you're spending $1 per month on each of those rows, that's $100,000 per month of spend that you should be... Even if you're spending 100K a month, which is a good size to count, $1 per 30 days of data is not actionable on any of those things. So realistically, if you can't spend at least $100 each month on each of those advertised product rows, and even if you're zooming out on a 60-day, 90-day timeframe, you're not even spending $100 on it, then you need to consolidate quite a bit more and get some better data aggregation going on with your campaign structure. You might be able to go up to 200,000 rows, but just keep in mind what we said towards the beginning, which is just things are going to start breaking, your computer is going to start slowing down, and then you're just going to have a really difficult time managing these bids and budgets. Like Andrew was saying, the hybrid structure. We do really like single product campaigns and you probably can do single product campaigns for your top 10 to 20 products in your catalog that you can try to focus on growing those, scaling those. You can do the whole structure where it's like five campaigns per product. So if you've got those 20 products, You can have all five campaigns, which is usually auto campaign, manual broad and phrase match campaign, manual exact match campaign, and then product target expanded and category targeting, and then product targeting exact. So you can do that full structure for those five campaigns, those top 20 products. That's 100 Campaigns that you're going to get going. There are 100 advertised product rows and from there you can do some keyword harvesting. You can maybe even throw in a small handful of single keyword campaigns if they're really that important. And then the next phase... For products like from the 20th top selling product to like maybe the 500th top selling product, those ones you can just consolidate into just like one auto campaign, one manual campaign. And then you can just group those products together. You don't need to do single product campaigns anymore, but you can do single product ad groups, SPAGs. And you can still say like, you can group those campaigns by like parent ASIN. So like one campaign could be one parent ASIN. Maybe you're selling like balloons, lettered balloons, right? So it's like, all right, this campaign is our gold foil letter balloons. And you're gonna have like 26 ad groups in there, one for each letter of the alphabet, a couple more if you have some punctuation balloons. And then, you know, the next one is gonna be your silver foil campaign. So it's still kind of nice to have some of that breakout at the campaign level so that you can kind of control the placement settings and things like that. Frankly, even if, depending on the volume, a lot of this just depends on how much volume each thing's getting. If between both your gold foil and your silver foil balloons, if they're both kind of low volume, you can just throw those together in the same campaign then. And you can break those ad groups out into, you know, you've got 52 ad groups in that one campaign. That's gonna allow you to consolidate and just get more data on the campaign itself so you can get better optimizations for those campaign placement settings and have an easier time controlling that budget. And frankly, you don't even probably really need to do the spags. If people are searching for like Golden A Balloon, and that's in the same like ad group as like all the other, like if you just have it all together in one ad group, then Amazon's naturally gonna like promote the best, the most relevant product from within that ad group, you know? So you can even group them together in those ad groups. And then for products like 500 to 5,000, so like, you know, now we're getting to like a bunch of low volume products. You can just set up a couple catch-all auto campaigns and you can I do single product ad groups within that or just group them together within that. The purpose of that is just to allow them to just generally be sponsored within Amazon and get some additional traffic and some sales. And you're not really ever trying to scale those campaigns. You're just trying to put a little bit of juice behind them to just allow them to get more visibility. But as you can see from this promoted structure idea that we're having here, this is only promoting up to the first 5,000 products. And, you know, that would probably take up, I mean, that would probably create for you, I don't know, maybe 10,000 rows or something like that. You don't really need to like start throwing in the whole rest of like the 95,000 SKUs you can, but it's just, it's probably not going to make that big of a dent on your total sales and could just potentially blow up your ad spend and make it really difficult to manage. Speaker 2: Yeah, very well said. I mean, you hit the nail on the head when you said that you don't have to be as concerned about Making sure you have maximum granularity and control whenever you're dealing with these large SKU accounts because Amazon is good at pairing a customer search to the right product and putting the right product in front of the right search. So you can have those mixed product ad groups. You obviously want to have some segmentation just to kind of make it make sense and have similar products and similar ad groups. So they're kind of still going after the same terms and all that type of stuff. But Amazon's really good about finding those proper products to put on the right search. One other thing, too, you mentioned around not promoting the full catalog. A lot of times in these big SKU accounts, they are, like I said, apparel brands that have multiple sizes, multiple colors. What you can do is just pick out the main hero SKU, or maybe it's like two, three, four, five SKUs, something like that, and just promote those. So then, yeah, you may still have like 100, 200 different variations within a parent, but you wanna put your best foot forward and put the right product in the ad and make sure you're just promoting that one main product that's the main seller anyway. So that kind of brings down the overall number of advertised products anyway. There are certainly gonna be edge cases like car parts and things like that, where it's like very specific, where you maybe wouldn't be able to do that. But yeah, just pick the one or a handful of hero SKUs within the parent and just kind of focus on promoting those. Speaker 1: Yeah, and something else that's worth mentioning just because I have seen, I mean, I've worked with a couple dozen accounts like this that just have massive catalogs. And in every example I've seen on these massive catalogs, it is never ever the case Where their whole catalog has volume and, you know, rating, good numbers of ratings and reviews and stuff. Usually 95% or more of the catalog has zero reviews. So it's like they don't have a ton of reviews. So the conversion rates are gonna be lower anyways. So you're gonna have to have like really low bids, really low budgets, all these types of things, which just is very difficult to manage effectively at scale when you have too many campaigns. Because if you do have like, let's just say your advertising budget is $10,000 and you've got 100,000 SKUs. And you put them into single product campaigns, whatever. With $1 per campaign, you're already budgeting, your daily budget is $100,000. So it's you just can't even manage like the total advertising budget. Yeah, I know that you can use like Amazon's sponsor product budget settings, whatever. But like hopefully you're starting to realize the point that it's just it's difficult to manage and most of your products have such a low conversion rate. And also the traffic that they normally are picking up on for those products, they're usually like if it's part of your catalog and it is driving sales, Like some sales, you know, like a few sales a month, whatever, and all that adds up at scale, obviously. But a lot of those products, where the sales are coming from is not a super competitive category. Like I bet you, your catalog is not protein powder. And you're not trying to compete with like one of your 100,000 SKUs is trying to compete in like in the protein powder and you have no reviews. Like you're probably in these other super fringe categories. Like that's why like carb parts, accessories, things like that, where people are searching super long, long tail search terms for, yeah, I want to find, you know, this specific size. I mean, not even a spark plug because those can be pretty high volume. Speaker 2: I'm thinking like specific model number of a part, like you've done research, Pat, on YouTube or something. You're like, I need this part. I'm going to go search that long tail version of that and see if I can find it. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so The point is there's probably not a lot of competition in there. So if someone's a lot of the traffic going to your listing is probably longer tail stuff anyways and because it's a longer tail search term, you're probably already ranking pretty highly organically if they're looking specifically for your product and there's only like a couple other sellers. So throwing in your little sponsored ad next to it just isn't gonna, it's just not gonna be very helpful, likely not incremental to the business. And so if you just like shut off those ads, you'll likely still be getting those same sales and just not paying the platform tax to get that traffic, so. Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. Just sometimes it's just a unnecessary overcomplication of things to try to advertise everything and create a lot of bottlenecks within workflows to Really start to break everything out super granularly. Speaker 1: So in general, those catch-alls are going to be your best friend. So you can have a bunch of different catch-all campaigns, which are just like basically auto campaigns where you're throwing huge amounts. You can be throwing like, you know, a thousand products or something into each campaign, into each catch-all. You can break out each catch-all. So it's like, these are going to be like our Honda Civic parts. And you've got like, you know, a thousand ad groups in there naming each of the different parts. Probably don't even have to do separate ad groups, but you can. And then you got your other campaign that's for your Toyota 4Runner parts, whatever. So you can break out the campaigns like that. So you have some level of similarity of what's going on in that campaign. So you're also clear on your naming system and where everything lives. And you can promote probably up to, if you wanna be crazy, you can probably have up to 90,000 products in those catch-all campaigns. Maybe you're gonna break it out into You're going to have 50 different catch-all campaigns and your 90,000 products are dispersed between those catch-all campaigns. Most of those are just a bunch of really low volume products. You just want to get a little extra juice to them, a little extra visibility. But then you only want to be trying to do a single product campaign for products that actually have 20, 50 reviews and five stars. And you've done some work on the SEO. You've optimized those listing images. They're going to be a bit more competitive. They're doing more volume. And so those are the ones where you can get a bit more granular with your advertising strategy and try to actually grow and scale. Those ones with harvesting and everything like that. But with everything else, just the volume is way too low to exercise any normal harvesting strategy and single keyword campaigns and trying to balance exact match, broad match. It's just really not necessary and it is not worth the payout to how much effort is going to be involved to set up and maintain that. Speaker 2: Yep, very well said. Now, for everybody that's listening, make sure you leave a comment. Make sure you like, subscribe, let us know what you thought of this episode. If you have any other ideas for other episodes we should do coming up, if you have any topic requests, throw them down there in the comments. We look at every single one of those. And we'll see you next week on That Amazon Ads Podcast. Speaker 1: See ya.