#118 - Amazon PPC Manager's Complete Task Schedule Revealed

#118 - Amazon PPC Manager's Complete Task Schedule Revealed Speaker 1: As an Amazon advertising manager, there are hundreds of tasks you need to do. But how do you know which ones to prioritize? Speaker 2: And how often should each task be done? Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or maybe it's something you're only doing on an annual basis. Speaker 1: We're giving you the Amazon PPC manager's routine tasks and workflow 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 2: So today's topic comes from one of our subscribers who left a comment on one of our last videos. If you want to have your question answered and have a whole video dedicated to your specific topic, make sure you're leaving comments below. Basically wondering what our workflows are as ad managers. What are the tasks that we're working on daily, weekly, monthly? What are we prioritizing and how is our workflow every single day, every single week within the Amazon advertising space? So we're going to be going through breaking down each of those segments. What are we doing daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly? What are those tasks and which ones you should be prioritizing with each segment? So let's jump in. We'll start from the bottom, most granular. Let's talk about what type of activities we're doing on a daily basis. Speaker 1: Daily tasks, Andrew, on a daily basis, every single day without fail, including weekends. You and I both go through every single search term that came through our accounts in the last 24 hours manually, one by one, assessing which should be harvested, which should be negated, every single keyword, every single search term, and controlling the bids on every single keyword based on yesterday's data. That is a critical daily task. Speaker 2: You get better performance that way. Speaker 1: It should be hourly, right? You should be looking at the live stream search term data as it's rolling through and optimizing within minutes of every new search query being triggered. Speaker 2: If you're not, you're losing money, actually. Speaker 1: Absolutely. So moving on to weekly. Just kidding, guys. Obviously, hopefully you caught the sarcasm in that. That is the literal opposite of what a daily performance or daily optimization should look like. In fact, Andrew and I do not do any regular daily optimizations. This is a big problem, I think, and misunderstanding of what people think it takes to properly I optimize their Amazon PPC campaigns. The only thing that we are doing on a daily basis and truthfully like without fail virtually on a daily basis, excluding weekends, is simply monitoring We're here to talk about performance. So Andrew, what are some of the things that go into that just monitoring? Speaker 2: Yeah, coming in every day, you just want to get a sense of how the account is trending. Are there any red flags, any major issues that have cropped up in the last day that you need to start to adapt to? This can include things like catalog issues, like maybe one of your listings got taken down or your parent got separated, or maybe it's incoming supply constraints. A lot of times I'm talking to clients and like, hey, we need to pause campaigns on this product or slow spend down on this product You know, not enough supply or maybe we have a bunch of supply. We really need to push on these things. So I'm just adapting on a daily basis to all these things that are coming in as well as keeping tabs on all of the performance across the account and making sure that I'm aware of and spotting and addressing any red flags or major shifts and changes in the account. Speaker 1: Yep, absolutely. It's mainly just keeping an eye out for any red flags, any anomalies. It's responding to client emails, obviously. That's actually something you should be doing on the regular. You should be checking your inbox from clients multiple times a day. You do not want the client ever waiting like 24 hours to hear a response from you. Ideally, you're responding to those. Any message is Ideally, you're responding in under two to three hours, max eight hours. Why is that the max? Because you should be responding to every email. Before you go to sleep at night, and if you're working like an eight-hour day, you should respond to those. If it's coming in after business hours, after normal hours, then obviously you can get to it in the morning. So maybe there's like a 12-hour potential gap, but yeah, that's probably the most important thing to monitor because that's the thing that's going to change in the middle of the day. But apart from that, yeah, I'm really just, and Andrew's just doing this, we're just looking at different time periods, making sure there were no irregular spend spikes, out-of-stock issues, Anything else, we're just looking for anomalies. If you have third party software, things like AdLabs, you can actually set up alerts for that to make that significantly easier. So you can just say if the last seven days or if yesterday spend any kind of weird spend spike, a cost spike, sales drop, plummet, whatever, you're gonna receive an email notification. So those types of things are really helpful. And for me, I just really like the budget manager tab within the Amazon Ads console, because there's a filter for campaigns that are almost or already out of budget. And I just like to check that periodically just to see if there's stuff that's currently running out of budget. But otherwise, you can do a lot of other campaign budget management on the weekly level. So with that, let's actually switch over to our weekly tasks. Speaker 2: Now, those daily checks are super important for just making sure you're aware of everything that's happening within the account. But on a weekly level, we start to get into more of the calculations and changes around bids and how we're calculating bids. Now, as we kind of alluded to in the sarcasm leading into the episode, a lot of people believe that they should be optimizing bids every single day. That's the only way to get optimal performance. We should be constantly changing and adapting to the most recent data. But we have a little bit of a different approach. We approach bid optimizations from a weekly cadence. You know, that's kind of a general rule. It is kind of an ad hoc thing, but as a general rule, bid optimizations need to at least be being considered and ran on a weekly basis. But if there are times where you need to jump in and make adjustments on a daily level to specific Campaigns are accounts that are out of alignment or not pacing appropriately. That would certainly be a time to do that. But on the weekly level, coming through, making those routine bid optimizations, still monitoring performance, evaluating different timeframes, looking at the last seven days, month to date, 14 day, look back windows, just evaluating how things are trending, how things are adapting to some of the adjustments you're making, and then strategizing for any adjustments or tweaks or changes that you need to be making coming out of that analysis. Stephen, what are you doing on a weekly level? Speaker 1: The bid optimizations are going to be the thing that you are doing most frequently in your account. And at the most frequent cadence that we're saying to be regularly optimizing, you can see weeklies as granular as we get. So that should hopefully be a breath of fresh air for a lot of you folks who are panicking about trying to stay busy and, you know, get into that analysis paralysis, panic stress mode from trying to optimize on a daily basis. And we do have a full episode on how frequently should you be optimizing bids where we really defend this kind of weekly cadence, but also dive into more detail around times where you may need to be doing a multiple times a week or only a couple times a month. So definitely watch that episode for fuller discussion on that. And our friend Derek, who is one of our content assistance producers, always puts the video in the upper left-hand corner, the link, and also in the video description. So you should be able to find that episode because I forget which number it was. But to really quickly summarize why you don't need to do that on a daily basis, let's just say there's a keyword, let's say you have a keyword that averages, let's say it got 10 clicks a day for the last 30 days and This is actually pretty bad math. We'll say you got 30 orders out of 300 clicks. So that's a 10% conversion rate. And you're averaging 10 clicks a day for the last 30 days. And let's say just yesterday, you optimized the bids yesterday, but then today when you check the bids again, you got 10 more clicks within the last 24 hours. That did not convert, so it missed your average 10% conversion rate. So if I recalculate what that conversion has dropped to, it has just dropped from a 10% conversion rate to a 9.7% conversion rate. So you are missing a sum total. Your conversion rate has changed by 0.3%, which would translate to, if you're trying to optimize the bids again, that would adjust the bids by 0.3%. And let's see here real quick. So 0.003 times, let's say you have a dollar bid. It's not even a penny. Right. If you have a dollar bid, so it's like there's not enough data to actually change the bid. And that's just like one example of why you don't need to do it on a daily basis. But like Andrew was saying, we're looking at the monitoring of how was the performance over the last seven days, 14 days, month to date, last 30 days. We just want to see Because why these are weekly optimizations, not monthly, is because the thing that will be changing the most in your account are the conversion rate trends because every single week of the year has a little bit of a different flavor. Your competitors are running deals, running out of deals, running back in stock, running out of stock. The organic ranking is constantly fluctuating. So that's mainly what we're trying to respond and adapt to. The fluctuations in different volumes for different keywords are changing. Amazon's updating their autofill suggestions in the search bar. All of that is going to influence your potential click-through rates and conversion rates. And so those are just regularly adapting trends that we want to ride the ebb and flow of those conversion rates and everything going on to just try to stay on top of it and just try to stay well greased and smooth and efficient. Anything else to to add to this one, Andrew? Speaker 2: No, I think that was really well said. You know, if the data doesn't change that's being fed into your bid calculations, then the bids aren't going to change that much. And that one extra day of data isn't very significant. That last 30 days is much more significant to what the overall averages are for the account. So you don't need to be optimizing every single day based on the most recent days data, because on average, that one day isn't actually that impactful to the overall calculations of what the bids should be. So Let's sum that up correctly. Speaker 1: Yes, sir. Let's move on to the monthly tasks. Speaker 2: Let's do it. Speaker 1: Now, there's one important caveat that we should add here, which is through all these different cadences. We are kind of assuming that these are campaigns that are more in routine maintenance mode. They are semi-mature campaigns have been running for at least a few months, maybe even six months plus. Things are in a pretty good rhythm. The exception would be if you are launching new campaigns. There's going to be less data, a bit more volatility in those campaigns. So all of these cadences that we're talking about, you're going to want to move it one level more granular. So your monthly tasks for new campaigns become weekly tasks. Your weekly tasks for new campaigns become daily tasks. So, and by daily- Daily becomes hourly. Minutely. Yes. You can definitely stop at daily. You don't ever need to do something multiple times a day. So just please bear that in mind. Now monthly tasks, keyword harvesting is a very good monthly task and if it's a brand new campaign then you're gonna have a lot more data coming through that you want to perhaps harvest and negate and frankly when we're talking about keyword harvesting we're also saying negating as well but Harvesting, negating for mature campaigns isn't something that's going to fluctuate very often because you should have pretty good keywords in there. As you're harvesting up more keywords, you're gonna have less and less keywords that are both relevant and have volume that hit our harvesting criteria. Same with negation. You're gonna have less and less search terms that are irrelevant and have volume. So those are just infrequently occurring items. So monthly is fine for those. And also campaign placement optimizations. My goodness, we need a full other Episode on this because I see far too many people optimizing placements the exact same way that they optimize bids, where they like to optimize bids on seven to 14 days, and maybe even sometimes just seven days or days since last optimization. And then they're always optimizing placements in that same round. And that's just not enough data for those placement optimizations. And also, the placement Data does not fluctuate as much as the keyword conversion rates themselves because for all the aforementioned reasons on the previous section when I was discussing why those bids and keywords need those weekly adjustments. For placements, it is not the same. They do not have those different flavors every week of the year because a lot of that is more just based on natural shopping behavior on Amazon, which is largely going to be about the same. The only exception are during deal periods. So during like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, that is the only time we see any fluctuations to those placement optimizations. But it's not like this week, Top of Search was performing the best. Next week, Product Pages is performing the best. The next week, The rest of the search is formulas. That does not happen unless if you're looking at seven-day timeframes and that data is not reliable to begin with, where it's like, oh, the top of search was 100% conversion rate on this campaign today on one click, one order. But next week, product pages has one click, one order and has 100% conversion rate. Obviously, that's not how you should be optimizing placements at all. You need 30 to 60 days to make sure you have enough data confidence at the campaign placement level. And once those get dialed in, you can frankly just check them and optimize them much less frequently. So Andrew, what else are we doing on a monthly basis? Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of the month, this is always where you're doing a lot of client reporting, talking with clients, going over the previous month's performance. There's kind of a routine thread throughout every cadence of tasks to continually monitor And analyze the performance of the account. And usually at the monthly level, when I'm doing client reporting, I'm extracting insights from strategic shifts in budgeting, in goals and objectives that we've made to a specific product, extracting the results from that. And then what are the recommendations coming out of those performance changes that we want to make going into the next month. So this is where I'm starting to evaluate the Longer, more aggregated trends of a product, we can make strategic budget decisions around certain products that we want to try to be more aggressive on, less aggressive on, and make those strategic shifts across the catalog around where you want to be allocating budget around strategic priorities. So on the monthly level, I'm reviewing all of that performance, coming up with the next steps, what are the action steps going into next month to continue to help steer the ship and deliver Better and better performance and optimized towards the client's goals. So that's what I'm doing on a monthly level along with everything else you just mentioned. But let's jump in one layer higher. Let's go to quarterly. Speaker 1: I'm going to add one more final thought on the placement optimizations. We were saying previously if the campaigns are new, then you should be doing those on like a weekly basis. I would also say if you are new to placement optimizations, so maybe the campaigns themselves aren't new, but previously you didn't have any adjustments on them. And now you're using, you know, either you're optimizing them yourself, or you're using AdLabs to optimize the placements, and you've never done it before. In those cases, it's a good idea to, you know, if you're the calculator saying top search should be increased by 200%, obviously, you don't want to jump there overnight. So that would be like, you'd want to work your way there over the course of a few weeks, and maybe try with like going to 25, 33, or 50% are generally the ranges I like at a time. So 50% increase on top of search, if if it sounds really good, like, Yeah, you want to work your way there over the course of the month. So let's say if it should be up by 200%, then break that into fours for four weeks. So you're going 50% at a time, working your way up to 200%. And just doing that one week at a time to make sure everything still seems good. Still using those like longer timeframes to account for the new data, but also don't ignore the relevant data from even before those optimizations. So important to note there. All right. Now, let's go on to the quarterly tasks. Speaker 2: Now, the quarterly level really mostly applies if you have bigger clients who are looking at things on quarterly level or they have quarterly budgets or objectives that they're specifically trying to go after. A lot of times, I don't do a ton of client reporting at the quarterly level. With smaller clients, usually larger clients like to evaluate things at this level. But some of the things that we're going through on the quarterly level are related to the overall market conditions. So, for example, I have a supplement company that I work with, and on a quarterly level, we're going through evaluating price points of top competitors. We're monitoring that, seeing are there adjustments to their pricing? Are they increasing pricing? Because we're feeling the supply constraints on one end of prices getting increased, so naturally we should start to see other competitors increasing their prices as well. So we're monitoring that, seeing can we potentially increase prices? Is there room within the market for us to capture a little bit of additional margin based on other competitor price points? Adapt from there. But usually that's on a quarterly level. That stuff's not changing every single month. That's like maybe a annual or quarterly type of adjustment that needs to be made, usually stemming from other supply conditions that are being met. Stephen, what are you doing on a quarterly level? Speaker 1: Yeah, on a quarterly level, I'm generally reviewing my day parting strategy. And goodness gracious, this is not something you need to be doing on a weekly level. The amount of people I see trying to optimize their day partying every single week or every single day is just insane. If placement optimizations do not have very great fluctuations month to month, week to week, day partying is even less. That is your least frequent task. That's just at a monthly level, just double check it. And obviously, same kind of thing, like I was saying before placements, if you're completely new to day parting, if you're realizing day parting is saying, Oh, I should be doubling my bids during the days and chopping them in half at night, then Yeah, work your way there over the course of a couple of weeks and make sure that those numbers stay that way. Because as you start increasing and decreasing, then the conversion rates might not be the same because there could have been a few anomalies in your account. But when you're globally pushing everything in the account, then things change. So generally speaking, ramp your way up there, check it a little bit more frequently if it's your first time doing day partying. But once things are kind of dialed in, I mean, yeah, it's like a couple times a year. I just double check that it looks good and it always looks good. So it's really just... It could even be an annual task, frankly, but I mean, quarterly, it's good to just double check it. That's all we're doing. Very rarely do I ever see that I need to make adjustments there. Speaker 2: Yeah, usually those trends are pretty consistent throughout the year. They don't need to change too much. But one thing that is really good to look at on a more aggregated level, on a quarterly level with a lot more data is Ngrams and analyzing your search terms on a broad level. Now with Ngrams, if you don't know about that, we have a whole episode breaking down Ngrams and the Ngram feature within AdLabs, how you can go through and identify potential wasted ad spend within your account using this sequence of analysis. Doing it on a quarterly level allows for more aggregation of data. You have a longer time frame. You've got a lot more data relevance and confidence in these little phrases that are showing up because with Ingrams, the goal is to kind of go through and find areas where you're wasting money. Two-word, three-word phrases that are, you know, getting one click here, one click there. It takes time for all of that to kind of add up to where it's statistically significant to where you'd want to go in and potentially negate it. So doing this type of analysis on a quarterly level allows for more data. You have a little bit more to go off of and can start to spot those broader trends of where you might have some ad spend leaking out on specific phrases containing specific. Speaker 1: Well said, Andrew. I have nothing else to add to that. So let's dive into our annual tasks. Now on a yearly basis, Andrew and I only once a year do we ever optimize our bids. I'm just kidding. Just thought it'd be funny to Based on what we introed with. On a year on an annual basis, we aren't really doing like optimization tasks per se, but at the end of the year, it's great to just look back on the last 12 months and do some review around what were the weak points. Really dive into the, you should have a tool that allows you to look at the weekly performance for all of your campaigns and products and everything throughout the year. If not, AdLabs could be a great tool for that, but In some view, you should be able to analyze last year's data, look at the weekly, look at the monthly, look at where the anomalies were, try to dissect what happened there. You should be keeping notes too, just to keep track of like, you know, for this one, the product went out of stock. For this one, we had listing issues. For this one, we were on deal or whatever. And just try to discover what you can be doing better for next year. Any A cost spikes, what caused that? We did that episode on like, How to troubleshoot rising ACoS. So that's a good one to go back and check out again if you haven't yet already. And I guess it wouldn't be again if you haven't already. You know what I mean. But try to figure out was that due to a CPC spike or a conversion rate dip and just try to like get ahead of it for next year so that if there was some super seasonal moment that caught you off guard or by surprise or whatever that you can just be aware of that going into next year. So Yeah, just review the last year and that's going to help you begin your next year planning. Speaker 2: That's right. Taking that first step to look back at what went well, what didn't work in the previous year and how we're going to adapt going forward. And that's really what we're starting to do at the end of the year is plan for the next year. We're looking at bigger trends to like across different months. We're looking for seasonal trends like where were there any areas where conversion rates really spiked that we didn't push spend and we should have and could have. So you're looking for those different trends throughout the year to Set yourself up for, basically just set expectations for the next year of when you might expect these things to start to happen. So whenever you're planning for your budgets, you know, like plus up this week or this month or whatever. That performed really well last year. So you start to look at these more aggregated trends and strategically flight the budgets around specific key moments and key seasonal holidays for your specific brand. And then start to think about what's going to drive growth in the next year. Plan for where that growth is going to come from, how you're expecting to capture it, any specific products, new initiatives, things like that. Starting to really set and formulate the plan of action that's going to take you from where you're at now to the goal that you want to to get to eventually and work backwards from of how you're going to do that within the current catalog setup that you have. But really, it's just a great opportunity to review, recap, and re-strategize for the year that you're heading into. Speaker 1: And we've got one final workflow routine for you, which we call the ad hoc tasks. In case if anyone doesn't know, ad hoc just means As the occasion arises, so pretty straightforward, but like campaign launches, for example, some people think like, oh, I should be launching new campaign every single week or something like that. Not really. Just as you're doing new products, as products are scaling, as you feel there's a greater need for greater granularity within your advertising strategies, then you will just be launching campaigns as they come up. For mature accounts, That aren't expanding their catalog. This is just not really a task that is ever going to happen. There are some brands that are launching a new product seemingly every week. And if that's the case, then that's just really annoying to have to launch a bunch of campaigns every single week. I have a client that was trying to do that and I was like, Hey, can we just, I bulk launch all at the same time. Can we just do this a monthly thing so that I'm only doing it once for all the new products rather than like every single week sporadically, you know, just, and he, uh, you know, obliged me on that one. So that's, that's good. Reporting is kind of like whatever cadence you're setting up with a client. That could be once a week, every other week, monthly calls, things like that. Speaker 2: Regular basis, just like throughout the day, you might get a request from a client that's like, hey, how's performance on X, Y and Z? Or what happened with this and that? And that's when you're going to got to jump in and do some quick analysis to provide some reporting to answer those types of questions. Speaker 1: And Andrew, what about reviewing product listings themselves and things going on there? Speaker 2: Yeah. So usually that gets done initially, like when you're setting up products, but products evolve, right? You want to continually improve them and enhance them. I would say As a general rule, looking at your product listings and evaluating the images, the bullets, the titles, all your imagery and copy and graphics and all that type of stuff, you should be looking at that. At least at a quarterly level, probably more consistently than that, but at least at a quarterly level, you're evaluating those things and looking to make enhancements to them, getting graphics done and all that type of stuff. It takes a little bit of time, so maybe not looking to split test graphics every single month, but at least at a quarterly level, starting to see how you might be able to make some tweaks and changes to your listing. To help enhance and improve the overall conversion rates and just overall appeal of the product. So that's usually where I'm looking at it. Some people do a little bit more frequently. Some people, you got a mature catalog, you've been running on Amazon for 10 years, there's not a whole lot that's really changing. Maybe it's just some fine tuning tweaks here and there. But generally, that's that's the cadence that I'm working with. Speaker 1: The reason why we say ad hoc rather than quarterly is because It's also just part of that daily task of just monitoring and weekly monitoring. As you see anomalies pop up there, you're going to be wanting to check out that listing and making adjustments as it appears. And then otherwise, I mean, for a lot of really mature products with tens of thousands of reviews that are doing really well, it's just not usually something you need to come back to on a regular basis. But obviously, if there are new products coming into advertising, then you've got to do a ton of work on that upfront. So it just really varies. And that's why we list it as an ad hoc thing. Anyways, this episode came from one of our subscribers who left a comment. So if you would like us to answer a question, we are going to be going through and answer questions, but you have to be a subscriber. So make sure you do that. And also, I was so happy the other day when I saw this on our YouTube, everyone who was commenting that they had made it to the end of the video. So thank you to everyone with your usernames that I can't pronounce. But one person in particular said, we have reached the end of the episode for the 114th time. Hadn't realized dropping out was allowed. That was on the 114th episode, by the way. So pretty awesome. Thank you everyone who left this comment. If you're making it to the end of the video again, please let us know. Drop the comment saying you made it to the end and we'll see you guys next week on That Amazon Ads Podcast.