Auto vs Broad vs Exact – How Much Should You Spend on Amazon PPC?

Auto vs Broad vs Exact – How Much Should You Spend on Amazon PPC? Speaker 1: 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: First up, we have auto versus manual campaigns. Andrew, what are the spend splits? Speaker 2: The spend splits should be 20% of your budget going to auto campaigns, 80% of your budget going to manual campaigns. All right, Stephen, next. Speaker 1: All right. Next up, within the manual campaigns, Andrew, How much of just the manual campaign spend should be going to, we'll say broad phrase match and also product targeting, expanded category targeting. So like that whole kind of match type, we can just say that like the broadish match type versus the exact match type, including product targeting, individual product targeting or product targeting exact. Speaker 2: So just within that manual segment, I would say Only about 20% some you know give or take to those broad phrase expanded match types because. You know, they're not scalable. Basically, they are great for helping you discover and find keywords and making sure you're showing up on a lot of long tail variations that maybe you wouldn't think of or don't get a lot of volume, just get like one off searches, you're still present, you're still showing up with your ads there. And then for exact match, you're going to be putting about 80% of your budget there because those keywords and those search terms are much more scalable, you have a lot more control over the bid to product relationship. You know where your ads are being placed. Whereas with broad and phrase, you have the potential to show up on stuff that's irrelevant and doesn't convert super well. And there's a lot of varying conversion rates across broad and phrase match types. Speaker 1: Auto manual, pretty much a 20-80 rule. Within the manual, the broad type versus more exact type, same thing, 80-20 rule. Which means at the overall account level, you would have around 20% of your total spend going to auto campaigns. And then around 15% of the total spend going to broad phrase category, those expanded manual types. So between auto and those other broad phrase things, that's in total around a 35% of spend. So around a third of the spend is going to a mix of some research things, trying to capture some longer tail stuff, discovering new terms. And then around 65% of basically the remaining spend is gonna be really just focused in on those exact match keywords. And exact product targeting, individual product targeting, which frankly even the individual product targeting now that I think of it is kind of a form of an expanded type phrase because it's watch your episode on product targeting isn't what you think it is. It's really just keyword index targeting for a basket of keywords that that individual product targets index for. So that's pretty much it. Now, the other question we had asked at the beginning, Andrew, is does it even matter? And how much if someone's realizing like, oh, I only have 10% going to auto campaigns or if they say I have 30% going to auto campaigns, does that mean that they are in trouble and that they have messed up their campaigns and they need to do something about it? Speaker 2: No, not necessarily. If you're not within those ranges, you might just be in a different phase of your account or your campaign launch. Maybe you're still Figuring out that those new terms that are popping up and you're harvesting out of those auto campaigns, you're maybe in like a, you know, you just launched a new, you know, set of campaigns, you got to extract the data out of them. But the goal would be to kind of work your way towards getting getting more of your spend going to exact match simply because you have that control over exactly where those products are showing up. You can dial in the bids, you can dial in the placements around specific terms. So I wouldn't be too concerned if you're just like not right on the dot on these. It's going to vary depending on where you're at. Speaker 1: And the other thing too is that with all of me and Andrew's campaigns and all the accounts that we're managing, this is kind of pretty close to the spend splits that we're getting. Unintentionally, I should say. We're not working towards these targets and saying, oh, around like 80% of my spend should be going to manual campaigns. We're not doing that. It happens naturally because Simply through bid and budget management, this is how the natural allocations should occur. And this episode has a lot of similarities to the previous episode on campaign ad type budget allocations. And the big takeaway from that episode was that you're naturally going to be spending more where conversion rates are higher and also where ad inventory is higher was what we were saying with like sponsored products. But when it comes to these keywords and match types, It's very much an 80-20 rule. In some categories, it's even a 10-90 rule where 10% of all the possible search queries on Amazon for your category are driving 90% of all the volume. So when that's the case, if 80% to 90% of all the search volume is consolidated down to just 10% to 20% of all possible search queries, and if you've If you can sufficiently put those into exact match keywords, then that's just where all the volume is going. And so those keywords are naturally going to be spending 80 to 90% of the entire account spend, especially just as you're optimizing. So if you're seeing, like when we audit accounts, and we also have the episode on the 10 step or 11 step, I forget how many steps, process there is to auditing an account. We are looking at the match type to see what that mix is and frequently when we see that there's like 80% of spend going to broad and phrase match keywords, to us that's an indicator that they have not done proper keyword harvesting and or keyword bidding. And what that's just going to allow you to do when you harvest out those keywords and you start bidding on them more precisely, That precision and that added or that increased efficiency will naturally drive more total volume because you can be more efficient, those bids are more dialed in and you'll just be able to spend more within that target ACoS. So it's just a natural occurrence of proper bid management is how these allocations should fall. So if you're off, if you're way off, it's not saying you have to like kill the budgets on your auto campaigns to make them spend less. That's not the solution. The solution is really Harvest and optimize the bids and then you'll get there. Speaker 2: I love what you said about how most of that volume is really concentrated around a core group of search terms. Now there are people out there that will say that you should be spending the most of your budget on auto campaigns and broad match campaigns simply because the conversion rates are higher and that a cost is too high on exact match campaigns. You can get a lower a cost with broad and phrase match. And now the reason I think this is wrong is because these conversions are happening at the search term level. So if you were to dig into the actual search term report of your broad and phrase match campaigns, you'll see that the things that are getting the most spend are still going to be those high volume search terms. It's going to distribute throughout that list of search terms pretty close to where most of the volume is going to 10 to 20 of those main keywords. And another thing is, And with those broad and auto campaigns, like I mentioned before, you can't scale them. You make an adjustment to a broad, you make an adjustment to a broad keyword and that impacts a whole list of search terms. And so you can't really fine tune and maximize the sales on any given search term. And what typically happens is they're picking up long tail keywords. That's why you're getting higher conversion rates on them. The problem with that is you, like I said, you can't maximize sales volume. So by pulling it into exact match where you can be more focused, yeah, you're going to pay a little bit more, but you're also going to be able to squeeze more sales out of that individual term without impacting the performance of other keywords. And so that isolation and that separation is super important. And the people that are telling you broad and auto campaigns are the best are not Actually drilling into the search term level data, which is where conversions actually happen. They're just looking at a keyword level. They're saying like, oh, this keyword is performing better in exact match than it does in broad match than it does in exact match, but they're neglecting the fact that The conversions are happening on a search term level. Speaker 1: Yeah. So just to reiterate in my own words, but if you have a broad match keyword, let's just say it's got a $1 bid, a $1 CPC. You've got 10 different search terms on the other side of that, that are all a $1 CPC. You're going to have some of those that have low conversion rates, high ACoS and others with high conversion rates and low ACoS. If that broad match keyword is already hitting the max, like affordable ACoS, you can't really scale it, you know, so it's limited. versus if you harvested those out and on those exact match and you turn those into 10 exact match keywords and on the keywords with the higher conversion rates, you can actually bid up to $1.50 or $2 CPC. You're just gonna be able to get more overall spend now happening on that exact match keyword because the conversion rates are higher and you're driving more traffic to it and you have a higher bid. So naturally that's gonna happen and what the concern is that Andrew was kind of mentioning that other people bring up is they think That there's some benefit to getting a lower CPC that Amazon will, you know, if you were able to get by with a $1 CPC on that search term, if you harvest it out with the same $1 CPC, you're not going to get that visibility and Amazon is going to force you to pay $2 CPC, which is not the case. If you got the $1 CPC before, There's a lot of reasons for why that is, but it could come down to placements, it could come down to budgets, it could come down to competitors. They run out of budgets at certain times of day, so you likely weren't bidding enough to be able to get more volume and having more controls over the budgets, placement settings, all that stuff is going to just allow you to scale it, but there's not a penalty. That we have seen where Amazon gives you some discount on really competitive keywords if they came through a search from a broad phrase or auto. And one other just reference episode for you guys is the 2v2 debate on should you negate harvested search terms? And Carly McMillan brought on some helpful screenshots that showed when she harvested out from broad into exact, the CPCs did not change and the conversion rates did not change. So you can pick up where you left off. The other thing that I was just seeing this LinkedIn post the other day actually, of this one individual really advocating for not negating from those auto campaigns And he was saying that the primary reason is that the campaign itself has a lot of history that is getting a benefit. And when you harvest it out into a new campaign, you lose all of that history and Amazon all of a sudden does not remember that this product, the Amazon has no idea what this product's conversion rate is on that search term anymore because it moved from one campaign to another. And that's just not the case. Amazon's Algorithm and ranking and the search engine, everything is just about keyword, product, pair, the end. It's not about campaign, history, things like that. That might have been the case back in like 2016. It's 2025 now. Amazon is not doing that anymore. So it's just a lot of super dated, legacy, black magic tactics that you just, you don't need to worry about. Speaker 2: Yep, very well said. Now, Stephen, there are some exceptions to these allocations. There's times when you should be prioritizing exact match even more than what we've kind of alluded to with the 65% before. One of those examples, we had Oweisan not too long ago, he was talking about this, but on a launch, putting 80 to 100% of your budget behind exact match keywords is going to be the most effective. And I've actually launched We've launched like 30 some products in the last year and have kind of used the same method of just putting as much into exact match. Again, because you have that control, you know exactly where things are going. You're targeting the highest volume, highest impact, most important keywords, and you don't have a whole bunch of other campaigns getting sales attribution and mixing your data between all these different match types. It's a lot more clear and precise whenever you're dialing things in with exact match from a launch and you're able to put as much juice behind certain keywords and get them rolling and get the products going and even sometimes tell Amazon like what this product should be indexing for. You can utilize exact match to do that. I was just doing this before and we had a keyword that was not ranking for like the first three weeks of the launch and we added it as exact match and started spending on it. Immediately started seeing that keyword rank go up and this is going to be a lot clearer for you whenever you're doing this at launch. Speaker 1: Yeah, essentially, when it's a brand new product, Amazon has to go through a bit of a research phase themselves of trying to figure out What is this product and what does it seem to really like resonate with the customers that with the consumers on? And so which keyword should it should it be indexed for and appear more in search for? And so when you launch a brand new product and you put it into an auto campaign, it's typically just gonna get a lot more irrelevant terms. And so you can just control that efficiency a bit more by like, I mean, and we've said this before a few times on the podcast, but like, You know what the product is. You know what search terms it should be going for. So just start it off right, mostly with exact to just really control the efficiency on it. You could throw in a few phrase match as well. Assuming that those phrase matches are a little bit longer tail, not super, super short tail. Like if you're selling toothpaste, you don't just want to go tooth, phrase, go, you know. But you could do toothpaste phrase and potentially see just I like including phrase too just because sometimes those exact match keywords are so competitive, you're not going to get a ton of volume on them at the beginning, at least not with an efficient ACoS. So I like to also throw in some phrase in there just to capture some of those longer tail terms that are less competitive to help this thing grow. So yeah, right from launch, maybe 80% on exact, around 20% broad phrase. Don't worry about autos until you've seen it get sufficiently indexed, which a good read to know if this thing's been well indexed by Amazon is just look at the suggested keywords. If you're adding keywords to a manual campaign, you can see what Amazon's recommending as a keyword. And if those all seem pretty relevant, then you're probably good to launch an auto campaign. But if you're seeing a bunch of irrelevant stuff appear in the suggested keywords, then hold off on the auto. Speaker 2: And another exception is it depends on ad type. For me, I put 100% exact match in my sponsor brand campaigns. And the reason for that is Sponsor brands, if you watched the previous episode around ad types, it's the most expensive ad type. Now, I don't like to do a whole lot of experimentation with extra higher priced premium CPCs. I'll leave that to sponsored products and let that figure out what keywords are performing best. And then I like to dial in those sponsored brands using almost 100% exact match. Sometimes I'll throw in some phrase there every once in a while, but for the most part, I can extract the most important keywords for those sponsored brands and target them with exact match. So that way I'm not wasting money on irrelevant searches or things that I don't necessarily want to be showing up on. Speaker 1: And I usually prefer to throw in same thing, but a little more phrase. So for me, it's still that 80-20 rule where 80% is exact, 20% is phrase. I don't like to mess with broad match for reasons that we won't get into on this one for sponsored brands. You can probably figure it out. So, all right, Andrew, I think we have sufficiently answered this question. If there's anything we're leaving out, make sure you guys comment below with your questions and don't forget to like and subscribe. We'll see you guys next week on That Amazon Ads Podcast.