How to Save Your Campaigns with Bulk Files for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

How to Save Your Campaigns with Bulk Files for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Speaker 1: What's going on Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den Podcast. My name is Michael Erickson Facchin and welcome to the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier, a little bit more profitable, and hopefully a little bit more calm as well as we navigate this treacherous environment that is Amazon Advertising. Now, my friends, I wanted to do something today, which, you know, I'm recording this in the middle of the summer, but we just finished up Prime Day. The topic came up when I was talking to some Amazon marketers, and I wanted to record this now so that come Thanksgiving time, come quarter four, we are ready Here's the scenario. It's Thanksgiving. You're with your friends and family having a great time. After a while, you realize that, hey, it's Thursday at 11 p.m. and tomorrow is Black Friday. I need to log in tomorrow. I need to set an alarm. I need to wake up early and go and tweak budgets and bids and think about strategy of how I want to navigate Black Friday and the weekend. You know, your family wants to go do something. Thanksgiving Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, and you have to say no because I got to optimize my PPC campaigns. And then after all of that is done, after Cyber Monday, you slip back into normal quarter four, and then you have to go finagle what to do after all this. Weekend of sales extravaganza. We don't want you stressing out during Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. The real pros, the thing that real advanced marketers do, they're not logging in over the weekend. They're not logging in at 8 a.m. on Tuesday after Cyber Monday to reset their account. My friends, We're not going to be any of these people. We're not going to be any of these people on screen who are frustrated at a computer. Thanks so much for all these actors. So what we're going to do in this quick Amazon PPC Den podcast episode is we're going to use bulk files to create save states for Amazon PPC where we're going to save, reset so that we can turn back our PPC options to what they were before we had this uncommon peak tentpole days. So for example, There's only three steps here. We're going to download a bulk file. We're going to make all the changes we want for the 10th poll day. You know, you can go nuts on Black Friday and the weekend. You can make all these aggressive changes. And then we re-upload that file that we downloaded to reset the account. There's actually lots of purposes for this. Let's say, you know, it is most common is the tentpole day, but there's lots of purposes for this. This is the one we're going to focus on now so that we have a calmer quarter four. In case you are unfamiliar with bulk files, I've talked about bulk files for years. And actually I haven't talked about them in a long time, but my friends, they are still useful. And in fact, Amazon has added more features to both files. Like you can now get all of your placement data in one singular spreadsheet so that you can analyze all your campaigns placement information, which is quite nice. Now, what you're going to do here is you're going to download a bulk file, find bulk files. It's just in the left hand column. It's actually like one underneath or two underneath where the advertising tab is inside Amazon advertising. So it's on the left sidebar. You click bulk files or bulk operations, then you just download. Your data. So what this will give you is it will not only give you like performance metrics, but it will also give you the settings for all of your campaigns, where your campaign names are, what the budgets of them are, what all your bids are, right? Pretty cool, huh? Pretty cool, huh? Now these can get pretty big, pretty fast. So if you're just downloading the settings, just go ahead and click yesterday because that's all you need. You just need the settings from the day that you want to reset back to. And in case this is the first time that you're hearing bulk files for the next few minutes, I'm just going to talk very basically about what a bulk file is. So what a bulk file is, it's going to be a spreadsheet that we download from Amazon that is all the entities. All the campaign settings and all the metrics from those entities all in one singular spreadsheet. So my good buddy Brent, we were talking about the other day and he said, Oh, it's so cool that you can like hop on a plane with your bulk file, go completely offline and fly for three hours and spend three hours deep optimizing and analyzing your campaign offline. And then you just re-upload that file when you're done and boom, you've Let's talk about improving campaigns. So it's all of your entities in one sheet. Now, the important thing to know about that is that every single entity has its own line. So everything from our sponsor products, and then right next to it I'll see like the campaign, bidding adjustments, ad group, product ads, negative keywords, all for that one campaign. And then all this gets doubled for the next campaign and doubled for the next campaign. And if I have a hundred keywords, I'm going to see a hundred rows for all of that. So I see a row for every entity. And then of course I have a bunch of columns for all the entities that I could ever have. So what I see here is like my campaign. Has a budget. So the budget column gets filled in for campaign, but my bidding adjustment doesn't have a budget. So that one gets blank. So this is the basic overview of what a bulk file is. And to be honest, we're not going to get too deep into this on this one because it's really been a really long time since I talked about both files. I invite you to go and get the checklist that we have. Where we catalog and index a lot of our episodes. So you can go back and actually revisit some of the bulk file information I've made. It's still relevant today, including some common ways to get started. But I didn't talk about the save state at that time. So I wanted to give it light today, because it's just as relevant as it was before. So I want to talk about that in slides here. And then I'm going to switch over to and actually do it with you. See, so we can see what the process looks like. Now, if you wanted to make edits to your Black Friday or whatever days, you could use a bulk file, but I didn't want to talk about that here because really to create the save state, you just need to download it. Cause then you're going to save it and then re upload it later. So it's actually incredibly simple. Now with that, let's go ahead and actually I'm going to share my screen just to show you how simple this is to sort of reset back to what it was to create these save states. Let's begin. So once you get into Amazon, you will make your way to the bulk operations area. The bulk operations area is actually very simple to find. It's the thing underneath campaign manager on the left side when you're looking at Advertising dot Amazon dot com. Now, because we just need the settings in the entities, all we need to download is the date range for yesterday. And we can go ahead and that's it. So create your spreadsheet for download. If you have a very large account, this might take over an hour. So it's the kind of thing that you set like before a long meeting and then you come back after and ideally it's done. So go ahead and do that. And I just want to show you what you will see and then how to sort of reactivate it in just a second. All right, so when you download and open up your bulk file, you will see all of your entities, the portfolios, the sponsor product campaigns, so on and so forth. The thing that I wanted to focus on is that this contains everything you need to re-upload and then reset to what they were previously. And I'll just sort of demonstrate that here for you. So essentially what we get if we focus on, for example, campaign budgets. So let's go ahead and just filter for that entity type and look at campaigns. So what I would see here are a bunch of campaigns with the name of what they were, with the target, the state, what they were. And let's say I went in to Amazon. And I increased all my budgets by 50% for Black Friday. Or let's say I created an even more complicated concoction of some campaigns I doubled, some campaigns I decreased, some campaigns I did 25% gains. All of those kinds of things, my budgets would have no way of sort of getting back and in the efficient way. This bulk file, the one that I just download, has all that information here waiting for me. So essentially what we'll need to do here is because we've edited the budget, it's no longer a dollar. I want to set it back to a dollar, right? So let's say it was a dollar. I download it. Then I do a whole bunch of bulk. Then I do a whole bunch of changes for Black Friday. I go ahead and change it to $10. So now the budget's $10, but I have a record here of what it was Before I changed anything. So what I want to do is I want to update it back to what it was. So I just type an update. So all of these old budgets will now have the budget of what they were previously. And because I'm updating it from anything that I did for Black Friday, I'm leaving that there. So when I re-upload this, Amazon will know, ah, okay. We're updating the budget. That's fantastic. The next thing maybe I would want to do during Black Friday is maybe I would go nuts with keyword bids. So let's say that these are my old keyword bids for all these different keywords, right? This was what it was before I began any Black Friday or tentpole day changes. But now I want to reset it back to what it was. So if I want to reset it back to what it was, I will need to, again, these are the values of what it was. So what I'll do is I'll just label them update because I'm updating them back to what they were. It is as simple as that. So that is how the process of sort of resetting works. Just a really easy, quick way to get in there and make a whole bunch of changes for Black Friday or Cyber Monday or any tentpole time and have it quickly, easily get back to where you were. So now that you've sort of marked update, Do you know your bids if you've changed them, your budgets if you changed them? All you need to do is just go back to Amazon and click upload. And in case you were unclear about where that upload button is, it's just that button in the third step of the bulk operations page. And my friend, it is as simple as that to return your campaigns to what they were previously to sort of have a saved state. It is as simple as that because I'm basically just telling Amazon that I'm updating it back to what it was because I have that saved save state. And because we were also talking about quarter four and saving time, you know, on these tentpole days, or maybe you'd want to be with your family or your friends or in the middle of the summer, it's Prime Day. Maybe it's Thanksgiving week and you're traveling for the holidays and you don't have time to sort of sit down and meticulously go through everything to make your changes. Again, that is where bulk files can come in so handy, where I can download the current state of my campaigns. Okay, great. That is my save state that I'm going to reset to. And then I'll download another bulk file, so I'll copy it. Then I have another bulk file, which I can actually then play with offline. So I play with it in a spreadsheet. So let's say I wanted to get ready. And let's just say for these, you know, keywords, I want it to double. You know, I want to set all of these to $2 for Black Friday as a quick example. So I go ahead and make that change in my Black Friday file. I upload my Black Friday file in the morning on Black Friday. That way everything is set up for Black Friday. I don't have to go in and mess with anything. I just have one file that I've already made and all I have to do is ideally have someone from my team just upload this for me on Black Friday. And then After Cyber Monday, they just go in and they upload the save state. So my friends, I hope I've inspired you to learn this skill. This is probably the easiest part of bulk files. I hope I've inspired you. I hope I've made your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. So experiment with this, play with this. Let me know if you have any questions. And I will see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And picked keywords. I've got my bids. Set placements too. Now bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of bright keywords. We are the people sitting like friends And we'll keep on dancing Two are the PPCs and we're talking about Amazon. No time for medicals, cause we've fixed the game.