The Amazon PPC Campaign Structure Checklist

The Amazon PPC Campaign Structure Checklist Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Erickson-Facchin, and this is the world's first and longest-running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today on the show, we're going to talk about campaign structure, which is the art of organizing your keywords, your targets, your products into different kinds of campaigns. Should you have all of your products together In your auto campaigns, it shows you split up your products into separate auto campaigns. What do you do with duplicated search terms? And there's pop up in seven different ad groups. Today, we're going to be talking about it. I sat down and I created a huge checklist, which you can grab if you go to the checklist in the description of this YouTube video. Let's jump in. Alrighty, friends, we're going to keep this nice and simple today. I've got Three screens for you today. So there are a bunch of checkboxes on screen. You can go and grab this checklist yourself. But essentially what this is, is a list of things that I would hope are true in your account. It also serves as a guideline of what to do and when. But the way that you can really use this is you can go to any one campaign in your account where you can scan through your entire account as we'll do later. And what this will allow you to do is assess if you have good campaign structure or bad campaign structure. Let the games begin. The first three deal with, well, the first four really deal with campaign naming. And essentially, is the campaign name descriptive? Do you have the product or product group, targeting details, and the goal inside that campaign name? You either do or you don't. You should be able to look at your campaign and know exactly what it is, campaign name, and know exactly what it is. Is the ad group name descriptive? Don't neglect ad group naming. Point three, are the ad group and campaign names descriptive enough to know important details of the products simply by looking at the search term report? Meaning, can you look at a search term report, look at the search term, look at the campaign name, and know the product search term pairing? That's very powerful. It makes optimization incredibly fast. Is the campaign naming consistent? Meaning if you type in auto on a campaign search, will you find all of your auto campaigns? If you are looking at a list of keywords and you filter for campaign name, is broad, will you see all of your broad match keywords? It makes life so much easier. It makes optimization so much faster. Have you viewed a product report to find all products and ensure you are aligned with your advertising goals? Are you advertising all products, some products? Do you have the appropriate levels of spend and revenue and performance on them? Are you ensuring that your best products are in sponsored products, sponsored brand, sponsored display, so on and so forth? We've talked about on the show how to do that. Have you documented products you want to advertise or not advertise? This is very true if you have lots of SKUs, you know, 50 plus, you might forget to advertise all of your products that you want to advertise. You may be advertising some products you said you didn't want to advertise. So keeping that pulse check is very important. Have you evaluated the same SKU versus other SKU sales and performance and made any decisions about what to advertise or not? You can download the purchase product report, the advertised product report, and see which products have a large amount of same SKU sales versus other SKU sales. Reason being, if you notice a product that has a very low percentage of same SKU sales but a lot of other SKU sales, you'll probably want to do something about that, i.e. advertise the stuff that has lots of same SKU sales. People click on it. They buy it. As opposed to clicking on it and then going and buying something else. Does every campaign only have one ad group? Very key. Again, you're limited by these settings. You're limited by these settings that if you have one campaign budget, that's going to be shared across both ad groups. So that's why you want one ad group per campaign. Ad group contains single product unless there is a reason to group them. Accessible reasons being, are they very, very similar products like clothing of various sizes? Are they very similar levels of performance, like the product has the same conversion rate, average order value, A cost, profitability? Do the products have very similar purchase intent, similar terms for discovery, price of product, so on and so forth? Meaning like the Search terms that are going to trigger this ad group, these products in this ad group are going to be grouped together so you want to serve those things. Like if somebody searches for like, if you sell shoes and you have like hiking shoes, you're going to want those hiking shoes to like sort of trigger that those hiking shoes that are going to be of similar intent. Search volume per campaign would be too low if segmented into individual product campaigns. So let's say you have multiple products and you're segmenting everything into individual product campaigns and you notice That's some of these products get very, very little data. The data is sparse. So you want to group these things together so that you can have more data per campaign, so you can actually do stuff and you can actually optimize. Skew count is so high that it might become unmanageable to have fully segmented products across the entire catalog. If I am Nike, there's no way in the world I'm going to have individual product campaigns across my entire account. I'd have so many products. I'd have such little data in many, many of them that it would make more sense to group these things. Obviously, they have products that vary. They have Very, very similar products like the same product, multiple sizes, similar purchase intent like my running shoes will probably go grouped together, so on and so forth. But I might notice that some running shoes convert incredibly well and in that case, those running shoes might go in a top tier Campaign, at the same time, intent, which we'll get to later as we talk about themes of campaigns. But I might have a ranking campaign that I only want to apply to a specific running shoe. So we're going fast and furious here. This is sort of intermediate-advanced campaign organization. So go back and listen to this on 0.75 speed because we're only halfway done. All search terms should be relevant to the ad group's product. With good campaign and ad group naming, you should be able to determine if the search term was relevant just by looking at the search term report. That's a callback to what we mentioned earlier. So basically what that means is if you have running shoes and it's triggering hiking shoes, you're in trouble. And if you think this isn't happening to you, Double check your search term report for sure. These pesky little search terms that are irrelevant towards what you're selling do creep up. It might be as simple as a sizing or a package size or some kind of strange thing that you probably didn't anticipate that people are searching and it's triggering your ads. So you'll want to do something about it. Let's take a nice stretch here. Unknown Speaker: Badgers. Speaker 1: We're about halfway done with our campaign structure and here we go. You should be viewing some kind of duplicated search term report and you should be analyzing that report because it will inform this campaign structure should you have duplicated search terms. It can be fine unless it's not. Meaning if you have one search term in one ad group with a 20% a cost, lots of orders, you know, that exact same search term triggering different products in different ad groups. With a 200% ACOS, you'll want to do some negative keyword sculpting to funnel that search term into your best performing place. Are the best product and search term pairings also expanded from sponsor product into sponsor brand and sponsor display? This is something I absolutely love. So for example, when you are auditing your sponsor product campaigns and you're sort of looking at them, you have really good performing search terms. That's beautiful. It could be a product target. Is that product target in sponsored display? It could be a keyword. Is that keyword inside sponsored brands? Those kinds of things you want to happen. That's a great way to naturally grow and expand your account and get incremental sales. So I ask myself, good sir, is the best Search terms, all my good search terms and all my good product pairings, are they also expanded to sponsor brand, sponsor display? It's really simple. Are new campaigns created for audience-based targeting versus no audience-based campaigns with appropriate bid adjustments? That's it. You don't want to create your audience-based Amazon Marketing Cloud campaigns in the same spot you have your normal stuff. Separate campaigns for separate intents. Do you have a low bid auto sponsored product? Yes. Have you segmented auto sponsored product campaigns like compliments, close match, loose match, substitutes? Have you segmented them out? Generally, it's better to segment those out. We've done a study here before on this show where we actually tested this and the four auto target segmentation performed better. You have more granular control. However, you don't want to segment too much. Go back and listen to a previous episode that I did just a few weeks ago on campaign structure. I talked about the power of this Goldilocks area because not every ad group that's auto will need four levels of segmentation. What I mean by that is if you end up segmenting this out like crazy and you end up with substitutes that is so low in data, Just bring it back into the normal four auto targets in that ad group. Have you broken out products and search terms that are specific? So if I'm selling red running shoes, I want to be sure that that word red and red running shoes funnels just to my red product. Very important to do that. That specific search term that's only relevant to some products is funneled away. You use negative keyword sculpting to accomplish that. Are campaigns broken out by goal? Do you have a ranking campaign? And then you have profit-focused campaigns. Those kinds of keywords shouldn't be in the exact same ad group in the same campaign. You want specific placement settings. You want specific audience settings. You want all the specific stuff for your goals. Do the campaign's bid strategy reflect the goals? Is it a ranking campaign and you forgot to set a top of search placement modifier on it? Are the campaigns broken up by search term, meaning you do not have a keyword that gets five orders in a day in the same ad group With a keyword that gets one order a month, you want to store like with like, similar goals, similar search volume. Have you avoided over-segmentation? This is that Goldilocks zone that I mentioned. If a keyword or target in a campaign has so little data that it's so difficult to optimize it because you look at it and it's a month and it only got two clicks, you are far better off rolling that back up with a buddy. So maybe taking three exacts and turning all three of those into a phrase that will trigger all of them. That's going to be much easier and more controllable and more consistent than three separate exacts that get two clicks a month. Do you have the correct amount of brand defense? Do you have the correct amount of competitor targeting? You'll know this if your ACOS power ratio is where it needs to be, meaning if you have a very, very low ACOS power ratio, it's probably time to push it and go after some more ambitious targeting like competitor targeting. For example, do you need to segment or negative keyword sculpt branded terms out? So basically what that means is if you Spend a lot, you know, I think this becomes very important around like $50,000 a month in ad spend, where it's possible that you have 40% of your budget just spent on branded terms. You want to know that, you want to study that, you want to control that. So you will use negative keyword sculpting to put a cap on how much you spend on branded terms. For your audiences, have you worked your way up the audience ladder from most valuable? Meaning start with your retargeting cold traffic audiences. My favorite is add it to cart but did not buy. Easy audience. Have you evaluated an approved performance in segmentations or sort of the performance bucket? So if you looked at sponsored products by itself. Have you looked at auto targets by itself? Have you looked at broad matches by itself? That kind of segmentation makes life really valuable and it can clue you in like, did I create way too many broads because they're misbehaving now? And the final three, do you have approximately 80% sponsored product, 15% sponsored brand, a 5% sponsored display? You know, you can be plus or minus on a couple of these things, but I would say those are the biggest ones. Do you have one match type or targeting type per campaign? Are you preserving historically good performing campaigns, even if they have a quote-unquote bad structure? Meaning you can follow all these rules, but if that campaign is humming along and doing great, I wouldn't touch it. So, those are the three pages for campaign structure. Go and get yourself this checklist. It is in the description of this video. Hey y'all, this is the second episode I've recorded about campaign structure. Campaign structure and the way things get organized is one of my favorite topics in Amazon advertising. If you haven't grabbed that checklist, go ahead and get our big Amazon PPC checklist in the description of this video. In the future, I'd love to do like a live audit. Of an account where I go in and I assess it based off that checklist, because I absolutely love this stuff. And I think if you understand how to put your products and keyboards into your account, and not only that, but you optimize it like you would optimize a bid or a budget, meaning you look at it and you assess it and you make adjustments and it improves things. That's where real magic happens. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode of The PPC Den Podcast. I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And Picked Keywords. I've got my bids. Some placements too. Never had mistakes. I've made a few. I've had my share of brought keywords, but I'm Hello. The PPC Den, my friends. And we'll keep on the music. The PPC. No time for medicals, cause we fixed the game.