The Easiest Amazon PPC Fix You’re Probably Ignoring

The Easiest Amazon PPC Fix You’re Probably Ignoring Michael Erickson Facchin: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon PPC life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. We've been podcasting now for over 350 weeks, so be sure to get the Amazon PPC checklist, which basically consolidates and categorizes A whole bunch of our episodes into categories. So if you're looking for the very best of our SEO episodes or the very best of our spreadsheet tool episodes, you can go get that download. It's in the description. Today, we're going to do something special. We're going to do a solo cast. We're going to look at Amazon PPC data, and we're actually going to be doing a quick activity I'm not going to take more than five minutes that I think dramatically makes you a better Amazon PPC marketer. So I assure you by the end of this episode, you will have something to do inside your campaigns and you will be a better marketer for it. The activity we're going to do today is actually incredibly quick and it has to do with time. So what I'd like you to do right now is think about time as you pull up and log in to your sponsor dad's campaign manager. What is time? Why is time? Has all time already happened? How accurate is the movie Interstellar? Ponder that as you go ahead and log in. We're going to be looking at an account today. They have spent $54,000 in the month of January at an A cost of 27%. Said another way, if I were to go back to the previous 30 days, manually using Amazon's default date picker, I would have an ACoS of 23%. Now the jump from 23% to 27% seems small, but that jump of four points is actually a 17% increase in ACoS. My spend also moved significantly as well from the upper 40s to the mid 50s. So I was spending $47,000 in December. In the last 30 days, I spent $54,000. Again, I had a spend increase and an ACOS increase. Now, when I'm in my campaigns and I'm scrolling around, I'm trying to figure out exactly what's going on, it's difficult to know what to do here. We look at this account level metric up top, this marketplace level metric up top, and it It doesn't give us the keys we need to unlock the doors to get to the data we want, that we need in order to make decisions. So a good Amazon PPC person is a good detective. We need to be able to answer the question, where did the spend increase happen? Where did the ACoS increase happen? And we cannot answer that in this view. We have to break out of this. You know, we have this view over here for Individual campaigns for an individual timeframe. So I have the month of January and I can flick back to the month of December. You know, I can look at this first campaign. Okay, great. This first campaign, you know, whatever the name of it is, how much did I spend? How many sales? What was the A cost? And then I can flick back to the date range again, the previous date range, and I can begin to ask myself, okay, you know, what did it do in this date range? Let me find that campaign again, go back and forth. Way too tedious. And imagine you're doing this at the keyword level. It would just take forever. You could not get it done. It would be similar to some kind of time purgatory where you'd be going back and forth, being unable to actually see in real simple terms, where did the change happen so that I can understand it and I can do something about it. So in short, what's the scenario? If I look at my previous 30 days at a 23% ACoS, if I look at the most recent 30 days, I've got a 27.8% ACoS. I need to know where this happened at the campaign level, the ad group level, at the keyword target level, at the search term level. I'm going to show you today how to access this data. It is Relatively quick. It still takes some time, takes about five minutes. So let the games begin. We're going to use only Google Sheets and we're only going to use the default Amazon advertising interface. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to do an export here. So I'm going to export my last 30 days, click export, and then I'm going to go to the manually select the previous 30 days and click export. So all I've done so far. Ladies and gentlemen, I've just selected two date ranges at the campaign level. Very simple so far. I could have done this while downloading a search term report. I could have done this looking at the products area. I could have done this so many different ways. I'm starting with the Campaign level. I'm going to be doing a couple different things here. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to upload it to Google Sheets. I'm a big Google Sheets head. And then what I'm going to do, I'm going to add an extra column. If you're unfamiliar with how to add an extra column. So I took my campaign report, I uploaded it, and then I added an extra column. So I added the column time and I labeled it January. That's it. That's all I did. Downloaded that campaign export, put it in here, added another column called time. I went to the next one. I uploaded it. All I did was I added an extra column. You know, right click that column header, insert one column right. Now I have two Extra columns on, well, I have one extra column on each timeframe. Very simple so far. Download my campaign report, put it into Google Sheets, add the extra column, say what the date range is. That's all we're doing so far. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and copy my January sheet. Go all the way up here to cell A1, paste it in. Very simple. I'm going to grab my December sheet. I'm going to select all, going to copy it. I'm going to go back to my both page and I'm going to drop that in as well. Now I've got, in very simple terms, both date ranges in one sheet and they each have either January or December in that last column. See what we're going to do with this? What we're going to do is we're going to run a pivot table. So I'm just going to select all my data. I just did a command A on my Mac. That's all I did so far. The way that I find my pivot table, I just go to help and search pivot table. Hit that pivot table. Add a pivot table to a new sheet. Now we have a pivot table. What do we do next? Well, this is what we do next. In the rows, I want my campaigns. Now I can bring in a couple of different metrics for what I would like to see. I'm going to see ACOS. Now you'll notice something here. I've got my campaigns And I only see one date range for that campaign. Hmm. I don't see both of my date ranges here. Hmm. So what do I have to do to quickly and easily see both? Well, that's where that extra column that we labeled December or January comes in. That's going to be my next area here. Now, when you add this as a row, You get this information exactly how you want it. So I can quickly see here, I've got this campaign. It was a 20% ACoS in December. I didn't get any sales in January. So already you can begin to see how much more useful having multiple date ranges is at helping you identify things. You know, I can see this campaign. It was 15% ACoS in December, 52% in January. This is already revealing two campaigns from the get go that have moved way too much. So, so far we're already sort of seeing the power of this. If I wanted to do a spend value or as Amazon quote, yes, let's throw in Spend, and let's just turn this back to a dollar sign. So again, I can see campaign changes pretty easily. The sum of campaign spend for both date ranges, but it just allows me to sort of see where I had spent and how it changed. Pretty, pretty nice. So this really simple analysis is a really nice way to sort of understand What I need. Another thing you can do is put the time in the columns area. Now when you put the time in the columns area, you sort of get a view that is even more workable where I see December values right next to January values. Also, but the total there, of course, so it just allows me to again see this now. We haven't spent too much time on this. This was incredibly fast. I can go ahead and copy this, put this into another sheet. And if I wanted to do like percent change, you know, what exactly would that look like? Well, I would go over here and I might do a, so that's C2 minus B2. Fantastic. And I can drag that down. Data. Let's do format, conditional formatting. Go ahead, put a color scale there. Make it pretty. Flip the numbers. Red is worse. Green is better. So already, this didn't take very long at all. What have we just produced? We have produced a list which will show us which campaigns had more spend, less spend, more sales, less sales, bigger ACOS, lower ACOS. And it took almost no time at all. I'm going very slow and meticulous here just for the sake of demonstration, but I can see everywhere where I've spent more. I can run another analysis for orders. Again, I run the exact same kind of analysis. So it just allows me to see where were there lots of orders? Where did I drop off? You know, I went from 107 to 83 over here. I went from 15 to 8 over here. Then put it over here, make it pretty, add some formatting, add a percent change. And you, my friends, should have your minds expanded right here. Because what this allows you to do, imagine you do this at the keyword level, you instantly get a view of what keywords have increased or decreased. So when you're looking at that campaign, that account level ACOS, that account level spend, And you are trying to understand where did the change happen? Do this little activity, download your data, put it in two separate sheets, apply a time, like a date range column, smack it together, create a pivot table. And you can run all different kinds of comparisons so that you can see which ones had a cost pop, which ones had a click decrease, which ones had my orders change. Whatever you want, you can get the answer really quick. This episode was only about 10 minutes. So imagine when you get efficiency, how quickly you can do this, answer those questions, get that data, And it really is incredibly powerful information because you're able to know exactly where the changes were to your keywords. So you know, not just what is a high ACoS keyword, but maybe highest ACoS keywords that were actually low the last timeframe. Or maybe, you know, this and, you know, in my previous timeframe, I had so many orders. Now I don't have any orders for it. Ah, I went out of stock on that thing. It allows you to really understand your data in ways that you could not previously access. So my friends, take the time to do this activity and I promise you, you'll be a more confident advertiser because you will never be lost on where the changes happened in your account so that you can go and actually take appropriate action and identify the areas. Oh, the ACoS increased for these keywords or this campaign 45%. I better go take some action there. So I hope this has helped you. I know that this has helped me for years and years and years. This is actually my second time doing an episode like this on this topic. I've been thinking a lot about time comparison. We've been working a lot on the systems and the tools internally that we use for time comparison. So I wanted to share and help make you a better Amazon advertiser. Have a good one. My name is Michael Erickson Facchin and I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. The PPC Den.