How to Ask a Question About Amazon PPC
We want to help you with any problems you’re having with Amazon PPC. But, sometimes nailing down specific problems in an account can be difficult without knowing your metrics. Check out our blog on Amazon Reports to brush up on your account’s metrics.
Once you have a firm grasp of the state of your account, from a metrics standpoint, it’s easier for a PPC expert at Ad Badger to diagnose your account’s issue.
If you want to ask a question about Amazon PPC go over to www.adbadger.com/voicemail and leave us a message with your question.
Question 1: How can product page listing quality issues affect CTR?
We got this question from someone in the European Union who was wondering how product page listing quality issues can affect CTR when someone can’t see your product page until they click on the listing.
Basically, shouldn’t product page optimization only affect conversion rate, not CTR?
Selling on Amazon is comprised of a number of micro-steps. What makes someone click on your ad? What makes someone interested in your product?
When a sponsored product listing appears on John Doe’s Amazon SERP, he can see a picture of the product, price, reviews, and if the product is an Amazon Prime item. All of these factors contribute to whether or not a shopper will click on your ad.
It’s difficult to quantify how much these factors contribute to making sales, but we do know that optimizing them, on average, will improve your CTR.
Question 2: Should I change my fixed bids to dynamic bids?
Another question from our international audience. This question is from someone in China wondering about using fixed bids or dynamic bids. We frequently get asked this question.
In this case, the account is currently using dynamic up and down bidding. In past episodes of the podcast, we’ve covered bid strategies, but let’s get a little deeper into this subject.
First and foremost, you don’t want to immediately change all of your bids from dynamic bids to fixed bids. When dealing with anything in your Amazon PPC account, you want to chip away and see how those small changes affect your account performance.
In the case of changing your bids, try switching a few of your dynamic bids to fixed bids and get a feel for how that works for you.
We often recommend people use fixed bids because it gives you the most control over your account. Dynamic bids seem to have gotten better with updates to Amazon’s algorithm, but keep in mind that Amazon isn’t optimizing your bids for ACOS and other metrics.
Your main concern should be hitting your goals (CPC and ACOS, for example), and fixed bidding gives you the best chance to do that.
The one time we do use dynamic bidding is auto-campaigns. You don’t have control of the search terms coming in, and Amazon will increase your bids for highly relevant search terms, and decrease bids for more irrelevant search terms.
Question 3: Why am I only getting clicks for ASIN-suggested sponsored products?
This question comes from a longtime listener of the podcast. He is someone who deserves to be in the PPC Den Podcast Hall of Fame. Their question was in regards to why, when running an auto-campaign, they were only getting clicks on ASIN-suggested sponsored products.
This listener followed our advice and started an auto-campaign to get keywords. But, he was only getting ASIN impressions.
This is probably caused by a couple things. First, this campaign probably has a low budget or just isn’t spending a lot. Second, Amazon is only serving your ads as suggested sponsored products.
If you look at your campaign and see that Amazon isn’t spending nearly enough on a daily basis, ramp up your bid in this situation. An auto-campaign is a tool to find keywords, not necessarily push product.
One thing that can cause this placement is a low bid, and you can only win a spot as a suggestion. If you want to fix this, increase your bid.
Without seeing this account, we can only give suggestions about what we think is going on. If you’re in a similar position, please reach out to us!
Question 4: When should software or an agency manage your campaigns for you?
Full disclosure: We make Amazon PPC software. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about why it’s imperative that your Amazon PPC account is connected to some software.
Regardless of if you are managing the campaign yourself, employing someone to run it, or using an agency, not having software optimize your account is costing you time and money.
To put this in perspective, not using software to run optimize your account is like using whale blubber to light your office. It’s incredibly time consuming, pain-staking, and putting you even further behind your competition.
On another note, let’s talk about how to assess the performance of an agency.
We would love to make a blog post or podcast about “How to Know if Your Agency is Ripping You Off,” but there’s two quick ways you can check right now. Look at how many times they’ve downloaded reports from your account and how many times they’ve conducted bulk operations.
There are some agencies that use different tools to get around reports and bulk operations, but just be careful with who you’re trusting your account with. Some agencies are sus.
Question 5: Should I split my campaigns by keyword search volume?
This question comes from George, and he was advised by someone to split his campaigns by keyword search volume.
So why should you not do this? Well, there’s really no reason not to. If you want to try it, go for it. It could make it easier to find high-traffic generating keywords, but you could just apply a filter to your keywords and sort them like that.
At the end of the day, there won’t be any uptick in campaign performance from splitting keywords by search volume.
One thing we encourage at Ad Badger is safe exploration with PPC. Nobody knows everything about the ever-changing world of PPC, and it’s by no means simple. If it were as simple as ABC, we wouldn’t write these blogs or record podcasts.
Question 6: Should I pause my campaigns during certain hours?
We frequently get asked about changing your campaign during certain hours. This is known as dayparting.
Essentially, because Amazon doesn’t provide hour by hour data, the average seller would be taking a shot in the dark by day parting.
Now, the one exception to this is a seller who has tons of detailed data and can make an informed decision about dayparting. Of course they should do it.
Pausing your campaigns at night isn’t the best move. Amazon is a PPC platform, so you only get charged when someone clicks. Why limit yourself?
If you’re seeing poor performance on certain days, conduct bid optimization on those days, don’t pause your campaign!
Question 7: Is click fraud a big deal?
Oh, yes. Click-fraud. Everyone seems to think that the reason they aren’t succeeding on Amazon is because of click-fraud.
Let’s settle this. Amazon keeps a close eye on people trying to abuse sponsored product listings. If an individual is trying to waste your ad spend, it would be very hard for them to get away with it.
Of course, there are exceptions. If a collective group effort is launched against your ads, then Amazon probably won’t detect it on their own.
Let’s just put it this way. Click-fraud is rare. You shouldn’t be too worried about it, and it’s very unlikely that click-fraud is the reason your conversion rate is low.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully this cleared up some of your questions about Amazon PPC and helped with some misconceptions surrounding Amazon Advertising. If you have any questions that weren’t covered here, let us know! You can reach us on any of our social media channels, Intercom on our website, and www.adbadger.com/voicemail.
