How to Quickly Lower ACOS Using Bulk Operations

October 22, 2020
By The Badger

I feel the need. The need for speed. There are tons of Amazon PPC strategies out there, but it can be difficult for sellers to make quick changes that have a substantial impact. One of the quickest ways to accomplish this is to utilize bulk operations.

Bulk operations are super simple spreadsheet techniques that will allow you to make changes across your account in just a few clicks.

A Walkthrough of Bulk Operations Files

When looking at Amazon’s advertising page, you’ll see a menu that has “Bulk Operations” listed next to a wide array of choices. After selecting “Bulk Operations” from the menu, you will be prompted to set a date range. Since these strategies revolve around cutting costs, not increasing revenue, we recommend using a 30-day time window.

After selecting this timeframe, Amazon will populate a spreadsheet for you containing all of your account data for the past 30 days.

This sheet includes:

Record Type
Impressions
Clicks
Sales
ACOS
Much More

That’s everything in your account all on one sheet. Optimizing can now take place in one spot.

Pausing Ads with High ACOS

The second column on the spreadsheet is “Record Type.” Records can be campaigns, ad groups, products, placements settings, and even more. Because we’re focusing on ads, filter out the “Ad Type” records.

Filtering for “Ad Type” ensures that every ad, even products that are in multiple campaigns and ad groups, are appearing. The data for a product will be different when looking at the product performance in different ad groups, so we want to include every record of the product.

Now that we see how every ad is performing, sort your ads by ACOS. One tricky thing about this step is that Amazon denotes these values as text fields, meaning that you will need to change the field to “data” before sorting. At this point in the process, you can see which ads have the highest ACOS.

lower acos bulk operations — Use a filter to sort your ACOS in descending order.

With this ACOS data at your fingertips, it’s time to optimize. To quickly pause an ad with a high ACOS, we recommend using the re-upload method. This method is very simple. Just change the field that says “enabled” and change the status to “paused.” After making these changes, re-upload the sheet and these ads will no longer be running.

There is a caveat to this method. If you have an ad that hasn’t gotten any sales, there won’t be an ACOS. If you want to make sure you find and pause these ads, filter your ads by spend and conversions. This will ensure that you don’t miss any abysmal ads.

Pausing and Archiving Bad Keywords and Targets

The steps followed for this next technique are very similar to the method we just walked through. Instead of filtering out for “Ad Type,” we’re going to filter out “Keywords” and “Product Targets.” This means only manual keyword targeting and automatic campaign targeting will be displayed.

Sort these records by highest ACOS. Also, make sure to check your CPCs. If your CPC is really high, the issue may lie with the bid and not the ad itself. In this situation, lower the bid before pausing the ad altogether.

After checking to make sure that bids aren’t the problem, find the keywords and targets with high ACOS and pause them.

Keep in mind that the same caveat applies to this scenario. Keywords and Product Targets with zero sales will also not have an ACOS. For these instances, use your best judgement or follow our rules for keywords with zero sales.

Changing Bids on Keywords and Product Targets

We’ve trimmed quite a bit of fat at this point. Now, let’s get a little deeper into the weeds and analyze bids.

To set-up these optimizations, the set-up is the exact same as the previous step. You still want to see your “Keywords” and “Product Targets” records and sort them by highest ACOS.

One of the best things about bulk operations files is that you can calculate a new bid inside of the spreadsheet.

Our super simple bid strategy would be perfect for this:

Revenue Per Click X Target ACOS = Bid

BUT, neither one of these columns is included on the spreadsheet! You will have to add them. Don’t worry, Amazon won’t get confused by you adding columns.

For your new Target ACOS column, simply insert your target ACOS into the cells and make sure that these values are percentages.

For revenue per click (RPC), it’s really tough to calculate. Just kidding. To calculate RPC, write a formula into your cell that looks like this:

After doing this once, drag the formula down and apply it to the rest of the cells in the column. Ta-da! You now have new bids.

Key Takeaways

These strategies will undoubtedly lower your ACOS fast! Once you get the hang of them, you can honestly go through all of these steps in less than 10 minutes.

Not only are these processes quick, they are also extremely powerful. Using bulk operations sheets is the only way to make hundreds of changes with a few clicks and formulas. If you’re not using them, you’re wasting your time and money!