Rainmkr Labs

Some Amazon PPC Stats That Might Shock You Dynamic bids up/down might be one of the most taboo things you can use in Amazon PPC according to a lot of industry experts. The idea of letting Amazon adjust your bids... Giving up that control... After all, we know better than an eCom giant that has invested 10s of millions (if not more) into its ad tech right? I'm not saying we should just give Amazon free reign to do whatever it wants with our money because 'the house' is looking out for its own wins - and not so much whether its players win. On to the nitty gritty. We did a quick data pull YTD for our longest standing clients analyzing dynamic bids up/down, down only, and fixed. We looked at impressions, clicks, spend, sales, and ACoS. We dont use fixed bids a whole lot unless we are going after very tactical objectives usually around single keyword rank, increasing TOS share, etc. For those reasons the comparison on up/down vs fixed wouldnt give us a really clean look. That being said aggregate ACoS on fixed campaigns came in about .45% higher than up/down. This alone might surprise a lot you. The real learnings were on up/down vs down only. Both of which our team uses the most often. Dynamic Bids Up/Down vs Down Only (YTD 2024) -Drove 38% more revenue -Only resulted in an additional 9% more spend -Generated 267% more impressions -Created 56% more clicks -Came in at a 7% lower ACoS Am I saying flip all of your campaigns to up/down? Absolutely not because that would likely set the AMEX on fire. What I am saying is that if you apply bid strategy judiciously, you can wring more sales out of the market with greater efficiency. Up/down works best in fertile markets that are growing. It thrives when search volume is robust. It can work well on high converting top of niche products to squeeze more impression share with strong sales. When up/down is used under the right conditions it is a beast. We have tried valiantly over the years to outsmart this by tinkering with fixed and placement multipliers. But what we ended up figuring out is that fixed with multipliers gain far less impressions than up/down with aggressive bidding. The take home here is don't just take industry speak as gospel. Think objectively. Run your own tests to create unique learnings. Aside: Admittedly I was on the up/down bashing bandwagon for quite some time until we onboarded an account during COVID where the seller was doing their own PPC. 'Dan the Man' as we lovingly called him was running nearly every campaign up/down with 900% TOS. I nearly had a stroke. But the mind boggling thing about this was that his top grossing campaigns were in the high teens and low 20s ACoS. It made no sense. Needless to say we moved a good chunk of campaigns that were underperforming off this burn the candle at both ends strategy - but it really made me take a harder look at up/down. We havent looked back since.

Amazon sellers frequently overlook what should be the most obvious thing that sets the stage for their success. Its not the sellers fault, but rather an industry shortcoming that pulls the sellers gaze in other directions. And what are those directions? Gadgets, hacks, metrics, angles, etc. Things like main image tricks, DSP, SEO tactics, PPC wizardry, some new Amazon feature announcement, and the list goes on and on... Do those things matter? They ABSOLUTELY matter but they are fleeting poofs of air in the sails if the foundation is poor. Picture this scenario. You hit a home run in a hot niche and were able to source the same product spec as the top seller. You do everything right not cutting corners on content, PPC, and checking all the boxes on compliance. Day 1: 1.5k Day 2: 2.2k Day 14: 3.8k But then...the reviews roll in. At first you think its a competitor seeding a bad review or two which they probably are. But then they just keep rolling in...1 star...2 star...1 star... What should have been a 7 figure launch has now fell on its face and you are stuck with 5k units of inventory with 10k more on the water because you thought this was gonna be a runaway hit. And it might have been. So what happened? Product Quality Happened. The problem is product quality is harder to solve because there is not as much information on how to solve it. Major issues for managing product quality are: -It requires a bigger investment. -It requires supplier savvy to find flexible partners. -It requires niche insight to identify meaningful product improvements. -It requires constant vigilance to keep improvements ahead of the clones. -It requires a strict QA process on inbound FBA shipments. The great news is that these are not unsolvable and there are experts that exist in these areas to help sellers get on the right track. Imagine if the reviews on the scenario above would have been 4 star, 5 star, 4.5 star, and continued on that trajectory? What would the launch have looked like? So before we look at the next TikTok shops external traffic 2-step url hack to get our product off the ground -- lets take a long hard look at getting product quality right. Image Credit: Levi Lindsay ?? ?? ??

A Secret Hidden Indicator to Product Launch Success... At this point if you have been around long enough you have a pretty solid idea of best practices when it comes to product launches. The bad news is that so does everyone else. These factors include: 1) High search volume 2) Low competition per unit of search volume 3) Segment revenue growth 4) Strong reviews out of the gate 5) Solid SEO 6) Etc... After countless launches there has always been one thing that stood out to me in hindsight and that is aggregate search volume. What is aggregate search volume? Aggregate search volume is how much total search there is across all tight product type keyword touchpoints. Essentially it is better to have 100 tight product type keywords that add up to 50k in search volume than it is to have 5 that add up to 75k. The more relevant targets there are, the more opportunity there is for a new product to penetrate the market on long tail terms that share a semantic core (root keyword). Its a warzone on well defined high search keywords. Experts like to tell you that you can top of search bid your way out of it but you cant. Top of niche brands can because they have a higher CVR, win placements at prime times of the day, etc. They have advantages that the underdogs don't. The good news is that if you can identify a lot of search that contains high search keyword fragments, you can still incrementally rank in those places and eventually win better placements at lower CPCs. Long story short - If you are doing product research pay close attention to aggregate search volume and beware of niches with few high search keywords even if there is a lot of money there.