Three Common AMS Mistakes

Are you making these three big mistakes with your Amazon Advertising?

1)   Not running HSAs on your branded keywords

A lot of advertisers cut corners on this one to save a few dollars on spend. But the truth is, if you aren’t winning that bid space, someone else is. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 products ranked on the first page for your brand name, you HAVE to have this ad.The headline ad is typically the first thing a consumer sees, so why risk letting them type in your brand name BUT then decide to click on your competitors intriguing ad instead. (Spend the extra money, bid on your own brand name, drive the low ACoS conversions)

2)   Not making data based decisions

These are two scenarios I often see

One, a keyword gets 15 clicks at a $2.00 CPC, and it gets paused. At first look, you have $30 of spend and no sales. 

15 clicks for one keyword is not enough data to make a decision. If 15 people walked down the beauty aisle of Walmart without purchasing your product, you wouldn’t take it off the shelves yet, so don’t pause your keyword. 

Two, a campaign with 50 keywords, a $20 budget, and an average CPC of $1.00 gets adjusted after 3 days.

With a $20 budget you’re going to average 20-30 clicks a day, and typically those clicks are not evenly distributed across your keywords. This type of campaign structure is going to take a while to collect data.

If you want to make adjustments after a week, open up your budget, and only change bids once keywords have enough clicks to justify your decision.

3)   Not diversifying your strategy

Your Major keywords are going to be expensive. You can have a fully optimized listing and still not break even on these (Specifically in highly competitive categories). But you have to have them. So in order to offset your high ACoS in these areas, make sure you are investing the time in the other advertising strategies. Use PDA’s to target listings in which you have a competitive advantage. Use long-tail keywords to target the 10-12 consumers that have highly specific search terms and drive conversions at a really low CPC. Test Auto campaigns to collect more ST data. Test different HSA content, Test different bids, Test different images in your headline. TEST!!