5 Ways to Improve Your Automatic Amazon Ad Campaigns
One of the simplest and easiest campaigns to set up in Amazon Advertising is a Sponsored Product ad with Automatic targeting. Even a beginner to the ad platform can get one of these ads up and running in just a few minutes’ time, so this ad format is often recommended as a best practice.
But even veteran Amazon Ad managers use Automatic targeting for most of their priority products.
Here are just four reasons why Automatic campaigns are usually in the mix.
4 Benefits to Using Automatic Sponsored Product Campaigns
They intercept more customers. Even if you’ve carefully curated hundreds of keywords, competitor ASINs, relevant categories, and audience interests within your manual campaigns, it’s not possible to cover as much ground as an Automatic campaign can. It’s going to expose many targeting strategies you didn’t factor into your plan.
They are cheaper. They typically get a lower CPC (cost per click) than you would get for those same keywords and targets within a manual campaign. Amazon prefers the freedom of Automatic targeting and usually serves up the ads more generously, giving them more impressions at a lower cost than an equivalent campaign with manual targeting.
They inform and expand your manual campaign strategy. As you discover additional keywords and targets that convert from Automatic targeting, add them to your manual campaigns for the same products (and possibly to other related products). This gives you more control over the investments made for each keyword. By the way, it used to be a best practice to add negative keywords to the Automatic campaign whenever you move them to a manual campaign, but most ad managers now leave them running in both, simply because the cost can be lower in the Automatic ad.
They get impressions & sales faster. Ads with automatic targeting are typically served up by Amazon more quickly and can convert earlier than equivalent campaigns with manual targeting. It takes a while for most other ad types to earn trust with Amazon, but Sponsored Product ads with Automatic targeting have the advantage of some inherent trust.
Tailoring Your Automatic Campaign Formula
Automatic targeting is a proven strategy that we intend to continue using for most of our priority products. However, it is important to clarify that “Automatic” does not mean “Automated.”
These ads are not “set-it-and-forget-it” campaigns. They require as much attention, finesse, and fine-tuning as their manual counterparts – sometimes more.
Automatic campaigns are quick to set up but time-consuming to refine. Even the setup process itself - although quick to complete - requires careful attention to detail.
There are hundreds of combinations of ways to structure Automatic campaigns and the particular recipe that will work best for you will vary by market, category, and often even by product within the same category.
If just a couple of settings aren’t in a particular combination, the poor results might force you to pause the campaign before it even had time to shine.
On the one hand, your ad might appear to do very well, getting exceptionally low ACOS, but then you discover that all of your ad dollars are being spent on branded searches because of how it was set up.
On the other hand, your ad may have very high ACOS because you’re paying 2-18x as much as you intended per click. [This happens when you have “Dynamic bids - up and down” selected in addition to allowing Amazon to increase your bid for higher placement in search results (more about that soon).]
Automatic targeting is one of the simplest ways to structure a campaign, but these ads work best when you incorporate a proven formula at the onset of each new campaign.
Since your product, market, and goals are unique, it isn’t possible for us to share a one-size-fits-all formula that is guaranteed to work for you, but we can provide some guidance regarding each of the following 5 settings available for fine-tuning your Automatic campaign template.
Dynamic or Fixed Bids
The first customization available within Automatic campaigns involves choosing between three options related to the extent of control you are willing to grant Amazon to adjust your bids. There are three options here: 1) Dynamic bids – down only, 2) Dynamic bids – up and down, and 3) Fixed bids.
Options 1 and 2 allow Amazon to adjust your bid based on the likelihood of a sale and the intensity of the competition.
“Dynamic bids – up and down” can increase your bid by as much as 100%. “Dynamic bids – down only” will reduce your bid as low as it can go, based on the bids competitors have placed for the same keywords and targets.
Which one is right for you? We rarely use Fixed bids, so our choice is usually between the first and second options.
If we have a small budget to work with and low ACOS is a top priority, we choose “Dynamic bids – down only.” But if we need to be more aggressive or if we have a higher ACOS threshold to work with, we’ll choose “Dynamic Bids – up and down.”
If we are somewhere in the middle and want to be aggressive but still stay within a mid-level range of ACOS, we’ll choose “Dynamic Bids - up and down” but will mitigate our risk by lowering the default bid and setting a lower daily budget cap. When the campaign has enough history, we adapt accordingly.
Adjust Bids by Placement
The second setting to tailor within your Automatic campaign formula is to adjust bids for specific placements. You can allow Amazon to increase your default bid by as much as 900% in order to secure high-visibility placement near the top of search results and on high-converting competitor product pages.
But be careful with this, especially if you selected “Dynamics Bids - up and down” in the previous setting!
If you have a $1.00 bid and you select “Dynamic bids – up and down” and then you select the maximum 900% bid increase for top of search or priority product pages, your $1.00/click bid could cost you $18.00 per click ($1 x 900% for top of search x 2 for “Dynamic bids – up and down”).
Is it worth it? And if so, what’s the right % for securing priority placement? That will vary by market and category.
Just remember, over 75% of clicks happen on the first 3 results, so it’s crucial to secure top-of-page placement. This is certainly a part of your formula worth refining!
Custom Text or Standard
The third customization to bake into your tailored Automatic campaign formula is related to the ad format. There are only two options - “Custom text ad” and “Standard ad.”
If you want to customize the text that appears within the Sponsored Product ad, you only have one choice – “Custom text ad.”
However, if you want to include multiple ASINs within the same campaign, your only choice is to use the “Standard ad” option.
Sometimes the custom text converts so effectively, it is worth setting up additional campaigns for other ASINs. But sometimes the benefits of grouping ASINs together or testing a variety of settings within the same campaign outweigh the benefits of custom text, making the “Standard ad” option more profitable.
Universal or Group Targeting
The fourth setting to tailor within your Automatic campaign formula is regarding Automatic Targeting.
Amazon’s Ad platform defaults to the universal setting where you just set one bid for the entire campaign, but we don’t recommend this. Instead, select “Set bids by targeting group” and refine your bids for each of the 4 options displayed.
As you refine this part of your formula, you’ll discover that your bids can vary widely between each of the 4 targeting groups. Sometimes, the bid for one group may be 10x as much as the bid for another group.
You might even want to uncheck some of them entirely so the ads don’t serve to those groups at all (more about that in a moment).
The 4 group targeting options are:
Close Match
Loose Match
Substitutes
Complements
The first two options use keyword-based targeting and the last two use ASIN-based targeting.
Keyword targeting: “Close match” is going to serve your ads when keywords are searched that are closely related to your product, whereas “Loose match” will be more liberal to expand the reach to include broader keywords that the algorithm thinks are still relevant.
ASIN targeting: “Substitutes” intercept ASINs that the algorithm considers to be competing with your product, whereas “Complements” extend more broadly to reach adjacent sub-categories, often still within the same main category as your product.
Sometimes it is best to use all 4 groups with different bids for each one, however, sometimes it is wise to deselect the two options that don’t align with your targeting goals.
If you get better results from keyword targeting, uncheck “Substitutes” and “Complements” and vice versa if a product performs better with ASIN targeting.
Negative Keywords & Products
The 5th and last way to tailor your Automatic campaign formula is to add negative keywords and negative products so that, from the onset of the campaign, it won’t waste any money buying placement for keywords and targets that don’t align with your goals.
If you want to eliminate brand bidding entirely from a campaign (not usually recommended), you could add all relevant brand names to the negative keyword field.
Or, if previous Automatic campaigns for similar products have already proven that certain keywords eat up a lot of the budget without converting enough sales, consider starting out the next related campaign with those terms as negative from the beginning.
Likewise, if certain competitor ASINs tend to eat up your budget without securing any sales, consider adding those as negative products for each related campaign. And, again, if you want to avoid brand bidding, you can enter the product’s own ASIN here as well.
Conclusion
There are hundreds of combinations of ways to structure your Automatic Sponsored Product campaigns.
We recommend creating a tailored formula that works well for your average product. Then keep a close eye on the performance of those Automatic campaigns. Fine-tune the settings for each one on a daily basis and then revisit your template every week or so based on the results of your average campaigns.
Automatic campaigns can be as tedious to optimize as manual campaigns, but the attention to detail is worth the time and energy.
If you and your team don’t have the bandwidth to create and revise custom formulas or if you don’t know which combination of settings are best to start with in order to achieve your goals, consider partnering with an experienced, certified agency in the Amazon Advertising Partner program. If you’d like to discuss a partnership with Amplify, we’d be honored to explore that with you. Just click here, fill out the form, and we’ll be in touch soon!
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