1 Sponsored Display Strategy that generated $116,016.02 at a less than 20% ACOS in 2017 for a client
Written by Sean on August 15, 2021
“RC fishing” is 1 of the easiest Sponsored Display strategies we’ve used to deliver consistently low ACOS campaigns driving anywhere between $250 - $5,000 / month for our clients. This strategy takes 10 minutes to setup and only 20-30 minutes per month management so you have no excuses not to set this up immediately after finishing this article
Have you ever seen a big competitor ad just dangling below your buy box tempting shoppers to leave your listing page and look at your competitor?
Well these ads are called Sponsored Display ads and if you're not running these ads you better start because most sellers on Amazon don’t use these ads, which means the aCPC in most categories is still extremely low.
So let’s dive in to the details on how to actually set up this “RC fishing” strategy.
When you’re creating a new campaign first you want to select “product display ad targeting”
Next you have to choose the ASIN that you want to advertise ( I recommend your best product )
Then it’s going to ask you to “choose a targeting method” and you want to select “product”
Once you’ve selected “product” it will ask you to put in the ASIN that you want to advertise.
I strongly recommend that you start testing this strategy only with your best ASIN”s ( you can test this on your newer product later )
Once you select your ASIN It’s now going to ask you to “choose the targeting for your campaign”
Select “target by category”
This is a type of targeting where Amazon auto targets ASINS in a certain category that is related to the category your product is in.
Essentially this is a Product display ad auto campaign.
From here you’ll see that there are between 3 to sometimes even six available categories that Amazon will allow you to target.
What’s really important is that you only select one available category to target for this campaign ( I’ll explain why later in the article )
Once you’ve chosen the category that you want to target for this campaign, next it’s going to ask you write out your campaign name.
Now It’s extremely important that you follow a consistent campaign nomenclature because they don’t allow you to change your campaign names once you’ve launched, and a consistent naming structure will make optimization and management of all your campaigns 10X easier.
Below is the campaign naming system we use within our agency.
Type of ad + product name + campaign strategy + targeting source + Better AMS
Type of ad: HDA, PDA, SP ( these are the only 3)
Product name: “Testosterone booster” ( or you can shorten this and say TB
Campaign strategy: RC fishing ( we have 16 different strategies we use for our clients so this part is important for reporting )
Targeting source: “vitamins, minerals & supplements” this is the exact name of the “category” that you're targeting within this campaign. Since it’s way to long we would shorten to “VMS”
Better AMS: This is so our clients know that this campaign was launch by us. For you I would recommend using your initials or something that allows you to see who actually launched the campaign.
In this example my campaign name would look like the following:
PDA - TB - RC fishing - VMA - Better AMS
Finally after adding your camping name you need to put in your starting bid.
I strongly recommend you use a simple bid method I call “CorA”
C means conservative
A means aggressive
C = Margin * 10%
A = Margin * 20%
So if your dollar margin or profit after all expenses is $8.00 then the conservative bid for you would be
$0.80 and an aggressive would be $1.60
I would recommend starting with C and gradually bumping the bid towards A if you don’t see any traffic coming in after a few days.
This isn't the strategy we use for our clients, it’s more so a solid bid method that I would use if you don’t have a software optimizing and managing bids like us ( we’re fortunate )
Then set your budget ( I recommend $20 )
And lastly you’ll need to write a headline! I won’t get into copywriting strategies ( we’ll save that for next months article maybe )
Then your good to launch your campaign!
But most importantly what you need to do after launching this campaign is repeat this whole process again until you’ve gone through all of the available related categories that Amazon will allow you to target.
So usually you’ll end up with 3-6 campaigns.
It’s important you don’t stuff all of the categories within one campaign because if you do this you won’t be able to control the bid or the budget for a specific category.
Keep in mind this strategy works successfully maybe 30 to 40% of the time for our clients so don’t just test this on your best product, definitely test it on all your products as time progresses!
I hope you enjoyed reading this post and I’ll definitely cover some more amazing content in future posts.
Thanks for reading!
Sean
Sean helps Amazon sellers and consultants systematically lower their ACoS and scale PPC sales.
If you're interested in systematically lowering your ACoS and scaling PPC sales sales then definitely reach out and request a free strategy session today.
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