Today I want to talk about Black Friday Cyber Monday Amazon PPC tips. 

I know that at least on my Facebook feed and LinkedIn feed I'm seeing a lot of Amazon PPC people posting about Black Friday Cyber Monday.

I wanted to share some of the tips and some of my viewpoints and my experience with Black Friday Cyber Monday over the past six years in the Amazon PPC space.

One of the big things I learned about the Q4 time period and the Black Friday Cyber Monday days is that for the accounts that I've worked with and the people that I teach, it's more about preserving profit.

It’s about preserving profit because what we see is a massive increase in advertising spend and advertising sales. But it doesn't always translate into top line growth. And I learned this early on when I was managing an account where, long story short, we decided, "Hey, let's not cap the budgets. Let's let the budgets ride and see what happens."

Our ACoS was really good. We had a favorable ACoS on those days, but what happened was, the PPC sales ate into the total sales. So it decreased our profit margin, even though our ACoS was low. And that was when it was an aha moment for me, where it was like, hey, these holidays, and these big days are about constricting ad spend and constricting ad sales so that we can maximize profitability by allowing that natural, organic growth to grow without eating into it with the Amazon PPC sales.

And so that's something to think about because around this time period, a lot of people are suggesting that you increase bids and increase budgets.

And some of those recommendations are aggressive, very aggressive, 200%, 100%.

But you don't want to increase ad spend for the sake of increasing ad spend, and you don't want to increase bids for the sake of increasing bids. Look at your metrics, look at your ACoS. Look at your TACoS. Look at where your account's going.

Because for example, a lot of people say increase bids during the holidays because CPCs will rise.

But you might not necessarily need to do that because if your conversion rate goes up, which generally happens for products around the holidays, then you don't need to necessarily increase your bids, because you become more competitive in the ad auction.

So, the current bid that you're at will still be favorable because of that increase in conversion rate, because we know that sales velocity history for a keyword and conversion rate history for a keyword are the two main factors for Amazon organic rank. So, you might not necessarily need to increase the bids.

And then on the budgets side, where's your TACOS at? If you increase your budgets by 100%, how is that going to affect your TACOS?

So, take people's advice, but do it within the framework of what you're working with the PPC your managing. 

Don't just do it because everyone says to do it. Think about it and look at how you can apply it. Look at where you're going and whether you're achieving your goals on your account.

So that's my general philosophy for the holidays. I think that there are a lot of different Amazon PPC philosophies, but ours is about how do we make it as profitable as possible. It's about finding that sweet spot where you're increasing sales, but also increasing profitability as well, because sometimes people will overemphasize an increase in sales and then that'll decrease profitability around the holidays. So, I think it's like looking at your profit goals and seeing how you can work with that with the PPC.

With Black Friday Cyber Monday, I will be forecasting how many sales we'll get. So, basically, what I recommend people do to preserve profit is to cap your budget on those days as a percentage of the forecasted total sales.

For example, ask yourself, ‘what type of sales volume will my Amazon account do for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?’

Let's say on Black Friday we will do a hundred thousand dollars on that day. And then on Cyber Monday, we'll just say a hundred thousand dollars as well. That's total sales, right? So, this is a forecast, right?

So then you'll say, "Okay, so what do I want my TACOS to be? How do I want to cap that?"

Let’s say you wanted your TACOS to be 10%. Well, then what you're going to do on Black Friday, when it's midnight PST, you're going to change your budget to $10,000. You might even bump it down. Amazon has stated that they're willing to spend up to 25% more than your budget.

So, you could do eight or nine thousand as well. You could be like, you know what? To factor in that potential 25% overspend, let's do 8 or 9 thousand, right? So that you can hit that 10% mark.

Then you could do the same thing for Cyber Monday. So you would on Black Friday at midnight PST, update your settings to let's say $8,000. And then you would reverse that, back to what it was before the holiday.

And then on Cyber Monday, you would do the same thing and you would do it for those days.

And what I'll be doing is I'll be watching the accounts to see the actual sales volume throughout the day, so that I can update the account. But be conservative with your forecasts of your sales.

Because let's say I said, I'm going to do a hundred thousand on Black Friday, and then a hundred thousand conservatively. Because if you're like, hey, if everything goes well, it's going to be $200,000. You want to be conservative, because you can always increase that cap throughout the day, but you want to always be conservative on those estimates because you don't want to, again, overspend.

Now, the reason that I work this way and with this specific philosophy or approach, is because over the years, the accounts that I've worked with, the PPC that I've done, is focused on profitability.

And so, everything that I've done and everything that I've thought about was about, hey, how do we grow? How do we scale this Amazon business profitably? Because when you do it profitably, it creates a healthier cash flow situation and it puts more money in the business owner's pocket, right?

So, those are my Amazon PPC tips for Black Friday Cyber Monday. I hope they were helpful.

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