First off, our initial Amazon Sponsored Products audit showed that there was only one campaign running with 3 products being promoted.

This was a huge discovery for us because the business has 5,671 active listings on Amazon and is only promoting 3.

To determine which products would be added to Amazon PPC we used sales data from Amazon Business Reports in Seller Central. We also asked that the company send us their top 100 performing products across all channels. (retail, ecommerce, etc.)

We didn't want to promote all of them at once because we would have burned a ton of cash and needed to deliver a solid ROI quickly. Plus, the Amazon Business Reports sales data told us a lot about which products were already performing well organically. 

Also, we had a lot of products that were over the $100 price point

Once we had our list of SKUs to promote we used Amazon's Bulk Operations to scale launching the Auto campaigns. 

First Lesson: A part of scaling on Amazon is adding SKUs to your inventory. Most large volume sellers have a healthy amount of SKUs. Also, PPC is a lot easier with higher priced products because you can spend more money and achieve a profitable ACoS as long as you have the margin.

Here was the original Amazon PPC setup which was done in June, 2017:

Auto Campaigns

4 Auto campaigns: 1 high bid, 1 mid bid, 1 low mid bid, and 1 low bid. The high bid campaign daily budget was $12. The rest of the campaign daily budgets were $8. The 3rd and 4th Auto campaigns didn't generate a ton of traffic.

The goal with the Auto campaigns was to generate converting search terms we could then use as keywords. Ultimately, we were using this money to pay Amazon to give use their ad system to gicve us data.

Manual Campaigns

We used a pretty straightforward and common sense approach. 

Step 1: Targeted Keywords

We opened up the Amazon listing and an Amazon keyword research tool called Merchant Words. 

We basically took phrases from the titles out of the listings and cross referenced the search volume from Merchant Words

We took the top ~70-100 highly relevant keywords and started testing them in Exact, Phrase, and Broad matches. The starting bids were:

Exact: $2.22

Phrase: $1.78

Broad: 1.42

There wasn't much calculation behind the starting bids because I didn't have suggested bids as a reference point. I used these values because they were higher than most CPCs I was seeing and I wanted to make sure we received impressions immediately. 

I also made sure to add the client's brand name to these ad groups.

Step 2: Competitor Keywords

I found the keywords that the competitors were ranking for by using the Keyword Inspector keyword research tool.

We used the highest volume keyword from Merchant Words, went to Amazon, and typed the keyword in the search box.

We then pulled the ASINs of the top 3 organic listings. We added the ASINs to the Reverse ASIN Extensive Keyword Inspector tool.

We dumped those keywords into a campaign and did a $0.63 bid on phrase and broad.

Step 3: Monitoring

We used the campaign performance report in Seller Central and PPC Scope to manage spend and ACoS at the SKU level.

We set ACoS targets then continued to optimize the bids over time. We also continued keyword research using the Search Terms report and niche specific keyword research.

This may seem simple but it took a ton of time, testing, and analysis to get to this point. It was a special experience and I feel lucky and humbled to be a part of it.

The best part for me is being able to grow a company so significantly and provide so much value. 

And there you have it. The steps we took to grow our client's Amazon PPC sales from $17,935.04 with a 41.7% ACoS to $124,595.33 with a 20.21% ACoS