Keyword research in Amazon is one of your regular to-do in doing Amazon PPC. Once you have optimized your listing, worked out your reviews, finding relevant keywords that convert into a sale, and effective bid management are key to generating PPC sales.
If you’re not sure about how to find your keywords, you can read this article about short and long-tail keywords and Bracket Bundle with Keywords Phrase and Broad.
You can use Helium10 to research keywords that you’d like to target and to rank for. You can also do a reverse ASIN search using the ASIN of your top competitors so you’ll know which keywords are they ranking and targeting. If they are already ranking with these keywords, you’d of course want to get a share of their sales to your listing. So might as well target their keywords.
How much PPC budget should I spend?
Next, you’ll have to do is to choose which keywords should you use for PPC. If you’re just starting, try to select your keywords first. The more keywords you want to target, the higher the budget in PPC spending you will need.
How much budget is ideal? $100 daily is a good start. If lower than that, it may not generate much. You might say that a hundred-dollar daily budget is too high but in reality, you won’t be spending that entire amount in a day.
You will only get billed for every click, not impressions or how many times your listing appears. So if your listing is optimized, those clicks should be able to convert into a sale.
If you think $100 is still too high, then Amazon might not be your e-commerce platform. With millions of products, sellers, and users using the platform, your listing will not be found on the search results page (or you can try searching page 2,788). But with PPC, even if your product is new, it can still appear on page 1 of the search results page. It’s like a shortcut to getting your listing to be seen vs listings that are older or are well-entrenched
So how do we make sure your listing will appear on page 1?
By bidding! The higher the bid, the better your chances on showing to the first few pages of the Amazon search results page.
But bidding the highest doesn’t necessarily get you the best sales conversion. You might be the highest bidder and get all the clicks but not turn into a sale.
You’ll get high PPC spend but no or low sales and high ACOS. To avoid this scenario, you need to make sure you are targeting a relevant keyword. Like if your listing is a pillow, you don’t bid on the keyword ‘pajamas’.
A Winning Bid Strategy for PPC
So you found your relevant keywords for your listing, how much should you bid? Should you try the suggested bid or set an amount?
Try bidding about 30% higher than the suggested bid. The main reason for this is so that Amazon’s algorithm will start to index you for that keyword. Bid low enough and you won’t see any impressions at all. It’s like Amazon won’t even bother to include your listing for that keyword.
So what we want is for Amazon to index us so we can start generating data and from there adjust your bidding strategies.
After creating campaigns with relative keywords and running auto, broad and/or phrase campaigns for 30days, you can download your Search Term Report (STR) and filter the report using the following metrics: sales, spend, clicks, & impressions. Using the metrics, follow this rule:
- For search terms with sales conversion, increase bid by up to 30%
- For non-converting search terms with greater than 5 clicks, create Broad match type keywords
- For non-converting search terms with 5 clicks or less, add as Negative Keywords
- For search terms with high Impressions & low clicks, add as Negative Keywords
Once you have created new campaigns using the rule, monitor the data weekly and repeat the process. This should help you maximize sales conversion and manage your spending for a better ACOS.
