In preparation for the holiday season, we've been revising, creating and restructuring Sponsored Products campaigns for new and existing clients. So we've built a campaign structure process to help facilitate optimizations and reporting to continue to achieve client's goals.
PART 1: Sponsored Products - The Foundation
Sponsored Products are Automatic and Manual campaigns.
Automatic campaigns help you target search queries based on the product listing information and help discover keywords and ASINs that you can add to the manual campaigns. It’s a great baseline to get started.
With Manual Campaigns, you can add keywords, individual product ASINs and categories that you’d like to target. You have control on the bid cost.
Let's say we're managing a brand called "Pelolindo" that focuses on hair care products. Pelolindo is available on Amazon, aiming to increase sales for two of their product lines: "Hair Oil" and "Hair Sprays."
1st Layer
At the very minimum, Pelolindo should have the following always-on campaigns with sufficient daily budget to cover a full month:
- 1X Auto: targeting all groups - close, loose, complementary and substitutes
- 1X Manual - Branded Keywords (includes misspelling) such as peloindo, pello lindo
- 1X Manual - Category Keywords: i.e think hair oil, quality hair spray, hair treatment, natural hair oil
Within the campaigns, we create two different ad groups for each product line. In each Ad group, we add the respective product ASINs that we'd like to advertise.
It's recommended to monitor the daily spend twice a week and make budget shifts between them if needed.
2nd Layer
The second layer is to activate competitors and product category targeting campaigns:
- 1x Manual - Competitor Keywords - includes misspelling of Pelolindo's competitors
- 1X Manual - Product ASINs: you can treat product ASINs similarly to keywords to show your product on the competitors’ product listing. You can also use the auto campaign to discover more relevant ASINs where you can convert on. These products are similar to yours or closely related.
- 1X Product category targeting: target a category to show your ad to users browsing in that category. The ad will show in the search results and product pages. You can also get specific and select price range and review count.
For manual campaigns, 20-25 keywords per campaign would be a good starting point. We start with all match types and optimize based on results.
By having a clear structure, we are be able to manage campaign performance more effectively and allocate budgets according to the objectives.
These two layers will set a solid foundation to run Sponsored Product ads. Equally important, you and your team will optimize better and deliver insightful reports to clients.
More to come soon!