The 5 key campaigns you must run for every product
Most sellers we work with want the most impact from their marketing dollars, and they don’t have infinite budgets. If this sounds like you, a key technique you need to use is running multiple campaigns for each product. Efficient advertisers do this so that their targets don’t pollute their efficiency and their budgets aren’t spent on the wrong clicks. This used to be super hard and time consuming, but Seller Ascent AI makes it one-click easy.
Here’s why you need to run multiple campaigns.
How you spend your budget reflects how your goals - like short term conversion, reach, defense, retention, new user acquisition, upselling, cross-selling - are prioritized. In advertising, a goal is embodied in a combination of targets, bids, creatives and budget. If you run one campaign that combines all of those different targets, bids, and creatives under one jumbo budget - you’ll probably end up failing to achieve any of your goals.
Let’s walk through a better approach.
Campaign 1 - Keyword Conversions - acquire sales and customers.
The first and most basic goal is driving conversions: getting more sales. All sellers need to allocate some budget to this goal. But in order to make those conversions grow over time you need to source new keywords to target in order to ensure you’re not missing an opportunity….
Campaign 2 - Keyword Sourcing - find new keyword opportunities.
Think this through with me: if we put those BROAD match keywords into your conversion campaign, they could take all of our budget, defeating our first goal of conversion! But if we put the BROAD sourcing terms in a second campaign, with a smaller budget, you can detect new keywords and copy them into your conversion campaign.
This isn’t a new concept; for years sellers and agencies have been doing this manually. But it’s time consuming because you have to create another ad group, targets, ads, and so on. And then you have to analyze and optimize the campaign each week. Most sellers don’t have the time for this, so they hire an agency, which can do that work for them. But it’s still a lot of work and judgement, which is one reason why agencies cost hundreds of dollars per month. In Seller Ascent, we use AI to perform this creation and optimization on a weekly basis for you. We create and optimize unique “Keyword Conversion” and “Keyword Sourcing” campaigns for every product.
Campaign 3 - Product Defense - block attacking big brands.
Conversion and Sourcing are the first two campaign types, but what if you have competitors who are showing up on your detail pages or in your search results? You need to block those competitors. Unfortunately, businesses with bigger budgets than you could easily consume your entire advertising budget. If you create a separate campaign with a separate budget, you can focus on winning your brand terms at higher cost and constrain your spend with a specific budget. Seller Ascent creates a specific Product Defense campaign so you can execute this strategy.
Campaign 4 - Product Expansion - reach in-market shoppers where they are.
Amazon also offers the ability to focus ads on specific detail pages or category results. These reach shoppers who are in different levels of consideration for your product. They may be looking at a competitor, looking at complimentary products, or looking at one of your other products. Seller Ascent creates a Product Expansion campaign, grouped into ad groups focused on each of these objectives, so that we can help you spend efficiently on these expanded opportunities.
Campaign 5 - Display Conquesting - attack competitor detail pages.
So far we’ve talked about Sponsored Products. These are primarily search ads without creative control. But two other key dimensions of advertising are placements and creatives. Placements are where your ad shows, and creatives are what the ads look like. Bigger, more prominent placements are more expensive because they use more pixels but they can convert better. Similarly, the more compelling and focused an ad is, the more likely it is to convert. Because conversion is so different across placements and creatives, Seller Ascent makes optimization easy with Sponsored Display.
Sponsored Display ads can show in a few places, but the unique placement that drives most performance is a small block underneath the product bullets on detail pages.
Seller Ascent uses Sponsored Display primarily to go after competitors, although you can tell the agent to update your strategy to focus also on defending your own detail pages. We automatically create two creatives with pitches that reflect your product’s differences. We run two creatives so that we can experiment with different pitches, comparing the prior to the challenger each week. If the challenger begins to win, we move it over to the primary creative and start with a new challenger. We use AI to do this for you.
You need to be able to measure impact on your SKUs.
The Amazon Ads console lets you see campaign level performance across different time ranges. However, if you’re running multiple campaigns and you want to see the performance of your ASINs, it’s difficult; you have to schedule and download reports, then you have to combine and analyze those reports in Excel. This is one reason why sellers don’t often create goal focused campaigns - it’s just too time consuming to understand how a SKU is performing.
Seller Ascent AI uses a different approach. First, we create those campaigns for only one SKU at a time. Then, we aggregate all the data at the product level to make analysis super fast. With Seller Ascent, you are always looking at the growth of your product and drilling into the strategies that are behind it, not the other way around.
Pick a product, create goal-focused campaigns, measure your results.
The ideal advertising playbook for Amazon Ads is relatively well established at this point. Pick a product to advertise, and make it good by getting reviews and improving your product listings. Build campaigns for only one SKU at a time. Focus those campaigns on specific goals. Optimize them regularly. Grow. You can do all of this on your own or with an agency, but if you’d prefer to try an intelligent, automated approach, there’s Seller Ascent AI.