These are the top 5 Amazon Advertising mistakes that even seasoned veterans might make.
1: Organization
Advertising campaigns get messy fast. The best advertising professionals use a standardized, organized structure to keep things neat and tidy. It's strongly recommended if you are the only person working on an account, and 100% essential if you are working on a team.
Standardized Naming Convention
The most important aspect of campaign organization is a standardized naming convention. Using a standard system you will get a name like this:
P|M|Sierra Sandal|DS|KT
Which tells me at a glance that I am looking at a Sponsored Products ad group with manual targeting, for the product Sierra Sandal, using the Discovery campaign strategy with keyword targeting.
Using a system like this allows you to filter your Campaigns and Ad Groups for things like Campaign Strategy using the search bar. Something which is completely impossible without a system like this.
We've outlined a naming system here based on our experience working with professional advertising agencies:
Amazon PPC Guide > Advanced > Naming Conventions
We strongly recommend you use this as a starting point if you don't have experience with this.
Your naming convention should be written down in a document that you can share with other team members, or agencies who may be working (or will work) on the same account.
Portfolio Grouping
Campaigns can be organized into Portfolios. Most people know that. But most of you aren't doing it, and that's a waste. In fact I don't think i've ever seen an account that reliably organizes all of it's campaigns into portfolios.
Consider that Portfolios can be assigned budgets, and also that you could organize your Portfolios by campaign strategy. That would give you a way to set universal budgets per campaign strategy... or product category... or however else you choose to group them. A powerful tool that most don't take advantage of reliably.
2: Single Ad Group Catch-All campaigns
Catch-All campaigns are a great strategy, but chances are you're doing it wrong.
If you're not sure what a Catch-All campaign is (AKA Backstop, AKA Safety Net) you can learn about it here: Amazon PPC Guide > Intermediate > Campaign Strategies
It is a very common mistake with Catch-All campaigns to put all the products into one ad group. You must still organize the products and their relevant targets into separate ad groups. Otherwise if you do win the auction, the product shown may be completely irrelevant to the target match (You don't get to decide which product from the ad group gets shown).
Additionally you will be less likely to win the auction at all if you are bidding on a product that is not relevant to the target (Keyword, Category, etc).
See Amazon PPC Guide > Advanced > Auction System Theory # Quality Score to learn about the hidden quality score and how it affects bidding.
That leads us nicely into number three.
3: Failure to Understand the Auction System
While the exact technical details of the Amazon Advertising auction system are a closely guarded secret, we are fairly certain that each advertisement is assigned a Quality Score which directly affects the price you pay per click and whether your product is chosen to be shown at all. Some items which are theorized to affect this quality score include:
- Search Term Relevance - Based on the product description, how relevant is the product to the search term?
- Product Reviews - Both the quantity of reviews and the average rating.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) - The percentage of times an ad is clicked on, compared to the number of times it is shown (indicates search term relevance).
- Conversion Rate (CR) - How often the product sells, compared to the number of times it was clicked.
That means that part of your job as an advertiser is to make sure that the product description is updated regularly to include your top keywords. And that you are doing what you can to get as many reviews as possible.
If you are managing advertisements for someone else and they have bad product photos... say something.
Read this post for more detailed Auction System Theory Amazon PPC Guide > Advanced > Auction System
4: Focusing Only On Advertisements
I'm going to generalize here and say that a solid 50% of your time (or more) should be spent on the following:
- Affiliates
- Youtube Videos
- Product reviews
- Product page (images and description)
- Online reviews/articles/blogs
Get your head out of the spreadsheets and interact with the rest of the advertising ecosystem. All of these things will raise your quality score, which will lower your bid cost and win you more auctions.
5: Failure to Follow A Plan
You should decide ahead of time what kind of overall strategy you will be pursuing. Short Term vs Long Term profit. I like to call them Bootstrapped vs Venture Capital.
A "Bootstrapped" campaign is one that is profitable from day one, but total sales are lower, and the organic ranking of the product will rise more slowly.
A "Venture Capital" campaign is one that is run at a loss in the short term, but total sales are higher, and the organic ranking of the product will rise more quickly.
Read this post for more information about Short vs Long Term profit Amazon PPC Guide > Intermediate > Short vs Long Term Profit
If you are running a VC style campaign, set a budget ahead of time with progress checkpoints. Then stick to the plan. If you planned a short term loss, don't get cold feet. You should have budgeted checkpoints and your expectations at each checkpoint. If you aren't at or near your checkpoints, you can reconsider your strategy. But you should have those checkpoints in place.