Campaign Strategies
In this section we will cover the various campaign strategies which are used by professional sellers as well as advertising agencies.
We will break these into two basic categories:
- Primary Strategies - These are the basic, tested strategies which should really be included in any professional campaign. They may go by another name, or be slightly different, but these are the core strategies that you should always be using.
- Secondary Strategies - These are the strategies that can be added on top of the primary strategies, depending on whether they are relevant to your situation.
Lastly we will cover a couple of additional topics:
- Universal Campaign Rules - These are rules that should be followed for all campaigns, regardless of the strategy.
- Discouraged/Debunked Strategies - These are strategies that are either outdated, misguided or rely on misconceptions.
Different individuals/agencies may use different names for the same strategies we describe here. While it would be nice if there were standardized names for these, there simply aren't. Use common sense and try to understand the underlying strategy, rather than the name.
Unless otherwise noted, assume a Fixed Bids campaign bidding strategy for all strategies listed here.
Primary Strategies
Research
Alternate names for this strategy: Research, Discovery, Prospecting, Top of Funnel, TOF, Exploration
The goal of this strategy is to find new targets (keywords, products) that are relevant to your product and are converting well. This strategy is extremely important in the beginning as it generates the data that will optimize the rest of your campaigns.
A research strategy will typically have the following targeting characteristics:
- Broad + Phrase Match Keywords
- Product Category Targeting
- Product Targeting (Match Type:
Expanded From) - Auto Targeting
The idea is that each of these targeting types casts a wide net, and may return results that you did not expect or predict. Those results are found in the reports. Once winning targets are identified, they are added to the High Quality campaign.
The discovery of negative targets is equaly important, and those are added to all campaigns.
Research campaigns are expected to be the least profitable of all campaigns, in fact they are nearly guaranteed to be unprofitable. The goal is to find new targets, not to make money.
Eventually the spending on a research campaign should diminish as the majority of the high quality targets have been discovered and transferred to the High Quality Targets campaigns. The duration and spend on Research Campaigns depends on whether you are running a Bootstrap or VC style campaign.
High Quality Targets
Alternate names for this strategy: High Quality, Exact Match, Proven, Bottom of Funnel, BOF, Conversion, Profitable, Winners,
This is where well converting targets which have been identified in research campaigns are moved. This is where the majority of your budget should be spent.
These campaigns will have the following targeting characteristics:
- Exact Match Keywords
- Product Targets (Specific ASINs, Match Type:
Same As)
Every target in these campaigns should be at or near target ACoS, and should be profitable.
High Quality Target campaigns should have the highest budgets of all campaigns. In theory, to maximize profit these campaigns should never run out of budget. If you are operating within the constraint of a budget, set the overall budget at the portfolio level, a smaller budget on the discovery campaigns and a very high budget on the high quality campaigns.
Catch All
Alternate names for this strategy: Backstop, Safety Net
A catch-all campaign is intended as a type of backstop for all of the traffic that slips through the cracks of all other campaigns, yours and your competitors.
This traffic could fall through the cracks for a number of reasons:
- Low bids
- Lack of targeting
- Budget expenditure (budget has run out)
Catch all campaigns are made by putting together all of your products together into a campaign. You also put all of your targets from all other compaigns into these campaigns. You set very low target bids (EG $0.15) which would normally never win any auctions. The hope is that if there are no matching targets in any other campaigns, or all other campaigns have run out of budget, the auction will find your low bid and serve your ad.
- All products together
- Extremely low bid ($0.15)
- 1 Broad Match Keyword Ad Group (all keywords from all campaigns)
- 1 Product Targeting Ad Group (all product targets from all campaigns)
- 1 Auto Ad Group
- Dynamic Bids (up and down 100%)
It may be necessary to organize your catch all campaigns into multiple campaigns, depending on the type of ads you are running. For example because Sponsored Products campaigns must choose between manual and auto targeting, you would need to create 2 campaigns to cover all your bases, like so:
- Catch All Manual (Campaign)
- Catch All Broad Keyword (Ad Group)
- Catch All Product Targeting (Ad Group)
- Catch All Auto (Campaign)
- Catch All Auto (Ad Group)
It is a very common mistake with catch all campaigns to put all the products into one ad group. This is a mistake. 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. 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. See Advanced > Auction System Theory for more on why that is.
Catch All campaigns are typically organized into their own portfolio. As they contain all of your products together, they cannot otherwise be organized by product category. If you wish to organize them by product category, you would need to create a catch all campaign for each product category.
Why are catch all targets organized into their own campaigns instead of ad groups within their respective product category campaigns? Because budgets are set at the campaign level, and a catch all campaign should never run out of budget. They typically have incredibly high ROAS (10x not uncommon), but will have a low volume. A set of catch all targets inside a campaign that has run out of budget is not doing anything for you. The backstop should always be up.
Secondary Strategies
These strategies should be created in addition to the primary strategies, if they are relevant to your situation.
Brand Competition
These strategies are only relevant for products that have strong brand recognition. For example if people would search for your product by brand name. If that is the case then you should consider offensive/defensive brand campaigns. Otherwise the offensive targets would simply be rolled into your high quality campaigns.
Offensive
Offensive campaigns specifically target your competitors brand names and ASINs. The idea is to steal shoppers away from your competitors even as they are searching specifically for your competitors products.
Target Characteristics:
- Competitor Brand Keywords
- Competitor ASINs
Offensive campaigns have a tendency towards low conversion rates. As you will be targeting users who are specifically searching for your competitor's products, they typically already know what they want to buy. It is difficult to run these profitably.
Defensive
Defensive campaigns are intended to protect your brand from your competitors. The idea is to prevent your competitors from stealing your customers who may be targeting your brand name or ASINs.
Target Characteristics:
- Brand Keywords
- Brand ASINs
Defensive campaigns will typically have very high conversion rates and low ACoS. However this can be deceiving as we are specifically targeting users who were already searching for our brand. In most cases it was probably unnecessary to pay for these clicks.
Product Variant Targeting
There are some types of product variations that may benefit from having their own sets of keywords.
For example if I you are selling a t-shirt in 3 different colors, then you may want to group all the sizes of each color together into unique ad groups, with keywords specific to that color.
For example blue t-shirt, blue jogging shirt, etc. Make sure that all of these keywords are either exact or phrase. It's imperative that the word blue is in the keyword target.
This strategy can be applied beyond colors, for example if you are selling a product in different sizes, or different materials, you can list those specific identifiers in the keywords. We are talking specifically about characteristics that are not the same for all ASIN's in the product line. Otherwise those keywords would just be in the primary ad groups.
This strategy is particularly useful for the variants which are not the most popular. As we learned in the Handling Product Variations section, the most popular variant is the one which should typically be advertised. As such a person who is looking for a particular product characteristic in a photo or title may pass right over the most popular variant, and not even realize that it is available in the variant they are looking for.
2nd Language
This strategy involves creating campaigns in a second language, typically the second most popular language in the region. For example if you are in the US, you would create a campaign in Spanish. If you are in Canada you would create a campaign in French.
You take your keywords from your High Quality Targets campaigns, and you duplicate those campaigns, translating the language of the keywords to the second language.
Dynamic Bids
There are some novel strategies that you can pursue with dynamic bids. For example you can use dynamic bidding to effectively create Sponsored Products ads that will only appear on the search page or competitors product detail pages, as opposed to both.
In some cases you may have keywords that convert higher for one or the other.
You can accomplish this by using fixed bids for the campaign, with the Adjust bids by placement option enabled. The highest increase you can set is 900%, which is effectively a 10x increase.
You would then just need to ensure that all the bids you place on the targets in that campaign are 1/10th of what you would normally bid. That would effectively take the undesired placement out of the running.
Universal Campaign Rules
- All product within a campaign should have the same price. Makes it easier to calculate profit and loss.
- All broad match targets should have a lower bid than exact match targets. This prevents keyword infighting and ensures that discovery campaigns are not stealing traffic from high quality campaigns.
Discouraged/Debunked Strategies
There are some strategies which are based on misconceptions or outdated information. These strategies are either not effective, or are not necessary if your other campaigns are configured correctly.
Mispellings Campaigns
There was a time when it was recommended to create campaigns with mispelled keywords. The idea was that you would be able to get cheap clicks because customers would mispell the keywords and you would be the only one bidding on the mispellings. The idea was the same for plurals. And in fact, this was an effective strategy years ago.
This is no longer the case however as the search algorithm now corrects for mispelled words and will match them to exact keyword targets with the correct spelling.
For advertisers this is actually fantastic news as we no longer need to spend our time trying to account for every possible combination of mispellings and plurals in our keywords.
Single Keyword Campaigns
A lot of content out there recommends something called a single keyword campaign. The idea is that you create a series of campaigns with a single keyword per campaign. In theory this "helps those keywords to perform to their full potential", or something along those lines.
Besides the fact that this would be an organizational nightmare, the justifications cited for this strategy rely on a few misconceptions.
Justification 1: You can ensure that the highest performing keywords never run out of budget!
Response: This would simply be an organizational failure on the other campaigns if it happened. Top performing keywords and other targets should be moved to the high quality campaigns, which should already have the largets budget allowable.
Justification 2: By putting a single keyword in a campaign, you can adjust dynamic bid settings uniquely for each keyword!
Response: While this is technically true, it would not be the most organized way to execute this strategy. You would instead create a separate campaign for each bid setting, and put all of the keywords with that bid setting into that campaign. For example Top of Search +50% would be a campaign, etc.