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Upgrade your PPC Strategies with the Recent Amazon Updates
Amazon Advertising Lessons - September 29, 2023
George Reid
September 29, 2023
Amazon has recently launched two game-changing features to help take PPC optimization to the next level. Combined, they can help drive higher ROI and scalability.
In this week’s email, let’s delve into these features and understand how they can help.
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New “Schedule Rules” for Bidding Strategy
One of the standout additions is the introduction of schedule rules for bid adjustments. This feature now allows increasing placement adjustments on schedule, which could be:
Daily: enabling you to run ads either continuously all day or during designated hours at defined start and end times.
Weekly: where you can target specific days of the week to optimize your ad performance.
Importantly, these scheduling rules add to your existing bidding strategy and placement adjustments. For instance, if you've already set a dynamic bid adjustment at 20%, these new rules will layer on top of it based on the percentage you specify.
New “Hourly” Campaigns report
Amazon has rolled out the hourly report for Sponsored Products campaigns, providing a granular breakdown of campaign performance for each hour of the day. Previously, this data was only accessible through the Amazon Marketing stream via API, limiting its use to a select few.
Now, it's available in reports, making it accessible to all advertisers in Excel format. This allows for easy data analysis, including the application of pivot tables and other functions for data summarization.
How They Can Help Improve Performance
The hourly data from the reporting feature offers invaluable insights into when your ads perform at their best, as well as the times when performance is low. You can analyze metrics such as Conversion, CPC (Cost-Per-Click), CTR (Click-Through Rate), and traffic, based on your KPIs, to identify peak and off-peak periods.
Advertisers can then act based on the insights using the schedule feature. For instance, if your Ads convert exceptionally well between 6 AM and 11 AM, you can schedule bid increases during these hours to maximize sales.
The scheduling feature also allows for setting up multiple schedules. For instance, if your Ads perform well at multiple times of the day, you can add multiple schedules as well.
In essence, you gain the ability to manage your ad budget on an hourly basis in addition to daily management, a potential game-changer for optimizing performance.
Limitation:
With bid scheduling, one limitation is it only allows increasing the bids but not decreasing, similar to the budget rules. This makes it ineffective for reducing bids during low converting times of the day.
Workaround:
A workaround to this is to keep the base bids low and then set the rules to increase them during the scheduled hours when there is a high conversion. This could be effective, but sometimes, one may be tempted to increase base bids when the overall performance is good but then would need to keep it low if there are schedules. It could have been most effective to be able to decrease the percentage as well, just like the increase.
Breaking down the insights:
Campaign or Product Level
When analyzing the hourly data, it’s crucial to avoid looking at the overall data and breaking it down to product or campaign level. The hourly performance could be different for the different products, based on their conversion, competition, search frequency, etc.
Account-level
It’s also important to combine this data with the account performance data as well, which you can obtain from the orders report. This will provide you with more data, including the non-attributed Ads data.
Day-wise
It’s worthwhile comparing the hourly data on different days of the week, or at least weekdays vs. weekends. Usually, the performance differs on the different days of the week, so it will help make more informed decisions. You can then use the weekly schedules to select the days for the different schedules.
Lastly, with this option, we can expect other advertisers to also be acting on this data. This means, they might also be adjusting their bids for the high converting times for example, which could significantly change the performance data. Thus, it will be equally important to regularly analyze these insights and make regular adjustments.
Other learnings:
Amazon introduces Reorder Coupons. These help in re-engaging previous customers to enhance loyalty and sales. [Read more].
Prime Big Deal to be held on Oct 10-11. Sellers can capitalize on this event by launching coupons, Prime Exclusive Discounts, or sponsoring products. [Read more].
Unlock valuable insights with Customer Loyalty Analytics. The dashboard provides deep insights into consumer behavior and historical trends to enhance customer lifetime value. [Read more].
Amazon Attribution enables off-Amazon retargeting. It now allows re-engaging visitors from the past 30 days who clicked on off-Amazon ads. [Read more].
Thanks,
Himanshu
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