It used to be that the standard was anything below a double digit roas (single digit acos, same thing) is a failed campaign that needs to be stopped. But I’m getting to the point where a campaign is “successful” with a much lower roas. At least for campaigns with actual sales (more than 1 sale per day, preferably getting 4-5/day at least to have some meaningful data)
Almost impossible for an item priced below $80-100 to have +10 roas, when the cheapest word in PPC is $3-$4 and half the budget of the campaign has been “mysteriously” drained by 8 AM when I first check campaign manager. Main issue I’m seeing is that without the absurd spending you can’t get new customers. They can’t find you, there’s no such thing as organic ranking for new buyers even when you’re #1 best seller for a given item/category.
Heck, even recurrent customers are having trouble finding items that they have already bought, buried below the mountains of advertisement
Are you guys accepting this as the new normal as well or do I really need to optimize my campaigns?
We have to adjust the ad spend seasonally. We don’t adjust how the ad is set up but only how the bid is set.
We do see double digit RoAs but it is a challenge to maintain. We have our two ads set with low click value (in other words … set at 2 cents per click). Then, we use the “Top-of-search bid adjustment” to control the price of the click while obtaining the top-of-search ad visual (depending on the season … adjustment could be 0% or up to 400% … currently we are 50% and 25%). Our 50% adjustment ad is 8.21 RoAs while the 25% adjustment ad is 10.58. We have more sales on the 50% adjustment ad. Depending on the season, we could have an average RoAs of 20.0+.
Our goal is to control the cost per click, maintain visibility, and receive enough sales to warrant the spend. By doing so, we get new customers but, more important, is we get customers who become repeat customers (which helps in not having to spend a ton of dollars in adverting in the long run).
Interesting.
I’m a very straightforwad-KISS (keep it simple, genius) type of campaign manager
I mostly select 1-2 words for campaign, set the price and remove as much autonomy from the campaign as possible, I trust Amazon very little to make the decisions.
Is this literal or figurative? Because if I set the bit to $0.02, I’d need to increase the adjustment by a factor similar to Avogrado’s number
Bid set is $0.02 to $0.05.
Inside a campaign, we have 13 different Ad Groups. Within that campaign, we can turn off or on an Ad Group (think seasonally … turn off one Ad Group … turn on another Ad Group). The bid set can be different between Ad Groups.
Our items are not high dollar value thus the price per click and RoAs are very important to make it worth the effort. By working with the “Top-of-search bid adjustment”, we can control the price per click and do it seasonally. Our target range of price per click is $0.25 to $0.50. We also won’t try to out bid (increase) during the holiday season as it doesn’t make sense to try to out bid the big guns. For us, March through September is when the higher spend translates into more sales.
What we do probably isn’t for everyone but it works for us. We used the same strategy when we did Google Ads for our regular site and it worked for us there also.
This makes a lot of sense, I fully understand your strategy, and applaud you for mantaining the right Roas
I’m going to give it a try with a campaign that follows that approach.
I did Google ads for months, had super high traffic (on the 100k views/month with a monthly budget of $500) but the conversion rate was so incredibly low that I gave up. I think that people still mistrust Shopify stores, Amazon does provide a level of safety to the buyer that is difficult to convey in your own store
Our site is it’s own domain and not on Shopify. It was built and strong before we dipped into Amazon. When we were hit with a tornado in 2017, we kept the website going but dropped the Google Ads so we could focus on other things and sales slowed down. Amazon required less attention back then so we worked with it more. This year will be the year we focus more on our site, rebuild the Google Ads, and pull back on Amazon.
When I was doing it, it was in the 80’s. When we hired someone, he steadily brought it down to the 30’s, then upper 20’s by end of year. So far this year, things have ticked up to the low 30’s again.
Amazon needs our Ad $. It’s how they survive folks.
Wow, I’m really sorry about the tornado. That’s crazy!
I did the google ads during the covid years… what a weird time. Maybe I should give them a chance again, but I hate wasting money
Your category is brutal. But, well, you actually know mine and my products, so mine is probably slightly less cut-throat, but not by much.
Maybe that’s part of the issue, is too competitive and I’m trying to do it myself. I’m “investing” about 1 hour a day in optimizing things, and while I’m slightly better than 30…
When the former sailor we had doing our advertising decided two retirements was enough to live a nice life in Thailand and Belize, we switched to an PPC management company. We were wasting money on buying ads off peak time and off season.
We got a deal for onboarding all 3 companies, but it is possible to be in the 7-10 range depending on the market and how good the listings are. The number below is only in the double digits because we are running an expensive campaign to sell expiring inventory.
Where Amazon gets you is when you have ads running at 1AM on a Saturday when you have sold 95% of your sales between 11AM-3PM Monday-Thursday. You cannot manage that manually when you have a lot of SKU’s.
There are a couple of things to do with Google for the ads to work. You need to have a Merchant Center account set up. Then add your product pages to Google.
After you have done that, then set up the Google Ads.
We have been out of it for a while but, in the past, there was a tracking script that Google had us add into the website which allowed for tracking of hits, sales, etc. Not sure if that is still being done. At one point, there was certain meta data that helped out also if it was formatted the way Google wanted it. But that was way back in the dark ages of the internet and so much has changed since then.
Yes, I did all that, and it took a bit of time. I never closed mine, still get the monthly emails saying 0 movement, but it was enough work that I decided it was best to keep it open
I do wish you lots of success (in general, but also in this venture) please consider circling back in a few months with (hopefully) a very positive update on results!
Thanks, VTR, interesting to see, and congrats on the successful campaigns!
I’ve noticed this a lot. It kills me that I wake up and a good amount of money has been squandered with no reason. You also know my line, you know that nobody buys my products at 3am, other than the peanuts, nothing is a drunk impulse buy.
I never know if it’s sabotage or mere trigger happy bots from on and off Amazon
Campaign rules only allow you to increase the bids at certain time, they don’t allow you to pause a campaign from say 7 pm to 8 am, right? Just to say, I want to go 150% at 11 am. In other words, you can spend your budget earlier to prevent the late hours, but not really choose the actual hours unless you toggle it manually on-off every day (super efficient)
I have four thousand seven hundred thirty seven campaigns (obviously not that many, but you get the idea) When I started to advertise, I had no clue as to how to do it, and there were a bunch of poorly done campaigns that I have archived. As the years go on, I have refined them. Some campaigns are 4-5 years old and running well enough, so I keep them going, others are more modern.
I have pondered killing everything and doing only 2-3 campaigns for the bulk, with ads groups per sku and what not, so that I can toggle it on-off, but I’m really allergic to messing with something that works. If it aint broke don’t fix it. I really don’t want to mess with the campaigns that have ran for years and have a track record of $100ks and MMs impressions.
The company we hired that uses AI and automation, changes our bid price and budgets automatically minute by minute as if you were manually doing it. At least that is what I took away from the demo when it was voted on two years ago and when I have to fill in for the person who does advertising on the Teams call.
We haven’t used that as it is API approach which would be to detailed for what we need … but on the regular ad page in the menu you will find rules. You can use rules to set up times for ads to run and to control the bid increase during that time. Could be used as a day, a week, before a holiday period, or to set as infinite (by using custom date).
But afaik those rules only allow you to set how much you want to increase your bids from 8 am to 7 pm (to say something) you still have bids from 12 am to 8 am, and if there’s any change left, from 7 to 11:59 pm
One thing that frustrates me a lot is that Amazon always drains my budget. If by the end of the day there’s some allocation left, bibbidi bobbidi boo, a bit of misdirection, a quick couple of clicks and there’s nothing left
Its impossible to answer this question without stated objectives of campaigns. I can start a campaign right now and make it 2% acos and .01 tacos but what am I doing?
a. market share
b. conversion
c. volume
d. market conversion
e. market volume
f. kws
g. kw ranking
h. organic ranking
There are so many variables that have to be addressed before indulging in acos and tacos discussions.
That is why we would set the lowest possible bid so that between midnight and 8am would be minimal. The 8am to 7pm would be increased to the level you would want the maximum bid to be during that time. The 7pm to midnight would be lower if not back to the lowest possible bid.
You are in the eastern time zone. 8am to 7pm is 5am to 4pm pacific time. We are central time so our spread isn’t as bad. Unless all of your sales are either eastern or central time, we wouldn’t set it like that. Our slowest time is 2am to 8am. Our best time is 3pm to 9pm. Late west coast orders tend to come in 11pm to 2am central time and early east coast orders are 5am to 8am central time. Winter time orders tend to be more of a mid afternoon thing while summer time tends to be morning and later in the evening after the sun goes down.
The way we are currently set up, we get maybe one or two clicks overnight and the cost per click is usually below $0.05 so it doesn’t hurt us or run our budget out. As the internet activity increases and decreases, our cost per click goes up and down (with the exception of November and December).
We would note that different product could have different trends. Just giving you some insight as to what we see so you can use what you can and discard the rest.
