With the upcoming launch of our software platform for Amazon sellers, myHorizons, we’re excited to announce a new suite of algorithms for Amazon PPC advertising. Envision Horizons is one of only a handful of Amazon partner agencies integrated fully with Amazon’s Advertising API. We’ve used our experience with PPC advertising to create tools for managing your campaigns faster and more effectively.
Managing your Amazon advertising presence through the console at scale is practically impossible. We find that brands who are managing their own ads with no algorithms tend to make one of two mistakes:
Mistake #1: Relying too much on autos
When you start using PPC, it makes sense to use automatic targeting campaigns. They’re easy to understand and set up, and you can get your advertising off the ground in just a few minutes. Manual campaigns, on the other hand, can take hours to set up and require constant monitoring and adjustment after launch. Amazon itself tends to guide first-time advertisers towards auto campaigns! These types of campaigns are a great way to get brands on board with advertising as quickly as possible.
At Envision Horizons, we’ve seen that brands without the bandwidth or expertise to actively manage their PPC tend to end up with 80% or more of their ad spend being spent by automatic targeting campaigns. Even if the campaigns have a healthy ACOS, this isn’t a good strategy. When you stick to auto campaigns, you can’t adjust the bids on individual keywords or product targets and you don’t have as much control over where your ads are shown.
For brands with this issue, the ability to automate bid adjustments and keyword discovery can allow them to start taking advantage of manual campaigns without a steep learning curve. MyHorizons’ algorithms will take existing automatic targeting campaigns and set up manual campaigns for you, gradually picking out search terms from your autos that do well as manual targets. The algorithms can optimize these manual campaigns after creation too, so all you need to do is stay focused on your big-picture strategic objectives.
Mistake #2: Spending hours a week making manual adjustments
Let’s face it – there’s a reason skilled PPC strategists are so hard to find. To run a good PPC campaign you need to be researching search trends, adjusting bids regularly based on their performance, and combing through the search term reports for potential new keywords or negative keywords. Even for a small brand with $15,000 of monthly ad spend, manually optimizing advertising can require upwards of 10 hours a week. If you’re a larger brand with an expansive catalog, it basically becomes a full-time job.
A lot of these tasks are formulaic and repetitive, which is why we started automating them to increase efficiency. MyHorizons allows you to spend less time on the small PPC decisions like adjusting individual bids or finding new keywords based on your search term reports. Relying on software for the more mechanical tasks frees up time for your PPC strategist to focus on the big picture. Let your ad strategist focus on strategic & creative planning; we’ll take care of increasing this specific keyword bid by 32 cents.
If either of these sounds like you, you should be looking at automated solutions for your Amazon PPC. To get a better sense of what MyHorizons can do for your brand, check out our suite of Campaign Management features below…
- Bid Genius
- Search Term Genius
- Campaign Wizard
- Budget Rule
- Bid Adjustment Tool
Bid Genius – hit your target ACOS with algorithmic bidding updates
What does Bid Genius do?
MyHorizons’ Bid Genius tool automatically optimizes your keyword, target and auto bids on a daily basis to make sure they’re perfect to hit your target ACOS. Bid Genius decreases bids on underperforming keywords, increases bids on keywords with good performance, and slowly increases bids on keywords with no clicks so they can get some performance data. If you’re trying to find a way to bring your ACOS down without losing too much of your ad sales, bid genius is exactly what you need – it keeps an eye out for overspending keywords while making sure the good ones thrive, so your campaigns stay dynamically close to your target ACOS.
How to use Bid Genius…
You can enable bid genius for Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaign types. The most basic setup is to pick a target ACOS for each campaign type and simply turn the rule on. The primary controls are located at the top of each tab:
A brand might get started with the following sample values:
- Sponsored Products: enabled, target ACOS 20%
- Sponsored Brands: enabled, target ACOS 30%
- Sponsored Display: enabled, target ACOS 25%
You can also set specific target ACOS levels by product. For example, maybe your brand is launching a new product and wants to spend more to promote it. You could adjust your Bid Genius settings as follows:
- Sponsored Products: enabled, target ACOS 20%
- New Product: target ACOS 50%
- Sponsored Brands: enabled, target ACOS 30%
- Sponsored Display: enabled, target ACOS 25%
If you want to exclude any campaigns from bid optimizations, you can do that as well. For example, let’s say you are creating a Sponsored Brands Video campaign and you want to optimize it manually without any algorithmic interference. You could do the following:
- Sponsored Products: enabled, target ACOS 20%
- Sponsored Brands: enabled, target ACOS 30%
- SBV Campaign 1: disabled
- Sponsored Display: enabled, target ACOS 25%
MyHorizons doesn’t guarantee that your campaigns will perform at exactly the target ACOS with Bid Genius enabled. However, in our trials with clients, we have found that turning on Bid Genius is a great way to optimize ad spend, reach your efficiency goals, and save hours per week (or even per day) on manual adjustments.
Search Term Genius – discover search terms that work; stop spending on ones that don’t
What does Search Term Genius do?
Search Term Genius works with your campaigns that use automatic targeting, broad or phrase match keywords, or category targets. We identify keywords or product targets that are converting and add them to manual campaigns so that you can have better control over your bids (this tool has great synergy with Bid Genius). At the same time, Search Term Genius is constantly looking out for search terms that spend with no return, and will add them as negative match terms so that you can stop wasting money on low-intent searches.
How to use Search Term Genius…
When you enable Search Term Genius’ Discovery feature, you are allowing the tool to create new manual campaigns for the keywords and product targets it discovers. These campaigns will use MyHorizons’ special campaign structure. You can choose which types of targets you are interested in discovering:
- Branded keywords
- Generic keywords
- Competitor keywords
- Branded product targets
- Competitor product targets
MyHorizons uses machine learning technology to determine which search terms fit your criteria and adds them to new campaigns. We recommend using this functionality along with Bid Genius; this way, once the campaigns are launched, they will be automatically optimized and all you need to do is sit back and watch the sales come in.
The Search Term Genius Removal feature is the opposite of the Discovery feature – it looks for customer search terms that don’t seem to be driving conversions. By adding these terms as negative match keywords or targets, it stops you from wasting spend on them.
You can enable/disable Search Term Discovery and Search Term Removal separately from each other. You can also customize your Discovery settings for specific products or campaigns.
Campaign Wizard – launch a full set of brand-new campaigns in just a few clicks
What does Campaign Wizard do?
The MyHorizons Campaign Wizard is the easiest way to set up your campaigns from scratch. It helps set up campaigns for a product by targeting and audience type in just a few clicks. By using Amazon’s targeting recommendations along with machine learning, you can have a set of campaigns running in no time. It is also a perfect tool for you if you want to launch campaigns for a new product. Instead of creating campaigns and ad groups for different targeting types and variants one after another through the console, now you can do it on a single page in a minute.
How to use Campaign Wizard…
Simply set up ad groups for the product you want to advertise, then select the targeting types you want to create. The wizard will get a list of keywords and product targets with suggested bids and sort them for you. You get to review everything before launch, so you have full control over what gets added.
Budget Rules – scale up spend based on performance
What does Budget Rules do?
MyHorizons includes a floating budget rule which lets you allocate more spend to campaigns that are hitting performance targets. By setting up budget parameters, you can make sure you’re getting the most out of campaigns and not running out of budget mid-day.
How to use Budget Rules…
On the Budget Rules page, decide what your target ACOS is and what your performance lookback window should be. Based on these parameters, MyHorizons will check in on your campaigns daily and increase budgets where appropriate. You can also view all the budget changes that have been made in the “Execution History” tab.
Bid Adjustment Tool – easily make bulk changes to your bids
What does Bid Adjustment Tool do?
You can manually adjust bids using an easy-to-follow set of parameters. For example, maybe you want to double your bids for any keyword that has an ACOS under 5% over the past month. You could also use the tool to decrease your bids for keywords that have an ACOS of over 50%.
Note: if you have bid genius enabled, the adjustments you make with this tool could be reversed by the bid genius algorithm. We recommend pausing Bid Genius and using this tool ahead of special events like Prime Day.
How to use Bid Adjustments Tool…
Simply set your parameters (do you want to increase or decrease bids? How much? What is your threshold ACOS?) and then hit “Preview” to see the changes that will be made. You can then accept and execute the changes, or cancel the action if you don’t like the effects.
In Conclusion…
If your brand takes Amazon PPC seriously, you shouldn’t still be managing campaigns with the traditional console interface. myHorizons gives you a suite of powerful tools that strike a balance between control and automation. You can set up most of them in just a few clicks, and if you have more complex requirements they allow for advanced customization. Once your bids and search terms are automatically optimized, you and your team can spend more time on strategy and positioning.
Interested in learning more about myHorizons? Schedule a demo with someone from our team below…
