Overview: 

If you've been advertising on Amazon, you're probably very familiar with Sponsored Products automatic campaigns. If you're just getting into advertising, you should become familiar with auto campaigns since these can be a real goldmine to your business. In this episode, we dive deep into how auto campaigns work, the different targeting types, and ways you can control your auto campaign performance to make sure you're not leaving any sales on the table or wasting ad spend.

Key Takeaways: 

• Everyone should be running auto campaigns
• Make sure you have separate bids for each target type: close match, loose match, substitutes, and compliments.
• Typically a close match targeting type performs better, so we recommend bidding higher for this type.
• Utilize catch-all campaigns, especially if you have a lot of products. The goal is to set a low bid and group all the products together, even if they're entirely unrelated.
• If you're just launching a product or focusing on the discovery side, then the high-bid low-bid auto campaign strategy is a great way to start.

How Sponsored Ads Auto Campaigns work: 

Sponsored ads auto campaigns work by using Amazon's algorithm to find keywords and ASINs that are relevant to your products. It is an excellent source for new product discovery, product development/improvement, listing optimization, and understanding consumer behavior. We're constantly surprised by how people search for different products, and auto campaigns let us capture that.

Sponsored Ads auto campaigns targeting types: 

• Close match: Target keywords closely related to the product.
• Loose match: Target keywords loosely related to the product
• Substitutes: Target products that are direct substitutes or products that are comparable to the advertised product.
• Compliments: Target products that would be bundled items or items frequently purchased with the advertised product.

Ways to control Sponsored Ads auto campaign performance: 

Firstly, to improve your Sponsored Ads auto campaigns' control and hit performance targets, we highly suggest separating your bids for each targeting type. This helps you find out what's most likely to convert into a sale after the click. We find that close match drives higher conversion, so we focus on boosting bids for that targeting type to drive incremental volume. This allows us to cut back bids for the other targeting types that won't convert as well.

Secondly, to control Sponsored Ads auto campaign performance is by using negative keywords and negative product targeting. You can obtain negative keywords by pulling your search term report and analyzing for poor converting keywords, then negate them. This way, those keywords will no longer trigger impressions, thus cutting wasted spend and encouraging productive spend. We walked through this in much more detail in the episode, so tune in for the details.

Using auto campaigns to feed manual campaigns: 

Using auto campaigns to feed manual campaigns is the beginning of the keyword funnel process. We recommend starting with catch-all auto campaigns since these are really easy to create with all your products grouped in a single ad group with a low bid. This generates impressions and clicks at a low CPC while producing low ACoS or RoAS.

Lastly, another way to feed manual campaigns is by using the bid-high bid-low strategy. It is best practice to set up two of the same auto campaigns with one bidding high and the other bidding low. This helps you generate targets that you wouldn't discover in other campaigns due to the high bid, which can be funneled into your manual campaigns for better control.

Episode Highlights: 

Intro: [00:32]

Should I run Amazon auto campaigns? [02:14]

How do Sponsored Ads auto campaigns work? [02:43]

Sponsored Ads auto campaigns targeting types [04:56]

Seller story: Using auto campaigns for keyword/target discovery [10:18]

Leveraging auto campaigns to combat shopping behaviors [11:43]

Steps to figuring out what works well for you [13:03]

Ways you can control auto campaigns performance [16:22]

Using auto campaigns to feed manual campaigns: [19:32]