Top 5 PPC Tips For Amazon Prime Day 2019

Today I’m going to be talking about prime day PPC. So, in other words, what’s tips and things you need to do, leading up to Prime Day here to get the best results with your PPC. So I’m going to go over some tips.

I’ve been seeing some of the other discussions on Facebook, from some other PPC experts or service providers, things like that. I agree with some of the things they’re saying I disagree with a lot of the other, or with some of the other with some of the things they’re saying. So first things first, you know, people always want to know about bids, you know, your PPC bids, should you raise your bids, should you reduce your bids? You know, all of those kinds of things.
So in, in our testing, between multiple years of Prime Day, we think that you should either keep your PPC or your cost per click bid your bids steady, leading up to the prime base. So up to the primary, you don’t want to increase bids, I would say either keep them steady or decrease your bidding. And that’s depending on what your current metrics are if you’re costs are blowing up right now, I would definitely say you reduce those bids.
The reason is right now is a lot of people are, I call it browser shopping. So they’re just going through and clicking through and find products that they want to purchase during Prime Day, but they’re holding off, you know, maybe adding to cart or not even doing that. So right now you’re getting a lot of clicking and a lot of conversions. So for us, we keep steady or decrease right now.
But we don’t touch our high performing keywords, we’re talking about keywords that are, you know, in your range of a cost, you know, so your targeted cost is 30%. If you have keywords that are performing in that 30 to 40% range prior to the weeks leading up, then you might want to reduce those bids. But for the performing keywords, you know, stuff that’s like  10% or under, you definitely don’t want to touch those, you want to keep those going strong.
So the day of Prime Day, we also think you should keep your bids relatively average, we don’t want you to raise them too much if you’re going to raise them do it by 10%. And only do that for winners. So in other words, the keywords that have a history of good performance.
And the other thing you have to think about which nobody really mentions is, you definitely don’t want to be raising your bids if you’re running a discount, you know, if your products 30% off, then your current a cost is not going to look the same. Because of that discount. So in other words, you’re not making as much per sale. So you’re going to see performance drop off, now there’s volume, and conversions, that will make up for a little bit of that gap. But just be aware that if you’re running a discount that, you know, that you may not see as good results if you raise your bids.
Okay, another thing that I highly, highly, highly, very much highly suggest and something that we’ve seen work really well, in previous prime days is what people will do is they’ll, you know, they’ll set up their budgets, and you know, they’re normal budgets. And with those normal budgets, you’ll see them budget out like super early in the day, you know, like 3 am 4 am 7 am 10 am things like that. In our data, we went back and looked at our data. Now this, of course, may not be across the board for all different accounts. But, you know, we assume that this is probably fairly accurate if you just look at common sense, you know, time-wise, East Coast, you know, Eastern Time Zone is also is the biggest time zone also the most people highest population density. So if you look at Eastern Time Zone, and we look back at our data, it looks like the real shopping starts at about three or 4 am pacific time, which is six or 7 am, Eastern Eastern Standard Time, and then goes till about 7 pm pacific time, which is 10 pm. Eastern Standard Time, like that, ‘s where we see, during those hours, kind of the strongest volume of sales, at least in our data.
Now, that being said, you know that how you want to position this is up to you, what we normally do is we’ll turn our PPC off, at least till three or 4 am. And the reason we do this is that people are going to go in super strong early in the morning, who are not dayparting, or who are not pausing or things like that. And they’re going to budget out super early in the day. So as the day goes on for Prime Day, the cost per click is probably going to go down, because so many people are going to budget out early in the day.
So that’s a huge, huge tip that nobody really talks about. So for us, we’re gonna add dayparting at the beginning of the day and then probably start at three or 4 am. We may do some test campaigns, using dayparting just so we have that data for next year. In other words, we might have some campaigns that we don’t even start till, you know, noon or you know, later in the day, to see what kind of performance we get there that way next year, we’ll have that data to, to look at.
So that’s, that’s another technique. Now if you don’t know what day party is, that’s turning campaigns off and on during specific times of day. There’s not a whole lot of tools that do that. I know that ours does, of course, our Daydream tool, if you’re not a member of SellerSEO, we give 30 day free trials. And we’re actually currently also not requiring payment anymore.
So in other words, you don’t need to enter a credit card to give the tool a try. You will have to verify your yourself via social accounts to get that free trial. But it’s a 30-day free trial. And I highly suggest that you sign up today and go and try that tool get it dialed in to learn how it works before Prime Day so you don’t run into any snafu is during Prime Day. I highly highly suggest you use Dayparting whether it’s our tool or another tool, definitely take a look at that. If you don’t want to use the tool, you can do it manually. But I don’t suggest that because if you sleep in or you forget or something like that, you could end up losing a ton of sales. So definitely look at an automated solution.
On that same note, another tip is going to watch your budgets like a hawk. It depends on how you want to do it. Normally how we do it is we’ll set our campaign budgets will go through before Prime Day and make sure our campaign budget levels aren’t too high. You know, because if you have a super high budget on a campaign that normally doesn’t blow through that campaign, that that budget cap, so in other words, if you have a campaign that you have a budget cap of hundred dollars, and normally it spends like 20 to $30 a day, something like that on Prime Day, it might, or it will most likely go all the way up to that cap. So just be aware that you could end up blowing through a ton of money really quickly, if you don’t have your budgets capped, at least at the budget level.
Now a lot of people don’t know that you can also set a cap at the campaign level, or I mean, I’m sorry, at the account level. So how you get to that is you just go to your advertising dashboard, and click on advertising settings. It’s one of them, you know, when you first go into your, your, your campaign manager, and you’ll see that there’s an option that says use daily budget cap now, how we use that is we set a cap, you know, early in the day, and then we watch it and we make sure that we don’t hit that cap. But the reason why we cap it is, you know, if if you’re you might have some campaign that for some reason, you know, generally, like I said it won’t spend, you know, it won’t normally spend at that amounts, because there’s just not the volume with Prime Day, you could end up spending a ton of money actually even going negative on Prime Day, if you get crazy with your PPC. So just be really, really careful with that. The other thing with the budget cap is if you’re not paying attention, you could end up budgeting out super, super early on, as I said, 3 am 4 am something like that. So really, really keep an eye on your budgets. This year, we’re probably going to take a nap and probably stay up you know till midnight and watch our campaigns midnight Pacific Time 3 am on the east coast. And we’ll probably just just start keeping an eye on it from there on and stay up for a while and see, you know, kind of how we’re performing and then you know, be able to make adjustments on the fly there if need be.
Now, another thing that you really, really want to think about is using your product targeting campaigns and headline ads. Use product targeted campaigns and headline search ads! You know, with a ton of our PPC clients that we’re bringing on, I would say nine out of 10 don’t even have any product targeting campaign spun up. And that’s where we’re seeing the most opportunity now. And the way that you have to think about it is like you may not have a lightning deal or a prime day deal. But your competitors probably do if there are bigger brands. So that’s where you really want to go hard on those on those competitive brands. You know, make sure that your product is on their page, especially if you have a better price or better reviews, you’ll be able to steal away tons and tons of their business. On Prime Day, if they have a lightning deal or primary deal that you don’t have, you can end up driving tons of sales and traffic away from your competitor to your ads. So just something to be super aware of.
Last but not least, Prime Day is two days this year. So you know to be cognizant of that, you’re going to want to make sure that you know that you’re not blowing through a ton of budget on the first day, it’s going to fall over into the second day. Now my assumption, my guess is that day one is going to be busier than day two, just because you know people are going to be more excited for the first day, I’m guessing the better deals will probably be on the first day, I can’t guarantee that I’m just guessing. Just you know, using a purely shopper mentality, you know, people are going to want to get the best deals and think that they’re going to be you know, the first deals out of the gate to get people excited for the rest of Prime Day. So definitely, just keep that in mind.
So yeah, those are the tips for Prime Day. Another thing, kind of a bonus tip here, if you don’t know a lot of people don’t know this. But you can actually adjust on things like your auto campaigns. If you go into your auto campaigns, that there’s a little button called placements. And what that lets you do is that lets you look at your past performance on top of search and product pages. And Amazon will give you stats for those campaigns at the campaign level. So they’ll say you know, top of search, you’re performing at, you know, 23% ACOS on product pages, you know, you’re performing at 55%, or something like that, what that lets you do is that lets you just bidding on what’s performing the best to, you know, if your top of search is performing the best you can go ahead and adjust those bids up to get the most amount of sales, because that’s converting the best. Unfortunately, you can’t, you can’t go negative on these values, which really is frustrating. To me, I think it would be awesome if Amazon gave us the ability to go negative. So that, you know, if your product pages are performing poorly, you can say, hey, negative 25% on the bid there. My assumption is they may do that at some point. But I wish I really wish that they had that rolled out at the moment.
One other thing to think about and to be cognizant of is your, your, your campaign adjustments on the campaign level. So in other words, under campaign settings, your bidding strategy. So in other words, when you go into your campaigns and you go into campaign settings, you’ll see the campaign bidding strategy dynamic bids down only dynamic bids up and down and then fixed bids. For Prime Day, you might want to go down to dynamic bids down only if you want to control your budgets. If you want to be really aggressive, you can leave dynamic bids up and down. In our testing, if you’re if you’ve just set up a new campaign dynamic bids up and down doesn’t really work very well. And we think that’s because there’s not enough data in that campaign in order for the AI to come up with the best strategy. So if it’s a new campaign, I would suggest down only. Also if it’s a campaign that generally doesn’t perform super well, you might want to leave it down only as well. If it’s a campaign that throughout the year performs really, really well, then you might want to think about the dynamic bids up and down for Prime Day. But once again, if you’re going to do that keep a really, really close on your budget. You could end up blowing through your budget really, really quickly, really early in the morning. You know, especially if you’re not using a party.
It’s going to be Prime Day before you know it, I believe it starts Monday the 15th. Let’s see, let’s make sure that 15th Monday, the 15th and 16th. If you put that into Google, if you say when’s Prime Day, and it will tell you, Google’s getting really smart with that stuff. But I think that’s it, guys.  Need more help? You can also find my group Amazon FBA Titans and also Amy’s group, which is amazing at home. Thanks again guys and we’ll see you next time!