How to Get the Most Out of Your Amazon Sponsored Ads Efforts: Bobsled's PPC Philosophy

As Amazon Sponsored Ads grow in features, numbers, and complexity, having an advertising strategy in place to use as a guide for prioritizing work becomes imperative.

This week we sat down with one of Bobsled’s team leads - Ross Walker and asked him the big question: What is Bobsled’s PPC Philosophy?

This blog post summarizes the main points covered in our discussion.

There’s no one size fits all

Advertising plays a big part at the top of the iceberg as Bobsled likes to put it. Advertising is a piece of your operation that everyone sees, delivering traffic to your forward-facing product listings, affecting your presence and your overall brand messaging and awareness.

Here at Bobsled, we tune advertising strategies to the client’s products’ lifecycle phase, the pre-requisites of it being: deep and thorough research, understanding of the brands’ sales history, additional sales channels the products are being sold at, brand messaging the product/brands’ unique selling points & product level profitability.

The power of incrementality

Amazon is a game of momentum, and it can take time to build momentum. At Bobsled we try to emphasize that growing step by step is the right path forward, as it takes time for Amazon to recognize that your product is doing better than competitors, but also makes things easier and more predictable from a supply chain and inventory perspective. Obtaining quick sales boost are definitely possible, but they usually require a multi-channel level strategy involving Off-Amazon traffic.

Factoring in the competitive landscape

Analyzing your account and advertising sales data should always be accompanied by analyzing the category you sell in as a whole. How much of the search results are you currently taking up? Which are the main competitors on a keyword level?

PPC professionals at Bobsled continuously monitor Share of Shelf for the most important keywords to the accounts they manage. Strategy adjustments based on your competitors’ moves are crucial for growth on Amazon in 2021.

The Amazon Advertising Triangle

Most Amazon advertising strategies can be categorized into two groups: improving sales velocity (I want more sales) and improving efficiency (I want lower ACoS). The Amazon Advertising triangle is a useful framework that highlights the inverse relationship between efficiency and velocity.

In summary, Amazon advertisers can choose between improving sales velocity fast, sacrificing ACoS, or improving ACoS fast sacrificing velocity but not both. Improving efficiency and velocity is a long-term goal that takes time as it relates to Bobsled’s focus on incremental growth.

Managing a new account: The first 30 days

At Bobsled we always try to start off the relationship at a pretty fast pace. The first 30 days are days of frequent communication: we try to get to know the client, learn as much as we can about the brand and the products it offers.

That is followed by a thorough market and keyword research where account specialists and PPC professionals combine what we already know with what the data tells us. We consider this phase done when we can answer the following questions: 

• What kind of SEO work do we need? 
• What kind of improvements or product pages can we make? 
• How can we improve the product catalog?
• Which types of advertising campaigns should be built out first?
• What is the estimated advertising budget and expected ROI for the first 90 days?

After the foundations are in place the remainder of the month is focused on testing, learning, and adjusting campaigns in accordance with the set goals for the month.

The Technology Factor

The adoption of third-party solutions which help advertisers manage Amazon campaigns more efficiently has been growing rapidly in the past few years. At Bobsled we firmly believe there is a huge advantage to pairing experienced professionals with innovative technology solutions. Bobsled’s advertising professionals utilize PacVue for more efficient campaign management. 

Pacvue’s suite of advertising tools includes many features that are not available through the standard Amazon Advertising dashboard. It also allows us to automate the bidding process by harnessing an advanced AI algorithm as well as rule-based optimization.