Oct. 7, 2025

076: Tactic Tuesdays: Is Amazon Becoming Your PPC Manager?

The advertising landscape on Amazon is undergoing a radical transformation. Gone are the days when brand owners needed complex campaign structures with thousands of exact match keywords to succeed. Instead, Amazon's algorithm has evolved to become your new PPC manager – and it's proving remarkably effective.

Our latest discoveries reveal that auto campaigns are now receiving substantially more exposure than traditional exact match campaigns, while simultaneously delivering superior performance metrics. This shift mirrors what's already happened on Meta and TikTok, where AI-driven targeting has replaced manual keyword management. The evidence is compelling: four of our top five performing campaigns are now auto campaigns, generating approximately 40% of our ad-driven revenue.

The game-changer appears to be Amazon's increasingly sophisticated audience targeting capabilities. By selecting the "highly likely to convert" audience and applying appropriate bid modifiers, brands can dramatically improve campaign performance without the complexity of traditional keyword management. For cash-strapped businesses or solopreneurs without agency support, this evolution represents an opportunity to achieve 80% of optimal advertising performance with a fraction of the management overhead.

That said, this doesn't mean exact match campaigns and manual optimization are obsolete. Ranking campaigns, brand defense strategies, and competitive targeting still require human expertise. The key is finding the right balance for your specific situation – leveraging Amazon's algorithmic intelligence while maintaining strategic oversight.

For brands looking to capitalize on this trend, we recommend starting with properly structured auto campaigns for each product grouping (not lumping everything together), implementing audience targeting with bid modifiers, and maintaining basic campaign hygiene by separating branded search terms. As Amazon's algorithm continues to improve, this approach will only become more effective.

What's your experience with auto campaigns? Are you seeing similar performance improvements, or are you still finding better results with traditional keyword-based approaches? Share your insights and let's navigate this evolving landscape together.

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00:00 - Amazon Becoming Your PPC Manager

03:37 - Cash Flow Crunch and Ad Strategy

08:19 - Auto Campaigns Getting Smarter

14:16 - Meta vs Amazon Ad Approaches

21:03 - Solutions for Small Brands

27:50 - Campaign Structure Best Practices

30:59 - The Future of Amazon Advertising

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00:00:00.360 --> 00:00:03.149
Welcome everybody to another episode of Brand Fortress HQ.

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Today we're excited to talk to you about something that's kind of happened on the ad side of Amazon, which is, you know, is Amazon becoming your new PPC manager.

00:00:11.846 --> 00:00:24.580
For people that may or may not be familiar with other ad platforms, especially meta has really transitioned over into more intent marketing and not as much kind of the keyword, different match types and those types of things that we're used to.

00:00:24.580 --> 00:00:36.533
So this is a great conversation to have today on you know what does this look like for the future of ads on Amazon, and so with that, Mike, I'm actually going to hand it over to you, because I know this is something you've been working on quite a bit lately.

00:00:37.840 --> 00:00:38.481
Yeah for sure.

00:00:38.481 --> 00:00:52.926
So, just being real, you know, anybody who's been listening to the podcast for a while knows that as a brand, we're kind of in a rough space with tariffs and whatnot and a few kind of mishaps that happened that unfortunately cascaded with the tariff problem.

00:00:52.926 --> 00:01:12.486
It's put us in a real cash flow crunch, and so one of the things that that results in is we just have to be really, really careful Not that we shouldn't have been in the past, but it's an absolute necessity right now that our ad costs, in relationship to the amount of revenue that they're bringing back, really have to be dialed in.

00:01:12.486 --> 00:01:44.308
Right now we just don't have any room for error, and so one of the things that came up recently was this I don't know trend, whatever you want to say, but more and more sellers, and especially some agencies, are starting to talk about this idea where Amazon is moving into this space, where auto campaigns are getting considerably more exposure, let's say, than exact, match or broad and phrase match campaigns, than exact, match or broad and phrase match campaigns.

00:01:44.308 --> 00:01:59.531
And in addition to that, amazon has rolled out some new features that allow you to, we'll say, give Amazon the leeway to decide who's seeing your ads.

00:01:59.531 --> 00:02:03.191
Now, of course, an auto campaign already does that right.

00:02:03.191 --> 00:02:13.894
When you set up an auto campaign, essentially what you're telling Amazon is this is my product, you figure out who to advertise it to and then Amazon is off to the races.

00:02:14.500 --> 00:02:33.532
Now what generally would happen in the past and this is still true, it's not like you don't still want to do this, but Amazon would flood the platform and your product would end up in front of anybody and everybody, and in the past oftentimes it seemed like they weren't very good at figuring out who actually should be seeing your ad.

00:02:33.532 --> 00:02:33.772
Right.

00:02:33.772 --> 00:02:37.049
Auto campaigns were not necessarily a performance campaign.

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They were a harvesting campaign through a big net and see what Amazon put it in front of and be able to see what keywords and what types of products was your product performing well against, and then you would exit those out to exact match and phrase match and all of that, and those would be the performance campaigns.

00:02:59.719 --> 00:03:08.094
Now I think we're moving into a space where much more, first of all, amazon is getting better at putting those ads in front of the right people.

00:03:08.094 --> 00:03:17.094
I would say our auto campaigns, even just left alone, are performing way better than they ever performed in the past, without a whole bunch of negation.

00:03:17.094 --> 00:03:19.167
Now that doesn't mean you're not going to have to negate.

00:03:19.167 --> 00:03:22.911
You're still going to want to go in and negate certain products and certain key phrases and things like that.

00:03:22.911 --> 00:03:30.745
So you know, don't think that you're going to avoid that.

00:03:30.765 --> 00:03:31.508
However, amazon is getting better.

00:03:31.527 --> 00:03:34.680
But what's even better than that is that on the auto campaigns you don't have that opportunity to say you can choose.

00:03:34.939 --> 00:03:56.139
Essentially it's an audience and it's kind of a bid modifier situation where you say, okay, amazon calls it highly likely to convert is the audience, and if you select that, you can give it a bid modifier, which in other words just says pay more, I'm willing to pay you more to put my ad in front of that person that you believe has a high likelihood to convert.

00:03:56.762 --> 00:04:08.947
And what we have seen is that that audience does convert significantly better than the standard auto campaign, even though the auto campaign itself is performing way better than the standard auto campaign, even though the auto campaign itself is performing way better than it used to.

00:04:09.388 --> 00:04:54.591
So Amazon's algorithm is getting way better at figuring out who will buy your product and if you give them the space to make those determinations, roas is going way up in comparison to where it was and, like I said earlier, to where it was and, like I said earlier, amazon is starting to devote a lot more exposure to auto campaigns versus exact match, and so if you really want to get as many impressions as your product is capable of receiving, I highly recommend that you start moving into giving auto campaigns a little more leeway and a little more budget so that you can give Amazon that opportunity to put your product in front of the right people, and that AMC being added onto that and audiences is just going to be another layer that makes that just that much more effective.

00:04:54.591 --> 00:04:58.151
But that's kind of where we are right now in our research phase and what we're trying to accomplish.

00:04:59.081 --> 00:05:00.404
Okay, Matt.

00:05:00.404 --> 00:05:01.588
Anything else you want to add to that?

00:05:03.562 --> 00:05:20.264
Well, I mean, the first that I had heard about this concept of automatic campaigns getting you know more love and actually a whole lot smarter from Amazon was a video that I saw Chris Rawlings from Sophie Society that Mike actually shared with me and you know a couple of.

00:05:20.264 --> 00:05:38.093
We mentioned it to our advertising agency and a couple of weeks later I was poking around in the campaign manager and it was fascinating just to see it live with my own two eyes just how well those audience and bid adjustments that Mike were talking about were performing.

00:05:38.093 --> 00:05:41.069
So it wasn't just a theory that you watched on a YouTube video.

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I was able to go into our campaigns and actually see how well different segments of our automatic campaigns were performing, and in some cases they're some of our highest performing campaigns.

00:05:51.545 --> 00:05:58.865
So it was very eyeopening to see the actual live performance of those after hearing that concept by Chris Rawlings.

00:05:59.908 --> 00:06:12.812
And also, just to clarify that point, not just our highest performers in terms of you know say point, not just our highest highest performers in terms of, you know, say, roas, but our highest performers in terms of number of orders that came in.

00:06:12.812 --> 00:06:36.247
So not only is the ROAS of those campaigns performing exceptionally well, but our top like over the last three, you know, or month or two out of our top five campaigns in in Amazon PPC, four of them are auto campaigns and one of them is a brand defense campaign, which is a completely different, you know, animal and should obviously have really good ROAS.

00:06:36.247 --> 00:06:56.148
But but four of our top five campaigns that are producing the most orders of anything are auto campaigns and I actually think, when I calculated it out the other day, I want to say that like 40% of the revenue that came in from our ad-based sales was those four campaigns.

00:06:56.620 --> 00:07:02.091
Yeah, I think this is such an interesting topic because I kind of mentioned at the top of the episode.

00:07:02.091 --> 00:07:05.081
I mean, this is really where Meta is already at Like.

00:07:05.081 --> 00:07:12.471
They're very intent-based and they're going to show ads to people that are going to be the they think are going to be the most likely on the purchase off of this.

00:07:12.471 --> 00:07:20.225
That's where you have like lookalike audiences, which they've had for a long time, but they've really gone even deeper on that to make meta.

00:07:20.225 --> 00:07:34.653
From what I understand and again I will be the first one to say that I know only the bare minimums about meta ads it's been a few years since I've run any meta ads, so definitely not an expert when it comes to running anything on Facebook or Instagram.

00:07:34.653 --> 00:08:01.326
That said, I do think that there's some things to learn from what's happening over there, of what we see for the future of Amazon ads, and I think a couple of things to keep in mind with what you're saying is that, first, it's just in general principles, and this has been true for years is that for most brands that are under, let's say, an arbitrary line of like 5 million, 80% of your sales are going to come from sponsored product ads.

00:08:01.326 --> 00:08:14.067
So sponsored brand sponsored display, dsp those are all nice, but the reality of it is, if you're looking at, hey, what's the 80-20 Pareto principle of what's actually bringing in sales and revenue?

00:08:14.067 --> 00:08:29.533
Most of it is going to be sponsored product ads and I think what really bolsters what you guys are saying is that the auto campaigns are getting more efficient and the broad match campaigns are getting more efficient in how they're targeting, and that really makes sense with.

00:08:29.533 --> 00:08:40.488
The other thing to keep in mind is that broad match changed a couple of years ago to where it went from being, you know, broad based on those keywords to being like really broad.

00:08:40.488 --> 00:08:57.072
And then we had issues where we'd have to do, like you know, for the people that, like me that were really nerdy into it, what we call broad modifiers, to say, hey, we actually want like a little less broad than what Amazon had pushed out to you in order to get efficiency out of those.

00:08:57.072 --> 00:09:01.567
So it sounds like Amazon's kind of figured that out on the ad side.

00:09:01.707 --> 00:09:17.761
Now, what I would say is and this all depends on the brand and what category you're in so I can think of a client that we just started working with where they have a consumable product and they weren't doing any remarketing, which is primarily a sponsored display ad type.

00:09:17.761 --> 00:09:31.980
So this is where, again, yes, auto campaigns, broad campaigns, are probably going to be a good thing to look into and to be working for a lot of, again, brands that are under 5 million.

00:09:31.980 --> 00:09:40.615
I think that there is like you need to understand, you know, I think, most likely customers to convert is probably an easy kill.

00:09:40.615 --> 00:09:49.530
But then also, thinking about how you do those auto campaigns and you may want to have multiple auto campaigns in order to control your spend on different things.

00:09:49.530 --> 00:09:56.961
So you might have a campaign, an auto campaign that's just dedicated to close match most likely to convert, for example.

00:09:56.961 --> 00:10:12.908
So you might have to, you know, kind of make things more granular for that perspective, and it really, again, it's going to depend on what category you're in, how competitive that category is, how differentiated your brand is, some of those other things in order to get the most bang for your buck, if you will, out of it.

00:10:13.730 --> 00:10:16.964
I think you know and again, this is as an agency owner's perspective.

00:10:17.024 --> 00:10:25.207
So I you know putting my own, you know, kind of not agency owner, but brand owner hat on.

00:10:25.207 --> 00:10:27.628
I think there's a lot of good stuff to be had there.

00:10:27.628 --> 00:10:37.583
But I also am a little bit cautious that when you start looking at, you know those granular details of how do I overcome a competitor where there's a big difference between being first and second.

00:10:37.583 --> 00:10:54.931
I think that's where there can be a lot of value in like thinking about, like ranking campaigns, for example, like you definitely, you know, for your hero product and your other products should be have tested, you know, regularly, and looking at ranking campaigns, which is an exact match type.

00:10:54.931 --> 00:11:04.243
So I think, in broad strokes, this is actually going to make PPC a lot simpler and more profitable for brands in general.

00:11:04.243 --> 00:11:23.692
That said, I do think that there is still a place, and will continue to be a place for those brands that have an area where they need to get to that last, you know, from 80% to 99%, because there's just such a big difference in sales between being first and second.

00:11:26.375 --> 00:11:29.760
I think so I would agree with that.

00:11:29.760 --> 00:11:48.692
I think probably the thing to come away from this with is, if you're a brand, that's in a space where you don't necessarily have the funding to pay an agency, right, Because the thing about it is, with an agency, there's nothing wrong with going with an agency.

00:11:48.692 --> 00:11:53.706
And if you can afford to and you can find a good agency, I think you know that's, it can be a good route.

00:11:53.706 --> 00:11:58.364
But you then have the ad cost and the agency costs.

00:11:58.364 --> 00:12:05.489
Now, of course, if you have it in house, you have the ad cost and you have whatever the cost is to pay somebody to set up the campaigns, you just have the cost of ignorance Right, oh yeah.

00:12:05.509 --> 00:12:05.990
No, for sure.

00:12:05.990 --> 00:12:10.229
So you're trying to figure it out yourself and depending on how smart you are it depends on how good you are.

00:12:11.159 --> 00:12:30.616
What I would say is if you are, you know, either, say, a one-man show or, you know, a small team, but right now your margins are a little on the thin side and you're wanting to find a way to bring your costs down but still get exposure for your brand and hopefully have ads that at least are performing profitably.

00:12:30.616 --> 00:12:54.224
I think you have an opportunity here where if you just simply set up a fairly simple campaign structure with auto campaigns for each of those individual products and you set it to a very strong bid modifier for highly likely to convert, I think that with that simple structure you could do relatively well without really getting super advanced.

00:12:54.224 --> 00:13:00.809
Now there's stages in that you could take that and then break that, as John was suggesting, like you could break that into.

00:13:00.809 --> 00:13:13.489
Okay, I want to loose match auto campaign and I want to close match auto campaign and I want to substitute auto campaign, so you can figure out which ones maybe are your best fit and maybe some of them that have the modifier and some of them don't have the modifier.

00:13:13.489 --> 00:13:15.506
So you can get as complex as you want.

00:13:15.506 --> 00:13:22.129
But again, if you are in that space where you just can't afford the agency and you can't afford to put a lot of time into management.

00:13:22.511 --> 00:13:37.840
The other thing that's important to recognize about an auto campaign 1% bid management, because you're only managing the bid at the campaign or ad group level and then your modifiers.

00:13:38.360 --> 00:13:41.028
There's no keyword bidding that you have to manage.

00:13:41.716 --> 00:13:48.293
That is a significant hurdle that you basically bypass by using an auto campaign.

00:13:48.553 --> 00:13:54.168
Now that's not to say that there's not going to be any value in doing exact match or broad match or any of these other things.

00:13:54.168 --> 00:14:08.048
But if you're trying to keep it on the cheap and you're trying to see if you can develop some ad sales at a reasonable price that you can manage, it's really moving in a direction where you could pull that off with auto campaigns, I think fairly effectively.

00:14:08.048 --> 00:14:23.783
But then, as John said, if you're trying to move the needle that extra you know, 20% you're probably going to either need somebody on staff who really knows what they're doing or you're going to need an ad agency, you know to run those ads and really you know, pull that off.

00:14:23.783 --> 00:14:38.649
But you know I do think you are moving into a space where kind of Amazon really can be that PPC manager If you keep things small and tight and you know you're really just trying to control that cost and make sure you're still getting those sales.

00:14:38.649 --> 00:14:41.144
I think you can do it, especially for smaller brands.

00:14:41.394 --> 00:15:01.386
Yeah, and what I would add to that too is if you're a smaller brand and I guess you know, starting with this, I think, experience because I mean, listen, I talk to a lot of different people that are Amazon you know brand owners that are selling on Amazon and a lot you know the reality of this is that a lot of Amazon agencies suck.

00:15:01.386 --> 00:15:06.705
That's just the reality of it Like they just don't deliver on you know the results that they promise.

00:15:06.705 --> 00:15:16.830
So I understand from a brand owner's perspective why it can be incredibly frustrating if you're paying for an agency on top of your ad spend.

00:15:16.830 --> 00:15:50.105
And so I think what's also really powerful to think about with this is if you're having a terrible experience and again, by all means, I would say you know and we've talked about this in a previous episode of set clear expectations, you know, just like you would with anybody you know, any other vendor or employee or anything like that like set clear expectations up front, you have to give you know at least, I would say, 60 to 90 days, unless they're doing something you know absolutely horrible, to see if they're any good or not Beyond that, if you're not getting the results out of it.

00:15:50.184 --> 00:16:21.495
I think what's powerful about this is knowing that you could do the 80% solution with something so simple that you don't need Like it's not critical that you have an agency that if you fired your agency today, your account, if you of a sudden, your ACOS is going to go to 200% and your entire account is going to collapse.

00:16:21.495 --> 00:16:37.172
Because I think what you're saying, mike, and what you're pointing out with this, is that, as Amazon gets a lot smarter, it is something that a brand owner can do at a pretty basic level and still do all the other things that you need to do as a brand owner.

00:16:37.634 --> 00:16:38.696
So we talked about.

00:16:38.696 --> 00:16:47.706
You know, most 80% of sales, especially for a brand that's just getting starting out on the platform, is going to be sponsored product ads.

00:16:47.706 --> 00:16:49.988
That's true as you start to dabble.

00:16:49.988 --> 00:17:04.218
So in my opinion, I think that bid adjustments, bid optimization, can be run by mostly by an AI tool.

00:17:04.218 --> 00:17:12.724
I think it's one of the few things in terms of Amazon advertising that can be run by an AI tool and you feel comfortable handing that operation over because it's essentially a math equation.

00:17:12.724 --> 00:17:19.188
If you get a target ACOS or a target TACOS, it's a math equation to figure out what to adjust that bid to.

00:17:19.188 --> 00:17:21.720
So computers are good at math, algorithms are good at math.

00:17:22.040 --> 00:17:48.544
I think that if you add on a tool, some sort of a tool, that does automatic bid adjustments based on some AI algorithm, I think you can start to get a little bit more advanced and even a little bit further up the funnel with your ad types and still keep your campaigns less complex than, say, they are today, while leaning on automatic campaigns and having some exact match campaigns for you know, ranking purposes and things like that.

00:17:48.544 --> 00:17:53.082
But using a tool to do automatic bid adjustments I've used a couple in my day.

00:17:53.082 --> 00:17:57.036
There's a really.

00:17:57.036 --> 00:18:02.455
Takemetrics is a really really good tool that has a really really good artificial intelligence algorithm that knows how to adjust bids based on different external factors.

00:18:02.455 --> 00:18:17.154
So you know, I think adding on one of those tools as you start to kind of go up the further up the funnel into more complex ad types is a solid solution that doesn't really add that much more time to a solopreneur's time or day but gives them the flexibility to be able to.

00:18:17.194 --> 00:18:18.198
I will just tell you a little bit there, matt.

00:18:18.198 --> 00:19:01.662
In the sense that I mean, we call AI now, but bid automation has been around for a long time and, having my own brand, working with numerous brands, testing a lot of different platforms, I think we all know that there has been a lot of terrible bid automation tools over the years, so the one important caveat that I would put on that and this is something that I feel very strongly about is that I think it is great to let the AI or automation do kind of the computational math to say, hey, here's my goal, acos, whatever and there's some different filters you can put in there.

00:19:01.662 --> 00:19:08.568
Based on this, which bids are out of range or should get adjusted and by how much.

00:19:08.568 --> 00:19:36.115
What I think is critically important, though, is that there needs to be a human in the loop that reviews all of that and clicks the button that says I accept these changes, because what we find time and time again is is that, if you don't have that human in the loop, the AI or automations or whatever starts to do kind of you know, funny things or you know it's not really on the automations.

00:19:37.297 --> 00:19:51.541
Things happen in unintentional ways, because it's really hard to understand what the impact of some of those bid changes are when it's a completely black box that you're not looking at on a you know at least every.

00:19:51.782 --> 00:19:57.359
You know once a week, let alone once a month, and all of a sudden your entire ad account goes sideways.

00:19:57.359 --> 00:20:04.582
So I do think it's important that somebody puts a you know, human eyes on those bid adjustments.

00:20:04.582 --> 00:20:10.923
And I would say again, 90% of the time you know 90% of those you're going to click, you know okay, on and accept.

00:20:10.923 --> 00:20:11.345
But there are those.

00:20:11.345 --> 00:20:13.314
You know 90% of those you're going to click, you know okay, on and accept.

00:20:13.314 --> 00:20:23.523
But there are those you know 10% of cases where you know things are off and they can be off drastically, especially when you're trying to do things that are a little bit more advanced.

00:20:23.523 --> 00:20:48.115
When you start looking at ranking campaigns and you start looking at you know we talked a little bit about defensive targeting If you start looking at offensive targeting, like there might be a really good reason why you have a campaign with a 200% ACoS because your goal is to steal as much market share as possible from a key competitor Well, that's really hard to teach an AI or an automation to adjust bids for.

00:20:48.135 --> 00:20:50.357
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.

00:20:50.357 --> 00:21:00.405
I mean, I've used auto bid adjustment tools in the past and, generally speaking, they do quite well, because again as.

00:21:00.445 --> 00:21:20.857
Matt said, most of it is just math, but I certainly have run into situations where the AI or the algorithm whatever it is that is actually working in the background whether it's truly AI or not makes a decision on a particular keyword based on erroneous assumptions.

00:21:20.857 --> 00:21:37.131
So, in other words, you know we've had keywords that were really important keywords for us that all of a sudden weren't producing anything because the AI made a decision based on a short window of data that didn't really line up with what we knew to be true, and so it made some adjustment.

00:21:37.131 --> 00:21:50.830
And then all of a sudden, you know, our PPC kind of fell off a cliff or, you know, went the other direction and did some you know extraordinary number that didn't make any sense, and so we started spending a fortune on something that you know we would never have spent money on, you know, to begin with.

00:21:50.830 --> 00:21:53.153
So I think you do have to be careful with it.

00:21:53.153 --> 00:22:13.815
But the good news is, like you said, john, I mean, if you're using a tool like that, 90% of the recommendations that it gives you, you're just going to click yes, and that's way faster than having to go through all the mental calculations yourself and make those determinations on your own, and so you're still going to cut that time on task significantly.

00:22:13.815 --> 00:22:27.038
And so the combination of letting Amazon kind of manage the auto side of things and then maybe having these selected campaigns for exact match and things like that, I think is really a good combination.

00:22:27.038 --> 00:22:47.455
And if you don't have the bandwidth for that, then stick with the auto campaigns, because I do think that you can tailor them enough and do enough of the basic negations that need to be done to get them into a space where they're performing very well for you, and it's a very simple campaign structure to set that up.

00:22:48.065 --> 00:22:56.576
A couple of other things that I would say is one Amazon is not going to differentiate an auto campaign between branded and unbranded.

00:22:56.576 --> 00:23:21.157
So at the very least, if you don't separate out your campaigns in any other way, I would make sure that when you set up the auto campaigns, you separate out branded search and brand defense, because your numbers are not going to be right if you leave it alone, because I can tell you that our auto campaigns now this isn't the reason they're performing well.

00:23:21.157 --> 00:23:24.575
They're actually performing well, even if we take this data out.

00:23:24.575 --> 00:23:40.250
However, it is serving up ads on our detail pages, so they're essentially brand defense ads, but they're in an auto campaign instead of a separate brand defense campaign, like they should be, and so we're negating those out.

00:23:40.250 --> 00:23:45.185
But then it also shows up on branded terms like pro-tough pool poll and things like that.

00:23:45.507 --> 00:23:49.096
Well, again, you really don't want those branded terms in an auto campaign.

00:23:49.096 --> 00:23:52.671
You'd be much better separating those out into their own campaign.

00:23:52.671 --> 00:23:59.236
So don't ignore the fact that there are some things you want to negate out, and I definitely recommend that branded is one of them.

00:23:59.236 --> 00:24:01.126
You're going to negate that out of your auto campaigns.

00:24:01.126 --> 00:24:02.488
Keep those in separate.

00:24:02.488 --> 00:24:09.476
You know brand defense campaigns and stuff, but that is still a way simpler campaign structure than what we would have had, you know, two, three years ago.

00:24:09.476 --> 00:24:29.150
You know, especially if you've got very many products and that's again that's another important aspect of this If you're a smaller brand but you happen to have a fairly large SKU list.

00:24:29.171 --> 00:24:34.063
This, the fact that you can run these auto campaigns, makes your life 90 easier than you think it does, and it really puts you in a position, such an important point, I mean.

00:24:34.063 --> 00:24:42.508
I mean, I've seen a brand that you know they're doing barely six figures on amazon and they have 200 skews, which is a little crazy, not something?

00:24:42.508 --> 00:24:44.634
Yeah, this is perfect for that.

00:24:44.634 --> 00:24:50.616
Yeah, and so again, I would much rather have somebody set up an auto campaign for each.

00:24:50.616 --> 00:25:03.835
You know, maybe parent, if you will, and you know, run 10, 20 auto campaigns, rather than creating one auto campaign and throwing, you know, all 200 SKUs.

00:25:04.035 --> 00:25:04.856
Yeah, for sure.

00:25:05.285 --> 00:25:12.046
Auto campaign, because your performance across those you know, those parent ASINs, is wildly different.

00:25:12.046 --> 00:25:21.926
Where you have some parent ASINs where you know they've got some pretty good traction, they've got some decent reviews and they're having some you know some success, and then you have others that, quite frankly, are just duds.

00:25:21.926 --> 00:25:30.315
Well, if you put everything into one campaign, well, what Amazon's going to do is it's going to take, say, you have you know $100 a day budget in there.

00:25:30.315 --> 00:25:34.258
It's going to spend that across whatever clicks, not what sells.

00:25:34.258 --> 00:25:38.842
And so now you're really struggling in order to adjust things in order.

00:25:38.842 --> 00:25:50.616
You really don't have a whole lot of or a ton of control in order to push that money in the direction of like what's working for you, whereas it's also going to confuse amazon, you're, yeah, you're confusing the algorithm at the same time.

00:25:50.636 --> 00:26:01.328
Yeah, yeah, so simpler does not mean run a single auto campaign for everything, like simpler just means you don't have 12 000 exact match campaigns like okay, yes, I've got.

00:26:01.349 --> 00:26:09.056
You know, maybe I've got 10 auto campaigns or something that you know you don't need an exact match campaign for every single keyword you want to target, Right?

00:26:09.056 --> 00:26:10.178
No, we won't.

00:26:10.178 --> 00:26:12.208
That was a cough.

00:26:12.208 --> 00:26:15.036
People can interpret later if they play it back slow enough.

00:26:15.036 --> 00:26:18.234
So, okay, I think this is a fantastic conversation.

00:26:18.234 --> 00:26:22.589
I think this might be a good place to wrap on it, be a good place to to wrap on it.

00:26:22.589 --> 00:26:33.365
So takeaways for you know, brand owners who are listening, I guess I'll.

00:26:33.365 --> 00:26:37.075
I'll start with you, Matt, Like what's the, what's the action item that you'd give to brand owners that are listening to this?

00:26:37.095 --> 00:26:38.317
Well, I'll, I'll give a little bit different.

00:26:38.566 --> 00:26:44.832
I'm not going to answer your question directly, but one of the things that we haven't talked about you know we talked about meta has gone down this route before.

00:26:44.992 --> 00:26:50.152
Google's gone down this route and actually TikTok is actually right now currently going down this route.

00:26:50.192 --> 00:27:02.555
They've actually removed all the other ad types and now there's one ad type, gmv max, which essentially is their automatic campaign and it's performing better than all of the other manual, more manual type campaigns were before.

00:27:02.555 --> 00:27:14.594
So TikTok just removed access to all of them and now you have one ad type and so you give it an ROI target and it meets that ROI target incredibly well.

00:27:14.594 --> 00:27:23.227
So even more proof that these big platforms, as they start to mature, they learn that and these platforms, their goal is to make money and they do that by selling products.

00:27:23.227 --> 00:27:36.471
So if they have data that tells them which listing is the highest likelihood to convert, they're going to rise that one to the top, and that's essentially what these ad campaigns are doing, or these types of campaigns are doing is giving them control, because they know who's going to convert.

00:27:36.471 --> 00:27:45.856
So just more proof that this, this is the way that Amazon is going, for a reason All the other platforms have already done it way that Amazon is going for a reason.

00:27:45.876 --> 00:27:52.226
All the other platforms have already done it, I think.

00:27:52.226 --> 00:27:54.234
For me I would say one recognize that the evidence does show that Amazon is moving this direction.

00:27:54.234 --> 00:28:02.271
It only makes sense that they would, considering that everybody else is moving that direction and Amazon's got so much data, obviously they would be able to make these sort of determinations.

00:28:02.271 --> 00:28:14.631
And I would say, because it's true that it's moving this direction, you need to get ahead of it, because not everybody understands this yet and not everybody is using it.

00:28:14.631 --> 00:28:34.215
And even if you don't dismantle the whole rest of your campaign structure, if you just recognize this one point and you start utilizing this to get more exposure because, again, auto campaigns done right can give you a lot of exposure right now, more exposure than you're going to get from running a bunch of exact match campaigns.

00:28:34.215 --> 00:28:36.670
And there's two things that that does for you.

00:28:36.670 --> 00:28:42.517
One, if the auto campaign is performing well, then obviously that creates more orders that are profitable.

00:28:42.878 --> 00:28:47.010
But secondly, don't forget what John mentioned earlier, which is sponsored display.

00:28:47.010 --> 00:28:53.198
Sponsored display you can use that as kind of a mini DSP for remarketing and things like that.

00:28:53.198 --> 00:28:58.136
Well, you can't remarket to somebody that you never had an ad show to in the first place.

00:28:58.136 --> 00:29:14.973
So if you're using sponsored products and you're getting more ad impressions to the right people at the right price so you can afford it, then you're giving more fodder to that sponsored display campaign for that remarketing, and so you can kind of spin that wheel a little bit.

00:29:15.365 --> 00:29:21.617
So I just think it's definitely a space that you need to pay attention to and also understand Amazon's only going to get better at it.

00:29:21.617 --> 00:29:23.594
It's not as if it's going to go downhill from here.

00:29:23.594 --> 00:29:24.998
Also understand Amazon's only going to get better at it.

00:29:24.998 --> 00:29:26.019
It's not as if it's going to go downhill from here.

00:29:26.019 --> 00:29:29.373
Amazon's going to continue to gather more and more and more data and they're going to get better and better and better at this.

00:29:29.373 --> 00:29:31.000
So get ahead of the curve now.

00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:37.346
Get your campaign structure set up to take advantage of it, and I guarantee you, six months from now it's going to be even more effective than it is today.

00:29:38.788 --> 00:29:49.971
Yeah, and I'll leave it with this, because I think it's really important that you know one, that you guys that as brand owners selling on Amazon, and just you know, being on the platform that you are, I think you're 100% right, mike.

00:29:49.990 --> 00:30:10.675
You're, you know, staying ahead of these things that are happening and seeing how, that, where this is going with ads, I'd also add that, or include that, just as a general principle, ads is never going to be, you know, set it up and then like YOLO, you know YOLO, amazon ads management, like let it do its thing and never look at it, never touch it.

00:30:10.675 --> 00:30:14.131
But it's also doesn't need to be the bulk sheet.

00:30:14.131 --> 00:30:19.469
You know bid optimization with pivot tables that we used to do, you know, four or five years ago.

00:30:19.469 --> 00:30:33.984
There is, you know, a, a right in between there and it's really going to depend on what category you're in, how big of a brand you are, what your brand goal is and a few other factors on Amazon.

00:30:33.984 --> 00:30:43.290
So I think, finding what is that right level for where you're at right now with your brands, for managing your ads successfully on Amazon.

00:30:44.594 --> 00:30:46.297
Also one last thing before we close.

00:30:46.297 --> 00:30:56.675
Don't forget that a lot of times, exact match campaigns and whatnot are used for ranking and obviously at the moment that's still valid and still useful and important.

00:30:56.675 --> 00:31:13.009
But AI is becoming the tool that people are going to be using to find their products, becoming the tool that people are going to be using to find their products, and so, more and more, how you rank in the actual search is going to become less and less relevant.

00:31:13.009 --> 00:31:14.271
It's going to be much more important how you rank in.

00:31:14.271 --> 00:31:17.680
What AI tells somebody is the product that they want.

00:31:18.204 --> 00:31:26.174
So you know, don't ignore exact match, don't ignore the possibility of ranking using those tools, but just recognize that is a dying strategy.

00:31:26.174 --> 00:31:31.317
You know like that is a strategy that's going to become less and less and less effective over time.

00:31:31.317 --> 00:31:34.654
So I would not be investing a massive amount of time and effort into that.

00:31:34.654 --> 00:31:40.676
If you've got an agency or you hire an agency, obviously in the short term you're going to want them to be doing that because it's still effective.

00:31:40.676 --> 00:31:52.631
But if you're not focusing in on AI ranking, then you're missing the boat and that campaign structure is going to reach a point where it's not serving your needs and you're going to fall off a cliff.

00:31:53.654 --> 00:31:57.288
And that's a great segue into something that we will cover on a future episode.

00:31:57.288 --> 00:32:00.057
So stay tuned, because that's definitely something we'll cover.

00:32:00.057 --> 00:32:04.619
Thank you everybody for listening and we look forward to seeing you next time on another Tactics Tuesday.

076: Tactic Tuesdays: Is Amazon Becoming Your PPC Manager?

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