Amazon PPC Guide: Campaign Bidding and Adjusting Bids

2. Up and Down, and

3. Fixed Bidding

• Down Only 

With Down Only bidding, if a click on your listing is less likely to end up in a sale, the bid can be reduced by a large margin. If the chance of conversion is low enough, the bid might not trigger at all! Down Only is a protective measure that ensures you don’t get burned trying to chase the shiny object when competition level suggests it isn’t worth pursuing.

• Up and Down 

With Up and Down dynamic bidding, Amazon could double your bid to get it to the top of the search results’ first page, but not always. For all other search placements, the Amazon PPC will raise your bid up to 50%, but not more than that to retain balance. You can see the inherent risk here, right? Getting in a race to the top using Up and Down could get very costly very fast. Especially if several of your competitors are using it also. However, if it works appropriately and the competition level is low, the payoff could be well worth the risk.

• Fixed Bidding 

And, well, fixed bidding is fixed. Under fixed bidding, you’re not using dynamic bidding at all. You’re using the traditional Amazon bidding style of choosing a default bid per click and sticking with that despite the market forces. Dynamic bidding is deactivated when you use fixed bidding.

There’s nothing dynamic or risky about it because you’ve already predetermined your acceptable level of risk by setting it where you did.

Amazon moved all of your existing campaigns to Down Only. This move happened when Amazon replaced the old Bid + system with dynamic bidding.

Down Only will be the default for any new campaigns you create going forward, so be extra careful to double-check those options before running a new campaign. Especially if you want to take more risk using Up and Down or don’t want to take any at all. Bidding based on the likelihood of conversion is a shaky reality, but like it or not, it’s a new reality.

If the competition in a category is relatively light and using dynamic bidding, it won’t be as necessary to spend as much to increase your chances of winning a sale. Trying to set your Amazon PPC budget given these scenarios isn’t easy. It takes trial and error to determine how complex bidding becomes in competitive markets. And how predictable it is in less competitive categories. If you’re going to commit to dynamic bidding based on the likelihood of conversion, make sure you have enough money in the reserve to weather the storm.

There will be times when you’re riding high and nailing the bidding pattern that increases conversion, but also times you’ll be spending money in a chase that you can’t win. Part of this process is learning enough to be able to recognize the difference and react accordingly. Quickly. It’s also possible to mix multipliers with your campaign bidding strategy to create a multi-pronged approach to push toward Top of the Search.

For example, let’s say you were willing to bid $2 per click – at face value – using 100% Up and Down dynamic bidding to try to get to Top of Search. This $2 per click is the goal, but you have a little wiggle room in your budget. So you add a 300% placement multiplier to your bidding campaign.

This multiplier allows Amazon to spend anywhere from $0 per click on the low end if you can’t compete to $6 per click if you max out on the 300% multiplier.

Mixing placement multipliers and campaign bidding is a great way to find a balance that works well for your budget. And for the level of aggressiveness, you want to use overall in your campaign bidding strategy from now on. When you use this strategy, it’s easier to understand how to calculate the maximum Amazon bid to get Top of Search.

However, our best advice is to be careful in implementing a high initial bid amount and a high multiplier. Have a deep understanding of your level of acceptable risk.

Like anything else with Amazon’s PPC strategy, understanding how to use dynamic bidding, placement multipliers, and always bidding with conversion in mind takes some trial and error. You’ll likely fail some at first. But, you’ll also start to get intimately familiar with your risk tolerance and acceptable levels of loss.

Both of those things are invaluable to keep you honest and understand the difference between a solid opportunity and a likely loser at first glance.

1. Top of Search

2. Rest of Search, and

3. Product Pages

Conversely, product pages very rarely lead to conversion, but one will happen now and then. It’s not a good idea to count on it.

When you’re chasing a Top of the Search listing, the goal is to land on the first two slots in the Amazon Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). To get to the top two in the SERPs, you’ll be up against the stiff competition. It’s a bidding war. The highest bidders will land in these first two slots in the SERPs.

But it doesn’t end there.

The way you position your dynamic bidding strategy will determine whether you’re able to hold onto these spots once you land there. Product pages can be valuable, but only more so than the Rest of the Search placements in the overall hierarchy. Sometimes click-through can be up to 10 times worse than Top of Search, for example. Bids on product pages are specifically Sponsored Product placements that land at the bottom of the details page for a product and sometimes on add-to-cart pages.

These types of bids aren’t nearly as “visible” as Top of Search pages, and a good majority of casual shoppers will glance past them. The rest of the Search placement is anything below Top of Search and on forever through the sea of SERPs. You can’t make adjustments to Rest of Search Amazon PPC placements, so it’s a better idea to modify your bids for Top of Search and Product Pages and let the chips fall where they may.

There’s some psychology at play. When a casual shopper on Amazon is looking at a particular product, they’re not going to recognize the difference between the Sponsored Products at Top of Search and the organic listings Amazon provides based on search intent. Whether your product reached the “top of the fold” on a product page by your campaign bidding efforts – or good old-fashioned SEO – most Amazon shoppers won’t recognize the difference.

This same psychology is why there’s still value in the Rest of Search and product page placements. Sophisticated Amazon shoppers look through these listings to find a good deal, which they’ve started to understand through experience, isn’t likely to happen at the top of the fold. Therefore, there are wins to be won throughout the SERPs. It just depends on what types of wins are most important to you in your overall Amazon PPC and marketing strategy.

Campaign Manager Account is available to sellers, vendors, and agencies.

Here are the steps to start using a manager account

1. Sign in to Advertising Console.

2. On the left side of the accounts, click on the manager account.

3. Click on the “Create a Manager Account”, decide on the name of the account.

4. After selecting the account type, either as an advertiser or as an agency, your manager account is set.

You can view seller and vendor accounts as unified under one dashboard or also if you are managing different marketplaces, you can combine the same regions under a single regional manager account. A unified dashboard allows you to manage different accounts while identifying which one needs immediate attention.

Read here for more detailed information about Manager Accounts by Amazon.

• This report is a great way for you to access bidding performance where you have an overview of the number of unique keywords you are bidding on.
• The period performance section gives you the numbers as to how much you have generated in terms of impressions, ad spend, paid sales
• In terms of inventory headroom, it helps you understand where you are bidding more or less and if you need to be more aggressive in your CPC bidding.