Last week, Digital Firefly Marketing explored how to research keywords for Amazon pay per click campaigns for your products. This week we’ll walk through how to best set up a campaign using all of your hard work.

How To Set Up Amazon Pay Per Click Campaigns

Be sure to read last week’s post (if you haven’t yet) to understand the terms we’ll use today.

Create Your Campaign

Start by selecting a product that has been selling well. Give the campaign a specific name. If all goes well, you’ll eventually have lots of campaigns. Don’t lose time trying to remember which is which.

Manual or Automatic Targeting?

It’s up to you. Here’s the basics to help you decide. This article is focused on manual targeting because automatic is really easy.

Manual campaigns are more time intensive. You’ll control nearly every aspect of the set-up. These can be more profitable but do take longer and some practice.

Automatic campaigns are quicker. Amazon will comb through your product listings and create the campaign for you. That means you can’t control which misspellings it puts in the back end or which regionalisms are used. These are less profitable but do save you time.

Automatic is better for beginners and does provide insight but after a while you’ll likely want to control every bit of your ad – you’re investing money in this, after all.

Set a Reasonable Daily Budget and Bid

You may have read that setting a huge budget will get you more impressions and likely won’t be spent by Amazon. While this may be true, eventually Amazon will figure this out and the algorithm will even the playing field. And what if Amazon did spend that amount of money. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

When it comes to your bid, use the data Amazon gives you but don’t be bare bones. Amazon will show you the lowest amount and the suggested amount. Many people do not change this. Change it. Increase your bid by a small amount to increase your chance.

Remember, you don’t pay per impression, you pay per click. Showing up doesn’t cost a thing, but clicks do.

Select Your Keywords

Go through your spreadsheet and select the keywords you want to hit. While you can load in thousands, be strategic and start with 65-75. Remember to use regionalisms and misspellings where appropriate and to include high and low volume. The data you get back from your Amazon pay per click ads should be mined – see which words are working for your products and switch out the ones that aren’t with alternative terms to find the best combination of keywords.

Broad, Phrase or Exact Match?

The more people who see your ad, the more you get charged. Remember that when setting things up.

Broad matches will have your ad show up most. A single word could trigger your ad popping up, even when it has nothing else in common.

Phrase matches will generally show up more than exact and less than broad. If a user puts words before or after the phrase, it will show up. But words cannot interrupt your search term.

Exact matches will show up least. A user has to search for the same keywords to see your ad. They will not see your ad if they put anything in the search bar other than your specific keywords. Amazon prefers exact match but these can be very difficult or require a huge number of campaigns.

Example:

Your campaign for hand decorated chopsticks uses the following (minimal) list of keywords:

• Chopsticks
• Asian tableware
• Colorful chopsticks
• Decorative chopsticks
• Stainless steel chopsticks
• Hand painted flower chopsticks

A search by a user for “red decorative chopsticks” will show your Amazon pay per click campaign if it is set to broad or phrase. It will not show up for exact because even though it uses the word “chopsticks” it is not an exact match.

A search by a user for “chopsticks” will yield your ad no matter what it is set to because it is a single keyword and an exact match.

Play around with types of campaigns to see which yield the best results for you.

Ready To Roll?

When you want to start pushing your products in front of larger audiences using Amazon pay per click, be sure to use this post and last week’s to help you set up the most efficient campaigns to start maximizing your profits.