Advanced

Amazon PPC
Strategy Guide
We’re seasoned eCommerce technologists that help Amazon
businesses grow

We spent 7+ years in eCommerce analytics helping Fortune 500 brands like Apple, HP, Coke, and Revlon
understand their ranking on Amazon for keywords. We then asked ourselves — instead of telling brands
where they rank relative to page 1, what if we built a platform to get them on page 1? Alas, Trellis was born.

We’ve spent 20+ years building and selling technology companies and have implemented innovative
analytical solutions resulting in 3x growth for businesses across the globe.

Here are some sellers that have a competitive edge on the competition and are growing their
eCommerce business:
 Advertising is complicated:

60% of Amazon sellers state that

PPC advertising is their biggest
challenge
Why is Advertising a Challenge for Amazon Sellers?

COMPETITION TIME EXPERTISE

With over 3 million active Requires continuous Requires deep technical
sellers on Amazon, it's adjustments to campaigns knowledge of best-
become increasingly as market dynamics practices and strategies.
competitive. change.
Manual Campaigns Self-Driving Campaigns
Results From Brands with Self-Driving Campaigns

“Amazon advertising takes a "With a catalog of 50,000 listings "Their elegant approach to ad
full-time person to figure it and counting, it would be an management has allowed us to
all out. Trellis took the impossible challenge without grow our overall sales within
complexity off our hands the support of Trellis that works our target ACoS. I highly
entirely.” day and night to optimize our recommend anyone looking to
sales in a way no human or scale their business to try
team could achieve." Trellis.”
3 Winning PPC
Strategies
By working closely with top brands on the Amazon
marketplace, here are the 3 strategies we used to
increase total sales and reduce wasted ad spend:

1. Discover more profitable keywords

2. Continuously optimize bids to reduce ACoS
3. Manage budget dynamically to maximize sales
to reach target ACoS

📌 TLDR; if want the easiest way to manage Amazon PPC campaigns

look no further than Trellis — we automate these 3 strategies
 #1 Discover more
Profitable keywords
People are unique, and how they search is also unique.
Think about it, how many different ways do shoppers
search for a “sweater”! Here’s how you discover more
profitable keywords:
Explore Profitable Keyword Opportunities By Targeting All
Stages of Buyer Journey

It can be tempting to focus on specific keywords that you THINK best capture customers and
convert. But this isn't always the case. Depending on your category and product, conversions play
out differently at every stage in the buyer journey. This is why it's important to cast a wide net of
keywords! Here's what you do:

● Test with exact, phrase, and broad matching keywords — don't make assumptions about which
keywords will drive sales!

● Keep your keywords relevant and negate irrelevant keywords — the goal here is to gain visibility,
increase engagement, and drive sales, so showing up for irrelevant keywords will cost you $$$

● Follow your consumers keyword journey instead of heavily copying your competitors — what works
best for them isn’t necessarily what will drive the best results for you
Harness The Power of Auto Campaigns

We're human - we miss things and have blind spots! Amazon is a big machine with lots of keyword
search and bid history with products similar to yours, so tapping into this via auto campaigns is a
helpful resource to catch anything you may have missed. Here's how to go about this:

● Set up an auto campaign for products - get the data on what keywords Amazon is mapping
your product to and how profitable those keywords are

● Harvest keywords — specifically those that meet your profitability criteria into your own
campaigns to better control your ACoS

● Negate keywords found in step #1 — because you’re already bidding and have finer control
over the bids of those keywords in your manual campaign
Intelligently Target Competitors

81% of shoppers research products online before purchasing them. Customers will use many keyword
variations to look through products before making a decision, and your product must show up on these
keywords and competitor listings throughout the entire customer journey. Here’s how:

● Identify your competitors based on similarities — Such as price, reviews, and feature sets

● Target competitor ASINs where you're positioned well - Don't shy away from advertising on
ASINs where your products can realistically compete with

● Harvest relevant keywords from competitor listing - Once you’ve identified your core
competitors try to discover new keyword opportunities based on product title, A+ content,
reviews, and feature bullets

● Negate any ASINs that are costing you and aren't converting — this tells you that you aren't
positioned well with these ASINS, make sure you're targeting competitors within similar price
ranges, reviews, and feature sets.
Use Negative Keywords to Reduce Wasted Ad Spend

As your advertisement matures (i.e after discovering a 20-50 profitable keywords and product
targets) you want to fine-tune your ads to boost your ROAS. For example, you’ll likely start to see
some keywords have a high click through rate and low conversion rate. This is an indication that: 1)
your product may be less relevant for that keyword, or 2) if your keyword is relevant then your content
needs works. If you feel the keyword is less relevant here are the approaches to follow:

● Soft-negate — For keywords where the conversion rate is low, you may be better served by
reducing the bid on these keywords as opposed to negating them all together. This keeps the
door open for picking up sales at an acceptable ACoS

● Hard-negate —Hard-negate is not limited to mature campaigns; if some keywords are

proving to be costly and not relevant then it makes sense to negate these; In addition, as
your campaign matures, you will converge on a collection of profitable keywords; in this
scenario one may decide to negate the broad and phrase keywords.
 #2 Continuously
Optimize Bids to Reduce
ACoS
Market conditions change QUICKLY, and taking a passive
approach will increase ACoS. Here’s what brands have to
consistently keep doing in order to stay competitive:
Monitor Performance

It is impossible to make optimization decisions without understanding what data the data is telling you.
We recommend monitoring monitoring impressions, click-through rates, conversion rates, serving hours
for keywords, competitor ASINs, product targets, and campaigns. With these metrics in mind,
performance should be monitored at 4 levels; 1) Overall performance across all campaigns 3) Category
performance 3) Ad level performance 4) ASIN/SKU level performance. The next step is to monitor trends
within these metrics:

Monitor micro trends hourly- this includes competitors on any given day running out of ad spend,
changing bids, inventory, etc.

Monitor macro trends weekly, monthly and quarterly - refers to seasonality, window shopping
vs. purchasing, competitors, holidays, saturation of sellers, advertising spend trends (ex: currently
ad spend is up by 40%)
Analyze Performance Reports

Looking at long- term performance helps inform you of future trends and predicts consumer behavior. It
also removes human bias when understanding bottlenecks in your campaigns, such as budget, bids,
impressions, ACoS, and effectiveness of content and pricing. The good news is that Amazon provides you a
rich set of reports that provide insight into your campaigns:

● Keyword and target level reports

The following key rations should then be
● Campaign level reports applied: CTR, CR, ACoS, ROAS

● Product level reports These reports should be monitored on a

daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis
● Search term reports
Adjust Campaign Bids Accordingly

After keywords, bids play the most important role in your ability to generate profitable sales while helping
you stay within your ACoS goals. Reports outlined in the previous steps give you deep insight into what is
working in your campaigns. The next step is to make changes based on that data:

● Change keyword bids - if your search term report is showing conversion at your ACoS goals don’t
be afraid to bid high on such keywords

● Alter competitor targeting -treat competitor targets the same as keyword targets. Aggregate
product target reports and monitor micro and macro trends to identify competitor products that
can be targeted profitability. Then increase or decrease your bids based on micro and macro
conversion rates

● Create new campaigns — if campaigns are showing affinity to certain products you can separate
products that aren’t performing into their own campaigns and find better keywords or bids that
drive more sales
 #3 Manage Budget
Dynamically to Maximize
Sales Within Target ACoS
The Amazon marketplace never sleeps, as such, ads
must be live when shoppers are shopping. When you
dynamically shift the ad budget based on the
marketplace, you’re able to optimize ACoS. Here are the
core principles:
Monitor Ad Serving Hours

Monitoring and understanding how long your campaigns are running given your budget is the first step
towards understanding if you should be increasing or decreasing your daily budgets. It can be tempting to
always add more budget but consider short and long term trends before making decisions on increasing
the budgets. Here are the best practices for monitoring your ads:

● Monitor hourly —Easiest way of doing this can be monitoring and recording the budget status on an
hourly basis from the advertising console on Amazon seller central or by scheduling an hourly report
from Amazon seller central

● Track budget longevity throughout the week - Not every day on Amazon is the same and before
making decisions on increasing or decreasing your budgets, consider tracking how long your budget is
lasting on the weekdays and weekends. Some advanced techniques to help stretch your budgets can
be to reduce the bids during the period of low sales.
Increase Budget When Profitable Sales Trends Emerge

Running successful sponsored campaigns on Amazon requires patience and consistent execution of a
framework tailored to your product. Structuring your campaigns with the right products, keywords and
ASIN targeting requires some experimenting. You want to identify what keywords and ASIN targets can
generate profitable sales for you before scaling your ad spend. Here’s how:

● Consistent campaign structure — create a consistent campaign structure based on your

products

● Prove profitability of keywords and ASIN targets — identify this based on product(s) being
advertised

● Time of day and day of week — identify when these sales trends emerge

● Next step — armed with the information above you are ready to start scaling your campaigns and
increasing budgets
Allocate Budget Across Campaigns Based on Performance

Every category in which you sell products has its own unique constraints including margin, goals and
advertising budgets. Understanding these constraints and goals allows you to make choices that drive
high margins and profitable sales. Here are steps you can take to start allocating your budget:

● Create a framework - take time to create a framework that allows you to set up advertising by
category, consider using Amazon portfolio or name our campaigns to reflect ads within the same
category

● Think about budget allocation based on category goals - goals by category allow you to drive
towards a finish line and making decisions on when budget can be reallocated between
categories
 So You’ve Implemented
This Strategy… Now What?
If these strategies are implemented and optimized on a
consistent basis, the results can transform your Amazon
business.
The Results

If you’ve implemented all of the strategies, you’ll see improvements to ACoS, ad sales and organic sales.
At the end of the day - more sales, higher margin.

Total Sales
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Impressions ACoS

Time
MapSherpa increased ad sales by 30% and improved
profit margin by 12% across 3000 products

“For a data guy, I also knew that AI

and machine learning was the
answer to my ability to
successfully advertise on Amazon.
Trellis is on to something and it’s
exactly what I needed.”

- Dave, CEO MapSherpa

Ready to Transform
How You Manage
Amazon Ads?
We’ve automated all 3 strategies to make it super
simple for you to run a profitable PPC campaign.

Advertising is complicated. And as a business

owner, you already have a million items on your
to-do list. Let Trellis take care of Amazon
advertising so you can focus on growing your
business.

Start your first self-driving Amazon PPC

campaign in just 5 minutes with Trellis:

Click here to start your 14-day trial

Thank You!
Thank you for checking out Trellis’ Advanced Amazon PPC Strategy Guide. These strategies are
a result of 20+ years of scaling, building, and selling autonomous optimization systems.

Trellis created this guide because it was something we wish we had when we started in the
world of Amazon advertising - so we hope you found it of value!

If you’re looking to grow your Amazon business, but are not seeing the results—we invite you to
try Trellis (it’s free) and see firsthand how our ad automation platform makes advertising easy.

Start your 14-day trial