Black Friday and Amazon Automatic Campaigns (PPC)

Video

In this clip from our recent webinar "Preparing Your Digital Marketing Campaigns for Black Friday", Izabela Catiru, Digital Strategist from ChannelAdvisor discusses the use of Amazon Automatic Campaigns before, during, and after Cyber Week and Black Friday.

[Morag Cuddeford-Jones] And talking about automatic campaigns - saying that, we've got one question here. It says "we find it difficult to work efficiently with automatic campaigns for Amazon, in a period with such high search volumes. Any guidance?"

[Izabela Catiru] I think, auto campaigns. They tend to be a hard regardless of the high search volume period. Because, as I said before, auto campaigns are a really good tool for keyword harvesting, and there are a few key things that I think you can do in order to have successful auto campaigns during such times.

One thing to mention is I have seen cases in which auto campaigns were used as the main type of campaign for companies that had aggressive budgets to cover as much as possible [of] the market. If you don't have that aggressive budget to cover as much as possible [of] the market, what you can actually do with auto campaigns, is; I don't know, first thing - invest a bit more at the beginning - maybe now, in September/October, to understand what types of keywords or what searches work best for your account, so that's harvesting and then as peak approaches. You can adjust your investment.

[The] second thing that you can do is ensure that the campaigns are using negative keywords. So you are adding the negative keywords, because you're just gonna avoid spending on keywords that do not perform or any overlaps with the manual campaigns.

And the third thing - I think I'm at the third thing - is to be careful with the bidding for the targeting options. So people that are running auto campaigns at the moment, you might be familiar with close match, loose match, substitutes, etc. And I tend to see that people are adding just the same bid for for a lot of them or they're slightly, you know, maybe bidding a bit more for close match - you're gonna be beat differently if the term is a close match to your product rather than the loose match or a substitute.