How to Keep your Amazon PPC Advertising Campaigns Organized with Elizabeth Greene.mp4
Interview with Elizabeth Greene
Tomer [00:00:04] OK. Let’s welcome Elizabeth Green again on our channel. This is the second time that she is a guest here. I got really amazing feedback about this video Elizabeth; you can also see the comments. I remember that we covered flat files before, and that’s something that not a lot of people are, you know, using and familiar with.
So, you know, for me, when searching for info about flat files, you are the first one that popped out and then it was really useful and during that interview or recording, like we talked about things that maybe you didn’t cover in one of the videos. I also saw that you just published a new video, I’m sorry, a new post on Facebook asking like, or that you are making a new version of it. I don’t know if it’s live yet or not.
Elizabeth [00:00:59] Yeah. So that should be alive soon. It’s getting edited, hopefully by tomorrow, films and the thing is that it’s actually a update to like a segment of the process. So, one of my videos that goes through how to adjust beds, I think one of the things I should mention in there, one of the issues is sometimes the cells in the max bid column will be blank and you’re like, What’s my bid? How do I adjust my bed if there’s no bid? So you can find that it’s tedious to do it manually, you can do it manually.
I had a previous process it was a formula I wrote for fun because I could put it out there. And unfortunately, that one it’s a little laggy because it works. If you know, spreadsheet formulas, you know, erase formulas, sometimes lag. So, I have a new updated process that is awesome. It will work and Google Sheets as well as excel in. So that should be coming out soon.
Tomer [00:01:55] Yeah, yeah. So I jumped a little bit to that. But for those that didn’t saw the first video, if you can tell us who you are and what, what, what you’re actually focusing on.
Elizabeth [00:02:07] Yeah. So my name’s Elizabeth Green. I am the co-founder of an Amazon advertising agency called Junglr. So that’s me in a nutshell. I find myself recently getting super deep into, I guess, data – connections for data and I think the post that triggered like you to reach out to me to come back on here was a speculation on like, how do you look at data? How do you make those assumptions?
And I think the deeper I get into it, the more I realize that the person who can get the best and deepest insights into like reading, not just OK, my ACoS is this but what is the story behind why that’s happening. And those are the people who are going to be able to make the best decisions and ultimately when it comes to advertising.
Tomer [00:02:54] Yeah, yeah. So if you don’t mind, I want to share that quote that you wrote.
Elizabeth [00:02:59] Yeah, go ahead.
Tomer [00:03:01] So it says you wrote “the best prices in the world won’t do anything if it isn’t implemented. It’s the work, not the knowledge that gets results. Just because you know the ultimate way to do something doesn’t mean that it’s feasible process to implement. My humble opinion is in this new world of Amazon advertising the ones who have accessible data displayed in a way that’s easy to digest way will win.”
So basically, there is so much data, so many reports, so many new things that are coming now that you are saying that the ones that’s me, if I convert is like the simple way it will have, like a nice dashboard or a nice way of displaying things that can help you like spot things in a very fast way will win. That’s basically what you’re saying?
Elizabeth [00:03:54] Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s correct. And I think that’s where a lot of people, at least I myself, got into the whole world of bulk files because like I said in the beginning, you can know that you need to do something; OK, so if my unit per session percentage is having an issue, it means my conversion rate drops so therefore, I should go troubleshoot this.
But sometimes if you have very large accounts like we work with some of our clothing brands, these SKU count is in the thousands. Like, it’s ridiculous to try and get that granularity across tons and tons and then you multiply that times I don’t know 25 accounts at this point, and it just gets.. so like, how can we do something and efficiently but still not sacrifice quality? I think that’s where I’m always going to try and ride that line.
So my first, I guess, portion was kind of speaking to that in the fact that as you begin to scale, doing best practices becomes tedious and there’s tools and there’s things I don’t think work files the ultimate, although I like how granular you can get with them. There’s also other amazing like automation tools out there but being able to actually do a process efficiently and then what I said in the beginning on kind of understanding the story behind numbers because you might have an ACoS spike as you say, Oh my goodness, my I need to adjust my bits because my costs went up and all these things are, you know?
But if you really looked into it, maybe the change was in the conversion rate. It wasn’t necessarily in your cost per click, your cost per click same conversion rate went down. And that’s the thing that needs to be addressed. So being able to get that insight quickly is, I think, where all of us find like attention in what we do.
Tomer [00:05:41] For sure. And yeah, like you’re totally right, like about displaying the data in a nice way or getting insights very quickly, it’s very important. You mentioned something about now, like the ACoS and the conversion and like a question came to my mind because I have some campaigns that recently I have keywords that we’re converting for, like 2 years, like amazing. Amazingly, you know, and the ACoS jumped and I quickly analyzed the conversion rate, and I saw that it went down and I very, very confident that it’s due to some PPC fraud activity or something like that. It just doesn’t make sense.
How you as someone that to manage 25 accounts approach this because you could have an history of keywords in campaigns and you see like everything like is the same what happened here and you suspect that there is a fraudulent activity, in that stage what are your actions? What are you doing like, what is like, how you continue and take it from there?
Elizabeth [00:06:42] Yeah, that’s difficult. So one thing is I would definitely want to establish that that was the issue was click fraud and not just some other things like the search terms aren’t triggering differences in search volume. Sometimes search volume fluctuates, sometimes people migrate to using different keywords to search for things. And that’s why I like continuous keyword research comes in.
But click fraud, I would determine as like steady impressions, so you obviously know that the traffic you’re getting to that keyword is the same and there is a definite spike in the clicks, a definite spike in the click through rate. That’s something you want to isolate because if all of a sudden someone is just like super clicking on your stuff, which Amazon does have things to detect, although they won’t always get it right. So, you know, look for a definite correlation drop in conversion rate, increase and click through rate with basically steady amount in the impressions, and that will help you identify that that’s the problem.
If you do identify that there’s click fraud, you want to report it to Amazon. Don’t say “I saw click fraud” because they’re going to like, go defensive, like “we don’t have cloud fraud. That doesn’t happen.” What you want to do is you want to say, “Hey, this date range, this date range in my account on..” and the other thing you want to look for is isolated to specific keywords so if your overall conversion rate drops on all of your products, like if and everything. Sorry, if I click fraud, no one’s clicking on all of your keywords at the same time.
But if you have isolated like one or two keywords, maybe some top performers, you know it does happen. So you would want to contact Amazon and say, “Hey, on x y z dates this campaign, this keyword x like weird data. I found this. Here’s my numbers can you look into it?” and they’ll look into it in like 99 percent of the time you get a refund?
Tomer [00:08:38] Yeah, yeah. I had a lot to experience. I did tell them that there is unusual activity and this is the data. You just say unusual activity without backing it up by data they will just close the case until you go away. So yeah, it was, you know, wanted to hear what you do, like doing so many accounts in these cases.
Another, you know, you mentioned, like you wrote this post, another big struggle that I don’t know if it just to me, I’m not managing PPC or doing anything to other, you know, accounts or anything like that, but something that I’m really passionate about to dealing with PPC platforms like Edwards, Facebook for many years. I think it’s more than 10 years now. So it’s something that I don’t know I like and enjoy.
And one big thing that always struggles with, is how you can track the changes in the history of things to keep everything organized. So, for me, what I do now is every day I just record manually in my own words. I tried to excel. I tried like little journals like electronic word. So what I do now is just write, ‘OK on this today’ and I have date and then like bullets. So I write ‘today, I modify these sponsored rent campaigns, added yada yada.’ Just telling in my own words, what I did so if I have to come back to it, it gives me an idea on what are the changes in what I did.
But I don’t know, I’m curious to know what you at scale are doing to keep things organized. I know there are some softwares like If I’m not wrong, helium like their platform giving you history changes that you do for bid and stuff like that. But obviously, like it’s also not that organized, but I want to hear from you. Like how you approach this?
Elizabeth [00:10:27] Yeah. So there are some insanely amazing tools out there that give you very good granular insights on like a keyword in search through mobile to performance changes. One that comes to mind that I, we talk with recent is called revenue wise. You literally can click a dropdown and it will show you on a graph. Now, you have to have the software hook up, so it only starts tracking from when you hooked it up. I think they pull historic data, but only the changes that will show are ones that happen within whatever time you’ve been sold off with our software. So that stuff is absolutely amazing.
Tomer [00:11:05] What is it called? I’m sorry.
Elizabeth [00:10:08] It’s called revenue wise.
Tomer [00:11:09] Revenue wise, it’s general or it’s for Amazon sellers?
Elizabeth [00:11:13] It’s for Amazon. I think they’re targeting agencies. I don’t know how they work with single; I think they probably allow single. Anyways, but the issue I found there, I definitely liked the software; why we ultimately didn’t go end up going in and using it was again, because I would love to sit there and look at every single keyword and the changes and then make like, that’s the stuff I love. You’re like, Oh, I made this change and then information’s increase, and I could see a definite correlate like this is awesome.
When you have thousands of keywords, you’ll spend there all day. Even though I do spend on, this is literally what I do 12 hours a day. But you still you couldn’t, you can’t make enough actional impact into that so it does get difficult. There are ways if you get scrappy with Excel and I’m talking to some other people who can actually you can pull reports and archive them and then keep something like you’re talking about where you just you manually write in what you did and then you can even manually write in other things like, I change my images, I tweet this, I tweak my copy. Record that in a spreadsheet in correlation with the date and there are ways to display that on a graph. Have the, you know, the sheet or whatever it is you can use macros correlate that.
So there are options to build stuff like that out. It’s kind of interesting, but I think the other thing that I’m looking at doing, that we are doing in some form and fashion is what are these snapshot insights that I can get into problem areas of my account that where I know that I need to go and dig deeper. I think that’s going to be the best way, especially when you start scaling to have some sort of read out; this is alright, this is what requires my immediate attention. And then you can go in and dig into that campaign. You can dig into the portfolio, you can dig into the products, and you’ve identified the places where you need to go digging versus trying to look at everything all the time. At some point, you just kind of burn out and don’t end up managing as effectively as you could.
Tomer [00:13:25] Yeah, yeah. Once you release that, maybe you should offer this to the public.
Elizabeth [00:13:30] Well, I have to give you the guy’s name. He’s got some really interesting tools he’s creating.
Tomer [00:13:35] OK, yeah, I would love to.
What is your strategy for keeping things organized? I’m not talking about history, but as far as like, you know, PPC like campaign structure, account structure, we all know that the good PPC account, it’s you know, it’s an account that is well-organized and everything is in structure because, you know, obviously it’d save you time, you’re more productive, you are more efficient rather than just having campaigns all over that you don’t even know what’s going on, which ASINs are targeted and what kind of campaign is that.
And I see that a lot with people that I help with. Not necessarily like on your PPC, but sometimes I look at their accounts and I see like, it’s a complete mess. I’m not going to say that I’m like the most organized guy, but I try to keep everything in the structure. I think in like your profession, what you do, it needs to be like super organized. How you organize your accounts and look at it?
Elizabeth [00:14:31] Yeah, so the way you have to do it is everyone, every client gets their own Google drive. That’s just where we archive everything. We use Google a lot just because it works better for collaborating with the team; that does create an issue if you have very large, I mean some of our accounts, you can’t even open the sheets and Google, it’ll break down so you got to use Excel. But as far as archiving and storing data, Google Sheets is definitely pretty cool and you can do some very cool connectivity with inside of Google. That makes it, I think, really well used.
Let’s see. So I would start off with some sort of hub. This is what we use for all clients we have; It’s called like our product sheet. It’s on version 5 now, maybe I don’t know how many times I’ve revamped it and bettered it and made it more efficient, but honestly, at its core is all of the products we’re advertising. The SKUs associated with them, the ASINs associated with them, our internal naming system associated with that particular product. And then the portfolio we’re storing that in, and that allows anyone in the entire account to go in and say, All right, I got to advertise this product. I don’t have to say, Hey, it’s this ace and now it’s like, All right, this is this type of product. Go pull it, go do it. It’s all right there
Now there’s a lot of stuff built around that now. I mean, we keep adding like, for instance, we just added a dropdown so I can literally go into a dropdown menu, select the particular product group and get a list of every single campaign and ad group that particular product is located in. So we have other things like that that allow us just like, get deep insights. That’s what I want and I’m like, I have this particular product. What have I done to it? Where is it? Let me go find it. And now, you know, that was I think our most recent update was a way to like, get insights into stuff like that.
So there are some pretty cool things you can do but I would say, yeah, I think at its core is just keeping like, this is what I have. This is what I need to do. This is what I’ve done. And then as long as you kind of have that, it could be as simple as I have these ASINs and I have these in a column and I’m just going to on this row and serve all of the campaigns I launch for them. It can be as simple as that. You don’t have to make it complex. Honestly, I think if you start with the core of it being simple, then as you, you know, you can add the pieces that you need instead of adding all the pieces and realizing that, oh, I built way more than I needed, and I’m never going to use that. Been there. Done that.
Tomer [00:17:03] Yeah, yeah, that’s good. What about like the actual naming of the campaigns? What do you suggest to, you know, sellers that don’t have a ton of SKUs, maybe like 10, 15 SKUs to name their campaigns so they can find easily like in and, you know, get their way seller central advertising platform easily.
Elizabeth [00:17:25] Yes. So I will tell you what we do and then I’ll also kind of give you like a lazy man’s hack into segmenting if like your campaign name structure is garbage and it’s everywhere and you’re like, I don’t know what I need to do. So, we do a lot of portfolio sorting. Now, if you have like hundreds of like, you know, thousands of ASINs, I wouldn’t go creating a portfolio for every single one of them. It’ll get kind of insane. But if you only have like, say, like 4 main listings; so we grew by listing, that’s how we choose to do it internally. I know some people split out by individual SKUs, individual child ASINs. The way we’ve chosen to view it is at a listing level. And that’s the reason is that the ranking is determined on a listing level. You can’t have multiple ASINs on a single listing showing up somewhere. So, we’ve chosen just to like group it that way, say this listing is getting this.
Again, deep dives are always good if something’s burning down, but for the most part, I think, you know the more you can space out while still seeing what’s going on. I like that approach. So, what I would do is I would just create a portfolio for like each listing you have and just put everything in that portfolio; that way when you click on that portfolio, you say, “Oh, this is what all the campaigns for this particular product are doing.” The campaign structure doesn’t have to be right. You can have one campaign named auto, and as long as it’s in that portfolio you know, it’s associated with that product. I would still rename that you want a better naming structure than auto, but you know it gets the job done. It’s quick and dirty in the beginning, and then you can start working through those portfolios and, you know, renaming cause as of right now, there are external tools that will allow you to rename campaigns. You still got a click into them, you still got to type it out.
So honestly, campaign manager is probably as good as anything you can’t rename with bulk files. I wish you could, but can’t. Someday they’ll give us that option, and I’ll make my life so much easier but as far as the naming structure, I can tell you what we use. So what we do is we put a product identifier, for instance, if you are advertising a ball. We’re just going to put ball maybe a little bit more, just a bit of like that than if you have like you have 20 different kinds of balls and we’ll put basketball, soccer ball, you know, blue soccer ball, that type of thing. And the theory behind that is that anyone can get into the account and see that this is a soccer ball. Like, I don’t have to go tell them that to px260 means this.
Now we do have clients that come in with a naming structure that they’re already using. That’s very uniform. If that’s the case, will simply adopt what they have, we might add a slight tag or something onto it just to make it clear. We try and get as descriptive to the product so we can understand what the product is without making it 20 sentences long. So you don’t want to, like do the title or anything, and then the next thing we place is going to be what the ad type; so S, SB, SD, SBV and then we put the match type, because we do split out campaigns based on whatever match type, so for instance, if I’m launching like a sponsor product, exact match campaign SPE the very first snapshot I can say it’s this product’s sponsor product’s exact match. I know exactly what that is.
Now in the last half of the naming structure is to identify what the, where we got the keywords and the strategy behind the keywords. For instance, if I go in and I say, like, “Oh, it’s a ranking campaign, we got the keywords from Helium 10, OK, so these are keywords we’re testing its ranking across as high, you know, sales are low. OK, I better go troubleshoot that because it’s ranking campaign versus if I see something with like LB, that’s a little bit low bid. We’re not expecting anything out of it. Cool. If we get something, if we don’t, we’re not. It’s not the end of the world. So I’m OK with low impressions. I see STR; I know it’s a search term report. These are keywords we’ve already proven. Why are there no impressions on that? Did we put the wrong bids to start? OK, so let’s go.”
So that’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of us preach like good naming structures is because it helps you identify like what’s going on. If you see, like you were in the campaign, you go auto, you’re like, “Wait, OK, so what was I actually advertising here? Did I put hybrids on the auto? Was it low? Is it like a catch all campaign?” So you got to go look in the ad “Oh, these are the products I had in here. Oh, this is what I did with this. This was only close match. OK, this is, you know, maybe it’s not.” And then, you know, you start rabbit training to try and figure out what’s even the campaign is before you can even go figure out what to do about it. So just by having good naming structure, it cuts out like a lot of the upfront work.
Tomer [00:22:17] Yeah, yeah, I actually lost a lot of money because the wrong naming. So I would take things that I wouldn’t really like understand just by looking at them quick and then by not really realizing what is the type of campaign or the really, you know, the goal of the campaign. I wouldn’t really optimize it that frequently like I’m supposed to do and because of that, I lost money.
So it’s super important to keep things organized because if you see like say the goal is, ACoS under 40 and then you quickly look there and you see that it is 70, it will make you take action like faster.
Elizabeth [00:22:56] Yeah.
Tomer [00:22:57] So that’s why I asked, like, you know, like about the structure that count and how organized it is, you know, as a PPC expert and someone seeing like ton of accounts. What are your top 3 wasters in Amazon PPC you would say.
Elizabeth [00:23:16] Hmm. Wasters definitely is going to be clicks in those sales. That’s I mean, I think everyone preaches that blut like clicks with no sales because you got nothing for it. Like if you’re advertising a top keyword and you’re like, my ACoS is like over 100 percent if you’re getting a lot of sales: No, it’s not profitable. It’s not great. But at least you’re ranking like hopefully you’re ranking. You should be tracking it. See if you’re ranking. You know, make sure it makes sense to do that.
But if you’re getting a bunch of clicks and those sales, like, you’re not getting anything from that, I mean, you’re getting visibility for whatever that’s worth but if you have no upside on the backend, it’s not really worth it so I would go and look at those bonus points. There is a targeting tab now, so you can look across your entire account; all of your targets point on this is it only covers sponsored products, but it does covere sponsored display, which is a pain in the butt to optimize. So you can view those inside the targeting tab.
Hopefully, they’ll eventually give us brand targets. I don’t know why we don’t have those, but what you can do is you can go in there, you can look at lifetime, so you can go lifetime, zero orders, store it by clicks and you could see what got the most clicks in your account and no sales. I would analyze the current bid versus what your cost per click is and see like – is this something I actually dropped or has this just been spinning its wheels and like wasting money? if you haven’t done like any optimizing in your account that’s going to get rid of a bunch of stuff, probably. So that’s a good place to check but yeah, I would say one is definitely not; two, a big waster that kind of sneaks in sometimes is going after top keywords in the beginning for, like new sellers.
Now if you have like a lot of budget totally behind it, maybe you have like an amazing account and you’re like, “All right, I have a lot of budget allocated. I’m fine with going after the top keywords.” As long as you know what you’re getting yourself into, like you can be OK but for like the average person just starting up PPC, you’re not really sure what you’re doing. Most people will go and they’ll reverse and search top competitors. What are they looking for? Let’s use this. That’s great. We use I mean, I just use it this afternoon. It’s a wonderful keyword research method, but you do want to go about it logically and understand what you’re doing.
So if you target like the top keywords and when I say top like a lot of search point, there are some there, some keywords on Amazon, I have like over hundreds of thousands of search volume. If you’re coming in with no reviews and maybe like 50 cents less than your top competitor, you’re not going to rank on those. You’re probably going to get a lot of clicks, no sales or your ACoS is going to be like insane and you’re just going to end up spending a lot of money. Do not go after those keywords if you have low budget, if you have like, I have $20 dollars a day to spend. Don’t start there. I would always recommend starting with, prioritize relevancy, not search volume in the beginning and figure out keywords that you think you can win. On ones that you can win, a lot of the things that Amazon prioritizes when it comes to ranking is sales velocity. That’s not all that goes into the equation, but that’s like a big chunk of it so if you can get a lot of sales through a particular keyword, you should start ranking for that again; track what you’re doing.
But so find those things that you think you can get good sales on. You know, like if you have a differentiator that you have keyword that speaks exactly to that differentiation. For instance, you have a water bottle that has a rubber sleeve and you can find something that says pink water bottle rubber sleeve with good search volume on it, like go after that one. So, I’m trying to think with a third biggest waster would be. It kind of goes back to bids, which is not optimizing frequently, just letting stuff run. You do want to give things enough, like time to actually get data.
You’ll always hear like, Oh, I’m waiting for data. If I’ve got 50 clicks, no sales in the first four days, it’s probably enough data, at least to start turning it down. I’m not saying pause it. I’m not going to add a negative keyword. I’m not saying nuke the account. Like you’re probably got enough data to do, at least make some tweaks. I’m not saying going on every four days, I’m not saying like, you have to be super vigilant with everything. You do want to give things time, but I’m not saying like, oh, in one month, we’ll worry about optimizing. No, you know, go check it at least after three days. Check. Poke around. Maybe don’t change anything. Just know what’s going on. Yeah.
Tomer [00:27:44] Yep. Maybe for me, negatives also recently like being very aggressive with my auto campaigns. And you know, you know, in order to waste a lot of money and really, first of all, before creating the campaigns and making sure that I’m doing a research and finding those cures that might pop out and, you know, triggered by the auto campaign and adding them. But still, it’s not bulletproof and you have to really be like on top of the search and report, making sure that you’re not getting those one words, keywords, pay three or four dollars, you know, per click, which is not really relevant and it creates a lot of, you know, wasting in their account.
Elizabeth [00:28:24] Yeah, that’s another go on. I should’ve said that one.
Tomer [00:28:29] OK, great. So, I want to keep it short; there was a lot of data to people to digest and understand. And maybe for us, it’s, you know, it’s like a natural conversation but many people struggle with PPC and especially like, like you say, taking action in a way that will not really like, first of all, will be quick organized and that will not really connect with other changes that you did. It’s super important, like it’s something that I also struggle with a lot and really wanted to thank you being a guest here again in the channel. And for those of the listeners and viewers that are watching this, that want to contact you and want, you know, potentially hire you how they can find out about, you know, where are you and what is your website or anything?
Elizabeth [00:29:22] Yeah. So the best place to contact me would be just our website junglr.com. There’s an intake form at the bottom, fill out a couple of questions; I’m still in charge of like looking over the intakes and everything. So you will get in touch with me personally and we’ll just see, you know, talk with you, see how we can help.
Tomer [00:29:42] Yeah, yeah, for sure. Contact her if you need a good PPC agency because I’m sure that the very soon she won’t accept any more customers. Hopefully. So, yeah.
Elizabeth [00:29:54] I have help now. I have help. I couldn’t do what I’m doing without help. That’s for sure
Tomer [00:29:58] I’m sure. So you’re doing like an amazing job. I follow you on social media and people that want to follow you. Do you have like a YouTube. Do you have a YouTube channel, right?
Elizabeth [00:30:09] Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So we have a YouTube channel. I think it’s Junglr LLC because I think Junglr was taken or something. So that’s on there. And then I post on Facebook, I’m more active on LinkedIn as far as posting content, I think I’m trying to be better about carrying that over to Facebook, but I’m more active, I think, on LinkedIn and these days.
Tomer [00:30:30] OK, great. Thank you again, Elizabeth, and good luck in Q4.
Elizabeth [00:30:35] Thanks. You too.