Believe me, I know that in the world of SEO this headline is not exactly a winner, but I just… it’s so hard to steer up the enthusiasm for something that is traditional. It’s so boring. Do you know what the proper version of this headline looks like?
“Optimization Tips and Strategies for your Amazon Sponsored Ads Campaigns: #2 – Keyword Isolation.”
Is that more professional? Sure. Does it convey the idea in a clearer fashion? Also sure. Does it use the word janky and funky next to each other? No. It does not. And for that it fails my current prime directive of dealing with Sponsored Ads:
DONT BORE YOURSELF TO DEATH DEALING WITH SPONSORED ADS
Anyone who says that this stuff is fascinating is either lying to you or amazingly well adjusted. This stuff is not fascinating. This stuff is boring. So funk-janky it up if you need to.
Remember our metaphor from the previous lesson? If you don’t, you should go back and read it. Ideally there’s a hotlink here but maybe not and you’ll have to do the work. This is going to be an extension of that idea.
Imagine your our clients’s advertising accounts are like a mansion and that mansion has thousands upon thousands of rooms, which are the individual campaigns.
Every day you walk down the halls of these mansions and because you don’t have the time to go into the rooms and make change you just drop off a bucket of cash and let the people in the room fight for it, make their change, and then you come back and pick up what happened.
For simplicity’s sake, we’re gonna pretend one of these rooms has exactly three people, with a budget of $10.
Every day you put in $10 in the room and the next day you check, and you get back $30. That’s not bad? A 33% ACOS. Life is good right?
Well let’s see who all is in that room, and how they each decided to make change. Remember, each person in a room is like a Keyword or Target in an ad campaign.
Person 1 took $5 and put back in $1
Person 2 took $4 and put back in $9
Person 3 took $1 and put back in $20
I tried to find a picture of a skinny person getting ganged up on by two bullies, something to convey that one person doesn’t have a chance to fight for this money and this is what a LOT Of searching gave me. The perfect image.
I hope I haven’t stolen this image from someone else’s blog about PPC that’d be SO embarrassing.
Okay, so from this picture we can tell EXACTLY what’s going on, can’t we?
Person 3, the accountant in the foreground, is having the hardest time getting access to the money because lets face it, she’s not physically stronger than person #1 and #2 in the background, she’s not gonna be able to fight those guys for that money.
Also, those guys are also not particularly great financial advisors because they can’t afford clothing or, by the looks of it, underwear. They seem to spend a lot of their money on protein powder, which is good for your health but we all know supplements are a challenging vertical in Amazon.
If you only take the lesson from the first episode in this series, you’ll be doing alright. You’d probably increase your budget from $10 to $20, and instead of getting $30 every day, you’d get $60. That’s progress for sure.
But there’s another choice.
What if you took this person out of this bully filled room and gave them their very own room in your mansion. Then she wouldn’t have to fight for that one dollar that those two meatheads overlooked.
MAYBE in that instance you’d have a room that when you dropped off $30 every day, you’d get back $600. Just maybe.
This is the beauty of “Single Keyword Ad Groups”, or as they are unfortunately referred to, SKAGs.
A SKAG (or SKAC) is a Campaign/AdGroup that only exists for the purpose of one particular keyword. That’s it. It has its own budget, its own reporting, its own room in the mansion. It doesn’t have to deal with those monstrous muscular bullies taking all their $, it can do what it wants and stop living in fear.
So, take a moment and dig through your campaigns. If any of them are hitting their budget ceiling on a regular basis, then it might be time to liberate some lip-biting accountants from their carb-counting roommates.
Now, there’s a chance that you won’t get the full amount, not every keyword has unlimited opportunities for conversions, but if those campaigns are regularly running out of money, chances are you’re leaving money on the table.
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