As we are now well into October and Amazon’s Early Access deals kicked off last week, now seems like a great time to review the PPC basics to set up your brand for success.
ACOS or TACOS?
Ensure you have clearly defined your advertising goals for Q4. Instead of only measuring ads performance using an ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales – Spend / Ad Revenue ), we like to have a more comprehensive view of the impact that ads are having on the whole account. Therefore, we recommend choosing a TACOS goal (Total Advertising Cost of Sales – Ad spend / Total Sales). Working towards this goal allows you to see what impact your ad spend is having on your total sales. It will also give you the flexibility to increase your budgets during Q4 if your total sales increase. It’s critical to ensure you have established a TACOS goal that’s both sustainable and achievable.
Contact us to see how your brand can benefit from a TACOS goal.
Budgets
Q4 Build-Up
Increasing your ads budgets pre-Q4 peak is a great strategy to increase brand awareness and consideration so that when we hit the peak traffic during Nov & Dec, your brand is fresh in the minds of potential customers.
We like to ramp up Sponsored Display campaigns in the build-up as they are a cost-efficient ad type to drive brand awareness due to their low CPMs.
Q4 Peak
To capitalise on the increased traffic during the Q4 peak, we typically suggest increasing budgets by 150% to 200%. However, it’s heavily dependent on the product category. For example, we’d suggest increasing budgets by at least 300% for ‘X’ alcoholic brand during December due to the traffic increase & strong conversion rates & not increasing budgets at all for ‘X’ Protein Powder brand, due to low search volumes and typically lower conversion rates during Nov & Dec. Instead, look at increasing investment during Q1 2023.
Select Your Ad Types
Utilise each of the ad types in conjunction with each other as each ad type has unique benefits – this will help you maximise efficient sales & brand awareness.
Sponsored Products (SP) – An essential ad type that will likely drive the majority of sales in Q4, we typically allocate 65-75% of ad spend towards SP, due to the strong conversion rates due to placement looking the most similar to the organic results compared to the other ad types.
Sponsored Brand (SB) – The banner grabs users’ attention & allows you to add a custom image that represents your brand and drive engagement. Promoting 3 products allows you to showcase your catalogue & can help increase the basket size. One tip for Q4 would be to update the headline & custom image to have a festive theme to help drive traffic to the store or product pages. Competitors’ ads will appear if you’re not present, likely losing out on sales and market share.
Sponsored Brand Video (SBV) – Videos are the best way to communicate your product features & highlight the USPs. You might see a higher ACOS due to high CPCs but remember, you’re only charged when someone clicks on your video, not for each view. For Q4, experiment with creating a unique festive video to capitalise on the holiday spirit.
Sponsored Display (SD) – Use this to defend your own ASINs, as well as targeting competitor ASINs to gain market share during high traffic peaks in Q4.
Keyword & Targeting Strategy
Your targeting strategy must be closely aligned with your Q4 goals. If your focus is to maximise sales & traffic with flexible budgets & higher ACOS, you can increase bids & budgets on non-branded & competitor keywords / ASINs, these will likely have higher CPCs but will see high sales volumes and help maximise sales. This is also an effective way to acquire New To Brand (NTB) customers, as they are either not searching for a brand or are searching for competitors. If your focus is to maximise profitability while maintaining market share, then focus on defending your branded terms & ASINs and stick to your historic best-performing keywords.
Targeting ‘giftable’ related keywords will help boost traffic to your product detail pages, but we typically see high CPCs and lower conversion rates with these terms as customers tend to do more ‘window shopping’ looking for gifts and aren’t ready to make the purchase as quickly.
Don’t Let Q4 Pass You By
With customers looking to spread the cost of shopping this holiday season, search volumes are already starting to creep up. Get in touch today to learn how Expert Edge can help shape and execute your PPC strategy for the Q4 peak.