Most Amazon sellers rely on multiple software tools to manage their business. For example, automated repricers, keyword research tools and accounting software. But the one area where a lot of them are still lacking is Amazon PPC Software.
Most sellers are trying to either run their ads internally, hire some VA off of Fiverr to do it for them, or just wing it entirely. This usually leads to inconsistent, suboptimal results and leaves many sellers scratching their heads when things go wrong.
If you’ve been in this situation before, you know how bad it is, and it’s the exact reason why Amazon PPC software now exists. Such tools can help you simplify account maintenance and optimization. Therefore, you’ll spend less time working on your ads and get better results.
What Can a PPC Software Actually Do for You?
Amazon PPC software offers countless features that you can use to improve your advertising strategy. But there are 4 main capabilities that benefit sellers the most:
Automated Bidding
The most popular use for PPC software is automated bidding. This process involves increasing and decreasing bids using data-based algorithms to hit a predetermined ACoS target.
The reason people use automated bidding is that manual bidding can often take too much time to do regularly and be difficult to get right. If you’re not updating your bids constantly, your CPC will eventually become either too high or too low which hurts your performance.
Campaign Creation
Most PPC software offer campaign creation tools that can help automate setup and keyword research for sellers. The way they work is:
- Provide the ASINs you want to advertise
- Specify the budget for your ads
- Select the campaign types you want to launch
The Amazon PPC software does the rest!
Using automated campaign creators, sellers can quickly set up dozens of campaigns to increase visibility on their most important ASINs and keywords and grow their Amazon sales.
Keyword Management
Another time-consuming task that sellers can automate is keyword management. You can add new keywords, harvest search terms, and insert negatives into your campaigns to maintain and improve performance.
Many software tools allow you to automate this entirely using customizable rules. Here’s an example: “if ad spend exceeds X amount on a search term with 0 sales, add it as a negative”. Or “if a search term produces two or more sales, add it as a keyword”.
This feature comes in handy when you run thousands of campaigns because, at that point, it becomes difficult to keep up with all the minor changes you need to make, which can hurt performance significantly.
Just adding 2 keywords and 1 negative search term per week into each campaign can easily bring you thousands of new orders and save you a lot of money in the long run.
Dayparting
Dayparting has only become popular during the last year because it’s always been very difficult to do manually. Throughout that year though, dayparting proved to be surprisingly effective in lowering ACoS for certain products and categories.
For example, if you sell primarily to B2B buyers, you might find that your conversion rate and ACoS are much worse before or after regular business hours, and during the weekend. Or if you sell coffee, your ads might perform a lot better during the morning than at night.
You can use dayparting to optimize your conversion rate.
A PPC software will help you identify if and when those high and low-performance periods occur. Then, the software will change your bids to react to them. In doing so, sellers can decrease their ACoS and divert spending from low-performing hours to high-performing ones.
Manual vs Software
Using an Amazon PPC software is one of the quickest ways to improve efficiency and decrease your workload. But there are still some things that are better done by humans. These can include:
Strategy
Some strategic decisions, like which SKUs to advertise or what budget to allocate to each ASIN, still need to be made by humans.
PPC Adjacent Tasks
There are specific tasks, like creating listing content or deciding on pricing that need to be done by humans. These tasks aren’t necessarily advertising related but they impact key advertising metrics like CVR and CTR.
Finances
An algorithm can’t tell you what ACoS target is optimal for increasing profit, what TACoS level is acceptable based on your margins, and how fast you can increase your ad spend without killing cash flow. All these decisions are crucial and should be made by a human.
Who Should Use an Amazon PPC Software?
While it’s generally a good idea for any seller to use an Amazon PPC software to run their account, there are 4 types of sellers who benefit from it the most.
Sellers with large catalogs
If you have a 400+ SKU catalog, it’s likely to be very difficult to keep up with all the bid changes, keyword updates, and new campaigns that need to be made in order to stay effective with your advertising.
The only way around that is to either use software to automate these tasks or hire an outside team to handle them.
Sellers in multiple marketplaces
Many sellers already have accounts that are too large to manage manually. That problem only compounds when they open up new marketplaces.
So if you reach the point where you start selling in multiple countries, it might be a good idea to use a software tool to make sure everything runs perfectly.
Lack of Expertise
Most sellers aren’t experts when it comes to PPC. This can lead to them either mismanaging their ads or hiring the wrong team or service provider to take care of it for them.
That’s why it makes sense for these sellers to test PPC software for an error-free, cost-effective ad management solution.
Too many campaigns
Sellers with too many campaigns (usually thousands) are going to find difficulty in doing things like bid changes, keyword updates, and campaign creation at a high enough frequency without software.
Final Thoughts
In today’s competitive landscape, having the right Amazon PPC software tools to run your business is pretty much table stakes.
Most successful Amazon agencies and sellers are already using PPC software. Those who try to compete with them without it will find it very difficult.
If you’re unsure of which software to use, doing a quick search for the best Amazon PPC software might be a good place to start. You can also check the Amazon partner directory and ask for recommendations from sellers you trust.
Author
Saif Elhager is the Co-Founder of AiHello, an Amazon PPC automation software company. At AiHello, Saif has spent 4+ years developing artificial intelligence algorithms that have helped over 6000 sellers automate their PPC and drive hundreds of millions in sales.
