Bid Plus – or more recently, ‘adjust bids by placement’ with Dynamic Bidding on Amazon, allows you to boost your ads placement by as much as 900%. Ad placement and rank is very important to Amazon sellers like you because it plays a big part in increasing revenue.
With a solid foundation for your campaigns, you could considerably increase sales for your products using this one feature. But you first need to know how it works before you dive in because you could end up on the losing end if your campaigns aren’t properly optimized from the ground up.
Bid Plus – or more recently, ‘adjust bids by placement’ with Dynamic Bidding on Amazon, allows you to boost your ads placement by as much as 900%. Ad placement and rank is very important to Amazon sellers like you because it plays a big part in increasing revenue.
With a solid foundation for your campaigns, you could considerably increase sales for your products using this one feature. But you first need to know how it works before you dive in because you could end up on the losing end if your campaigns aren’t properly optimized from the ground up.
What is Bid Plus?
The Bid Plus feature of Amazon Advertising can dynamically increase your max CPC bid fr manual campaigns. This only happens, however, if the Amazon algorithm decides that you have a chance of reaching the top spot in the platform’s search results. This is how it promises to get you the highest traffic placements.
How Does Bidding Work on Amazon?
Pay close attention to this section before you decide to turn on the bid plus feature on your campaigns. There is a variety of components to Amazon Advertising that work together to determine what CPC you’ll be paying and who the winner will be.
First, you probably don’t want to put your CPC too high for fear of draining your ad budget too quickly. A higher CPC, however, gives you more chances of winning against the competition bidding for the same keywords. Of course, you won’t always pay what you set as your CPC – this is just the maximum that you’re willing to pay for a click.
Second, you need to sort out whether you’re setting CPCs at the ad level or at the keyword level. Setting bids at the as level is super convenient. If you set a high CPC at the ad level, however. you could be losing out on keywords that aren’t really performing well. Consider setting separate bids for both the ad group and each keyword individually. Yup, this is a little-known strategy that is very useful and effective.
Basically, you need to know how high you should go, and fine-tune your CPC settings for each keyword before you even think about using Bid Plus.
In terms of how Amazon decides which ad gets top placement, that’s another well-kept secret. But we do know that optimized listings go a long way here, and ad rank as well as ad and keyword relevance play a big role.
When Does Bid Plus Start Working?
If the Amazon algorithm sees that your ad could reach the top of the search results, Bid Plus kicks in – if you have it turned on. You can’t use it to boost ads whenever you want. It only works on ads that are already quite successful. Then it gives you a little push up the search results to increase your chances of converting. And don’t worry, Amazon won’t go over the daily budget cap that you’ve set.
Things to Watch Out for
Bid Plus makes your Sponsored Products ads more competitive. Even Amazon warns, however, that you must first have a good ACoS. If you don’t, you might still increase sales, but you’ll also spend a ton on advertising costs.
In addition, you should know that Bid Plus works at the campaign level, so all of your keyword bids in a given campaign will be affected. If you have a ton of keywords, you might get a severe shock. It’s wise to test Bid Plus on smaller campaigns that are already performing well so you can minimize the risks. Then measure how much it helps by running it for a while, then turning the feature off again and checking the numbers.
Note that there are no reports available for Bid Plus. This means that you have no way of knowing what position an ad did best in, why Bid Plus decided to up or not to up a bid, and how this decision affected your revenue. You can track ad performance manually by extrapolating the data from your other reports, but it will only give you a general idea.
Be aware as well that there’s no guarantee that your ad will reach the top spot if Bid Plus is turned on. Moreover, there’s also no guarantee that your ad will convert even if it does reach top placement. Amazon gets paid either way, of course, so you need to be careful not to get too excited about turning the feature on. Unless you’re very experienced at PPC, you’re more likely to end up spending more money and not significantly increasing conversions.
Is Bid Plus a Good Idea for You?
Unless you’re absolutely sure, we don’t recommend turning on Bid Plus. Instead, work first on your optimizations across the board, then work on your campaigns to increase your ACoS for exact match keywords. Then you can increase bids manually for these keywords. This is how you get PPC to work for you. Bid Plus is not a magic PPC solution.
Of course, it’s possible to make Bid Plus work for you. We just think that you should be extremely cautious when using it and have a solid plan for tracking your results.
