Amazon Match Ads: Don’t Make This Mistake

Don’t make this mistake with your Amazon Ads!

Too many sellers and advertisers are worried about competing against themselves in the ad auctions. Broad, Phrase, Exact match, as well as Auto targeting, can all produce different (higher or lower) CPCs and ultimately varying ACOS levels.

Traditional performance marketing best practices would warn us to stay away from competing against ourselves. I see, for example, many advertisers adding a negative term in their auto campaign that was performing really well and adding that as an exact match in their exact match campaign only to result in a higher CPC and higher ACOS only to find out a few weeks later that ACOS is higher and sales volume is lower.

Listen up, here’s the secret: if something is working in Amazon, don’t pause it or add it as a negative. Keep it running if that’s a valuable term/target for your product and then figure out how to add to it.

The auctions behave differently based on HOW you’re targeting the keyword and you can maximize your exposure and get a cheaper CPC and ultimately lower ACOS if you experiment with bidding on that keyword via broad, phrase, exact, and auto-targeting.

We generally see performance increase even when we’re “bidding against ourselves” in this regard. Keep the good things running in your account.

Try following these steps:

1. Find a keyword that you like and that has solid performance in your auto-campaign
2. Don’t add it as a negative, try to teach the algorithm to bid on it more frequently
3. Take the term and add it into broad, phrase, and exact match campaigns to maximize exposure
4. Measure which match type is getting you the best CPC and ACOS
5. Re-allocate your spend accordingly
6. Rinse and repeat

Need some help optimizing your Amazon marketing? Our Amazon team is here and ready to help you win.