Amazon PPC Tool Quick Start Guide

Learn what to expect, how to navigate, and where to start when mastering an Amazon PPC tool.

As Mark Twain once said, the secret of getting ahead is getting started. But in many instances, getting started can be the most challenging part. Especially with the amazon ppc tool.

That much is certainly true regarding Amazon PPC and software designed to simplify and add sophistication to Amazon’s advertising platform. Amazon Advertising is still very much in its early stages. There should be no expectation to know where to begin.

So we’re here to help guide you in the right direction. To provide a basic knowledge of the Viral Launch advertising platform. You will know where things are, what to look for, and what’s included. Everything else begins to make much more sense.

Just like we must learn to walk before we run, you’ll need to understand the basics of Viral Launch’s PPC automation and management tool. Then, you’re free to start implementing advertising strategies that take your business to the next level!

You’ll need to set up a Viral Launch account that includes access to Viral Launch’s advertising platform, Kinetic PPC.

Sign up for our FREE Amazon PPC Playbook. With training from experts guiding you through all steps, you can perform PPC like a pro and dominating on Amazon!

First, you will need to provide Viral Launch with both MWS and seller central authorization in order to integrate Kinetic with your Amazon Advertising Console. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to do that here.

Once successfully added, you’ll see your storefronts and ASINs within your account. Additionally, we strongly recommend setting up your landed unit cost and target ACoS within Kinetic. While admittedly tedious, doing so pays off in the end to fully experience the benefits. We’ll explain more on that shortly.

Campaign View vs. Product View

Once you’ve added proper authorizations, you’ll notice there’s not one but two ways you can view your ad.

  • Campaign View shows information for every campaign across all your products. It looks a lot like Seller Central. 
  • Product View shows information per ASIN, so you can see how each individual product is performing.

For those familiar with Amazon PPC, campaign view offers a more familiar appearance. With souped-up features, embedded data reporting, and cutting-edge integrations from the Viral Launch software suite, it’s like the Amazon Advertising Console on steroids.

But Product View truly allows for innovative insights into their ads like never before. With Product View, you are able to view how your ads are performing at the ASIN level so you can maximize efficiency. Once you’ve added your landed unit cost and target ACoS, you gain the ability to pinpoint your campaigns to minimize risk and maximize your ROI.

Make Your Own Rules

Create a rule for your campaigns or utilize our templates to optimize your ads.

One of the biggest roadblocks to Amazon advertising success continues to be monitoring adjustments. With all the duties placed on a business owner’s shoulders, monitoring campaign statistics and making changes at the right time can feel impossible.

Kinetic solves that problem with its ability to create rules to optimize your ads. Don’t know where to get started? No worries! Our handy pre-made templates can help get you started with understanding what rules you can create by providing the strategy behind them.

Set parameters to shut down underperforming campaigns or increase the budget for ads that are skyrocketing your sales to enact performance-based automations. That’s right. Kinetic’s by-the-minute monitoring and your personalized rules combine to stop losing campaigns in their tracks or reward winners with more ad spend.

You can set the rules to three different states of action.

Automatic

  • Rules set as automatic continuously go into effect once the rule has been triggered. In this state, the rules you’ve created for a campaign will fire off whenever the conditions have been met. For example, if you create a rule that increases your bid amount for keywords with a low ACoS and place it on automatic, the rule will take action every time it’s applicable without any action needed from the seller.

Manual

  • Rules in a manual state work similarly to those in automatic. However, instead of the rule going into effect as soon as the conditions have been met, you’re notified within the tool without Kinetic making any changes. Once notified, you can review the rule that’s been triggered in the Activity History tab to decide whether or not to approve the action. As the name implies, this state is more hands-on.

Paused

  • In a paused state, rules exist without any action taking place as a result of them. Perhaps you’d like to experiment with rule creation but don’t want to trigger changes for your campaigns. Placing them in a paused state ensures that your work is saved, but there will be no automations or notifications regarding the specific rule. At any point, you can take paused rules off the bench and into the game by selecting manual or automatic with the push of a button.

With Kinetic, your campaigns can literally make desired real-time adjustments while you sleep! If you prefer a more hands-on approach for your ad campaigns, you can do that too. Featuring the option to do either,

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Get Familiar with Your Keywords and Search Terms

On top of the ability to create campaigns at the ASIN-level with customizable rules to more effectively carry out your goals, this Amazon PPC tool collects extensive reporting for a clear view into your ad performance at the keyword level.

The Keywords and Search Terms tabs within Kinetic display critical metrics that better informs your advertising strategy and tactics.

In Seller Central, you have to run a report for a particular date range, export it to Excel, add a series of filters and try to understand where it’s actually delivering and look for opportunities to improve the targeting. Kinetic simplifies this process, giving sellers the power to dig deeper into their data and make changes to optimize their campaigns.

The Keywords and Search Terms tabs offer unbridled insights into your ad performance.

While many make the mistake of using these words interchangeably, a very important detail differentiates these two Amazon buzzwords. In short, the Keywords tab is where you’re targeting, while the Search Terms tab presents only where your ads are delivering.

Keywords Tab

This view helps to consolidate all of the keywords you are targeting and allows you to see how the keyword is performing, and what campaigns are contributing to that.

Search Terms Tab

The Search Terms tab can save you loads of time in understanding where your ads are delivering. Once you’re using an Auto campaign, or broad and phrase match targets, your ads can deliver for a wide array of customer search terms.

In short, the Keywords tab shows keywords are targeting, while the Search Terms tab presents only where your ads are delivering. Your Search Terms report will show you a list of keywords that have garnered at least one impression, along with a bevy of metrics that gauges performance.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this quick start guide helps you gain a better understanding of this cutting-edge Amazon PPC tool. As PPC continues to become a larger priority for Amazon, it can serve as an engine for your business to scale like never before.

Now that you have a better lay of the land, taking your business to a new level is within reach! Register for a Viral Launch account today and start your 14-day free trial to turbocharge your FBA efforts.

Sign up for a 14-day FREE trial to Viral Launch’s most comprehensive plan, featuring Kinetic PPC

Amazon PPC for Beginners: A Glossary of Terms

Amazon Advertising has exploded in usage and importance for Amazon sellers in the past few years. As the Amazon marketplace continues to grow, the stakes for understanding, implementing, and executing Amazon PPC strategies into your business have never been higher. Viral Launch is here to help with our Amazon PPC for beginners guide!

Although Amazon launched its advertising platform in 2012, it has grown recent years. In a short amount of time, Amazon has placed itself behind only Google and Facebook for digital advertising market share.

With so many shoppers heading online, Amazon sellers can transform their business with advertising by attracting more visibility than ever before.

However, since it’s a relatively new advent, it’s a topic most sellers don’t feel comfortable adding to their marketing mix. And we understand! At times, learning about Amazon PPC can feel similar to learning advanced math or a foreign language. In a way, it’s a mix of both, with formulas and equations that determine your success and terminology that exists in a world of its own. With so much to learn, where do you even begin?

Right here with Viral Launch and our Amazon PPC for beginners guide!

While this may sound daunting, it’s actually a little easier to understand than you might think. Whether you’re just beginning with PPC and need to speak the language or just want to reference an unfamiliar term or two, feel free to use our glossary and explainer for popular PPC terms!

[You may also be interested in: The Amazon PPC Playbook from Viral Launch]

Amazon PPC for Beginners: From A to Z

Advertising placement

Advertising placement is where an advertisement is displayed. On Amazon, ads are commonly shown on mobile and desktop. Found at the top of search results, alongside search results, product display pages.

Example of an ad placement at top of search, via Amazon Sponsored Products

Budget

The maximum amount of money that can be spent on a campaign. If you set a daily budget at $25, this means you will not spend more than $25 for the selected day.

Bid

The amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for each click. On Amazon, sellers can choose between automatic or manual bidding.

Keywords

The most common PPC tactic for how customers will discover your ads. Whether through automatic or manual targeting, sellers can target specific keywords that customers utilize in search to find products.

Search Term

Often confused with keywords from a PPC perspective, search terms within Amazon reports (and PPC tools like Kinetic) refer to where your ads appear.

In short, the Keywords refer to what you’re targeting while Search Terms refer to where your ads are being delivered.

Demand-side platform (DSP)

An Amazon software platform that enables advertisers to programmatically buy display, video, and audio ads on and off Amazon.


Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS)

A metric used to measure performance, efficiency, and profitability of Sponsored Products ad campaigns. You can calculate ACoS by dividing Total Ad Spend by Total Sales.

For example, if an advertiser’s ACoS is 30%, the seller paid 30 cents for every dollar made.

Target ACoS (TACoS)

Not the delicious Mexican treat, unfortunately. Target ACoS, or TACoS refers to advertising spend relative to total revenue generated, while including organic revenue. While ACoS utilizes only spend and revenue numbers that are directly related to advertising, TACoS includes organic revenue to apply a more holistic perspective to your promotional efforts.

Return on Ad Spend (RoAS)

A prominent benchmark across digital advertising, RoAS is the inverse of ACoS. Instead of measuring the cost of a sale, ROaS represents the dollars earned per dollar spent.

Conversions

An action that a customer completes; this phrase can be used to refer to any number of actions, including clicking “Add to Cart,” completing a purchase, etc. Generally, this measures how many times your ad ended with the desired result.

Conversion rate

Measures the frequency that your advertising campaign ends with the desired result.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

Specifically, the average cost you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. To find out your CPC, divide the amount of money spent on an ad by the number of clicks it receives. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands feature CPC ads.

As a whole, CPC can be a mutually beneficial relationship between Amazon and the seller, as sellers only pay for ads that receive a click.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

The percentage of ad impressions that are clicked as compared to the entire number of clicks. The standard calculation for CTR is (clicks/impressions) x 100.

New-to-brand metrics

Metric used to describe customers purchasing your brand/product for the first time on Amazon over the past year. These metrics estimate the cost of engaging new customers on Amazon and identify the most efficient channels and tactics to achieve their campaign goals and are popularly used in comparison with repeat customers for brands to better understand their customer acquisition vs. customer retention paths.

Automatic Campaigns

A campaign or targeting type where Amazon decides when and where your ad is displayed. Automatic campaigns are convenient for their ease of use and the data gathered through Amazon, but take control out of the seller’s hands.

Since automatic targeting campaigns are made programmatically, they can occasionally lead to running ads for odd keywords or unrelated products, which can cause less efficient campaigns.

Manual Campaigns

The counterpart to automatic campaigns, manual campaigns put more control in the advertiser’s hands, allowing more strategy in campaigns. Sellers can select competing or complementary products or keywords for their product to appear for.

PPC Spend

The total amount of money allotted to advertising efforts on Amazon.

Target ACoS

Not TACoS or tacos, Target ACoS refers to your profit margin before advertising divided by target profit margin after advertising. This number will vary from seller-to-seller and determined by the various costs of making your product available.

For more, check out Amazon’s official glossary

We’ll be sure to update as more words enter the Amazon lexicon. Subscribe to our email list below to stay on top of all things Amazon!

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