Learnings from $100m of Amazon Adspend

Welcome Back to the Emplicit Weekly Newsletter!

Every Saturday, we'll share an actionable Amazon & TikTok growth guide with practical tactics and strategies to help you dominate your competition and scale your Amazon sales. This newsletter will remain free forever. We hope you enjoy!

At Emplicit, we've helped over 500+ eCommerce brands earn $550 million in sales through Amazon.

Want to boost your sales using Amazon & TikTok? Click here to book a call & claim a Free audit of your store/brand.

Want to supercharge your Amazon PPC performance?

Here are 5 proven tricks we use to optimize accounts fast:

(If you prefer video to text click here)

1️⃣ Sort by highest spend

Focus on campaigns eating up your budget first for biggest impact.

This trick is all about prioritizing your efforts.

Here's how to do it:

• Open your campaign manager in Amazon Seller Central

• Click on the "Spend" column to sort campaigns from highest to lowest spend

• Start with the top-spending campaigns

Here’s what it looks like:

Why does this work?

Because these campaigns are using the most budget, even small improvements can lead to significant savings or performance boosts.

For example, we had a client selling Coffee.

Their top-spending campaign was eating up 40% of their total ad budget. By optimizing just this one campaign, we reduced wasted spend by 25% and increased sales by 15%.

2️⃣ Adjust bids based on CPC

If observed CPC is ~60% of bid, increase to maximize impressions.

This trick helps you find the sweet spot for your bids. Here's the process:

• Look at your keywords or product targets

• Compare the actual Cost-Per-Click (CPC) to your bid

• If CPC is around 60% of your bid, you have room to increase

For instance, if your bid is $1.00 and your actual CPC is $0.60, you could potentially increase your bid to $1.20 or $1.30. This can help you win more auctions and get more impressions without overpaying.

We used this technique for a supplement brand and saw their impression share increase by 30% with only a 15% increase in spend.

3️⃣ Pause low CTR keywords

Remove keywords with tiny CTRs eating impressions.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a crucial metric for Amazon's algorithm. Here's how to optimize for it:

• Sort your keywords by CTR, lowest to highest

• Look for keywords with very low CTR (usually below 0.2%)

• If these keywords have significant impressions but few clicks, pause them

This prevents you from wasting impressions on keywords that aren't resonating with shoppers.

For a client selling outdoor gear, we paused 20 low-CTR keywords that were getting thousands of impressions.

This allowed better-performing keywords to get more exposure, resulting in a 12% increase in overall campaign CTR.

Here’s what it can look like in practice:

4️⃣ Add new product targets

Use Amazon's suggestions to expand reach.

Amazon's algorithm is constantly learning about shopper behavior. Leverage this by:

• Going to your product targeting campaigns

• Clicking "Add targets"

• Selecting "Individual products" under the "Suggested" tab

• Adding all relevant suggestions

This can help you discover new, relevant products to target that you might have missed.

We did this for a beauty brand and found 100+ new product targets. Within a month, these new targets accounted for 15% of the campaign's sales at a 20% lower ACoS than the campaign average.

5️⃣ Balance auto campaign bids

Adjust bids for complements, substitutes, etc. to equalize ACOS.

Automatic campaigns have different match types. Optimize them individually:

• Look at your auto campaign's performance by match type

• Adjust bids so that each type (complements, substitutes, loose match, close match) has a similar ACOS

• If one type consistently underperforms, consider lowering its bid significantly

For another food and supplements client, we noticed their "substitutes" match type had a 50% higher ACOS than other types. By reducing its bid by 30%, we brought its performance in line with the others, improving overall campaign efficiency.

These tricks work wonders for mature campaigns. At Emplicit, we've used them to help 500+ brands earn $550 million on Amazon.

The key is making small, frequent adjustments.

Don't over-optimize new campaigns.

Want to see these in action?

We’ve made a longer video walking through each trick, click here to watch it:

Happy optimizing!

See you next week,
Adam Weiler

Here are some other newsletters you might find useful:

Amazon PPC 101

How we boosted Amazon sales by 17% in just 2 weeks

Pillow Talk: How to Make Your Listing Stand Out on Amazon

Whenever you are ready, here’s how we can help you:

Grow Your Brand on Amazon & TikTok with 100% hands-off marketplace management

We've helped over 500 clients earn more than $550 million on Amazon. If you need help making the most of the Amazon opportunity, click here to book a call & claim a Free audit of your store/brand.