Save Your Amazon PPC Budget: 5 Critical Fixes

Author

Adam Weiler
January 04, 2025

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.

Your Amazon PPC campaign is bleeding money.

Here's how we plugged the leak and boosted one client's sales by 317% by addressing these common PPC errors:

1️⃣ Product Ineligibility

Make sure your product can be advertised. Inventory issues or pricing problems can make it ineligible.

Let's break this down:

  • Inventory issues: Amazon won't run ads for out-of-stock items. We found our client had several products with low stock levels, causing their ads to stop running intermittently.

  • Pricing problems: If your product's price is higher than the maximum price you set in your campaign, Amazon will pause your ads. Our client had accidentally set maximum prices too low on several items.

  • Buy box issues: You need to win the buy box to run ads. We discovered our client was losing the buy box on key products due to pricing inconsistencies.

Solution: We set up inventory alerts, adjusted pricing strategies, and implemented a buy box monitoring system. This ensured our client's products were always eligible for advertising.

2️⃣ Paused Products

Double-check that your ads are enabled and running.

This seems obvious, but it's a common oversight. Here's what we found:

  • Several high-performing products were accidentally paused during a bulk edit.

  • Seasonal items weren't reactivated at the right time.

  • New product launches weren't added to existing campaigns.

Solution: We implemented a weekly audit process to catch paused products and created a calendar for seasonal product activation. We also set up automated rules to add new ASINs to relevant campaigns.

3️⃣ Negative Keywords

Be cautious with negative phrase match keywords. They might accidentally eliminate important keywords.

This is a tricky one. For example:

Our client sold "organic juice cleanse" but had "juice" as a negative phrase match keyword to avoid showing up for "apple juice."

This accidentally blocked their ads from showing for "organic juice" searches.

Solution: We conducted a thorough negative keyword audit, replacing broad negative keywords with more specific ones. We also implemented a regular search term report review to catch any unintended keyword blocks.

4️⃣ Low Bids

CPCs on Amazon increase over time. If your bids are too low, you'll stop getting impressions.

We found that many of our client's bids hadn't been updated in months and some top-performing keywords had bids set too low, resulting in lost placements. At the same time competitor bids had increased, pushing our client's ads down in search results.

Solution: We used dynamic bidding strategies, regularly adjusting bids based on performance data and competitor analysis. We also set up automated rules to increase bids on high-converting keywords.

5️⃣ Keyword Restrictions

Amazon sometimes prevents bidding on certain keywords it deems irrelevant to your product.

This can be frustrating, but there are workarounds:

Our client couldn't bid on "protein supplement" for their plant-based protein powder.

Amazon deemed it too generic, despite its relevance.

Solution: We focused on long-tail keywords and product-specific terms. We also improved the product listing's relevancy signals (title, bullets, description) to expand the range of keywords Amazon would allow.

Use these solutions to problem solve for your business and optimize now for unprecedented 2025 revenue growth.

That’s all for this week!

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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.