Too Much Bloat

Hey,

After a bit of a rough night with the twins (we're taking them to doctors today, if we can get an appointment!), this newsletter is a little later than usual, so apologies about that.

If you're anything like me, you've likely bought courses, watched YouTube videos, read blog posts and tried to absorb and take action on everything you possibly can to improve the performance of your Amazon Ads.

Learning and implementing what you learn should be applauded, don't get me wrong. You can't call yourself a professional cyclist, for example, if you know all the theory of riding a bike, but you've never actually sat on one and ridden anywhere!

So, taking action is key, without a doubt.

The problem becomes that, over time, your Amazon Ads Account starts to become bloated with a strategy from this guy, a strategy from that gal, a tactic from this blog post, a tactic from that podcast episode, and before you know it, your Account is a big hot mess. You get overwhelmed just looking at it, let alone trying to figure out what to do with it all, so you end up doing 1 of 3 things:

Turn all the Ads off, forget about Amazon Ads and move onto the next big thing
Leave the Ads on but forget about them, until months later and you find you've racked up some serious Ad Spend
Or, maybe, you do put your big boy pants or big girl pants on and attempt to see the wood from the trees, trying to untangle the mess of data that is your Amazon Ads Account.

Either way, when an Amazon Ads Account gets to this stage (and I've seen a few now!), you really have to drill down into the data to figure out what is actually working and what isn't working.

When I'm taking over an existing Amazon Ads Account from a client, here's a top-level view of exactly what I do:

Download the relevant Amazon Ads Reports and do some number crunching/analysis
Look at multiple time periods of data (e.g. Last 30 Days, Lifetime, Last 7 Days, etc.)
See where the money is being spent (which Campaigns and which Keywords/ASINs)
Look for patterns/trends in the data
Review the Campaign and Account Structure
Look at the naming conventions used and re-name every remaining Campaign and Ad Group accordingly
Setup the required Portfolios to help organize the Account
Make sure that the same books aren't being advertised in multiple Campaigns with the same targeting and bids (a common problem I see a lot)
Look at the bidding strategies being used and how much is being bid on each target
Turn off irrelevant or under-performing targets
Review which placements the sales and page reads are coming from and adjust accordingly
And take action on it all

To be honest, I can be pretty ruthless when an account is in such a mess; I turn a lot of Campaigns off if they haven't generated a single sale for at least 30-60 days and focus on the 20% of Campaigns that are delivering 80% of the results.

The same goes for keywords/ASINs. I often come into accounts where there are 500+ keywords in an Ad Group, but over the past 30 days, only 30-50 of those keywords have actually had any clicks and maybe 10-20 of those (if you're lucky) have generated any sales or page reads.

So, I immediately pause all those non-spending keywords and allow the budget to focus on only those keywords that have been spending money recently.

This is the only way to turn an Account around.

You have to get in there, look at all the data and really focus in on what is actually working.

It's not to say that all these random strategies and tactics you've been testing out have been a waste of money; they have taught you how to use the Amazon Ads platform for one, but they should have also collected a lot of data (depending on how long you have been running the Ads for) that can be used in your future Campaigns.

Amazon Ads doesn't have to be complicated, but it can become complicated when your Account is bloated.

Keep things SIMPLE, because SIMPLE works. Every time.

To Your Success
- Matt