#676 – Prime Day 2025 PPC Bootcamp

What if your Amazon Prime Day PPC strategy could skyrocket your sales like never before? Join us for an enlightening TACoS Tuesday session with Destaney Wishon, CEO of btr media, as she unveils the secrets to making the most of this bustling shopping event. As Prime Day continues to gain traction akin to a national holiday, Destaney shares unique insights into consumer behavior, comparing it with other major shopping events such as Black Friday. Tune in to understand how deal-seeking tendencies and burgeoning search intentions can be your golden ticket to optimizing ad performance and capturing a broad audience.

Together, we dissect the art and science of Amazon PPC campaigns. Destaney takes us through the intricacies of advanced keyword targeting, emphasizing the power of long-tail keywords that drive higher conversion rates due to their specific search intent. Discover how diversifying your approach with various match types can set you apart from the competition, enhancing both impressions and bid management. Avoid common pitfalls by learning the importance of not over-relying on core terms, and instead, optimize your campaigns through comprehensive keyword research. It’s time to rethink your strategy and master the tools at your disposal to enhance your brand’s visibility.

For those looking to maximize advertising efficiency during high-traffic times like Prime Day, this episode serves as your roadmap. Destaney explains the benefits of both automatic and manual targeting, offering tips for effective campaign management using tools like Helium 10 Ads. From search term report analysis to strategic budget management, you’ll gain actionable insights to refine your approach. Whether you’re a seasoned seller or just starting out, this conversation is packed with expert advice to ensure your Amazon advertising strategy is primed for success.

In episode 676 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Destaney discuss:

• 00:00 – Maximizing Amazon Ads for Prime Day
• 03:34 – Prime Day’s Impact on Amazon Customers
• 06:22 – Advanced Amazon PPC Keyword Targeting
• 09:18 – Customer Intent and Long Tail Keywords
• 12:08 – Maximizing Amazon Advertising Efficiency and Performance
• 19:11 – Amazon Search Query Performance Data
• 20:10 – Optimizing Amazon Advertising for Prime
• 22:49 – Optimizing Advertising for Prime Day
• 27:36 – Amazon PPC Strategy for Prime Day
• 27:58 – Advanced Prime Day Campaign Strategy
• 30:18 – Advanced Audience Targeting and Rule-Based Bidding
• 32:06 – Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategies
• 35:25 – Customizing Budgets for Prime Wee

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we’re joined by Destaney Wishon, CEO of Better Media, to break down what it really takes to win during Amazon’s biggest sales event, Prime Day. If you want to target smarter, bid stronger and make your ad dollars go further during a high traffic, high competition window, then this is the episode to catch my friends.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show…

Shivali Patel:

That brings you our monthly TACoS Tuesday special, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon, PPC and ads. Today’s episode was recorded in collaboration with Amazon ads to help you get fully prepped for Prime Day, officially happening July 8th through 11th. That is four full days of increased visibility, fierce competition and massive opportunity, which means that your ad strategy needs to be sharper than ever. You are fine tuning your sponsored products or building out a full funnel sponsored brand strategy. She shares tactics that are relevant, timely and immediately actionable. Let’s dive in.

Destaney Wishon:

So diving in. The first thing we’re talking about here is Prime Day specifics. So I like to zoom out a little bit and talk about Prime Day as a whole, because I have been doing this since the days when Prime Day wasn’t synonymous with a national holiday, and I think that’s a really key thing to hit on here is when we are talking about Prime Day specifics and how it affects your Amazon ads. I like starting first with just consumer sentiment. As we all know, last year was a very large Prime Day more than 375 million items worldwide and more than $2.5 billion saved directly from Amazon. So with that, one thing that we have seen is customers are now sitting here waiting and prepping for Prime Day. Now same thing as brands are. So with that, we see a really high traffic increase, no matter who you are. We see broadening customer search intent. So one of the things that we see now is, if someone wants toothpaste, they go and they type toothpaste. If it’s Prime Day, people have a much broader discovery phase, right, they are going to Amazon and they are looking around for things that they want to buy. That’s maybe on a deal or a discount. That’s something that is really, really synonymous with Prime Day shopper habits and how does that compare to other tentpole events? Think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What type of products are people going to Black Friday, Cyber Monday for? Typically, we see it skewed towards more holiday and more gifting items. Prime Day is a little bit different, so we see this broad. In customer search, we see this lift across almost all categories. That’s also really really important to consider. With that, we see a little bit more deal seekers right. Everybody knows what Prime Day is for. It is incredible deals and finding new products.

Destaney Wishon:

Soon the traffic side, we almost always see detailed page views increase. On the conversion side, we definitely see higher purchase intent going into Prime Day. This is really really important to consider because it’s going to directly affect your Amazon advertising. How does it directly affect your Amazon advertising? Well, one of the first things we see is, if you have deal badging, you’re going to see a conversion rate increase. You’re almost always going to see spend and impressions increase because of the overall traffic on the platform. So even if your ads are sitting in the same position, there are more customers on the platform, more people clicking on your ads. What does this mean? When you combine both of them, you know, heightened purchase intent, heightened traffic. That typically means you see a direct performance increase, depending on what your definition of performance is. So I have a quick screenshot from you know, years past.

Destaney Wishon:

Historically, one of the things that you can see is spend is starting to increase as you lead up to Prime Day, and that’s because customers are still shopping on the platform. They are window shopping. They may not be purchasing just yet, so customers are hopping in and building their basket, they’re adding to cart, they’re creating lists the week or two weeks leading up to Prime Day and then, during Prime day, as they start seeing things that are on deals or that are discounted, that’s when they start checking out. Understanding this expanded timeline is incredibly important, because a lot of the questions that I get asked, especially during the lead-in period of prime day, is my ACOS isn’t as good as it normally is, or my spend is increasing, but my sales are down, why? Well, think about how customers shop on the platform. The traffic is increasing, people are adding to cart. They’re preparing for one of the largest shopping holidays on Amazon, right? So that’s really important to keep in mind.

Destaney Wishon:

Another thing that’s important to consider is how the platform changes during Prime Day. Here’s an exact screenshot that we’ve used from brands historically during Prime Day.  And, as we know, when you have deals or discounts, you get highlighted badging on your listing. I loved this year’s badging style because it was bright blue and it really stood out on the page. So consider how customers shop on Amazon and consider the impact that badging has. So, as you can see, if you’re running a dealer discount, the click-through rate is typically going to be higher. More people are going to see that listing and click through on that listing.

Destaney Wishon:

So, when we’re considering our Prime Day strategy, some of the things that we really lean into are visibility. How do we make sure we’re maximizing more top of search traffic? How are we maximizing our ASINs that have a deal or have a discount that is created specifically for this holiday? Another thing that we typically see during Prime Day is Amazon sees heightened traffic on things like Amazon Lives. You know they’re doing a lot of work on their end, whether it’s a homepage takeover. You know every single time you open your app and when Prime Day is announced, you’re going to see the little Prime Day badging. So, when you have things like live streams and heightened traffic being driven to the page. That means, if your top competitors are running deals and discounts, you’re probably going to see a lift as well, because customers are going to be shopping in your category a little bit more than what they typically would. So this is really really important as we dive into the specific strategy that we’re talking about now, which is, how do you take that sentiment of Prime Day, knowing that customers have a higher purchase intent, knowing that there’s more traffic on the platform than what we normally see, and how do we optimize our targeting, our bids and our budgets? These are the three key things, key three levers that you need to pull when preparing for Prime Day.

Destaney Wishon:

So first, let’s talk about what those mean. When we talk about targeting, we’re really talking about the keywords we are targeting and the ASINs we are targeting, or the categories we are targeting. When we think about our keywords and the ASINs that we’re targeting, it’s what shoppers are seeing our ad. Is it the shopper that types protein for lifting? Is it the shopper that types probiotics for women? Who is seeing our ad? When we are considering optimizing our bid, one of the things that we really need to consider is where on the page is my ad being shown? If I have a high bid, I’m more likely to be at the top of the page. If I have a low bid, I’m more likely to be on page two or page three. And the last one is our budget. How frequently is our ad being seen? We know who we’re targeting. We know where our ad is showing up on the page. How much budget do we give that placement? How much can we afford? So those are the three levers that we’re going to dive into more specifically here.

Shivali Patel:

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Destaney Wishon:

All right. So the first one we’re diving into is targeting. Now we’re gonna start with the basics and we’re gonna get more advanced as we move on here. Keyword targeting is one of the most important levers you can pull when it comes to Amazon PPC. Now, keyword targeting is also the area that advanced sellers and beginning sellers simplify and consider the easiest. But I see some of the biggest mistakes being made now. Reason being is when customers are uploading their product and advertising it, everyone says, ok, I sell a protein, I need to bid on protein, right? The problem is, if you’re thinking to bid on protein, so is everyone else.

Destaney Wishon:

So what we really discuss here is when you’re considering your Prime Day audience, how do you identify the actual keywords that your customers are typing in that you’re going to have a higher opportunity to win on? So one of the key differentiators is everyone who’s selling protein can bid on protein. But you need to do the keyword research to really consider the long tail keywords that are going to be more likely to drive customers to your listing. Is it a protein for bodybuilder? Is it a protein for weight loss? Is it vanilla protein with collagen? There’s a really big difference in the search intent across these. If I’m targeting someone typing in protein and I sell protein, think about the customer who types in protein. They probably don’t know exactly what they want yet, right? If I know, I want vanilla protein with collagen. That’s the keyword I’m going to type in. So one of the things that Shivali and I really are going to talk about throughout this presentation is how we do a better job of identifying that key customer, because on Prime Day, as we mentioned, you have your customers that are looking to buy things just to buy but we also have our customers that are looking to buy with higher search intake. So one of the things that we typically see is, as you get into more long tail keywords like vanilla protein with collagen, you’re going to see a higher conversion rate, because the customer who types in vanilla protein with collagen and sees your vanilla protein with collagen is going to be much more likely to convert than the customer who’s looking for vanilla protein with collagen but who types in protein. Right, because it’s going to be much more competitive. Everyone’s going to think to bid on those key terms. Not everyone’s going to think to bid on the long tail terms behind that. So we’re going to start there with just keyword research, making sure you’re expanding and bidding on these long tail terms behind that. So we’re going to start there with just keyword research, making sure you’re expanding and bidding on these long tail terms that maybe you didn’t think you needed to, because you’re already bidding on protein right.

Destaney Wishon:

Start with the customer intent first. This is incredibly important. The second thing to consider is competition and or search volume. When you go a little bit more long, tail can sometimes decrease because you’re being a little bit more specific. So you can frequently see oh, you know, lower search volume with these terms, but much higher conversion rate, and that’s going to help you compete on a lot of your core terms.

Destaney Wishon:

As we go into Prime Day. It’s probably one of the biggest mistakes I see brands make is only targeting four to five core terms and only targeting them in exact match, which I’m going to pause here because this is the question I typically get in the chat. Next is what match type performs best. Look, we’ve tested every single one of them. We run all of them. All of them work well. Depending on where you are in the business, exact match can be a little bit more precise. You know exactly what your ad’s showing up on. That being said, broad match can typically serve you more impressions because you’re covering more search terms within that match type. So one of the things that we like to do is we personally run all three match types for these scenarios when we’re starting to do a little bit more aggressive keyword research and expand into these long tail terms. We like to bid on exact match so I have precise control over my bid. If I’m bidding on protein, maybe I’ll go into broad match so I can collect more keywords that I can then continue on. And I think this is really important because of the incrementality again you can get with these long tail keywords. Now we’re not going to talk about in this section because again we’re talking about targeting, how do you choose what keywords and what ASINs to target?

Destaney Wishon:

But we’re going to talk about the optimization, the bid management, in the future sessions. So we’ve talked about keyword research just at its basics. So what are the best ways to do keyword research? Well, the easiest beginner ways, in my opinion, is starting an auto campaign. Let’s say you don’t actually know what are the best keywords for your ASIN. It’s a little bit of a concern because you should know that when you’re putting your ASIN live, but maybe you don’t quite know all of the long tail searches that are going to be provided.

Destaney Wishon:

This is a good time to lean into automatic targeting. Automatic targeting is going to allow Amazon advertising to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You upload an ASIN and you create the campaign and Amazon’s going to figure out the search terms you should bid on. Once you get those search terms, you can then create a manual targeting campaign which is going to allow you to bid on any of those search terms you want to, but then control the bid behind them. That’s one of the easiest beginner ways to get up and running. A second thing that you can do is you can actually lean into keyword groups. I would say this is relatively similar to auto campaign, but the next level.

Destaney Wishon:

Amazon advertising has keywords related to your brand and keywords related to your product category. So let’s say you create a campaign and you’re advertising cat food and dog food. Maybe you want to target keywords related to your brand. Let’s say you create a campaign specifically for dog food. You probably want to bid on keywords related to your product category. These are fantastic ways to get going and define keywords relative to your product that you may not know about, but they are rather beginner level keyword research.

Destaney Wishon:

What we are kind of recommending is taking that next step and doing a lot of the heavy lifting the search term report analysis yourself. So the next thing that you could also do is utilize a software. So this is something that comes up pretty frequently. Amazon advertising can take a lot of time to do the appropriate keyword research to do the bid management. If you’re utilizing a tool like Helium 10, Helium 10 actually has AI advertising. This is fully automated campaign management. So again, for the person who doesn’t quite understand keyword research they don’t quite understand how to structure and create their campaigns AI advertising is a really good place to start, especially, again you’re looking at Prime Day. You have more traffic on the platform than ever before. You’re not 100% sure who to target. Leaning into a tool like Helium 10 AI advertising can be a really big unlock for brands who need that additional operational efficiency.

Destaney Wishon:

Now let’s talk about the intermediate levels here. Let’s say you know what you’re doing on the keyword research side. You know how to create a campaign and add manual keywords. One of the best ways to collect data on an account is your search term report. So is everyone here familiar with the difference in keywords and search terms? Out of curiosity, the difference in a keyword is a keyword is you’re targeting a specific keyword where you’re going to show up. A search term is the actual search a customer typed in. So let’s say I’m targeting the keyword protein. The customer search term could be protein for women, right, and utilizing those search terms and utilizing the search term report is going to allow you to basically take all of those search terms that converted and upload them into a new campaign where you can target them precisely.

Destaney Wishon:

Search term report analysis is absolutely incredible for figuring out again all of those search terms driven from the keywords you were bidding on. So a few things that we like to look at when we do search term report analysis is what are the top keyword orders? It filtered top down by orders, what keywords and what search terms are driving the most sales for me. What is the lowest conversion rate terms in my search term report? Maybe I should pause those. What is the highest conversion rate term in my report? Maybe I should add those to a new campaign. Search term report analysis is really, really incredible for driving again that expansion in your targeting. Now moving on to the next section, let’s say you don’t quite understand search term analysis, building a pivot table and pulling out your search terms to put into a new campaign.

Destaney Wishon:

Helium 10 actually does a lot of keyword harvesting for you. It allows you to create rules on things like if I drive X amount of orders, let’s pull that out and put it into a new campaign. This can be really important for kind of taking that next step. A lot of people ask me about things like how do I improve my organic rank? How do I make sure I’m maximizing my kind of potential at top of search? We like to lean into tools like Helium 10, where I can see things like my search volume opportunity or I can dive into the search query performance report. Helium 10 has a search query performance analyzer and what that allows us to see is how we are converting on terms compared to the category and when you do this level of keyword harvesting, it allows you to create campaigns that are a little bit more strategic than just advertising.

Destaney Wishon:

How do I focus on campaigns where I have an opportunity to maybe improve my BSR? This is a good area to lean into when you think you’re in that next level of Amazon advertising and leaning into during something like Prime Day. Organic rank is a fun one. We’re not going to dive in too much on this specific chat, but when we’re looking at improvements to BSR, improvements to organic rank, there’s two key factors we like to consider. One of them is search volume and sales being driven. One of them is conversion rate, and utilizing tools or utilizing search query performance report can really help you analyze, understand what keywords you should be putting in your Amazon advertising campaign that are going to influence both of those. So search query performance report does definitely fall into the advanced section because a lot of people aren’t 100% sure how to utilize it. I did pull some screenshots here, and the reason SQP is so valuable is one of the questions that we always get when we do these webinars is how do I see what search terms and keywords are valuable for my brand outside of advertising and how do I see how my competitors are doing? That comes up all the time.

Destaney Wishon:

Search query performance report is available in Seller Central. It’s not actively available in Vendor Central. There’s some workarounds you can do with the keyword tools there. It’s not actively available in Vendor Central. There’s some workarounds you can do with the keyword tools there, but in Seller Central you can actually see all of the search queries related to either your brand or your ASIN and you can pull this data. So up until a few months ago, it was not available in the API, so a lot of tools weren’t actually able to access this either. It is now available in the API, which is incredibly exciting because it allows you to see total count of purchases for any one search query. It allows you to then compare these insights into your personal brand.

Destaney Wishon:

So if I’m looking at this search query performance report right here, there’s a few things that really stand out to me. I can see my brand isn’t driving a lot of purchases compared to the category. Now, to be fair, this product was out of stock, so I’m not going to put them on blast here, but you can see that our purchases are really low compared to the category. But I can see that a lot of searches were made for mushroom coffee in the last 30 or 60 days, whatever time frame I looked at here. This is highly, highly valuable because it’s going to allow you to see where you have opportunity to grow in terms of the search terms you’re bidding on, but also how to identify where you have a conversion rate advantage over the category.

Destaney Wishon:

Now, conversion rate’s not native on this right. You can’t directly see it in Seller Central, but we are given clicks and we are given purchases, which gives us a native way to really understand where do we have an area of opportunity? Where are we converting better than the category? Now let’s talk about why this is important for something like Prime Day. We’re, you know, heading into Prime Day and we know that we want to advertise or put our products in front of customers where we have a higher likelihood of converting. We want to know that when customers see our ad, they click into our ad. They’re going to more likely to make a purchase.

Destaney Wishon:

You can download your search query performance report and you can add a column here to put what is my conversion rate on brand counts clicks, brand count purchases compared to the category, which is total counts. This is incredibly powerful because now I can see hey, I actually do much, much better when lion’s mane is included, but I don’t do as well when maybe I don’t know mud water or decaf is included.

Destaney Wishon:

This can help me intuitively know what keywords I’m probably going to perform better when I add Amazon advertising to the mix, right, because this is just pulling your search query performance data fresh, so you don’t need to be running ads to see this. This is actually really powerful because it’s going to allow us to lean into the better search terms that we can find for Amazon advertising before we have to test it within Amazon ads. Now, if you’re not familiar with this, it is under Brand Analytics in Seller Central and you’re going to see quite a few new rollouts and new reports there. We’re not covering them here, but you have customer journey analysis, a few others, and you can also use this in tools like Helium 10, where they have actually taken the data and manipulated it in a way that may be a little bit easier to navigate for brands. So Helium 10 has it in the Search Query Analyzer.

Shivali Patel:

So everything that Destaney just said is something that you can pull from Seller Central and do on your own right. Go in, download the data and then make the calculations. Or, alternatively, if you already have Helium 10 and let’s say you’re on the Diamond plan, you’re brand registered what you can do is go into our Search Query Analyzer tool and pull either by weeks or by months, and you can do bulk selections as well. So, as you can see on this slide right here where the arrow is pointed, we have multiple weeks selected. Now, how is this relevant to Prime Day? Well, now you can actually go back and take a look at the data of how it was performing last year on Prime Day, right during Prime Week. You can go in, check out all those search terms and now begin to really see not only the Seller Central data but have it layered in with Helium 10 insights. So this will do all the calculations for you.

Shivali Patel:

If you’re looking for impression share, if you’re looking for your conversion share, you’re trying to figure out which key terms of all of these do I actually end up having a whole lot of great conversion share that’s higher than my market conversion share. And now I want to actually double down on my advertising because I know that it’s converting into sales for me. Or, alternatively, maybe you don’t have as many impressions and you know that that means you’re not actually showing up organically and be a sponsored on the actual search page. So it gives you a lot of different insights and actually, if we go to the next page here, I have a screenshot listed here that shows you some of the columns that you’ll end up seeing. So, yes, you’ll be seeing. You know which keywords your products actually showed up for on page one, how many times somebody clicked your product versus somebody else’s products, what the conversion rate was for your product versus the market conversion rate. But then what I have actually in boxes here is going to be your match type and that’s what’s listed below is kind of a breakdown, because this will quickly let you discern exactly which ones to focus on. So LPC will show you where your conversions, where the ASIN conversion, is below market conversion.

Shivali Patel:

What does that really mean for you for Prime Day? Now you’re going in and trying to optimize out your listing correct, because if you are not having as great of a conversion rate as the rest of your market, maybe you need to go back in and optimize something. If you have OPC, these are going to be your keywords where the ASIN conversion exceeds the overall market conversion rate. And so this is where you would want to double down, as I said before, SGK keywords that have produced at least one sale. Well, if it’s producing at least one sale, maybe this is something that you want to consider looking more deeply into.

Shivali Patel:

And then EI or EL keywords where the ASIN impression is above search query volume highlights produced shown in several search placements. So this is going to be based remember, guys, for search query performance. It’s based on denormalized search. So it’s not just going to be the search volume that you’re seeing, maybe inside of a tool like Cerebro or Magnet, if you’re using Helium 10, but rather it’s going to be all of the searches that are going to page two are getting counted, page three, or maybe you’re going back and then coming back, so the search volume will be a little bit boosted because of that.

Shivali Patel:

And when your impression rate is actually higher than the search volume, well, that is telling you you’re showing up multiple times on a page, whereas if you’re not, then you want to go back and kind of tweak your advertising accordingly. So a lot of really great stuff you can do here for Prime Day specifically. Go back, check your weeks from last year, check your week specifically for last year for Prime Day and figure out what was really going on for your brand and tweak from there. Now quick question for everyone here how many brands plan to run deals during Prime Day?

Destaney Wishon:

Did anyone submit some deals for Prime Day this year? The reason I was curious is, when you again are running deals or discounts, it’s directly affecting how your ad shows up on the page, which is really important because when we are talking about bid management, this is probably one of the more complex areas of Amazon advertising. How do I optimize my bids? How do I think about my bids? So we’re going to cover that really quick. When I think of bids, I like to utilize real estate to really explain how Amazon advertising bid management works. This is a fun one. So when we talk about real estate, we always talk about location, location, location. Right, that is what a lot of brands like to understand when it comes to real estate. If you’re coming to buy a house, we can all expect Malibu to have the best properties.

Destaney Wishon:

Amazon advertising is relatively similar. In one, it is auction model. In two, everyone is vying for the best placements on the page. So when we think about how we’re optimizing our bids, we really like to consider where do we want to show up on the page and where can I afford to show up as well, bids we really like to consider where do we want to show up on the page and where can I afford to show up as well? So, for a day like Prime Day, we showed that first example where the deal badging was bright blue. One of the things we really like to lean into is you know how do I think of my bids and how do I think about my placements? If your only goal on Prime Day was to maximize visibility and sales you did not care about anything else. You had an unlimited budget you would want to show up in this ad placement right here.

Destaney Wishon:

It is the most visible placement on the page. You can open your phone right now and do the exact same thing on mobile. The number one sponsored product placement on the page typically drives the highest amount of sales. The number one sponsored brand at the top of the page gets a lot of visibility. It’s one of the first things that’s seen. What does this have to do with your bid management exactly? Well, if you’re not willing to bid, there’s a good chance someone else might be, especially when Prime Day comes into play, and that’s because that valuable real estate drives incredible results for brands. The studies we’ve done at Better Media show that over 70% of click share can be driven from that spot, and that’s because it’s one of the first things customers see, right, you open your phone, you open your desktop, you get maximum visibility and impressions there. The problem is it’s expensive because that real estate is so valuable that sometimes CPC is going to be a little bit higher.

Destaney Wishon:

So a lot of people have probably dealt with this of you know, I bid really high, I showed up, but my ACOS wasn’t that great, right, and then I lower my bid and my sales went down a bit. And that’s because, when it comes to bid management, we are just paying for placements on the page. So one thing that you know we typically see is we can lower our bids and then we’ll get maybe a 12% ACOS, using this kind of example equation I used here. But when I bid $3, my ACOS is a 75%. So that’s always a really fun balance for brands to start to learn what their threshold is, to really understand their placements, which is going to affect their sales and their optimizations, which is really going to affect the ACOS and the ROAS. So any questions related to this. Is this making sense so far?

Destaney Wishon:

Because the difficulty with bid management is finding that personal sweet spot for you. That’s the part that I would say gets really difficult. When doing training on bid management I typically get two questions. I lowered my bid and I didn’t get sales. I’m like, okay, well, if you lowered your bid to 10 to 20 cents, maybe you’re showing up a page two or page three and page four, so you’re not getting near as much traffic as you need to drive sales. On the flip side, when I bid really high, I get a ton of sales and I get a ton of traffic because I’m showing up on the best part of the page. But maybe I can’t afford it because I’m not converting well enough. I’m driving clicks but I’m not driving enough sales to justify it. Every brand owner, every person who’s logged into ad console bid management is one of the most difficult things to learn but also one of the most beneficial. It’s all about finding the placement that works for you.

Destaney Wishon:

Now keywords really come into play here, right, because again, we talked about it earlier. If I’m bidding on protein, it may be really broad, I may not have as high of a conversion rate. A lot of people will click, realize I don’t have the flavor they want and leave. But if I bid on something a bit longer tail, I may be able to bid higher because I’m going to be more likely to convert. That’s a really big opportunity for brands. So the next step that we like to recommend and this is where we’re getting into a little bit more advanced strategy when it comes to Prime Day is right. We understand the basics. What we like to do is look at those keywords, segment them by campaign strategy. Now, again, this is more Helium 10, BTR best practices.

Destaney Wishon:

Generally I don’t see everyone running this level of strategy, but because of the real estate aspect of search, we like to segment campaigns, that we are willing to focus more on sales in one campaign and efficiency in another campaign. And what that allows me to do is say you know, for this one term, I’m okay with bidding high and maybe having a lower ROAS or a higher ACOS, because it’s my most important keyword. It’s driving a lot of sales for me. I know my BSR improves when I spend more on this campaign. I may take that exact same keyword in another campaign and put a low bid and focus on profitability. What that allows me to do is switch on and off as needed and move my budget around to adjust my goals right. So a lot of people will say for Prime Day, because I have a deal or a discount, I know my conversion rate is going to be higher when people click, they order right. So on Prime Day, maybe you’re willing to increase your bids, increase your budget a little bit more because you know that you have a higher likelihood of driving sales.

Destaney Wishon:

So I think someone asked a little bit earlier do I create specific campaigns for Prime Day? Sometimes we do. If I know I’m running deals and discounts, I will create sponsored brand ads specifically for Prime Day because I know I’m going to get more visibility. Now we haven’t talked about sponsored brand ads yet. Here I’m going to give a shout out. The next session we are doing is going to be diving on sponsored brand strategy, but for this specifically, even on sponsored product ads, we will also create campaigns for Prime Day. And the reason being is there’s different goals for different things. As you can see here, sometimes we’re going to focus more on ranking, sometimes on efficiency, sometimes on branded, which can be really really valuable as we lead into that holiday. Now, moving on really quick, you can see here this is how we segment our campaigns for this specific reason, I’ll have lower bids for efficiency, higher bids for branded, higher bids for ranking, and then I’m going to be able to control a lot of my budget distribution for that specific purpose as well.

Destaney Wishon:

Now, moving on to some of the more advanced levels that we can see here audiences are now a huge opportunity for brands and sellers because now we don’t just target keywords, we’re also targeting segments of an audience within that search. So, as you can see here right now these have been rolled out into advertising console. If you have a campaign targeting protein, you can now add a bid modifier, a bid adjustment, to target audiences specifically, so we can target a high likelihood to purchase, added to cart or maybe they purchased from us before you can hop in, identify your top keywords, layer in a top audience and then also add in a bid modifier for that specific campaign. This can be really really powerful for a Prime Day type audience, because now we are narrowing down the people we are targeting and increasing our conversion rate. Other quick things I think are really valuable as we look into Prime Day is we have rule-based bids. So we chatted quite a bit about bid optimization and the struggles that people may have. Rule-based bids allow us to add operational efficiency, because now, when we’re creating our campaigns, you can set thresholds for your bids. Maybe you want to set rules for certain days I know I’m running a deal, let me increase bids. Maybe you want to set thresholds based on performance or KPIs. We’re also able to do that, which is really really powerful.

Destaney Wishon:

Now we’re moving on to the budget section next, and after that we’re going to get into a few more Prime Day specifics. But moving into the budget section, so again your keyword what shoppers are seeing my ad, my bid? Where’s my ad showing up on the page? My budget is really how frequently my ad is being seen. This one is really fun to dive into because this is kind of the final step. We’ve chosen our keywords, we’ve chosen the bids for those keywords. How do we decide when to increase and lower budgets? One of the best places is within Ad Console. You can directly review your budget dashboard.

Destaney Wishon:

I like to do this leading into Prime Day, because if I’m already logging in and seeing that I am running out of budget, Prime Day is going to drive a lot more traffic, which means a lot more clicks, which means more spend. So if I’m running out of budget prior to Prime Day, I should probably go in and optimize for Prime Day. So I highly recommend checking this out and then starting to identify within my increased budget rules tab, should I lower my budget on everything with a bad ROAS? As you can see, I filtered here. Sometimes I do that.

Destaney Wishon:

If I’m leading into Prime Day, I want all my spend to go to my top performing campaigns. Or maybe I need to look at ranking. Do I have campaigns for specific ranking terms where I know my conversion rates better than the category? Or maybe I have certain creatives I’m pushing? This is where I really look into my budget. Distribution strategy is based on these goals.

Destaney Wishon:

What am I trying to achieve during Prime Day? How much visibility do I want during Prime Day? The other thing is Amazon’s also again, I want during Prime Day. The other thing is Amazon’s also again rolled out tools to help us in this area. So we have increased budget by strategy directly within Ad Console. We can budget by schedule. So I know Prime Day is going to be hot and I’m going to be worried about everything else. I’m going to go ahead and increase my budget during high traffic times or specific date ranges. This is perfectly capable directly in Ad Console. Same thing for performance.

Destaney Wishon:

A lot of brands I talk to will continue to increase their spend or budget if they’re within an ACoS, ROAS or conversion rate that they’re happy with. This is a great way to apply a budget rule directly to your campaign allocation. That’s going to allow you to increase budget as long as you’re hitting those parameters. The cool thing is those parameters are set by you, but you focus on ROAS, ACOS, click-through rate or conversion rate and you can directly layer those into your campaign. Specifically, I filtered for that exact call-out of when we’re leading into Prime Day. There’s different objectives we’re looking for. Conversion rate is a fantastic example. We build campaigns focused on increasing our conversion rate on the page, so that way we can potentially be on page one, two or three organically. So then our TACoS stays relatively stable. But that’s a whole different advanced webinar we can get into. So, Polly, I know you have a few things up and ready.

Shivali Patel:

Yes, absolutely so. Destaney’s been talking about increasing your budget based off different things maybe the metrics, maybe the strategy. What we have that’s brand new at Helium 10 is something called the Budget Manager. Now, this was exclusively released to Elite on May 13th, but this should be rolling out to Diamond, if it hasn’t already, and so I did want to talk about it really briefly, because it gives you full control of your ad spend, not just at the campaign level, but across your entire account. And so if we go to the next page, let’s see. Okay, there’s four things that I really want to touch base on.

Shivali Patel:

So one you can hit the settings icon and go into your daily budget. That’s going to obviously control how your budget is getting distributed across your entire account. You also, if you want more control at the campaign level, you can hit the three dots that show up on the left-hand paneling. I know that that screenshot is small, but I promise usually, when you’re doing stuff hands-on, that’s really the best way to learn, right. So if you click that, you can adjust your minimum and maximum budgets for campaign budget limits, as well as auto pacing. So auto pacing let’s say that one day your ads end up spending a little bit more than allotted, then the next day it’ll make sure that I’ll spend a little bit less to even it out and ensure that you don’t end up going over whatever your total daily or monthly goals really are. You can also stop overspend and that’s a quick drop down, it’s active, or you can pause it out.

Shivali Patel:

But I think one of the coolest features here is really being able to customize your calendar, and this is really helpful for Prime Week, right, because you can go in now. You put in your monthly budget. I have daily pulled up, but if you can see in the grayed out zone, you have a full calendar from January to December and you can go in and say this is, let’s say, I want to spend 10,000 for a given month, and then I can put in that monthly and then go in and say, actually, for daily budget for this specific week, I want to go in and increase it by a hundred percent, okay, so instead of going in and trying to manually tweak all your campaigns or do it the week of now, you can prepare for it, go in, set the budget for your daily, your monthly, any sort of performance tweaks that you really want to do to give you that flexibility without sacrificing profitability?

Destaney Wishon:

Absolutely, and I would say this is also why Shivali and I opened up with understanding the timing of Prime Day. What does the lead-in period look like If we know customers are still shopping? Do of Prime Day? What does the lead-in period look like If we know customers are still shopping? Do we want to pause our ads during lean-in? Probably not, because we know they’re still adding to cart. That week may look like it has bad spend and bad clicks, but what’s happening is they’re still window shopping. They’re just not purchasing until later, which is why Amazon Advertising does have the attribution window that it does. It helps you expand.

Destaney Wishon:

You can lower your budgets if needed during the lead-in period and then increase your budgets day of or whenever you have your specific deal running which can be really, really powerful. So now just to kind of sum everything up here, the biggest things we like to look for during the Prime Day specifics are understanding again, the deal badging and the conversion rate increase. We really like to lean into conversion rate increase, which we almost always see, especially if you have a badging, which means we like to go ahead and increase bids on everything we’re within our performance targets of. So anything that is converting near our goals anything with ACOS ROAS. If I have a deal, I can expect that to be even better. So I like to increase my bids just to maximize traffic. I know if my ads are at the top of the page, they’re going to have a higher likelihood of being seen and clicked. That’s one of my biggest focuses. The other things I think we really talked about here is doing the same thing for budgets. If you have zero deals and discounts, there’s still a chance that you’re going to have more traffic. So we like to go ahead and increase our budgets on everything that is within our current performance goal. If I have deal badging, I may even increase my budgets a little bit more because, again, you’re going to get more clicks, naturally because you have that badging on the page.

Destaney Wishon:

I saw a lot of questions around audiences. That could be a whole webinar in itself. We actually did other content on that, so I will make sure to include it. It’s probably one of the newer, most exciting rollouts from Amazon, so not going to cover too much of that. But the last thing in this section that I’ll really leave you with is the Amazon recommendations on everything that you can target. This is kind of our bonus section of what is possible using audiences with an ad console or using custom audiences as well. Thank you all so much for joining. This was a lot of fun, see ya.

Shivali Patel:

See ya, and that’s a wrap on today’s deep dive into all things Prime Day ads, from smarter targeting and real-time bid strategies to full funnel creative that actually converts. We hope you’re walking away with tangible insights you can implement right now. If you want to use tools like Search Query Analyzer to spot high converting keywords, or budget manager to control your ad spend without micromanaging every campaign, like I showed you, now is the time. Sign up for Helium 10 using the link and the code is in the description. And don’t forget our free Prime Day prep checklist. Created with Destaney and Carrie Miller, is packed with over 25 expert strategies that you can put to work today. Grab your copy at h10.me/primedaychecklist and get ready to make this Prime Day your best. Yet I’ll catch you on the next episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast.

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