It’s not difficult to manage PPC campaigns using Amazon’s campaign manager. The user interface is decent considering the amount of data you’re working with. But once you begin growing the number of SKUs and adding new ads, manually modifying and creating campaigns can be tedious.
Why Do We Use Bulk Operations?
When we first started growing our company, like many Amazon sellers, we manually created and adjusted campaigns using the campaign manager. This worked but it was hard coming up with a system and process for our team to follow that would limit mistakes and that was fast and efficient. Bulk operations allowed us to do these important but often tedious ad-related actions quickly.
- Create, pause, or archive campaigns
- Adjust bids
- Add new keywords
- Add negative keywords
Reducing Errors and Improving Efficiency When Creating Campaigns
When creating campaigns, we like to maintain a consistent naming convention and limit the number of keywords per campaign. Using bulk operations lets us review this information clearly before and create these campaigns while limiting clicks which helps us in also limiting mistakes that could be made and improving efficiency.
With so many different types of campaign types (keyword/product targeting, video/headline search ads, etc.), creating campaigns can be a headache without using bulk spreadsheets. Even if you are very detail-oriented you may find yourself bored or burnout by constantly clicking through the interface to add or modify campaigns, keywords, and bids.
Regularly Adjusting Bids
If you are an experienced seller, you know that regularly adjusting bids based on performance is a must. Manually reviewing and adjusting the bids without using bulk spreadsheets is way too much of a time suck for us.
We’ve implemented a process where we can analyze the spreadsheet and based on certain criteria, we would increase or decrease bids.
For example, if ACOS is under your threshold of 20% for X amount of days or weeks, go ahead and increment the bids so you can potentially increase impressions. With thousands of keywords, this would take hours of analysis and implementation without using spreadsheets.
Adding and Negativing New Keywords
As with regularly adjusting your bids, negativing and adding new keywords is important when managing your campaigns.
What we typically do is download the search term report that contains search terms that are converted into sales. We would then add these terms to an existing or create a new Exact campaign. We would also add these keywords to a “negative exact” list in our Phrase, Broad, and Auto campaigns so that they would not show up anywhere else besides our Exact campaign.
This is something that could be very burdensome without managing them on a spreadsheet. Using bulk operations allows us to integrate this into our process without our team going crazy.
The Main Benefits of Using Bulk Operations
Efficiency and consistency (limiting mistakes) are one of the most important factors when creating a process for managing your ads. Bulk spreadsheets help you with both of these.
Managing campaigns using the web interface can be a waste of time if you are performing repetitive tasks like adjusting bids, pausing campaigns, negativing keywords, or creating many new campaigns. This can also lead to fatigue and is more prone to user error not to mention the time it takes staring at the screen while it’s loading and refreshing data.
Bulk Operations Newsletter
We will be continuing our series on how we use Amazon’s bulk spreadsheets to make ad management easier as well as updating everyone on our new bulk spreadsheet generator via our newsletter. To be notified of new content and updates, you can sign up on our home page.