Hey, everybody, this is Seth Kniep, Kniep’n it real.
I hope you are doing awesome as you pursue passive income on Amazon.
I'm here to answer the most common questions I hear on
how to run campaign ads on Amazon.
I'm also here to answer the What If questions
when you run into troubleshooting issues or problems,
I want to show you how to navigate around those and how to
find a way to make things work for you
in the most effective way possible. Remember your dream.
You're not here because you wanted a different job or a different boss.
You're here because you want to go passive income
so you can have the margin to spend time with the people you love.
and to do the things you love, to have the freedom, to be able to go on a hike
or go to a really cool restaurant or give to someone in need
or invest in your best friend or your spouse or life partner or lover.
There's so many opportunities that passive income creates.
That's why I am sold out on passive income,
and that's why I love the illustration of the tree you planted.
You take a lot of time investing in it, and it does nothing for you
because it's this little tiny sapling.
But then someday it grows you fruit, and every day you go out
and you can eat the fruit and enjoy the product of your labor
without having to do very much
because it's already established, its roots are deep.
You don't need to even water it anymore.
That is why I do this. That's why I love it.
So today, let's talk about how to deal with ad issues on Amazon.
Now, the number one question that comes up is How do I change my default bid.
On your Seller Central account, you're going to click on advertising
and then campaign manager, and now you can see your campaigns.
And the way you change your default bid is really easy.
The first thing you want to do
is just click on the campaign that you want to change your default bid for.
So I'm going to click on this one; coffee mugs manual.
I call it manual because it's one of my manual campaigns.
And then from here to change my default bid right here,
I can type in whatever I want.
Well, technically not whatever I want,
but if I see the competition is really getting ahead, I can change it.
Let's say, for example, to 75.
Now how do I know what to change it to?
Well, that's really easy as well.
Let me show you how. If I click on the ad itself,
Amazon's going to give me a really good idea of what
how much I should be bidding on this in order to arrive at the front page.
So you click on the ad and then you click on keywords right here
and see right here, it says suggested bid.
And it even tells you; use suggested bids to choose bids for keywords.
You can use the suggested bit or choose any bid.
Over time you can optimize keyword bids based on actual campaign performance.
Well, that sounds like a lot about nothing.
But the suggested bid based on this, for example, $1,
the idea is, if yours is $1 or higher, you should rank to the first page on a search.
Doesn't guarantee you'll get it every time, but you should.
I like to keep mine $0.15 to $0.20 higher,
so I'm just going to go $1.15.
This one, if I hit apply, it'll make this $1 like that.
But I still want to be higher, so I'm going to go $1.15.
Hit save. Let me go back and fix this one.
In fact, just for fun, I'm going to make this one $0.20.
You can go through here.
Now this one, $5 really high, we'll look over here; coffee.
If I'm selling a coffee mug, I don't want to be ranking for this.
People are probably looking for coffee to drink.
Therefore, every time they click on my ad, I'm spending the money
that is not going to turn into a sale.
So for that reason, I'm going to go over here.
I'm going to click this, and I'm either going to pause it
because I think I will use it in the future, which I won't.
Therefore, I will archive it, which means goodbye.
Yes, and done. It is gone forever.
So that's exactly how you change your default bid.
Now, next question. How do you change your daily budget?
Again, it's very simple. I'll show you how.
So what you do is you come back
to advertising campaign manager and you're going to click on
the actual campaign for your product that you're advertising.
So again, I'm going to go back to coffee mugs manual.
I click on it and I'm going to go to campaign settings right here.
When I go here, I can change my daily budget right there.
Now, I highly recommend when your first, you first have a new product
and you're promoting it. You already got your reviews on it.
Make sure you get reviews on it first.
If you can a minimum of 25 because what that does is
it makes your product very desirable.
It validates it.
Then you want to run an ad.
A lot of rookies, they'll start with the product.
They have no reviews on it
and they'll run an ad. And they wonder why am I not getting any sales.
Well, maybe a lot of people are looking in and clicking on it, but
when they see it and it has no reviews, why are they going to buy it?
You need to get reviews on it first.
Otherwise you are pouring your money down a black hole
and it will never return to you.
So once you have your reviews,
you run an ad, and in this ad you're trying to get an idea
of what kind of keywords are going to rank and which ones do not.
What I mean by that is you need to know which keywords
people are searching for and the only exact way to do that,
Keyword inspector can't do it as exact as Amazon can.
Merchant words can't. Keywordtools.io, Keyword tool dominator
the scientific keyword search or whatever thing they call it.
None of these are as good as Amazon itself.
You know why? Because Amazon is the only. This is the only place you can get exact.
I mean, exact keyword performance is from Amazon itself within Seller Central.
So this really is your most powerful place to find keywords.
So the idea here is when you run an ad even just for a week and then you go
look at your search term reports,
you can look at the keywords and find out which ones are actually
making your money. and which ones do you need to remove.
For example, imagine that you are selling apples
for people to eat, but someone searches Apple computer
and they click on your ad you just gave them.
You just spent $0.20 gave it to Amazon,
and that person is never going to buy your apple
because this person was looking for computers, right?
You need to know which keywords are hurting you
and make these negative keywords.
In my training, in my coaching, I show you exactly how to do that.
So going back to this, your daily budget, I recommend it be at least $15.
The reason I recommend that is this.
Imagine that in the morning your ads get clicked on.
Now, remember, you pay your money when they get clicked on,
and by the time it's eight in the morning, your budget is used up
because every time someone clicks on it, money goes out.
And once you've used up, that's your daily budget,
the rest of the day. Let's say it's 8:00 in the morning,
your ad does not run.
Well, that's time lost where your ad could be running, and you could get data
that tells you what people are clicking on and making them want to buy
and what people are not clicking on.
So I would prefer to spend a little more money now.
It's only $105 in seven days so I can get the data I need
so I can make a whole lot money later.
Look, if someone is asking me, if you give me, if you give the system a dollar
and then it will give you $100 back. That's a good deal.
I'm OK with letting go of the dollar, even if I have to wait two weeks
to get my $100 back. That's a good investment.
That's why you need this daily budget to be high enough
in order to get the data that you need.
Next question.
What if I don't want to spend all my time watching my ad to make sure the bid is high enough?
What if people start outbidding me
and all of a sudden, I'm not showing up on any search page engine results on Amazon?
Very easy solution. I love this one.
I personally use it sometimes, but not as much because I check my ads every day.
Therefore, I can use my own intellect to make it work.
But if you if you're on vacation or you don't have time.
Go back to your campaign.
Notice you have ad groups,
negative keywords and campaign settings and go down here to bid+.
What it does is it will raise your bid up to 50% more,
if you turn this on, any time someone starts out bidding you,
that way you can be sure your ad is still showing up on the first page
of search results.
Next question.
How much should I spend on my ad?
Now this is one of the hardest questions
because it depends on your capital, your budget, how much or
how much you spent on your product, what your profit margins are.
As a general rule, I think a $200 investment on a new product for one week
and that $200 is split two ways on an automatic ad campaign.
Because Amazon will recommend their own words based on your listing.
And a manual ad campaign, I'll put in all the keywords that I found myself
using keyword tools when I first found my product to sell.
Those two are going to give me precious data.
So then in the third situation, I can create my exact match campaign,
which is extremely targeted. When people search the exact phrase I know
is already performing well,
that's what my ad pops up, and that's how you make good money.
So as a general rule, I would say $200 bucks.
$15 a day. It ends up being $105 for your automatic
campaign and $105 for your manual.
Now, keep in mind, your daily budget is not always used up.
In fact, often it's not.
You might put in $15, but one day only spend $10 and the next day spend $12
and the next day spend $4. It’s is just the limit.
So usually you ends up
being much less than $200, but I would recommend setting aside $200.
Now, I know that might seem a little crazy.
“My goodness, I already spent so much money on this product, I customized it.
I paid for shipping and customs and all this time,
and now I got to spend more money?”
If you owned a company online,
you would have to spend a whole lot more before you could look at a single sale.
That is the way entrepreneurialism is.
So actually selling on Amazon is a huge de-risker for entrepreneurs.
Because they make it so much easier and they're running the ad for you.
You don’t have to go out and talk to someone and hire someone.
You just put it in the system
and in 10, 15, 20 minutes, depending on how new you are at it,
it's running for you.
That's very, very normal.
Those people out there, you wonder how they make so much on Amazon.
They did this. They took the time. They invested so they could get a return
on their investment, and they were OK with the fact that there's risk involved.
You have to have risk in order to succeed.
If you don't like risk, you should not sell on Amazon.
There's always going to be risk when you choose the life of an entrepreneur.
Next question.
How do I set up an ad campaign for a product with variations?
Super easy. It's exactly the same way you do as a regular one.
Let me show you how.
You go to advertising, you go to campaign manager in Seller Central.
When you create your new campaign, you're just going to click
on the yellow button that says create campaign and just for fun,
let's just call this, I'll say, variations ad for my rubber ball.
And let me spell that right.
OK. My daily budget, as I mentioned, I recommend $15.
And let's say we want to do this as an automatic one.
Keep it simple. Continue to next step.
Here, I'm going to name this one, let's name it variations.
I'm going to type in coffee.
Now, two variations just popped up.
All I do is bam and bam.
I just select them and that is it.
So you're each variation will pop up as a as if it's its own product.
Remember, you can't do an ad on a parent listing. That's just a placeholder.
You do ads on the child listings, the variations.
If I'm selling a rubber ball and I have a white one, a red one and a green one,
the parent listing is just going to say something like rubber ball.
I don't do an ad on that, but I can do it out in the white,
I can do one on the red and I can do one in the green.
That's how you do it for variations.
Now, if you do a manual ad, you can later
go back and change the keywords for each variation.
So you want red rubber ball for a keyword for your red one
and you want green rubber ball as a keyword for your green one.
See that? You can do that as well, which is really cool.
Next question.
What if I get high clicks and low conversion? Now this is a really interesting situation.
This means a lot of people are clicking on the ad,
but very few people are buying it. What does that mean?
It means the ad itself was interesting.
Whatever the keyword was, let's just say again, it was a white rubber ball.
This is a very, very desirable item.
People are clicking on like crazy. You are getting a lot
of what's called impressions.
But if no one's buying it, it's not converting,
that means the problem is not the visibility of your listing,
a lot of people can see it,
the problem is the desirability of your listing.
No one's buying it.
So usually that goes down to two things.
The price of your product. Are you competitive?
Are you priced low enough to be competitive with the competition?
And second, your main photo. Is your main photo really good?
Does it pop out? Does it blow people's minds?
Actually, there's a third I want to share.
Have you differentiated your product? When people see your white rubber ball,
is there maybe something that goes with it like a nice little bag, like a game,
like a How-To manual?
I don't know. With the ball compared to all the others that don't have that,
you need it to stand out in a very significant way.
Next question.
What if I get zero impressions for a keyword?
Now this is a really interesting situation
because what it means is you have a keyword like White Rubber Ball.
But no one's clicking on the ad.
This could be for a number of reasons.
Number one, it could be that your title, you need to take White Rubber Ball,
if that's your main keyword and put it at the beginning of your title.
It's really important that your most important keywords
at the beginning of your title, so people actually see it.
When people look through Amazon and there's browsing.
They don't read all the words of a title, especially those ridiculously long ones
where they try to keyword stuff it like crazy.
They just look at the first few words.
And then they decide if they're interested, and then they might click and read the rest.
So make sure it's at the beginning of the title.
Second issue this could be is simply it's saturated.
You, you know, you're selling these white rubber ball, but everyone
selling a white rubber ball on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.mx,
and therefore, you just there's not enough interest
and you picked the wrong product.
The other reason could simply be you need to call Amazon to find out
if there's something wrong with your ad that has happened before,
you contact Seller Central help, and they're super helpful with that.
What if my advertising budget is getting drained in a short time?
Now this does happen, and it's not a good thing.
However, keep in mind your advertising budget
is going to be dependent on the category you're in.
So, for example, if you're in health products, consumable health,
pre-workout stuff, man, those keywords are super expensive.
I've seen them up to $6, $7, $8. A click, $8. That's insane.
Can you imagine getting 50 of those clicks?
Your budget is gone within like first 5 minutes of the day? See?
So be careful with that.
Understand the category you're going to sell in
so you don't get crushed by the competition.
That could be one reason your budget is getting eaten up super quickly.
Another reason could be what's called click fraud,
where competitors would go out,
they find your ad and they keep clicking on it and clicking on it
and clicking on it to use up your budget.
Because they know if they click on,
let's just say, you know, 50 times it uses up your budget for the day,
your ad will not run the rest of the day.
Then they can sit there and enjoy getting purchases from theirs.
If you suspect this, contact Amazon because that's a big issue and is a big no, no,
and they will probably get their account suspended as soon as they're caught.
What if? Here's the next question.
What if the ASIN is added, the ASIN number as some of my keywords?
Have you seen this, when you go to the keyword search term report, it's a spreadsheet,
and one of the keywords is an actual ASIN number? How does that happen?
Well, it’s really weird. But here's what happens.
If someone searches a product and they click on it
and below are recommended, you know, Amazon recommend other products,
one of those is sponsored and they click on that,
it triggers Amazon to think: “Oh, that's a keyword for this product.”
So they automatically add it in.
This will happen, especially on your automatic ad campaigns.
If that happens, I would remove it. I would pause the word
or just put it in your negative keyword area.
Into my coaching material, I show you exactly how to do that.
Next question.
What if Amazon says my product is not eligible or ineligible for ad campaigns?
Now, there could be several reasons for this.
If you are selling in the sexual wholeness category,
there are no ads allowed for that.
If you're selling in the jewelry category, you have to get special permission,
almost kind of like a second ungating.
You have to get ungated to sell in jewelry,
then another ungated to actually advertise in jewelry.
Now, by the time you see this, that policy could have changed
because Amazon does change their policies.
Just remember this. The rules depend on the category a lot.
The other reason is if you have not won the Buy Box.
So if someone else is selling your product, and you're both selling the same product
and they got to buy a box.
So when you go to the listing, it shows buy now, and if they click it,
it automatically goes into their order.
Then that means you cannot advertise. In fact, you don't want to.
You don't want to run an ad that someone else
is going to get the results for because most people will buy
whoever won the Buy Box.
They are not going to go down
and look at all the other sellers and decide.
Last reason that this can be an issue is if you run out of inventory.
You obviously cannot run an ad.
It's funny because Amazon will let you create the ad,
but then at the bottom it'll say uneligible or ineligible.
OK, I hope this has been helpful for you guys.
These are just a few quick tips and tricks on how to run ads.
What I do is I teach a super cool strategy.
I take the two most important parts of running an ad,
the two most proven methods of running an ad, and I bring them
together into one strategy to help you sell your product.
But I keep that from my coaching program.
This is Seth Kniep, Kniep’n it real. Hope you have an awesome day. I'll see you.