Amazon PPC Automation: What Sellers Need to Know?

Amazon advertising management is time-consuming and hinders your ability to scale. On average, you'll spend 10-15 hours a week in Amazon PPC, working on bid adjustments, harvesting keywords, and optimization. It's when PPC becomes unmanageable that automated Amazon PPC takes over.

Amazon PPC automation enables software to manage your PPC 24 hours a day. This will mean that bids are constantly updated. Also, you will witness that high-profit keywords are pulled out of the data. Lastly, spam and irrelevant content are filtered out.

They enable you to scale your PPC marketing without building teams or sacrificing weekends.

In this blog, you will find out all you need to know about how to automate your Amazon PPC effectively. We'll go through what your automation will manage, how to decide on what software to use, and typical pitfalls to watch out for.

What Is Amazon PPC Automation?

Amazon PPC automation uses technology to run ads without human input. The software will work with the:

   • Amazon Advertising API
   • Constantly check and maintain ads
   • Automatically Adjusting Bids
   • Target relevant keywords
   • Reallocate the budget to higher-converting ad segments.

Manual Amazon PPC management, on the other hand, involves:

   • Logging in to Seller Central every day
   • Downloading a report from each of your campaigns
   • Taking hours looking through an Excel document with all of your keywords
   • Tweaking your keywords, bids, or parameters individually.

There is an opportunity for ads to go wrong while you are unable to log in.

PPC automation carries out these actions using algorithms. This will collect thousands of data points per hour (including ACOS, CTR, CR, keywords, and search terms entered). The system then optimizes either by applying rules you set or by using machine learning.

There are four main functions of automation:

   • Bid Management: Adjusts the costs of the click, dependent on your targets
   • Keyword Optimization: Removes wrong keywords and picks up ones that work automatically
   • Budget Control: Divides your budget into the parts of your ad campaign that give you the most back
   • Campaign Structure: Allows you to organize your keywords and targeting in effective ways

The automated software runs continuously. Even small micro-optimizations compound into a larger impact. While you sleep, the system increases the bid on keywords that convert well. Furthermore, it reduces spending on unconverted terms.

Why Amazon Sellers Need PPC Automation?

It's no secret that Amazon's ad platform has become complicated. Sellers are managing Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP across 14 countries worldwide. Manual optimization is a thing of the past at this scale.

There are five essential problems PPC automation solves:

   1. Saves You Time

Automation will take care of time-consuming tasks you have to do every single week, 5+ hours minimum! No more thousands of bids being manually adjusted every week; you simply set your targets, and the software handles all execution. This gives you more time for new product ideas, inventory optimization, and business strategy!

   2. Optimizes Performance Faster

Automation can act on data much faster than any human. As soon as a keyword converts, its bid will go up within minutes. As soon as a keyword begins to waste money, it will be paused before you have a chance to lose too much money.

   3. Scale Beyond Hiring

With automatic PPC campaigns for Amazon, you can scale to hundreds of thousands of keywords across hundreds of campaigns. There's no way that's possible without hiring multiple virtual assistants.

   4. Reduces Waste on Your PPC Ads

Amazon PPC campaigns automatically remove and optimize poorly performing keywords. They replace irrelevant keywords with relevant negative keyword bids before money is lost on unnecessary searches. These savings can far outweigh the cost of the automation software.

   5. Enables More Advanced Optimization

Automation software offers dayparting that adjusts ad bids by hour. It offers separate bid optimization for Top of Search vs Product Pages, and much more—it can even respond to competitor bidding!

Amazon PPC Automatic vs Manual: Which Strategy Wins?

Automatic vs. Manual – There is only one answer: you need both. The campaigns have separate uses

   • Best Use Of Automatic Campaigns: Use as a tool to discover new products/keywords and topics. Amazon's algorithm is doing research for you and shows which search term resulted in a sale. That is real, verifiable data to create the specific manual campaign.

   • Best Use Of Manual Campaigns: Once high-performing keywords are identified, launch a specific exact-match manual campaign and control your bid, placement, and targeting based on your desired ACoS.

   • The Hybrid Method of Optimization: Intelligent sellers use both Amazon PPC automatic and manual campaigns simultaneously. Automatic campaigns are always running as a keyword discovery engine and search term analysis for your campaigns. Every week, review search term reports, create exact-match manual campaigns, and strategically bid. This makes your ad spend a self-improving entity.

How Amazon PPC Automation Works: Key Components

Four integrated systems work together to optimize your campaigns continuously. Each is responsible for one aspect-bid management, keyword harvesting, budget allocation, and structure-whilst constantly capturing thousands of data points per hour.

Rather than a monthly manager review of your campaign, automation responds instantly, boosting bids on keywords. It converts and pauses irrelevant ads before cash is wasted.

   1. Automated Bid Management

Bid automation is the engine behind a successful PPC bidding automation strategy. This technology monitors the target ACoS/ROAS you’ve entered. Moreover, it automatically adjusts your bids to keep them in check.

Revenue per Click is used to help calculate optimal CPC’s. Using your historical conversion rates and average order values, along with your current profit margins, the automation system increases the bid if it determines that RPC warrants higher bids. If the performance dips, the bid will also decrease automatically.

Advanced automation accounts for placement differences. Top-of-Search conversions generally outrank Product page conversions. Accordingly, the automation software applies a different bid strategy based on performance to each placement.

Bids change instantly in real time. If you experience an hourly surge in conversions, automation will increase your bids to capitalize on it. Conversely, during slow periods, the bid will decrease to conserve spending.

   2. Keyword Automation

Keyword harvesting collects high-converting keywords from your research campaigns. When a keyword in a broad or automatic matching campaign generates conversions, your software will notify you of the promotion.

Your highest-converting keywords are then added to exact-match campaigns with optimized bids. Non-performing keywords will be added as negative keywords to avoid wasting spend.

You typically tell the Amazon PPC automation software what performance metrics to meet to harvest keywords. E.g., Harvest keywords that have had three conversions with an ACoS below 25%. Or, a negative keyword after 30 clicks with zero conversions.

   3. Budget Allocation

Budget automation is the practice of allocating advertising dollars based on return on investment. Campaigns with the highest returns receive a larger share of the budget, while underperforming campaigns have their budgets reallocated.

This happens dynamically throughout the day: if a high-performing campaign hits its daily budget, the remaining budget from your slower campaigns is diverted to your winners so they can keep performing.

Dayparting works on a similar level. The software learns, hour by hour, which conversion rates apply and bids higher accordingly. Budget pacing helps ensure you don't exhaust your spend early by managing how aggressively you place bids on average throughout the day.

   4. Campaign Structure Automation

Structure automation provides the right campaign hierarchies for effective PPC management. It will build research campaigns for you with automatic and broad match campaigns, and proven keywords will be added to exact match campaigns with aggressive bids.

Use it to build hundreds of campaigns at once with templates automatically. Your software can handle targeting parameters, naming, and starting bids—Etc—for your entire product catalog.

Setting Up Your First Automated PPC Campaign

PPC ad automation can sound a little overwhelming, but it does not mean surrendering control – it means working smarter.

Automation utilizes past campaign results and scales what's already successful. However, it will not bring underperforming campaigns up to scratch or save structurally unsound ones.

Your account should be healthy and have realistic targets set before enabling automation:

   1. Audit Your Campaigns: Review them thoroughly. Analyze your data for at least 60-90 days. Automation will build on success, but it can't rescue failed campaigns.
   2. Determine And Define Appropriate Targets: Calculate your break-even ACoS by evaluating your product margins. If your product has a 35% profit margin and you aim for a 15% net profit after ads, you must set an ACoS target of 20%.
   3. Prioritize Campaigns With The Highest ROI: Use automation for Sponsored Products with top-selling items first. They already have adequate information.
   4. Set Up Automated Rules Accurately: Configure the following three fundamental automated rules:
                          • Increase bid by 10-15% if ACoS is 20% below target for 15-20 clicks.
                          • Decrease bid by 10-15% if ACoS is 20% above target.
                          • Pause keyword after 30 clicks, zero conversions.
   5. Prepare Keyword Harvesting Processes: Automate your system to transfer highly effective search terms from automatic campaigns to manual exact-match campaigns.
   6. Allow AI-Learning Phase: Your AI-driven tools will take 14-30 days to acquire relevant data. Avoid making frequent changes to your system.

Timeline expectations:

   • Days 1-14: Learning phase with some variability
   • Days 15-30: Stable performance, learning period, patterns start to appear
   • Days 31-60: Noticeable improvement in ACoS, ROAS, etc.
   • Days 61-90: Total success of automated PPC advertising, steady performance

Effective PPC Bidding Strategies for Automation

Your strategy determines whether the automation succeeds.

Target ACoS bidding sets the desired advertising cost as a percentage of sales. This works very well with clear profitability goals—automation bids to keep your ACoS at your desired Level.

Target ROAS bidding is not cost-oriented; it is return-oriented. For example, a 5x ROAS target means you want to generate $5 in sales for every $1 spent. This is useful for brands seeking rapid sales growth.

Dynamic bidding strategies:

   • Down only occurs when Amazon decreases bids when they are less likely to convert.
   • Up and down will raise the bid by 100%, and only for the top placement.
   • Fixed bids will stay flat regardless of bid probability.

The placement bid modifier can increase bids for higher-converting placements. For example, if Product Pages convert 50% better than Product Placement, apply 50% modifier.

Click thresholds should be implemented. Never change a bid for the first 15-20 clicks to eliminate the noise that confuses the optimization.

What Amazon Sponsored Products Automation can (and cannot) Do?

This helps remove unrealistic expectations for automation.

Amazon Sponsored Products automation is good at:

   • Bid optimization with 100's of automated bid adjustments a day.
   • Keyword harvesting of winning search terms.
   • Negative keyword management to stop wasted spend.
   • Budget pacing within 24-hour segments.
   • Dayparting hour-based bid adjustments.
   • Placement optimization between positions.

What automation is NOT good at, and manual management is required:

   • Strategizing and campaign structure setup.
   • Product and budget selection.
   • Copy creation and image selection.
   • Tracking suppressed listings and stock-outs.
   • Monitoring major competitive behavior.
   • Understanding algorithm updates and adjusting your strategy.

Automation within Amazon advertising is not "set it and forget it." It requires weekly check-ins to catch errors and identify opportunities. Software can augment decision-making, but can never replace strategic decision-making.

Common Amazon PPC Automation Mistakes to Avoid

Efficiency and better results await with automation. However, even experienced sellers make the mistake of blowing their ad spend on obvious problems. Most of them arise either because they view automation as a "set and forget" scenario or because they aren't ready for it.

Others will have unrealistic expectations that stop the automation from working correctly. Additionally, they sometimes automate problems that have never been solved. The problem is that many of these mistakes are easily avoidable. Most occur in predictable patterns that you can easily steer clear of.

   1. Over-Automating and Not Reviewing – This is one of the biggest mistakes sellers make. Check campaigns at least weekly.
   2. Not Reviewing Search Terms/Ignoring Negative Keywords – Huge waste of money. Review at least once a month and manually add in negative keywords.
   3. Setting Unrealistic Acos Targets – Setting a 10% target if your products naturally support 20%. If you have a 10% target, you cannot optimize campaigns to their full potential, as the auto optimization will drop bids on even your best-performing keywords.
   4. Not Auditing Before Automating – If your campaigns have issues without automation, the autopilot will amplify these issues. Get your foundation right first.
   5. Automating Already Failed Campaigns – If a campaign has had nothing in 60-90 days on manual, will it suddenly start working when you throw it on autopilot? No, it just wastes time.
   6. Not Taking Seasonality Into Account – Review automation rules every quarter and ensure seasonal adjustments are factored into campaigns.
   7. Tweaking Every Day – This muddies your data. Optimization should occur at least weekly, not daily. Allow the automation to run independently for 5-7 days.

Measuring Success: KPIs for Automated Campaigns

You’ve automated – great. Halfway there. However, unless you're measuring the right metrics, you won't know whether your automation is actually generating revenue or costing you money.

In fact, many sellers track vanity metrics that often "look great" but do not indicate a successful process—for example, high click-through rates but no sales, and higher ad spend but an uncontrollable ACoS.

However, the most successful sellers focus on only five Key Performance Indicators. These provide full visibility into whether campaigns are optimising appropriately. They also indicate whether ad spend is driving sustainable growth.

   1. Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): Indicates ad spend as a percentage of revenue generated from ads. The lower the ACoS, the better your ad spend. Most categories operate efficiently with an ACoS between 15% and 35%.

   2. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Sales generated per advertising dollar spent. For example, a 5x ROAS means $5 in revenue for every $1 spent.

   3. Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS): Total Advertising Cost of Sale, including organic sales. A downward trend over time suggests ad spending is driving organic growth.

   4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Improving the CTR performance demonstrates the relevance of your ads. A high CTR suggests relevance to shopper intent and helps the ad stand out from other ads.

   5. Conversion Rate (CVR): Conversion rate, expressed as the percentage of clicks that convert to a sale. Track separately for Top of Search, Rest of Search, and on the Product Pages. Conversion rates of 8-15% are common for Sponsored Products.

Monitor the timeline for the best Amazon PPC management practice:

   • Daily: Check for budget exhaustion and out-of-stock warnings
   • Weekly: Review ACoS performance and adjust campaign strategies
   • Monthly: Monitor search term reports and add negative keywords
   • Quarterly: Review overall strategy and set new seasonal targets

The Future of Amazon PPC Automation

Amazon Advertising remains highly dynamic. Advances in AI and Machine learning continue to improve predictive analytics. These newer technologies will forecast seasonal demand, anticipate competitive behavior, and automatically adjust strategy.

The downside to AI is that it relies on large volumes of historical data. AMC expansion provides advertisers with detailed analysis of paths to purchase, CLV, NTB, and more. Tools that leverage AMC data will be crucial.
Use the detailed segments available through AMC to push bid boosts to the highest-intent customers while reducing investment in low-value customers.

Third-party cookie deprecation makes privacy-safe measurement critical, giving Amazon, with its first-party data, a competitive advantage. Expect complex attribution models to emerge.

Dotcom Reps: Your Partner in Amazon Success

Automation saves me 10-15 hours per week and makes campaigns more profitable by keeping them continuously optimized. It automates your bidding, keyword harvesting, budgeting, etc., so you can grow your business.

Scale to one campaign before proceeding further. Audit meticulously. Set a reachable ACoS goal. Give the system 30-60 days to learn. Check campaigns at least weekly rather than daily to avoid disrupting optimization.
The optimal solution is to integrate technology with human oversight. Automation will support you in decisions rather than making them for you.

Dotcom Reps empowers sellers to achieve more from their advertising, increasing ROI through intelligent automation and dedicated campaign management. From tool selection and campaign setup to aggressive optimization and sustainable growth strategies, we deliver results.

We are your entryway to Amazon PPC management basics. Get your free Amazon PPC consultation with Dotcom Reps today! Start transforming your advertising efforts while gaining time to focus on your business.

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