text: Training new employees can feel like additional work, but taking the time to properly onboard them pays dividends later. It’s all about creating leverage to deliver on the founders’ vision—and that requires not only recruiting the right people, but structuring their roles and the organization in ways that favor growth. If you don’t let go, your organization won’t scale.
  
  In terms of efficiency, Amazon Ads perform and convert better than Google Ads, and many smaller to large online sellers choose to use them over Google. They are very simple to set up and see a good return on investment. Google Shopping can be complicated and often needs external marketing aid which generates additional costs. With Amazon Ads, as long as you have the buy box your products are eligible for advertising.
  We have been working with Amazon Ads for some time and to help online sellers we have created a progressive plan that anyone can pick up and use. It applies to any category on Amazon. Even if you have never set up any Amazon Ads, this will work well for you; and if you are already running ads this may help to improve performance.
  Amazon Advertising includes Amazon Sponsored Ads, Sponsored Brands (formerly Headline Search) and Product Display. This plan focuses on Amazon Sponsored Ads.
  Before you set any ads up you should first agree on target ACoS. This is the Advertising Cost of Sales, so you are able to monitor the profitability of your product, taking into consideration product cost, postage and Amazon commission. Let’s take an example, if your profit is 30%, then your Amazon ACoS should be less than 30% to ensure you make a profit from running ads. Check out our Amazon profit calculator.
  With any client account, we always begin with ‘Automatic Targeting’ ads. This is where Amazon will target keywords and products that are similar to the product in your ad. Often, Amazon will also use the content and keywords on your product page to target your ads, so it is vital to ensure your content is optimised and relevant.
  1/ Best practice: Set up and run Automatic Targeting ads for 3 to 4 weeks to allow enough time for the ads to work and collect customer search term data.
  2/ Campaign Structure: Use product type or category to create informative campaign names. If many people are using the account, we must ensure that the campaign structure is self-explanatory. For example, if you are in Ladies Fashion, you could break the campaigns down into clothing type e.g. ‘Tops’, ‘Trousers’ and ‘Shoes’.
  3/ Ad Group Structure: Now it’s time to be more granular, don’t worry about how many ad groups you have, breaking it down to be as targeted as possible is best practice. Taking the Ladies Fashion example again, if we’ve created a campaign for ‘Tops’. The Ad Groups could include ‘Evening Tops’, ‘Casual Tops’, ‘Jumpers’ and so on. Or, if you supply different brands, or different colours etc.
  4/ Reports: Utilise Amazon’s Advertising Reports, especially the Search Term Report. With the search term report, you can find converting and non-converting keywords. You can use the converting keywords to create Manual Targeting Ads, and add the non-converting keywords as negatives to reduce wasted spend. See an example of what the search term report looks like, showing non-converting keywords. We can see a very high spend for the top keyword but no sales in the last 7 days!
  5/ Conversions: If you’re finding your automatic ads aren’t converting straight away, don’t threat or pause straight away. Ensure you’ve allowed them enough time to run and bed in. Further to this, campaign data is often behind and conversions can continue updating for up to 14 days.
  6/ Even after allowing plenty of time to run if you’re still experiencing no conversions but high spend then we would recommend reviewing your prices and even product copy. Ensuring prices are competitive and that your product copy is relevant and includes the right keywords.
  Once you’ve been running Automatic Targeting Ads for a couple of weeks, and gathered relevant customer search term data via the search term report. You are ready to set up targeted Manual Ads.
  1/ Reports: Use the search term report to generate a list of converting keywords. Also, ensure to find non-converting keywords to add as negatives to the new campaign. This stops wasted spend from the beginning and ensures the campaign is targeted.
  2/ Campaign & Ad Group Structure: There are 2 common ways of structuring Manual campaigns and ad groups, firstly the same way we discussed above for Automatic campaigns and ad groups. Or, secondly splitting ad groups by Match Type e.g. Broad, Phrase and Exact. This allows you to easily measure the effectiveness of different match types. Either way can work well, it just depends on how granular you want to be. See example in this excel sheet.
  3/ Keywords: It is good practice to keep only 20 to 30 keywords in 1 ad group, with a large number of keywords, not all of them will get impressions. Therefore, if you have a large list, consider setting up multiple ad groups and perhaps group relevant keywords together. You can have a product advertised in several different campaigns and ad groups.
  4/ Products: It is good practice to only list 10 products in 1 ad group if you have a large number consider grouping them in a different way and create several different ad groups. With a large number of products, not all of them will get impressions (this is based on experience).