6 Tips for Better Amazon Performance on Black Friday

What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to the PPC Den Podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon PPC life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today, we have my dear personal friend, Elizabeth Green on the show, and we're going to be talking about what to do on the day of Black Friday. Another name for this episode could have been a slacker's guide to Black Friday for Amazon sellers. Basically, if you haven't done any prep work, this is what to do today, 10 a.m., 9 a.m., whenever you're waking up on Black Friday. It's also a checklist of what you should do, even if you did your prep work, what to do today to get the most out of Black Friday. Other cool news is that Ad Badger only goes on sale one week a year, so be sure to go to adbadger.com. You'll see the banner on the site for our Black Friday deal. It would definitely help you in your Black Friday efforts because we have some bulk actions that allow you to change budgets and bids and manage your search terms really easily, so be sure to go to adbadger.com and check that out. Without further ado, let's jump in. Last minute activities for your Black Friday. We are the PPC Den, my friends. And we'll keep up the amazing, to the end. You too are the PPC Den. We took a part of the time, no time for money cuts, 'cause we fixed the gambit of war. Uh, Elizabeth, it's the day after Thanksgiving. You know, hopefully people traveled home with loved ones, and they're hanging out with their family, waking up from a, you know, turkey hangover, and it's Black Friday. And for Amazon sellers, the rest of your family's relaxed, but you are frantically refreshing Amazon, watching what's going on. What do you like to do on Black Friday yourself? I am lucky now that I have an amazing team. So my days are not as frantic as they used to be. I do remember frantically switching between multiple accounts, which is kind of annoying when you have a different email to log in to separate accounts, because you've had so many account connections over the years, Amazon cut you off and you had to create a new one. Yeah, just a lot of checking. A lot of work on budgets. And does your family do turkey family Thanksgiving? We do not. So I married into a family that shortly after I joined the family, everyone looked around one Thanksgiving, and we're like, does anyone really like, not that turkey's bad, but it's not like the pinnacle, it's a tradition thing. And they were like, no, we prefer a prime rib. So they do a prime rib every Thanksgiving, and I am unthinkful. You know, I grew up not liking turkey either. I was just like, why are we eating this? It's so dry. It tastes so bad. The worst part of the Thanksgiving plate. However, as I got older, I discovered the salt brine method. No, you can do a legit turkey. You can do it. There is a way to make legit turkey, but is it ever going to be as good as prime rib? That's a good question. My vote says no, but you know. And Elizabeth, we have a message out there for this. This episode is designed for the people who hopefully they did their prep work for Black Friday and Cyber Monday the whole weekend. Hopefully they did their prep work, but let's say they didn't. You know, maybe their flight got delayed as they were traveling home. It's the busiest travel time of the year across America. Maybe they didn't get a chance to do everything they needed to, or maybe they did. And they're wondering, what should I be doing today? We have an episode just for them. I don't want to call this the slacker's guide to Black Friday, but it's really like what hopefully someone can turn this on on Black Friday and get 30 minutes of good optimization. So let's jump into the episode. We have four things to do today on Black Friday. Let's jump in. Alrighty, Elizabeth. So if I can kick things off, I would say the first thing that I recommend, and we see this message come up a lot, is people looking at ad console, like advertising.amazon.com, looking at the default interface for Amazon and refreshing it and seeing very few sales for the day of whatever peak date is Black Friday, Prime Day, doesn't matter. They're looking at that and the numbers are low or bad. And I cannot tell you how many years in a row that number one, the sales information inside ad console are delayed every single day of the year. It's not live updated. Every single day they're delayed. So it never makes sense to look at how I'm doing today in my ad console. Number two, almost every year, there's some kind of bug happening. And it's like it was a banner that says data is delayed. Yes. Or there's some error in some ad type somewhere. Every single year for years, I don't know what the deal is. Amazon's got infinite resources. You think it wouldn't happen, but it just does. So my first tip is don't get distracted by looking at ad console and using that as your sales metric for the day. Go into business reports, which is based off orders, like as orders are happening, you then see the revenue roll in. This is a common one still to this day. No, it makes sense. Let me log in and look at my data. Yeah. I mean, it is because if you hit refresh inside ad console, the numbers change. So logically you would think while numbers are changing, data is getting updated. Yes, what the problem is, especially when it's getting updated soon and frequently, just one order point will drastically change what the numbers are. So if you're hitting refresh, you're like, oh my gosh, you're telling me I'll have 100% ad cost. Logically, it could be like 50 or 20. We have no idea. And the issue with trying to make decisions based off and complete data is you're going to make wrong decisions. You just start. You're going to turn off things that you shouldn't be turning off. I've heard it. People do it. They do, but the good news, the good news, I have a silver lining, which Michael just told you, is business reports, sales data is real time. So the good news is if you want to know, what am I doing in terms of sales? Am I making more sales? You can find out that information. It's just, it's not inside of ad console. Although I will tell you that budgets being out. So here's the, here's the crazy thing, right? Ad spend technically is the most, most quote, most accurate, but it's not going to be accurate, like the actual ad spend, but your budget being out will. That notification that says you ran out of budget, that is real time. Now you might look at it and be like, wait, it says my budget's out, but it tells me when they spent like $20, but my ad budget is actually like $50. So you're going to see that it is there. So Amazon's like, hey, give us more money. We're not going to tell you the performance of that money right now. We're just going to tell you it's out. So you're going to be using the out of budget, the out of budget filter inside of ad console is going to be your best friend today, but that's going to be the only accurate real time. So that's our first tip. You know, you're tracking your ad cost of total sales, sometimes known as tacos. You're tracking your total A costs. Be sure to use your business reports, because that'll give you per order updated information to give you a better pulse on how many sales you're doing today. So that's the first thing that we'll say. And you mentioned budgets. Let's jump in to tip number two. All right, Elizabeth, let's talk about budgets. It's Black Friday. We just woke up. What do I do with my budgets? And again, this is for people who maybe haven't done their prep work and already optimized their budgets going into today. What is some day of budget considerations that we can make? Primarily, what is going to be happening on Black Friday is you're probably going to be increasing your budgets. Those should be done at the campaign level. And remember how he also said like, "Hey, data and ad console is not real time. A cost is not going to be accurate. Nothing's really going to be accurate." That's why it's important to use historical data. Now, a pro tip here is you're not going to want to look at the last two or a couple of days. I would go longer than seven days for this. The reason why is because leading up into Black Friday, everyone's shopping for Thanksgiving. Like if you have a Thanksgiving tablecloth, you've probably done pretty well over the last couple of days. But outside of those very obvious choices, your performance most likely has decreased those last couple of days. You don't want to like, again, we don't want to make inaccurate. So what we're doing Black Friday is we go, "Okay, I know this budget ran out. Does it make sense to increase it?" And the answer to that question doesn't make sense to increases is, "Hey, look at what it did probably the last 30 days and say, like, what is the performance of this? Has this generated orders? Is it within the KPIs and I'm comfortable spending more money on?" And then in those cases, we make the determination yes. So the things that you want to really make sure that you're prioritizing in terms of, "Hey, let's increase the budgets here," is going to be things that, one, have driven great orders for you. These are the campaigns that we want to make sure ideally, if we can afford it, and we'll talk about looking at business reports to determine if you can afford it. But you want to make sure that you're keeping those in budget as much as you possibly can, because that's where all the orders are coming from. Not that you want to not keep the lower order volume campaigns in budget, but those are maybe they're not going to give you as much bang for your buck in terms of momentum. And the other thing you obviously would want to look at is like, what is the performance KPIs? So am I running at like, over 100% ACOS for orders have been coming here? Do I want to spend more of my ad dollars at 100% ACOS? For some of you, that answer may be yes, because you'll like, "Hey, this is a ranking campaign." High priority for me, I completely understand that all ad dollars spent technically in terms of advertising return are going to be at a loss. So again, we're looking at that to make good decisions on like, again, does it make sense for me to put more money towards this? Yeah, exactly. And I think over the years, there's been a spectrum of how people approach their peak days like Black Friday and Prime Day, where depending on the history of what's been going on this year for the particular brand and depending on the brand's goals, it really has influenced how they approach budget changes going into these peak days, where maybe in the years past when CPCs were lower, competition was a little bit softer, fees were a little bit lower, maybe they would just go in and just add a zero to all their budgets and be like, "This is going to be awesome no matter what, every single campaign." But I think over time, it's evolved quite a bit where people are maybe prioritizing where they put their budget increases. And I think a really easy rule to follow is if you have campaigns, just like you mentioned, if you have your very best campaigns, the ones that perform well in a nevergreen format, low A cost, high orders, you don't want to be caught with a budget limitation on those very best campaigns. People sometimes ask, "What should my Black Friday budget strategy be?" And I think an easy way to think about it is conversion rates are going to be two to three times higher for the most part, hopefully you have year over year data. The conversion rates are going to be higher, order counts are going to be greater, click volume is going to be greater. There's usually a two to four X boost globally and that means that inside of an account, if it's going to be two to four X, what it normally does, that means some campaigns might be four to six X and some campaigns might only be one X. They might just do what they normally do, just with a slightly better conversion rate. So I think having an 80/20 approach and just ensuring that the campaigns that have done well historically just are not budget capped. So if there's a campaign that's typically in your target A cost that your best 20% of campaigns, I think it's a really easy, safe bet to just be sure that those top 20% of campaigns have no risk of being budget limited. Because if they do well on a typical day, they're probably going to do extra good on a day like Black Friday, so you don't want to be budget limited. So if you wanted a place to focus, just focus there. Imagine if you got two times the amount of clicks, would you be budget limited? Ask that question to yourself. No, I love that. And I also like going back to what you're saying, like how we used to do it back in the day, it's like, you know, sometimes you would just go in and like we were talking about prep works, you might say like, okay, so these are my campaigns, I'm just going to like, you know, maybe double the budgets of these things and call it good. Going back to how my team is more in it these days, right? So it used to be that we would just like go into that ad console, you know, make sure things weren't limited or maybe doing prep work, increasing in specific areas of the account. But these days, actually, one thing that we found to be really beneficial in terms of budgets is you mentioned the question from sellers, like, hey, how big should my Black Friday like what would be so we have like our general benchmarks of like you said, two to four X. And then we also have like what's that specific account going to do, which you can look at historical data if you have it, which is fantastic. Sometimes that can be a little bit hard to dissect though, if you say maybe launched internally new product line this year, and you're like, well, I know what my account did last year, but I don't really know how these products are going to perform. And the fact that business reports is real time, well, totally cost, which is really a great barometer to know like how is my ad spend playing into profitability in the account is your ad spend divided by your total sales. So you can imagine if you're pacing almost the same with your ad spend, but your total sales have increased quite a bit, you can afford to increase your ad spend, and then not have that be negative in terms of total cost. Other things to keep into account here though, is the fact that if you're running a lot of like deals in your account, you have a lot of coupons, your profitability is technically going to be lower. So you want to have an awareness of that. That's one thing that we always ask for all our brands like, hey, are you running any deals or you're doing anything? How does that so we can actually calculate like what does that look like in terms of profitability? And so I'm really part of the team. We did this, we've just gone through like fall prime day. And I was looking at our accounts pretty much across the board, we saw an increase in sales and at least maintenance or decrease in total cost for pretty much across the board. And we we assure you that to the fact that what we're doing is actually checking multiple times a day to gauge that increase in the total sales and then making sure that that is informing what we're doing in the account in terms of budgets. So that's a really good way. So you don't have to be completely flying blind. You can have a really solid handle on, you know, which of those now that requires you to check the account multiple times a day and you'll be very incremental there. But again, if you want to make sure that you are going to end out on top, that's what we found is like really required. And yeah, the last thing I'll say about budgets too is when you're looking at the business reports, you should be able to see what multiple you're doing over a normal day. So, you know, you log in at 10 o'clock, you should be able to have a sense of like what you'd normally do by 10 o'clock, and then use that as a barometer say like, oh, this is like three times more than we normally do. That's a good indication to take those top 20% of campaigns and maybe give it a 3x budget increase. You don't want to be caught. Related to budgets, let's jump into our next point, which is of course bidding. Alrighty, Elizabeth. Bidding. Let's just pretend people didn't do their prep work. They weren't paying attention. And now it's Black Friday. And it's last minute, you know, it's related to budgets. But let's talk about bids. What is what would be your advice to someone who maybe hasn't done their prep work or maybe they did do their prep work and they just want to know if there's anything extra to do with their bids, you know, pretend it's Black Friday morning, 10 o'clock in the morning? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, it used to be years ago and quite a few years ago, like four or five years ago, people would say like, oh, kind of how you said like, hey, just apply like a general benchmark increase to just the budgets and like just kind of do that across the board and, you know, let the let the chips follow where they may. Some people used to do this to bids as well. Which to be honest, I don't think it never all the data I saw on all of those accounts because I would audit them after the brands that come to me be like, oh, we didn't do so great in terms of brand day. It was again, it was it was very indiscriminate and very much like a model just increase it because we need more traffic. Now, what I will say is that cost per clicks will go up day of. And so there is this sort of worry that if the cost per clicks are rising and my bid is no longer competitive, I'm going to be losing out on important traffic. And I would say that is true. However, the cost of that traffic, the benefit does not always outweigh the cost in all situations. So we never indiscriminately increase. And in fact, when at all possible, we will maintain our current bids and then just allow the budgets to capture that additional traffic so we don't have as much of an increase in the cost per clicks. That's one something that has worked for us very, very well. And we continue to coach our team through that. I think we've been really implementing that through like major holidays and major high traffic times, even into Q4 for the past two years. And it's worked really well in terms of maintaining profits. But what I will say is that if you have an important ranking keyword, or there's a keyword that historically has worked for you, that it is imperative to the performance of the product that you maintain a very visible presence on that, then those would be the keywords that I would highly recommend a budget or a bid increase there. We do have certain, of course, that's why we just, we rely on very skilled ad managers, because it's very hard to like incrementally SOP this. If you've been managing an account for any length of time or just understand the products, you'll notice that, oh, when I main, when I lose presence here, the market shifts, things get more competitive. I very much observe a decrease in total sales volume here. So you should have an idea. These oftentimes are ranking keywords, main keywords, again, make sure that your ad structure is in a place. So if you have like an auto campaign, and you increase that, and you're like, Oh, it's just going to pick up like it's got it's going to pick up that search, but it's also going to pick up a lot more searches. So you want to be very strategic here. Again, this is like your prep work, you don't necessarily want to like increase the bids three or four days before, but you do want to know where they are. So part of our prop work is like, all of those campaigns or those keywords or those things that we're like, we need to keep a tight eye on this. Offstreams will create like a very specific portfolio. So you can just go and click on that portfolio and like kind of see everything and just get a very condensed idea of what that looks like. Is a more maybe manual or incremental process, but I would say that's that would be our approach to bids is mainly focused on budgets, and then focus on the bids on the places where we absolutely need to to make sure we're not hurting market share. Very well said. I've very few points to add, but it's sort of the same mentality of the things that are there areas where I can increase bids, potentially pay a higher cost per click and still come out ahead. I think that's just that's the question that you want to answer for yourself, which is, oh, I have a keyword that does a really good amount of volume for me. And then I also think it's key to understand what you as a brand wants to accomplish on Black Friday. It could be very acceptable to say, Hey, I'm optimizing for profit today. I really want a big day of profit. So I'm going to, you know, not five X my bids, because I care more about the profit as opposed to the volume. On the other end of the spectrum, people want to maybe say, I want to be in top search term impression share position for today, for these family of keywords, you're going to need to increase your bids a little bit more significantly, maybe two, three times what they normally are, just to give yourself that expect that assurance that you're going to end up in a top spot. The keyword that you mentioned to me was like, don't do it indiscriminately, really just think about it. And I think on a day like today, you know, you can just sort of assume that you're probably going to have a two X conversion rate on some of your best terms like that should factor in. So even if you don't do anything with your bids, you're going to get more traffic, you're going to get a better conversion rate, you're going to get a better A cause, you're going to get better day of profitability. And then the more you increase your bids, the more your profit will be decreased, typically, because you're going to be paying more for those clicks. So you're increasing bids, generally, you're going to show up in a better position, get more volume. So it's just a matter of, you know, where you want to land as a business. If you want to get really aggressive with volume, you know, you're looking at a two to three X bid increase. If you just want to, you know, maintain, maybe push it a little bit, that's like a 50% increase. But don't do that indiscriminately. Yep. And with that, let's jump to our final tip for what to do today on Black Friday. Alrighty, Elizabeth. We hopefully gave people some clarity and some calmness from frantically refreshing the ad console. We give them some guidance to, you know, keep track of total sales and total A costs in the business reports, talked about budgets, talked about bids. What's your final piece of advice for what to do today on Black Friday? Probably this will go out to the people who have done no prep work. Right. This is the slacker's guide. This is the slacker's guide is going to be, I have some very quick spot checks for you to like, please check the things that will absolutely crush profits today. So really all of the prep work going up to Black Friday is really what are the things that are not working? Let's be ruthless with those. And so today is the day to be ruthless with anywhere that you're on. And that sends your budget to things that are much better. Correct. Correct. So these ruthless things are going to be things that have clicks with no sales. I'm going to give you an extra one, which is untested keywords. These easily sneak up on you today. And then the other one is obviously search terms, clicks with no sales. I'm going to give you a fast, quick and dirty way to do this. So targeting tab is your best friend here. Honestly, one of my most favorite updates, probably to date inside the ad console. It's fantastic. And what you want to do is go into targeting tab. You're going to, I would look at the last 30 days, maybe even longer, maybe even last 60. I would sort for, so we're looking for clicks, no sales on keywords. So I'm going to filter by zero orders. And then I'm going to sort either I spend or clicks. Take a good hard look at it. Say what is active? Where am I getting a heck ton of clicks that are not translating to sales? Do I want to have those clicks accelerated, given the fact that there's way more traffic on the platform? Probably not. And so again, here we're going to be ruthless. Another pro tip for you here as well. There's a couple of ways you can do this. You might pause it in my lower bids. My favorite way when I'm doing like a quick and dirty change all the things, but I want to keep track of them is going to be to set a bid that I would not necessarily set that is a good random rounded number. So an example here might be like three sets, seven cents, 11 cents, something where when I run across it and add console later, I say, Oh, yeah, three cents. That was when I did that. So if you want to like go back and retest or something, sometimes when you like, do you a drastic change or like pause something, you're like, was it paused because like I was sure I wanted to pause it. Now, if you're looking at things that have like 50, 100 clicks, no sales, like maybe just take care of those be like, I can elect to get rid of these. I should have done that a while ago. But for all the things you're like, Oh, I'm a little bit uncertain and I maybe want to retask, but like today is not the day to spend on these things. I would use that like, you know, some sort of bid as an indicator to yourself. And that's going to come in handy when we do the second thing, which is looking at things that are untested. This is very, very easy because a normal workflow, a good workflow in any sort of bid optimization is I am not receiving impressions. Let's increase the bid and check to see if we can receive impressions. Fabulous workflow can come back to bite you on days like today. So you might have something that's not really getting impressions because that has very low search volume. That's a common one. Or, you know, maybe it's in another campaign and that maybe when that campaign runs out of budget, all of a sudden that other one's going to trigger. There's all kinds of things and reasons why these things happen. What you want to do is again, you're going into add console, you're sorting by things that have zero orders. So again, things that are not already tested. And then you're going to instead of sorting by click, source, spend, you want to sort by bid. I have come across bids that are like $20, $25. Like somebody just, you know, like the system just kept increasing. Nobody paid attention. Again, not that we don't necessarily want to test these. I would again use some sort of, hey, let's set a 4 cent bid or something on those. So it's an indicator to myself, these are untested and you need to go back. But like today is not the day to have a $25 bid. And then the very last one is a spot check. So this is not, if you have the time, it's not a bad idea to go and like download a full search report, run a whole analysis, but then you're going to have to go find those campaigns, add those negatives, like that whole workflow could take you an hour. So you may not have it. You might be like, I need the thing to like find all the worst things fast. Again, add console is my favorite here. You're going to make sure it does have orders. So you just want to be looking at everything I would sort by spend, again, highest the lowest, what has the most spend. I'm checking the match type column to see it doesn't have search terms I need to negate. So if it's a broad match, if it's a phrase, if it's an auto, if it's an exact, I don't necessarily want to negate something, that's actually going to create issues. And then what I'm going to do is for those top things, especially the ones with high costs, that's a good trigger here. Just see like, hey, is there a waste within this target? I'm going to find all those. I'm going to right click so I can open the ad group in another tab so I can just go through the tabs. And then I'm going to go through in that ad group. I'm going to go to the search term tab. Again, we're looking at sorting spend highest to lowest, just going down those. And so you're like nearing in on the targets that have a high ad spend that have lower performance. So those are where typically you're going to find the biggest bleeders in terms of your ad spend on a search term level. You should be able to just select quick, apply those as negatives. Again, prep work, an entire sweep of the entire account going through all these things would be ideal. But if you have five minutes, you could probably bang all of that out in 10 to 15 minutes, probably. Yes. The way I like to think about it is like these peak days, it's a great time to practice the hedgehog concept, you know, the hedgehog concept, you curl up in a ball and you're focused to, you know, you have your spikes on the outside and you're just focused on the core, you're protecting your core parts of your account. That's what you're focusing on. It's not the time to stretch yourself out too thin. It's time to focus on the things that, you know, work well. So I think trimming, using a reminder to sort of trim some of the fat. And then the benefit here is that all this, all these extra clicks and spend that would have gone towards things that, you know, are weak in your account are now hopefully being redirected towards things that are going to do much better. So I like that hedgehog concept. So we've done it, Elizabeth. Hopefully people feel a little bit more confident about what to do today when logging in and, you know, hopefully set the intention for next year that you start your prep work well in advance, so that you have the game plan going into today. But I think, you know, Slacker's Guide, four things to do in 30 minutes on Black Friday, I think we've given people some good direction here. Yeah. As is normal with a Black Friday episode, I always like to ask this question, which is they're going to be any products that you're going to be looking for for Black Friday? I will probably not personally, I'll probably peruse like any gifts for my children have not given me their Christmas list yet, because we're prerecording this. So my goal would probably be to find those items and then I'll save them to cart. And then I'll just go and like check and see like, ah, do any of these have a deal? Yes or no? And then maybe I'll get them. That's kind of my work. So that's exactly what I was thinking too. I'll probably be looking for a power wheels. Power wheels with a remote control so that, you know, the kid, the kid can operate the power wheels themselves. But also there's a remote control for parent override. For when you have to like break hard. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Elizabeth. If someone wants to follow up and ask you some follow up questions, what's your favorite way that people get in touch with you? Personally, like if they want to like personally reach out to me, I would say LinkedIn. You just always feel free to shoot me a DM. It's probably going to be the best way just for like a quick. Now, of course, if anyone was interested in working with us, best place is going to be the website. You're still going to talk to me, but we get a set up call. So that would be the website jungler.com, J-U-N-G-L-R.com. Awesome. Elizabeth, it's always such a pleasure connecting with you. Have a good one and everyone else. I'll see you next week here on the PPC Done Podcast.