Introduction on find the Best Start Bid for Amazon PPC
In many situations in your Amazon FBA selling journey, you will be working with unknown, incomplete, or inaccurate data. For example, the data you use for your product research using Helium10 or Jungle Scout tools are estimates.
In many cases, there is no data there for you to make a decision. The best Amazon seller can play detective and correlate a set of non-related data to the decision they make. In this regard, Amazon PPC advertising is no different.
In Amazon PPC, there is one situation in particular where this situation can apply: figuring out what is your best start bid for your Amazon PPC campaign.
Below are Top 5 Ways to Find the Best Start Bid for Amazon PPC
Amazon PPC Reports
Using the Amazon advertising reports to get your starting bid will only make sense if you have an existing related Amazon PPC campaign running.
I also want to emphasize related, as you only want to use data related to your advertised product as possible. So, for example, from your Amazon advertising reports, you want only go after the same following characteristics:
Product Type ➡️ Is the product you are advertising similar to what is in the report data? Selling variation will give you the closest data.
Price ➡️ Is the price the same or similar? Too large of difference can affect conversion rate and, in turn, your CPC (Cost per click)
Match Type ➡️ What match type are you using for reference?
For example, if you are looking to create a new a Sponsored Products campaign, you will calculate your starting bid by referencing the Sponsored Products reports only. You should also benchmark the starting bid by your match type; that is why it is recommended your Amazon campaign structure at the ad group level be separated by match type.
Now let’s get to nitty-gritty details on how to get the best start bid for an amazon PPC campaign using your advertising console reports.
1. One your Amazon Advertising Console hover to the side nav bar and click “Reports”
2. Once in the Reports screen, click “Create report” button
3. Select the campaign type, and select the targeting level report, keep report period to 30 days. Click ➡️ “Run report”
4. What 30 or so sec for the report to and download the loaded report
5. Open the downloaded spreadsheet report in step 4. You will filter the data using the following fields
Campaign Names ➡️ Campaign closest to your advertising product
Match Type ➡️ the same match type that you want to use in your new bid
7 Day Total Orders (#) ➡️ Should have at least one order
6. Average the CPC (Cost per click) column of your remaining data after step 5. This will give you the most accurate start bid for your keyword
CPC or cost per click is just the average amount you pay for a click using the formula Spend/Clicks.
Also to note, if you want to achieve an even more accurate starting bid, use the weight average CPC between Clicks and CPC. Yeeaaah, I am such a data nerd. 🤓
To calculate the weight average of CPC you will use the SUMPRODUCT formula like below.
Which will result in $1.49, which would be my starting bid.
If you find the SUMPRODUCT formula too complicated, you can just use the average to calculate your starting bid. The difference should not be too material.
CPC number on the Amazon Advertising Console
Suppose you do find the above way to find the starting bid too much. Then, a quick and easy method is to use the CPC figure in the subtotal of your Amazon advertising console.
The CPC is $1.48. This is the figure to use in your starting bid. The start bid derived from this method should not be far off from the CPC calculated from the report. The same filter applies; as you can see, I only show the keywords that achieved at least one order in the last 30 days.
The only drawback of this method is that you would have to toggle in and out of the different campaigns and then get an average CPC between them if you want to analyze multiple campaigns. If that is the case running the Amazon advertising report might be a better way to go.
Run Amazon PPC Automatic Campaign
If you are a new seller and about to launch a product, you probably think the above two ways don’t apply to me. That is true because the above method requires you to have an established and relevant campaign currently running.
What you can do is to run an Amazon PPC Automatic Campaign. The automatic campaigns allow Amazon to control what Keywords or ASIN to bid for. This campaign type also allows Amazon to make the specific bids in the keyword auction based on some user-defined restrictions such as default bid.
A side bonus to this method is that it allows Amazon to get an excellent understanding of your product/audience match. So, if the automatic campaign performs well and the keyword/PAT that is bidding for is relevant, you can have confidence that your Amazon product listing is well optimized.
Create and run the Sponsored Product automatic campaign for at least 30 days, and then you can get a strong starting bid via the Amazon PPC Reports using the first mention discussed.
Amazon Suggested Bid
Another method is to use the Amazon suggested bid on the target tab when creating a new manual campaign.
Once you select suggested bid in the dropdown, it will change all your default bids to the suggested bid.
According to Amazon ” the suggested bid, provides you with an estimate of the Amazon bids that have been used by other advertisers for products such as yours.”
It will be Amazon that will make a decision on what products are similar in your bid range estimation. The suggested bid of the keyword will fall within the suggested range. For example, a suggested bid for your keyword is $0.70 with a range of $0.40 and $1.40.
Incremental Bid Increase
I am saving the best way to find the best start bid for Amazon PPC for last. I call this the incremental bid increase method. This method involves entering a well below average bid and increase each bid incrementally through time.
The main drawback to this method is that it involves lots of monitoring and consistent bid management. Basically, you are trying to find that perfect bid equilibrium to win a bid auction—nothing more and nothing less.
For example, using the keyword below and its suggested bid, a bid of $0.80 would be well below the average needed to win the keyword auction. Therefore, the $0.80 bid will be the starting bid you use, increasing upward or downwards incrementally until we get some actionable results.
Even though the above start bid method gives you the best chance to lower your ad spend, it is a huge time suck, and as a fellow Amazon FBA seller, we don’t have all that time to focus on our PPC. So this is where our Amazon PPC automation software, SellerMetrics, comes in.
Our “Growth” bid automation strategy would incrementally increase your bid automatically until either a click or an order is achieved. Then our algorithm will consistently monitor the keyword’s performance and make additional bid adjustments automatically. Using our software, you can be assured that you are making your most optimized bid no matter where you are in the product launch cycle. So check us out at https://sellermetrics.app/ and give us a shot with a free 14 days trial.
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
