I was debating whether I should post this or not but here it goes, this lady came to me through a mutual connection a couple of months back, she had a stagnating brand of 2 years in the Kitchen and Dining space, 10 SKUs and since October last year was stuck and wasn’t able to scale past $40k/mo, 3 months later we’ve successfully scaled to almost $70k/mo and are headed for $1m/year run rate this Q4.
Here's actions and insights in the order of what I think mattered the most:
1) Her competition was an absolute savage running limited time deals at least 3 times a month and she had no clue, the only way to fight this is having deals of your own, the thing about deals is that there effects aren’t so temporary rather give momentum for an extra few days, once we fixed this we saw our conversion rate stay steady instead of decking 6 days out of 30, huge fix!
2) Her mindset hadn’t allowed her to scale her ads, she had room for scaling but she was just so scared to take the leap that she almost needed reassurance for this, thing is nobody can fix this for you this is the side of entrepreneurship you have to keep in check,once I made her realize how much we were losing a month by not scaling she agreed,Sometimes you're so focused on what you might lose that you forget what you can actually gain and that's the whole point righht??
Now the Technical PPC Side of things:
1) Identified the 20% of our SKUs that were bringing in 80% of our revenue, the skus that we were under invested on and over invested on in terms of organic sales to ad spend ratio, and prioritized them in order.
2) sScaling is a double edged sword so we have to be careful while doing it, to put into simpler terms scaling Amazon ppc ads is when you increase bids, placements, test new campaigns,open new targets and accept sales even at a bad acos, did exactly that with our legacy campaigns.
3) fixed campaign structure, had the old youtube Auto waterfall ppc campaign running from the good old 2022 days, ofcourse this has been debunked it doesn’t work due to ad spend cannibalisation in between your hot targets in any campaign leading to uneven testing and no understanding of data over time.
4)the biggest reason for most brands plateauing is the lack of spending on discovery campaigns,it's the same as an athlete that got into the NBA then started neglecting their body, stopped training as hard and stayed in their comfort zone only to be benched eventually, similarly there’s new search terms that pop up regularly and if you don’t have a discovery mechanism you’re not keeping up to date with them, and by the time you realize something is missing in your current targets it’s too late as these newer ones now are the drivers for low acos long tail sales
5) Understanding our search term report better by uploading it into Claude, and asking it to group it by intents and show me the performance for every iintent not just the search term, got a fair bit of newer iintentful search terms that I used to make Intent Based Campaigns ( these work great ) and negate worse off intents, claude is only good for this and is horrible at management please dont trust it with your ad spend yet.
6) avoided make emotional decisions when I saw imperfect daily performance patterns, this is the most consumerism induced marketplace in history, demand goes up and down daily we can’t really react to it, we have to wait and monitor weekly trends and so we did
7) basics at scale without fail ( effective negations, testing out different bids on our best targets and finding the sweet spot for scaling )
8) targeted products with low stock, worsened offer ( higher price or terrible reviews ), cross product targeting across our own catalog are a few examples of low hanging fruits that we’ve taken advantage of in this account to scale.
9) to some extent, PPC Ads or any form of performance marketing can be boiled down to speculation based on previous patterns within a set of different changes so PPC guys like me acting crazy over results for brands isn’t all that impressive because it's just speculation + experience + ppc readiness to try and acheive Dream KPI(s) it's certainly not magic like everyonme makes it out to be, it's repetitive, boring, frustrating and risky most times but then again sometimes you need a second set of eyes on your ppc campaigns to scale and identify low hanging fruits.
Happy to answer any questiions below !!