Today we’re continuing the blog series with another common Sponsored Ads pitfall: inconsistency when managing your Sponsored Ads.
If you’re inconsistent your setup is messy and that impacts your performance because you’re having a hard time navigating your account and finding problems. Inconsistency is a compounding problem over time and costs you every step of the way but let’s get into it.
Inconsistent account structure
Your account deserves attention, it’s spending your money. Putting in the effort goes a long way to not throw cash into the wind. Decide on one way you’ll name your campaigns and ad groups and stick to it. Far too often I come across accounts with “NB” in the name and I find their brand name as a keyword. Better yet when the campaign or ad group is labeled as a competitor, and their own brand becomes the competitor. This reinforces the point above.
How to improve it?
- Use negative targeting to delimit your strategies and be consistent.
- Be consistent every time you add a new ad group or campaign.
- Consistency is key to better control and having better control means better performance.
- Decide on how you want to split up your products into ad groups.
- Avoid having all your products in the same ad group.
I would also advise against having all your variations in the same ad group. It affects what will get matched. For example, for a protein powder with different flavors and pack sizes of 2kg and 500g. Let’s say you put them all in a single ad group in Sponsored Products. Your 2kg packs might be showing where your 500g should be and vice versa. This causes wasted spend. You’re pairing many products with many products, and you lose clarity.
At Amerge, we put each ASIN into its own ad group and put it up with relevant targeting. In the example with the protein powder, it would be keywords capturing the pack size and flavors paired with the specific ASIN. If budget allows, we scale this out to campaigns by products to have better control over performance.
We’ve developed our proprietary automation to create our account structures, correctly label them, and implement negative targeting from the start. This gives us clarity and control over every aspect of the account and enhances our capabilities for reporting. We’re sure that every action has a concrete impact on performance and that there are no knock-on effects. This wouldn’t be possible if we were to clump up all products and targetings in a single ad group.
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