Balancing advertising budgets across multiple products isn’t easy. But as PPC costs rise and profits get harder to come by, brand operators are diving down to the SKU level to boost profitability.
Today, we’re sharing practical strategies to get more out of your advertising while juggling a range of brand goals and products.
Tight margins. Low budgets. No problem. Get powerful automations that keep RoAS where you want it. Try Trellis today.
4 Ways to Optimize Your Advertising Across Products
In the modern game of eCommerce, each product has its role to play in driving profitability. Whether it’s navigating low-cost competition or defending rankings against brands with deep advertising pockets, the following strategies will help you make sure all your campaigns are performing like they should be.
1. Use Dynamic Pricing to Optimize for Sales or Profit
Thinking about raising prices but not sure how much higher to go? With a wide range of products, you need a campaign management strategy that makes the most of every dollar. But a common mistake when dealing with multiple products and channels is to jump straight into the ads automation deep end.
First, get clear on your end goal at the portfolio level. Then consider how your pricing strategy can help you achieve it. The following tips can help:
- Maximize price for profits: With a portfolio-level profit goal, you can use a combination of dynamic and rules-based pricing to slowly raise prices until you see profits drop off.
- Test your results: What’s the pricing sweet spot for a profitable sale? Where do conversions drop off? Is portfolio-level profitability still the goal? Or has it changed?
- Revisit your budget and keywords: By maximizing overall profitability, you can stop overspending on opportunities that aren’t resulting in profitable sales and free up more room for going after competitive keywords in other campaigns.
Whether you need to secure prime rankings for a new product launch or maximize topline revenue, the key is to put systems in place that make it easy to adapt pricing as your goals change.
At Trellis, we’ve seen brands increase product-level profits to the tune of 500% using a dynamic pricing strategy alone. With tools like Trellis’ Dynamic Pricing platform, you can automatically A/B test different prices to understand how they affect sales and margins based on demand elasticity and profit sensitivity.
Find out how Boosted Commerce implemented dynamic pricing for 13% growth in sales and a 20% rise in profits across 25+ brands on Amazon.
Increase Your RoAS By 38%
These 3 Amazon pricing strategies will have your competitors scrambling to keep up.
2. Find Undervalued Keywords
With a wide range of products, Amazon’s ads dashboard can only do so much. To optimize ads and keep the conversions coming, you need to constantly adjust campaigns to include new keywords. Fortunately, there’s a wide range of tools that can do this for you.
For example, Trellis uses a combination of Amazon Auto Campaigns and daily monitoring to identify the best keyword opportunities based on your goals. The PPC advertising system automatically layers in time, trends, competition, and customer purchase behavior to maximize results across the product line.
No matter which keyword tools you’re using, the following strategies can help increase your results:
- Look for long-tail keyword opportunities: By spending on low-competition keywords, you can drive conversions across a range of keywords instead of consolidating your budget in just a few competitive targets.
- Use AI to help set the pace: With an advertising automation tool that uses AI to predict seasonality and slow periods, you can run ads aggressively when competition is low.
- Take advantage of day parting: To keep ACoS low, optimize your budgets and bids for effective placements throughout the day.
These best practices may sound straightforward, but with hundreds of keywords across dozens of products, things can get complicated fast.
If you’re already a Trellis user, the system will automatically use your historical sales data to determine your category’s weekday sales trend and automatically adjust the budget. With every adjustment, the platform continues harvesting new keywords based on a goal of either increased profitability or market share.
3. Set the Right Bid Modifiers
Sure, Amazon has its out-of-the-box modifiers, but it can still feel impossible to keep your placements where you want them. If you’re using a platform like Trellis, you can take advantage of AMC audience based modifiers to automatically adjust bids for Sponsored Product ads based on shopper behavior.
For example, if you create an AMC audience around shoppers who have added a product to cart, you can set your modifiers to ensure you're getting that click.
Here are some additional strategies to help boost search term performance:
- Set the right bidding rules: ACoS is important, but are you optimizing it for the right reasons? Create rules to stay competitive on short-tail keywords, while keeping sales and inventory levels where you want them.
- Figure out where to cut: Where is there wasted budget in your campaigns? Don’t stop at campaigns that have high clicks and low sales. Are there any keywords that have solid ACoS but low conversion rate? Are they eating up the majority of your budget?
- Discover where to grow: Dig into your search query data to find new opportunities for growth. Are there any organic listings bringing in sales? Amplify those opportunities with PPC.
Whether your goal is to successfully launch a new product on Walmart or defend an important Amazon Buy Box position ahead of peak season, the target is always changing. With the right modifiers, you can go a layer deeper with your bidding based on the audiences you create.
4. Identify Products that Attract New Customers, Repeat Sales, and High-LTV Shoppers
Not only do different categories behave differently, but two products in the same category can have very different sales patterns. When dealing with a large product catalog, it’s critical to examine product behavior at every level.
The following tactics can help you understand how each product contributes to your success:
- Build profit profiles across categories: Get insights into how much it costs to get a shopper to engage and how much they're spending at the category and individual product level so you can adjust your advertising strategies.
- Identify your gateway and halo products: Use the signals in your AMC data to understand which products are most effective in driving new-to-brand sales and which ones keep buyers coming back. If you can afford it, prioritizing rankings on halo products may open you up to new cross-selling opportunities.
- Know your Golden Ratio: Sometimes it’s worth spending more on a customer if their lifetime value is strong. Calculate your LTV:CAC ratio to determine which ads are worth the cost.
With emerging data sets, you can go beyond the total RoAS delivered by DSP to see exactly which organic listings and ad placements the customer interacted with leading up to the purchase.
Depending on your goals and strategy, you may decide to drop the price on a halo product as a loss leader to bring in new customers with high lifetime value. In Trellis, the Path-to-Purchase report helps you see multi-touch attribution and the ad campaigns that contribute most to profits so you can make the best decisions in your advertising.
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Optimize Multiple Campaigns from One Central Command Center
In the face of rising CPC costs and increased competition both on and off Amazon, long-term profitability depends on your ability to distribute tight ad budgets across products.
To increase sales and consistently find the top prices customers are willing to pay—all while keeping ACoS low—you need a powerful advertising platform that gives you product-level controls.
Trellis was purpose-built for busy brand operators looking to optimize campaigns across a wide range of products. With the ability to demystify the path to purchase and drill into the key metrics for each ad type, you’ll have everything you need for a profitable ad strategy that works.
Learn how Trellis can help you optimize multiple campaigns in a click. Book your free demo today.