07 Jun Automatic or manual campaigns: what they are and which is better
- Both are based on the use of keywords as a means for customers to find your product.
- The use of one or the other will depend on the needs of each salesperson, the type of product and the sales strategy they want to follow.
The use of advertising campaigns is becoming more and more essential to sell your products on Amazon in a stable and secure way. Although, many times, it is difficult to know which is the best option among all those available in the Sponsored Products section.
Faced with the question of what type of advertising campaign it is preferable to invest money in, whether in automatic or manual ones, at Nozama Solutions we are clear: in both. In the hydro model, the two types of campaigns feed back, which is why it is considered the most effective for most cases since you can use the data you collect from one campaign to profit from the other and vice versa.
On the other hand, it should be noted that the decisive factor in an Amazon campaign is the keywords, through which you will be able to reach potential customers.
Below, we explain what each type of campaign consists of and how you can benefit from them.
Automated campaigns
They are ideal for getting started with the pay-per-click (PPC) system. In this case, it is Amazon itself that is in charge of selecting the keywords that will lead customers to your product.
Once you’ve selected the inventory items you want to advertise, the platform lets you bid on the type of match, i.e. what other products or search terms you want yours to relate to:
- Close match: related words or products that would be the descriptive terms of your product, based on titles, descriptions, bullet points, etc.
- Distant coincidence: products that have to do with each other but are further away.
- Complementary products: it relates you to those products of the competition.
- Related products: it relates you to products in the same sector but that are not properly the competition. For example, if our keyword is “premium gin”, the search engine will match everything that has to do with gin, including glasses, spices or a book to make cocktails.
Depending on your strategy, you’ll need to increase your bid for one type of match or another to better position your product on the platform. You can also block the items that Amazon links you to if you’re not interested in that type of match.
Manual campaigns
In this case, it’s you as the marketer who chooses the keywords that will guide your campaign by targeting ads. To do this, do good keyword research and establish the type of segmentation that best suits your business objectives. There are three types of matching:
- Broad match: Amazon will be able to increase the reach of your keyword by using variations such as plurals, abbreviations, use of a single word (in the case of more than one keyword), change of order, or addition of terms.
- Phrase matching: This is more restrictive than the previous one and requires the keyword to appear exactly as you put it.
- Exact match: Ads will only show if the term you chose is used.
But, the most important aspect of manual campaigns is the ability to place bids on each keyword. This involves developing various strategies to achieve higher performance based on your budget.
Hybrid campaigns: the most complete option
Generally, automated campaigns are ideal for launching a new product within Amazon. This is because it is difficult to know what the behavior of buyers is going to be at first. Also, you also don’t know what search terms are used to find it or what the state of that market is.
On the other hand, manual campaigns are very useful when you know the sector very well, the competitors and when you are clear about the keywords. This way, it will be easier for you to advertise your products wherever and whenever you want.
At Nozama Solutions we think that the ideal is to combine both models, starting with an automatic campaign from which we can extract the best-performing keywords and observe how the advertised products behave. Then, you can gradually move on to the manual one, controlling the keywords as you please, investing more or less money in bidding for them and taking control of the campaign in a more complete way.
But, moving from the automatic campaign to the manual one does not mean abandoning the former, since it is also a good option to keep both active and use them simultaneously so that they feed back, thus obtaining results and yields of the keywords that can be decisive for success.