You’ve spent thousands to rank at the top organically, yet the sales just aren’t there. Frustrated, you try product giveaways—same disappointing results.
Here’s the truth: organic ranking doesn’t drive sales like it used to. Ranking inflation is real. With more ads crowding the top spots, organic listings are buried below:
Sponsored Brand Placement right at the top of the search page
Sponsored Product placement right above the first Organic placements
Organic listings placements are now pushed down below ads placements
The web page now prioritizes paid placements, cutting into organic visibility and sales.
The game has changed. Organic visibility alone isn’t enough anymore.
Instead of chasing organic rankings, focus on maximizing returns with sponsored ads. But with fierce competition, how can you secure those top spots?
We created this article to help you leverage Amazon PPC to maximize your organic opportunities and reduce your wasted ad spend. We’ve also included a video for you below, so stay tuned.
So, How Can You Further Maximize Your Sponsored Ad Budget?
After many private conversations with 7, 8, and 9 figure-sellers and hearing about their unique strategies, we’ve identified two often-overlooked factors that can minimize wasteful ad spend and maximize your organic opportunities: keyword rankability and look-back periods.
Let’s break them down.
1. Keyword Rankability: Focus on the Right Keywords
Not all keywords are created equal.
Some keywords are inherently easier to rank for, for your business, because they align better with customer intent and are more relevant. We call these rankable keywords.
Rankable Keywords: These are your high-conversion keywords.
We recommend an aggressive bidding strategy for these.
By prioritizing your ads with these keywords, you can also potentially boost your organic rankings with them. We’ve observed that this usually results in sellers being able to achieve, maintain, and increase profitability for the longer term
Non-Rankable Keywords: Conversely, some keywords have low conversion rates. These shouldn’t be your focus for ranking.
Instead, you can treat them as opportunities to maintain profitability. Gradually lower your bids and aim for a break-even point.
While these keywords won’t drive significant organic traffic, you can use them to can contribute to your bottom line.
Adjusting your keyword conversion criteria based on your market conversions can help you make better decisions on your campaigns.
2. Look-Back Periods: Find Patterns in Your Data
The look-back period—your time machine to go back to previous performances to analyze your data—is critical in uncovering trends.
It allows you to compare keyword performance over a certain time frame. Tracking your keyword performance lets you compare your conversions against your market competition and see if your keywords are gold nuggets or money bleeders.
One of the biggest mistakes we see sellers make is relying on a one-size-fits-all approach to data analysis.
Short-Term Trends: A 7-day look-back period could be ideal for spotting sudden changes, like a spike in sales due to competitors running out of stock or a drop caused by a negative review.
In such scenarios, you can immediately double down on them and capture sales before the opportunity expires.Mid-Term Trends: A 30-day period could provide a broader view, helping you identify consistent patterns and assess campaign stability.
Long-Term Trends: A 90-day period could be essential for slow-moving keywords or seasonal products. This longer timeframe can reveal hidden opportunities that shorter periods might overlook.
Adjusting the look-back period based on your product and campaign goals can help you make more informed decisions on more scenarios.
Framework to Maximise Advertising Dollar with Keyword Rankability and Look-Back Period
Can you systemically minimize your wasteful ad spend and maximize your organic opportunities with them? Our answer is yes.
Here’s how:
To make sure that we are maximizing our Amazon advertising spend, we classify keywords into four main tiers that consider multiple scenarios to cover possible blindspots:
Rankable and Sudden Rankable Keywords: These keywords have high conversion rates and are highly likely to be the most profitable. You can bid on them to maximize ranking opportunities. Bidding aggressively on these keywords can give you more visibility and rank higher organically.
Rankable Keywords
Possible Criteria:
Within a 30-day lookback period,
Keywords with:
3 or more orders
20% conversions or more
Possible action
Bid Aggressively: Change maximum bid to match 40% target ACoS
Sudden Rankable Keywords
Possible Criteria:
Within a 7-day lookback period,
Keywords with:
10 or more orders
20% conversions or more
Possible action
Faster Bid Adjustments: Change bid adjustments settings with a “3 Days to Observe” setting
Non-Rankable Keywords and Sudden Non-Rankable Keywords: To maintain profits, you can bid on unrankable keywords, which are unlikely to rank and have low conversions.
Non-Rankable Keywords
Possible Criteria:
Within a 30-day lookback period,
Keywords with:
Less than 5% conversion
More than $10 spent
Possible Action:
Bid at breakeven: Change bid adjustment setting to up to 99% drop per adjustment, with the maximum bid at 20% Target ACOS
Sudden Non-Rankable Keywords
Possible Criteria:
Within a 30-day lookback period
Keywords with:
Less than 5% conversion
100 more clicks
Possible Action:
Bid at breakeven: Change bid adjustment setting to up to 99% drop per adjustment, with the maximum bid at 20% Target ACOS
Cut Un-Optimizable Traffic, Manage Zero Sales, and Cut Silent Bleeders: To reduce wasteful spending, you can pause keywords that have no sales or minimal sales at very high spending.
Cut Un-Optimizable Traffic
Possible Criteria:
Minimum bid
More than 40% ACOS
Less than 10% conversion
20 or more clicks
Possible Action:
Pause keyword
Uncover Opportunities keywords: These are keywords with no clicks. You can increase bids to test their performance further.
Uncover Opportunities:
Possible Criteria:
Within a 45-day lookback period
Zero clicks
Possible Action:
Inch-up bids every 7 days
Knowing where your keywords fall into these four categories will help you:
Maximise sales and ranking opportunities
Maintain profitability with breakeven keywords/campaigns
Stop wasteful bleeders by shutting off keywords/campaigns that will most likely continue only to drain your ad budget.
Manually monitoring, analyzing, and changing settings will be very time-consuming and prone to errors.
Not to mention mind-numbing.
But you don’t have to.
You can set the process up once in Scale Insights and let automation do all the heavy lifting for you.
Automate Amazon PPC With Scale Insights
Now, you can set up and automate your rankable keywords with just one dashboard- only with Scale Insights!
Set it up once, and you will no longer need to:
Manually check which keywords/campaigns fulfill the criteria
Manually change the bids or settings for each of the keywords/campaigns one by one
Stay awake when these automations are executed
Steps to Set Up "Rankable Keywords" in Scale Insights:
Navigate to the "Automation" tab and click "Create Rule."
Name your rule and set the evaluation/look-back period.
Configure your automation settings: keyword criteria (e.g., >=3 Orders, >=20% Conversion), action (e.g., Optimize Target ACOS), target ACOS (e.g., 40%), and bid limits.
Click "Create."
Once created, you can assign the rule to all the ad groups you want to optimize.
It’s like having your robot that can do exactly what you want, with no human errors and no panic attacks.
Voila! Set it up once and automate it beyond just one keyword/campaign.
With Scale Insights, you can streamline your process and let automation do the heavy lifting.
Set your parameters just once—whether it’s a 7-day observation period or a 45-day data analysis—and let Scale Insights handle the rest. No more manual adjustments or constant monitoring.
Massively minimize wasted ad spend and maximize opportunities that would otherwise slip from your hands due to the time and effort necessary in manual operations.
Don’t wait—take control of your PPC strategy with Scale Insights today!