The complete guide to promoting your products with sponsored products ads – Part 3
So you have started running sponsored product ads campaigns – here is what you need to do now.
In this part we will talk about:
8. How does Mabaya decide what products to promote where? Is it all about the money?
9. How do I determine what is a good ROAS?
10. Can and should I influence where my ads appear?
11. When will I see results?
12. What should I do if I get low impressions?
13. What should I do if I get bad ROAS?
8. How does Mabaya decide what products to promote where? Is it all about the money?
Not really. Every time a shopper enters a search result page, a product page or a category page in the eCommerce site, our ad server examines what sponsored ad to present.
Our algorithm takes into consideration different factors such as relevancy, product price, page context and keywords, user purchase history and of course the current campaigns in the system and the offered bid.
In other words – You can offer the highest bid for your product and still not get any impressions in a certain category page if our algorithm doesn’t find it relevant. Make sure you are using the right description and keywords in your product page.
9. How do I determine what is a good ROAS?
That’s is really up to you – It depends on the purpose of the campaign and it should be determined in advance before you start promoting your products.
If the purpose is increasing profit, then the ROAS will be determined by the margin of the product. For example if the product price is 250 euros and it costs you 150 euros, you can set your target ROAS to 500%.
In this case if you spend 100 euros on sponsored products ads you expect to sell 2 items and gain a profit of 100 euros. In this example any ROAS that is higher than 250% is profitable.
If your goal is not only increasing immediate profit but also promoting a new product in order to create awareness and improve its organic visibility, you can compromise on lower ROAS for the short term for the benefit of long-term profit.
ROAS vs. ACOS
ROAS presents the generated revenues divided by the campaign cost – For example if the campaign costs 100 Euros and generates sales of 500 Euros, the ROAS is 500%. Every Euro generated 5 Euros in sales.
ACoS presents the percentage of the revenues that was spent on the campaign. Meaning the cost of the campaign divided by the revenues it generated. if the campaign costs 100 Euros and generates sales of 500 Euros, the ACoS is 20%, Meaning that 20% of our revenues were spent on this campaign.
10. Can and should I influence where my ads appear?
You can choose automatic targeting or manual, in this case you can hand pick the target audience for your campaign.
In general we suggest to use the automatic targeting as this option empowers our smart ad server to optimize your campaign and try to get relevant visitors to your product page from various places in the site.
The decision is up to you and you can always change it on the go.
You can also choose negative keywords or URL’s that you don’t want your products to be promoted in. For example if you don’t want your ads to run on certain product pages you can exclude their URL’s from your campaign. If you indicate certain negative keywords than your ads won’t be displayed in pages that are connected to these words.
Here are another 2 examples for how to use negative keywords:
- Let say that you are selling large screen televisions. You don’t want shoppers who are looking for a small screen TV to see and click your ads. You can do it by choosing negative keywords such as 39’’ 30’’ etc.
- Let say that you are selling iphone covers – If you see that your ad appears when people are searching for Iphones you should exclude the keyword “iphone”.
11. When will I see results?
Right after you start running the campaign you can enter the dashboard or the report tab and learn what is going on in real time.
We recommend to be patient and let the campaign run for at least 5 days before jumping into any conclusions.
It can take time for a new campaign to take off and get enough impressions and coversions and usually it also takes time for new campaigns to reach a sustainable profitable ROAS.
Don’t rush to turn off a campaign or adjust CPC and budget before you’ve given it sufficient time to prove itself.
12. What should I do if I get low impressions?
If your campaign is getting low impressions there are usually 3 main possible reasons: (1) your bid is too low, (2) the competition in your product category is very high or (3) the product is not that popular and there are not that many shoppers searching for it.
We suggest that you check that your bids are competitive and are at least 10% higher than the average winning bid (which you can see in the campaign admin).
Also make sure that your products descriptions are relevant to the categories that your are targeting and that the titles are compatible.
Another suggestions is to try to promote as many products as possible in the category. By doing that you can increase the Probability that one of your products will be chosen to appear in the promoted products places.
13. What should I do if I get bad ROAS?
If your campaign is getting low ROAS there can be several possible reasons: (1) The competition in the category is very intense and the bid prices are high (2) The product doesn’t deliver meaning that it doesn’t get enough purchases – it can be a matter of price, reviews, features, branding etc.
In this case we suggest to check the competing products in the category and see if your products are competitive (price, features, reviews etc).
If there is nothing you can do to change any of these factors we suggest you exclude these products from your campaign or exclude keywords and URL’s that display these product’s ads.
You will usually get better results when promoting products that have lower competition or when your product has sustainable advantages on the competitors (great ranking, reviews, special features or great value for money).
That’s it!
You are now qualified to start running Sponsored Products ads!
If you think that we have forgotten something or if you have great tips or advice you would like to share with us and with the other sellers please let us know: Dan@Mabaya.com.
If you want to keep it to yourself we would totally understand 🙂
Good luck!
The Mabaya team.
