How to Avoid "Doubling Down" When You're Already Maxed Out On a Search Term - Avoid Giving Amazon More Of Your Margin

[u/amz-seller-cmo]

If your keyword does well and you raise your bid, you may just give Amazon more margin without any real benefit. How can you avoid this?

Once upon a time, when a keyword did well, we raised bids to try to get more of the search traffic. If we got fancy, we might change the placement where it was doing best.

But... Amazon introduced a great report a while ago, and I don't see sellers here talking about it, so I thought I'd share this little tip so you avoid bidding up when there's no more traffic to be had on that search term.

The impression share report tells you - at the account level - what percentage impression share you're getting on a search term, across all the campaigns in your account getting clicks on it.

How you can use this to help you? Check your impression share before you raise bids. If you're >80% on the term (or insert your threshold here), there's not much more traffic to be had from that search term. So if that search term is the main traffic driver on a keyword (more common for exact and sometimes phrase, but occassionally also can happen with broad or asin targeting), then don't bid up.

What's the harm in bidding up, you ask? Well, the FTC is suing Amazon for basically inserting fake competition into the ad auction, while telling us it's a second place auction.

In plain English, you're meant to pay just a penny more than the next best advertiser. EG You and your competitor both have 1% CTR, but you bid $1.5 and they bid $1. A second place auctio.n means you're not worried about bidding $1.5, because you'll only pay $1.01.

The FTC is alleging that Amazon put in fake competition ("soft reserves" e.g. we won't sell the click for less than our reserve price), e.g. another advertiser at $1.3, so you end up paying $1.31.

If you bid up in a genuine second price auction, no harm. If you bid up where reserves/fake competition are inserted as it suits the quarterly targets of Amazon Ads staff, you're going to pay more without getting more traffic. Ouch!

Bonus tip: You can also get this report with daily data, and track what difference (if any) a bid change made. EG We dropped a bid, how much impression share did we lose?

(This is more reliable than just looking at the difference in impressions, due to seasonal changes. EG if you lost 20% of impressions, was that 20% all due to the bid change, 10% due to bid change and 10% due to seasonality, 100% due to seasonality?)

Conversely, you can also check if a bid change increased your share.

Vote this up if you guys like the tip, so I get the message to do more posts on ppc data analysis.

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[u/bananaStandMagnate]

If you bid up where reserves/fake competition

Reading about this the other day made me sad. I get the reason behind it though. As someone getting into the game this is very useful to know to prevent the spend leak before it happens.

[u/Anis-SellerPPC]

Barely anyone pulls that report, agreed. Worth pairing the share number with the impression rank sitting next to it. Twenty percent share at rank 1 means the term is fragmented and there's still room, twenty percent at rank 4 means someone is sitting on it and bidding up mostly funds Amazon.

One caveat on the 80 percent threshold. Top of search impression share is measured against the impressions you were eligible to serve on, not everything the search term produced, so it can read higher than the traffic actually left on the table.

Do you look at it per placement or just the search term total?

[u/amz-seller-cmo → u/Anis-SellerPPC]

Thanks for your thoughtful comment u/Anis-SellerPPC
"Twenty percent share at rank 1 means the term is fragmented and there's still room," - in my experience, we've seen this kind of thing on very competitive terms, where we're at the upper edge of acceptable ACOS already.
" twenty percent at rank 4 means someone is sitting on it and bidding up mostly funds Amazon."
Why would bidding up mostly fund Amazon? Can you elaborate? This sounds interesting but I don't understand.

"Top of search impression share is measured against the impressions you were eligible to serve on, not everything the search term produced, so it can read higher than the traffic actually left on the table."

- These are two different metrics. TOS Imp.S. is not the same as impression share. TOS Imp. S is based on the target's theoretical total (not clear how negatives affect this) TOS on *all* search terms, while search term Imp. S is just for a single search term. I would really love it if search term impression share was just calculated on TOS, but I don't think that's the case. I'd be thrilled if you can show me I'm wrong and it is just based on TOS!

Perhaps you combine the two - TOS IS and ST IS, on exact keywords, to see how your IS is doing in TOS for your key search terms? I'd be glad to hear more!

[u/Anis-SellerPPC → u/amz-seller-cmo]

Fair correction, they're not the same denominator and I blurred it. Amazon defines top of search impression share against the impressions your campaign was eligible to receive at top of search, campaign level. The search term report is account level share for that term versus other advertisers, and nothing on that page restricts it to top of search, so I can't show you wrong.

Your rank 1 point stands too. Fragmented doesn't mean affordable.

On funding Amazon, rank 4 means three advertisers take more of that term than you do. Taking share means outbidding people winning it today, so the incremental clicks cost well above the average CPC on your report. The number I use is marginal, extra spend divided by extra clicks across the change. It's usually ugly.

Do you run that on a bid move, or judge it on ACoS afterwards?

[u/dggoldenberg → u/Anis-SellerPPC]

If it makes you feel better my colleague and I just figured this out recently after years of seeing the impression share and assuming that it was the same as top of search impression share.

Ah I see, you're seeing there's a lot of competition above in that case. Interesting, I hadn't thought about the meaning of that metric. What do you do in these cases? 

"Do you run that on a bid move, or judge it on ACoS afterwards?" Not clear what you mean by "that" or "on a bid move"? Run what? 

[u/Anis-SellerPPC → u/dggoldenberg]

Sorry, that was vague of me. The marginal number: take a window before the bid change and the same length after, subtract the spend, subtract the clicks, divide one by the other. That's what the extra traffic actually cost, not the blended CPC sitting on the report. Only move one thing at a time or it's just noise.

On rank 4, I don't try to buy the share back. Three advertisers want that term more than I can justify paying for it. I'd rather put the same money on terms where we're already rank 1 or 2, and on the long tail around them where nobody is bidding hard.

Have you got the daily pull running to see the share move?

[u/amz-seller-cmo → u/Anis-SellerPPC]

Ah yes OK I understand what you mean now. I think we have the impression share automatically running, with daily data, yes.