How to find wasted ad spend in your Amazon PPC

Here’s a way for you to pocket additional $100s or $1000s more per month in your Amazon biz.

It’ll cover holiday shopping this year.

How about that? 😉

It’s through the art of finding (and then cutting!) wasted ad spend.

If you’re running Amazon PPC ads, this is a “must do” on a biweekly basis.

I’ve seen brands that pocketed an additional $10k per month using the method I’m about to describe. How much you can save depends on how much you spend on ads. But, everyone can save something. This will be a tactical walkthrough.

Here’s how to do it in 10 steps:

(1) From Seller Central, go to “Advertising”

(2) On the left-hand sidebar, go to “Measurement & Reporting” and then click “Sponsored ads reports”

(3) Click “Create report”

(4) The settings for this report should be: Report category = “Sponsored Products”, Report Type = “Search Term”, Time Unit = “Summary”, Report Period: use the calendar to go as far back as possible. Amazon will allow us to go 60 days back (after which this data is gone, which is why it’s important to do this exercise at regular intervals). You can keep the “Reporting settings” as they are.

(5) Click “Run report” in the upper right-hand corner.

(6) It will take a moment for the report to generate. Download it once completed.

(7) Open the spreadsheet in your program of choice.

(8) With the document open, turn on filters. We’re going to be filtering by the first row (with Start Date, End Date, Portfolio name, etc.).

(9) With filters on, filter Column O (“7 Day Total Sales”) to include ONLY items showing $0.00. This way, we’re only showing Amazon PPC terms that made no sales for the time period this report represents.

(10) Sort column N (“Spend”) by Descending (i.e. from largest to smallest).

And there you go!

We now have a document with all of the ad terms that we spent money on, but that didn’t actually produce any sales.

The “Spend” column sums up to $100s or $1000s of dollars for most sellers.

It’s scary to see how much ad spend is being lit on fire.

But, like anything, there’s nuance here:

– nuance #1: ‘wasted’ ad spend is like body fat. Some body fat is normal and necessary for proper functioning. For example, it’s normal for some wasted ad spend to occur if you’re experimenting with new terms or ad types. Campaigns like Automatics tend to have more wasted ad spend. “Broad” match types tend to have more wasted spend than “Exact” match.

– nuance #2: what if a term has just 1-2 clicks and that ad spend was wasted? With only 1-2 clicks, it’s too early to turn that term off because it might work in the future. The time to turn off terms is when it’s very statistically unlikely that the term will ever convert into a sale. For example: your product converts at 33%. But, this 1 ad term has got 30 clicks and no sales (where normally it should have ~10 sales). It’s time to turn it off.

Do you want this exercise done for you for free?

We’ll gladly do it for you, and indicate how much cash is currently being lost to wasted ad spend every month. Book a time here for an expert to look through the account and get you that number: