How BidX helps scale advertising campaigns to multiple countries

July 30, 2021

In 2015, Max Hofmann was a university student and an Amazon seller. He managed advertising for his company Easy Principles, a baby safety equipment company, that he helped grow to seven figures in revenue. But he found that he spent a lot of time manually optimizing bids for his sponsored ads campaigns. Hofmann began searching for a software that would automate those tasks. Eventually, he decided to create the solution himself. With the help of three fellow students, Hofmann launched BidX.

Initially, BidX’s technology was exclusively rule-based. In mid-2018, the tool became a self-learning system that recognized which adjustments needed to be made to make Amazon Advertising sponsored ads campaigns more successful. Today, the BidX tool sets optimization standards, offers continuous improvements to its algorithms, and automates managing sponsored ads to achieve sellers' and vendors' goals—while running campaigns in different countries.

"Our goal is to make it easy for sellers, vendors, and brands to manage Amazon Advertising campaigns in all countries where they sell products," says Hofmann. "Our integration with the Amazon Advertising API enables us to do so."

Based in Darmstadt, Germany, BidX currently employs over 30 people and manages thousands of campaigns for brands in 42 countries. Hofmann, Managing Director and Co-founder of BidX, shares how his company helps advertisers manage their Amazon Advertising campaigns in multiple regions.

headshot of Max Hofmann, Managing Director and Co-founder of BidX

Max Hofmann, Managing Director and Co-founder of BidX

Tell us about BidX’s approach to helping clients advertise in multiple countries and how you leverage API integrations to build these types of campaigns.

Integrations like the Amazon Advertising API localization feature helps our customers create ad campaigns in different countries. The Amazon Advertising API localization feature enables advertisers to transfer a campaign from one country to another with just a few clicks. It translates keywords, applies bid settings, finds equivalent products, and converts currency—saving advertisers time and effort.

What’s your recommendation for an advertiser who is getting started with ad campaigns across multiple countries?

We recommend that brands who sell products in multiple locales start by creating ad campaigns in their most relevant country. Once the campaigns are set up in one country, they can transfer them to others with a one-click setup and the localization feature. Since we generally advise advertisers to set up as detailed campaigns as possible and to create separate campaigns for different match types, the localization feature will save advertisers a lot of time. BidX will then transfer search terms as keywords in campaigns with the other match types, in order to control them individually with their own bids and help make them more profitable.

Are there general rules that you follow when you set up campaigns for your clients?

We recommend creating a separate campaign for each ad group and ASIN. This means that we would create four campaigns—one automatic and three manual (product targeting, broad, and exact keyword targeting)—for each product. Having each match type in its own campaign allows you to optimize the budget so, for example, if broad keywords are performing below expectation they will not use the budget of all other match types which are higher performing in a short period of time.

Furthermore, it is advantageous to test one country first and apply the learnings to new locales accordingly. You should keep in mind that your keyword performance may differ depending on the country. A keyword that generates a lot of conversions in one country may not perform well in another, despite being translated correctly. So analyze your campaigns on all countries regularly, or use BidX for that.

In addition, when you start in a new country or with a new product, we recommend boosting advertising at the beginning, to help generate awareness and clicks.

What are three tips for running Amazon Advertising campaigns that you want the reader to walk away with?

  1. Define goals
  2. Before you begin to advertise, think about the goals you would like to achieve, and then start with the appropriate advertising formats and metrics to measure success. If you want to achieve a high reach with a new product, for example, then advertising cost of sales (ACOS) or return on ad spend (ROAS), which measures profitability, is not as important as impression share and number of clicks. You should also calculate the point at which you’re profitable with your advertising, so that you know at which values you make a profit or loss.

  3. Set up campaigns according to goals
  4. Set up your campaigns according to your strategy and goals. If you group your most important, most performant keywords in one campaign, you can better optimize them for a target value than if they are in a common campaign with several generic keywords. For example, we recommend creating a separate campaign for branded keywords to protect your brand. These keywords usually have a low ACOS and a good conversion rate. If they are mixed in with other keywords in a common campaign, this could skew the campaign’s overall performance.

  5. Check keyword performance regularly
  6. The detailed setup of campaigns and using one match type per ad group or campaign has advantages—besides planning your budget, you can more easily read the performance of the campaigns. Check them regularly and transfer well-performing keywords from auto and broad campaigns as positive keywords to the corresponding manual campaigns, and less-performant as negative keywords to the corresponding manual campaigns, to be able to control them with their own bids and to be displayed more profitably. An advantage of BidX is that we automate this process.

    We recommend that you test advertising in all the countries where you sell products. Currently you can transfer one existing campaign to a new country with BidX and the localization feature, but in the coming months, we’ll make it possible to do so for multiple campaigns at once through "Multi Select”. This means that advertisers can transfer multiple campaigns to different countries in a few clicks, helping you to advertise where you sell.

The Localization APIs that power the BidX localization feature are available for integration by any Amazon Advertising integration partner.

The multi-marketplace campaign creation feature is also available in the
Amazon Advertising Console. This features lets you launch campaigns in multiple countries with the same effort as it takes to launch a campaign in one country. You can learn how to use the feature here.