Best practice guide to campaign recommendations
A step by step guide exploring how recommendations can help improve your advertising campaigns.
Here are the themes we’ll cover in this guide
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 5
Introduction
Let’s get started with the basics—what are campaign recommendations, exactly?
What are campaign recommendations?
Campaign recommendations are generated to help improve the performance of your sponsored ads campaigns.
They can provide you with ideas for new campaigns, or adjustments to your existing campaigns.
The best thing about these recommendations is they can be edited to suit your needs.
Plus, they're super simple to implement and can be applied in one simple click, per ad product.
Where are recommendations delivered?
To provide you with a quality and secure experience, we deliver campaign recommendations directly to your advertising account in the campaign manager. By clicking on the bell notification, you will land on the notification feed, where each recommendation is listed as a ‘Quick Task’. An example is shown below.
Each recommendation is tailored to a specific ad product: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display. The recommendation will either be to create a new campaign with products that are not currently advertised, or to improve existing campaigns by adding new products to the campaign, or updating the bid, targeting or budget strategy. Within the notification feed, you have the opportunity to view all your recommendations across multiple campaigns, in one go.
How to access your recommendations
Your recommendations live within your advertising account—here's how to access them.
Are recommendations new?
Prior to the availability of campaign recommendations within your advertising account, recommendations were only delivered to you through emails and spreadsheet attachments, accompanied by instructions on how to interpret the file and then upload to your account.
Now, we have added this information to be shown directly within your account, too.
This will significantly help improve your experience of applying recommendations, by removing the manual handling required via a spreadsheet, and instead applying recommendations with just one click.
We continually review, update and grow our recommendations, to ensure they're always helping you succeed with advertising, and helping you reach your goals.
Accessing your recommendations
Once recommendations are generated and available, you will receive a notification on the bell icon on the top right hand corner of your advertising account to tell you recommendations are available.
Click the link in the notification to view your recommendations.
In addition to the notification on the bell icon, you may receive an email. This email will state the availability of recommendations for your review.
Click the link in the email to log into your Amazon Ads account and view your recommendations.
Once you're on the recommendation page, you can review, edit and apply recommendations as you see fit.
What to expect from campaign recommendations
You’ve read through your recommendations, but where do they come from, and how long are they around for?
How are campaign recommendations created?
Amazon Ads generates campaign recommendations based on the type of advertising campaign you are running, and the products within it.
We use machine learning and advanced analytics to continuously refine our campaign recommendations to help improve performance of campaigns.
We determine what the most relevant search terms, bidding and budget recommendations are for your brand, to help improve the performance of your campaigns.
Recommendations will expire 14 days after they have been generated. You will be able to see the expiry date of your recommendation at the top of the page.
Recommendations support Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display.
How to apply campaign recommendations
It’s time—here’s how to apply the recommendations. It’s easy!
How do I apply campaign recommendations?
Once you are on the recommendation page, you will be able to view all your recommendations across different advertising products and recommendation types, within the 'Quick tasks' tab.
Here, you have the ability to edit individual line items, apply your recommendations by recommendation type, or across all recommendations at once.
How do I apply campaign recommendations?
Expanding each recommendation card will display the details of recommendations within a table.
All recommendations will have been pre-selected for you.
If you would like to reject a recommendation, you have the option to de-select individual rows, de-select the entire page or the entire table.
Step by step: applying recommendations
1. Review
Review the recommendations found within the quick task tab.
2. Edit
Whilst we feel these recommendations are best for your campaigns, you are able to edit any recommendation values as you see fit.
3. Selecting
Expand each card to review the recommendation in its entirety. Deselect any part of the recommendation that you do not want to apply.
4. Apply
Once satisfied with your recommendation, click ‘Apply recommendation’ to either launch the new campaign or make the suggested changes to an existing campaign.
I’ve applied my recommendations – what’s next?
Once the campaign recommendations have been applied to your account, the updated values will be reflected within your campaigns, on the campaign manager.
We recommend that you continuously monitor the performance of your campaigns, evaluate against your business goals and make adjustments as you see fit.
You should review your campaign performance often, and allow recommendations to run for at least 2 weeks. We recommend that you continuously monitor the performance of your campaigns, evaluate against your business goals and make any adjustments as you see fit.
What's next?
Tips on how to help execute a successful advertising campaign.
Top tips to help drive ad sales
Now you know how to view and apply your campaign recommendations, make sure your campaigns are set up for success, right from the start.
Here's some tips.
1. Create and select strong products for your campaigns
Try to create engaging and inspiring product detail pages. This can help customers understand your key product differentiators, and help drive sales.
2. Increase your budget for higher traffic
When your daily budget runs out, your ads are paused until the next day. Set a daily budget that enables your campaigns to run for longer. This way, you won’t miss out on potential sales.
3. Set your bidding strategy to dynamic bids – up and down
Setting this flexible bidding strategy helps increase impressions, clicks and sales opportunities by focusing your bids on opportunities more likely to convert to a sale, while preventing you spending budget on clicks that are less likely to convert to a sale.
4. Update your keyword strategy to drive targeted traffic
Monitor your campaigns for high-performing keywords and use exact and phrase match types during the event. This can help drive more targeted traffic to your ads, helping to increase your sales.
Ready to get started?
Go to advertising.amazon.com to register, or for more information about our solutions.
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Best practice guide to campaign recommendations