Analyze & improve
Is your campaign not performing as hoped? The step-by-step plan below helps you analyze and improve your campaigns.
Don't change your campaigns too quickly
It's important that a campaign gets enough time before you start improving it. Has your campaign run for at least two weeks, or generated about 80 to 100 clicks per item or keyword? Only then will you have collected enough data to implement your first improvements.
5 tips before you start
Once you start improving your campaign(s), the following tips are helpful to remember.
- Improve your relevance
The position of your advertisement in the search results depends on multiple factors, such as your item's title, category, brand, item description, and other item characteristics. Make sure this information aligns with the keywords you use for your advertisement. - Prevent useless impressions with negative keywords
Improve your campaign by refining keywords, even in automatic campaigns. The algorithm searches for the most relevant keywords, but you can enter negative keywords yourself. These are keywords you don't want to be found for, which prevents useless impressions and improves your results. - Split your campaign based on performance
With ad groups, you can view and analyze results per item and placement separately. This provides an overview and makes it possible to activate or deactivate placement types without having to set up new campaigns. - Use reports
Measuring is knowing. Use reports to gain insight into the performance of your items, keywords, and categories. For example, analyze how your campaign performs on different devices. Are your ads successful on mobile? Then increase your bids for them. Or exclude devices where your campaign performs less well. - Pay attention to campaigns that often reach the daily limit
In combination with a good, low ACoS, you can increase the daily limit to ensure your advertisement remains visible all day. Calculate your ideal ACoS with our handy ACoS calculator.
Improve your campaign step by step
Click on the campaign
Take a first look at the campaign's performance. What stands out immediately? Are there items that perform poorly, or exceptionally well? Is the ACoS for a certain placement type higher than your target?
Analyze your items
Items with a (too) high ACoS may not be successful. This can be related to the content about the item, the price, or the ratio to the cost per click (CPC) to be paid. What can you do about this?
Automatic campaign?
- Lower the target ACoS and thus the costs. Note: this will lead to fewer impressions and clicks.
- Exclude underperforming items, so you have more budget available for better-performing items.
Manual campaign?
- Lower the bid for keywords with a (too) high ACoS. Use the "average winning bid" feature to determine your ideal bid.
- Are you bidding below this average winning bid? Then it's unlikely you'll win the auction, but you will keep costs better under control.
- Are you bidding higher than this average winning bid? Then try to lower your own bid in small steps to see if you maintain similar performance at lower costs.
Good to know
You can also divide items into ad groups to monitor performance better. Do you have items in your manual campaign with different results? Place the well-performing item in a new ad group within the same campaign. This way, you can lower the bid for the less successful items and increase the bid for the well-performing item to achieve better results.
Improve your keywords
Exclude keywords that cause a (too) high ACoS. Manual campaign: if you notice that a keyword has a high ACoS but is relevant to your item? Then first try to lower the bid for a better ACoS. If that doesn't work either? Then turn it off.
Note: certain keywords are more expensive to advertise on than others. This can increase your campaign costs. So also pay attention to the impressions and clicks of your automatic keywords.
Tip
Keep monitoring trends regularly. As soon as you exclude campaigns, items, and/or keywords, you give room to competitors.
Check categories
Exclude categories that cause a (too) high ACoS or where you don't want to be visible. Manual campaign? Then you can also lower your bids for categories with too high an ACoS.
If your goal is to improve your ACoS and/or increase your return, then focus on the best-performing categories.
Analyze item pages
Are the results of the item page not as good as hoped?
- Manual campaign: Consider lowering your bid for this placement and wait a few days before analyzing again.
- Automatic campaign: Consider creating a separate manual campaign for this placement type, the item detail page, to set bids yourself.
Boost your campaign
Want to quickly boost your advertising campaign? The tips below will help you.
Automatic campaign
- Increase your daily limit and target ACoS for more visibility and conversions
- Consider a manual campaign for more control over your spending
Manual campaign
- Increase your bid for more visibility and conversions
- Increase your daily limit to remain visible longer
Tip from another partner
“Try it step by step. Sometimes it feels like a lot, even too much, to get everything perfectly in order. But it doesn't have to be perfect. The more you work on it, the better it gets. Like with everything, really. Patience is a virtue!”
Tom Maddelein, Marketplace Manager at Maxxtools