PPC Farm’s Proven Farming Process Explained (How We Make Tons of Money With Amazon Ads)
Our farming strategy is based on two main goals:
1) Find out which search terms actually convert.
2) Figure out how much to bid on those terms.
Sounds simple enough, right?
That’s exactly the beauty of it! We believe this back-to-basics approach is truly the best and most effective way to run any PPC campaign.
While it’s not exactly revolutionary, we have found that most systems and software out there don’t actually optimize towards these goals.
Why Our Process Is the Best
How do we know our process is actually the best? Well…
We had the unfortunate experience of trying out tons of different software and systems and lighting tons of money on fire before we finally figured things out.
The reason we believe this is the only viable strategy is because it’s impossible to predict which keywords are actually going to convert. Or in other words, there’s no way to predict what your customers are actually going to be typing into the search bar.
However, that doesn’t stop people from trying to look into a crystal ball and make changes to their ad campaigns with no real rhyme or reason based on these hazy predictions.
In a nutshell, our farming process works like this:
We generate a huge list of highly relevant keywords that we first put into broad campaigns for a certain period of time (2-3 weeks usually). Then, we look at the data from those campaigns to identify high-performing search terms which we move into exact campaigns to make sure those bids are as efficient as possible.
That’s basically how it works. Now, lets get into a little more detail…
Farming Process Overview
Our farming process doesn’t just operate in a vacuum.
The whole point of this process is to optimize for the long-term growth of the product and the brand.
We believe that PPC is the catalyst that starts the flywheel that propels a product’s growth.
In other words…
While you can organically grow a product on Amazon, PPC acts like a spark to get things moving much faster. When your campaigns are working well not only are you increasing your revenue you’re also optimizing your brand for long-term stable growth.
Alrighty, let’s break it down. Our farming process has 6 major steps.
Step 1: Till the Soil
This is the foundation of everything. We dig down deep in order to understand your goals for your business and products. This allows us to establish our initial campaigns so that we can farm effectively.
Step 2: Plant Seeds
Human ingenuity drives keyword research and optimization to ensure nothing is overlooked. Our team of PPC experts carefully analyzes your products and target audience to select the best possible “seed” keywords, categories, and competitors to include in campaigns.
Step 3: Farm
Just like any good farmer, we monitor our crops each day. Our proprietary A.I. looks at your data to figure out which of those “seeds” actually convert so we can make sure we’re bidding on the right SERPs. For example, you might think that the keyword “coffee stirrer” will drive a ton of sales but actually “swizzle stick” converts a lot better for your specific product.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Step 4: Weed
Next, we make room for the winners by eliminating the losers. We weed out (make negative) any keywords that aren’t making money and modify bids accordingly.
Step 5: Harvest
Our software then looks at over 32 potential data points to determine which keywords are profitable and will help you reach your goals. We move these keywords into their own exact campaigns for easy observation. Now it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Step 6: Fertilize and Prune
Our A.I. will then precisely adjust each bid in order to ensure your campaigns remain profitable. Things change over time. So, we continue to keep an eye on your campaigns and make adjustments as the seasons change or the market fluctuates.
Finally we lather, rinse and repeat for all of your ASINs to keep growing those dollars.
This framework allows us to work systematically using real data to identity high-performing keywords while also allowing for the creativity that it takes to truly understand the ecosystem of keywords around a specific product.
FAQs About Our Farming Process
Here are some common questions we get about our farming process.
Q: Is the process the same for every product?
A: Not exactly. The beauty of this process is that we are able to full customize the strategy to the needs and goals of the product or business. For example, if you’ve got tight margins on a product or really need to lower your ACoS yesterday then we can set up our farming campaigns to align with those goals.
Q: How do you guys organize your campaigns?
A: Each of our campaigns plays a part in our farming process and theory. We’ve found that having these 6 campaigns for each ASIN makes things easy to manage and to optimize.
Q: How do you decide exactly what to bid?
A: This part of the process can get pretty complex and this is where the software comes in to do a lot of the heavy lifting. To put it simply the software is going to look at a bunch of different scenarios, timelines and data points for your product and specific keywords in order to figure out which scenario is the most relevant and then it will calculate what the bid should be based on that. For example, while it might be hard for a human to answer questions like these…
- What has your ACoS been for the past 30 days?
- How about 90 days?
- Or the lifetime of the product?
- What’s the current CPC?
- How many times has this keyword converted in the past year?
- Should you go for up and down bids or down only?
- How much did you bid last time, again?
Our software can do it in his sleep.
Q: Can you show me an example of what a farming campaign looks like?
A: Here ya go!
Q: How do you treat products in different stages of the product lifecycle?
A: We do believe in the value of the farming process throughout the product lifecycle. We think there are always more keywords to find and so the process is ongoing and cyclical. At the end of the day the whole point of this process is for improving organic rank and eventually reducing your reliance on ads. So our goal is to really find all of the terms that are going to get those organic sales. That being said though, the process is totally customizable based on whatever specific goals you have for your product.
What do you think about this process?
Did anything in this article spark your curiosity or bring up a question? Comment below or email us at Howdy@PPCFarm.com. We love talking about PPC!
