Tactics Introduction

 

Tactics can be used to protect your brand and/or target competitors. They let you be more aggressive or blacklist specific segments

For each strategy, the algorithm automatically collects keywords and products. Then it puts them in different campaigns. It starts its optimization if it is an ACOS optimization strategy.

A tactic is a sub-strategy associated with a segment. A tactic either force the algorithm to bid on a segment or forbid the algorithm to bid on it!

For recommendations on how to create a standard strategy (without any tactic), please read this article. Here is an article to help you understand the tactic structure.

 

How to create a tactic

 
You can create tactics in sponsored brand strategies.

Let’s start with the branded traffic. Go to Strategies > click on one of your Strategies and click on “Add a tactic”.

When you create a tactic, you need to select or create a segment. For more details about segments and how to split your traffic, see What is a segment.

You can choose between two types of tactics :

1. Product & keyword targeting when you want to change the intensity to which the algorithm bids on specific terms or ASIN. The higher the intensity, the higher the algorithm bids!

2. Blacklist: when you want to forbid the algorithm to bid on specific terms or ASIN

On Amazon, blacklist keywords and products are known as negative

Once you created the tactic, you can update its segment by clicking on the pencil on the right of the tactic. There you can add keywords and ASINs to the segment so that they will be used in the tactic.

For products: Write each ASIN on a new line

For keywords: Write each keyword on a new line

Keep in mind to click on Add to update the segment
 

Adjust the level of intensity

 
For a given group of products, the PPC Logic technology offers the opportunity to configure the investment by the source of traffic. Let’s say you want to protect your brand “GoldTeeth” for the Kid’s toothpaste items. You currently have a standard strategy for the Kid’s toothpaste products. Its ACOS target is 5%.

You will add a Branded traffic tactic associated with a “High” intensity. You are asking the PPC Logic technology to go after more expensive sales for the traffic related to your brand name and your product pages. It means it will be more expensive for your competitors to get their ads displayed under your brand name or on your product pages.

What you’ve done here is break down the traffic of the Kids toothpaste items between branded traffic and non-branded traffic (generic search terms, competitors’ brands, and product pages). Your ACOS target is more aggressive on branded traffic, which means you are protecting your brand from competitors. You are increasing your odds of being displayed when a customer searches for your brand or browses your product pages.

If you were trying to go after new customers (i.e. people who did not search for your brand nor did not browse your product pages), you could have kept the same structure but your intensity would have been set at “Low” and you should have set a more aggressive ACOS target.

The modifiers applied to the bids predicted by the algorithm are the following :

Intensity level :

• Low : 0,25
• Medium-Low : 0,5
• Neutral : 1
• Medium-High : 1,5
• High : 2

 

Investment re-adjstment

 
By activating this feature, you will instruct our algorithm to display your ASINs only on the first pages (placement parameter) of the search terms touched by the KWs contained in the tactics.

Here is what will happen in practice:
When a potential sponsored sale is detected by our prediction tool, ASINs will be pushed to the front page only or not at all depending on the ACOS target and the competition.

Quick example

Let’s say you created a product & keyword targeting tactic with a segment named “My competitors” in which you wrote the keywords you think your competitors use. You set the intensity to super high. PPC Logic will bid on all the keywords in “My competitors” with high cost-per-click (CPC).

Beware

The algorithm might still bid on a segment even if you delete a product and keyword targeting tactic. Once you delete a tactic or you delete a keyword or product from a tactic, the algorithm may bid on it through all the other traffic

If you want to forbid the algorithm to bid on a segment you used in a product & keyword targeting tactic before, you need to delete the specific keywords and ASINS from the tactic and create a blacklist tactic with the given segment.
 

Common questions:

 

What is the limit of keywords inside a tactic?

 
Amazon does not allow negative targeting for keywords containing more than 4 words. So does the algorithm.

The algorithm limits the length of a keyword included to a tactic in order to maintain a clean campaign structure. The algorithm negative targets the keywords included in your tactic from the exploration campaigns of your strategy, especially the auto campaign.

The limit is set to :

• 4 words for phrase matching
• 10 words for exact matching