Why Is My Amazon Manual Campaign Getting No Impressions?

If you’re not getting impressions on a manual campaign, the first step is to run those keywords through Helium 10’s Index Checker. Here Bradley Sutton, Helium 10’s Director of Customer Success and Training, is answering the question, “Why Is My Amazon Manual Campaign Getting No Impressions?”

This one’s a more complicated issue. We don’t have a quick fix, but we can suggest several possible factors for you to consider:

Our first suggestion: consider that Amazon gives preference to campaigns with a history of performance. Therefore, if your automatic campaign is older than your manual campaign, Amazon will naturally favor it and you will likely see better results with the automatic campaign.

This is also a good reason to keep older campaigns instead of discarding them, even if periodically inactive (kind of like how credit advisors suggest keeping older credit card accounts open, even if you don’t use them that often). This ensures that you retain all of your hard work on your previous campaigns, and are able to leverage its ‘credibility’ over time.

Another thing to note is how many keywords you’re actually targeting in your manual campaigns. For example, if you’re only bidding on five keywords, you’ll be limited to the impressions available for those keywords.

On the flipside, automatic campaigns aren’t limited in the same way, since you’re allowing Amazon to select and target keywords for you. This is always a good option for a product or product space you’re not very familiar with, and need to collect more data on first.

To help improve your Manual campaign, there are some additional things you can try: 

First, use Helium 10’s Index Checker tool to ensure the keywords you are bidding on are indexed. If you’re not getting any impressions at all for those keywords on your manual campaign, this is probably why.

Next, try increasing your campaign budget and bids if feasible for you and your allocated ad spend. For example, if you’re bidding $1, bid $3 or $4 instead. Of course, always make sure to factor in ad spend into your overall profits/ROI and business plan.

All in all, PPC is hard to predict. The bids are constantly changing day to day, depending on what others are bidding against you. Make sure you regularly check the Suggested Bids from Amazon to bid above it, stay ahead of the curve, and generate traffic on the keywords you are targeting.

Also note that all campaigns are not created equal, so don’t be discouraged if one campaign type is more successful than the other. At the end of the day, it’s a lot of trial and error.

(P.S.: For Helium 10 members with access to Freedom Ticket, week 8 is packed full of PPC-related content).