Before we dive into what Bid+ is an how to use it on your pay per click (PPC) campaigns, we’d like to offer a little advice. If you haven’t already mastered the concepts behind bidding on Amazon and how they work together to decide both the CPC cost and who wins in the end, go read our other posts specifically geared towards marketing through PPC campaigns. Spend some time wrapping your mind around how to optimize your listing and use of keywords.
We say this because the Bid+ feature kicks in only when your ads are eligible to show at the top of a search result. And if your ads are already proving successful, Bid+ just might give you the boost you’re looking for!
What is Bid?
Bid+ is a feature of Sponsored Products that helps you increase the opportunity to display your ads in the top placement (top row of the search result pages). In other words, it’s a feature that can increase the competitiveness of your Sponsored Product ads that already have high traffic.
Bid+ works by automatically increasing your bids to claim the highest spot, but don’t worry — the increase is capped at 50% of your original bid. Please also be aware that Bid+ is only available for manually targeted campaigns and is designed only for the top placement.
How do I activate it?
You can activate Bid+ once your campaign is active. Look for the Sponsored Products Manual Campaign Settings tab. Like we mentioned, when you turn on Bid+ for a campaign, it automatically increases your bids by up to 50% for each keyword match in an effort to beat the next highest bid.
For example, say you bid 45 cents on a keyword and it matches a customer’ search. Bid+ finds that the highest bid is $0.58, so it automatically increases your bid to $0.59 in order to win that bid. But if the highest bid was $0.95, Bid+ wouldn’t change your bid at all, because remember, it will never increase your bid by more than 50%.
Of course, using Bid+ comes with extra financial considerations. You’ll need to adjust your advertising budget to account for the up-to-50% increase in your bids at the algorithm’s discretion. It won’t always need to go all the way up to 50% for every bid, but it’s always prudent to prepare for the worst-case scenario (and then some)!
And because activating Bid+ is as easy as clicking a button, deactivating it is just as easy! We encourage you to try Bid+ to see how it works for your business — as long as you’re tracking the results, you’ll be able to know relatively quickly if it’s the right option for you.
