Amazon is back at it again with more updates to the campaign manager on both the Seller Central advertising platform and Vendor Central AMS platform. These updates are part of Amazon’s continued push to make advertising on Amazon easier for agencies and in-house managers. The updates include tools now available for both vendors and sellers, as well as updates exclusive to both types of merchants. Let’s take a dive into the latest Amazon advertising improvements has to offer.
Vendor & Seller Advertising Tools
These updates affect both vendor and seller central merchants. If you advertise on Amazon, you will be seeing these updates in your account.
Multi-Campaign In-Line Edits
Merchants can now select multiple campaigns to make bulk edits for budgets, start/end dates, status, and bids. This helps save time when you have a number of campaigns you want to edit at once. Instead of having to go line-by-line and make the adjustments, you can select the campaigns to edit and then make your adjustments at the top of your campaign table.
Fancier Date Range Selector
With the updated table also came an updated date range selector. The new design is easier to use and looks better than the previous design. While you can still only create custom date ranges for the last 90 days, it does make it easier to select starting and end dates for the data and the presets are easier to quickly choose as well.
Pre-Update
Image Via Amazon.com, Inc.
Post-Update
Overall Account Time Zone
If you have a large team spread across multiple time zones, you might have noticed your advertising account would list the local time zone of whoever was in the account. This could lead to campaigns launching too early or too late depending on where the actual company was located. With this update, the time zone listed is for the physical location of the company. This will help with ensuring campaigns launch on the right day at the right time.
Vendor Central AMS Exclusive Updates
These updates are for vendor central merchants using Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). If you are a seller central merchant these updates have actually been available for a few months so you can skip ahead to the next section or read through to see what was transitioned over to the AMS side.
Performance Dashboard
This is an exciting development on the AMS side of things. The performance dashboard previously only available to seller central merchants is now available to vendor central merchants. We previously covered the dashboard in depth when it was released for seller central. To summarize, the dashboard allows you to visually graph metrics related to account performance to help in strategic planning. It is a cool tool to finally have available in vendor central.
Filters on Filters
If you are anything like me, you have wished you could better filter your data in the AMS interface. They have finally answered our prayers with the addition of filters. Above the dashboard is the option to Filter by and then a drop-down menu of options appears.
- Status
- Type
- Targeting
- Budget
- Impressions
- Clicks
- CTR
- Spend
- CPC
- Orders
- Sales
- ACoS
To use multiple at once, you do have to set and then save each individual filter before you can add another. You cannot create multiple filters and then save for the data to show all at once at the time of this writing. A small price to pay for being able to sort the data. With this tool implementation, you can now filter for top performing campaigns or poor performing campaigns to get an idea of what is and is not working in your account.
Seller Central Advertising Exclusive Updates
We saved the best for the last with the seller central updates. Similar to the last section, if you are a vendor central advertiser you can skip through the section or read to see what updates are available on the seller central side of things.
Campaign Type Consolidation
In seller central, headline search and sponsored product ads are now combined into one “All Campaigns” view whereas previously there were separate tabs for HSA and SP ads. Personally, I wish we still had the tabs if we wanted to see the data separated out. It can make the main data table feel clustered when the ad types are mixed together. However, that is still possible with the filters, it just takes an extra minute or two.
Data Table Download
Speaking of the data table, you can now export the table as a CSV file. With the customizability of the table columns, you can create specific reports for your clients or teams to show how your advertising efforts are performing.
Campaign Set-Up Efficiencies
Amazon has implemented a few updates to the campaign creation process that I wanted to highlight but did not deserve individual sections. First, sellers can now sort products by star rating or number of reviews when creating a campaign to see what their best-performing products are and if they want to run on those products. Sellers can also now upload a file of keywords during campaign creation to save time on adding keywords. Also, sellers can now add negative keywords during campaign set-up as well, where before you had to create the campaign then go into the campaign and add the negatives after it had launched.
Conclusion
Amazon is on the path of improving account management and I am a huge fan. I feel like every time I log in to Amazon some new tool or design is up and running. It is an exciting time to be on Amazon. From the merchant updates making it easier to update campaigns and keep launches on-time and efficient to the exclusive updates for AMS and seller central, it is clear we are only seeing the beginning of Amazon’s improvements to their advertising platform.
How do you feel about the updates? What are your favorite changes and what do you want to see next? Let me know your thoughts on Twitter.