When Should Amazon Advertising Campaigns Be Paused?

How to improve your campaign’s overall score and why older campaigns are still valuable.

Your advertising performance on Amazon depends heavily on campaigns. 

You may not be aware, but the word “campaign” originally meant “promotion” in the Old Greek language.

Promotion plays a significant role in Amazon Advertising campaigns, so that’s really interesting.

Every day, we want to raise our products to higher BSR “seats,” just like the old senators in Athens who wanted to be promoted to more prestigious positions.

On Amazon, you can choose from a number of different campaign types. Due to Amazon’s efforts to make the advertising more smart and complex with each update, expect that the number of possible ad angles will only grow.

More advertising fields will be added to product pages and search engine result pages as a result of the complexity of ad types. Advertising won’t become any easier, it’s safe to conclude. From Amazon’s perspective, why should it?

Since we are testing more due to complexity, Amazon will benefit from higher ad spending. The need to master and concentrate on the fundamentals is more than ever.

To get the most out of your advertising, concentrate on improving the quality of your products and always optimizing your product listings.

This reasoning may lead some Amazon marketers to think that pausing campaigns will maximize their efforts.

This approach is effective in some situations. However, it’s not always a good idea to pause efforts. Continue reading to learn when it’s advisable to pause campaigns and what to do in its place if that’s not your best option.

Should you eventually pause your Amazon PPC ads?

No, you shouldn’t generally pause your Amazon PPC ads.

Because Amazon prefers keywords and ads that run for longer periods of time rather than shorter ones, you shouldn’t pause your campaigns. Anecdotally, ongoing campaigns outperform newly launched ones and are simpler to optimize.

Even if you decide to pause your campaigns, nothing terrible will happen.

When should Amazon campaign pauses happen?

There are many situations where pausing an Amazon campaign might make sense. It might even be the best course of action in your particular situation. Continue reading for a strategy overview and examples of pausing Amazon campaigns.

An Amazon campaign may be put on hold if:

• The campaign’s advertising budget is high.
• The ACoS achieves its goal level.
• Entropy occurs in the campaigns.
• The performance of the portfolio and products is not what is expected.
• An account has too many campaigns.
• The products are no longer in trend.
• The number of relevant conversions that are negatives is high.

Let’s get to the point quickly. When a campaign’s ad spend surpasses your account level objective and its ACoS ratio does, it would be advisable to suspend it. When this occurs, you negatively impact the performance of your account level. If you notice that your campaigns are experiencing entropy without facing any dramatic changes, you could consider suspend them.

Sponsored brand campaigns with out-of-stock products should also be paused if these products were driving the majority of sales since SB campaigns, unlike Sponsored Product campaigns, will keep running, even when the product is out of stock. That is the most effective, immediate step to get your ratios back on track.

Here is a realistic illustration of when pausing an Amazon campaign might be a good idea.

Additionally, think about whether or not the campaign’s portfolio- or product-level performance is on target.

If so, you have additional space to allow them to run. Pause the campaigns if your “north star” metric for a given product level is not being fulfilled, especially if they are costing a lot more than your weekly average in terms of ad spending.

Another thing to think about is the possibility that you may have started too many campaigns too early while advertising on a younger account. Due to the fact that you are spreading your energy among too many campaigns, this is occasionally ineffective.

Every plan should always have simplicity as a central component.

When there are too many campaigns, it is advised to suspend some of them and concentrate your advertising resources on fewer campaigns with more “ammunition,” so to speak.

We advise against archiving campaigns in cases when there are OOS situations, items that are out of season, or other similar circumstances.

Keep these campaigns running because the historical campaign data will be useful later.

Another situation where you might think about suspending your campaign is if you have already over-harvested, or squeezed the life-juice out of, it or if you have too many meaningful conversions as negatives, especially in auto campaigns. When this happens, A9 believes the item is inappropriate for the search terms.

All of these are good reasons for stopping Amazon campaigns. Each reason has its own subtleties, just like everything else in relation to Amazon marketing. The optimal course of action for you and your campaigns must be determined with good judgement and long-term planning.

When should you give Amazon campaign pauses a second thought?

Campaigns should be paused for a variety of reasons, depending on their purpose and the stage of their product’s life cycle they are promoting on.

When you launch aggressively, you give your campaigns more breathing room. Additionally, this is true for campaigns aimed at improving your product’s rating for a set of search terms.

The A9 algorithm, which Amazon uses, assigns values to each campaign’s variables and determines which ad will win the auction and receive the click.

Any auction will probably be won by the advertisement with the highest projected CTR, CVR, and revenue. Amazon values consistency. High conversion and click-through rates are two factors that are crucial to the success of your advertising campaign.

Your campaign score will suffer if you see diminishing conversion or click-through rates in your account. Pause the campaigns, take your “players” out of the game for a moment, and keep them there to maintain the campaign in order to reverse dropping rates.

Let’s continue using the coach as an example. You must choose whether to add two participants into the game. When compared to the other, who is still talented but has less on-field experience, one has an established track record and experience. Which one would you choose? The player with a track record of success is most likely a safer bet.

Why do old campaigns still have value?

The click-through rate, which is the first variable the A9 algorithm takes into account, determines the winner of every auction in a bidding pool in accordance with Amazon’s definition of effective advertising.

To determine whether your CTR is healthy, divide your total clicks by your total impressions.

You can turn an adjusting screw if your campaign’s CTR is less than 0.30% in order to raise the campaign score. In this scenario, the campaign is not accelerating as it should do.

Because Amazon prefers the products that have a higher chance of earning a click in any bidding pool, pause the campaign and re-upload it. Your goal should be to determine the cause of your low click-through rate. Possible examples include the campaign’s keywords being too wide or not relevant enough to earn the high impressions and low-quality clicks they received. This lowers the campaign’s overall score. In that case, to achieve optimum effectiveness from a CTR standpoint, we advise separating those keywords into separate campaigns with a different goal.

A campaign’s history of CTR makes it important even now. Sometimes it is preferable to stop your advertising and concentrate on the basics, like improving your CTR. Continue reading to learn how to raise your CTR.

How to increase your CTR

Check the CTR optimization best practices before advertising a product. We advise improving your listing’s main image, using your main keyword as a fathead in the title, mobile-optimizing your listing page, offering discounts, and analyzing your competition.

In order to break the customer’s pattern recognition while they scroll through the SERP, the primary image is the most important click-through rate component. Examine how your company’s first impression stacks up against those of your competitors and be completely honest with yourself about whether you are attracting customers.

Does your title contain both the longtail and the fathead of your main keywords? Ideally, you can enter the search term into the search field and look for relevant search term ranking to determine the relevance of each keyword. Does your title contain both the longtail and the fathead of your main keywords? Ideally, you can enter the search term into the search field and look for relevant search term ranking to determine the relevance of each keyword. As an alternative, be sure to complete your keyword research.

Does your title encourage the main desire of your target audience? Your title should sell what your target audience desires most in the first 60 characters to increase CTR. It is crucial to plan ahead and understand your target market’s primary motivators for buying your products.

Keep in mind that 70% of Amazon customers use their mobile devices to make purchases. As sellers and advertisers, we frequently view product pages and search engine results pages on desktop, which is not consistent with how the majority of your customers shop. The important idea in this case is wearing our customers’ glasses.

Price reductions are another suggestion for improving CTR because they are a well-known, powerful psychological incentive. If it makes sense for your pricing point, we advise using dollar discounts rather than percentage ones because they are more noticeable from the perspective of the buyer.

Constantly keeping an eye on your competitors is also beneficial. Understand who your bidders’ pools’ competitors are. Your CTR and CVR will be determined by the multiple bidding pools into which each bid will place you. Always keep in mind that we are not working in an isolation.

Here are a few short examples and some words of advice:

Situation: Is there a downward impressions trend?

Answer: Increase your bid or improve the positioning of your bids.

Situation: Is CTR reducing at all?

Answer: Optimize your incentives in relation to your competitors, including your main image, price point, primary emblem, price discount, title, and review count/rating.

There are other aspects to take into account when figuring out how to enhance your CTR strategy, but CVR, or conversion rate, is another factor that may have an impact on whether or not you feel pausing your Amazon campaigns is the right course of action for you.

How does CVR influence the campaign score?

After taking CTR into account, we would analyze conversion rate and expected revenue, average, or value to decide the best course of action for pausing or not pausing Amazon campaigns.

Amazon is a unique machine learning system. As a result, it will likely support campaigns that have more data and a history of success.

The A9 algorithm relies on CVR because it continuously evaluates each product for maximum gain. 

In short, the product with the highest income generation and the lowest return rate will be ranked first.

How to reactivate campaigns that have been paused

Consider that the search volume for the product you advertised in the previous campaign may have changed when it’s time to restart paused campaigns. To improve and restructure your strategy, research competition.

Like a vehicle, campaigns that have been removed from the game require maintenance. Recognize the need to regain sales velocity. Advertising campaigns occasionally fail as a result of being harvested too much, too quickly, or for too long. If you do not maintain them like a mechanic, they will eventually succumb to entropy.

When reactivating paused campaigns, offer them some TLC.

Finally, after being reactivated, certain campaigns can be kept up and have been shown to be successful. However, in some instances, they never fully recover from being overly squeezed.

In some ways, the A9 is similar to us. Despite the fact that it is a machine learning system, it reads human behavior and, from what we have observed and been able to deduce, likes consistency in terms of spending volume.

When is it a good idea to pause Amazon campaigns?

In general, suspending Amazon advertising is a wonderful strategy to immediately reduce high costs. You temporarily “pull out of the game” underperforming players so that failing campaigns might receive more budget or “play time.”

Put those campaigns into maintenance mode and take into account the Ins and Outs effecting CTR and CVR is our suggested overarching strategy.

Finding the source of the performance reduction can help us make logical decisions based on the data, as opposed to emotionally acting. 

Only when we pay attention to what the numbers are saying to us and look at them with objectivity can we make wise decisions.

You will win more auctions if you constantly signal the algorithm’s consistent spending behavior and maintain or, ideally, increase your KPIs.

Amazon wants you to succeed. Nothing here is a secret. The market’s top product will win. That is a natural law.