PGN 2.0 Structure and Strategies
A PGN is an abbreviation for Product Group Network, which is a campaign structure that is proprietary to ZonTools. The PGN feature is only available for Dominator subscribers.
PGN is designed to generate an ecosystem of campaigns and ad groups to leverage the full potential of Amazon's matching algorithm within Amazon's TOS (terms of service). PGN 2.0 is our latest iteration that includes product attribute targeting (PAT) campaigns and the enhanced auto target (EAT).
What composes a PGN?
When a PGN is created it is composed of:
- Exact campaign (E) : made up of > 1 ad group
- Phrase campaign (P) : made up of > 1 ad group
- Broad campaign (B) : made up of > 1 ad group
- Auto/EAT campaign (A) : made up of just 1 ad group
- PAT campaign (T) : made up of 4 ad groups
The Exact, Phrase, Broad campaigns starts with one ad group. The ad group increases as more keywords are added, either by the Amazon seller, or as more keywords are added by our automation engines. Each ad group can contain only 1,000 keywords. When these ad groups for the Exact, Phrase and Broad campaigns reach the limit, the system goes about creating additional ad groups.
ZonTools assigns only 1 ad group to the Auto/EAT campaign while the PAT campaign has 4 types of ad groups which has its own specific strategy. Each of PAT's ad groups are assigned a fraction of PAT Default Bid and PAT Daily Budget.
How does a PGN operate?
- PGN automatically distributes your Default Bid and Daily Budget across campaigns and ad groups
- It is not uncommon for Amazon sellers to generate revenue from sales but bleed from their Amazon ads so they end up not making any real profit. A PGN is structured in a way so that you stand a better chance of making a profit from the Amazon ad auctions.
- PPC management is made better as your campaigns and ad groups that are contained in your PGN are assigned daily budgets and bid amounts based on the likelihood of conversion. All these campaigns and ad groups are fully automated which means you need not grapple everyday what to bid on, how much to bid on, which campaign is intended for research (not meant to generate sales but data), which campaign is mean to go after other ads (meant to generate sales).
- All these are done for you by ZonTools.
- 3 entities with the highest likelihood of converting to sales (conversion):
- Exact campaign – offensive, keyword targeting
- Defense Ad Group in PAT – defensive, product targeting
- ASIN Ad Group in PAT – offensive, product targeting
- 5 Research entities which are less likely to convert. Research campaigns and ad groups have less of PGN's default bid and daily budget to be consistent with the risks involved.
- Phrase campaign – keyword targeting
- Broad campaign – keyword targeting
- Auto/EAT campaign – keyword targeting
- Brand Ad Group in PAT – product targeting
- Category Ad Group in PAT – product targeting
5 campaigns inside PGN
PGN
daily budget
PGN
default bid
Exact
30%
100%
Phrase
20%
80%
Broad
15%
60%
Auto/EAT
10%
40%
PAT
25%
varying default bids
- Defense Ad Group - 100%
- ASIN Ad Group
80% - Brand Ad Group - mix of default bid
- Category Ad Group - a mix of default bid
- PGN equips you with a network of fully automated campaigns and ad groups.
- For a compete discussion on the automations that run in each PGN, see PGN automations. Each PGN is designed to reduce your ad spend as it carries out a large portion of PPC monitoring and decision-making for you:
- No more manual campaigns:
- adding keywords
- tweaking each bid
- No more endless hours of monitoring campaign metrics.
- No more worrying on running out of a daily budgets across campaigns.
- PGN expands your options by instantly creating 5 strategic campaigns+ad groups
- A PGN is more than just a network of campaigns and ad groups. It has a built-in set of strategies. Each PGN at the onset has 4 research/test, 1 defensive and 2 offensive campaigns.
- Exact campaign is an Offensive campaign.
- Phrase campaign is a Research campaign.
- Broad campaign is a Research campaign.
- Auto/EAT campaign is a Research campaign/ad group.
- PAT campaign is a combination of Defensive, Offensive and Research ad groups.
- Each of these campaign types are discussed further below.
- Exact campaign is an Offensive campaign.
- The Exact campaign is designated as offensive because it is Intended to attack other keywords. The campaign contains the initial set of keywords submitted during PGN creation + any search term the automation engines identify as profitable. All these chosen keywords are all exact matches and are seen to have the highest probability of converting into a sale.
As such, the Exact campaign gets the lion's share of both the daily budget and default bid of the entire PGN: - 30% of PGN daily budget
- 100% of PGN default bid
- Keyword targeting: only Exact matches done by ZonTools
- Phrase campaign is a Test/Research campaign.
- The Phrase campaign is a research campaign meant to generate as much keywords that can be used in the other campaigns and ad groups of the PGN. The Phrase campaign contains all the good search terms that are tested as Phrase match + all the search terms found by the automation engines.
- A research/test campaign is less likely to convert so the budget and the daily bid are both lessened (comparatively to an Exact campaign).
- 20% of PGN daily budget
- 80% of PGN default bid
- Keywords targeting: only Phrase matches done by ZonTools
- All keywords with Exact matches (taken from Exact campaign) are added to the Phrase campaign as Negative Exact match (Search Term Isolation strategy)
- Broad campaign is a Test/Research campaign.
- The Broad campaign is like the Phrase match as it also a research campaign meant to generate as much keywords that can be used in the other campaigns and ad groups.
- The ad groups in the Broad campaign contain the search terms generated by automation engines Keyword Miner and Target Miner from scanning your Customer Search Term (CST) reports, as well as keywords that you add as Broad matches. These broad matches expand your reach as they identify new long tail search terms to be used for bidding.
- 25% of PGN daily budget
- 60% of PGN default bid
- Keywords targeting: only Broad matches done by ZonTools
- All keywords which are Exact matches taken from the Phrase campaign are added as Negative Phrase match as Search Term Isolation strategy. With Search term isolation, ZonTools negates all the keywords that you added as Phrase matches, taken away from the Broad campaign.
- Auto/EAT campaign is a Test/Research campaign with 1 Ad Group.
- Enhanced Auto Targeting (EAT) is the enhanced version of the Automatic campaign that is entirely controlled by Amazon.
- 10% of PGN daily budget
- 40% of PGN default bid
- Keywords and Product targeting: only Broad matches done by Amazon
- ????ASK SARA ????.
- All keywords and targets that are Broad matches (taken from the Broad and Phrase campaigns) are added as Negative Phrase (search term isolation strategy). ????ASK SARA ????.
- Auto/EAT has only one ad group but this ad group contains 4 Match types implemented by Amazon:
- Loose Match
- Amazon generates keywords that match your product listing to broadly related CSTs.
- Close Match
- Amazon generates keywords that match your product and ads with highly relevant CSTs.
- Substitutes Match
- Amazon generates keywords and targets the product detail page (PDP) of other seller's products. Substitutes specifically targets direct competitors which sell the same products as yours.
- For example, if you're selling spatula, then this substitutes match targets and bids on other spatula products sold by other sellers.
- Complements Match
- Your ads and PDP are shown to shoppers looking for products that complements other products or are accessories to yours.
- Product Attribute Targeting (PAT) campaign is a combination of Defensive, Offensive and Research ad groups.
- When Amazon launched PAT at the end of 2018, ZonTools immediately re-worked PGN to accommodate this new way of targeting. PAT allows you to do what only the Automatic campaign was capable of doing, but now this can be done by PAT and more precisely.
- 15% of PGN daily budget
- a mix of PGN default bid
- Product and audience targeting done by ZonTools
- ???? ASK SARA???? All Exact matches are added as Negative Phrase match (search term isolation strategy). With Search term isolation, ZonTools negates all the keywords that you added as phrase matches, away from the Broad campaign.
- ???? ASK SARA??? PAT can negate ASINs away. If you are building an ASIN that is not working you now can negate the ASIN or pause the particular PAT Ad Group.
- PAT targets specific PDP, specific competitors, or even your own products with your own ads, or specific sub-categories for a broader reach of your ads.
- PAT's sub-categories are:
- Brand
- Price Range
- Star Rating
- This is why at PGN creation, the system asks for your product price and your star rating as these values will be used to create a very pro segmentation of all the targets.
- Technically, PAT can only be used at an Ad Group level. You cannot have a PAT campaign but you have 4 PAT Ad Groups. For a simplified presentation we refer to PAT as PAT campaign but in reality it is a set of ad groups. PAT ads will show up in all the positions (ad placements) where Sponsored Product ads are displayed, but in different locations (ad placements)
- Discussions on the 4 PAT ad groups are found below.
- Each PAT Ad Group is sorted according to the goal of the ad group.
- PAT Defense Ad Group
- PAT Offensive ASIN Ad Group
- PAT Research Brand Ad Group
- PAT Research Category Ad Group
PAT Defense Ad Group
- The Defense Ad Group created in the PAT campaign is meant to defend your product listing, to take as much real estate as possible within your own listing, with your own product, in order to improve customer retention.
- Let's say here we're going to target your google product, we're going to target all your catalogs. So this Ad Group will go about targeting all your catalog. And this specific target, the way it will behave would be a very similar to the Exact keyword.
add video showing defense ad group
discuss/explain ad placement
Running a Defense Ad Group results in your product being featured . Instead that you will be able to bid on, to auction on with your PAT campaigns and ad groups. And specific over here we are seeing the defensive strategy into play.
So we see the listing which is called Miley, is the brand Miley and we see that this
brand is doing an excellent job into defending its own listing. And as a matter of fact you can see with the Product Group related to this item, you can pretty much only see Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley items - so this brand, this products is doing a really really good job with this defense strategy and this is the same strategy you will be able to leverage with just a click of a button within our PGN structure.
PAT Offensive ASIN Ad Group
- Like playing chess, you need to first defend your listing and once your listing has defense then the next move is to retain as much traffic as possible of your brand. And an the ad group that does that, attack other ASINs is the ASIN Ad Group.
- The ASIN Ad Group targets Exact specific ASIN, or the one that Amazon will suggest to us. Your submitted SKUs relevant to roughly 200 to---we gonna go about targeting the top 200 listings--- Amazon tells us, the API tells us your product is relevant to and these are also Exact matches--- similar to an Exact match.
PAT Research (Brand and Category) Ad Groups
- The Research Brand Ad Group works in a similar way the Phrase campaign works. It target all brands within your suggested categories based on your SKUs (you will submit to us for advertisement).
Amazon responds by telling us what categories both items are relevant to. And based on the categories both items are relevant to or suggested categories, Amazon will give us the top 50 brands within those categories. - So what we do, we take every single category that Amazon tells us you're relevant to and within each of those categories we identify the top 50 brands that are your competitor. And for each of those brand we go about segmenting their catalog in 4 different ways.
- So we will bid on brands but refined by:
- Higher price, Lower rating.
- This the highest likelihood of conversion because you're bidding on items that are more expensive than you but [shitty-er] than yours. So here we will 100% of default bid because we are have the highest likelihood of conversion.
- Lower price, Lower rating brands.
- So we filter by brand by lower prices lower rating this you have a slightly less likely low conversion, so you gonna use 80% of your Default Bid. Then we gonna a segment was brand by
- Higher priced, Higher rating.
- So more expensive product with higher ratings so they are more expensive are they high ratings so they could be perceived a higher value product, so you're less even less likely to convert 60% and then for this segment we gonna use is lower of
- Lower price, Higher rating.
- so on this one you really have a very small chances of conversion, it's really about what you offer, what different is within your product compared to the one your targeting, because you are selling something more expensive more cheaper star rating so for because of this risk we're gonna just bid 40% of your Default Bid that you set up initially at PGN when you created it.
===========================
PAT allows sellers to display ur ads in specific categories and target specific product ASINS
this is such a powerful option as now
you can specify the exact categories and exact specific competitor listings to show your ads.
the key here is how you set up these campaigns and who you're
targeting you want to create three ad
groups so that you can keep the data
separate for you to analyze
(1) one for categories
(2) one for products that are
your direct competitors and
(3) one for products that bundle well with your product
the idea here is that you want your targeted ads to show up in the most relevant categories. you also want your ads to show up in the product listings of the bestsellers that are your direct competitors so when people are on those listings they can see yours as an option. And you also want your ad to show up in the listings of the best sellers of products that bundle well with yours so when people are looking to actually buy the bundled product they'll see an ad for your product and potentially buy your product as well.
- PGN Search Term Isolation, Negation and Search Term Collision
- Broad campaign
We also will leverage search term isolation so we will negate all the keywords that you PGN will be negated as Phrase match away from the Broad. - Search term isolation is also leveraged as the system negates all the keywords that you added as Phrase matches, away from the Broad campaign.
Phrase campaign
When a PGN is created it automatically negates all the keywords that you're putting in the Exact match. The system will negate (exclude) them away from the Phrase campaign in order to avoid Search Term Collision and leverage certain isolation.
ASK SARA: You want to isolate Exact, Phrase and Broad campaigns so as not to bid for the same search term in more than allocation more than a phrase and more than a campaign.
What ZonTools does not offer and what PGN does not manage
- product research
- keyword research
- SEO writing
stefano
3.1 - PGN 2.0 Overview - with PAT and EAT
3.1 - PGN Overview - Zon.Tools Amazon PPC Software
Zon.Tools V2.0: PGN Overview
One of Amazon Seller Central's limitation is that it only offers you 2 layers for managing your PPC ads: campaigns and ad groups.
For you to continue participating in the Amazon ad auctions you need to keep monitoring each keyword, each ASIN target.
