First, make sure that your mindset is about generating revenue, and less about minutely managing costs. This can be as simple as looking at your ad profitability as Ad Revenue / Ad Spend (RoAS), instead of Ad Spend / Ad Revenue (ACoS). If you’re getting a healthy return on your ad spend in Q4, don’t worry too much about an ACoS that looks a bit worse than it does in other quarters. Huge volume multiplied by slightly lower profitability results in more profit than moderate volume with slightly higher profitability, and the best sellers recognize that in Q4 the potential for huge volume is there.
Next, for keywords that are profitable, increase your bid by 70-80% to ensure that you get holiday impressions. To pay for this, shut off all of the keywords that you’ve been testing that just aren’t working for you. And make sure that you don’t lose your Brand keywords – competitors will come for them, and they will take away sales if you’re not defending them. Increasing by 30% should be enough to ward off the worst effects of competitive pressure.
Remember that Amazon has enabled a bulk upload tool that can save you a lot of time to make these changes. It’s right in Seller Central, and you can use it to make mass adjustments like the ones listed above.
The earlier you get aggressive, the more you’ll be able to protect margin while driving volume. Your competitors will put massive amounts of dollars into the same keywords that you target during Q4, and especially from mid-November onwards, so if you start in October (like Amazon did), then you’ll be able to raise your bids more granularly. Your October and early November volumes will increase significantly while margin holds up, and then margins will thin as you get into the teeth of the holiday season.