Advertising is a huge part of all growing businesses, and it is no different for Amazon. 75% of Amazon sellers have used Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising at least once for more visibility and sales.
In fact, most Amazon businesses depend on the success of their PPC strategy. Business owners usually manage or closely watch advertising campaigns themselves. However, tracking and following up with campaigns can be time-consuming.
Amazon business owners can’t trust anyone easily with their ad budget unless they hire a specialist — which is an expensive resource.
As it is an integral part of your business, it may be difficult to delegate the task to just anyone in your team. If you cannot afford to hire a PPC specialist, you can delegate the tasks to anyone with an administrative role, or your Virtual Assistant (VA).
However, it may be time-consuming to train your VA to manage PPC.
In this blog, we talk about how you can train your VA to manage Amazon PPC campaigns in 6 steps.
What is a virtual assistant (VA)?
A virtual assistant is a remote-based contract worker who works full-time, part-time, or on an as-needed basis and provides administrative, creative, or technical support.
You can find two types of Amazon VAs: those who specialize in one area, such as product listing or Amazon PPC, and general VAs, who can handle a wide range of tasks. Nonetheless, hiring an Amazon VA will save you time and money, and enhance your PPC campaigns, while you focus on other areas of your Amazon business.
Why train the VA to manage PPC?
VAs are becoming an important part of the Amazon business. The demand for Amazon VAs is also rising. The remote aspect gives you the flexibility of hiring anyone in the world. This allows you to hire anyone that suits your budget.
Most Amazon VAs know and understand what is required of them for the business. Even generalist VAs can help with routine product listings, optimizations, emails, and dealing with several administrative tasks, once trained.
For PPC, you can start by delegating some advertising housekeeping. Eventually, you can delegate more tasks as your Amazon business grows leading to an increased workload including administrative tasks, inventory, emails, and setting up product listings. While the VAs know various areas of the business, they could do a better job of managing PPC than most employees.
How can a virtual assistant help your eCommerce business?
Amazon PPC VA can support the growth of your business in a variety of ways:
They handle tasks you do not have the time for
Running an Amazon business is stressful. You must deal with product management, inventory, competitors, shipping, etc. Once the business grows, finding time for tasks you used to handle can be impossible.
A VA handles keyword research, product research, ad performance monitoring, and several other tasks. They can handle these laborious tasks on your behalf and present their findings in an easy-to-understand form that you can read through and approve in a few minutes.
They save costs
Hiring and recruiting a VA is also less expensive than hiring an on-premise assistant. Because they work remotely, you will not have to pay transportation allowance, office space, equipment, taxes, compensation, and benefits. Moreover, international wages could be lower. An experienced VA can help you maximize each cent you pay for the ads.
However, VAs can charge anywhere from $5 to $100 per hour. The factors that will determine how much you will pay for your virtual assistance for Amazon PPC include the type of assistance they will provide, the VA’s experience level, their geographical location, and the duration of the project.
You access a global talent pool
By hiring remotely instead of physically, you can work with anyone from any place in the world without worrying about relocating. Aside from getting access to the global talent pool, you will be exposed to a diverse pool of VAs with wide-ranging skills and experiences. This will allow you to pick the best fit and expertise and choose hours that make the most sense to your business.
VAs are flexible
An Amazon PPC VA can work part-time, full-time, or on an as-needed basis. So, rather than pay for resources you do not need, you can hire them when needed or part-time to match your business needs. You can increase their hours and hire them full-time as your business grows.
How to Train VA for Amazon PPC?
A skilled VA can create lots of opportunities for your business. They already have a diversified role and wear multiple hats as needed. Extensive training in any field can set them up to do a great job,but advertising has some unique challenges.
If you hire one, make sure they have some marketing experience in writing, designing, or branding. Moreover, spreadsheet and inventory management skills would also help. However, the most important skill is to make sure they are good at remote communication and willing to learn various aspects of the business, such as advertising.
Once you have a VA to work with, here is how you can train them for Amazon PPC:
1. Make sure they understand your product portfolio
Before anything, your Amazon PPC VA must need to know what products they will be marketing. Create a list of all your products in order of priority and sales, if possible, and go through them with your VA. It will help them understand how to allocate budgets between the products. Also, be sure to let them know if you have a continuing or upcoming product launch.
2. Familiarize them with existing ad campaigns
If you have ad campaigns that are currently running, you should go through them with your VA. It will help them understand what you have, such as impressions, conversion rate, and ROAS.
While familiarizing them with your ad campaigns, ensure you explain your pain points so they can help you optimize. They can analyze the low-performing or high-budget campaigns to know the changes they need to make.
3. Train them to use your software and tools
It is important to ask your VA what software or tools they intend to use. If they do not have any, be sure to provide them with the relevant tools and software for Amazon PPC, such as keyword research and tracking tools.
If the VA is unfamiliar with the tools, teach them how to use them. You can also direct them to helpful resources. Moreover, most, if not all, software and tools have helpful tutorials either on YouTube or on their own websites.
4. Start delegating tasks
What do you want your VA to handle? Is it the whole PPC campaign or part of it? It would help if you made clear what their functions are. Some of the things you may want your VA to handle for you include the following:
- Campaign upkeep
- PPC report analysis
- Competitor assessment
- Keyword research
- New product launches
- Bid optimization
As you explain their functions, set goals and expectations that you can use to monitor performance.
5. Explain your budget management
Your VA should understand how flexible you are with the campaign budget. Do they have wiggle room, or is the budget fixed? By knowing this, they can allocate their budgetary allocation in the most efficient ways.
You should also let them know if they have control over allocating the budget to campaigns and products or if they must follow protocol.
You must complete this training section because their bidding strategies depend heavily on your budget and its management.
6. Explain bid optimization details
There are several bid optimization methods and strategies, so the VA needs to know the ones your business uses. Inform them of your bid optimization schedule, what campaigns are optimized, and how to optimize them. You can give them autonomy to optimize according to their expertise or give them instructions.
Challenges to Train VA
Training your VA can be a good investment of your time. The longer you keep the employee, the larger your return.
Therefore, when hiring one, make sure you understand their long-term goals, interest in the role, and what they are seeking out of it. Training a VA to manage PPC can take a ton of your time initially but the long-term returns are well worth it if hired and trained well.
If you integrate advertising dashboards like Trellis, VA could too spend less time managing PPC and find opportunities faster.
Amazon VAs and Trellis
Trellis makes advertising simple through automation and easy-to-use tools. If you train your VA through the six steps, you can confidently let them manage the high-level inputs of the advertising workflow with Trellis.
From campaign creation to campaign analytics, our dashboard makes it easier to find insights for optimizations. We have designed our advertising dashboard to reduce the time spent on tedious tasks which could be better done, tested, and executed by algorithms.
For instance, your VA with Trellis can efficiently advise on;
- Top-performing keywords,
- Most valuable products,
- Products increasing brand value,
- Competitor targeting,
- Budget management,
- And, managing metrics like ACoS.
Our Dynamic Pricing platform can also help your VA advise on data-driven pricing. Learn more about how Trellis can help you get a competitive edge using various automation and AI tools to optimize your workflow.
Book a free demo to learn how Trellis can help you grow.