How To Scale Your Merch Account Through Amazon Advertising (AMS) Automation

It has been a while since we posted anything on the Merch Informer blog, and for good reason!

The last few weeks we have been extensively testing one of the coolest tools that has JUST hit the market that anyone serious about Merch by Amazon will easily find the value in. This tool takes one of the only guaranteed ways to scale any business (advertising), and takes it to an entirely new level!

I should have titled this blog post “how to scale your merch account through amazon advertising without losing your mind”. Lets face it, competition is increasing on Merch by Amazon. Using the proper keywords to get in front of the right audience is only a single piece of the puzzle. Once you have a successful design, if you really want to grow your numbers, you have to act like a business and put some ad spend behind your assets (your designs). When you have a design catalog of 100+ or even 10,000+ designs, this entire process becomes near impossible. You have to set up ads one at a time, change bids, add campaign names…the list goes on and on…for each and EVERY shirt.

There are people in the Merch Community that have spent over 1,000 hours creating ads for all of their shirts, and their royalty numbers reflect this.

But what if there was a way to create all of these ads for ALL of your designs in just a few button clicks?

^^That sounds like absolutely click bait, but ever since we have started testing this tool, it has really blown us away.

Introducing Merch Amigo – Merch Ad Automation


Merch Amigo is the brain child of someone this community knows very well: Ken Reil.

Ken has not only become a great friend over the years, but has his hand on the pulse of Merch by Amazon.

He is leading the fight against frivolous trademarks (through the Trademark Watch Dawgs), knows more about licensing art for his Merch account than anyone I know…and knows a thing or two about selling a LOT of clothing through the platform.

One of the driving factors behind getting the initial boost in search and getting great selling designs to the first page has been to put ad spend behind his business. There is absolutely no quicker way to get your designs in front of the right audience.

Doing the ads one by one is something that most of us do NOT want to do, so Ken came up with the automated solution and let us tag along for the ride in making sure everything was working properly in just a few clicks of a button. Merch Amigo is truly the Amazon Advertising solution that you need if you run a real merch business.

Let’s get into how it works!

How To Set Up Merch Amigo In 3 Easy Steps

Step 1: Get The extension

The first step is to actually go get the Merch Amigo chrome extension here: https://merchamigo.com/.

Sign up (which is 100% FREE), and get the extension by clicking on the link!

Step 2: Log Into Merch by Amazon

The next step after you have the extension installed is to log into your Merch by Amazon account.

Go to your “manage” tab and you will see that now you have the extension enabled, the manage tab has a navigation bar.

Step 3: Click Settings

From the manage tab, click on the settings button.

This will bring up the settings window. In order to get the plugin to “talk” to Amazon advertising and your Merch account, we need to enter in some settings.

The first is your US Account ID:

To get your US Account ID, log in to advertising.amazon.com (you can click this link), and your ID will be the LAST string in the URL. What you need to copy and paste will be right after “entityld=”.

Copy and paste that into the account ID into the settings and the plugin is now ready to work!

Before you save and reload the page, make sure you enter:

  • Daily Budget – This is the TOTAL amount you will spend per day PER ad that you set up with Merch Amigo.
  • Default Bid – This is how much you will spend “per click” on your ads.
  • Campaign Bidding Strategy – This is how the ads will function. If you want to spend the same amount per click every time, start this at “fixed bids”. If you want them to change depending on the competition to get more clicks, you can switch to dynamic bids.

Once you have selected these settings, click on save and reload and you are now ready to set up your automated ads!

Automating Your Merch by Amazon Ads

Let’s go through the functionality of how this is going to make your life a LOT easier to set up and start running ads immediately.

Note: This is phase 1 of the plugin which has everything you need to get started. There is a LOT more in development that we will let you know about in time.

When you go to your manage tab, you will now have the Merch Amigo bar at the very top:

You can set up GLOBAL bids by clicking on the settings button like we did above, but the way it starts, is that you can create individual ads by clicking “create ad” under each shirt.

This will use your global settings (for budget and bid), but if you have a shirt you want to change budget and bids on the fly, you can change that in the top menu bar!

Clicking on “create ad” will automatically open up an Amazon Advertising tab and prefill everything for you, including the name of your campaign (the clothing title) so that you can easily track later.

Here is an example shirt. This shows what settings were selected and everything is pre filled:

That’s pretty great and all, but the reason we got excited about this tool is when you switch the selector at the very top under “ad type”

Once you have this flipped on, it allows you to create ALL the ads with the click of a single button:

You can go through and select what shirts you want to run ads for individually, or you can set the selected (right below the live dropdown menu) to on, which will select ALL your shirts on that page.

Then all you have to do is click on “create” and it will open up all the AMS tabs for you with ALL of the information in the campaign prefilled. The only thing you have to do from there is click on “launch campaign”.

There is also an option as you can see from the top menu to run group ads, but I would recommend running 1 campaign with a single shirt in that campaign for the best results!

Wrapping It Up

Head over to Merch Amigo and grab a free account to try it out here: https://merchamigo.com/.

That about wraps up what this tool can do right now (and Ken has some amazing updates planned in the next couple of weeks).

What used to take hours and hours of “pull your hair out” time, can now be done in 3 button clicks. Click the “ad type” selector to on, Click the “select all” slider to select all the shirts on the page, and then finally click create to launch all the pre-filled tabs. Everything done for you so that you can spend time on what REALLY matters, creating and uploading so that more customers can buy your products on Merch by Amazon!

After you have clicked the link above and given it a spin, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Until next time, keep creating!

Comments
  • This is so amazing! Thanks so much for continuing to create such awesome time-saving software to help us with our Merch businesses. This is yet another game changer and I can’t wait to get started with it!

  • Need help just downloaded the Merch Amigo but when i click on create Campaign i get this message.
    My Campaign page is Blank. Please help.
    Thanks
    Lawrence

  • I got set up for this and created 5 ads. I left the keyword settings on automatic, but my experience is that I have much better success when I choose my keywords manually. However, I have not tested the automatic keyword function very extensively. What kind of success do you get with each of these options?
    I am thinking that even if the auto-keyword option is less successful at converting, the best strategy might be to use Merch Amigo and the auto-keyword function anyway (I realize that I can use MA and still manually insert keywords), then use the saved time to create more designs and listings. Perhaps the additional listings will result in more sales than fewer, but more optimally advertised listings. What do you think?

  • Thank you Ken for creating this awesome tool! AMS sucks up a lot of time, but is really important to driving traffic to designs, especially new ones that target more competitive keywords. This will definitely save a lot of time 🙂

  • I tried Merch Amigo and liked it, so I subscribed. But now the MA toolbar has disappeared from my Merch account so I can’t use it.
    I’m ready to create some ads, but instead, I’m having to deal with this problem. I sent in a support ticket and now I guess I just have to wait until somebody gets to it.

  • Thank you for offering a wonderful tool. Since I’m still new to Merch by Amazon, does my Merch account have to be approved for Amazon Advertising before I can use Merch Amigo?

      • What is required in order to be considered / approved for an advertising account on MBA? I’ve tried requesting advertising for this platform but keep getting directed to my account on FBA.

        • They need to open it back up for Merch sellers. I do not have a time period on this, but when it is turned back on, you will get a code to sign up with in the Merch dashboard whenever that happens.

  • Hey Neil, informative post thanks. I used to have an AMS account but I am locked out of it currently. Is there any way to sign up for an AMS account currently? Thanks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *