Learning a new platform can be intimidating for even the most experienced digital marketer. I have a client that uses Adobe Experience Cloud, which is a host of different marketing platforms ranging from bid management, audience management & creation, to direct media buys.
As I learned the new platform, there were a few need-to-knows that are important to have when utilizing AMO.
Portfolio Hierarchy
Within AMO, after you have added all the necessary tracking to your search accounts to pull in your campaigns, you can create a portfolio hierarchy. This hierarchy can be determined by whatever your marketing objectives are. Within the portfolios, you can group campaigns based on those objectives.
For example, I have three campaigns that are focused on revenue and two campaigns that are focused on leads. In my hierarchy, I could set up two separate portfolios to target each of these objectives.
Important Note: Adobe allows you to set up different custom events that pertain to your website and the actions you want your users to take. These can be as granular as you’d like. Objectives could include: visits, carts, orders, abandoned carts, time spent on the page, check-outs, etc.
When setting up your portfolio hierarchy, you can base it on how you’ve set up your different website events.
Objective Weights
After you’ve set up different events, you can tell AMO to optimize your portfolios towards them. You can set up objectives based on those events – called ‘objectives.’
Setting up objectives allows your portfolio to optimize toward multiple events, but with different priorities. If I take my above hierarchy and focus on my Revenue portfolio, there are additional events that I could target. I could set up an objective that looks like this:
Revenue 50 + Carts 50
Or an objective like this:
Revenue 50 + Carts 25 + Visits 25
With having multiple events set up through Adobe on your website, you have a variety of options to set up different types of objectives with various weights. It is a great testing initiative too!
Bidding
There are different options to choose from for managing your portfolio budgets in AMO.
Depending on how you want to manage your budget, you can choose from monthly, daily, day of the week, etc., to whatever fits your spending goals.
One important thing to note is that at the portfolio level for spend management, AMO will only make automatic budget adjustments in the search interfaces if the status is selected as ‘Optimized’ (see below screenshot). If it is set to ‘Active’, no changes will be made to campaigns in the interfaces and AMO will only be collecting data to learn.
Additional Set-Ups
There are additional setup features that you can select or adjust at the portfolio settings level. These encompass how much of your budget you want to put towards performance learning, if you want to allow Adobe to spend more/less than your set budget depending on performance, what limits do you want to put on spending, etc.
Conclusion
AMO is a good platform to utilize automated bidding if you have large search accounts, large budgets, and if you do not want to spend your time managing keyword bids or campaign daily budgets. It is a platform that has many nuances and little ins and outs that are important to know and study before utilizing to ensure that all your settings are correct.
