July 23, 2024 • 48 mins
Can mastering Amazon PPC strategies catapult your online sales to the next level? Tune in as we uncover advanced tactics that top performers use to dominate the marketplace. In this episode, Matt, with his wealth of experience analyzing hundreds of advertising accounts, shares powerful insights on why single SKU campaigns and separating match types are essential for achieving clarity and scalability. You’ll also learn how robust naming conventions can simplify campaign management, making it easier to filter and analyze performance as your number of SKUs grows.
Navigating the complexities of PPC software is no small feat, but what if there’s a way to balance automation with strategic human oversight? We dissect the effectiveness of semi-automated approaches, leveraging tools like PPC Ninja and Take a Metrics, and emphasize the importance of setting proper rules for automation. Matt also discusses the strategic significance of exact match keywords, revealing their benefits, potential costs, and how to balance different keyword match types to optimize your overall conversion rates.
Prime Day can be a goldmine, but only if you play your cards right. Discover how strategic adjustments in your advertising budgets can maximize profitability during this high-traffic event. We also explore why focusing on sponsored product ads is crucial despite the allure of newer ad types. Finally, we highlight the importance of integrating PPC with your overall business strategy, ensuring that your efforts aren't in vain. Join us for an episode packed with actionable insights and strategies that can transform your Amazon advertising game.
🚀 Transform your brand on Amazon by building a powerful customer list with the After Purchase Funnel Blueprint course. Click here to get the full course for free.
➡️ Ready to go deeper into your Amazon FBA journey to accelerate your success? Get your hands on ALL of the Brand Fortress HQ resources, mentorship, and knowledge base by visiting us at BrandFortressHQ.com
⭐️ Want to help our show grow so we can continue bringing you the very best of guests and actionable content for your Amazon FBA business? We'd greatly appreciate if you took two minutes to give us a five star rating and review. Thank you!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right.
So we are live, and today we'regoing to be talking about
proven Amazon PPC strategies fortop performers as a part of
this Tactics Tuesday.
Welcome everyone to the podcastand also welcome anyone who is
joining us live.
This is a topic that we wantedto talk about because,
especially we're recording thisactually on the beginning of
(00:20):
Prime Day PPC is one of thosethings that is ever-changing.
The beginning of Prime Day PPCis one of those things that is
ever-changing, and so we reallywanted to tackle this topic and
provide some principles that aregoing to be important and
useful for brand builders, nomatter what stage you're at that
are listening to this.
So with that, matt, I'm goingto turn it to actually, if you
(00:42):
want to start, maybe a couple ofthings that you've learned in
the last year or so as far asPPC, and maybe some common
misconceptions that you thinkpeople have or mistakes that
sellers make when it comes toPPC.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, I would say so in my role in working in the
agency space.
I've probably analyzed three400 advertising accounts over
the course of the last fouryears.
So I mean, I would say that thevery first thing that most
people I don't want to say getwrong.
There's more than one way toskin a cat, especially in the
game of Amazon PPC, but I thinkstructure is one of the first
(01:20):
ways that people get thingswrong.
I personally I don't know howyou guys feel about this, but I
always have single SKU campaignsfirst off and foremost.
I also keep all of my matchtypes separate in campaigns.
Also, it just for me makes iteasier to be able to isolate a
match type because they performdifferently.
So I would say structure isprobably the biggest thing in
terms of things that peoplecould do better, sellers could
(01:42):
do better and, in my opinion,when you have the right
structure, when you have theright foundation to start with,
it allows you to scale a wholelot easier and it also makes the
data a whole lot more clear,because you know that.
You know we know that exactmatch converts differently than
broad match and it's less.
You know the CPCs are differentas well.
So when you get those intoseparate campaigns, those match
(02:09):
types into separate campaigns.
It allows you to scale and andadjust based very specifically
on that match type.
So I'd say that's probably thebiggest thing that I see is is
just the structure of thecampaigns could be a whole lot
better.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, that's a great point is that, I mean, if you
start out with a good structure,and I think it comes down to
not only your match types butalso even something as simple as
naming conventions.
So we use both video and imagefor sponsor brand quite a bit
now, especially with brands thatare more mature, and just
having that breakout of, youknow, putting video in the
(02:39):
campaign name makes it so mucheasier to know.
Like, okay, are the staticimages that we have or kind of
the carousel image ads that wehave, are those outperforming
the video or is the videoactually doing a lot better in
telling that brand story?
And it really depends on thebrand.
But it's important to know likewhich one is having a bigger
(02:59):
impact, either video or stillimages.
And that's just kind of onekind of micro example of why
having a good campaign structurehelps you manage your account,
especially once you startgetting, you know, numerous SKUs
in there.
I mean, it's one thing if youonly have one, two or three SKUs
, but once you start getting 10,20, a hundred SKUs, it can get
pretty complicated pretty fastif you don't have a good
(03:21):
structure.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Well, in the naming convention too.
I think one of the thingsthat's nice about that is that,
whether you're viewing yourcampaigns within the actual
sponsored ads console or whetheryou're downloading the reports
or viewing them in some otherplatform, if you really have a
good naming convention where,let's say, every important
(03:44):
aspect about that campaign isdetailed within the naming
convention.
So, in other words, is it videoor image, you know.
Is it sponsored products orsponsored brands or sponsored
display, you know.
What SKU is it?
What match type is it?
Is it exact broad phrase auto?
You know all of those thingsbroken out.
Sometimes it can make forsomewhat of a long campaign name
(04:07):
, but at the same time, it makesit really easy when you're
filtering.
You know so, whether, again,whether you're in the console on
Amazon or you're just viewingit, as you know, as a downloaded
spreadsheet or something, ifyou can filter and sort and
search by either you know SKUname or product name, you know
(04:28):
so, like, for instance, we sellpool poles, we sell pool nets,
we sell a brush, so we couldeven have, if we wanted to have
it by a product type, you knowwe could have pole brush net,
you know, or something like that, so that I can search by any
one of those at any given timewhere I can search video, or I
can search, so that I can searchby any one of those at any
given time where I can searchvideo, or I can search image, or
I can search auto, and then Ican get all the campaigns that
(04:50):
are related to that particularsearch and see how they're
comparing.
So the naming convention ispretty important there.
But I would also say, if you'regoing to use naming convention,
be careful that you're beingvery exact about using it
exactly the same way every time,so you can't have poll in one
campaign and then polls inanother campaign, or you know
(05:12):
like, be very careful.
In fact, it would even beuseful to set up a spreadsheet
where you had it set up, so thatyou choose, like anytime you're
going to set up a new campaign.
You choose okay, what's the SKU, what's the type, is it
sponsored brand, product, youknow.
Display, is it?
You know, choose all thedifferent things.
And then it spits out thecampaign name and you just copy
(05:33):
the name and paste it, you know,in when you create the new
campaign.
That way you can't screw it up,you know, because it's really
easy to mistype something orthings like that and then all of
a sudden now, anytime yousearch for that, you don't
actually get the campaign thatyou think you're getting.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, that's a good point and that actually connects
really well to one of the otherthings that I want to make sure
that we cover before we got toodeep, which is, you know, one
of these.
I think one of the biggestmistakes that's being made out
there, and kind of you know whatI would call Amazon lore, is
this concept, and a lot of itcomes from software automation
for Amazon PPC, where you know,kind of this.
(06:08):
The conventional wisdom is,let's say, that you've got a
keyword that you notice isworking in an auto campaign that
converts Well, you know, thenthe conventional wisdom is after
it's got a couple of sales, wewant to move that over to.
You know an exact match, andthe reality about it is is that
you can really be running bothat the same time and they have
different purposes.
(06:29):
And not only that, but you know, say you create that exact
match campaign and it's got 10keywords in it that are also
performing Well.
Again, that typically what thesoftware does and kind of
conventional wisdom is take thathero keyword, if you will, and
put in a new campaign.
The problem with that is is thatthere's a certain amount of
kind of essentially randomness.
(06:49):
That happens anytime you createa campaign and there's weight to
campaigns that have been aroundfor a long time, that have
historical data to them.
So that's why you know a coupleof things.
Is you know, if you're lookingat, hey, I need to redo, you
know a product line, or ifyou're looking at redoing your
whole account, why you shouldn'tcreate all your campaigns from
scratch?
You're better off kind ofmodifying and rebuilding the
(07:13):
campaigns that have beensuccessful in the past as
opposed to just deleting themand creating new campaigns.
And so with that, you know, oneof the things that we've
discovered that has workedreally well for us is, rather
than kind of migrating thosehero keywords into new campaigns
, keep them in the campaign thatthey're already working in
because they've proven a certainresult in there in order to be
(07:34):
profitable, and then take theother keywords that maybe
they're doing okay, maybethey're not doing well at all,
and move those into the newcampaign, because then you're
not rolling the dice with thekeywords that are working for
you, that are those quoteunquote heroes, and it gives you
the opportunity then to testthose other keywords that, hey,
(07:55):
when they're getting a biggerportion of the impression share
in the budget, do they actuallyperform better, and sometimes
they do.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Well, and also there's a certain amount of
value in that.
You mentioned kind of therandomness of how it can, you
know, sometimes function andsince the historical data is
what Amazon kind of uses as partof its algorithmic, you know,
determination for whetherthey're going to show you or not
show you, what happens is when,if you've got keywords that are
not performing well in onecampaign and you now move them
(08:25):
to a new campaign whateverhistorical data Amazon had that
for some reason might have beenaffecting those keywords Like
there's times we all know thisto be true there's times you
have keywords in a campaign andyou know they're good, they're
good keywords for your product.
Like there is no reason thatthose keywords should not be
performing well and for whateverreason, at least from an ad
(08:47):
basis, they don't perform andyou don't know why.
And you can take those and movethem into a new campaign and
all of a sudden, now thatthey're in that new campaign,
now they start to produce andit's because whatever historical
data Amazon was using, forwhatever reason, it went south.
Like you threw those keywordsin that campaign, whatever
happened up front, it went south.
And now Amazon has that dataand it's like, no, we don't like
(09:09):
those keywords.
As soon as you shift them andall that historical data goes
away, you'll find sometimes youplace those keywords into a new
campaign and all of a suddenthey become a good keyword for
you where they weren't before.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that's againgoing back to the software piece
of it.
And this is why this, I think,is so important, because I feel
like for years we've beenpromised this kind of automated
solution, an easy button thatyou could just tap.
It would automatically, youknow, manage the accounts
effectively or the campaignseffectively down to, you know,
the CPC level.
The reality of it is is that,at least from everything that
(09:55):
I've seen right now is you know,you want to take kind of a
semi-automated approach is whatwe find effective where, yeah,
software is great at crunchingnumbers and telling you like,
okay, here's what your, you knowpredicted ACOS is and you know
data on, here's how manyimpressions you get with, you
know, this cost per click versusthat cost per click and those
types of things.
(10:16):
But it does take a person in theloop to kind of make those
decisions from a strategy levelof you know which keywords
should I start, move where tocreate new campaigns, because a
lot of the automated software isgoing to say, hey, this keyword
is working, create a newcampaign for this keyword and,
like we just talked about,that's pretty much the opposite
of what you want to do.
And then, in addition to that,you know there's a lot of nuance
(10:38):
with that of you know, inincreasing and decreasing both
your CPCs on a regular basis butthen also your campaign budgets
.
That I think is really hard froma structural standpoint to get
right if you're relying on asoftware to do 90% to 95% of the
work for you.
(10:58):
I know we personally use PPC.
Ninja Ritu we've had her on thepodcast does a fantastic job
with that and one of the reasonswhy we like that solution so
much is because it does a greatjob of providing that kind of
the best of both worlds, if youwill, because there is a
component in there where you canset up the parameters to say
here's what my goals are forthese campaigns or the account,
(11:21):
and then it'll show you what theautomated kind of
recommendations are for you knowbids and budgets and that type
of stuff, and you can, you know,accept all, reject, all, accept
.
You know you can pick whichones you want to accept and kind
of filter through there and Ithink that that kind of gives
you the best of both worldswhere it's efficient from a
management standpoint but alsoallows you to filter out those
(11:44):
things that maybe are a littlebit more nuanced or are outside
of kind of the standard process.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
I've used three or four different softwares for my
own brands and then I've seenthe result of other softwares in
analysis that we've done.
What I can say is that bidoptimization, I think, is
something that softwareautomated software can be really
good at.
Like you said, john, it's mathI mean figuring out what to
adjust your bid to is math.
There's one tool I take, ametrics that I actually
(12:11):
currently use.
They crunch so much data Idon't know how much ad spend
they have access to over thecourse of a month from all of
their clients, but they use thatdata to feed an AI that does a
predictive analysis on what itthinks that the conversion rate
is going to be at differenttimes throughout the day, based
on current data, yesterday'sdata, all the way back to a year
(12:33):
ago data.
So I think that having somesort of especially now in the
days of AI where it can crunch amassive amount of data bit
optimization is something that Ithink can be automated and I
can trust software to do the bidoptimization and I'm not that
concerned about going in andchecking that you don't.
Looking at the high level,metrics is sufficient in most
cases but, like you kind ofalluded to, john, where I think
(12:54):
software isn't good at and whereI think there has to be a human
in the loop and I've seen in myown brands where it's gone run
wild is like keyword harvesting.
Keyword harvesting I think ishard for software to do because
I think having software make adecision based on a conversion
to graduate a keyword to amanual campaign I mean I sell in
the barbecue accessory spaceand if I get a curiosity click
(13:17):
from a pool tool and someonebuys my heat resistant glove
that was searching for a poolrake I don't want to show up, I
don't want to target pull rakein any of my campaigns.
So actually one of thesoftwares that I had, I didn't
have any sort of rules at allset on what kind of you know
what keyword harvesting rulesthere were, like I want at least
three conversions to happen orfour conversions to happen
before I graduated.
(13:37):
But I kind of in that I gottrigger shy and in that I don't
let software Take a Metrics.
What I use now has the optionto automatically bring or
converting keywords into manualcampaigns.
I have that completely turnedoff because I think that in a
lot of cases humans are going todo that.
Me as the human knowing my brandand knowing my consumer, can
(13:58):
think of keywords, that kind oftangential type of keywords that
I might want to show up for.
I just don't think software isgreat at that.
So I think software has itsplace.
I think bid optimization iswhere you can use it effectively
(14:19):
as long as you have the rightrules in place.
But I think there always has tobe a human in the loop.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, I think too.
You know, like the, the keywordharvesting thing is definitely
difficult, and this is evendifficult even even if you take
the automated piece out of itand you're not talking software
but you're just talking agencies.
You know that that are you knowwhen, when you're not running
it internally as a company andyou're having an agency do it.
That's not to say, don't havean agency, but make sure that
(14:46):
you're having good conversationswith them and that you're
paying attention to things,because, for instance, within
our category, there's a numberof keywords that at first blush
if you don't know the categorythey look like they are
extremely targeted to what wesell and in reality they are
extremely untargeted to what wesell.
So, for instance, a good onewould be a swimming pool net.
(15:08):
Now we sell pool nets forcleaning the pool.
The problem is is that what wehave found over time is that
swimming pool net is althoughoccasionally people are using
that phrase to search for a netthat you would clean the pool
with the majority of time whenthey're searching for that,
they're actually searching for anet that you would clean the
pool with.
The majority of time whenthey're searching for that,
they're actually searching for anet that you put over the pool
(15:30):
to keep leaves out.
To keep leaves and debris outof the pool, which is a totally
different product, right?
Well, every automated tool andevery agency that we've ever
tried, you know, has tried toplace those keywords into our
campaigns.
Because, oh, we got aconversion on it, you know, and
like all of a sudden, we got topay attention because it looks
very relevant.
Turns out it's not, and so Iwould just say you know your
(15:52):
brand best.
Make sure that you're eitherturning off harvesting if it's
automated, because I thinkthere's going to be a lot of
situations like that, or whenyou're dealing with an agency,
you need to make sure thatyou're having conversations
about that.
You know, like those specifickeywords seem like they're
relevant, but they're not.
This is why you know that sortof thing and just kind of
keeping tabs on that because ithappens, and then you end up
(16:13):
spending a boatload of money ona keyword that you know really
never should have been in acampaign at all.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, a couple of things there.
I mean any, I would say.
You know, you know, no agencyis perfect, but at the same time
, any agency that's worth theirsalt is going to do a couple of
things to make sure that thatdoesn't happen.
Or at least this is what we dois, first of all, you know,
before, if we're looking at aseriously looking at a keyword
like that, we're going toactually look at what the search
terms are for it.
And in those search terms, ifwe see that the first 10, 20
(16:42):
products are a pool that goesover you know, or a net that
goes over the pool, as opposedto you know something or you
know what you're selling, thenobviously you know that's what
people are buying, which is whyAmazon is ranking those products
organically a lot higher for it.
The other thing is is that youknow that's why you keep tabs
and you know do keywordadjustments, do keyword
(17:04):
adjustments.
And you shouldn't be spendingboat loads of money on something
like that, because you shouldbe able to tell and now it
depends on conversion ratewithin generally 10, 20 clicks,
whether you're headed in theright direction or not.
So that way you're not burninga whole bunch of money on
keywords that aren't going towork.
But in addition to that, what Iwould also say is there are a
lot of keywords that can be likethat and I think that where
(17:27):
they fit really well into whatwe call a catch-all campaign,
which is basically kind of theselow volume keywords that we put
a low bid in for that maybe youonly get a sale once a week,
once a month, doesn't matter.
Once a week, once a monthdoesn't matter.
But if I'm only paying, youknow if I'm paying, you know,
just to make the extremes, youknow, say I'm paying $10 a click
(17:50):
for that.
You know that pool term, thatdoesn't convert very well for
the product.
Well, in order to be at thevery top of the page, that's a
problem.
You know, if I'm not convertingwell, well, but if I'm paying
50 cents and the only peoplethat I'm really going to show to
are the ones that are diehard,you know, looking at researching
(18:10):
, you know pool stuff and itmight be a good fit for them
Well, that keyword I can stillget a good ACOS on at that 50
cents and drive some incrementalsales by using a catch-all
campaign.
So that's another greatstrategy that people can use.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Well, it's good for auto too.
That similar strategy works verywell.
We've had a campaign that we'verun for years.
To be honest, we haven't reallychanged it much.
Occasionally we adjust the bidand whatnot, but it's basically
a low-bid auto.
That's just a catch-all, likewe just run it, and we just run
it at a really low bid and letAmazon just throw whatever they
want at it.
And because the bid is so low,our ACOS on that is incredibly
(18:50):
good and we actually get quite alot of sales out of that, more
than you might think.
Just because we're lettingAmazon kind of go wild with it
to some degree, I'm just sayinglook, find whatever sales you
can grab for us.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
If we can get it for that price, I'll do that all day
long.
Well, I think that's animportant point too is that I
feel like the Amazon lore outthere is that the bulk of your
sales should be coming fromexact match and in a perfect
world, everything shouldeventually migrate to exact
match.
So you're so, you know,narrowed in.
The reality of it is.
This is that you know, when youlook every ad type and you know
(19:26):
campaign type has its own prosand cons, and so, if we look at
it, you know, talk about autocampaigns.
Hey, if I can add incrementalsales that are profitable, I'll
use auto campaigns.
For that I'll use broad, I'lluse'll use broad.
We do a lot of broad modbecause the nice thing there is
that if you look at exact matchkeywords, the bids are a lot
(19:48):
higher because everybody's likeoh, I got to be exact match.
Well, we might go over to broadand use a broad mod where the
CPC is a third of what we'repaying for an exact match.
So we can get some of thebenefits of what we would with
an exact match at a much lowerprice, which allows us to have a
(20:09):
profitable ACoS that we couldnever get with an exact match
keyword and drive sales that way.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Taking that another step further, which I've seen a
lot of people do, is a broadmatch campaign will generate a
sale for a search term, and thenthat seller will graduate that
to an exact match, but thenthey'll negate it in the broad
match, even though that was aprofitable sale.
I don't understand that.
(20:37):
I mean, yes, I understanddouble targeting something.
I don't know that you willactually compete against
yourself in that case though,but it's a profitable sale one
way or the other.
If it's at a good ACOS in thebroad match, I'm not going to
negate it just because I'mgraduating it to an exact match.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Based on what John just said, the likelihood is
that if you do that, if younegate it and you put it into
this exact match campaign, thelikelihood is you're going to
pay more per click in the exactmatch than you were in the broad
and so, even though it is exact, you might end up with a higher
ACOS that way than having leftit.
(21:15):
So you'd be better off leavingit and comparing.
You know, over time you knowhow those, how those numbers,
you know flesh out and how theycompare.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Yeah, and that's exactly what we do with a lot of
campaigns is so if we seesomething in, you know, in a, in
a broad campaign that's akeyword that's performing really
well, that we're not currentlyrunning an exact match, we'll
run an exact match but we'regoing to pay a lot more for that
CPC.
Now that can make a lot of senseAgain, even in an exact match.
I would say the benefit there,and part of the reason why the
(21:45):
CPCs are higher, is that becauseit's an exact match, you have a
lot more control and you'realso getting keyword rank for
that, because if Amazon keepsseeing that you're converting
well on cleaning pool net, forexample, then you're going to
organically rank high for that,and so there is a compounding
(22:05):
effect, or kind of a halo effect, if you will, that you get from
exact match keywords.
That is harder control ifyou're using broad, broad mod
phrase or you know other adtypes, and so there is, you know
, a reason to pay even above.
You know kind of what yourbreakeven ACOS is sometimes for
exact keywords.
(22:26):
But that doesn't mean that italways makes sense and that you
should stop using the othermatch types.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Well, also, I think it's important to remember, like
if you're using it for ranking,like if you're trying to use an
exact match campaign forranking and you're using it for
ranking, like if you're tryingto use an exact match campaign
for ranking and you're willingto spend more you know from an
ACoS perspective because that'swhat you're trying to do well
then you better be tracking tomake sure that you're actually
affecting your ranking, likethat's actually helping, because
if it's not, and you'reoverspending on your ACoS
(22:55):
because that's your target butyou're missing the target, well
then at some point you have todecide whether you're going to
turn that campaign or turn thatkeyword off, or turn the bid
down or whatever it is you'regoing to do, because now you're
just throwing away money if yourranking's not changing.
I was also going to mentionsomething else that I think is
probably important to payattention to, and that is we
were talking earlier about thewell, let's take the maybe say
(23:18):
more extreme example of thatauto campaign that we run a low
bid campaign.
Generally speaking, those aregoing to be fairly low
conversion rate keywords.
We're getting them at a low bid, so we get a good ACOS on those
, and so they're profitable.
But depending on how much ofthat kind of a strategy that you
employ, I think that you needto pay really close attention to
(23:40):
how does the conversion rate ofyour listing overall compare to
the competitors in yourcategory that you're trying to
beat in terms of a rankingperspective?
Because if the conversion rateof your product is fairly
similar to some of those otherproducts that really you're
trying to compete against andtrying to rank better than then
(24:01):
be careful using strategies thathave a low conversion rate that
are going to potentially bringdown the conversion rate of your
product overall.
You know, because you're reallyclose.
You know like if you've got a20% conversion rate and somebody
else has got a 15 and you knowthe sales that you're putting
through are only going to bringyou down marginally in that
(24:21):
conversion rate, it probablydoesn't matter.
But if you're all sitting atabout a 15% conversion rate and
you start throwing a bunch oflow conversion rate targeting at
that, I have a little bit ofconcern over that in terms of
your ranking strategy.
I'd be interested to hear whatyour guys' thoughts are on that,
but I just think it's somethingto be careful with.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
I think for me, I think it's important.
So what I think it's importantto pay attention to is match
types as a whole and whatpercentage of your spend is
going to each match type.
I think John mentioned the loreof having all of your keywords
be exact match because it's morespecific.
But I think having most of yourspend be exact match because
(25:02):
it's more specific and but Ithink having most of your spend
and when I say most, maybe 60,70% of your spend, I think
should be an exact matchcampaigns, maybe 30%, 20 to 30%
in broad and phrase, and thenonly like 10%, maybe even less
than that in an auto, I thinkyou should have all of those
match types.
But I think if you have thatratio and you're thinking about
it from in terms of how much amI spending on each match type, I
think that conversion rate endsup leveling out over time
(25:25):
because most of your spend isvery targeted.
You have a little bit.
That's research.
But again, one of the thingsthat you mentioned is making
sure that if you have a campaignthat you expect to increase
your rank, make sure that it isincreasing rank.
I think that's the same with allof your campaigns.
I think you should know whatthe purpose of every single
campaign is and don't just run acampaign because someone on
YouTube video told you to, but,like, actually understand what
(25:48):
is the purpose of this specificcampaign and how do I measure
that?
How do I measure what theresults of that is?
Because if, like you said, ifwe, if I have a ranking campaign
which I love, ranking campaignswhat I love about the ranking
campaigns that I've been usingrecently are just single keyword
, exact match.
But, like I pay attention tofirst of all, what am I spending
, how is it affecting it on theranking side and how can I
adjust that?
(26:09):
Can I adjust top of search?
Will that keep my conversionrate where it is?
So I think knowing kind ofwhere your spend is going and
where they are going to eachmatch type, I think kind of
levels out that conversion rateover time.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Well, the other thing that I would say, too, is that
remember that Amazon doesn'tonly take into account
conversion rate.
I mean, there are multiplefactors that are taken into
account for rank.
One of the other ones is salesvelocity, and I think that that
has a bigger impact than than wegive it credit for.
(26:43):
So, to kind of go to yourexample, mike, you know, if you
had a product that had, you know, an 18% conversion rate but a
much higher sales velocity,versus another product that had
20% conversion rate but a lowersales velocity, my guess is is
that the one at 18, at a muchhigher sales velocity, is
actually going to rank betterfor a lot of the keywords that
are going to matter for thatbrand and that where customers
(27:06):
are going to find them.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Fair point.
I think it's an important pieceto pay attention to.
Obviously, the algorithm is notfocusing on any one thing.
That's why it's an algorithmright.
There's all sorts of parametersthat are coming into play there
, so sales volume is definitelyimportant.
It actually brings me back tosomething that we were talking
about briefly before we jumpedon the podcast, and that is that
there's a number of otherfactors that come into play here
(27:31):
, not only in terms of ranking,but in terms of CPCs on your ads
and things like that, and oneof them is inventory and so
paying.
You know, paying really closeattention when you're running
your PPC that you have enoughinventory long-term that you can
sustain.
Because if you start spendingon a campaign for a particular
(27:53):
product or multiple campaigns,whatever it is, if you increase
your bid or you increase yourbudget or whatever that is, and
you're not paying, or youincrease your budget or whatever
that is and you're not payingattention to, well, if I do this
and my sales velocity begins toincrease, do I have enough
inventory to actually sustainthat long-term?
Then all you're doing isstealing money from yourself
(28:13):
because you might sell moreright now, but you're selling it
at a higher cost to yourselfand then you're going to run out
of inventory.
And now you're screwed whereyou'd have been better off not
raising your bid or raising yourbudget or whatever and just
keeping the status quo so thatat least you just continued to
sustain and were able tomaintain those sales through and
not run out of inventory.
The other piece of that is thatranking is very tied to
(28:37):
inventory.
There is a direct relationshipbetween how much inventory you
have for any given product andspecifically we've talked about
this before in terms of georanking and how much inventory
you have in particular areas ofthe country, especially high
population areas, that Amazontakes into account when they
rank you.
So your keyword ranking is notjust okay, I rank in my product
(29:01):
for this keyword.
This is where I rank everywhere.
I rank here for Philadelphia, Irank here for New York, I rank
here for Michigan and very muchit's based on what is the
delivery time for that productand if there's no inventory in
that area, then delivery timeswill be longer and your ranking
will be less.
Also, if Amazon sees that yourinventory is low let's say
(29:24):
you're down at 20 days ofinventory or 25 or 30, then your
ranking is going to be less,they will lower your rank
because you have less inventory.
Because ultimately what theywant is they want to put
products at the top of thecategory that they're going to
be able to continue to sell.
They want consistency.
Like consumers like consistency, and so Amazon's not going to
rank you well if you don't haveenough inventory to sustain
(29:45):
sales.
So pay attention to inventorywhen you're managing your PPC,
because you know, as that,inventory declines even if you
don't go out of stock, if yourinventory declines below roughly
45 days of inventory at anygiven point you're going to,
your ranking is going to suffer.
So you better be payingattention to that too.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, there's a couple of things that I want to
double click on there because Ithink that's so valuable.
One is that, when it comes toAmazon, looking for that
consistency I mean the days ofyou know where Amazon was kind
of the wild wild west and theywere willing to accept almost
anything, and you know sellerswere basically on the platform
as a way of essentially creatinga job, or basically over in the
(30:28):
sense of you have to thinkabout Amazon more now as walking
into a Walmart or Target in thesense of they want to see that
product in the same spot on theshelf all day, every day.
Because I can tell you rightnow I mean I think we talked
with a couple of our brandbuilder guests about it where
you know they ran out ofinventory and they couldn't
fulfill inventory to I don'tremember if it was Walmart or
(30:49):
Target for like a month or twoand they got completely pulled
off the shelves because Walmarthas a certain number that they
need to hit with every singleone of those slots on the shelf.
Now, in theory, there'sunlimited shelf space on Amazon,
but in practice there's alimited number of slots on page
one and Amazon they're investingin visibility in your brand
(31:12):
just as much as you areinvesting in Amazon between ads
and everything else that you'redoing in order to build your
brand on Amazon.
So they look at that and theysay, okay, if we don't see that
consistency over time, thenwe're going to put somebody else
in that spot that does providethat consistency, both in
staying in stock but also theinventory levels that you need
(31:33):
in order to be a consistentbrand on the Amazon platform.
So I think that's a reallyimportant piece for people to be
aware of.
The other thing that I wascurious to get your guys'
thoughts on this is kind of atheory that we're testing right
now as we record this, for PrimeDay is rather than so.
(31:53):
Let's say that you're startingto run out of stock and you know
that it's going to be slowcoming in and you want to slow
down your ads.
Well, rather than pausingcampaigns or adjusting budgets
and we'll talk about budgetshere in a second one thing that
we're testing for Prime Day onone particular account is
actually significantly reducingthe bids to about 50% of what we
(32:17):
would normally bid, and thetheory behind that is that as
soon as you start pausing andunpausing campaigns again, you
throw that kind ofunpredictability into the
situation.
And then the other piece isthat if we significantly lower
bids, what we find is thatAmazon campaigns with limited
(32:38):
bids perform actually worse thancampaigns that have plenty of
budget.
Or, excuse me, campaigns withlimited budget perform worse, is
what it really boils down to.
So our theory is by reducingthe bids significantly, yes, we
realize we're slowing down sales, but those sales that we're
getting are actually much moreprofitable.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And by keeping your budgets high, as opposed to
bringing a budget down andsaying I want to spend less,
then you're still maintainingthat differential that so far,
for you, seems to be making adifference the campaigns that
have budget that outstrips whatAmazon says it means.
So if Amazon says you need $20for a campaign per day I don't
(33:21):
remember if we mentioned this onthe podcast or if this is
pre-podcast, but we were talkingabout how you've been running
your campaigns at like threetimes what Amazon recommends for
that budget and that you'regetting better ACOS out of that,
correct.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, and I think we talked about that before the
podcast and that's goodclarification.
So yeah, we've tested anywherefrom double to 10X and what we
found is that sweet spot ofthree to five times what those
campaigns typically spend in aday.
If we give it so, say it'snormally.
Just to make the numbers easy,let's say it normally spends
(33:54):
$100 a a day.
If we give it three to $500budget, we see it be a lot more
efficient than if we gave it a$200 budget and at the same time
, we don't see any gain inefficiency If we give it a
thousand dollar budget or 10 X,what it means, and so that's why
, with that, then, this strategyfits that very well, because,
rather than reducing your budget, if you reduce the bid, then
(34:17):
that budget still stays high andyou still maintain that at
least that particular benefit.
Right, you get all theefficiency, but at the same time
it actually becomes moreefficient because, yes, you're
going to slow down sales, butlet's say that normally you're
paying a dollar for your clicks,or well, I guess in this day
and age let's call it $3.
Right, you cut that.
(34:38):
You know.
So if you cut your bids in half, and let's say you now you're
bidding a dollar 50, well, yeah,you're going to get a lot of
less impressions, a lot lessclicks, which means a lot less
sales.
But because those bids are somuch lower, those sales are
going to be a lot moreprofitable for you at the same
time.
So now you slow down your salesvelocity and made your ad sales
(35:00):
more profitable at the sametime.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Makes sense to me.
We haven't tested that, but itmakes sense as a strategy.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Mike, I know that you don't run any Prime Day deals
or anything along those lines.
Do you adjust campaign budgetsor bids specifically for Prime
Day?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
So we actually currently have PPC Ninja
managing things at the moment,and so we had a conversation
with them about that for PrimeDay, and I believe they are
pulling back bids for Prime Dayfor that reason, because we're
not running deals, we're notgoing to perform as well as
those, as those brands that arerunning deals.
(35:39):
Because we found that Prime Dayfor us and I think most of it is
because we're not a we're not aspontaneous kind of a product
it's not, like, you know,clothing or gadgets or things
like that.
You know that.
You know people are excitedabout.
You know it's a pool, and soit's one of those things where
either somebody needs one orsomebody doesn't for the most
part, and so if they need oneand I offer them a discount
(36:01):
today, maybe I sell it to themtoday, but I might've sold it to
them tomorrow or next week, youknow, at at regular price, and
they would have bought itanyways.
And that's that's actually whatwe found last prime Prime Day
we ran deals and we had a goodspike in sales, but then we just
had a big trough afterward thatwe normally don't see, and so
essentially all we did was juststeal those future sales and
(36:24):
sold them now at a lower pricepoint and at lower profit.
So we are not running deals,and this year we are lowering
bids on those campaigns so thatwe don't spend so much.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Well, that's another thing that we're testing to kind
of get the best of the both ofthose worlds is lowering the
bids for the first half of theday and then raising them back
up to 100 to 120% for the secondhalf of the day.
And again, the theory behindthat and we'll see what the data
tells us when we're done withthis but the theory behind that
is that, based on the data fromlast year, is that we know the
(37:00):
CPCs are the highest at thebeginning of the day because
everybody's got budget, but thetraffic stays pretty consistent
throughout the day and, moreimportantly, the conversion rate
stays pretty consistent.
So you kind of have thiscrossover effect around 11 am
Pacific time where you have theCPC start to come down by 20 to
(37:23):
30% because campaigns arerunning on a budget, but you
still have consistent conversionrate and traffic.
So our theory there is that forthe first half of the day we
cut those budgets by 25% to 50%and then for the second half of
the day we bring them back to100% to 120%.
So that way, those veryaggressive competitors because,
(37:44):
again, most of the brands thatwe're working with well, all the
brands we work with areUS-based and a lot of them are
premium products is all thoseaggressive overseas Chinese
competitors have burned throughmost of their budget in the
first half of the day and nowwe've got, you know, basically
full budget when we up thosebids on the second half of the
day, to be to get thatvisibility for the second half.
(38:05):
So that's the theory behind it.
We're testing out and I'mexcited to see what the numbers
look like after kind ofeverything shakes out in the
next week or so.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Well, and I think it's easy to make the assumption
that everybody who'sadvertising through the platform
knows what they're doing whenthe reality is, the majority of
them don't know what they'redoing, especially because number
one you've got a lot of newsellers who are trying to make
it big, right, and so they seean opportunity like Prime Day or
something like that, and theygo huge on it.
(38:35):
Not really understanding muchabout the platform.
They're just like, hey, it's anopportunity, right.
And so many of thoseindividuals that you would be
competing against for ads on aPrime Day event or something
like that are individuals thatdon't really understand
advertising.
They certainly don't understandAmazon advertising and they are
going to blow through thosebudgets right away, and so I
(38:55):
think it makes a whole lot ofsense as a strategy.
It's clear that the statisticsshow that a lot of sellers are
running out of budget midday.
Why not take advantage of thatopportunity?
It only makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, so I'm trying to think of.
So the other thing that I wantto make sure that we haven't
mentioned yet that I think isreally important and, matt, I
think you actually touched on ita little bit in kind of, we are
talking about the ad mix, whichis, I think, something that
gets lost, especially as Amazon,over the last couple of years,
has launched a number ofdifferent ad types, both between
(39:28):
the regular ad console and withDSP, keeping in mind that at
least what we're still seeing isthat about 70 to 80% of our
sales are still coming throughsponsored product ads.
So, yeah, video is fun,sponsored brand is fun and that
type of stuff, but at the end ofthe day, if you're really good
with sponsored product adsthat's the Pareto principle
(39:53):
you're 80-20 of winning when itcomes to Amazon ads.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, I think I mean overall, if you look, if you
just look at a sponsored product, like my dad, for example, it's
the.
I love understanding how people, how people shop on Amazon and
why they shop that way.
My dad is the kind of guy thatlikes to support the underdog.
So for him, if he sees a big,shiny, beautiful looking ad type
on the top, he's not going toclick on that because he sees
(40:18):
that as that's the guy that islike the Nikes or the Dasanis of
the world.
So he goes down and clicks onone of the sponsored product ads
and it looks like a listing.
Most people don't even know thatthose are ads.
Most consumers think thatthat's just a normal listing, my
dad included.
So I actually had to change howmy and actually show my dad how
(40:38):
to look at what an underdog is,as opposed to what he was doing
, which he was actually choosingpeople that were spending the
most amount of money, which waskind of funny.
But yeah, I think I think thereason for that, the reason for
sponsored product ads resultingin most of the sales for most
sellers, is because of howorganic they look.
They look just like a normallisting.
Most people don't even know.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, and I've had the same thing, you know, when
I've talked to people andthey're like you know, and
they're like, oh, what do you do?
And we start talking aboutAmazon.
And they're like, yeah, I shopon Amazon all the time.
And, um, and you know, we start.
I was like, yeah, listings thatyou see.
And they're like what, thoseare ads.
I'm like, yeah, and I'll pullout my phone and I'll show them
(41:18):
the little corner.
I'm like you see, where it saysin small gray tax sponsored.
That means somebody paid to bethere.
And I would say probably 80% ofthe people that I have that
conversation with are shockedthat that is an ad.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Well, the reality is.
I mean, when you look at a pageon Amazon, it's probably at
least 30, maybe 40% of the itemsthat are on that page that you
could click on are sponsored.
You know, like the?
Ratio of sponsored ads toorganic.
You know listings.
Is, you know so ridiculous, youknow, these days?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I think I saw a stat that it was like 70%.
I think the stat that I sawrecently was like 60 or 70% of
the pages sponsored ads.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
It could very well be .
I mean, it's massive, it'scrazy.
So, and you're right, mostpeople don't know.
You know that that's the caseand I do think it's one of those
things where you know you referto the Pareto principle is that
you know at least get reallygood at the one thing that you
know is the big piece ofsponsored ads.
Even if you don't really dabbletoo much in display or
(42:21):
sponsored brands, I think youshould.
But even if you didn't just getreally good at sponsored
product ads and recognize someof these primary principles that
we're presenting here.
For instance, one of the reallybig ones that I think will help
you a lot, if you're not alreadydoing it, is making sure that
you're keeping good performingkeywords in the campaigns that
(42:43):
they're in and taking thenon-performers out and moving
them someplace else.
That is a huge differential andpaying attention to if you're
using automated tools.
Recognizing that that's whatthose automated tools are going
to do is just the exact oppositeof that.
They're going to take the goodones out and put them someplace
else, and you're going to see adecrease in production on those
almost always, and so modifyingthose settings if you're using
(43:06):
the automation so that they'renot creating new campaigns,
they're not keyword harvesting,they're not moving those
keywords out, they're just doingbid optimization and you're
doing the management of thosecampaigns.
I think is a really big deal.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Yeah, I think those are some great action items for
our listeners, Mike, that youbrought up there.
Matt, anything else that youwould add?
I know PPC is a very complextopic that we could talk about
for a long time.
I think this is a good place tokind of wrap on this topic for
today.
But any kind of action itemthat you would give to listeners
when it comes to PPC that we'vetalked about.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, I don't think that spending hours in
spreadsheets and downloadingreports is the best use of most
brand owners' times.
I think that outsourcing PPC atsome point, at whatever level
that is for you, it makes a lotof sense for most brand owners.
But what I will say and this issomething that we've touched on
is that even if you havesomeone else or a tool, first of
(44:02):
all, don't have a tool, justdon't throw tool thinking that
it's going to be autopilot,because it's not.
But second of all, if you havean agency that's doing it for
you, you still have to beinvolved.
You still have to be looking atwhat keywords are they negating
, what keywords are theygraduating?
You know what are they relevant?
And maybe the agency doesn'tknow they're relevant, like Mike
threw up an example.
So I think being involved andnot just handing it off and
(44:24):
looking at a report once a monthis super important.
Being at least involvedsomewhat at high level on your
PPC campaigns is important forall brand owners.
I think that's the biggesttakeaway for me.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, and I think you know we didn't really touch on
it much here.
But one thing that I want towhat I would leave listeners
with is PPC is an importantcomponent, but remember that it
goes hand in hand with howstrong your listing is.
So if you've got a listing thatyou know has a pretty poor main
image and title, and you knowsecondary images and that type
(45:00):
of stuff compared to yourcompetitors, your PPC is going
to suffer, because PPC is reallyjust a visibility tool.
So make sure that you're usingboth of those levers.
Ppc is great at gettingyourself or getting your
products in front of customers.
Of those levers, ppc is greatat getting your products in
front of customers.
But then you also have to makesure that you have a listing
that really shines compared toyour competition, and that's
(45:21):
going to mean a lot of differentthings depending on what
category you are in and howcompetitive that category is.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Well, and I think a good extension of that idea is
just, overall, recognizing thatif you silo PPC, then you're
going to have problems.
If you're not paying attentionto PPC in terms of its relevance
to everything else, then youdon't really understand what
you're doing.
So, again, if you're not makingsure that your listing shines,
(45:50):
then you're overspending on PPCand you're just throwing money
away.
By the same token, again goingback to that idea of when you're
looking at PPC, that your ACOSis not the be all and end all,
you know, like paying attentionto what is the conversion rate,
you know, do you need to improvethe conversion rate on your
listing?
Like, are you in a bad spot?
(46:11):
Are you trying to use a campaignfor ranking, in which case
maybe spending more on ACOS isrelevant, and if you're using
the campaign for ranking, makingsure that you're actually
tracking the rank to see if it'sactually working, you can't
silo that off and just look atPPC from the standpoint of ACOS
and say, well, the ACOS is good,so I guess it's working for me.
Well, yeah, maybe, but maybethere's some other things that
(46:33):
you should be using PPC for anddialing in that you're not, or
maybe there's some other thingsthat you were using a PPC for,
but it's not really performing,but you're not tracking it and
paying attention to it.
So just don't silo it off.
You know, make sure that you'repaying attention to the other
areas of the business that touchPPC and that PPC touches.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, absolutely, and I know we're going to talk
about it here in the next coupleof weeks, but I'll just kind of
throw this as a teaser and aplug which is ACOS, when it
comes to advertising on Amazon,is probably the worst metric to
track.
There are much better metricsthan ACOS when it comes to how
effective is your ads and reallythe rest, and how healthy is
(47:16):
the rest of your Amazon account.
So I'll put that out as ateaser for a topic that we're
going to cover in the nextcouple of weeks, but I think
that's really important forpeople to understand when
they're looking at their account.
So I think that's a great placeto plot or kind of stopped for
today for PPC, we covered a lotof different things.
I would just encouragelisteners, you know, pick one or
(47:41):
two things based on whereyou're at in your Amazon journey
, and I think you'll find atleast implementing one of those
things will have a pretty bigimpact on your business.
All right.
So we are live, and today we'regoing to be talking about
proven Amazon PPC strategies fortop performers as a part of
this Tactics Tuesday.
Welcome everyone to the podcastand also welcome anyone who is
joining us live.
This is a topic that we wantedto talk about because,
especially we're recording thisactually on the beginning of
(00:20):
Prime Day PPC is one of thosethings that is ever-changing.
The beginning of Prime Day PPCis one of those things that is
ever-changing, and so we reallywanted to tackle this topic and
provide some principles that aregoing to be important and
useful for brand builders, nomatter what stage you're at that
are listening to this.
So with that, matt, I'm goingto turn it to actually, if you
(00:42):
want to start, maybe a couple ofthings that you've learned in
the last year or so as far asPPC, and maybe some common
misconceptions that you thinkpeople have or mistakes that
sellers make when it comes toPPC.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, I would say so in my role in working in the
agency space.
I've probably analyzed three400 advertising accounts over
the course of the last fouryears.
So I mean, I would say that thevery first thing that most
people I don't want to say getwrong.
There's more than one way toskin a cat, especially in the
game of Amazon PPC, but I thinkstructure is one of the first
(01:20):
ways that people get thingswrong.
I personally I don't know howyou guys feel about this, but I
always have single SKU campaignsfirst off and foremost.
I also keep all of my matchtypes separate in campaigns.
Also, it just for me makes iteasier to be able to isolate a
match type because they performdifferently.
So I would say structure isprobably the biggest thing in
terms of things that peoplecould do better, sellers could
(01:42):
do better and, in my opinion,when you have the right
structure, when you have theright foundation to start with,
it allows you to scale a wholelot easier and it also makes the
data a whole lot more clear,because you know that.
You know we know that exactmatch converts differently than
broad match and it's less.
You know the CPCs are differentas well.
So when you get those intoseparate campaigns, those match
(02:09):
types into separate campaigns.
It allows you to scale and andadjust based very specifically
on that match type.
So I'd say that's probably thebiggest thing that I see is is
just the structure of thecampaigns could be a whole lot
better.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, that's a great point is that, I mean, if you
start out with a good structure,and I think it comes down to
not only your match types butalso even something as simple as
naming conventions.
So we use both video and imagefor sponsor brand quite a bit
now, especially with brands thatare more mature, and just
having that breakout of, youknow, putting video in the
(02:39):
campaign name makes it so mucheasier to know.
Like, okay, are the staticimages that we have or kind of
the carousel image ads that wehave, are those outperforming
the video or is the videoactually doing a lot better in
telling that brand story?
And it really depends on thebrand.
But it's important to know likewhich one is having a bigger
(02:59):
impact, either video or stillimages.
And that's just kind of onekind of micro example of why
having a good campaign structurehelps you manage your account,
especially once you startgetting, you know, numerous SKUs
in there.
I mean, it's one thing if youonly have one, two or three SKUs
, but once you start getting 10,20, a hundred SKUs, it can get
pretty complicated pretty fastif you don't have a good
(03:21):
structure.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Well, in the naming convention too.
I think one of the thingsthat's nice about that is that,
whether you're viewing yourcampaigns within the actual
sponsored ads console or whetheryou're downloading the reports
or viewing them in some otherplatform, if you really have a
good naming convention where,let's say, every important
(03:44):
aspect about that campaign isdetailed within the naming
convention.
So, in other words, is it videoor image, you know.
Is it sponsored products orsponsored brands or sponsored
display, you know.
What SKU is it?
What match type is it?
Is it exact broad phrase auto?
You know all of those thingsbroken out.
Sometimes it can make forsomewhat of a long campaign name
(04:07):
, but at the same time, it makesit really easy when you're
filtering.
You know so, whether, again,whether you're in the console on
Amazon or you're just viewingit, as you know, as a downloaded
spreadsheet or something, ifyou can filter and sort and
search by either you know SKUname or product name, you know
(04:28):
so, like, for instance, we sellpool poles, we sell pool nets,
we sell a brush, so we couldeven have, if we wanted to have
it by a product type, you knowwe could have pole brush net,
you know, or something like that, so that I can search by any
one of those at any given timewhere I can search video, or I
can search, so that I can searchby any one of those at any
given time where I can searchvideo, or I can search image, or
I can search auto, and then Ican get all the campaigns that
(04:50):
are related to that particularsearch and see how they're
comparing.
So the naming convention ispretty important there.
But I would also say, if you'regoing to use naming convention,
be careful that you're beingvery exact about using it
exactly the same way every time,so you can't have poll in one
campaign and then polls inanother campaign, or you know
(05:12):
like, be very careful.
In fact, it would even beuseful to set up a spreadsheet
where you had it set up, so thatyou choose, like anytime you're
going to set up a new campaign.
You choose okay, what's the SKU, what's the type, is it
sponsored brand, product, youknow.
Display, is it?
You know, choose all thedifferent things.
And then it spits out thecampaign name and you just copy
(05:33):
the name and paste it, you know,in when you create the new
campaign.
That way you can't screw it up,you know, because it's really
easy to mistype something orthings like that and then all of
a sudden now, anytime yousearch for that, you don't
actually get the campaign thatyou think you're getting.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, that's a good point and that actually connects
really well to one of the otherthings that I want to make sure
that we cover before we got toodeep, which is, you know, one
of these.
I think one of the biggestmistakes that's being made out
there, and kind of you know whatI would call Amazon lore, is
this concept, and a lot of itcomes from software automation
for Amazon PPC, where you know,kind of this.
(06:08):
The conventional wisdom is,let's say, that you've got a
keyword that you notice isworking in an auto campaign that
converts Well, you know, thenthe conventional wisdom is after
it's got a couple of sales, wewant to move that over to.
You know an exact match, andthe reality about it is is that
you can really be running bothat the same time and they have
different purposes.
(06:29):
And not only that, but you know, say you create that exact
match campaign and it's got 10keywords in it that are also
performing Well.
Again, that typically what thesoftware does and kind of
conventional wisdom is take thathero keyword, if you will, and
put in a new campaign.
The problem with that is is thatthere's a certain amount of
kind of essentially randomness.
(06:49):
That happens anytime you createa campaign and there's weight to
campaigns that have been aroundfor a long time, that have
historical data to them.
So that's why you know a coupleof things.
Is you know, if you're lookingat, hey, I need to redo, you
know a product line, or ifyou're looking at redoing your
whole account, why you shouldn'tcreate all your campaigns from
scratch?
You're better off kind ofmodifying and rebuilding the
(07:13):
campaigns that have beensuccessful in the past as
opposed to just deleting themand creating new campaigns.
And so with that, you know, oneof the things that we've
discovered that has workedreally well for us is, rather
than kind of migrating thosehero keywords into new campaigns
, keep them in the campaign thatthey're already working in
because they've proven a certainresult in there in order to be
(07:34):
profitable, and then take theother keywords that maybe
they're doing okay, maybethey're not doing well at all,
and move those into the newcampaign, because then you're
not rolling the dice with thekeywords that are working for
you, that are those quoteunquote heroes, and it gives you
the opportunity then to testthose other keywords that, hey,
(07:55):
when they're getting a biggerportion of the impression share
in the budget, do they actuallyperform better, and sometimes
they do.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Well, and also there's a certain amount of
value in that.
You mentioned kind of therandomness of how it can, you
know, sometimes function andsince the historical data is
what Amazon kind of uses as partof its algorithmic, you know,
determination for whetherthey're going to show you or not
show you, what happens is when,if you've got keywords that are
not performing well in onecampaign and you now move them
(08:25):
to a new campaign whateverhistorical data Amazon had that
for some reason might have beenaffecting those keywords Like
there's times we all know thisto be true there's times you
have keywords in a campaign andyou know they're good, they're
good keywords for your product.
Like there is no reason thatthose keywords should not be
performing well and for whateverreason, at least from an ad
(08:47):
basis, they don't perform andyou don't know why.
And you can take those and movethem into a new campaign and
all of a sudden, now thatthey're in that new campaign,
now they start to produce andit's because whatever historical
data Amazon was using, forwhatever reason, it went south.
Like you threw those keywordsin that campaign, whatever
happened up front, it went south.
And now Amazon has that dataand it's like, no, we don't like
(09:09):
those keywords.
As soon as you shift them andall that historical data goes
away, you'll find sometimes youplace those keywords into a new
campaign and all of a suddenthey become a good keyword for
you where they weren't before.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that's againgoing back to the software piece
of it.
And this is why this, I think,is so important, because I feel
like for years we've beenpromised this kind of automated
solution, an easy button thatyou could just tap.
It would automatically, youknow, manage the accounts
effectively or the campaignseffectively down to, you know,
the CPC level.
The reality of it is is that,at least from everything that
(09:55):
I've seen right now is you know,you want to take kind of a
semi-automated approach is whatwe find effective where, yeah,
software is great at crunchingnumbers and telling you like,
okay, here's what your, you knowpredicted ACOS is and you know
data on, here's how manyimpressions you get with, you
know, this cost per click versusthat cost per click and those
types of things.
(10:16):
But it does take a person in theloop to kind of make those
decisions from a strategy levelof you know which keywords
should I start, move where tocreate new campaigns, because a
lot of the automated software isgoing to say, hey, this keyword
is working, create a newcampaign for this keyword and,
like we just talked about,that's pretty much the opposite
of what you want to do.
And then, in addition to that,you know there's a lot of nuance
(10:38):
with that of you know, inincreasing and decreasing both
your CPCs on a regular basis butthen also your campaign budgets
.
That I think is really hard froma structural standpoint to get
right if you're relying on asoftware to do 90% to 95% of the
work for you.
(10:58):
I know we personally use PPC.
Ninja Ritu we've had her on thepodcast does a fantastic job
with that and one of the reasonswhy we like that solution so
much is because it does a greatjob of providing that kind of
the best of both worlds, if youwill, because there is a
component in there where you canset up the parameters to say
here's what my goals are forthese campaigns or the account,
(11:21):
and then it'll show you what theautomated kind of
recommendations are for you knowbids and budgets and that type
of stuff, and you can, you know,accept all, reject, all, accept
.
You know you can pick whichones you want to accept and kind
of filter through there and Ithink that that kind of gives
you the best of both worldswhere it's efficient from a
management standpoint but alsoallows you to filter out those
(11:44):
things that maybe are a littlebit more nuanced or are outside
of kind of the standard process.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
I've used three or four different softwares for my
own brands and then I've seenthe result of other softwares in
analysis that we've done.
What I can say is that bidoptimization, I think, is
something that softwareautomated software can be really
good at.
Like you said, john, it's mathI mean figuring out what to
adjust your bid to is math.
There's one tool I take, ametrics that I actually
(12:11):
currently use.
They crunch so much data Idon't know how much ad spend
they have access to over thecourse of a month from all of
their clients, but they use thatdata to feed an AI that does a
predictive analysis on what itthinks that the conversion rate
is going to be at differenttimes throughout the day, based
on current data, yesterday'sdata, all the way back to a year
(12:33):
ago data.
So I think that having somesort of especially now in the
days of AI where it can crunch amassive amount of data bit
optimization is something that Ithink can be automated and I
can trust software to do the bidoptimization and I'm not that
concerned about going in andchecking that you don't.
Looking at the high level,metrics is sufficient in most
cases but, like you kind ofalluded to, john, where I think
(12:54):
software isn't good at and whereI think there has to be a human
in the loop and I've seen in myown brands where it's gone run
wild is like keyword harvesting.
Keyword harvesting I think ishard for software to do because
I think having software make adecision based on a conversion
to graduate a keyword to amanual campaign I mean I sell in
the barbecue accessory spaceand if I get a curiosity click
(13:17):
from a pool tool and someonebuys my heat resistant glove
that was searching for a poolrake I don't want to show up, I
don't want to target pull rakein any of my campaigns.
So actually one of thesoftwares that I had, I didn't
have any sort of rules at allset on what kind of you know
what keyword harvesting rulesthere were, like I want at least
three conversions to happen orfour conversions to happen
before I graduated.
(13:37):
But I kind of in that I gottrigger shy and in that I don't
let software Take a Metrics.
What I use now has the optionto automatically bring or
converting keywords into manualcampaigns.
I have that completely turnedoff because I think that in a
lot of cases humans are going todo that.
Me as the human knowing my brandand knowing my consumer, can
(13:58):
think of keywords, that kind oftangential type of keywords that
I might want to show up for.
I just don't think software isgreat at that.
So I think software has itsplace.
I think bid optimization iswhere you can use it effectively
(14:19):
as long as you have the rightrules in place.
But I think there always has tobe a human in the loop.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, I think too.
You know, like the, the keywordharvesting thing is definitely
difficult, and this is evendifficult even even if you take
the automated piece out of itand you're not talking software
but you're just talking agencies.
You know that that are you knowwhen, when you're not running
it internally as a company andyou're having an agency do it.
That's not to say, don't havean agency, but make sure that
(14:46):
you're having good conversationswith them and that you're
paying attention to things,because, for instance, within
our category, there's a numberof keywords that at first blush
if you don't know the categorythey look like they are
extremely targeted to what wesell and in reality they are
extremely untargeted to what wesell.
So, for instance, a good onewould be a swimming pool net.
(15:08):
Now we sell pool nets forcleaning the pool.
The problem is is that what wehave found over time is that
swimming pool net is althoughoccasionally people are using
that phrase to search for a netthat you would clean the pool
with the majority of time whenthey're searching for that,
they're actually searching for anet that you would clean the
pool with.
The majority of time whenthey're searching for that,
they're actually searching for anet that you put over the pool
(15:30):
to keep leaves out.
To keep leaves and debris outof the pool, which is a totally
different product, right?
Well, every automated tool andevery agency that we've ever
tried, you know, has tried toplace those keywords into our
campaigns.
Because, oh, we got aconversion on it, you know, and
like all of a sudden, we got topay attention because it looks
very relevant.
Turns out it's not, and so Iwould just say you know your
(15:52):
brand best.
Make sure that you're eitherturning off harvesting if it's
automated, because I thinkthere's going to be a lot of
situations like that, or whenyou're dealing with an agency,
you need to make sure thatyou're having conversations
about that.
You know, like those specifickeywords seem like they're
relevant, but they're not.
This is why you know that sortof thing and just kind of
keeping tabs on that because ithappens, and then you end up
(16:13):
spending a boatload of money ona keyword that you know really
never should have been in acampaign at all.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, a couple of things there.
I mean any, I would say.
You know, you know, no agencyis perfect, but at the same time
, any agency that's worth theirsalt is going to do a couple of
things to make sure that thatdoesn't happen.
Or at least this is what we dois, first of all, you know,
before, if we're looking at aseriously looking at a keyword
like that, we're going toactually look at what the search
terms are for it.
And in those search terms, ifwe see that the first 10, 20
(16:42):
products are a pool that goesover you know, or a net that
goes over the pool, as opposedto you know something or you
know what you're selling, thenobviously you know that's what
people are buying, which is whyAmazon is ranking those products
organically a lot higher for it.
The other thing is is that youknow that's why you keep tabs
and you know do keywordadjustments, do keyword
(17:04):
adjustments.
And you shouldn't be spendingboat loads of money on something
like that, because you shouldbe able to tell and now it
depends on conversion ratewithin generally 10, 20 clicks,
whether you're headed in theright direction or not.
So that way you're not burninga whole bunch of money on
keywords that aren't going towork.
But in addition to that, what Iwould also say is there are a
lot of keywords that can be likethat and I think that where
(17:27):
they fit really well into whatwe call a catch-all campaign,
which is basically kind of theselow volume keywords that we put
a low bid in for that maybe youonly get a sale once a week,
once a month, doesn't matter.
Once a week, once a monthdoesn't matter.
But if I'm only paying, youknow if I'm paying, you know,
just to make the extremes, youknow, say I'm paying $10 a click
(17:50):
for that.
You know that pool term, thatdoesn't convert very well for
the product.
Well, in order to be at thevery top of the page, that's a
problem.
You know, if I'm not convertingwell, well, but if I'm paying
50 cents and the only peoplethat I'm really going to show to
are the ones that are diehard,you know, looking at researching
(18:10):
, you know pool stuff and itmight be a good fit for them
Well, that keyword I can stillget a good ACOS on at that 50
cents and drive some incrementalsales by using a catch-all
campaign.
So that's another greatstrategy that people can use.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Well, it's good for auto too.
That similar strategy works verywell.
We've had a campaign that we'verun for years.
To be honest, we haven't reallychanged it much.
Occasionally we adjust the bidand whatnot, but it's basically
a low-bid auto.
That's just a catch-all, likewe just run it, and we just run
it at a really low bid and letAmazon just throw whatever they
want at it.
And because the bid is so low,our ACOS on that is incredibly
(18:50):
good and we actually get quite alot of sales out of that, more
than you might think.
Just because we're lettingAmazon kind of go wild with it
to some degree, I'm just sayinglook, find whatever sales you
can grab for us.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
If we can get it for that price, I'll do that all day
long.
Well, I think that's animportant point too is that I
feel like the Amazon lore outthere is that the bulk of your
sales should be coming fromexact match and in a perfect
world, everything shouldeventually migrate to exact
match.
So you're so, you know,narrowed in.
The reality of it is.
This is that you know, when youlook every ad type and you know
(19:26):
campaign type has its own prosand cons, and so, if we look at
it, you know, talk about autocampaigns.
Hey, if I can add incrementalsales that are profitable, I'll
use auto campaigns.
For that I'll use broad, I'lluse'll use broad.
We do a lot of broad modbecause the nice thing there is
that if you look at exact matchkeywords, the bids are a lot
(19:48):
higher because everybody's likeoh, I got to be exact match.
Well, we might go over to broadand use a broad mod where the
CPC is a third of what we'repaying for an exact match.
So we can get some of thebenefits of what we would with
an exact match at a much lowerprice, which allows us to have a
(20:09):
profitable ACoS that we couldnever get with an exact match
keyword and drive sales that way.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Taking that another step further, which I've seen a
lot of people do, is a broadmatch campaign will generate a
sale for a search term, and thenthat seller will graduate that
to an exact match, but thenthey'll negate it in the broad
match, even though that was aprofitable sale.
I don't understand that.
(20:37):
I mean, yes, I understanddouble targeting something.
I don't know that you willactually compete against
yourself in that case though,but it's a profitable sale one
way or the other.
If it's at a good ACOS in thebroad match, I'm not going to
negate it just because I'mgraduating it to an exact match.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Based on what John just said, the likelihood is
that if you do that, if younegate it and you put it into
this exact match campaign, thelikelihood is you're going to
pay more per click in the exactmatch than you were in the broad
and so, even though it is exact, you might end up with a higher
ACOS that way than having leftit.
(21:15):
So you'd be better off leavingit and comparing.
You know, over time you knowhow those, how those numbers,
you know flesh out and how theycompare.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Yeah, and that's exactly what we do with a lot of
campaigns is so if we seesomething in, you know, in a, in
a broad campaign that's akeyword that's performing really
well, that we're not currentlyrunning an exact match, we'll
run an exact match but we'regoing to pay a lot more for that
CPC.
Now that can make a lot of senseAgain, even in an exact match.
I would say the benefit there,and part of the reason why the
(21:45):
CPCs are higher, is that becauseit's an exact match, you have a
lot more control and you'realso getting keyword rank for
that, because if Amazon keepsseeing that you're converting
well on cleaning pool net, forexample, then you're going to
organically rank high for that,and so there is a compounding
(22:05):
effect, or kind of a halo effect, if you will, that you get from
exact match keywords.
That is harder control ifyou're using broad, broad mod
phrase or you know other adtypes, and so there is, you know
, a reason to pay even above.
You know kind of what yourbreakeven ACOS is sometimes for
exact keywords.
(22:26):
But that doesn't mean that italways makes sense and that you
should stop using the othermatch types.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Well, also, I think it's important to remember, like
if you're using it for ranking,like if you're trying to use an
exact match campaign forranking and you're using it for
ranking, like if you're tryingto use an exact match campaign
for ranking and you're willingto spend more you know from an
ACoS perspective because that'swhat you're trying to do well
then you better be tracking tomake sure that you're actually
affecting your ranking, likethat's actually helping, because
if it's not, and you'reoverspending on your ACoS
(22:55):
because that's your target butyou're missing the target, well
then at some point you have todecide whether you're going to
turn that campaign or turn thatkeyword off, or turn the bid
down or whatever it is you'regoing to do, because now you're
just throwing away money if yourranking's not changing.
I was also going to mentionsomething else that I think is
probably important to payattention to, and that is we
were talking earlier about thewell, let's take the maybe say
(23:18):
more extreme example of thatauto campaign that we run a low
bid campaign.
Generally speaking, those aregoing to be fairly low
conversion rate keywords.
We're getting them at a low bid, so we get a good ACOS on those
, and so they're profitable.
But depending on how much ofthat kind of a strategy that you
employ, I think that you needto pay really close attention to
(23:40):
how does the conversion rate ofyour listing overall compare to
the competitors in yourcategory that you're trying to
beat in terms of a rankingperspective?
Because if the conversion rateof your product is fairly
similar to some of those otherproducts that really you're
trying to compete against andtrying to rank better than then
(24:01):
be careful using strategies thathave a low conversion rate that
are going to potentially bringdown the conversion rate of your
product overall.
You know, because you're reallyclose.
You know like if you've got a20% conversion rate and somebody
else has got a 15 and you knowthe sales that you're putting
through are only going to bringyou down marginally in that
(24:21):
conversion rate, it probablydoesn't matter.
But if you're all sitting atabout a 15% conversion rate and
you start throwing a bunch oflow conversion rate targeting at
that, I have a little bit ofconcern over that in terms of
your ranking strategy.
I'd be interested to hear whatyour guys' thoughts are on that,
but I just think it's somethingto be careful with.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
I think for me, I think it's important.
So what I think it's importantto pay attention to is match
types as a whole and whatpercentage of your spend is
going to each match type.
I think John mentioned the loreof having all of your keywords
be exact match because it's morespecific.
But I think having most of yourspend be exact match because
(25:02):
it's more specific and but Ithink having most of your spend
and when I say most, maybe 60,70% of your spend, I think
should be an exact matchcampaigns, maybe 30%, 20 to 30%
in broad and phrase, and thenonly like 10%, maybe even less
than that in an auto, I thinkyou should have all of those
match types.
But I think if you have thatratio and you're thinking about
it from in terms of how much amI spending on each match type, I
think that conversion rate endsup leveling out over time
(25:25):
because most of your spend isvery targeted.
You have a little bit.
That's research.
But again, one of the thingsthat you mentioned is making
sure that if you have a campaignthat you expect to increase
your rank, make sure that it isincreasing rank.
I think that's the same with allof your campaigns.
I think you should know whatthe purpose of every single
campaign is and don't just run acampaign because someone on
YouTube video told you to, but,like, actually understand what
(25:48):
is the purpose of this specificcampaign and how do I measure
that?
How do I measure what theresults of that is?
Because if, like you said, ifwe, if I have a ranking campaign
which I love, ranking campaignswhat I love about the ranking
campaigns that I've been usingrecently are just single keyword
, exact match.
But, like I pay attention tofirst of all, what am I spending
, how is it affecting it on theranking side and how can I
adjust that?
(26:09):
Can I adjust top of search?
Will that keep my conversionrate where it is?
So I think knowing kind ofwhere your spend is going and
where they are going to eachmatch type, I think kind of
levels out that conversion rateover time.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Well, the other thing that I would say, too, is that
remember that Amazon doesn'tonly take into account
conversion rate.
I mean, there are multiplefactors that are taken into
account for rank.
One of the other ones is salesvelocity, and I think that that
has a bigger impact than than wegive it credit for.
(26:43):
So, to kind of go to yourexample, mike, you know, if you
had a product that had, you know, an 18% conversion rate but a
much higher sales velocity,versus another product that had
20% conversion rate but a lowersales velocity, my guess is is
that the one at 18, at a muchhigher sales velocity, is
actually going to rank betterfor a lot of the keywords that
are going to matter for thatbrand and that where customers
(27:06):
are going to find them.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Fair point.
I think it's an important pieceto pay attention to.
Obviously, the algorithm is notfocusing on any one thing.
That's why it's an algorithmright.
There's all sorts of parametersthat are coming into play there
, so sales volume is definitelyimportant.
It actually brings me back tosomething that we were talking
about briefly before we jumpedon the podcast, and that is that
there's a number of otherfactors that come into play here
(27:31):
, not only in terms of ranking,but in terms of CPCs on your ads
and things like that, and oneof them is inventory and so
paying.
You know, paying really closeattention when you're running
your PPC that you have enoughinventory long-term that you can
sustain.
Because if you start spendingon a campaign for a particular
(27:53):
product or multiple campaigns,whatever it is, if you increase
your bid or you increase yourbudget or whatever that is, and
you're not paying, or youincrease your budget or whatever
that is and you're not payingattention to, well, if I do this
and my sales velocity begins toincrease, do I have enough
inventory to actually sustainthat long-term?
Then all you're doing isstealing money from yourself
(28:13):
because you might sell moreright now, but you're selling it
at a higher cost to yourselfand then you're going to run out
of inventory.
And now you're screwed whereyou'd have been better off not
raising your bid or raising yourbudget or whatever and just
keeping the status quo so thatat least you just continued to
sustain and were able tomaintain those sales through and
not run out of inventory.
The other piece of that is thatranking is very tied to
(28:37):
inventory.
There is a direct relationshipbetween how much inventory you
have for any given product andspecifically we've talked about
this before in terms of georanking and how much inventory
you have in particular areas ofthe country, especially high
population areas, that Amazontakes into account when they
rank you.
So your keyword ranking is notjust okay, I rank in my product
(29:01):
for this keyword.
This is where I rank everywhere.
I rank here for Philadelphia, Irank here for New York, I rank
here for Michigan and very muchit's based on what is the
delivery time for that productand if there's no inventory in
that area, then delivery timeswill be longer and your ranking
will be less.
Also, if Amazon sees that yourinventory is low let's say
(29:24):
you're down at 20 days ofinventory or 25 or 30, then your
ranking is going to be less,they will lower your rank
because you have less inventory.
Because ultimately what theywant is they want to put
products at the top of thecategory that they're going to
be able to continue to sell.
They want consistency.
Like consumers like consistency, and so Amazon's not going to
rank you well if you don't haveenough inventory to sustain
(29:45):
sales.
So pay attention to inventorywhen you're managing your PPC,
because you know, as that,inventory declines even if you
don't go out of stock, if yourinventory declines below roughly
45 days of inventory at anygiven point you're going to,
your ranking is going to suffer.
So you better be payingattention to that too.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Yeah, there's a couple of things that I want to
double click on there because Ithink that's so valuable.
One is that, when it comes toAmazon, looking for that
consistency I mean the days ofyou know where Amazon was kind
of the wild wild west and theywere willing to accept almost
anything, and you know sellerswere basically on the platform
as a way of essentially creatinga job, or basically over in the
(30:28):
sense of you have to thinkabout Amazon more now as walking
into a Walmart or Target in thesense of they want to see that
product in the same spot on theshelf all day, every day.
Because I can tell you rightnow I mean I think we talked
with a couple of our brandbuilder guests about it where
you know they ran out ofinventory and they couldn't
fulfill inventory to I don'tremember if it was Walmart or
(30:49):
Target for like a month or twoand they got completely pulled
off the shelves because Walmarthas a certain number that they
need to hit with every singleone of those slots on the shelf.
Now, in theory, there'sunlimited shelf space on Amazon,
but in practice there's alimited number of slots on page
one and Amazon they're investingin visibility in your brand
(31:12):
just as much as you areinvesting in Amazon between ads
and everything else that you'redoing in order to build your
brand on Amazon.
So they look at that and theysay, okay, if we don't see that
consistency over time, thenwe're going to put somebody else
in that spot that does providethat consistency, both in
staying in stock but also theinventory levels that you need
(31:33):
in order to be a consistentbrand on the Amazon platform.
So I think that's a reallyimportant piece for people to be
aware of.
The other thing that I wascurious to get your guys'
thoughts on this is kind of atheory that we're testing right
now as we record this, for PrimeDay is rather than so.
(31:53):
Let's say that you're startingto run out of stock and you know
that it's going to be slowcoming in and you want to slow
down your ads.
Well, rather than pausingcampaigns or adjusting budgets
and we'll talk about budgetshere in a second one thing that
we're testing for Prime Day onone particular account is
actually significantly reducingthe bids to about 50% of what we
(32:17):
would normally bid, and thetheory behind that is that as
soon as you start pausing andunpausing campaigns again, you
throw that kind ofunpredictability into the
situation.
And then the other piece isthat if we significantly lower
bids, what we find is thatAmazon campaigns with limited
(32:38):
bids perform actually worse thancampaigns that have plenty of
budget.
Or, excuse me, campaigns withlimited budget perform worse, is
what it really boils down to.
So our theory is by reducingthe bids significantly, yes, we
realize we're slowing down sales, but those sales that we're
getting are actually much moreprofitable.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And by keeping your budgets high, as opposed to
bringing a budget down andsaying I want to spend less,
then you're still maintainingthat differential that so far,
for you, seems to be making adifference the campaigns that
have budget that outstrips whatAmazon says it means.
So if Amazon says you need $20for a campaign per day I don't
(33:21):
remember if we mentioned this onthe podcast or if this is
pre-podcast, but we were talkingabout how you've been running
your campaigns at like threetimes what Amazon recommends for
that budget and that you'regetting better ACOS out of that,
correct.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, and I think we talked about that before the
podcast and that's goodclarification.
So yeah, we've tested anywherefrom double to 10X and what we
found is that sweet spot ofthree to five times what those
campaigns typically spend in aday.
If we give it so, say it'snormally.
Just to make the numbers easy,let's say it normally spends
(33:54):
$100 a a day.
If we give it three to $500budget, we see it be a lot more
efficient than if we gave it a$200 budget and at the same time
, we don't see any gain inefficiency If we give it a
thousand dollar budget or 10 X,what it means, and so that's why
, with that, then, this strategyfits that very well, because,
rather than reducing your budget, if you reduce the bid, then
(34:17):
that budget still stays high andyou still maintain that at
least that particular benefit.
Right, you get all theefficiency, but at the same time
it actually becomes moreefficient because, yes, you're
going to slow down sales, butlet's say that normally you're
paying a dollar for your clicks,or well, I guess in this day
and age let's call it $3.
Right, you cut that.
(34:38):
You know.
So if you cut your bids in half, and let's say you now you're
bidding a dollar 50, well, yeah,you're going to get a lot of
less impressions, a lot lessclicks, which means a lot less
sales.
But because those bids are somuch lower, those sales are
going to be a lot moreprofitable for you at the same
time.
So now you slow down your salesvelocity and made your ad sales
(35:00):
more profitable at the sametime.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Makes sense to me.
We haven't tested that, but itmakes sense as a strategy.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Mike, I know that you don't run any Prime Day deals
or anything along those lines.
Do you adjust campaign budgetsor bids specifically for Prime
Day?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
So we actually currently have PPC Ninja
managing things at the moment,and so we had a conversation
with them about that for PrimeDay, and I believe they are
pulling back bids for Prime Dayfor that reason, because we're
not running deals, we're notgoing to perform as well as
those, as those brands that arerunning deals.
(35:39):
Because we found that Prime Dayfor us and I think most of it is
because we're not a we're not aspontaneous kind of a product
it's not, like, you know,clothing or gadgets or things
like that.
You know that.
You know people are excitedabout.
You know it's a pool, and soit's one of those things where
either somebody needs one orsomebody doesn't for the most
part, and so if they need oneand I offer them a discount
(36:01):
today, maybe I sell it to themtoday, but I might've sold it to
them tomorrow or next week, youknow, at at regular price, and
they would have bought itanyways.
And that's that's actually whatwe found last prime Prime Day
we ran deals and we had a goodspike in sales, but then we just
had a big trough afterward thatwe normally don't see, and so
essentially all we did was juststeal those future sales and
(36:24):
sold them now at a lower pricepoint and at lower profit.
So we are not running deals,and this year we are lowering
bids on those campaigns so thatwe don't spend so much.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Well, that's another thing that we're testing to kind
of get the best of the both ofthose worlds is lowering the
bids for the first half of theday and then raising them back
up to 100 to 120% for the secondhalf of the day.
And again, the theory behindthat and we'll see what the data
tells us when we're done withthis but the theory behind that
is that, based on the data fromlast year, is that we know the
(37:00):
CPCs are the highest at thebeginning of the day because
everybody's got budget, but thetraffic stays pretty consistent
throughout the day and, moreimportantly, the conversion rate
stays pretty consistent.
So you kind of have thiscrossover effect around 11 am
Pacific time where you have theCPC start to come down by 20 to
(37:23):
30% because campaigns arerunning on a budget, but you
still have consistent conversionrate and traffic.
So our theory there is that forthe first half of the day we
cut those budgets by 25% to 50%and then for the second half of
the day we bring them back to100% to 120%.
So that way, those veryaggressive competitors because,
(37:44):
again, most of the brands thatwe're working with well, all the
brands we work with areUS-based and a lot of them are
premium products is all thoseaggressive overseas Chinese
competitors have burned throughmost of their budget in the
first half of the day and nowwe've got, you know, basically
full budget when we up thosebids on the second half of the
day, to be to get thatvisibility for the second half.
(38:05):
So that's the theory behind it.
We're testing out and I'mexcited to see what the numbers
look like after kind ofeverything shakes out in the
next week or so.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Well, and I think it's easy to make the assumption
that everybody who'sadvertising through the platform
knows what they're doing whenthe reality is, the majority of
them don't know what they'redoing, especially because number
one you've got a lot of newsellers who are trying to make
it big, right, and so they seean opportunity like Prime Day or
something like that, and theygo huge on it.
(38:35):
Not really understanding muchabout the platform.
They're just like, hey, it's anopportunity, right.
And so many of thoseindividuals that you would be
competing against for ads on aPrime Day event or something
like that are individuals thatdon't really understand
advertising.
They certainly don't understandAmazon advertising and they are
going to blow through thosebudgets right away, and so I
(38:55):
think it makes a whole lot ofsense as a strategy.
It's clear that the statisticsshow that a lot of sellers are
running out of budget midday.
Why not take advantage of thatopportunity?
It only makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, so I'm trying to think of.
So the other thing that I wantto make sure that we haven't
mentioned yet that I think isreally important and, matt, I
think you actually touched on ita little bit in kind of, we are
talking about the ad mix, whichis, I think, something that
gets lost, especially as Amazon,over the last couple of years,
has launched a number ofdifferent ad types, both between
(39:28):
the regular ad console and withDSP, keeping in mind that at
least what we're still seeing isthat about 70 to 80% of our
sales are still coming throughsponsored product ads.
So, yeah, video is fun,sponsored brand is fun and that
type of stuff, but at the end ofthe day, if you're really good
with sponsored product adsthat's the Pareto principle
(39:53):
you're 80-20 of winning when itcomes to Amazon ads.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, I think I mean overall, if you look, if you
just look at a sponsored product, like my dad, for example, it's
the.
I love understanding how people, how people shop on Amazon and
why they shop that way.
My dad is the kind of guy thatlikes to support the underdog.
So for him, if he sees a big,shiny, beautiful looking ad type
on the top, he's not going toclick on that because he sees
(40:18):
that as that's the guy that islike the Nikes or the Dasanis of
the world.
So he goes down and clicks onone of the sponsored product ads
and it looks like a listing.
Most people don't even know thatthose are ads.
Most consumers think thatthat's just a normal listing, my
dad included.
So I actually had to change howmy and actually show my dad how
(40:38):
to look at what an underdog is,as opposed to what he was doing
, which he was actually choosingpeople that were spending the
most amount of money, which waskind of funny.
But yeah, I think I think thereason for that, the reason for
sponsored product ads resultingin most of the sales for most
sellers, is because of howorganic they look.
They look just like a normallisting.
Most people don't even know.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, and I've had the same thing, you know, when
I've talked to people andthey're like you know, and
they're like, oh, what do you do?
And we start talking aboutAmazon.
And they're like, yeah, I shopon Amazon all the time.
And, um, and you know, we start.
I was like, yeah, listings thatyou see.
And they're like what, thoseare ads.
I'm like, yeah, and I'll pullout my phone and I'll show them
(41:18):
the little corner.
I'm like you see, where it saysin small gray tax sponsored.
That means somebody paid to bethere.
And I would say probably 80% ofthe people that I have that
conversation with are shockedthat that is an ad.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Well, the reality is.
I mean, when you look at a pageon Amazon, it's probably at
least 30, maybe 40% of the itemsthat are on that page that you
could click on are sponsored.
You know, like the?
Ratio of sponsored ads toorganic.
You know listings.
Is, you know so ridiculous, youknow, these days?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I think I saw a stat that it was like 70%.
I think the stat that I sawrecently was like 60 or 70% of
the pages sponsored ads.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
It could very well be .
I mean, it's massive, it'scrazy.
So, and you're right, mostpeople don't know.
You know that that's the caseand I do think it's one of those
things where you know you referto the Pareto principle is that
you know at least get reallygood at the one thing that you
know is the big piece ofsponsored ads.
Even if you don't really dabbletoo much in display or
(42:21):
sponsored brands, I think youshould.
But even if you didn't just getreally good at sponsored
product ads and recognize someof these primary principles that
we're presenting here.
For instance, one of the reallybig ones that I think will help
you a lot, if you're not alreadydoing it, is making sure that
you're keeping good performingkeywords in the campaigns that
(42:43):
they're in and taking thenon-performers out and moving
them someplace else.
That is a huge differential andpaying attention to if you're
using automated tools.
Recognizing that that's whatthose automated tools are going
to do is just the exact oppositeof that.
They're going to take the goodones out and put them someplace
else, and you're going to see adecrease in production on those
almost always, and so modifyingthose settings if you're using
(43:06):
the automation so that they'renot creating new campaigns,
they're not keyword harvesting,they're not moving those
keywords out, they're just doingbid optimization and you're
doing the management of thosecampaigns.
I think is a really big deal.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Yeah, I think those are some great action items for
our listeners, Mike, that youbrought up there.
Matt, anything else that youwould add?
I know PPC is a very complextopic that we could talk about
for a long time.
I think this is a good place tokind of wrap on this topic for
today.
But any kind of action itemthat you would give to listeners
when it comes to PPC that we'vetalked about.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah, I don't think that spending hours in
spreadsheets and downloadingreports is the best use of most
brand owners' times.
I think that outsourcing PPC atsome point, at whatever level
that is for you, it makes a lotof sense for most brand owners.
But what I will say and this issomething that we've touched on
is that even if you havesomeone else or a tool, first of
(44:02):
all, don't have a tool, justdon't throw tool thinking that
it's going to be autopilot,because it's not.
But second of all, if you havean agency that's doing it for
you, you still have to beinvolved.
You still have to be looking atwhat keywords are they negating
, what keywords are theygraduating?
You know what are they relevant?
And maybe the agency doesn'tknow they're relevant, like Mike
threw up an example.
So I think being involved andnot just handing it off and
(44:24):
looking at a report once a monthis super important.
Being at least involvedsomewhat at high level on your
PPC campaigns is important forall brand owners.
I think that's the biggesttakeaway for me.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, and I think you know we didn't really touch on
it much here.
But one thing that I want towhat I would leave listeners
with is PPC is an importantcomponent, but remember that it
goes hand in hand with howstrong your listing is.
So if you've got a listing thatyou know has a pretty poor main
image and title, and you knowsecondary images and that type
(45:00):
of stuff compared to yourcompetitors, your PPC is going
to suffer, because PPC is reallyjust a visibility tool.
So make sure that you're usingboth of those levers.
Ppc is great at gettingyourself or getting your
products in front of customers.
Of those levers, ppc is greatat getting your products in
front of customers.
But then you also have to makesure that you have a listing
that really shines compared toyour competition, and that's
(45:21):
going to mean a lot of differentthings depending on what
category you are in and howcompetitive that category is.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
Well, and I think a good extension of that idea is
just, overall, recognizing thatif you silo PPC, then you're
going to have problems.
If you're not paying attentionto PPC in terms of its relevance
to everything else, then youdon't really understand what
you're doing.
So, again, if you're not makingsure that your listing shines,
(45:50):
then you're overspending on PPCand you're just throwing money
away.
By the same token, again goingback to that idea of when you're
looking at PPC, that your ACOSis not the be all and end all,
you know, like paying attentionto what is the conversion rate,
you know, do you need to improvethe conversion rate on your
listing?
Like, are you in a bad spot?
(46:11):
Are you trying to use a campaignfor ranking, in which case
maybe spending more on ACOS isrelevant, and if you're using
the campaign for ranking, makingsure that you're actually
tracking the rank to see if it'sactually working, you can't
silo that off and just look atPPC from the standpoint of ACOS
and say, well, the ACOS is good,so I guess it's working for me.
Well, yeah, maybe, but maybethere's some other things that
(46:33):
you should be using PPC for anddialing in that you're not, or
maybe there's some other thingsthat you were using a PPC for,
but it's not really performing,but you're not tracking it and
paying attention to it.
So just don't silo it off.
You know, make sure that you'repaying attention to the other
areas of the business that touchPPC and that PPC touches.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, absolutely, and I know we're going to talk
about it here in the next coupleof weeks, but I'll just kind of
throw this as a teaser and aplug which is ACOS, when it
comes to advertising on Amazon,is probably the worst metric to
track.
There are much better metricsthan ACOS when it comes to how
effective is your ads and reallythe rest, and how healthy is
(47:16):
the rest of your Amazon account.
So I'll put that out as ateaser for a topic that we're
going to cover in the nextcouple of weeks, but I think
that's really important forpeople to understand when
they're looking at their account.
So I think that's a great placeto plot or kind of stopped for
today for PPC, we covered a lotof different things.
I would just encouragelisteners, you know, pick one or
(47:41):
two things based on whereyou're at in your Amazon journey
, and I think you'll find atleast implementing one of those
things will have a pretty bigimpact on your business.
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