In this episode we are joined by Andy Craig, an Army veteran who's conquered the Amazon marketplace with his agency, Adhabit. Andy delves into his agency's tailor-made strategies that help clients shine in a crowded marketplace. Discover the art of optimizing conversion rates, the intricacies of A/B testing, and the shrewd game of bidding on competitor brand names. Andy generously lays out his playbook, from enhancing listings with compelling visuals to harnessing Amazon's own tools to soar in sales rankings.
The episode is packed with inspiration and practical advice for launching and sustaining successful products on Amazon. Andy shares insights into the importance of brand protection, the impact of reviews and videos, and the crucial role of tracking metrics. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or an established online retailer, Andy's story and expertise offer a treasure trove of guidance for navigating Amazon's competitive waters.
For more information about Andy and Adhabit, you can visit the following links:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/theandycraig/
- https://ad-habit.com/about--us
- https://www.youtube.com/@Andy-Craig
Want to chat with us about this podcast? Send us a text message here
The Planet Amazon podcast, brought to you by Phelps United, addresses all things Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces. In each episode, we talk with Brands, Agencies, and Sellers about Amazon news, new features, policies, brand policies, logistics, marketing, issues, and challenges, among other topics.
To watch all Planet Amazon Podcast episodes, visit our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Phelps United, visit our website.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Announcement (00:00):
Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam
Shaffer, where we explore theworld of Amazon and other
e-commerce marketplaces.
Join us as we delve into thelatest strategies and tactics
for successful selling on theworld's largest online
marketplace.
Adam Shaffer (00:17):
Hello, I'm Adam Shaffer and welcome to Planet
Amazon, where we talk about allthings Amazon, and today I
wanted to welcome to the podcastAndy Craig.
Who is Andy Craig, you mightask?
Well, it's an interesting storyand he's going to tell us more,
but Andy is an Army veteranturned Amazon entrepreneur, from
(00:37):
Detroit, no less.
After diving into Amazon in2020, he quickly transitioned
from launching products.
Diving into Amazon in 2020, hequickly transitioned from
launching products to foundinghis own ad agency called AdHabit
in 2021.
Andy is a super passionateperson in general, but he's also
passionate about leveragingAmazon's platform to help brands
grow, and he loves sharing hislife lessons to people on Amazon
(01:03):
and in the real world outsideof Amazon.
He's just that kind of guy.
He's also a husband and afather of two, and that I
definitely want to alsounderstand a bit more, because I
have two kids running aroundthe house today and he's
enjoying every moment of hisjourney.
So welcome to the show, andy.
Thanks for having me, reallygreat intro.
(01:26):
So tell me first, before we getinto all this other work stuff.
Tell me about the kids.
Andy Craig (01:34):
Well, I got a four-year-old and a soon-to-be
nine-year-old.
They're both at school rightnow, thankfully, so there's no
background noise here today.
Yeah, they're both great.
We're here in Michigan and youknow they're one boy, one girl.
Adam Shaffer (01:50):
Okay, I have two girls and so there's basically
three women in our family andI'm the only guy.
So I get outranked every minuteof every day.
So I live a painful life withmy family, but I love them to
death.
So cool and good luck with yourfamily.
Now, this Army thing to Amazon.
(02:12):
I mean, I imagine there'speople out there that have been
in the Army and then went toAmazon.
But you were in the Army for awhile.
What happened?
What made you take the leapfrom serving our country to now
serving folks on Amazon?
Andy Craig (02:25):
Yeah, there was a little bit of gap, I would say,
in between.
I was artillery in the Army forsix years and then I became an
electrician my last couple ofyears and then I transitioned to
become an electrician withGeneral Motors, fixing the
machines and the plant thathelped to build all the cars and
the factory.
Life just wasn't for me as much.
So I was always looking forsomething entrepreneurial to
(02:48):
leave and, just like many others, I seen Amazon.
I seen the opportunity withAmazon FBA, so I just dove in,
learned as much as I could,started launching products and I
really got a knack for theAmazon ads, the PPC side of
things, which kind of led me towhere we are today.
Right, I started doing it formy own products, helping friends
(03:08):
, and then I got more demandfrom other brands than I could
handle myself, and that's whereAdHabit was born.
So I started hiring, trainingand that's kind of how I grew up
from there.
Adam Shaffer (03:19):
So the products you were launching, were they
your products, private label, orwere they third-party products?
Andy Craig (03:24):
Yeah, when I started out I looked into all the
aspects.
Right, there's the wholesale,there's the retail arbitrage and
I just seen a much biggeropportunity in the private label
side because you have a lotmore control there as well and I
believe usually there's highermargins With wholesale.
You need more quantity rightOver quality and you don't
really have as much control.
(03:44):
And I feel brands could youhave an agreement in place with
brands with wholesale, but theycould always decide to just sell
themselves on Amazon and Ididn't want to have that
additional risk of the business.
Adam Shaffer (03:56):
Yeah, no, I get it .
I mean, our company is helpingbrands and there's always that
fear that you build them up tothis point where they say, okay,
maybe we want to do itourselves or whatever.
So there's always that riskthat you lose a great client.
So you always got to get more.
But so what's interesting aboutit is you said you got kind of
(04:16):
into the PPC.
What's funny is I meet a lot ofpeople that get into Amazon and
the PPC and the advertising andsetting ads is complicated and
scary and obviously that's whyagencies like yours are around.
But it seems like that's whereyou gravitate it.
Personally, I love it, but it'sdefinitely like the ocean it
never stops.
There's always something yougot to be doing.
(04:38):
So why don't you talk a littlebit about how you work with
clients and how you build agreat PPC campaign?
I know it's kind of a loadedquestion, but give us your best
shot at that one.
Andy Craig (04:51):
Yeah, I mean how we work with clients.
Clients come to us when youknow, either they don't want to
do the PPC themselves they havehad bad experiences trying to
learn it or hire, and then theycome to us because we have the
expertise that we've been doingit for years.
We take a very hands-onapproach with the advertising
and part of my background, too,is I went to school for
(05:12):
engineering, right, so I'm anumbers guy.
We really look at the numbersand come up with a plan to tell
us exactly what to do Now withPPC campaigns.
We don't know if it's going tobe successful or not.
We're all about testing, right.
We test something.
If it works, we do more of it.
If it doesn't work, we pullback and try a different
strategy.
And you know, these campaignscould run for years and years
(05:35):
and years and just as the longeryou run them, the more
consistency you're usually goingto see.
And it's not, like you know,with Facebook.
A lot of times you just stop acampaign, start a new one.
Amazon has a lot more historybuilt into their campaigns.
Adam Shaffer (05:50):
So I guess there's a budget or something like that
.
But when you start to attack it, are you focused on manually
doing this or are you usingsoftware?
How do you do it?
Because I find that we've triedsoftware and then our guys will
wind up setting it andforgetting it, and then we have
to come running back and adjustthings later.
(06:10):
What's your philosophy here?
Andy Craig (06:13):
Yeah, so we don't like the softwares that are the
set it and forget it, becausethere's a lot of them out there
that have their specialalgorithms, but what we found,
because we've tested some ofthese, is they don't work for
every product, they don't workfor every client.
So we use a good mixture of asoftware that we have a lot of
control over and expert PPCstrategists is what we call them
(06:34):
, ppc managers that have beendoing this for years that can
utilize the software to helpthem with the campaigns.
So you're doing a lot of manuallabor, along with some software
helping you exactly because, asyou've seen, with amazon right,
we there's a lot of differentreports, there's a lot of
different things you can look at, and we started off and we
(06:56):
still use, you know, the bulkoperations which are to pull all
the ads into spreadsheets, um,which is a great way to do it
right instead of just clickingin campaign manager all over the
place.
But with the software, it savesa lot of time.
We're able to stop downloadinga bunch of reports, open it up
in Excel and now we're able toget all the data through
Amazon's API, and it saves us aton of time and gives us a
(07:19):
really nice quality dashboard tolook at all the campaign
performance, the keywordperformance, all the data that
we need in an instant.
Adam Shaffer (07:29):
And do you look at long tail?
Are you focused on just a smallamount of words?
Because there's some people whosay, oh, we should just focus
on the top 10 words and that'sit.
And then there's some that say,wow, you really got to play
that long tail.
That's kind of why you need toget some kind of software to
help manage or organize it.
But how do you go about it?
Andy Craig (07:48):
Yeah, we do both right and it really depends on
the client where they're at intheir journey with the product.
If they're just launching, wemay focus more on the long tail,
highly specific, and thensprinkle in some of the higher
competitive words.
But it's so dependent oneverything.
We focus on everything right.
We long tail, short tailcategories.
There's a lot of different adtypes on Amazon that you know,
(08:10):
give you a different kind ofbrand awareness and things like
that that we could push outthere.
Adam Shaffer (08:16):
And how do you deal with?
You know you mentionedcompetitive words.
How do you deal withcompetitors?
Like you know, you have a brandthat you're helping manage and
things are going okay and you'regetting you know the cost to
acquire down and things aregetting going the right
direction.
All of a sudden, you kind ofbottom out and you see
competitors coming all over you.
What's your thoughts on that?
Andy Craig (08:37):
Yeah, we can't control, you know competition,
right?
What we have to do is controlhow we perform versus the
competition.
So there's a lot of differentbenchmarks you could look at to
see how your competitors aredoing versus you, and the
conversion rate is going to bethat most important thing, right
, Because Amazon ads it's anauction, so if your competitors
(08:58):
are converting better than you,they could afford to be higher
on that auction because thatcost per click is going to be
built into it, right?
So if you're converting at 10%and they're converting at 20,
they could afford double thecost per click or the bid that
you can afford.
So we always want to look atthose benchmarks and if we're
not converting quite as well, weneed to go into the listing and
(09:21):
figure out what we need tochange, whether it's the image,
the main images, the A pluscontent, the title, the reviews,
you know the price point, maybeand really come up with that
strategy as well.
Adam Shaffer (09:33):
Andy, I'm glad you brought that up, so it's not
just let me figure out what I'mgoing to bid on.
You actually are looking at thelistings themselves, right?
So you're sitting there tryingto optimize listings.
Are you working on words andphotos, videos Like?
How do you go about that?
Andy Craig (09:49):
Yeah, so a lot of this stuff.
It really goes hand in handright Like we're a PPC agency
primarily, but the listing kindof goes hand in hand with it.
So we go through and we workwith them.
We have a full creative teamin-house to optimize those
listings.
And Amazon even has splittesting built right in to where
we could split test the imagesand we could split test the
(10:10):
things to see what's going topush the needle to that next
point of that click-through rateand the conversion rate to
compete in any niche.
So you've been doing A-B testing.
Yeah, so we're doing A-Btesting.
We build out videos for theclients.
Now we can't A-B test a video,but what we'll do with that is
we'll actually run this videofor a week.
(10:31):
We'll run this video for a weekor whatever period of time we
want to do with the test to seewhich one performs better.
Thing you could do with A-Btest is usually going to be the
title and the reviews I'm sorry,not the reviews.
(10:52):
The title and the main image onAmazon is going to have a huge
impact.
And then the price point.
There are softwares out therethat could help you to split
test that as well.
It's a little bit more manualif you want to do it yourself on
Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (10:59):
Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting.
Like you know, I go to theAccelerate show.
I don't know if you've been tothat in Seattle, but it's great
and you could see the amount ofmoney that Amazon's investing in
the tools.
And obviously this A-B testingand the ability to run tests and
then let the winning resultcontinue on is to me great.
And obviously they have all thebrainpower in the world there.
(11:22):
They have, you know, datascientists and all these guys
looking at all this stuff allthe time.
So I think that if people aren'tleveraging that there, you know
they should.
If they're not, because evenjust a little bit better result,
like I don't think you could gowrong with A-B testing, because
either you're going to keep theresults you have or you're
going to better it.
And if you can keep on tryingto better it, why not?
(11:43):
And you know Amazon wantshigher conversion rates because
they want more sales, like so itkind of works and so I'm
thrilled that you're doing thatfor your clients.
When it comes to the contentitself, are you trying to change
like the bullets and the copyto try and get a higher
conversion on that?
Andy Craig (12:02):
Yeah, yeah, that's one of the things that when we
first onboard a client, we kindof do a complete listing audit
as well to see if they'reranking on the right keywords,
if they're even indexing, whichmeans like, can you even show up
on the keywords according toAmazon's algorithm?
So we'll double check all thatand if we need to rebuild the
copy, that's what we'll do.
Right, and we the title isgoing to be a huge impact.
(12:24):
And then the back backendsearch terms, like if we're
going after hard, if we'retrying to rank on a certain
keyword we need to put that andrun some tests with the title
and okay, good, fair enough.
Adam Shaffer (12:39):
And then when it comes to the competitors again I
bring that up because I'm in aworld where there's always lots
of competitors Are you buyingtheir names?
It's funny.
I was talking to someone theother day about Epson, who makes
label printers or receiptprinters, and in the real world,
(12:59):
outside Amazon, they're thenumber one player.
Like you, go into every store,you see it, but on Amazon you
punch in Epson and you'll see 10other guys there, the brands
that you've never heard of.
They're definitely all offshorekind of manufacturers coming in
, and then Epson is somewheredown at the bottom.
So these guys are all buyingthe word Epson.
Are you buying competitivenames?
(13:21):
Is that work?
Because I can see it workingfor them.
I just don't know if it worksfor Epson.
Andy Craig (13:25):
I can see it working for them.
I just don't know if it worksfor Epson.
So a lot of times, right, we'renot going to be able to convert
as well as Epson when peopleare looking for an Epson.
But right now we're running astrategy with one of our clients
because they've kind of hit theceiling to where they can rank
on the category type keywords.
So we're starting to go aftersome of the competitors.
We're seeing an increase inrank as we kind of get more
aggressive with those and getsome of the share away from it.
(13:49):
But you have to spend a bit more, right?
Yeah, usually.
And it depends if that brand iseven protecting their brand
search terms, because if they'renot, usually the bid is not
going to need to be very highfor it.
And then also there's toolslike Amazon brand analytics, to
where we could track our marketshare on certain keywords.
So, as we're pushing these andas Amazon brand analytics to
where we could track our marketshare on certain keywords, so as
we're pushing these and aswe're spending more, we could
(14:11):
actually measure to see if we'regetting more market share on
those keywords.
Adam Shaffer (14:16):
Cool.
So and then when it comes toadvertising, obviously you know
you're buying keywords, but areyou doing any brand advertising?
So do you try to promote theentire brand or is that like
super expensive and doesn'tconvert?
Andy Craig (14:32):
well, no, every everything has its bid right,
because it's all going to bebased on the conversion.
If we're converting well, wecan afford a higher bid, but if
we're not, we'll just lower thebids.
So we're like those sponsoredbrand ads right.
We can show up headline searchads all the way at the top of
search when people first land onthe search results page.
We can be right up at the topwith a few products and a nice
(14:53):
custom image and we like totailor that custom image to what
people are searching for.
And then a little bit down,sometimes at the top, we get the
video ad, which it depends onthe video and it depends on how
competitive that ad is going tobe.
But that could be a very, verywell converting ad placement and
I've had brands that just takeoff just with that one video.
(15:16):
That just does very well.
Adam Shaffer (15:17):
So video ads are huge.
I mean, I see them everywhere,my eye always goes to them and I
almost always click, even ifI'm not looking for that product
, because it kind of tells thestory right there.
So so you're doing that too, soyou're doing a lot of video ads
for your clients.
Andy Craig (15:32):
Yep.
Adam Shaffer (15:33):
Yep, Okay, that's awesome.
And and what?
What's your thoughts and what'syour philosophy on the brand
store?
Like, is that important, Notimportant?
I see some people like spend afortune of time on it and then
some just you know it's notimportant enough, it doesn't
matter.
Andy Craig (15:48):
I think it depends on how much you're running with
the sponsored brand ads, becauseyou could run ads that you know
send people directly to yourstorefront.
So if you're trying to test outa lot more of this, you need to
have a well convertingstorefront.
So that's where I kind of getinto the importance of it.
Right, are we pushing peopletowards it or are we not?
I always recommend buildeverything out the best that we
(16:09):
can and invest it.
That way, everything's set.
Now let's start to push adspend towards well-converting
Amazon.
You know kind of pages.
Adam Shaffer (16:18):
So your brand ads will go to the brand store.
Andy Craig (16:21):
They can, so we could send them either to the
product detail page or send themdirectly to the brand store.
Adam Shaffer (16:27):
Cool.
So you've been doing this for awhile.
What's been like your biggestsuccess?
You don't have to tell us thebrand, but you know, tell us
something about where you gotinvolved with the client and it
was just a mess and you reallyreally streamlined it and now
it's off the charts.
Andy Craig (16:45):
Yeah, I mean we've done.
We've worked with brands thathave been up and running a while
.
We've worked with brands thatare just getting started, and
it's one of my favorite thingsis launching new products, right
, because we can get in there,we could launch a new product,
and when that hits and when thatreally starts to rank, that's
one of my favorite things.
You know, getting them fromzero to their first $10,000 in
(17:06):
sales, 20, 30, and just everymonth, seeing it kind of go up
on a on a nice curve, issomething I love, right, we we
do a lot of training with brandstoo, because I love teaching
people how to do it.
So we'll get in there, we'lltrain them how to do it
themselves, and I love theexcitement when they see things
are starting to turn around andhit the goals and numbers that
(17:26):
they're starting to see.
Adam Shaffer (17:27):
So you're helping people launch new products.
Andy Craig (17:33):
Yeah, we're helping them launch new products, but
we're also training them how todo their own PPC, because a lot
of brands want to build theirown in-house teams.
So we show them.
We transfer our expertise overto their teams to show them how
to do it themselves.
Adam Shaffer (17:42):
I always found new products is like a lot of work,
like so.
But you guys, because it's fromevery discipline you have to be
good at with a new product andgetting it out there.
So that's awesome, because insome cases, there's agencies
that don't want to work withstarters.
They want to work with brandsthat are already spending a lot
of money and need help.
But I think that that's reallyadmirable, that you're working
(18:04):
with people that are trying toget new products launched,
because it's actually the mostfun.
It's just it's a lot of workand it's awesome that you're
doing that.
So you've taken some brand newproducts from zero to something
right.
Andy Craig (18:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it doesn't always happen
right.
With any new product, there'sgoing to be a risk to it because
it's not tested yet.
But you have to launch it, youhave to start pushing things and
I like to work with the brandsto develop that strategy, and
we've had clients that have justtaken off and hit with one
product, be able to go from zeroin the first month to the first
(18:40):
20,000, and then the next monthto 40 and to 50, so on and so
forth.
Adam Shaffer (18:44):
You said it a little earlier, but you were
talking about something else butproduct reviews.
When you do these new products,do you help them get the
reviews too?
Andy Craig (18:52):
No, we don't have a review service.
We do recommend a lot ofdifferent strategies whether
it's Amazon, vine, using theirown email list to develop, to
get those first reviews.
But that's a very importantaspect, right, people need to
kind of step back and look attheir listings versus their
competition.
Right, if you're a higher pricepoint, if you're a new product
(19:14):
with no reviews, why wouldsomebody click and pick yours
versus the competition?
So you need to have a strategyin place to get those initial
reviews.
And if I'm looking at a productand I see, hey, this one has
5,000 reviews, but they're onlyfour stars, and this new one has
five stars, but there's only 15, I might be considering buying
(19:35):
this new one because it'sobviously of a better quality.
Adam Shaffer (19:38):
Yeah, I mean Vine is great, but you got to have a
good product, because if youdon't they might give you a bad
review and that could be trouble.
Andy Craig (19:48):
Yeah, and the people in the Vine program may not be
your ideal customer avatar, sothey might not even need this
product.
So the average Vine reviews, Ibelieve, are like 4.2, 4.3 stars
.
Is that right?
Oh, okay, that's what I'veheard.
I'm just kind of pulling it offthe back of my head yeah, no, I
didn't realize that.
Adam Shaffer (20:05):
I mean, I think there is a little.
I think it's important, but Idefinitely always think there's
a little bit of a risk.
You know, you got to kind of doeverything right now.
If you don't have a greatproduct, you probably shouldn't
be trying to sell it, unlessit's, you know, Uber,
inexpensive and people get that.
They're getting less for less.
But, um, I think the quality ofthe product, the packaging and
all that stuff is superimportant.
Are you helping any of thesenew brands with their packaging
(20:27):
at all?
Is that part of it or not?
Andy Craig (20:30):
No, we don't do any of the packaging.
We have partners that can helpwith that, but we don't do any
of the packaging design in-house.
But we will give them kind ofrecommendations on it, right,
because that packaging.
Adam Shaffer (20:49):
You could put that main image on Amazon so it
could have a huge impact on thatconversion and click-through
rate when people see yourlisting for the first time and
let's go to BSR for a bit whenyou're looking at the products
that you're managing, obviouslyyou want to get that ranking as
close to one as you can, whichis not always easy.
But is that like a KPI for youguys?
Like where did we start withyou and now where are we with
your ranking?
Andy Craig (21:09):
Yeah, that's something.
We're very data focused, right.
So we're tracking all themetrics and the BSR is one of
them.
We like to track the BSR of thecategory, but also the
subcategory, and make sure we'regoing in the right direction,
either being consistent if we'rehappy with where we are, or
we're on a constant trend down,which, for BSR, right, we want
(21:30):
to go lower, right, we want toget to that number one spot.
So that's a very importantmetric.
And every time, one of thethings I hate is running out of
stock, right, but it does happen, right, we run out of stock, we
see that BSR start to go backback up, right, and then we come
back in stock and we have tokind of push even harder to work
to get that BSR back to whereit was.
Adam Shaffer (21:51):
Yeah, no.
I mean, if you're not in stockit's deadly and it definitely
happens, but you got to makesure that you're in stock.
I mean, that's like therequirement on Amazon you can't
sell it if you don't have it forsure, and so have you you've.
You can't sell it if you don'thave it for sure, and so have
you been able to get some ofyour products that you manage
into the top 15 or 20 orsomething like that?
Andy Craig (22:11):
Oh yeah, yeah Not every client, like if it's a new
brand that's just starting.
It's going to take a while,right, but we do our best to
constantly track it and come upwith a plan of action to get
there.
Adam Shaffer (22:29):
So we're coming and I don't want to date this
podcast too much, but we'recoming and I don't want to date
this podcast too much, but we'recoming into prime day.
So is there any secret advicethat you want to tell people
about?
On what?
What are good practices forprime day?
Is it spending a lot more moneyon on ppc?
Is it promotions?
Is it coupons?
What?
What's your thoughts there?
Andy Craig (22:45):
yeah, we we're actually working with a lot of
our clients right now on thatstrategy and it's going to be
different with each one.
We give them their options andultimately let them make the
decision.
But some of our brands theywant to just do business as
normal.
But other brands really want tohit Prime Day hard.
They got the stock in place todo it.
So we're going to start rampingup some of the ad spend leading
(23:06):
up to the prime day and thenwhen prime day hits, we're going
to push even harder and theconversion rates on prime day go
through the roof so we canafford those higher ad
placements, those higher youknow, that higher bid in place
where some of our brands, like Isaid, they just want to use the
extra traffic, even kind ofturn down their bids a little
bit, where they're justmaximizing their profitability
(23:28):
on the day.
Adam Shaffer (23:29):
I mean, Prime Days is huge.
From what I understand, it's asgood as Cyber Weekend.
Is that what you find?
I don't know.
Prime Day 2 isn't as good, butit's still pretty good.
Andy Craig (23:45):
It's usually based on the niche, right.
We see it kind of different allover the place, but every year
we see it perform better andbetter right.
More people know about PrimeDay.
The more Prime customers wehave, the more sales we usually
get.
Every Prime Day is better thanthe last is almost what we see.
Adam Shaffer (24:00):
So you know whether it's Prime Day or not
Prime Day or holiday or notholiday.
You know one thing that a lotof the tools give you the
ability to do is day parting,and I don't know what your
thoughts on it.
I mean, is it a scam or is itlike?
Is day parting something thatyou should try to do?
Andy Craig (24:15):
I think you should test it.
That's our thing.
Test it, see how it works.
You don't have to do it withevery campaign.
You can do it with some.
We do a little bit of it, butwe don't do a lot of the Amazon
marketing stream stuff.
But we'll maybe shut off ourads on certain times of the day
that we know we don't convertwell, Like if it's midnight and
5am.
We'll just save the ad spendfor those better converting
(24:37):
times.
So that's about all we do forthat.
Adam Shaffer (24:40):
So you see that there's times a day where people
are maybe just shopping butthey're not buying, like they
might be looking and clickingbut they're not doing the deal.
Andy Craig (24:49):
Yeah, and we also have days of the week where that
day is a much better performer,so we will push harder.
On a certain day, we know thatwe get a lot more sales and a
lot higher conversion rates.
Adam Shaffer (24:59):
No, it's funny because we have some products
now.
Our weekends used to be quitelow, but now we have some
consumer products that are.
It seems that the weekend istheir best day, so it is pretty
interesting.
It's definitely based on theproduct.
The more B2B it is, the lessit's going to sell on the
weekend.
Andy Craig (25:16):
Yeah, we have some office products that just do
much better on a Wednesday thanthey do on a Saturday.
Adam Shaffer (25:21):
Yeah, no, but I used to hate the weekend.
It was depressing.
Now I kind of dig it.
So that's interesting and youknow, I know that you said you
don't really do it, but off,amazon has become quite big.
There's a couple of firms outthere that are helping brands
with Google advertising toAmazon, and you know what's your
(25:42):
thoughts on that, because it'sjust another expense to me, but
is it required?
Andy Craig (25:49):
Yeah, I think it's been a, you know, a big topic
lately, like everyone's talkingabout sending Google ads to
Amazon, sending external trafficin, which I think is great, but
you're always you're let's justsay, usually you're usually
going to have a much betterconversion rate through Amazon
PPC.
So if you're not maximizingyour potential there, I don't
think it's time to start testingout Google Ads yet.
(26:10):
If you're not ranking on yourkeywords, at least on page one,
let's not work on Google Ads yetbecause there's still an issue
on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (26:19):
Right.
So get Amazon right before youstart going off Amazon for sure,
and that's good.
Andy Craig (26:26):
I was just going to say that's just with you know
kind of ad spend, right, I stillrecommend people to build their
, their presence off Amazon,their social media, build all
that stuff, because building thebrand and then pushing, like
Google, ads to Amazon are twodifferent things, because some
of our best performing clientsthey've built a brand through
Amazon, through through Facebook, through Shopify, through
(26:47):
Instagram, through you know,tick tock all these different
channels, and those are thebrands that I see doing the best
.
Right, because people arecoming to Amazon, not from
Google, but they're coming to,they're looking for that brand
themselves.
Adam Shaffer (27:00):
So they're building the brand off Amazon
and people are going to find iton Amazon and buy it.
Yeah, you know it's interesting.
I love Shopify, but I justsometimes believe that the
conversion rate is better onAmazon because people are just
more comfortable buying it onAmazon.
They have their accounts set up, they know that they're going
to return it without a hassle,which nobody likes returns, but
it's part of the game.
So I definitely I see thebenefits of it and I also
(27:23):
believe Amazon gives you.
If it's on the 14-day cookie,if it comes from Google to
Amazon, they'll give you apercentage back like 8%.
Andy Craig (27:31):
Yeah, yeah, that brand performance bonus or
whatever.
Adam Shaffer (27:34):
Yeah, no, I think it's a big deal because you know
that's for three-piece sellers.
They're spending probablybetween $8 and $15 or something
for the commission.
So that's a good way to incentyou.
Andy Craig (27:45):
Yeah, and that's something we help our customers
set up is those attributionlinks so they can send traffic
from their email list, frominfluencers, from whatever
social channels they're tryingto track Are you again?
Adam Shaffer (28:02):
I know you spend most of the time in advertising,
but are you helping peoplebuild their social media, or
influencers or any of that?
Andy Craig (28:07):
No, we don't work with influencers.
We do have recommendations andpartners that we work with.
That that's their primary focus, but we try to keep our
attention focused on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (28:16):
Do you think that influencers are helpful?
Andy Craig (28:19):
I do.
I think you find the rightinfluencer and I think that
external traffic does help a lotwith the Amazon algorithm and,
honestly, everything, you'rebuilding the brand right.
The more people see the product, the more they're going to know
about you, the more they'regoing to hopefully purchase and
the bigger you're going to kindof build your presence on Amazon
, on Amazon, on online period.
Adam Shaffer (28:42):
I mean, do you ever mess around with Amazon
posts at all?
Andy Craig (28:46):
Yeah, we have a lot of clients.
We don't do it too muchourselves, but we have a lot of
clients that they're alreadydeveloping.
You know the content, so whynot post it there also and we're
able to see it work right?
And the thing is, it's stillfree.
Amazon doesn't charge for it no, I mean so.
Adam Shaffer (29:03):
So why not?
Andy Craig (29:03):
it's the time to do it right yeah, and just extra,
and if you can do it to whereit's right, if you have a
employee maybe they're a va,virtual assistant or something
that doesn't cost you a ton youcan measure their time spent on
that versus the sales becauseamazon does provide that and see
what kind of return oninvestment you have there.
Adam Shaffer (29:23):
Yeah, I mean it's funny that more people don't do
it because it is free.
It is a little mind boggling.
But I think they think, oh no,it's not going to convert.
But to me it's like the morecontent that's out there the
better.
Why not?
But it is the time and it'sanother cycle out of your life.
But, like you said, you can getvas to post for you for, you
know, a small amount of money.
Andy Craig (29:44):
I don't think it would.
Yeah, and it's.
It's measurable, which is great.
Adam Shaffer (29:47):
Right, you can measure the performance of it so
with I don't know the number islike 2.5 million three-piece
sellers out there, um and andI'm sure you know there's the
tip of the spear that you knowdoes most of the business, but
there's so many sellers onAmazon and so many categories
that become so competitive.
(30:09):
Is it too late for somebody newcoming into the game to be
successful on Amazon?
Andy Craig (30:17):
I do not think so, because we're constantly working
with new brands, because youknow, like you said, a lot of
those agencies.
They only want to work withbrands of a certain size when,
with my background as a seller,I've been there right.
So I like helping these newsellers get there.
We recently launched a newseller we're training on Amazon.
We're training them how to dotheir own PPC, and they ran out
(30:39):
of stock on Amazon.
We're training them how to dotheir own PPC and they ran out
of stock, which is not a good,you know, not a terrible problem
to have.
But they doubled their saleswithin the first month.
Second month they ran out ofstock and their tacos which is,
you know, that total advertisingcost of sale, which is a good
reflect of profitability wentdown right.
So they just launched theirproduct and they're in the right
niche.
(30:59):
And for those of you that arelistening that have launched a
product and it didn't work out,it's not the end, launch another
one.
We work with brands that aredoing eight figures a year, that
have products they launchedthat just don't work.
You want to pivot, launchanother one and keep testing
things launch another one andkeep testing things.
Adam Shaffer (31:24):
So it also goes back to what kind of product
would you launch if you weregoing to do one today, for
yourself or for a partner?
Because for me it's like.
I love selling stuff on Amazon.
There's the thrill when you seeyour product start to sell, but
there's something about aproduct that people have to use
over and over again.
And the subscribe and savestuff is, to me, awesome Because
you can actually potentiallylose money to bring in a new
(31:46):
customer if they're going tospend X amount of dollars with
you in the future.
Andy Craig (31:51):
Yeah, we're working with a client right now that's
launching a new product and it'sjust they found the right niche
.
That's kind of at the beginningof it, but we're seeing the
search volume trend on Google.
We're seeing the search volumetrend on Amazon constantly going
up and there's no hugecompetition there.
That has 20, 50,000 reviews, sonow's the perfect time to get
in there.
So when you're choosing theproduct, it's all about the
(32:14):
research, the demand, thecompetition, because the more
the competition, the more you'regoing to need to spend to get
ranked and to get profitable,and it depends.
There's also a bigger upsidethe more competitive spaces have
a lot of demand and peoplelooking for it, but it might
take you a little bit longer tohit that profitability.
Adam Shaffer (32:35):
I mean, I think it's shocking if people knew how
much money was spent onproducts.
Until you're in the biz youdon't really see it, but I think
the number is something about$650 billion a year in gross
merchandise sales through Amazon.
So it's such a great platformfor you to mess around with.
(32:56):
I mean, if you're going to gostart your own business
somewhere and say you're goingto start a retail store, you got
to go find a location, investin leasing the store, invest in
fixing up the store, then investin inventory to put in the
store, then man the store andAmazon gives you this platform
and Amazon could be friend orfoe, but they don't make things
(33:17):
easy, especially for the smallguys.
But I just think there's hugeopportunity there.
So I'm glad you still see that.
Andy Craig (33:29):
Yeah, it's, you know it.
The barrier to entry is solittle you could.
You could order 10 products andlaunch them and just test it
and see if it works, see ifthere's a demand for it, and you
don't have to order maybe awhole container full of products
or multiple containers forAmazon right, but if you're
working with a Costco, you needto have quite a bit of stock,
right.
Adam Shaffer (33:43):
Yeah, yeah, no.
And also I don't know if yourun into it Maybe you do, maybe
you don't in your business.
But, like, brand protection iskind of important these days
because you talk about Costcoand then you have these
arbitrage guys go to Costco, buystuff and break it up and sell
it on Amazon, depending on thesale.
So there's a lot of policingthat has to go on with your
(34:05):
brands.
I don't know if you do that ornot, but what do you see out
there on the brand protectionfront?
Andy Craig (34:12):
Yeah.
So we've been hit a coupletimes with people jumping on
some of our brands listings andthere's not a ton you could do
about it.
Amazon doesn't always protectyou from it, but there's a
couple of things.
Right, you have to be brandregistered to get your trademark
in Amazon system, yeah, andthen you can sign up for the
Amazon transparency program soyou could add that extra QR code
(34:34):
label to your, to your products, to show Amazon like hey, these
are mine, those other ones arenot.
Let's get those guys off ofthere.
Adam Shaffer (34:43):
Transparency is big.
We have a few partners now thatare doing that and it's
definitely helping them a lot.
There's a lot of work to haveto go into getting it going, but
once you get it going itdefinitely helps.
You know, because there's folksbringing stuff in from overseas
.
There's people buying used andselling it as new like.
Andy Craig (34:59):
There's all kinds of scammers out there, and
protecting the brand is, if youwant, if you want to increase
your conversion rate, get thescammers off your listings when
you can so I always tell myclients to like, when they are
starting their wholesale oftheir business right,
wholesaling it to othercompanies, to retail stores, to
make sure there's an agreementin place to let them know hey,
(35:21):
you cannot sell these productson Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (35:25):
So we talked about conversion a lot, but give us
Andy's top three or top fourways to increase conversion rate
on an ASIN.
Andy Craig (35:37):
So when we work with new clients, we're going to
audit the account.
We're going to see there's alot of different areas, but
sometimes the simplest thing isthey're just going after the
wrong keywords.
Right?
If you're targeting super broadareas and you're not hitting
those longer tail keywords thatare specifically describing your
product, you're not going toconvert quite as well.
So let's make sure we'retargeting the right keywords and
(36:00):
then let's start working on theother things.
Right, the listing, the reviews,the price point.
Those have the biggest impactthe main image, the title, the
price point, the reviews.
And then we go into the listing, build out those secondary
images, the A plus content, thecopy, and even add in videos
into the listing have a hugeimpact because nowadays people
(36:21):
love watching videos.
So get some user generatedcontent, put that in the, you
know, under the videos, rightunderneath your main images or
even at the bottom, right abovethe reviews.
Having some video reviews inthere are another impact to it.
So it kind of each part of thelisting, each part of it kind of
impacts it a little bitdifferently, but they all work
together to increase thatconversion.
Adam Shaffer (36:44):
So it's definitely do your keyword research and
make sure you have kick-asscontent right, like that's going
to be it.
And it goes back to why wouldpeople feel that I need to go
spend money with an agency tohelp me with this stuff?
And for me, it's like Amazonhas become so competitive and so
(37:05):
mature and they have so manytools and it changes by the
minute, like there's somethingnew every day.
We come in.
We're learning something fromthe community and we're learning
something from doing it thatthings change.
You have to be great ateverything.
So, whatever the discipline iswhether it's logistics, whether
it's the content creation,whether it's the way you handle
(37:27):
customer service and now theadvertising these are all
different disciplines.
You can't be great ateverything.
And if you want to be great ateverything, you've got to get a
great team.
And if you want to be great ateverything, you got to get a
great team.
And so I just see that thereason that companies like yours
exist is because PPC is arabbit hole.
Man Like you could go and spenda lot of time on this and it's
(37:49):
still not enough time, so Idon't know what your thoughts
are, but I think that it's socompetitive right now.
You got to be so good at everypart of this thing.
Andy Craig (37:58):
Yeah, and you got to think about it of like a cost
of your time perspective too,for a lot of these brands,
because they may spend a tonmore time on their ads than I
would and we're going to givethem a better result than they
would get on their own.
Just because this is what we do, this is our expertise, what we
do every single day, let themfocus on the brand growth,
(38:20):
launching more products, and letagencies or other experts
handle what they do best.
Adam Shaffer (38:23):
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that if you'rein the biz, you should
definitely see what it's like towork with others, because
you'll benefit from the help,whether it's going to open up a
lot more time for you or it justgets really complicated and you
want to make sure that somebodyis watching your advertising on
a regular basis, which you'respending money.
So you know, I think it's it'sworthy for you to do that.
(38:46):
I think if you suffer on thelogistics side, you should find
a logistics partner to help youthere too.
So I just think that if you'regreat at building products, try
to focus on that and get peopleto help you with your other
stuff.
Andy Craig (39:00):
Yeah, and people also.
There's a people miss, right.
I'll work with clients aboutall right, how do we grow?
I'm like let's launch anotherproduct, let's launch, you know,
maybe multiple multi-packs onwhere we're at, but also let's
expand to other Amazonmarketplaces because we already
have proof of concept.
Let's kind of go into Europe,let's go into Asia, let's go
into Australia, these differentmarkets on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (39:22):
Yeah, no for sure, especially if you're not doing.
You know Canada and you're youknow and you're selling in the U
?
S.
You should, because you don'treally even have to put products
there.
Amazon will do the heavylifting in Mexico and now Brazil
.
I think is like that, so sure.
Andy Craig (39:36):
Yeah, and you can test it out through the.
Uh, what is it called?
Yeah, and you can test it outthrough the.
What is it called?
Adam Shaffer (39:40):
the NARF program North.
Andy Craig (39:40):
America Remote Fulfillment and if you start to
see good results, then just shipit directly into Canada FBA,
because you're probably going todo a little bit better that way
.
Adam Shaffer (39:48):
It'll definitely do better, but it's a great way
to test and see if you should bein the country or not.
And that's another aspect ismanaging your inventory in other
areas.
Andy Craig (39:58):
So it gets a little more complicated.
Yeah, and you definitely wantto look to see what kind of
different laws that Canada hasand what different requirements
they're going to sometimesrequire you to have French on
your label and things like that.
Adam Shaffer (40:09):
Yeah, for sure.
So, but it's definitely.
Again, they go back to theworld outside of Amazon.
If you wanted to launch yourproduct in other markets, other
countries, it's not super easy,but on Amazon you could flip a
switch for the most part and youcould be there and it's pretty
cool.
They do the translations on thepage.
They'd help you with thecurrency conversion.
(40:29):
It's awesome.
So, again, I'm a big fan and Idefinitely agree with you that
that's something you could do tohelp grow your business.
So with that we're to startwrapping it up.
But I just wanted to make surethat if there's any words of
wisdom you could give theaudience any words of
inspiration, bring it on, man.
Andy Craig (40:50):
Yeah, so I'll kind of go back to it.
I'm a numbers guy, this is whatI focus on.
So if you're not tracking allyour metrics, it's hard to make
a plan to do better and to hitthose next goals.
So, whether you're using asoftware or manually extracting
it from Amazon, track yournumbers over time, set goals and
run different experiments andtests to see what's going to hit
(41:11):
that next metric that you'retrying to hit.
Adam Shaffer (41:14):
Cool, and if any of the audience wants to reach
out to you and learn more aboutworking with you or just ask you
questions, how can they reachyou?
Andy Craig (41:23):
Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn.
You can find Andy Craig onLinkedIn.
You could go into my YouTubechannel.
I have a ton of content therethat's going to be youtubecom
forward slash at the Andy Craigand then I believe that's what
it is, and then you could alsoemail me, andy, at ad-habitcom.
Adam Shaffer (41:42):
Awesome, great.
Well, I really appreciate youbeing on the show today.
You're a wealth of knowledgeand you're a great guy.
Thanks for your service to thecountry.
Also, I always love talking toveterans, so thank you for your
service there and thank you forhelping all the Amazon folks.
Andy Craig (41:59):
Thanks, Adam.
Thanks for having me.
I had a great time Great.
Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam
Shaffer, where we explore theworld of Amazon and other
e-commerce marketplaces.
Join us as we delve into thelatest strategies and tactics
for successful selling on theworld's largest online
marketplace.
Adam Shaffer (00:17):
Hello, I'm Adam Shaffer and welcome to Planet
Amazon, where we talk about allthings Amazon, and today I
wanted to welcome to the podcastAndy Craig.
Who is Andy Craig, you mightask?
Well, it's an interesting storyand he's going to tell us more,
but Andy is an Army veteranturned Amazon entrepreneur, from
(00:37):
Detroit, no less.
After diving into Amazon in2020, he quickly transitioned
from launching products.
Diving into Amazon in 2020, hequickly transitioned from
launching products to foundinghis own ad agency called AdHabit
in 2021.
Andy is a super passionateperson in general, but he's also
passionate about leveragingAmazon's platform to help brands
grow, and he loves sharing hislife lessons to people on Amazon
(01:03):
and in the real world outsideof Amazon.
He's just that kind of guy.
He's also a husband and afather of two, and that I
definitely want to alsounderstand a bit more, because I
have two kids running aroundthe house today and he's
enjoying every moment of hisjourney.
So welcome to the show, andy.
Thanks for having me, reallygreat intro.
(01:26):
So tell me first, before we getinto all this other work stuff.
Tell me about the kids.
Andy Craig (01:34):
Well, I got a four-year-old and a soon-to-be
nine-year-old.
They're both at school rightnow, thankfully, so there's no
background noise here today.
Yeah, they're both great.
We're here in Michigan and youknow they're one boy, one girl.
Adam Shaffer (01:50):
Okay, I have two girls and so there's basically
three women in our family andI'm the only guy.
So I get outranked every minuteof every day.
So I live a painful life withmy family, but I love them to
death.
So cool and good luck with yourfamily.
Now, this Army thing to Amazon.
(02:12):
I mean, I imagine there'speople out there that have been
in the Army and then went toAmazon.
But you were in the Army for awhile.
What happened?
What made you take the leapfrom serving our country to now
serving folks on Amazon?
Andy Craig (02:25):
Yeah, there was a little bit of gap, I would say,
in between.
I was artillery in the Army forsix years and then I became an
electrician my last couple ofyears and then I transitioned to
become an electrician withGeneral Motors, fixing the
machines and the plant thathelped to build all the cars and
the factory.
Life just wasn't for me as much.
So I was always looking forsomething entrepreneurial to
(02:48):
leave and, just like many others, I seen Amazon.
I seen the opportunity withAmazon FBA, so I just dove in,
learned as much as I could,started launching products and I
really got a knack for theAmazon ads, the PPC side of
things, which kind of led me towhere we are today.
Right, I started doing it formy own products, helping friends
(03:08):
, and then I got more demandfrom other brands than I could
handle myself, and that's whereAdHabit was born.
So I started hiring, trainingand that's kind of how I grew up
from there.
Adam Shaffer (03:19):
So the products you were launching, were they
your products, private label, orwere they third-party products?
Andy Craig (03:24):
Yeah, when I started out I looked into all the
aspects.
Right, there's the wholesale,there's the retail arbitrage and
I just seen a much biggeropportunity in the private label
side because you have a lotmore control there as well and I
believe usually there's highermargins With wholesale.
You need more quantity rightOver quality and you don't
really have as much control.
(03:44):
And I feel brands could youhave an agreement in place with
brands with wholesale, but theycould always decide to just sell
themselves on Amazon and Ididn't want to have that
additional risk of the business.
Adam Shaffer (03:56):
Yeah, no, I get it .
I mean, our company is helpingbrands and there's always that
fear that you build them up tothis point where they say, okay,
maybe we want to do itourselves or whatever.
So there's always that riskthat you lose a great client.
So you always got to get more.
But so what's interesting aboutit is you said you got kind of
(04:16):
into the PPC.
What's funny is I meet a lot ofpeople that get into Amazon and
the PPC and the advertising andsetting ads is complicated and
scary and obviously that's whyagencies like yours are around.
But it seems like that's whereyou gravitate it.
Personally, I love it, but it'sdefinitely like the ocean it
never stops.
There's always something yougot to be doing.
(04:38):
So why don't you talk a littlebit about how you work with
clients and how you build agreat PPC campaign?
I know it's kind of a loadedquestion, but give us your best
shot at that one.
Andy Craig (04:51):
Yeah, I mean how we work with clients.
Clients come to us when youknow, either they don't want to
do the PPC themselves they havehad bad experiences trying to
learn it or hire, and then theycome to us because we have the
expertise that we've been doingit for years.
We take a very hands-onapproach with the advertising
and part of my background, too,is I went to school for
(05:12):
engineering, right, so I'm anumbers guy.
We really look at the numbersand come up with a plan to tell
us exactly what to do Now withPPC campaigns.
We don't know if it's going tobe successful or not.
We're all about testing, right.
We test something.
If it works, we do more of it.
If it doesn't work, we pullback and try a different
strategy.
And you know, these campaignscould run for years and years
(05:35):
and years and just as the longeryou run them, the more
consistency you're usually goingto see.
And it's not, like you know,with Facebook.
A lot of times you just stop acampaign, start a new one.
Amazon has a lot more historybuilt into their campaigns.
Adam Shaffer (05:50):
So I guess there's a budget or something like that
.
But when you start to attack it, are you focused on manually
doing this or are you usingsoftware?
How do you do it?
Because I find that we've triedsoftware and then our guys will
wind up setting it andforgetting it, and then we have
to come running back and adjustthings later.
(06:10):
What's your philosophy here?
Andy Craig (06:13):
Yeah, so we don't like the softwares that are the
set it and forget it, becausethere's a lot of them out there
that have their specialalgorithms, but what we found,
because we've tested some ofthese, is they don't work for
every product, they don't workfor every client.
So we use a good mixture of asoftware that we have a lot of
control over and expert PPCstrategists is what we call them
(06:34):
, ppc managers that have beendoing this for years that can
utilize the software to helpthem with the campaigns.
So you're doing a lot of manuallabor, along with some software
helping you exactly because, asyou've seen, with amazon right,
we there's a lot of differentreports, there's a lot of
different things you can look at, and we started off and we
(06:56):
still use, you know, the bulkoperations which are to pull all
the ads into spreadsheets, um,which is a great way to do it
right instead of just clickingin campaign manager all over the
place.
But with the software, it savesa lot of time.
We're able to stop downloadinga bunch of reports, open it up
in Excel and now we're able toget all the data through
Amazon's API, and it saves us aton of time and gives us a
(07:19):
really nice quality dashboard tolook at all the campaign
performance, the keywordperformance, all the data that
we need in an instant.
Adam Shaffer (07:29):
And do you look at long tail?
Are you focused on just a smallamount of words?
Because there's some people whosay, oh, we should just focus
on the top 10 words and that'sit.
And then there's some that say,wow, you really got to play
that long tail.
That's kind of why you need toget some kind of software to
help manage or organize it.
But how do you go about it?
Andy Craig (07:48):
Yeah, we do both right and it really depends on
the client where they're at intheir journey with the product.
If they're just launching, wemay focus more on the long tail,
highly specific, and thensprinkle in some of the higher
competitive words.
But it's so dependent oneverything.
We focus on everything right.
We long tail, short tailcategories.
There's a lot of different adtypes on Amazon that you know,
(08:10):
give you a different kind ofbrand awareness and things like
that that we could push outthere.
Adam Shaffer (08:16):
And how do you deal with?
You know you mentionedcompetitive words.
How do you deal withcompetitors?
Like you know, you have a brandthat you're helping manage and
things are going okay and you'regetting you know the cost to
acquire down and things aregetting going the right
direction.
All of a sudden, you kind ofbottom out and you see
competitors coming all over you.
What's your thoughts on that?
Andy Craig (08:37):
Yeah, we can't control, you know competition,
right?
What we have to do is controlhow we perform versus the
competition.
So there's a lot of differentbenchmarks you could look at to
see how your competitors aredoing versus you, and the
conversion rate is going to bethat most important thing, right
, Because Amazon ads it's anauction, so if your competitors
(08:58):
are converting better than you,they could afford to be higher
on that auction because thatcost per click is going to be
built into it, right?
So if you're converting at 10%and they're converting at 20,
they could afford double thecost per click or the bid that
you can afford.
So we always want to look atthose benchmarks and if we're
not converting quite as well, weneed to go into the listing and
(09:21):
figure out what we need tochange, whether it's the image,
the main images, the A pluscontent, the title, the reviews,
you know the price point, maybeand really come up with that
strategy as well.
Adam Shaffer (09:33):
Andy, I'm glad you brought that up, so it's not
just let me figure out what I'mgoing to bid on.
You actually are looking at thelistings themselves, right?
So you're sitting there tryingto optimize listings.
Are you working on words andphotos, videos Like?
How do you go about that?
Andy Craig (09:49):
Yeah, so a lot of this stuff.
It really goes hand in handright Like we're a PPC agency
primarily, but the listing kindof goes hand in hand with it.
So we go through and we workwith them.
We have a full creative teamin-house to optimize those
listings.
And Amazon even has splittesting built right in to where
we could split test the imagesand we could split test the
(10:10):
things to see what's going topush the needle to that next
point of that click-through rateand the conversion rate to
compete in any niche.
So you've been doing A-B testing.
Yeah, so we're doing A-Btesting.
We build out videos for theclients.
Now we can't A-B test a video,but what we'll do with that is
we'll actually run this videofor a week.
(10:31):
We'll run this video for a weekor whatever period of time we
want to do with the test to seewhich one performs better.
Thing you could do with A-Btest is usually going to be the
title and the reviews I'm sorry,not the reviews.
(10:52):
The title and the main image onAmazon is going to have a huge
impact.
And then the price point.
There are softwares out therethat could help you to split
test that as well.
It's a little bit more manualif you want to do it yourself on
Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (10:59):
Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting.
Like you know, I go to theAccelerate show.
I don't know if you've been tothat in Seattle, but it's great
and you could see the amount ofmoney that Amazon's investing in
the tools.
And obviously this A-B testingand the ability to run tests and
then let the winning resultcontinue on is to me great.
And obviously they have all thebrainpower in the world there.
(11:22):
They have, you know, datascientists and all these guys
looking at all this stuff allthe time.
So I think that if people aren'tleveraging that there, you know
they should.
If they're not, because evenjust a little bit better result,
like I don't think you could gowrong with A-B testing, because
either you're going to keep theresults you have or you're
going to better it.
And if you can keep on tryingto better it, why not?
(11:43):
And you know Amazon wantshigher conversion rates because
they want more sales, like so itkind of works and so I'm
thrilled that you're doing thatfor your clients.
When it comes to the contentitself, are you trying to change
like the bullets and the copyto try and get a higher
conversion on that?
Andy Craig (12:02):
Yeah, yeah, that's one of the things that when we
first onboard a client, we kindof do a complete listing audit
as well to see if they'reranking on the right keywords,
if they're even indexing, whichmeans like, can you even show up
on the keywords according toAmazon's algorithm?
So we'll double check all thatand if we need to rebuild the
copy, that's what we'll do.
Right, and we the title isgoing to be a huge impact.
(12:24):
And then the back backendsearch terms, like if we're
going after hard, if we'retrying to rank on a certain
keyword we need to put that andrun some tests with the title
and okay, good, fair enough.
Adam Shaffer (12:39):
And then when it comes to the competitors again I
bring that up because I'm in aworld where there's always lots
of competitors Are you buyingtheir names?
It's funny.
I was talking to someone theother day about Epson, who makes
label printers or receiptprinters, and in the real world,
(12:59):
outside Amazon, they're thenumber one player.
Like you, go into every store,you see it, but on Amazon you
punch in Epson and you'll see 10other guys there, the brands
that you've never heard of.
They're definitely all offshorekind of manufacturers coming in
, and then Epson is somewheredown at the bottom.
So these guys are all buyingthe word Epson.
Are you buying competitivenames?
(13:21):
Is that work?
Because I can see it workingfor them.
I just don't know if it worksfor Epson.
Andy Craig (13:25):
I can see it working for them.
I just don't know if it worksfor Epson.
So a lot of times, right, we'renot going to be able to convert
as well as Epson when peopleare looking for an Epson.
But right now we're running astrategy with one of our clients
because they've kind of hit theceiling to where they can rank
on the category type keywords.
So we're starting to go aftersome of the competitors.
We're seeing an increase inrank as we kind of get more
aggressive with those and getsome of the share away from it.
(13:49):
But you have to spend a bit more, right?
Yeah, usually.
And it depends if that brand iseven protecting their brand
search terms, because if they'renot, usually the bid is not
going to need to be very highfor it.
And then also there's toolslike Amazon brand analytics, to
where we could track our marketshare on certain keywords.
So, as we're pushing these andas Amazon brand analytics to
where we could track our marketshare on certain keywords, so as
we're pushing these and aswe're spending more, we could
(14:11):
actually measure to see if we'regetting more market share on
those keywords.
Adam Shaffer (14:16):
Cool.
So and then when it comes toadvertising, obviously you know
you're buying keywords, but areyou doing any brand advertising?
So do you try to promote theentire brand or is that like
super expensive and doesn'tconvert?
Andy Craig (14:32):
well, no, every everything has its bid right,
because it's all going to bebased on the conversion.
If we're converting well, wecan afford a higher bid, but if
we're not, we'll just lower thebids.
So we're like those sponsoredbrand ads right.
We can show up headline searchads all the way at the top of
search when people first land onthe search results page.
We can be right up at the topwith a few products and a nice
(14:53):
custom image and we like totailor that custom image to what
people are searching for.
And then a little bit down,sometimes at the top, we get the
video ad, which it depends onthe video and it depends on how
competitive that ad is going tobe.
But that could be a very, verywell converting ad placement and
I've had brands that just takeoff just with that one video.
(15:16):
That just does very well.
Adam Shaffer (15:17):
So video ads are huge.
I mean, I see them everywhere,my eye always goes to them and I
almost always click, even ifI'm not looking for that product
, because it kind of tells thestory right there.
So so you're doing that too, soyou're doing a lot of video ads
for your clients.
Andy Craig (15:32):
Yep.
Adam Shaffer (15:33):
Yep, Okay, that's awesome.
And and what?
What's your thoughts and what'syour philosophy on the brand
store?
Like, is that important, Notimportant?
I see some people like spend afortune of time on it and then
some just you know it's notimportant enough, it doesn't
matter.
Andy Craig (15:48):
I think it depends on how much you're running with
the sponsored brand ads, becauseyou could run ads that you know
send people directly to yourstorefront.
So if you're trying to test outa lot more of this, you need to
have a well convertingstorefront.
So that's where I kind of getinto the importance of it.
Right, are we pushing peopletowards it or are we not?
I always recommend buildeverything out the best that we
(16:09):
can and invest it.
That way, everything's set.
Now let's start to push adspend towards well-converting
Amazon.
You know kind of pages.
Adam Shaffer (16:18):
So your brand ads will go to the brand store.
Andy Craig (16:21):
They can, so we could send them either to the
product detail page or send themdirectly to the brand store.
Adam Shaffer (16:27):
Cool.
So you've been doing this for awhile.
What's been like your biggestsuccess?
You don't have to tell us thebrand, but you know, tell us
something about where you gotinvolved with the client and it
was just a mess and you reallyreally streamlined it and now
it's off the charts.
Andy Craig (16:45):
Yeah, I mean we've done.
We've worked with brands thathave been up and running a while
.
We've worked with brands thatare just getting started, and
it's one of my favorite thingsis launching new products, right
, because we can get in there,we could launch a new product,
and when that hits and when thatreally starts to rank, that's
one of my favorite things.
You know, getting them fromzero to their first $10,000 in
(17:06):
sales, 20, 30, and just everymonth, seeing it kind of go up
on a on a nice curve, issomething I love, right, we we
do a lot of training with brandstoo, because I love teaching
people how to do it.
So we'll get in there, we'lltrain them how to do it
themselves, and I love theexcitement when they see things
are starting to turn around andhit the goals and numbers that
(17:26):
they're starting to see.
Adam Shaffer (17:27):
So you're helping people launch new products.
Andy Craig (17:33):
Yeah, we're helping them launch new products, but
we're also training them how todo their own PPC, because a lot
of brands want to build theirown in-house teams.
So we show them.
We transfer our expertise overto their teams to show them how
to do it themselves.
Adam Shaffer (17:42):
I always found new products is like a lot of work,
like so.
But you guys, because it's fromevery discipline you have to be
good at with a new product andgetting it out there.
So that's awesome, because insome cases, there's agencies
that don't want to work withstarters.
They want to work with brandsthat are already spending a lot
of money and need help.
But I think that that's reallyadmirable, that you're working
(18:04):
with people that are trying toget new products launched,
because it's actually the mostfun.
It's just it's a lot of workand it's awesome that you're
doing that.
So you've taken some brand newproducts from zero to something
right.
Andy Craig (18:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it doesn't always happen
right.
With any new product, there'sgoing to be a risk to it because
it's not tested yet.
But you have to launch it, youhave to start pushing things and
I like to work with the brandsto develop that strategy, and
we've had clients that have justtaken off and hit with one
product, be able to go from zeroin the first month to the first
(18:40):
20,000, and then the next monthto 40 and to 50, so on and so
forth.
Adam Shaffer (18:44):
You said it a little earlier, but you were
talking about something else butproduct reviews.
When you do these new products,do you help them get the
reviews too?
Andy Craig (18:52):
No, we don't have a review service.
We do recommend a lot ofdifferent strategies whether
it's Amazon, vine, using theirown email list to develop, to
get those first reviews.
But that's a very importantaspect, right, people need to
kind of step back and look attheir listings versus their
competition.
Right, if you're a higher pricepoint, if you're a new product
(19:14):
with no reviews, why wouldsomebody click and pick yours
versus the competition?
So you need to have a strategyin place to get those initial
reviews.
And if I'm looking at a productand I see, hey, this one has
5,000 reviews, but they're onlyfour stars, and this new one has
five stars, but there's only 15, I might be considering buying
(19:35):
this new one because it'sobviously of a better quality.
Adam Shaffer (19:38):
Yeah, I mean Vine is great, but you got to have a
good product, because if youdon't they might give you a bad
review and that could be trouble.
Andy Craig (19:48):
Yeah, and the people in the Vine program may not be
your ideal customer avatar, sothey might not even need this
product.
So the average Vine reviews, Ibelieve, are like 4.2, 4.3 stars
.
Is that right?
Oh, okay, that's what I'veheard.
I'm just kind of pulling it offthe back of my head yeah, no, I
didn't realize that.
Adam Shaffer (20:05):
I mean, I think there is a little.
I think it's important, but Idefinitely always think there's
a little bit of a risk.
You know, you got to kind of doeverything right now.
If you don't have a greatproduct, you probably shouldn't
be trying to sell it, unlessit's, you know, Uber,
inexpensive and people get that.
They're getting less for less.
But, um, I think the quality ofthe product, the packaging and
all that stuff is superimportant.
Are you helping any of thesenew brands with their packaging
(20:27):
at all?
Is that part of it or not?
Andy Craig (20:30):
No, we don't do any of the packaging.
We have partners that can helpwith that, but we don't do any
of the packaging design in-house.
But we will give them kind ofrecommendations on it, right,
because that packaging.
Adam Shaffer (20:49):
You could put that main image on Amazon so it
could have a huge impact on thatconversion and click-through
rate when people see yourlisting for the first time and
let's go to BSR for a bit whenyou're looking at the products
that you're managing, obviouslyyou want to get that ranking as
close to one as you can, whichis not always easy.
But is that like a KPI for youguys?
Like where did we start withyou and now where are we with
your ranking?
Andy Craig (21:09):
Yeah, that's something.
We're very data focused, right.
So we're tracking all themetrics and the BSR is one of
them.
We like to track the BSR of thecategory, but also the
subcategory, and make sure we'regoing in the right direction,
either being consistent if we'rehappy with where we are, or
we're on a constant trend down,which, for BSR, right, we want
(21:30):
to go lower, right, we want toget to that number one spot.
So that's a very importantmetric.
And every time, one of thethings I hate is running out of
stock, right, but it does happen, right, we run out of stock, we
see that BSR start to go backback up, right, and then we come
back in stock and we have tokind of push even harder to work
to get that BSR back to whereit was.
Adam Shaffer (21:51):
Yeah, no.
I mean, if you're not in stockit's deadly and it definitely
happens, but you got to makesure that you're in stock.
I mean, that's like therequirement on Amazon you can't
sell it if you don't have it forsure, and so have you you've.
You can't sell it if you don'thave it for sure, and so have
you been able to get some ofyour products that you manage
into the top 15 or 20 orsomething like that?
Andy Craig (22:11):
Oh yeah, yeah Not every client, like if it's a new
brand that's just starting.
It's going to take a while,right, but we do our best to
constantly track it and come upwith a plan of action to get
there.
Adam Shaffer (22:29):
So we're coming and I don't want to date this
podcast too much, but we'recoming and I don't want to date
this podcast too much, but we'recoming into prime day.
So is there any secret advicethat you want to tell people
about?
On what?
What are good practices forprime day?
Is it spending a lot more moneyon on ppc?
Is it promotions?
Is it coupons?
What?
What's your thoughts there?
Andy Craig (22:45):
yeah, we we're actually working with a lot of
our clients right now on thatstrategy and it's going to be
different with each one.
We give them their options andultimately let them make the
decision.
But some of our brands theywant to just do business as
normal.
But other brands really want tohit Prime Day hard.
They got the stock in place todo it.
So we're going to start rampingup some of the ad spend leading
(23:06):
up to the prime day and thenwhen prime day hits, we're going
to push even harder and theconversion rates on prime day go
through the roof so we canafford those higher ad
placements, those higher youknow, that higher bid in place
where some of our brands, like Isaid, they just want to use the
extra traffic, even kind ofturn down their bids a little
bit, where they're justmaximizing their profitability
(23:28):
on the day.
Adam Shaffer (23:29):
I mean, Prime Days is huge.
From what I understand, it's asgood as Cyber Weekend.
Is that what you find?
I don't know.
Prime Day 2 isn't as good, butit's still pretty good.
Andy Craig (23:45):
It's usually based on the niche, right.
We see it kind of different allover the place, but every year
we see it perform better andbetter right.
More people know about PrimeDay.
The more Prime customers wehave, the more sales we usually
get.
Every Prime Day is better thanthe last is almost what we see.
Adam Shaffer (24:00):
So you know whether it's Prime Day or not
Prime Day or holiday or notholiday.
You know one thing that a lotof the tools give you the
ability to do is day parting,and I don't know what your
thoughts on it.
I mean, is it a scam or is itlike?
Is day parting something thatyou should try to do?
Andy Craig (24:15):
I think you should test it.
That's our thing.
Test it, see how it works.
You don't have to do it withevery campaign.
You can do it with some.
We do a little bit of it, butwe don't do a lot of the Amazon
marketing stream stuff.
But we'll maybe shut off ourads on certain times of the day
that we know we don't convertwell, Like if it's midnight and
5am.
We'll just save the ad spendfor those better converting
(24:37):
times.
So that's about all we do forthat.
Adam Shaffer (24:40):
So you see that there's times a day where people
are maybe just shopping butthey're not buying, like they
might be looking and clickingbut they're not doing the deal.
Andy Craig (24:49):
Yeah, and we also have days of the week where that
day is a much better performer,so we will push harder.
On a certain day, we know thatwe get a lot more sales and a
lot higher conversion rates.
Adam Shaffer (24:59):
No, it's funny because we have some products
now.
Our weekends used to be quitelow, but now we have some
consumer products that are.
It seems that the weekend istheir best day, so it is pretty
interesting.
It's definitely based on theproduct.
The more B2B it is, the lessit's going to sell on the
weekend.
Andy Craig (25:16):
Yeah, we have some office products that just do
much better on a Wednesday thanthey do on a Saturday.
Adam Shaffer (25:21):
Yeah, no, but I used to hate the weekend.
It was depressing.
Now I kind of dig it.
So that's interesting and youknow, I know that you said you
don't really do it, but off,amazon has become quite big.
There's a couple of firms outthere that are helping brands
with Google advertising toAmazon, and you know what's your
(25:42):
thoughts on that, because it'sjust another expense to me, but
is it required?
Andy Craig (25:49):
Yeah, I think it's been a, you know, a big topic
lately, like everyone's talkingabout sending Google ads to
Amazon, sending external trafficin, which I think is great, but
you're always you're let's justsay, usually you're usually
going to have a much betterconversion rate through Amazon
PPC.
So if you're not maximizingyour potential there, I don't
think it's time to start testingout Google Ads yet.
(26:10):
If you're not ranking on yourkeywords, at least on page one,
let's not work on Google Ads yetbecause there's still an issue
on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (26:19):
Right.
So get Amazon right before youstart going off Amazon for sure,
and that's good.
Andy Craig (26:26):
I was just going to say that's just with you know
kind of ad spend, right, I stillrecommend people to build their
, their presence off Amazon,their social media, build all
that stuff, because building thebrand and then pushing, like
Google, ads to Amazon are twodifferent things, because some
of our best performing clientsthey've built a brand through
Amazon, through through Facebook, through Shopify, through
(26:47):
Instagram, through you know,tick tock all these different
channels, and those are thebrands that I see doing the best
.
Right, because people arecoming to Amazon, not from
Google, but they're coming to,they're looking for that brand
themselves.
Adam Shaffer (27:00):
So they're building the brand off Amazon
and people are going to find iton Amazon and buy it.
Yeah, you know it's interesting.
I love Shopify, but I justsometimes believe that the
conversion rate is better onAmazon because people are just
more comfortable buying it onAmazon.
They have their accounts set up, they know that they're going
to return it without a hassle,which nobody likes returns, but
it's part of the game.
So I definitely I see thebenefits of it and I also
(27:23):
believe Amazon gives you.
If it's on the 14-day cookie,if it comes from Google to
Amazon, they'll give you apercentage back like 8%.
Andy Craig (27:31):
Yeah, yeah, that brand performance bonus or
whatever.
Adam Shaffer (27:34):
Yeah, no, I think it's a big deal because you know
that's for three-piece sellers.
They're spending probablybetween $8 and $15 or something
for the commission.
So that's a good way to incentyou.
Andy Craig (27:45):
Yeah, and that's something we help our customers
set up is those attributionlinks so they can send traffic
from their email list, frominfluencers, from whatever
social channels they're tryingto track Are you again?
Adam Shaffer (28:02):
I know you spend most of the time in advertising,
but are you helping peoplebuild their social media, or
influencers or any of that?
Andy Craig (28:07):
No, we don't work with influencers.
We do have recommendations andpartners that we work with.
That that's their primary focus, but we try to keep our
attention focused on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (28:16):
Do you think that influencers are helpful?
Andy Craig (28:19):
I do.
I think you find the rightinfluencer and I think that
external traffic does help a lotwith the Amazon algorithm and,
honestly, everything, you'rebuilding the brand right.
The more people see the product, the more they're going to know
about you, the more they'regoing to hopefully purchase and
the bigger you're going to kindof build your presence on Amazon
, on Amazon, on online period.
Adam Shaffer (28:42):
I mean, do you ever mess around with Amazon
posts at all?
Andy Craig (28:46):
Yeah, we have a lot of clients.
We don't do it too muchourselves, but we have a lot of
clients that they're alreadydeveloping.
You know the content, so whynot post it there also and we're
able to see it work right?
And the thing is, it's stillfree.
Amazon doesn't charge for it no, I mean so.
Adam Shaffer (29:03):
So why not?
Andy Craig (29:03):
it's the time to do it right yeah, and just extra,
and if you can do it to whereit's right, if you have a
employee maybe they're a va,virtual assistant or something
that doesn't cost you a ton youcan measure their time spent on
that versus the sales becauseamazon does provide that and see
what kind of return oninvestment you have there.
Adam Shaffer (29:23):
Yeah, I mean it's funny that more people don't do
it because it is free.
It is a little mind boggling.
But I think they think, oh no,it's not going to convert.
But to me it's like the morecontent that's out there the
better.
Why not?
But it is the time and it'sanother cycle out of your life.
But, like you said, you can getvas to post for you for, you
know, a small amount of money.
Andy Craig (29:44):
I don't think it would.
Yeah, and it's.
It's measurable, which is great.
Adam Shaffer (29:47):
Right, you can measure the performance of it so
with I don't know the number islike 2.5 million three-piece
sellers out there, um and andI'm sure you know there's the
tip of the spear that you knowdoes most of the business, but
there's so many sellers onAmazon and so many categories
that become so competitive.
(30:09):
Is it too late for somebody newcoming into the game to be
successful on Amazon?
Andy Craig (30:17):
I do not think so, because we're constantly working
with new brands, because youknow, like you said, a lot of
those agencies.
They only want to work withbrands of a certain size when,
with my background as a seller,I've been there right.
So I like helping these newsellers get there.
We recently launched a newseller we're training on Amazon.
We're training them how to dotheir own PPC, and they ran out
(30:39):
of stock on Amazon.
We're training them how to dotheir own PPC and they ran out
of stock, which is not a good,you know, not a terrible problem
to have.
But they doubled their saleswithin the first month.
Second month they ran out ofstock and their tacos which is,
you know, that total advertisingcost of sale, which is a good
reflect of profitability wentdown right.
So they just launched theirproduct and they're in the right
niche.
(30:59):
And for those of you that arelistening that have launched a
product and it didn't work out,it's not the end, launch another
one.
We work with brands that aredoing eight figures a year, that
have products they launchedthat just don't work.
You want to pivot, launchanother one and keep testing
things launch another one andkeep testing things.
Adam Shaffer (31:24):
So it also goes back to what kind of product
would you launch if you weregoing to do one today, for
yourself or for a partner?
Because for me it's like.
I love selling stuff on Amazon.
There's the thrill when you seeyour product start to sell, but
there's something about aproduct that people have to use
over and over again.
And the subscribe and savestuff is, to me, awesome Because
you can actually potentiallylose money to bring in a new
(31:46):
customer if they're going tospend X amount of dollars with
you in the future.
Andy Craig (31:51):
Yeah, we're working with a client right now that's
launching a new product and it'sjust they found the right niche
.
That's kind of at the beginningof it, but we're seeing the
search volume trend on Google.
We're seeing the search volumetrend on Amazon constantly going
up and there's no hugecompetition there.
That has 20, 50,000 reviews, sonow's the perfect time to get
in there.
So when you're choosing theproduct, it's all about the
(32:14):
research, the demand, thecompetition, because the more
the competition, the more you'regoing to need to spend to get
ranked and to get profitable,and it depends.
There's also a bigger upsidethe more competitive spaces have
a lot of demand and peoplelooking for it, but it might
take you a little bit longer tohit that profitability.
Adam Shaffer (32:35):
I mean, I think it's shocking if people knew how
much money was spent onproducts.
Until you're in the biz youdon't really see it, but I think
the number is something about$650 billion a year in gross
merchandise sales through Amazon.
So it's such a great platformfor you to mess around with.
(32:56):
I mean, if you're going to gostart your own business
somewhere and say you're goingto start a retail store, you got
to go find a location, investin leasing the store, invest in
fixing up the store, then investin inventory to put in the
store, then man the store andAmazon gives you this platform
and Amazon could be friend orfoe, but they don't make things
(33:17):
easy, especially for the smallguys.
But I just think there's hugeopportunity there.
So I'm glad you still see that.
Andy Craig (33:29):
Yeah, it's, you know it.
The barrier to entry is solittle you could.
You could order 10 products andlaunch them and just test it
and see if it works, see ifthere's a demand for it, and you
don't have to order maybe awhole container full of products
or multiple containers forAmazon right, but if you're
working with a Costco, you needto have quite a bit of stock,
right.
Adam Shaffer (33:43):
Yeah, yeah, no.
And also I don't know if yourun into it Maybe you do, maybe
you don't in your business.
But, like, brand protection iskind of important these days
because you talk about Costcoand then you have these
arbitrage guys go to Costco, buystuff and break it up and sell
it on Amazon, depending on thesale.
So there's a lot of policingthat has to go on with your
(34:05):
brands.
I don't know if you do that ornot, but what do you see out
there on the brand protectionfront?
Andy Craig (34:12):
Yeah.
So we've been hit a coupletimes with people jumping on
some of our brands listings andthere's not a ton you could do
about it.
Amazon doesn't always protectyou from it, but there's a
couple of things.
Right, you have to be brandregistered to get your trademark
in Amazon system, yeah, andthen you can sign up for the
Amazon transparency program soyou could add that extra QR code
(34:34):
label to your, to your products, to show Amazon like hey, these
are mine, those other ones arenot.
Let's get those guys off ofthere.
Adam Shaffer (34:43):
Transparency is big.
We have a few partners now thatare doing that and it's
definitely helping them a lot.
There's a lot of work to haveto go into getting it going, but
once you get it going itdefinitely helps.
You know, because there's folksbringing stuff in from overseas
.
There's people buying used andselling it as new like.
Andy Craig (34:59):
There's all kinds of scammers out there, and
protecting the brand is, if youwant, if you want to increase
your conversion rate, get thescammers off your listings when
you can so I always tell myclients to like, when they are
starting their wholesale oftheir business right,
wholesaling it to othercompanies, to retail stores, to
make sure there's an agreementin place to let them know hey,
(35:21):
you cannot sell these productson Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (35:25):
So we talked about conversion a lot, but give us
Andy's top three or top fourways to increase conversion rate
on an ASIN.
Andy Craig (35:37):
So when we work with new clients, we're going to
audit the account.
We're going to see there's alot of different areas, but
sometimes the simplest thing isthey're just going after the
wrong keywords.
Right?
If you're targeting super broadareas and you're not hitting
those longer tail keywords thatare specifically describing your
product, you're not going toconvert quite as well.
So let's make sure we'retargeting the right keywords and
(36:00):
then let's start working on theother things.
Right, the listing, the reviews,the price point.
Those have the biggest impactthe main image, the title, the
price point, the reviews.
And then we go into the listing, build out those secondary
images, the A plus content, thecopy, and even add in videos
into the listing have a hugeimpact because nowadays people
(36:21):
love watching videos.
So get some user generatedcontent, put that in the, you
know, under the videos, rightunderneath your main images or
even at the bottom, right abovethe reviews.
Having some video reviews inthere are another impact to it.
So it kind of each part of thelisting, each part of it kind of
impacts it a little bitdifferently, but they all work
together to increase thatconversion.
Adam Shaffer (36:44):
So it's definitely do your keyword research and
make sure you have kick-asscontent right, like that's going
to be it.
And it goes back to why wouldpeople feel that I need to go
spend money with an agency tohelp me with this stuff?
And for me, it's like Amazonhas become so competitive and so
(37:05):
mature and they have so manytools and it changes by the
minute, like there's somethingnew every day.
We come in.
We're learning something fromthe community and we're learning
something from doing it thatthings change.
You have to be great ateverything.
So, whatever the discipline iswhether it's logistics, whether
it's the content creation,whether it's the way you handle
(37:27):
customer service and now theadvertising these are all
different disciplines.
You can't be great ateverything.
And if you want to be great ateverything, you've got to get a
great team.
And if you want to be great ateverything, you got to get a
great team.
And so I just see that thereason that companies like yours
exist is because PPC is arabbit hole.
Man Like you could go and spenda lot of time on this and it's
(37:49):
still not enough time, so Idon't know what your thoughts
are, but I think that it's socompetitive right now.
You got to be so good at everypart of this thing.
Andy Craig (37:58):
Yeah, and you got to think about it of like a cost
of your time perspective too,for a lot of these brands,
because they may spend a tonmore time on their ads than I
would and we're going to givethem a better result than they
would get on their own.
Just because this is what we do, this is our expertise, what we
do every single day, let themfocus on the brand growth,
(38:20):
launching more products, and letagencies or other experts
handle what they do best.
Adam Shaffer (38:23):
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that if you'rein the biz, you should
definitely see what it's like towork with others, because
you'll benefit from the help,whether it's going to open up a
lot more time for you or it justgets really complicated and you
want to make sure that somebodyis watching your advertising on
a regular basis, which you'respending money.
So you know, I think it's it'sworthy for you to do that.
(38:46):
I think if you suffer on thelogistics side, you should find
a logistics partner to help youthere too.
So I just think that if you'regreat at building products, try
to focus on that and get peopleto help you with your other
stuff.
Andy Craig (39:00):
Yeah, and people also.
There's a people miss, right.
I'll work with clients aboutall right, how do we grow?
I'm like let's launch anotherproduct, let's launch, you know,
maybe multiple multi-packs onwhere we're at, but also let's
expand to other Amazonmarketplaces because we already
have proof of concept.
Let's kind of go into Europe,let's go into Asia, let's go
into Australia, these differentmarkets on Amazon.
Adam Shaffer (39:22):
Yeah, no for sure, especially if you're not doing.
You know Canada and you're youknow and you're selling in the U
?
S.
You should, because you don'treally even have to put products
there.
Amazon will do the heavylifting in Mexico and now Brazil
.
I think is like that, so sure.
Andy Craig (39:36):
Yeah, and you can test it out through the.
Uh, what is it called?
Yeah, and you can test it outthrough the.
What is it called?
Adam Shaffer (39:40):
the NARF program North.
Andy Craig (39:40):
America Remote Fulfillment and if you start to
see good results, then just shipit directly into Canada FBA,
because you're probably going todo a little bit better that way
.
Adam Shaffer (39:48):
It'll definitely do better, but it's a great way
to test and see if you should bein the country or not.
And that's another aspect ismanaging your inventory in other
areas.
Andy Craig (39:58):
So it gets a little more complicated.
Yeah, and you definitely wantto look to see what kind of
different laws that Canada hasand what different requirements
they're going to sometimesrequire you to have French on
your label and things like that.
Adam Shaffer (40:09):
Yeah, for sure.
So, but it's definitely.
Again, they go back to theworld outside of Amazon.
If you wanted to launch yourproduct in other markets, other
countries, it's not super easy,but on Amazon you could flip a
switch for the most part and youcould be there and it's pretty
cool.
They do the translations on thepage.
They'd help you with thecurrency conversion.
(40:29):
It's awesome.
So, again, I'm a big fan and Idefinitely agree with you that
that's something you could do tohelp grow your business.
So with that we're to startwrapping it up.
But I just wanted to make surethat if there's any words of
wisdom you could give theaudience any words of
inspiration, bring it on, man.
Andy Craig (40:50):
Yeah, so I'll kind of go back to it.
I'm a numbers guy, this is whatI focus on.
So if you're not tracking allyour metrics, it's hard to make
a plan to do better and to hitthose next goals.
So, whether you're using asoftware or manually extracting
it from Amazon, track yournumbers over time, set goals and
run different experiments andtests to see what's going to hit
(41:11):
that next metric that you'retrying to hit.
Adam Shaffer (41:14):
Cool, and if any of the audience wants to reach
out to you and learn more aboutworking with you or just ask you
questions, how can they reachyou?
Andy Craig (41:23):
Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn.
You can find Andy Craig onLinkedIn.
You could go into my YouTubechannel.
I have a ton of content therethat's going to be youtubecom
forward slash at the Andy Craigand then I believe that's what
it is, and then you could alsoemail me, andy, at ad-habitcom.
Adam Shaffer (41:42):
Awesome, great.
Well, I really appreciate youbeing on the show today.
You're a wealth of knowledgeand you're a great guy.
Thanks for your service to thecountry.
Also, I always love talking toveterans, so thank you for your
service there and thank you forhelping all the Amazon folks.
Andy Craig (41:59):
Thanks, Adam.
Thanks for having me.
I had a great time Great.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.