With all the information that’s out there about how to run a successful Amazon PPC campaign, it can be difficult knowing what really works. In this episode, we have Destaney Wishon, Co-Founder and CEO of BetterAMS, expert on Amazon Ads, to talk about the best way to handle PPC and Amazon ads. We’re going over some of those key aspects and providing you with our best tips for creating an unbeatable advertising strategy so your business will always stay ahead in its competition!
Topics Covered in This Episode
- About Destaney
- What’s the best way to handle PPC
- Keyword Research, Product targeting, Brand building
- Amazon ads & DSP
- PPC for Prime day
- Amazon and Social Commerce
- Question & Answer
Watch on YouTube
Download Options
- Direct Download: Click here and right-click “Save As audio” for a direct download
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Podcast Transcription
[00:00:00] Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics podcast. Signal code unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen converting and profiting fast with your host former top 50 seller on all of Amazon, the [00:00:30] professor Howard Thai.
[00:00:32] This is the Signalytics podcast signal code unlocked. Hello and welcome guys for the today session. And thank you so much, destiny for taking out your time and joining us. Very happy to be here. I was just talking about how hard it is to find destiny because she doesn’t reply. You have to keep on, uh, D DMing her and making sure to see if she says [00:01:00] hello.
[00:01:00] And, and so she’s one of the hardest person I can. I, I bet you in the industry to find , I just wanna feel needed Howard. I need a few messages from you, and then I’m ready to go.
[00:01:14] Okay. Awesome. So destiny, we would like to hear some of your background, like how did you start your Amazon journey? Yeah, of course. So destiny was Sean from better AMS. I got started in Amazon advertising like six years [00:01:30] ago. I, now I think it’s, it’s been a while I got started working on the one piece side. So I was working with a lot of really large vendors.
[00:01:37] That was how I was able to learn really quickly is cause I was thrown into a lot of situations with really high spend and just figuring things out. And I have not stopped doing Amazon ads since. So since it’s my primary focus, I can go really deep on a lot of concepts and I don’t really manage any other aspects of the business.
[00:01:54] So that’s where we are now. Awesome. Great. So [00:02:00] let’s jump onto today’s topic. Like how do you handle the PPC? What is the best way to do it? Yeah, I think the biggest thing we’ve seen lately, and I would love to hear your all’s opinion on this. Cause I know you all handle the ranking side incredibly well, but Amazon has just oversaturated page one with ads.
[00:02:20] So when anyone types in their top keywords, you see a headline search and four sponsor product ads, four organic placements, and then the rest is just internal recommendations, [00:02:30] video insert, sponsored, climate friendly, all of these things. so I think we’re seeing a crazy change. Like tacos is increasing slightly.
[00:02:37] If you’re not in the top of the page, terms of service changes have made things a little bit more complex and people are just spending more money on ads. So we’ve really had to start focusing on things like conversion rate in volume and the factors that are a little bit out of our control in order to make PPC more successful.
[00:02:55] All right. Great. So like, what is your strategy for the ranking? [00:03:00] If we talk about specifically for the PPC. Yeah. The key things that we look at is driving high volume, higher volume than the rest of your competitors, and then converting really, really well relative to your category. So kind of just breaking down the algorithm in a really, really simple way.
[00:03:18] Amazon doesn’t wanna show ads to people who don’t wanna buy those products. So if your ad doesn’t have high clickthrough rate high conversion rate, they’re not gonna. So, what we really focus on doing is typically running really high [00:03:30] volume top of search sponsor, product ads, sponsor brand ads, and then analyzing the conversion for those exact match keywords.
[00:03:37] And then comparing that with things like search query performance and brand metrics to make sure we’re converting better than the category mm-hmm okay. So we have a, like, there are too many sellers in here, Pakistan who actually have launched low price products. Like the price point is $6, $7, or up to $10.
[00:03:56] So, how do you handle those products in which you [00:04:00] have very thin profit margins? Yeah. I think that there’s two things that really need to happen. One expectations probably need to change because you’re not gonna be able to compete at top of search and be profitable at the same time. So we’re having to do that math of, if you’re paying $3 a click and you only have a 20% conversion rate.
[00:04:18] you’re not gonna be profitable, but back in the old days for the people like the professor at Baldwin, like when we all used to run Reiki campaigns, using external sources, we set aside budget for rank. We [00:04:30] said, Hey, here’s $5,000 for search. Find, buy, giveaway, whatever here’s the budget to spend PPC should probably be viewed in the same way.
[00:04:37] If you’re creating ranking campaigns, you need a set aside budget to focus on rank and make sure that your tacos slowly improves over. If that expectation’s out the window and they’re like, no, I don’t wanna spin that. And I can’t afford it for top of search. Then you’re gonna have to look at doing, you know, more longer tail keyword targeting.
[00:04:54] You’re gonna have to look at more product targeting and a lot of those cheaper placements, but you’re not gonna be able to rank mirrors quick [00:05:00] because you’re gonna have to drive that volume over extended period of time, because there’s such low search volume for those. Okay. So in addition to that, there are so many sellers who have chosen the product with the very, very, you can say low number of keywords as well.
[00:05:20] Like they have the, the thin profit margins and the keywords are really low. Like they are totally are around 10 to 15 keywords Uhhuh. So how do you [00:05:30] handle that? I typically see that there’s more keywords than people think, uh, even in super, super, super precise categories. There’s ways that you can extend a lot of your keyword research and get a really long tail.
[00:05:43] Again, just know your search volume is gonna be a lot lower, but you can still expand into those areas. Another thing you can do is just run product targeting. So for any one keyword, there’s typically 50 products that you can make sure you’re targeting and taking advantage of all the external traffic they’re driving in their organic ranks.
[00:05:59] That’s something [00:06:00] we really wanna look at, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a category with less than at least 500 keywords that you can bid on. All right. So Baldwin, what’s your take on it? Well, it seems like the industry has changed a lot where you kind of have to brute force it, right. Top of search.
[00:06:20] usually whoever has the most budget wins out at the end. What do you feel like? Is that the direction where [00:06:30] Amazon is going, where it’s like, whoever has the most money wins? I think that’s a, a much bigger part of it than ever the before. Even if we look at some of the new things, Amazon’s rolling out, they’re focusing on brand building.
[00:06:44] So the new influencer platform where you can work directly with influencers, sponsor brands, custom image, sponsor, display, custom image, more DSP off platform, video and search ads. All of those really give priority to the people who have a brands. [00:07:00] And typically the people that are like building a brand have more money and they have more longer term expectations.
[00:07:05] And I think what it came down to is Amazon values their customers. We’ve always known that that’s like their number one focus. And they don’t want a bunch of knockoff, terrible products on the platform. They have all of the customer base. Now. They don’t need anything and everything. They need the best of everything.
[00:07:22] So they’re really starting to focus on those brands who have that loyalty and the opportunity to spit cuz that’s where they’re making all their money. When you’re [00:07:30] saying, um, the influencers Amazon’s bringing in to connect with the sellers, you’re talking about what you just recently posted about the creator connections.
[00:07:39] Yes. That’s exactly what it is. I couldn’t remember the name. I, I follow you.
[00:07:48] if you didn’t know, if you didn’t know on a side note, like in Pakistan, you’re, you’re very popular as well. Aw. Well, that’s a kind thing I’m very excited about that. Is that why ? [00:08:00] Yeah, so there are too many people following you. And I would say like, there are so many people. Who are fans like, they really love your content.
[00:08:13] They really love the value you are putting. And we do respect that and we do appreciate that for being in the industry and just giving the value. Well, that’s amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Anytime I can get back and help like this. Industry’s a little crazy [00:08:30] right now. So without a community, it’d be impossible to succeed.
[00:08:34] Yeah. So I would like to know also that how Amazon is changing, like too quick, like mm-hmm uh, if we see the recent changes on, especially on the PPC, there are too many things coming out from Amazon. Yep. So how do you learn those things? Too quickly. So because people, people over here are like, they are learning something and then the change or new update [00:09:00] pops up.
[00:09:00] Yep. And they started learning that. So how do you actually do that? So I, I wanna answer that question, but I wanna start with something else first and that’s. There are so many shiny objects in our space. And I post all the new and shiny content because it’s a lot of what our team does. We work for a lot of large brands and that little stuff makes a big difference.
[00:09:22] And my team only manages Amazon ads. So it’s really easy to log into the platform every day and find these new things. But [00:09:30] for everyone who’s just starting out and who’s really starting to understand ads. I would say just don’t get distracted by it all at the end of the day, from the beginning, when all four of us on this call started managing, you know, six to 10 years ago, the basics of PPC are still bid management and keyword research.
[00:09:46] That’s what’s gonna make you successful. Sponsor brands is exciting and it helps. And we could drive an additional 20% sales sponsored display is really fun. We’ve now seen just in the last week. I think we’ve seen auto campaign bid [00:10:00] suggestions by holiday. We’ve seen add to cart data. We’ve seen video and search expansion, all of these fun and shiny things, but at the end of the day for a new person, that doesn’t matter.
[00:10:12] Get really good at keyword research. Get really good at bid management and then understanding the correlation between your conversion rate and your success. And that’s, what’s gonna drive long term value for you. All right. Good. I think, I think there’s this new thing that’s coming out or is rolling out about the added card [00:10:30] and brand searches and commun, uh, cumulative.
[00:10:34] which yeah. Or fourth under the advertising console side. Yep. Have we seen that Baldwin? Yeah, I actually, that information is super valuable, so it’s exciting to see. I I’m super excited for it. We’ve had it for 48 hours and the actual data has it hit. So part of me is wondering if it’s tied to sponsored brands OTT.[00:11:00]
[00:11:00] So maybe cuz we are starting a test campaign there. So I’m curious if those metrics were added just for that. Since the metrics are kind of like DSP metrics. So for those who don’t know on the DSP side, you have all the audience data you could ever want. You have, you know, how long they watched your video add to cart when they left all this, we’re starting to get some of it on the sponsored ad side.
[00:11:21] So I think it’s really exciting for the future of ads because the more data we have, the better we can tell the. Baldwin. Do you [00:11:30] have any, sorry, Paul, do you have anything you wanna ask? Yes. So speaking of DSP, what do you think about those who do run DSP ads and display ads? Would you recommend overlapping?
[00:11:47] Would you recommend doing the same or not doing the same? Both at the same time? Yeah, kind of. I. I know, like if you’re working with a very [00:12:00] advanced agency, like one of us, we will help segment and make sure that there’s not a lot of overlap, but a lot of agencies sell DSP is just a way to increase their retainer and they end up running only remarketing.
[00:12:13] And then that remarketing doesn’t actually increase top line sales and it can be run under sponsored display. So we recommend running product targeting under sponsored display. We usually recommend running remarketing under DSP. Cause we can get more granular and we can segment our audiences a little bit [00:12:30] deeper.
[00:12:30] But the problem with DSP is you typically need some type of minimum. So if you have 300 skews only do your top five skews on DSP, get really granular and then use sponsor display to run the rest. So that way you have better control of your budget, that makes sense. Okay. So for the newbie, what would you recommend to learn about the DSP?
[00:12:52] I would probably not play around too much with it in all honesty. I think that there’s a lot of like misinformation in the space and [00:13:00] I don’t think DSP makes sense for a lot of brands. The easiest way I use to segment it is sponsored ads are for a customer to come to you. They’re typing in the keyword.
[00:13:11] That’s gonna bring them to your page. They are already wanting to buy you. They’re just trying to find you the real value in DSP is going out and getting your customers. It’s saying, Hey, I wanna target someone between this age range and this category who’s viewed my competitors. Let’s go out and get them and tell them that they need my product.
[00:13:29] [00:13:30] So with that, there comes different goals and expectations. It’s typically a lower row as you’re typically moving up the funnel. And a lot of that doesn’t make sense for small brands with limited budget. Okay. So what do you recommend, like what should be a brand to go for the DSP? Like it, is it on the sales side or is it on the SKU side?
[00:13:51] What was that question? What, what do you, well, he was saying, what kind of, what is the requirement for a brand to go into [00:14:00] DSP? So on Amazon it’s typically like a $35,000 minimum. uh, three month commitment, anything like that. And they typically say, Hey, high price points, or highly remarkable products, anything that can be bought multiple times, supplements, trash bags, all that type of thing.
[00:14:18] On the agency side, I think we have much lower commitments. I’d be curious to hear what your thresholds are. We typically look for a minimum of like $8,000 in spend for a couple of skus, and then [00:14:30] we wanna make sure we have a high price point and remarketing as well.
[00:14:35] Yeah, on, on our side, uh, we’ve started taking on smaller clients where, where they’re not getting as much traction they should be or can, because we’ve been doing more middle of the funnel, things like awareness to drive traffic to the, the listing, uh, and making sure that their listings are optimized [00:15:00] so that they can convert.
[00:15:03] Do you, do you feel like you have to do a lot of educating brands? Because sometimes I’m like, oh, I want a five down ROAS on this. And I’m like, oh no, no way. Yeah. There’s definitely, you know, remarketing is awesome because you can show off the high numbers where you can have like 15 to 20, but , but when there’s a client or a brand that
[00:15:28] comes to you and [00:15:30] they don’t have the traffic that they need. Yeah. You, we gotta kinda educate them to let them know. Look, we’re not gonna see the higher laws we can do remarketing, but you don’t have enough traffic into your listing in order for it to be effective. That makes sense. That’s, that’s a lot of what I feel like is on our end.
[00:15:55] so like, do you recommend using any AI tool for the PPC [00:16:00] management? Like I can see here in the Pakistan, like there are very, very few people who are using the AI tool. Most of them are like managing by the Excel and the bug files. So do you recommend. No, not necessarily, uh, I think ad tools are needed a hundred percent.
[00:16:20] I think both of our agencies have built their own ad tech tools. And that’s what allows us to scale really efficiently. I think that once you [00:16:30] get into anyone that’s playing around with like AI and there’s, I don’t think there’s really such thing as AI in OurSpace per se, it’s all the same API. We’re getting the same data and just making adjustments.
[00:16:40] I think that ad tech tools can be really important, but they need to do two things. They need to showcase the data in a way that advertising console does not. So that way you can better visualize your account, but at the end of the day, it’s still bid management, keyword research, negating keywords, and campaign launches.
[00:16:55] So almost all the ad tech does something really similar. So if you’re trying to [00:17:00] run, you know, advertising for 500 skus and you don’t know how to use bulk ad, Tech’s gonna be super important for you. Anyone who tries to manage bids completely by hand for more than 10 skus is probably letting a lot fall through the cracks wellbeing.
[00:17:17] What’s your take on it? Yeah. I totally agree. Uh, doing bulk files is kind of like you’re wasting a lot of time. I feel just by looking at the spreadsheets and stuff like [00:17:30] that. While you can have a system that actually manages your bids, manages your key organization and doing your exploratory keyword harvesting the, the problem is that when you’re doing bulk files, You can’t, you don’t really have time to concentrate on the launching side that you should really pay attention to.
[00:17:55] That’s probably where most of the attention is going, looking at your [00:18:00] launches and having your automated. Yeah. Agreed. All right. So nowadays the most, probably the, the hard topic is, uh, PPC for the prime day. Oh, how do you, how do you, we like 26 days that announcement was made yesterday within the app.
[00:18:23] Like our largest brands didn’t know about it, which is kind of funny, cuz everyone’s just sitting here scrambling. [00:18:30] Uh, biggest suggestions I have on my end is last year we saw the week before prime day, be some of the worst performance we’ve ever seen in Amazon advertising history. That being said. We don’t recommend making a lot of changes because what people are typically doing is window shopping and adding to cart, and then waiting until prime day to purchase.
[00:18:50] So you may be getting a lot of clicks and no sales. That’s fine because people are leading up. So not making any crazy drastic changes is probably one of my [00:19:00] recommendations. And then on the strategic side, Amazon’s putting a lot more focus on anyone running deals. So some of our brands that did not run deals yesterday did not see an increase in sales, just from the traffic.
[00:19:12] So anyone who’s running deals, discounts, coupons, we recommend putting higher budgets and higher bids behind your main keywords, your top converting keywords. So you can really take advantage of that. Traffic prime day is a great opportunity to improve your rank. People are ready to buy, ready to convert.
[00:19:27] There’s a ton of traffic. So get your [00:19:30] ads in front of the right customers. And if you’re converting well, you can definitely improve rank on prime. so I’m more on the, on the organic ranking side, more, more on the paid side, Uhhuh PPC. So I wanted to see, what do you see that works really well with organic ranking and PPC ranking.
[00:19:50] I think lately we’ve been seeing a lot of improvements from like Google ad traffic or driving external traffic. That’s been something that’s done really well. I am like [00:20:00] the least knowledgeable and like everything that could be done on that end, but those are the two variables we’ve heard from the most.
[00:20:07] And then on the ad side, it’s really focusing on that conversion rate. So we’ve been pulling out like our keywords that we can see are converting much higher than average. And then just going really, really hard on top of search modifiers. Cuz if you’re in the number one sponsored product placement, it looks a lot like an organic placement.
[00:20:23] So if customers are converting on that ad. You’re gonna do really well at top search. So we’ve been focusing on [00:20:30] narrowing in, on those keywords where we have the data that our customers are converting and then spending more. I, I don’t think like right now, the, you being using maybe helium 10 CPR, trying to get ranked on the first page right now, the first page doesn’t really mean too much because it seems like you really need to be on the top three spot.
[00:20:49] It’s called top three. Right. So cuz you can’t really see you after that. You’ve got too many, uh, Kinda too many noise, like these high rate rated or [00:21:00] these other clear cells that Amazon choice maybe, or some other carousel that kind of distracts everyone. So it seems like you really need to be really aggressive on your ranking in order to be inside the top three, a hundred percent.
[00:21:13] I mean, back in the day, it was all about just getting on page one and you’re fine. And now it’s like, we have brands that are page one. They’ve been dominating brands for five years, but they’re having a 20% tacos still being on page one, or they’re seeing, you know, all of their volume decrease because [00:21:30] top of search looks amazing.
[00:21:31] You have products with 10,000 reviews and great price points. Like you’re not gonna compete the bottom page. So Baldwin, would you like to add on the prime? That prime day. I, again, I, I agree with destiny in terms of not doing much. A lot of times when people try to chase that ad sale, they, they end up spending a lot of money.
[00:21:58] You can see that [00:22:00] the ROI in regards to ads for prime day may not be. You might get that boost in ranking, but it’s just gonna be temporary. That will maybe it’ll only last one or two days, to be honest, what we suggest for our clients when I think is better use of your money is to rank before prime day, try ranking.
[00:22:25] When you know that prime days in June or July, try [00:22:30] getting your organic ranking up before that time so that you have more exposure during. Yeah, I I’ll say one of the case studies we had from last prime day, CPCs were $40 for protein. Like even if you have a hundred percent acquisition rate, you are not gonna be profitable.
[00:22:51] So like as with organic being so much more competitive ads are that much more competitive too. You have a lot of big brands that [00:23:00] are viewing it as a billboard and just driving up CPCs and paying for that traffic. And if you’re not ready to play. You better be finding external traffic or different placements that you’re okay with?
[00:23:11] Like a while ago. Like I always say 2015, you know, it’s like really pretty easy to, uh, or to get ranked. Oh, no, actually actually just say to get sales right now, it’s so much harder, right? Like you said, if yeah, it can’t be on top three. You it’s hard for you to get sales. There’s no real [00:23:30] way to, to not do PBC.
[00:23:31] It seems like then you. Yeah. And when CPCs were so low, like I know that’s kind of the click bait headline for the last two years, like CPC, they were so high, but if we compare the last six years, I mean, I would say we used to pay like 37 cents 60 cents. And that means we had a lot of room for error. Like people, we could have terrible listings, but who cares?
[00:23:54] The traffic’s still converted properly now it’s like. There’s not a lot room. I [00:24:00] remember when the ads platform started coming out, it was down to pennies pennies for ad per click, you know, for France, Germany, other countries. It was so, so almost like zero, it doesn’t cost anything. Yeah. So now if you make a mistake, you can be really expensive.
[00:24:18] So with that said like for the, for other banks, there’s a message that just do not do anything for the prime. There’s there’s few things, a few things that I would say [00:24:30] we do. We typically like increase our product targeting. And if we have a competitive advantage over price point or anything like that, we’ll run more product targeting because a lot of people are just looking for deals and discounts.
[00:24:42] So if we’re running a deal and discount, I’m gonna target a bunch of people’s other listings that when they see my coupons, they’ll click DSP. Remarketing can be really big for prime day cuz. Getting all of that traffic. So you may wanna serve them an ad post prime day, especially if like Baldwin said you’re in a competitive category and you’re [00:25:00] organically ranked well, like why don’t you retarget them when traffic’s a lot cheaper than paying for them precisely on prime day with search.
[00:25:06] So there’s those small things we can do, but the end of the day, like you just, you need to rely on your brand being a good position before prime day. Don’t expect prime day to make any drastic changes to your brand. So, uh, we get, we, we get a lot of, uh, We do a lot of DSP and also PPC, right? So Amazon themselves come and approaches us and tells us to teach our [00:25:30] customers to spend more, to get more visibility.
[00:25:32] Maybe Baldwin can talk about that. What, what do you think about that, where they’re telling you to, to spend more, go ahead, Bon, maybe you’re probably better at explain this part. Yeah. So I mean the whole business model for Amazon is make more money. Right? so. They’re really trying to tell customer or agencies to push for, you know, you gotta spend more money when every time I [00:26:00] hear about a client going directly to Amazon to do their DSP there’s it was horrible results for them.
[00:26:07] It turns ’em off from DSP, to be honest. Yeah. And . Yeah, we, we do have meetings with them. They, they say, oh, you know, this is how you can improve. This is how you can spend more money, more top of the funnels, maybe some OTT. Yeah. And do more holistic approach where you’re doing spending money on every part of the [00:26:30] funnel and that too, to a small brand.
[00:26:32] That’s, there’s no way they can do that even to a big brand. That’s that’s a big commitment. Yeah, cuz you’re typically locked in to really large budgets. So on our end, we’re really flexible. Something’s not working. You turn it off and go somewhere else. But on DSP specifically when ran by Amazon, you’re very committed and a lot of their goals and KPIs are based off new to brand and impression.
[00:26:58] So they’ll come to [00:27:00] you and say, Hey, this campaign was incredibly successful. We had a million additional impressions, like, well, none of them converted. So we see the same thing and it’s, it’s a business of cash flow. You’re buying inventory. So when you’re committing to these types of budgets, like it can be detrimental.
[00:27:14] So I think that’s why the education part is so important. Like doing podcasts like this and just providing content because. Coming from Amazon. It sounds really cool. Like Amazon’s reaching out to me, wanting me to do this. They should know what they’re doing. Yeah. [00:27:30] But it’s not always in the brand’s best interest.
[00:27:32] Yeah. For, for us, we do bottom funnel up instead of, yes. The only, the real metric that I look at is for remarketing. Mm-hmm it. When I start doing upper funnel things or middle of the funnel, Is my remarketing growing because that’s really the only way I know that the top of the funnel part of DSP [00:28:00] actually works.
[00:28:01] And for those that don’t know what top of the funnel or middle of the funnel, it’s more of the awareness campaigns, where it is driving traffic. You may see really low roll loss, but, um, what you’re really trying to do is get the people to, to view. Listing so that your remarketing campaigns will target them off Amazon.
[00:28:25] Yeah. I, I think you, like, you just need to see overall efficiency increases. [00:28:30] Your search should become a little bit more profitable because maybe you have more branded search coming your way. Like there’s, it’s just seeing the big picture of how all these pieces work together rather than expecting a DSP campaign to perform the exact same as a search campaign.
[00:28:45] Like you’re spot on, you have campaigns. You’re willing to take a loss on because it’s gonna make this campaign perform better. So, you know, our audience, a lot of the big sellers are here and probably listening to you right now, destiny, anything you can [00:29:00] say that, that you don’t normally talk about in, on podcast that you could talk about here, any one thing that you think that you can share with our audience?
[00:29:08] Nothing specific. I’m never good at your hack questions, but I will say Amazon’s moving into a direction of seeing how the limited adventory on the platform is just becoming pay to play. So Amazon’s kind of scrambling of how can we diversify this? How can we provide more off-platform traffic? How can we open up our fire TV ad inventory to the regular [00:29:30] audience?
[00:29:30] Same thing with influencers, for those who didn’t see the creator connect, is that what it creator connect platform? What it allows you to do is to directly connect with Amazon influencers. So there is a list of 300 influencers within there, and you. Filter by category say, Hey, I wanna see all 300 of your health and wellness influencers.
[00:29:53] You could then open up their rate card for TikTok, for Instagram, for Facebook, for Amazon lives. And you [00:30:00] could directly contact and pay them to run. Whatever type of influencer campaign. So Amazon’s trying to take advantage of the social commerce that we’re seeing across the board that Instagram is doing, that TikTok is doing, and they’re providing us more opportunities to do it through them.
[00:30:15] So every brand that’s starting to see search, get more expensive, find out a way to use UJC and start bridging the gap between external content on platform content, and start viewing your advertising from a cost per acquisition perspective. Like I think that’s the [00:30:30] way of the. So Howard, do you have any more questions before we start taking the audience questions?
[00:30:37] Well, I’m trying to think if we actually talked about this, but how would you, I, I know that marketing side right? Where you can kinda hope the DSP side with bringing in a lot of PPC, like high volume PPC traffic into the re uh, DSP re marketing. So any, do you see any other way to use P and PPC sponsor
[00:30:59] [00:31:00] product adds together? I think there’s a few things for brands that have like a high repeat purchase rate. There’s some really creative things you can do to only target new to brand customers and then like serve them a coupon. So if you know, you have a really high lifetime value, you can come up with a custom creative only targeting people who viewed your number one, competitor.
[00:31:23] And then you’re gonna give them a coupon. So that way you bring them into your funnel and then once they love your brand, they’re probably gonna repeat [00:31:30] purchase. So that type of granularity, I think, is what really needs to be pitched. You can also say, Hey, I sell a car seat here, right? Like, like let’s say so like that, you can say, Hey, I wanna target every single female between the ages of 20 and 35 that bought prenatal.
[00:31:46] Eight months ago or six months ago. Cause if they bought prenatal six months ago, they’re pregnant and they’re probably gonna need a car seat carrier at some point. So I know that’s nothing like very specific, but when people understand the power of DSP and that we have all of those [00:32:00] audience insights, that’s where it becomes an amazing opportunity.
[00:32:03] So I think those kind of things will be really cool and unique in the future. Yeah, back in, I believe October, when we were at the mastermind together, we talked about weather targeting and temperature and stuff like that for a lot of the brands that have to do with weather or, you know, seasonal things.
[00:32:25] I think that was really powerful to, to hear from you to understand, [00:32:30] you know, we can target zip codes, we can target location geo locations. And we have the audience to build on top of that, so that it’s DSP don’t get me wrong. A lot of it is I feel like noise, but there’s some tools is that can be really helpful.
[00:32:53] A hundred percent. Like it kind of makes me laugh. Like everyone’s always like Amazon doesn’t give us customer data. We [00:33:00] can’t email. Like we can’t email customers. It’s the worst thing ever, but I’m like, well, if you use DSP, you technically can find out a ton. You could creep on everyone’s shopper habits.
[00:33:09] It’s absolutely insane. For the, regarding weathering and targeting. Are you talking about DSP itself having that function? Because we only know about the geotargeting geotargeting, meaning based on zip code or I. Sets, but I don’t, I don’t know. Besides what APAC view maybe talked about [00:33:30] with AccuWeather about their database, is there any other, other thing regarding geo target weathering that can do be directly inside DSP?
[00:33:40] The rollout I believe was native to Amazon because I. Believe they own one of the addresses, one of the weather addresses. So it was native within DSP. And the concept example they gave was like, Hey, I have an umbrella. Let’s serve it to this location who we know is about to see a really crazy storm.[00:34:00]
[00:34:00] Something else, actually that I’ll mentioned. That’s super cool is Amazon’s also re releasing virtual product placements. So Amazon owns a ton of TVs, like TV channels, TV networks, and all these different types of things. So what they’re rolling out is the ability to say, Hey, let’s take this number one TV show, put your product on the kitchen counter, like a virtual product.
[00:34:23] And it’s postproduction. So typically, if you wanted to partner with a TV network, you had to do it right before it was ever created. [00:34:30] I think that’s gonna be super cool. And the billboard aspect is the best part, your product showing up on a shelf. I’m kinda like that’s a brand awareness play, but you can actually take a fake billboard in this team, EV network and build your own billboard, which is cool.
[00:34:43] Wow. That’s crazy. I mean, all this advertising stuff that Amazon’s doing, like the, the influencer, the, you know, creator conduct and all the rest of it looks like they’re gonna try to dominate everything. You know, it looks really powerful. Howard, can we [00:35:00] partner on something for advertising in the metaverse? I would like to do that.
[00:35:05] I think be pretty cool. How are we gonna make a metaverse and how are we gonna get that? And with Amazon e-commerce and what me, I think it was me or Anthony was talking about, I think it was me probably. I was saying, if you buy something on Amazon, you’ll get it in the metaverse, you know, product that you buy one, and then you get like a, you get an email saying here’s your metaverse whatever product that you bought on Amazon.
[00:35:28] So you take that into your [00:35:30] metaverse. As a shoe or a matter of shoe or something that, yes. So then, and they’re, they’re already playing with AR, so we know they’re gonna do VR in some type of way. Like it’s gonna be so cool. I’m actually using a app. I don’t know if I want to hello, it’s a web 3.0, like it’s called step in where you just walk around and, and then you get paid by coins.
[00:35:50] So, you know, that’s by their, their coins. So it’s kind of dropping now, like everything else, but, but it’s kind of interesting. I’m trying to immerse myself into the metaverse or [00:36:00] the what? 3.0. So I can have more. Knowledge or what I can think of some, some ideas how we can utilize this. We actually have Anthony Lee coming on a little later.
[00:36:09] Yes. Or a podcast. He’s gonna be talking about the, how we’re gonna, well, yeah, I didn’t wanna say it before. how, you know, crypto or, or the NFT or the metaverse. How, how we gonna, how we gonna have that connect with the eCommerce? Yeah. I think there’s huge opportunity there. Let’s see how we can connect and [00:36:30] partner up, but let’s see what there is.
[00:36:31] We could do. I, but I think there was another question, you know, how there’s a lot of people, a lot of big sellers, or a lot of people saying about this back, back, back a year ago, maybe, but I’m not sure about now because I wasn’t looking into it too much, but maybe Baldwin or destiny, you knows about how about this attribution attribution on DSP is the attribution on DSP, still going back to PPC side.
[00:36:55] So you’re getting double attrinution. not, if you appropriately set up [00:37:00] your campaigns, if you’re running super, super broad campaigns, I think view through attribution can definitely add quite a few complexities. And we’re even seeing on a sponsored display side, sponsored display has VCPS, which means you’re charged for every thousand impressions.
[00:37:16] What people don’t realize is Amazon’s charging you based off one second of a view. So think about how many times you scroll a product detail page and see an ad for one second, and then you go and buy that product five days later. And it’s being [00:37:30] attributed to that ad, even though you probably would’ve bought it organically.
[00:37:33] So I think attribution across the board is a really, really complex area of Amazon. But on the DSP side, like I’d liked in your Baldwin’s response. Cause I know you’re definitely more into DSP than I am , but if you set up your line items the right way, you can make sure you’re only targeting people who have never viewed your listing before and that incrementality can help segment your attribution quite a bit.
[00:37:56] Yeah. I, I believe the only [00:38:00] real way to segment on Amazon platform and off Amazon platform is to just target off Amazon platform. That’s the only way that you really know. Your attribution is attributing to a legitimate sale that you got the client to get, to buy your product on the customer. Well, what DSP says is as long as we have the merchant token, uh, [00:38:30] associated to the DSP account, that’s on the Amazon merchant side, they can separate and they know where the traffic is coming.
[00:38:38] That’s why Amazon marketing cloud is more important to the DSP user because you can run queries on where everything is flowing from. If you show an ad outside of Amazon, it can track all of the ads that they click on [00:39:00] to get to your product page. So, this is what Amazon says. I don’t know if I truly can trust what they say, but you know, this is what they say.
[00:39:12] It’s in their favor to have all of our ad performance look better. So take that as you will. Uh, are you destiny? Are you looking into the Amazon cloud cloud? Yeah, we’re looking a bit into AMZ. We’re not diving in too deep [00:39:30] because there’s only so many of our brands that are spending enough money to really move up and off platform where it starts making a big enough difference.
[00:39:37] So from like a scalability perspective, some of our largest brands are diving into it and we’re having to help support a lot of that. They’re releasing a lot of really cool things in that end. Really, really investing in giving us more data. I think they recently partnered with like IRA to start getting retail data pulled into there as well, which will be nice for anyone that’s in stores and on ads.
[00:39:58] And then I believe they’re also [00:40:00] finally giving us what hourly data that’s like actual push data, which will be really nice. So tiny things they’re like trying to get, but not fully getting on the AMZ side. yeah, Amazon actually has another. So they’re trying to come out with all these other things. Like they have another thing called seismic.
[00:40:22] Seismic is actually the one that actually, if you run like Facebook ads, Google ads and stuff like that, you actually [00:40:30] could track that stuff on. Seismic And it’s, I don’t really, because I don’t know anyone that has it right. But this is supposedly what I was told that this is where you track your attribution on other ad platforms.
[00:40:48] You know, what makes it hard is like we talked about earlier, all the new rollouts on the ad strategy side that we have to keep up with. Amazon operates in a very similar fashion on the ad tech side. So it’s really kind of difficult because [00:41:00] for like our agencies to vest fully into something like AMZ, it’s a pretty big upfront investment to really dive in, learn and set up the fundamentals for managing.
[00:41:08] And then in three months, the platform can go away or it can completely change. And I think that from a development standpoint, we’re in a position of having to pay those costs and pass it on to our brands for additional data set. So I think that’s something that we struggle with on our end with keeping up on all the new shiny things.
[00:41:26] Yeah. I mean the new shinny [00:41:30] things like for other, other big software vendor, you know, like those, they seem like they’re offering it a lot and they’re built into the, their system and stuff. Yeah. So we’ll see. But you know, I think, I think, I think it’s still a little time before we really need to go into Amazon.
[00:41:48] Cloud I, because I think there’s too much push noise now, or at least, at least like you, you said, get the, get the fundamentals down first, get, get, make sure you, you don’t just jump onto everything. [00:42:00] So you gotta get something grounded. Yeah. And pay for that. yeah. That, that be a lot of investment for the programmers and stuff.
[00:42:07] Yeah. Okay. So let’s start some few questions from the audience. What do you think about budget and cost budget for page one or launch in average, not gonna be a clear answer anywhere for this? I don’t think, but one of the things that we recommend doing is just create a fake sponsor [00:42:30] product campaign. and then type in the keywords you’re wanting to bid on and see how expensive they are.
[00:42:35] Your suggested bids are gonna be probably off because it’s an average of every placement on the page. It’s not just off of search. It’s not just the product detail page, but protein, for example, I think if you go on right now will show you an $11 CPC toothpaste is a $14 CPC. So you can at least know what type of category you’re playing in and then make assumption.
[00:42:55] Your actual, budget’s really gonna depend on your conversion rate though. You convert like crap. You’re gonna need a lot [00:43:00] more budget to drive a lot more traffic. So I don’t have a great answer. Oh, can I hear, I could dive into this, but I really wanna hear your opinion on day partying for us day partying.
[00:43:13] Currently, what I feel is I, we don’t have as much information as we can to effectively do deep budget. Yeah. As much as people say, oh, you know, we got orders at [00:43:30] this time. You know, I don’t think there’s a effective way to really do deep for PPC when I could not agree more like there’s two concepts. I tell people is one, it is a pay per click model.
[00:43:44] someone clicks at 3:00 AM. They’re interested in your products. If they click at 9:00 PM, they’re interested in your product. The reason day parting is complex for agencies is because most people don’t buy right after clicking, most people click and then add to [00:44:00] cart and then buy four to five days later.
[00:44:01] So when someone comes to me and they’re like, no one buys my product on Sunday, I’m like, well, how do you know that they’re not clicking on Sunday, but buying your product on wednesday. Like, well, there’s not a great answer for that. And then you throw an attribution, which is another complexity. The only time I am a fan of day partying is like, if you only have a hundred thousand dollars budget a month and you are running outta budget every morning, because it’s so expensive because everyone’s bidding at the same time in the morning, I’m [00:44:30] like, well, maybe tests running here.
[00:44:31] Same ads at night when CPCs are cheaper. , but at the end of the day, your conversion data is still like the key piece. And like, Amazon just doesn’t give us this data. So always go revert to it’s a paper click model. People are clicking, they’re interested and buying that’s all Amazon boils down to. Yeah, actually we kind of like day partners because that means that during the night we get cheaper CPC.
[00:44:55] Yes. Yes. it averages out in our favor. . [00:45:00] What do you think about ratio ads to organic SP SB and DSP? This is something that I think’s changed quite a bit. I would say, used to be, you know, 70% organic, 30% of ad sales was really, really healthy. Nowadays we see closer to 50 50. Anyone who has more in ads typically means you’re over leveraged in ads and you need to improve your organic ranking.
[00:45:24] on the taco side, we used to see like five to 8% was really, really healthy. [00:45:30] Nowadays we see more of like 10 to 12% being average in terms of SP SB and SD. 75 to 80% of all sales still come from sponsored ads because they have more ad inventory than any other ad type 15 to 20% sponsored brands. The rest is sponsored display and then DSP budgets I’ll say depends on your goals.
[00:45:50] There’s just a lot of flexibility there. Some people recommend doing 50%, what you do on search. But also depends on number of ASINs, how up the funnel you’re going. [00:46:00] So can’t really answer DSP before another question I’m really interested in like how you handle, like what kind, what kind of things that, you know, like a lot of our audience aren’t like the big, big brands, right?
[00:46:11] Mm-hmm so what, what, what are the big, big brands doing right now? What the, what the ads pushing a lot of creatives, I think is one of the biggest things, because that gives. The big private label sellers, especially have a competitive advantage because like someone like Lego needs to have a professional graphic [00:46:30] design team that is gonna create an asset that needs to go through legal.
[00:46:34] It needs to go through all their marketing assets. It takes forever to do one image, responsive brand at the large brands that are really kicking ass are the ones that are investing in their creatives. They’re launching like custom image on sponsored ads. They’re really creating a ton of video assets.
[00:46:49] They’re doing Amazon post. Because the more Amazon posts you have, the more followers you get, the more followers you get, the bigger your email listed the email customer. Engagement’s kind of crap right now, but it’s [00:47:00] another one of those things that Amazon’s trying to invest in. So we know they care about brands.
[00:47:03] So focus on brand. Yeah. We, we track Amazon post and other sales that it attributes and we see pretty good and results. Mm-hmm , you know, it might not look like it, but you can actu you you’re like getting a lot of placement in inside your own and your competitors’. Especially since it’s free, like, that’s the biggest thing like you said, it’s very important for even Facebook and other media [00:47:30] buyer buying.
[00:47:30] That’s all about the creatives. Yeah. And yeah, as everything gets more expensive, like it’s always the traffic versus conversion date, but as everything gets more expensive, like if you’re paying $4 a click and they’re not buying your product, you need to invest in your great. Ooh, how would you tune your PPC campaigns after being outta stock?
[00:47:51] For two weeks, we typically just increase bids and budgets and try to drive a lot of traffic in all honesty. I don’t really [00:48:00] have anything great for that. Other than you’re typically lost a lot of rank and you’re in this position of just having to play catch up. So that’s kind of what we do. If you don’t have the money to spend on that, then just turn everything on again and hope for the best.
[00:48:16] You take on category change. What if six sellers out of 10 are from other category, but organically ranked in top 10, even with low daily sales writing and reviews. I don’t have a good answer for this. I think this is more of a Howard answer. [00:48:30] Maybe let me see. Hold on. um, is considered those keywords more relative to others.
[00:48:40] Trying to understand the question more, but, uh, I think this is to do with your relatively relative relativity scores. Generally. I don’t see other products. Really. If it, it doesn’t [00:49:00] go into your category, they’re not gonna show up. I’m not sure what this is pertaining to, in terms of yeah. Not a lot of help.
[00:49:13] Uh, is that true? That UK have two to three main keywords for most of products. We, we manage quite a few UK brands and I would say not necessarily, I think that 80 20 applies to almost all of our business. 20% of your keywords are probably gonna drive 80% of your [00:49:30] volume. So that’s basic, but there’s so much keyword research you can do everywhere.
[00:49:35] Like there’s so many different ways a customer could type in something and be led to your product. So the easiest way to test is to find a ton of keywords and bid on them. And if it’s true, 300 of your keywords are not gonna get any clicks or sales. If it’s false, you’re gonna collect data and be able to optimize towards that.
[00:49:55] But this is a super easy split test on your end, without harming anything, [00:50:00] upload 30 keywords and see what gets a click. Okay. So we have like five more minutes left. So two to end to make the ending interesting of the session. We do the fun fact. So I would like to know that what is the most funniest thing
[00:50:18] happened to you in the Amazon space? In the Amazon space. Yeah. Like the advertising, anything that happened to you and you thought [00:50:30] that, okay, this is funny. One of the best things that happened was going to Howard’s event in Vegas and getting to go. I don’t know if it’s like funny as in like, haha.
[00:50:41] But it was like one of the best things in the. Really? Yes. But you go to a lot of events. I do go to a lot of events, but like in Vegas for prosper, there’s just so many people and it’s a lot. And I don’t, I don’t wanna say it’s diluted because that can be really good. But what I really valued [00:51:00] about your is it was like such close relationships and like Omni was such a great time because I could hang out with just everyone without being like, wow, I need to talk to this person, this person and this person.
[00:51:09] And I mean, we had champagne come from the ceiling on the little. You can’t beat that. Like, it was amazing. And also we had our little logos and, and our, our name of our elite seller society are coming out from the signs. Yes. You like walk into this massive club and it’s like logos [00:51:30] it’s for us. Welcome everyone.
[00:51:32] That was top notch. One of the coolest things. Well you, next time I’ll take you to a castle. Yes. I heard amazing things. Ally was showing me pictures. You guys had horses brought in at the castle. I think they lived there. oh, okay. I, I really, a hundred percent assumed you were like, bring these horses in for the magic of the event.
[00:51:54] Yeah, this is like a crazy castle. It’s actually like a, like a historical monument [00:52:00] or like historical monument or something because Henry the fifth used to live there or like kind of had like, like it’s, it’s actually a Royal, Royal castle family members. They go hunting on the, on, on the castle and they stay there.
[00:52:11] They live there and they go like hunting for wolves or something like that. That is. Did you ever once feel haunted? Because that was my concern. My wife actually went to. Part of a castle where no one was there and they, I think Ashley was there. yeah. Did she tell you about [00:52:30] that? I don’t really know the details, but they, they went in and it was dark.
[00:52:34] Right. And it was, I’m not sure. I think they opened the door and it looks like there’s a cave or something that is that right? Yeah. They went to the, like my wife and ours wife, they went exploring, they kind of went into this like. Uh, it’s like built into it, used to be a quarry and it’s like the building had built into.
[00:52:56] The side of the mountain. And I just went in, [00:53:00] I, it looked pretty cool in the pictures I don’t in terms of haunting, I dunno all. Oh, so this is what she told me. She went in there all of a sudden she was kind of really scared all of a sudden. This never happened to her in her whole life. Siri on her phone or not her iPhone started talking I would’ve like I’m out, not like that crazy.
[00:53:24] Like I think with Ashley, which is Owen’s wife, I’m like, she was like telling, [00:53:30] so she says it never happened in her, her whole life. And then all of a sudden when she got, she says like serious started. No, that is okay. So everyone, everyone is scared of the dark. Like, I don’t think anyone can say they’re not slightly scared of the dark.
[00:53:42] So could you imagine being in a pitch black room you’re already like on edge and your phone starts talking to you? I would’ve been out no way. Yeah. I, I, you know, I’m a list. I’d be scared. I’ll be jumping out there before my wife. Yes,
[00:53:59] awesome. [00:54:00] Well, this is an amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people had fun. It seems like we had like these camp, I and, uh, camp fire, castle fires, and then we were sitting there smoking cigars, Kevin King and norm. And I have a question. Yes. How good was George’s bartending skills? Like, would you tip him?
[00:54:22] Actually, I was pretty busy working. I, I tried to have fun. I, I actually drunk during my event cuz I [00:54:30] was worried and I gotta make sure I wake up on time. Yes, yes. Like, like last semester of mine in, in, I guess it was Mexico with them. Uh, I, I actually didn’t care. I was like drinking a lot more and then having fun because I would say good thing is not my mastermind.
[00:54:44] I could do and then, and then Tim said, yeah, yeah. You know, but regarding, um, talking about George’s bartending skills, I don’t know. I heard it was pretty good. Actually. I did I take, did I take 1, 1, 1 drink from him? I thought it was pretty [00:55:00] good. It didn’t didn’t didn’t like it wasn’t bad or anything. So it was it passing.
[00:55:05] I’ll give them that then. Okay. The last questions guys. Okay. I think that, that’s it. And thank you so much destiny for joining us today. Yeah, of course. So much for your time. Just check us out on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place. Add me on Facebook or go to better AMS dot. Thank you guys. [00:55:30] Awesome.
[00:55:30] Thank you. You. Thank you. See you take you. Bye. Thank you. Do you want your products seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etzy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic? Make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics podcast. Signal code unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen converting and profiting [00:56:00] fast with your host former top 50 seller on all of Amazon, the professor Howard Thai.[00:56:06] This is the Signalytics podcast signal code unlocked.