073: Tactic Tuesdays: The NEW Geo-Targeting & Amazon Marketing Cloud Strategies

073: Tactic Tuesdays: The NEW Geo-Targeting & Amazon Marketing Cloud Strategies Speaker 2: Welcome everybody to another episode of Tactics Tuesday at Brand Fortress HQ. Today, what we're going to be talking about is the new AMC and geo-targeting strategies happening on Amazon. This is one of those things that I feel like it's been around the Amazon community for a number of years. That said, it is worth taking another look at because Amazon has put a lot of resources into updating AMC, making it much more available, and then also their geo-targeting strategies as well. So with that, Mike, I know you've been working Working on this quite a bit. So I'm going to toss it over to you. And if you can maybe just talk about, you know, how you've been thinking about this and maybe some of the things that you're looking at testing when it comes to geo-targeting and AMC. Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. So anybody who listens to the podcast knows, you know, we sell pool cleaning tools and so we're a very seasonal kind of a product. And one of the things that we have run into in the past is that When we move into the off-season, which essentially is going to be like, you know, August or September, probably more like September through February, then our sales drop off. But more than that, the cost of advertising goes up because what you end up with is if you're advertising across the US as a whole, Then a lot of the individuals that you're advertising are people who don't have their pools open right now. And so they might be looking, you know, like they're browsing around and they're taking a look at things, but they're not buying because the pool's not open. And so you get a lot of tire kickers and so your ACoS goes kind of through the roof. And so you end up having to cut back on your advertising because you're advertising to a bunch of people that you don't actually want to at that moment. So what we're looking at as one of the opportunities that AMC offers us is the opportunity to limit our sponsored ads, you know, to specific geographic regions that essentially have year-round pool openings. So we can target, you know, Southern California, Southern Texas, Southern Florida, Arizona, you know, Las Vegas, you know, those sorts of areas where people got those pools open all year round. When we run those ads, our A cost doesn't have to climb. In fact, it might even be better than it is right now because another thing that we were looking at is those areas. Okay, so backing up. Our product, again, a lot of people already know this who listen to the podcast regularly, but we offer unlimited lifetime replacement warranties on our products. And so if you think about it for a second and you were to compare somebody who owns a pool in Michigan to somebody who owns a pool in Phoenix, The Phoenix person has their pool open all year round. They have super high, you know, UV, you know, light and whatnot. So it's like tools break down way faster and they get used considerably more and for a much longer period of time every season than the person in Michigan. So what happens is a person in Michigan, they might buy a standard pool net, you know, from just Joe Glow for like 15 bucks. And it might actually last them a few seasons because they're not using it super hard. They only use it for four months out of the year. The UV is not that hard. But the person in Phoenix, they might go through two per season, certainly one per season. And so for that person, our lifetime warranty becomes that much more valuable. Now, this is all speculation, but it makes perfect sense. Like if I'm putting myself in their shoes, I absolutely, if I was living in Phoenix, would pay much more attention to a lifetime warranty and the value of it would be much higher to me than if I lived in Michigan. So what we want to do is start advertising and really directing our ads to those individuals who are, you know, individuals that have their pool open year-round because I have a stinking suspicion that Their CTR and CBR values will be considerably higher than if we're advertising nationwide. Now, with AMC, you can target regionally like that. It's a little bit different for some ads versus others. So, AMC can be used to create audiences that you can use in DSP, but you can also use in sponsored ads. Now, in DSP and Sponsored Display, which is kind of like a mini DSP, you can actually specifically target the ad so that it only goes to individuals in whatever geographic region you specify. Alternatively, for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, it's more of a It's not really a limiter. So in other words, it's not only going to run your ad to those individuals. However, it's almost more like a bid modifier kind of a situation where individuals that fall within your geographic region are going to get the bulk of the advertising and the ad spend. So you might still advertise to people in Michigan, but more of your ads are going to show up to people in Phoenix or Southern California and things like that. So that's actually one area that we're moving into right now and are looking to implement almost immediately. Is that geographic target? Speaker 2: Yeah. So, if I understand you correct, just to break this down for our audience, I think there's a couple of really important points here. So, the first one is thinking about, you know, audiences in the sense of, you know, I think most people at this point understand the concept of You know, a highly targeted audience versus a broad audience. So let's just take, you know, men's boots as an example, a random example that comes to mind. So if you were advertising for a keyword that was men's boots, you know, that's pretty wide. And so you're going to get a lot of people that might click on your ad because they are men that are looking for a boot. You know, it may not be the right boot that they're looking for specifically for maybe they're looking for something for motorcycling as opposed to working construction as opposed to, you know, cowboy boots. Like there's a lot of different variety there. And so when you go wide like that, I think we're pretty familiar with the concept of Those keywords are not going to convert as well as if we have something that's super specific where, you know, maybe if we were saying it was for construction where it's like men's, you know, boots for construction or something like that, where it's, you know, very precise. So I think we understand that from a keyword standpoint. And really, this is just taking that same concept and applying it to audiences. And in your particular case, You know, hey, if somebody lives in Minnesota, they're only using their pool four months out of the year because it's frozen the other eight months versus somebody who lives in Arizona where they might be able to use their pool year-round. Not only are they able to use that tool longer, also if they live in Arizona because of, you know, how much you know, just UV light and sunshine that they get down there, that tool is much more or that pull tool is much more likely to break down if they're buying it, you know, from, you know, that Chinese manufacturer that's selling on Amazon versus, you know, versus your brand that's a much more premium product. That kind of, at least so far, kind of a good description of how you're approaching this. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's absolutely the way that we're looking at it. And obviously, you can create audiences based around all sorts of different things. Amazon has kind of some semi-default audiences that you can use. And there's also There's tools out there that allow you to connect into AMC that have, let's say, pre-built audiences that aren't necessarily Amazon-built audiences, but they're pre-built queries, let's say. So to back up a little bit, The way that you utilize AMC to actually create these audiences is that you write SQL queries, which a lot of people don't know what that is. They have no idea how to do it. And so there's front ends, just like there is for sponsored ads, you know, like PackView and things like that, you know, so services out there that allow you to have a front end interface that's better than what Amazon gives you. There are interfaces that allow you to connect into AMC and they have pre-built SQL queries that will create an audience of a certain type. And so you can go through their list and be like, oh, that's the kind of audience that I want. And you click on it and it will run the backend query in AMC to create that audience for you. And so you have that option of either manually entering those SQL queries or using some sort of a front-end interface to make that easier to do. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think something else that I'd like to add to this conversation, just because things have changed over the last few years. So the first thing is that, so AMC is Amazon Marketing Cloud, I believe is what that abbreviation stands for. Only for people that were using a display network or DSP, which typically, you know, and again, I think this is changing pretty considerably as well where, you know, DSP used to have to have, you know, I think it was like 20 or $25,000 a month in dedicated ad spend in order to run DSP. And I think that that has come down pretty considerably where, you know, you can run DSP now for a few thousand dollars a month. That said, just kind of a little bit of a rabbit hole here is that really sponsor products And sponsor brand, sponsor display are still very much, you know, I would say those fundamental block, you know, blocking and tackling or building blocks for an Amazon ads account. So if you're struggling, you know, with getting sponsored products to work, the chances of you getting, you know, good return on investment from DSP is pretty darn low. So I just throw that out there as people that are like, oh, well, my, you know, sponsored product to add a cost is much higher than I want it to do. Let me try DSP. I'm sure that there's a unicorn out there that gets a better return on DSP than their sponsored product ads. For the most part, most brands are going to be best served by making sure that they have their sponsored products ads squared away at first and kind of maximize the opportunity there. Speaker 1: That's absolutely true because if you're not good with sponsored ads, DSP is way more complex than sponsored ads is. So if you're not able to dial in your sponsored ads, then DSP is a rough route. And quite frankly, sometimes we've had a little trouble with DSP, partly because we've had some troubles getting our sponsored ads dialed in. But it's also because a lot of the value of DSP is remarketing. And you're remarketing to people that you've gained from within sponsored ads. And so if your sponsored ads are not profitable on the front end, and then you're remarketing on the back end, now you're just spending more money to get, you know, so it's You really do have to get sponsored ads dialed in before DSP becomes super viable. However, like you said, now that AMC is applicable to sponsored ads, you don't have to go the DSP route. You can use, you know, sponsored display as kind of a mini DSP, if you want, and use AMC to lay around those audiences to better target your ads. Speaker 2: Yeah. And so a couple other things I would add into this. So, you know, again, I just want to reiterate for people that maybe have heard of, you know, Amazon Marketing Cloud a couple of years ago and thinking, you know, DSP and that type of stuff. Those 2 things don't necessarily have to go together anymore. Amazon Marketing Cloud works even if you're just running sponsored product ads now, and it can be incredibly helpful in just the data that's happening there. The other thing is that, and I think you touched on a little bit, Mike, and I think it's just worth double-clicking on, which is Sponsored display ads now do a number of the things that used to be DSP only. So when you start looking at targeting different audiences, you start looking at retargeting, cross-selling, those types of things. Sponsored display ads can now do a lot of those things without having to have a DSP account. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways to approach this, but at the end of the day, I think you bring up a really valuable point here, which is, you know, we're really familiar with targeting based on keywords, but really from an Amazon standpoint, The platform isn't as rich in audience or hasn't been in the past. And this is an opportunity really to take advantage of that where other platforms, if you've ever run meta ads before, does a fantastic job with audiences and taking some of those same principles and applying it to how you're running Amazon ads. Speaker 3: Audiences are super, super powerful. Like you were saying, Jon, keywords, we've been targeting with keywords on Amazon and Google for a long time. But being able to do both, I know that this particular Tactics Tuesday is about geo-ranking and how we're going to implement that. The amount of things that you can do with audiences, you know, on DSP, historically, but now sponsored display, and now you can use those same audiences and layer them on top of the keywords that you're already using. I mean, it's so, so ridiculously powerful because like Mike said, I mean, you know, year round, we're targeting just everyone, everyone searching for anything. I know that in Michigan, in December, most people aren't searching for pool poles or pool brushes. However, there's ads being served to them. So So being able to layer on an audience, either demographic or retargeting or something along those lines, and also in sponsored product, I think Mike touched on this just a little bit. They're expanding how you can target within sponsored products. Now there's a couple of other audiences, like for ProTuff, there's a B2B. It's almost like it's a bid adjustment. Raise your bid based on who the audience is. We've started doing that for the B2B audiences, but there's also retargeting on sponsored products with those bid adjustments as well. They're starting to open up all of these really, really super cool ways to target people within sponsored products, but with AMC, allowing other people to access AMC that aren't Using DSP now opens that up to the rest of us. And that's really what we're playing around with specifically with the geo-targeting thing. But it's super exciting. I mean, once we figure out the geo-targeting thing and who that pool professional is, and then be able to layer on other audience kind of demographic type stuff on it, that's when things really start to scale. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think those modifiers are really important too. I mean, I know Top of Search has had a modifier for a long time and there's definitely solid strategies that have been used for a long time of having lower bids and then using that modifier to get as much of that Top of Search as possible. Because if you look at now that Amazon shows us those stats, you just see so much better clicks and conversions on that. I'm Top of Search. In a lot of cases now, obviously, a lot of brands have gotten very aggressive as they've seen Top of Search work really well. The nice thing about this is that, hey, you might have some competitors. In fact, Mike, you probably are a good example. If you have a lot of competitors, that B2B market probably isn't their strong suit. And so by being able to add that modifier specifically for B2B, where that's an audience that you can serve significantly better, that gives you a huge advantage. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. One of the things that we noted not too long ago was just Just how valuable that B2B customer was to us. So, you know, the average order value for those B2B customers on Amazon is nearly 50% higher than for non-B2B customers. And then in addition to that, we were finding that our conversion rates were considerably better for B2B. And so therefore, obviously click rates, you know, or click costs, you know, are lower. We were able to take and do that modifier so that we can more specifically target those B2B customers. And one thing that I think it's important to recognize is you have an opportunity through your Amazon advertising to, this is a bad word, but I'm going to use it anyways, to manipulate your Amazon stats. Overall, right? And this is, you know, the more of your sales that run through ads, the more you can do that because such a high percentage of your sales are running through there, like for ProTuff, unfortunately. Obviously, you don't want that to be the case, but if it is the case, then your ad strategy can really kind of manipulate your overall numbers for your product in the right direction or the wrong direction if you're not doing it well. So, in other words, Amazon is taking into account when they're looking at organic ranking and things of that nature, what is the standard conversion rate of your product? What is the standard click-through rate of your product for certain keywords? When they're looking at those numbers, if you are very careful with your Amazon PPC and you're targeting properly, So that you're targeting the right individuals who are going to give you better conversion rates, better click rates. Not only do your ad costs go down, but your overall stats for that product and that ASIN go up. And in Amazon's eyes, then there's a good chance that organically you will rank better as a result of it. So don't underestimate the value of being able to kind of manipulate those numbers with your PPC. Speaker 2: Cueing, Matt or Mike. We're going to call that cueing. We're cueing. Unknown Speaker: I did say it was a bad word. Speaker 1: I wasn't coming up with a good one though. Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, it is a great point as far as, you know, especially, I mean, again, we have a magic wand. We'd all love to be back in the days where, you know, 70% of our sales were organic and 30% of them were ad based. And especially if, you know, depending on where you are in your category and what category you're in, you know, you know, it's one of those things where unfortunately that's just not the case anymore, but you do bring up a good point as far as like how you can take advantage of that and especially making sure that you're pushing So, you know, campaigns that really are focusing on those right keywords, if that's what you're trying to rank for, and do have good conversion rates, to really give, you know, Amazon the queuing data that your products are on. Speaker 1: Signaling. We're signaling Amazon. Speaker 2: There you go. That, you know, it has the statistics that they're looking for. So, I think that's a very valid point. I'm trying to think of what else would be important as our audience listens to this when we think about AMC and geo-targeting. Speaker 1: Well, a couple of things that I could add would be, just as we've walked through this process, is getting AMC added to your account is not as easy as a lot of people have made it sound. Supposedly, you can contact Amazon directly and make that happen. However, if you do, expect to wait many, many weeks before it actually gets implemented, if it ever gets added to your account at all. However, running through a provider of some sort, an agency or, you know, whatever, something like PACVIEW as a service or something, they can get AMC added to your account and they have much more sway so it will actually happen. And what I did confirm the other day was that once it's added, even if you step away from that agency or from that service, say like Packube or something, you maintain AMC access and you can access it directly through your advertising console within Amazon. So, if you want access to AMC, the fastest way to get it is to go through an agency or a service of some sort and get them to add it. I don't recommend signing up for some agency just to get AMC and then leaving the agency. That would be really crappy to do to somebody. However, I'm just letting you know, that's the way to get yourself in the door. And if it turned out you didn't want to continue using that agency because they're not really fulfilling your needs, you can step away from them and maintain that AMC access. I would also say, make sure Okay, I mentioned earlier that you can use those interfaces to create SQL queries that will create an audience. And you can use pre-built queries based on the audience type that you want to create. I would say that you're likely going to want to get to the point where you can create those manual SQL queries yourself in the back end within your Amazon Ads console. And the best way I can suggest to do that is to either utilize one that's already been created, Create it or create your own custom GPT that knows how to generate SQL queries for AMC. And then you just go into the custom GPT, you tell it the audience that you're trying to target, and it will generate the SQL query that you can just paste into AMC. So you don't have to be an SQL expert to do it. You just have to be decent at creating a custom GPT that can do that for you. Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's probably, I bet if you did enough searching out there, I'm sure there's a GPT. Speaker 1: I know there's at least one that exists out there because Matt's the one that pointed it out to me. Speaker 3: Monsoor from Incrementum actually put it together. It's amazing. Speaker 2: Tip of the hat for him. I figured if somebody had it, that would probably be him. So, all right. Fantastic. Well, I think as we wrap up this episode, you know, Mike, what would be, you know, one takeaway that you would have for listeners as they think about geo-targeting and audiences and AMC? Speaker 1: I think that probably the biggest thing that I would say is get access to AMC, reasonably speaking. It would be silly to not do that because You're probably going to do some testing with it and you're going to think there's some audiences that are going to be good for you and they're not going to work out. However, if you keep testing, you will find audiences that will improve your performance on your sponsored ads and also DSP if you're using DSP. So get access. Whatever you need to do to get access, get access. And then test it, you know, like really start thinking through, you know, use ChatGPT or some other AI to discuss, you know, like prompt it to say, this is what I have access to. This is what I can do with AMC. How should I use it? This is my product. This is the current avatar that we sell to. These are our stats. What are creative ways that I might be able to use AMC and create new audiences to potentially improve our performance? I guarantee you that ChatGPT or some other AI will give you some really good ideas of audiences that you should try and create and test to get better performance. And I'm absolutely certain that at least some of them will be productive for you. And so I would just say, move. Don't wait. Do something with it. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would also add just, you know, again, you know, Sponsored Display has some great capabilities now. And whether, you know, the people that I've seen that are the happiest that I think spent. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: We've got to silence some notifications. All right. Anyway, I think as we wrap this up, see, we do this live as evidenced. Unknown Speaker: So. Speaker 2: I think looking at sponsor display and audiences and knowing that like you don't have to wait till you have AMC or DSP in order to do that. The other piece of advice that I would give is that what's different about audiences is it's very creative dependent. So, you know, be prepared to invest some time in good creatives and testing out creatives and those types of things in order to be successful. That said, you know, think about it as, you know, An additional tool in your tool belt, and I think we're going to see a lot more of Amazon's advertising going towards, you know, audience targeting that does involve having good creative in order to be successful. So if you're starting on that now, I think you're going to be in a good place in the next couple of years as the platform changes and starts leaning into more audiences as opposed to keywords. Speaker 1: For sure. I agree. Speaker 2: All right. And with that, I think that's a great place to wrap for today. 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