#114 - FREE 1 Hour PPC Masterclass for Amazon FBA I The Corey Ganim Show

#114 - FREE 1 Hour PPC Masterclass for Amazon FBA I The Corey Ganim Show Speaker 1: Most Amazon resellers think that PPC advertising is only for folks that own their own brand, but that mindset is costing them thousands in lost sales every single month. Now, I run a $3 million per year reselling business on Amazon and PPC advertising is actually one of my secret weapons. Not only for dominating the buy box, but for moving more inventory and moving it faster. Now here's what most resellers don't understand. You actually don't need to own the brand in order to run profitable ads. In fact, some of our highest performing campaigns are on products where we buy them at wholesale and we simply resell them on Amazon. So in this video, I'm going to be giving you a complete PPC masterclass for resellers on Amazon. You're going to learn when PPC makes sense for resellers, how to actually set up campaigns that drive profit, my exact targeting strategies for products that I don't own and brands that I don't own, and real case studies from my business where I break down successful advertising campaigns. And in the end, at the very end of the video, I'm sharing my number one PPC hack. It's been an absolute game changer. Regardless of what kind of reseller you are, this system is going to help you drive more sales, protect the buy box and increase your cash flow. So let's jump right in. So here's exactly what you can expect from this PPC masterclass. So the first thing that we're going to go over, and this is important because without the PPC fundamentals, there's no way to build long-term, profitable, scalable campaigns. So we're going to go over the fundamentals, the different types of campaign types, How to set up a campaign. I'm going to even share my screen if you're watching this on YouTube and show you guys exactly how we set up these campaigns. Now, if you're listening to this on the podcast, I highly recommend going over to Corey Ganim on YouTube and making sure you watch this on video because a lot of this is going to be very visual. Now, some other things that we're going to discuss are why resellers should run ads. Because there's a lot of misconceptions around resellers and running ads. A lot of people mistakenly assume that if I run ads, then that's going to drive sales to my competitors when my competitors are in the buy box, which is not true. And we're going to go over exactly why that's not true. So we're going to be going over an entire list of exactly why resellers should run ads. Even if you don't have an exclusive with the brand, that's another misconception. Resellers think that, Well, just because I don't have an exclusive because I'm competing with other sellers, there's no reason for me to run ads, which is not the case. Next, we're going to talk about when exactly resellers should run ads, because sure, there's a lot of use cases for why you should run ads, exactly when you should run ads, but There's also certain specific scenarios when running ads does not make sense as a reseller. So we're going to go over those in detail so that if you have some of those listings or some of those products or some of those relationships where ads don't make sense, we're going to help you avoid the trap that could result in spending a lot of money on ads when it's not the best opportunity to advertise those products to those brands. Next, we're going to talk about how advertising affects the buy box. So how running certain ads and certain types of ads can affect your buy box eligibility and the percentage of the buy box that you get. And as I alluded to a second ago, we're going to talk about when not to run ads. There's only a couple of specific scenarios when running ads doesn't make sense. There's actually a whole lot more scenarios, a whole lot of really running ads make sense in a whole lot more cases than people probably realize. Then we're going to go over how to create a campaign. Like I said, I'm going to share my screen. So if you're listening to this on one of the podcast platforms, you can listen to it all the way through. You're going to get a lot out of it, but I recommend rewatching it on YouTube. So we're going to be going over how to create a campaign. I'm going to be showing you step-by-step all the way from creating the campaign, naming the campaign, setting your bid, setting your strategy all the way to launching that campaign live. Then we're going to go into some specific advertising strategies. We're going to get into the weeds here on specific strategies around what you should be doing, pitfalls to avoid, ways to structure your campaign to make them easily findable, to organize them correctly and to make sure that you're doing things in an efficient and an organized manner. Then, which is going to be one of my favorite parts, we're going to be talking about pitching advertising as a value add to brands because there are so many sellers who will pitch a brand trying to land an exclusive and say something generic like, well, hey, we can help run PPC ads or we can help do some of your advertising. But a lot of times they don't give these brands the specifics. They're not able to talk At a granular level on exactly what they can do. So we're going to be talking about exactly how you would position PPC advertising as a negotiating chip for landing some of these brand direct exclusives. And then we're going to go into two or three specific things that you can do to position yourself and position your advertising skills as a way to land some of these accounts. Then towards the end of the masterclass, we're going to go into some specific tools and automations that you can use. And just a spoiler for this section, so don't go skipping ahead to this section right away. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be tempted to do so because there's a million and one PPC tools out there. There's a million ways you can automate your PPC advertising, but spoiler, automation around PPC is really only suited for people at scale. So we're going to assume in the tools and automation section that you are scaling, meaning you're spending five to 10 K or more per month on PPC, because only then does it really make sense to use some third party tools and some automation. So don't skip ahead to that section, unless you're really at that point and you want to get into the meat of ways you can automate your campaigns. Then we're going to go into two specific case studies of brands that I work with today. Showing you exactly how advertising has helped to level up those brands. And I can show you the exact numbers all the way from this is how much we spent. This is how much we made. This is how the campaigns are structured, et cetera. And then last but not least, again, don't skip ahead to this part, but we're going to be talking about the most powerful and by far the easiest advertising strategy for resellers. So this is going to be the biggest takeaway by far. It's going to be at the end of the masterclass of stay tuned for that. And let's jump right in. Now, quickly before we get into the real meat of the masterclass, we're going to go over three quick goals for this video slash podcast. If you're watching this, My goal is for you to take away three main things. I want this video to help you drive more sales by using smart, tested, efficient advertising strategies as a reseller. I want to give you a tool to land new brand direct accounts. So that's what we're going to cover in detail, talking about how we can use PPC as a lever, as a negotiating chip for landing some of these brand direct accounts and help you increase your sell through and your cashflow. Now, We all know that Brand Direct Wholesale is by far the best way to sell on Amazon in 2025. And this video, if you invest about an hour of your time, is going to help arm you with a very powerful tool that you can use to go and pitch these brands and to actually know what you're talking about. Because so many resellers pitch brands and just say, hey, we'll help you run PPC. But in reality, they have no idea what they're talking about. So this is going to help arm you with some knowledge and give you these three results as a result of watching this masterclass. So we're going to start by talking about the fundamentals of PPC advertising. So really there are three main advertising types that you can take advantage of as an Amazon seller. And those are sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display ads. So the vast majority of this masterclass is going to be focused on sponsored products. This is the ideal type of advertising For resellers, in fact, all of my advertising, except for a couple of campaigns that actually I have an agency manage for me, are sponsored products campaigns. So we're going to focus pretty much this entire masterclass on sponsored products. And what a sponsored products campaign does is it allows us to advertise at the ASIN level. For a sponsored product campaign, we can advertise one ASIN from a given brand. We can advertise five ASINs. We can advertise 50 ASINs. The idea is we don't have to advertise an entire brand. We can pick and choose the individual products that we want to advertise. With a sponsored products campaign. Now the next option is a sponsored brands campaign. And these are the advertising campaigns that you probably see all the time when you're searching on Amazon for products to buy yourself. You type a search term into the search bar and then at the top of the search results page, you see a headline banner ad. That has sometimes the brand's logo, a headline and up to three featured products. Now sponsored brand campaigns can be very effective and they work very well. However, these require brand registry to be able to run. So unless you are an authorized reseller of the brand and they have added you to their brand registry, or if you're the exclusive seller for the brand and you've been added to their brand registry, then you can run these campaigns. But for the majority of folks watching this video, This is something to work up to and it's not always feasible unless pretty much the whole brand is optimized. So sponsored brands again is effective, but it's not the most used campaign type for this particular reseller, this particular avatar, which is a reseller, right? And then last but not least, we have sponsored display ads. So sponsor display ads can show up on product detail pages. They can show up in customer review sections. They can even show up off Amazon. Now we're not going to spend any time focused on sponsor display ads because they are situational at best. Really sponsor display ad campaigns are ideal only for large brands. That have huge budgets and are doing a lot of volume and have a lot of data because it's kind of hard to measure the effectiveness of a sponsored display ad as just an individual reseller with a couple of products under your belt. And a couple of reasons for this is you don't always control where they show up because again, they can show up off Amazon. They could show up under a customer review. They can show up anywhere. And like I said, you need a lot of data and a lot of volume for it to be worth it. And it's really ideal for only larger brands. Now when it comes to another fundamental of PPC, so really the reason we run PPC as a reseller is we are just continuing to take existing demand and leveraging that existing demand to drive additional sales. So we're not creating this demand from scratch because again, if customers are searching for a certain keyword or a certain search term, And that search term describes our product very accurately, then it makes sense for us to advertise against that search term. So that way, when customers search for that search term, usually the first four search results on a product results page is going to be sponsored ads, sponsored products. So we want to make sure that we're in those top four results because that's going to help us get more sales, leveraging that existing demand to drive even more sales to our product listing, even more than the organic sales that it was already getting. Now when it comes to PPC as a reseller versus PPC as a private label seller, there are going to be some nuances, but of course this being a video focused on resellers, me being a wholesale seller. The entirety of this masterclass is going to be focused on PPC strategies for resellers. Now, these strategies can definitely apply to private label sellers as well. But like I said, we're going to focus on strategies for resellers, which is mainly going to be around sponsored products and advertising individual ASINs. Next, we're going to talk about when exactly you as a reseller should be running ads and why you as a reseller should be running ads. We're going to get into some more details here. The first reason is buy box eligibility. Now, remember what I mentioned in the intro that a big common misconception that a lot of resellers have around running PPC ads is that, well, hey, if I'm sharing a listing with say 10 other resellers, And I'm running, I'm spending money on ads and they're not, well then my ads sometimes might cause them to get a sale. And I'm essentially spending money on ads for my competitors to get sales. And that is not true because your ads actually only run when you are in the buy box. And this is a very common question. I've gotten this question many times over the years. So just keep in mind that even if you're on a listing with a hundred other sellers, right, which isn't that common, but let's just say you were, You can still run ads and those ads are only going to run when you're in the buy box. So you're never going to spend money on ads for another seller to make a sale. Now, I guess the opposite side of that, which is a huge benefit, is when you are the one dominating the buy box, whether you're the exclusive seller on a listing or maybe it's just a listing that you're the only FBA seller on or maybe the only seller on period, when you run PPC on those listings, you really get more sales. That is a way to truly juice as much sales out of that listing as possible. There's been listings that I've sold on in the past where maybe I'm not the only seller on the listing, but maybe I'm the only FBA seller. So I am typically dominating the buy box, 40, 50, 60% of the buy box if I'm the only FBA seller on that listing. So what I've done in the past is I've turned on a sponsored products campaign just for that listing and thrown, you know, 5, 10, 15, $20 per day in ads at that listing. And a lot of times that has almost doubled sales because I'm already dominating the buy box. Now I'm throwing a little bit of an advertising budget behind it, which juices those sales even further and ends up being a really good listing and a really good way to drive additional sales. So let's talk about when ads make sense. So really ads are gonna make the most sense as a reseller when you have listings that you're selling on and you've got excess inventory, right? This happens to me. I feel like every Q4 where it's really hard to gauge how much of a seasonal product that you should buy. Let's just say you're selling a Christmas product during Q4 and maybe you've got 50 units left over. Christmas is over, but you still got these 50 units. So you've got some excess inventory on hand. It makes sense to run a sponsored products campaign to get some of that excess inventory offloaded. And it doesn't just apply to seasonal products. Anytime you got excess inventory, simply running a sponsored products campaign, whether it's an auto campaign or a manual campaign, both of which we'll get into the details of shortly, that can be a really good way to move some excess inventory. Now ads also make sense. When you're selling on high volume listings with multiple sellers, because remember, like I said earlier, your ads only run when you are in the buy box. So even if you're on a listing with a bunch of other sellers, you can still run profitable, effective PPC ads. Now this tends to work best on listings that are doing a lot of volume. So if you're competing with a bunch of other sellers, but it's a listing that sells 500, 1000, 2000 units a month or more, ads can be very, very effective. And ads also make sense trying to move new or slower moving inventory. So let's just say you've got a listing where maybe it sold really well for a while and then it kind of dropped off. Well, the best way to juice sales on that listing and to kind of get it regoing is to simply run some ads and start moving some of those slower listings and revitalizing some of those slower listings. And it can also make sense when you're testing a new product, whether it's for a brand or whether it's one that you're buying from a distributor, Because it's a newer listing, sometimes throwing some advertising dollars behind it can help you get more of the buy box sooner and Amazon essentially trusts you more as a seller because you're putting some ad dollars behind that listing. Now, as far as when not to run ads, it's best to not run ads when you don't have buy box control. Now, what I mean by that is simply when you are not getting any of the buy box currently. So this happens to me from time to time, I'll be selling on a listing and for whatever reason, I'm just not getting much of the buy box. I might be getting 1% of the buy box or 2% of the buy box, or I might not be getting any of the buy box at all. A lot of times it doesn't make sense to run ads on those listings because sometimes running ads might get you into the buy box a little bit more, but it's really, it doesn't make sense to throw advertising dollars at a listing where you're just not getting any sales at all, period, right? It works for slower moving listings, but it doesn't work for listings where you're not getting any sales at all. Now, it's also not ideal to run ads on listings where the margins are really thin and they're ultra competitive. And a good example of a listing like this is I used to sell a specific razor that does huge volume. I mean, we were selling like 100, 150 units per day. Our margin was only 6%. Now I was okay with that because the price was relatively steady. But the margin was razor thin and there were a lot of other big sellers like mega sellers on that listing. So we actually chose not to run ads on that listing because it was ultra competitive and the margins were already razor thin. It doesn't make sense to run ads to make an extra 20, 30, 40 sales per day if it's going to take my margin from 6% down to say 2%, right? It's just not worth it at that point. Now, the final example of when it's not ideal to run ads at all is when you're selling on a listing where the brand is dominating the buy box. Now, a great example of this scenario is a brand that I used to sell many years ago actually. The brand sold on Amazon themselves, but they also allowed third-party resellers. And over time, what I noticed is their best listing, their best product, The brand started to dominate the buy box. For whatever reason, Amazon's algorithm was giving the brand the buy box and third party sellers were hardly making any sales at all. So on that particular listing, it just didn't make sense for me to throw advertising dollars behind that product because it wasn't going to get me any more sales. It was clear that the brand was going to dominate the buy box. What I ended up doing is just waiting quite a while to sell through the last few units that I had. Alright, so if you're listening to this section on the podcast, this is where I would highly recommend you switch over to YouTube because right now I'm sharing my screen and we're diving into a real-life campaign setup looking at my advertising console inside my Amazon seller account. So if you look at the overview, this is my lifetime performance from Amazon ads. So this just shows you how powerful using Amazon advertising is for a reseller. For the entire lifetime of my account, so this is really since the beginning of 2019, which is the first time I ever ran ads. Now my account is, I think I created it in 2017, so I made the mistake of not running ads for the first two years. But for my lifetime advertising performance, I've spent $66,941.44 on ads to make sales of $1,126,425.76. So that's an insane return on ad spend, right? Imagine if you could spend almost $67,000 on ads to generate $1.1 million in sales. That's how powerful some of these strategies are for resellers. Now, what you're going to do, Is you're going to jump into the advertising manager in your seller central account, then we're going to click create campaign. So once we create campaign, this is where you have the different advertising types that we discussed. So for the sake of this video, we're going to focus on sponsored products. We're going to click continue there. Now, first and foremost, it's going to ask you to name your ad group. And in this case, I just like to name the ad group, whatever the ASIN is that we're advertising. So I'm just going to type in the word ASIN there as a placeholder. Now, second thing we're going to do is we're going to scroll down to products, and these are going to be all the products that you have that you're currently selling at the moment. So we're going to focus on one product at a time. So we're going to choose this product here, and you're going to simply click the add button to add that to this campaign. So now we're going to be running ads to this specific ASIN. If you scroll down further, targeting is where you choose your targeting strategy. So you have two options. You have your automatic targeting or your manual targeting. So automatic targeting is when you let Amazon choose the keywords and basically choose the keywords to advertise against. So an automatic targeting campaign is really good for discovering new keywords to advertise against. So what I like to do is I like to run an automatic targeting campaign for an ASIN and keep an eye on that campaign after a week or two or three weeks. Look at the keywords that Amazon has chosen to advertise for for that specific ASIN and then choose the keywords that performed well, meaning they're making sales and the ACOS is below my target, which stands for advertising cost of sale. So for the keywords that fit that criteria, I will then pull those keywords out and put them into a manual campaign, which we'll talk about now. So a manual targeting campaign. Is when we can choose to either target specific keywords or we can target specific products, categories or brands. So for the sake of this video, we're going to focus on keyword targeting because in my opinion, this is the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest strategy for resellers to implement. So for a manual targeting campaign, we're going to choose keyword targeting. And now what we're going to do is we're going to scroll down and we're going to look at the keyword targeting section. Now I realize this can look overwhelming if it's your first time inside the campaign manager, but it's pretty straightforward and I'll explain it to you guys in detail. So here we have selected currently the suggested keywords. So these are the keywords that Amazon is suggesting we advertising against based on the ASIN that we've chosen. Again, right here are all the keywords that Amazon is recommending we advertise against. They're recommending the keyword keychain, they're recommending multi-tool, they're recommending bottle opener keychain. So they've got a lot of different suggested keywords for us here. Now before we choose some specific keywords, Let's talk about the bidding strategy. So this is important. So basically there's a couple of different bidding strategies. They've got suggested bid, which is when you're essentially bidding, the price that you're paying for each click is going to be whatever Amazon suggests. So Amazon has obviously billions and billions of data points based on previous advertisers. And they're going to suggest a certain bid range, in this case, We choose the keyword keychain. Amazon is suggesting that we bid anywhere from 21 cents to 35 cents per click for this particular keyword. And so the bid it's going to give us as a pre-fill is kind of right in the middle of that range. Okay. Now the other bidding options we have is we can set a custom bid. So that way we can set a custom bid for each keyword or we can set a default bid. So the default bid would be, Hey, we're going to bid the same amount for every keyword, no matter what the keyword is. So in this case, for the sake of keeping things easy, let's just go with suggested bid. And then now we have the option to, it says filter by, and three options are broad, phrase and exact. So let's dig into what each of those three terms mean. So a broad campaign, a broad match campaign. Simply means that the search term that you're advertising against, if somebody searches, well, I'll give you guys an example to make it even easier. It's when a search contains your keywords in any order and it could include words before or after it. So for example, if we choose the keyword keychain here to advertise and we choose it as a broad match, that means that the customer might search best keychain for dogs, right? Because the word keychain is contained in their phrase, then Amazon will advertise against that keyword. So that's what broad means. It includes your keyword, but it can have words before or after it. The next option is a phrase match. Now a phrase match is when somebody searches for your keyword in the exact order that you've chosen, but it has words before or after. So for example, if we chose the keyword here, bottle opener keychain, The search that the customer makes must be exactly bottle opener keychain, but it might be bottle opener keychain for Beer, right? Bottle opener, keychain for the car, right? It's going to contain words potentially before or after, but it has to perfectly contain the words bottle opener, keychain in that order because that's the keyword that we're advertising against there. And then the last option is an exact match campaign, which is exactly how it sounds. An exact match campaign is when the search that the customer makes must exactly match the keyword that you're advertising against. So to use that same example, an exact match campaign, if a customer searched our keyword bottle opener keychain, then our listing would show up. But if the customer searches bottle opener keychain for the car, it wouldn't show up because it's not an exact match. Alright, so those are the three different options for essentially how you can have customers find your particular advertisement, whether it's broad, phrase or exact. Now another section of the keyword targeting module that I want to touch on is keyword groups here. Now Amazon is telling us that this section is still in beta, but it's definitely worth looking at and it's worth using if you really want to simplify your targeting. So if you hover over the little information panel here next to keyword groups, it simply says keyword groups use multiple strategies. To match your ads to shoppers searching for your products. They can help simplify and expand your targeting. So it's pretty self-explanatory, but it's like I said, it's worth touching on. So what you can do is you can add this keyword group here and this keyword group says it's keywords related to gifts. Now, Because this product is giftable, for example, this product does really well on Father's Day and during Christmas, this could be a really good keyword group for us to target and let Amazon do a lot of the heavy lifting around the exact keywords. So by adding the keyword group of keywords related to gifts, Amazon's suggesting we bid $0.61 per click. And if we click add there, it's going to automatically add it to our campaign. Same here, keywords from brands that are also considered by shoppers. You got to keep in mind how much data Amazon has around what shoppers are searching for and what they're buying. So by adding this keyword group, It allows us to target those products and those brands that shoppers are already searching for, most likely our direct competitors. And we've got some other keyword groups here, like keywords related to your product category and keywords related to your brand. The most potent ones in this example, in my opinion, are probably going to be keywords related to gifts and then keywords from brands also considered by shoppers, because those are most likely going to be your direct competitors. Now, the next thing we're going to look at is negative keyword targeting. So if we scroll down and we're going to get into this in a little more detail later, but negative keyword targeting is simply when you tell Amazon, Hey, do not run ads against this keyword. Right? So the reason that you would include a negative keyword is if you have a keyword that maybe you're advertising against and you find that it's getting a lot of clicks and you're spending a lot of money on that keyword, but nobody's buying, right? That keyword is not converting. So if you come to find that out, that the keyword is not converting, that is when you would include that here in your negative keyword targeting, right? So you're telling Amazon, Hey, this keyword doesn't convert. So do not let me spend money advertising against that specific keyword. And we're gonna talk later in this masterclass exactly how to determine when you should add a keyword to the negative targeting, all right? There's a pretty simple formula that you can use to determine when you should add a keyword to negative targeting. And then down below we've got the campaign bidding strategy. So this is when we choose our actual bidding strategy. So we've got three options. You've got dynamic bids up and down, which essentially allows Amazon to adjust your bid either up or down from the bid that you set earlier up to a maximum of a hundred percent over the bid that you set in real time, which they claim makes the ad more likely to convert. But personally, But me personally, I don't want to have my budget necessarily in their hands. So I don't want to choose dynamic bids up and down, right? Because a lot of times they will raise your bid to when they think you're going to make an extra sale. But in reality, it just makes you spend more money on ads and sometimes it doesn't convert. So I don't like to do dynamic bids up and down. I typically prefer dynamic bids down only. So that's when Amazon will adjust your bids in real time, but they will only adjust it downwards. They cannot go above the bid that we set earlier. So that kind of gives you a ceiling to where they will never bid above the amount that you set. And then lastly is fixed bids, which we'll talk about in the tip that I give at the end for the most powerful advertising strategy you can use. That campaign utilizes the fixed bid bidding strategy, but typically dynamic bids down only is going to be the option that you choose. Now next we've got bid adjustments. So this is where we can essentially add a multiplier to our bid for placing our ads in certain places. Now the only place I like to add the multiplier is for top of search, first page, this first box here. So if we change this to let's say 50%, right? What that means is that we're willing to spend 50% above our bid amount if it's going to place our ad at the top of search on the first page. And think about how powerful this is. Basically you're telling Amazon like, Hey, I'm willing to pay a premium for my ads to show up at the very top of the search results on the first page. Now that doesn't mean that every time your ad shows up there, you're going to spend 50% more. It just means that you're willing to spend a little bit more to get that premium placement. Okay, so that can be a really powerful strategy for getting higher in the search results. Now, I personally never add a multiplier for the other two options, which are rest of search and product pages. I just don't think those are as powerful as strategies, but I'm happy to add a multiplier for top of search on the first page. And then last but not least, Amazon is going to ask us to name the campaign, which again, I just like to name it the name of the ASIN. It's going to ask us if we want to add it to a portfolio, in which case we are not going to choose a portfolio because that's outside the scope of this particular tutorial. It is going to set our start date for this campaign to today by default, and it's going to set the end date to no end date by default. Now, if this is a campaign that you're planning on running for the longterm, You can keep that no end date intact, in which case you could just come in and turn it off manually if you want. Or if you're saying like, Hey, I want to test this campaign out for 10 days or 20 days or a month, then you can come in and simply set it to a month. And then lastly, which is important, is your daily budget. So Amazon is going to ask you to set a daily advertising budget, at which point once you hit your daily budget, your ads are going to essentially turn off for the day. Amazon will always give you a suggested daily budget. In this case, they're suggesting I spend $40 per day towards this campaign based on their internal data. Now, if you're new to advertising or if you're just testing out a product or testing out an ad strategy, your daily budget doesn't need to be anything crazy. You could set it to $5 per day on the low end and maybe $25 per day on the high end. And just because you set a daily budget doesn't mean you're going to hit that daily budget every day. So this is really just the maximum. That you're willing to spend on ads every day. So what we would do at this point is we would simply launch the campaign and we would evaluate it over time and optimize it over time, which is a strategy that we're going to discuss later in the masterclass. Next, we're going to go into a little more detail on the different targeting strategies that we discussed. The two strategies being either automatic campaigns or manual campaigns. And we're going to talk about the pros and cons of each. So when it comes to auto campaigns, one of the biggest pros is the ability to mine the campaigns for data. So as I mentioned earlier, I like to have an auto campaign going for certain products that are replenishable, which I have here as my second bullet point. These are ideal for replenishable products. So that way the auto campaign is constantly finding new keywords for me to advertise against. And when Amazon's auto campaign finds me a new keyword that maybe I never considered or that I never knew about, I can then take that keyword and put it into a manual campaign and advertise specifically against that keyword. Alright, so it's a really good option for mining some data around what keywords people are searching for when it comes to that product and which keywords are converting. Now, as I just alluded to, this is a really good way to consistently find new keywords, specifically long tail keywords, because a lot of people make the mistake of advertising against these keywords that have tons of traffic. For example, ones we were just looking at were like multi-tool or bottle opener, right? Those keywords are going to have thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. But auto campaigns help you find the long tail keywords that maybe only get 100, 200, 500 searches per month, but convert at a way higher clip and are way more profitable. So for example, a long tail keyword might be something like Bottle opener for my lighter, right? Like people like to have lighters that they can attach to their bottle opener. So that is an example of a long tail keyword that there's going to be way fewer people searching for that specific keyword than there would be somebody searching for say bottle opener, but there might not be as many people advertising against that long tail keyword, which makes it way more profitable and way more likely to convert. Now, some of the cons of auto campaigns is that sometimes it can target keywords that are not relevant. So we're going to talk about here shortly how to determine when a keyword is not relevant and when a keyword is not converting from your auto campaign, at which point we take that keyword that's not converting, And we add it to our negative keyword targeting list. So we're basically telling Amazon, hey, I know you thought that keyword XYZ was going to convert for us, but based on the data, it's just costing us money and not bringing in any sales. So we're going to negatively target that keyword, meaning we're not going to spend money advertising against that keyword. Now when it comes to manual campaigns, some of the pros of manual campaigns is like we mentioned, it lets you target specific ASINs, specific keywords or specific brands. So it just gives you a lot more control, a lot more flexibility over exactly what you're targeting and who you're, or really what you're running ads to, whether it's a keyword, whether you want to show up on a competitor's product listing or in a competitor's brand search. And manual campaigns give you the ability to target weaker competition, right? Whether it's targeting their listings directly by showing up as a sponsored product on their product detail page, or maybe even some weaker variation. So maybe you have a competitor They just launched a new variation, but maybe the competitor didn't put a lot of effort into building that variation listing or they're not really advertising against it. If you feel like you have a product that can really outcompete that variation, you can advertise specifically against that variation and that listing. And as we also alluded to earlier, you can target by category in specific niches. So this allows you to target by entire categories. If you're trying to break into a new category as a product or as a brand, this can be a really powerful strategy for doing that. Now some of the cons of manual campaigns is that a lot of times costs can balloon really quickly. So if you're not careful and you're not keeping an eye on your manual campaigns, you can spend a lot of money on these campaigns without much to show for it. And especially if you're not optimizing these campaigns over time, right? So we're going to talk about here shortly how to optimize these campaigns. But if you're not keeping your eye on the ball and checking your advertising reports daily or weekly, you can lose a lot of money. Now, when it comes to negative targeting, again, we just mentioned this, but you're allowed to, it basically allows you to block certain keywords that are costing you money and not converting. All right. So next we're going to talk about how we read a search term report. So how you can get a search term report is you can simply go into your campaign manager, click on insights and reports, and just download this report. Now what I did, so you download it in Excel. I hate Excel. I'd rather work in Google sheets. So I saved it to my computer, uploaded it to Google sheets, and we're looking at it in sheets. Now there's a couple of specific terms that you need to know in reading these reports. And these titles are at the top of the columns here. Column A, this is going to be the actual search term that we're looking at. And sometimes you see that these are ASINs that we're advertising against, not just search terms. Impressions simply means the number of times your advertisement showed up, the number of times a customer literally saw, laid eyes on your advertisement. Next is clicks, so that's the amount of times somebody clicked your ad. Click-through rate, otherwise known as CTR, is just the rate, basically the impressions divided by the click, or sorry, the clicks divided by the impressions. That's the percentage of people who saw your ad that actually clicked on your ad. Next is your CPC, which stands for cost per click. That is the amount of money you spent per click. Next is your total spend. Next is your seven day total sales. So that's the amount of money you've spent, or sorry, the amount of money you've made selling products against that advertisement over the last seven days. And the next two we want to look at are your ACOS, which stands for advertising cost of sale. And then your ROAS, which stands for return on advertising spend. So what I like to do when looking at this report is I like to sort by clicks. So if we look at, click on the clicks column and then we come over here and we sort. From I want to see the most to the least, right? So I want to see which of my search terms, which of my ads are getting the most clicks. And then I'm going to look at the data for the search terms that are getting the most clicks. So in this case, it looks like this specific ASIN that we're advertising against has 387 clicks, right? So that's quite a few clicks. So the CTR, meaning the click-through rate on that ad is 2.2%, which is not as relevant here. What I want to look at is the listings that are, or sorry, the ads that are getting a lot of clicks. And I want to look at the ACOS, the advertising cost of sale relating to those clicks. Oh, it looks like we're sorting by ACOS, one sec. Okay, so now we're sorting by the number of clicks that our ads have, right? So this first column here, this ad has 387 clicks. And what I want to compare that to is the ACOS, right? The advertising cost of sale. So if my goal is to have an ACOS, Between 5% and 20% on the high end, which simply means that it caught in this case, 24.69%. That's the amount of the sale price that went towards ads, right? So I want to keep that under 20% ideally. I'm looking for ads where I've got more than 10 clicks, but my ACOS is above my threshold, meaning that I'm spending too much on those particular keywords for it to be worth my time. So, In this case, this particular keyword, or it's actually an ASIN has gotten 387 clicks, but my ACOS is 24.69%. All right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this ASIN up in a new tab and see, is this ASIN relevant? So it looks to me like this ASIN is definitely a direct competitor. So even though the ACOS is above my target, it's still probably smart to keep this ad going because it's a relevant ad, right? We're directly advertising against the competitor. Now, if this continues to balloon to 25, 30 plus percent, then I would probably cut this ad off altogether. Now, if we scroll down a little farther, right, let's look at Maybe one of these keywords here, middle of the list. This one's called Men's Gadgets. So we're advertising against the keyword Men's Gadgets. That ad has 15 clicks. And from those 15 clicks, we've got an ACOS of 11.25%, which tells me... That particular keyword, even though we've only got 15 clicks, our ACoS is only 11%, right? And this column here next to it is our ROAS, our return on ad spend of 8.88, which means that for every dollar we spend advertising on the keyword men's gadgets, we're making $8.88 back in sales. All right, that's a pretty good return. So really the sweet spot is I want to look at keywords where I'm getting 10 or more clicks where I've gotten 10 or more clicks so far and my ACOS is below my target, right? So if it's got 10 clicks and ACOS is under 20%, then that to me is a keyword that I might raise my budget on to continue to drive sales on that keyword profitably. All right, that's how we scale these ads further and that's how we scale keywords that are working. Now on the other end of the spectrum, like we said, if we've got a keyword that's getting a ton of clicks, in this case, this is the example we use, 387 clicks, But our ACOZ is higher than our level that we want to shoot for, right? 20%. Then we want to add that keyword to a negative keyword targeting. Now, again, you can kind of make the judgment call of, well, in this case, this particular keyword, it's actually an ASIN, is super relevant. It's a direct competitor. So maybe I'm willing to raise my limit of my ACOZ to continue advertising against that competitor. Versus if we look at this keyword and it was totally irrelevant, it was a totally random product and it wasn't converting and we were spending too much, then we would definitely add it to our negative targeting. So I hope that makes sense. And if it doesn't, feel free to leave a comment on the video or leave a review asking your question if you're listening on Apple or Spotify. And we're going to keep going on with the masterclass. So now that we've read a PPC report, let's talk about campaign optimization. Now this is going to be probably the most important section aside from the strategy that I'm going to share at the end for really scaling profitable PPC advertising. So when it comes to setting a bid, right, this is a common question that I get is, well, how much should I bid on the keyword? I like to recommend using the suggested bid range as a starting point. You can go with a suggested bid and then you can adjust further from there. All right. And we're going to talk about in a second, how do we adjust that bid further? Now if a keyword is converting well and it's within your target ACOS, then you want to raise your bid slightly because the idea is if it's converting well and it's profitable, you can keep slightly raising that bid to keep getting more traffic, which theoretically should help it continue converting, which should help make more sales and keep that keyword pumping a lot of advertising sales into that product. Now, if you're getting clicks, but you're not getting any sales, then you can simply lower your bid or pause that keyword entirely, right? Before adding it. To your negative campaign. So if you find like, Hey, I'm spent a lot of my budget is going towards these particular keywords and I'm getting clicks, but I'm not getting sales. Then you can either lower your bid on that keyword or you can pause it altogether. And a good rule of thumb for optimizing your campaigns and is to prune any keywords by looking at the search or the search term report that we were just looking at. So if you find that a keyword has gotten 10 or more clicks in the last one to two weeks, If you have a product that's either not gotten any sales or it's gotten sales but it's above your target ACOS, then I recommend adding it as a negative exact match. And the reasoning we just explained in the last module, Just because the keyword is getting clicks and getting sales doesn't mean that they're profitable sales. Sometimes you're spending way too much on a keyword to generate sales and they're not profitable sales. So that's when we would take that keyword and we would add it as a negative exact match to essentially tell Amazon, Hey, this keyword is costing me too much money. We don't want to advertise against it at all. Let's just focus on other keywords. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, when you have keywords that are converting and are within your target ACOS, then you can increase the budget on those keywords like we just said. And now more of an advanced tip, but it's not necessarily vital, but it can help in just keeping things organized. When you find winning keywords or winning campaigns, you can actually split those off into their own campaign with a dedicated budget for ease of tracking. Now you could also use the portfolio function, which we'll touch on later, but that just comes down to organization and making sure you're easily and efficiently able to evaluate your campaigns and optimize and tweak them over time. All right, so now we're going to get into my favorite section of the entire masterclass. And this is going to be a Meteor section because we're talking all about how to add value to brands Using PPC ads as a tool in your tool belt, right? And the first observation I want to make is that a lot of brands aren't running any ads at all. Even if the brand themselves are selling on Amazon, they might not even be running ads. And if they have a bunch of resellers, then I can virtually guarantee none of those resellers are running ads. So simply by making the brand aware of the fact that, hey, nobody is advertising your products, that can open up a lot of opportunity and at least get your foot in the door to have a conversation with that brand. And now the easiest way to determine whether or not the brand is running ads is to literally search the brand name on Amazon and see if any sponsored listings come up. Because if the brand or their resellers are not advertising on their own brand name keywords, then they're definitely not running any ads, right? And it's a really easy pitch to the brand like, hey, when I search your brand name, there's no sponsored listings that come up, right? Or worse, your competitor sponsored listings come up because your competitors see that you're not spending any money on ads, so your competitors are spending money advertising against your brand name keyword. All right, it's a really powerful pitch to a brand. Now when it comes to pitching brands on why they should be running ads or why they should have you running ads for their products is because it does simple things like increase sell-through, which we've talked about. It allows you to place quicker reorders because obviously if you're spending money on advertising and sales are going up as a result, Obviously, you're going to be ordering more product. You're going to be ordering more often and you're probably going to be ordering more volume. So it's direct money in the brand's pocket if you can advertise their products. And it also shows that you're doing more than just buying product, that you're actually spending your own marketing dollars advertising their products. Because think about how powerful that is to a brand. It's like, hey, I don't even own this brand, but I'm going to spend money advertising your products just for the opportunity to be an authorized reseller and to be able to buy from you guys and I make my money when I actually sell your products, right? So that way everybody's incentives are aligned and it's a way more compelling pitch to the brand. And the beauty of running PPC ads is that when you run ads and you increase basically your sponsored rank, your paid keyword rank, it actually increases their organic rank as well. So a beautiful thing about PPC is kind of the saying that a rising tide lifts all boats. As your PPC sales become more effective, your organic sales become more effective in turn. So better PPC also means better organic, which means just better all around sales for the brand and obviously for you as a reseller. Now there's a couple of different ways to negotiate PPC ad spend for the brand, right? These are the three most common Use cases that I've seen, right? So you can either simply spend your own money on ads, right? You're paying out of your own pocket. The brand's not reimbursing you. You're just making sure that you're buying the product at a low enough price where you can justify spending money on ads and still make a profit, right? That's option one. That's obviously the easiest pitch to a brand because they're not having to do anything. You're literally just spending your money advertising their product. The second option, which I think is ideal, is For you to essentially agree with the brand on a budget. So say, Hey, brand owner, I'm going to spend $1,000 a month advertising your product. I'll spend the money, but I just want you to reimburse me for it. Because most brands have an advertising budget. So by asking them to just allocate some of that advertising budget to Amazon ads that you're going to manage and you're going to run, It's money they were going to spend on marketing anyways. So the reason I like this the most is because you're controlling the spend, you're controlling the campaigns and you're getting the credit card points or the cash back. For the ad spend and then the brand is just reimbursing you for that, right? It makes it, in my opinion, way easier and way, well, really you get to capitalize on those credit card points. And then the last option is you can negotiate a 50-50 split or some other negotiated split. Whether that's, you know, 60-40, 50-50, 80-20, really just depends on what you negotiate with the brand. Now, what I recommend you do is use PPC as a negotiation lever, right? You could use a line, something along the lines of, well, hey, we're ready to invest in your ads, we're ready to optimize your listings, we're ready to increase your sales, but we need some level of protected distribution to make this investment worthwhile. Because what you're telling the brand is like, listen, I'm about to dump a ton of money into advertising your brand, But in order for me to be comfortable making that investment, I've got to have some sort of reassurance. You've got to do something for me. And typically that ask is asking them to limit the number of resellers. Whether that means to make you the exclusive reseller, which is the best case scenario, or at the very least, limit the number of resellers to a very small trusted group. And as an exclusive seller, once you eventually land that exclusive deal, whether it's just you as the exclusive seller or whether it's you in a small group of sellers, when you start running ads and these ads are effective and they're converting and they're optimized, it helps you defend the buy box, all right? If a random seller jumps on that listing and they don't have much inventory or they're new to selling that product, but you are the one driving paid traffic and you're making sales and you're running ads, Amazon's algorithm is going to keep you in the buy box more often, right? It just makes sense. That's part of how the buy box algorithm works. When you're converting, when Amazon essentially trusts you as a seller of that product and you're spending money on ads, why would Amazon give this random guy more buy box when you're trusted, right? That is simply how the algorithm works. You're more likely to keep the buy box as long as your campaigns are converting. So let's get into some of the tools and automations that you can use to make your PPC more effective and more scalable. Now, what I recommend for 95% of resellers is simply to start with the Campaign Manager inside Seller Central. And it's very unlikely you'll ever need a tool aside from the Campaign Manager for a couple of reasons. One, it's free. So it doesn't make sense to use a paid tool when you can use a free tool that's just as effective and it does everything that you need it to do. So especially if this is your first time advertising, don't worry about learning third-party tools, don't worry about doing anything fancy, just stick to the campaign manager inside Seller Central. Now, as you scale, you can still stay inside the campaign manager, but you can use something called bulk files to make managing more campaigns or more ASINs a lot easier and a lot more efficient. So my recommendation is once you're managing 10 to 20 or more paid SKUs with ads, this can be a really good option. And all it entails, all you do is you're downloading a spreadsheet of your campaigns directly from Seller Central. You can make changes to your campaigns right there in the spreadsheet in bulk and then simply re-upload that spreadsheet which essentially implements all those changes in one go. So this is way easier and way quicker than going product by product, campaign by campaign, ASIN by ASIN, inside Seller Central and making those changes one at a time. And this is a huge time saver when you're adjusting bids across multiple campaigns or you're adding or removing keywords in bulk or you're launching new campaigns. This is a really efficient way to do that without paying for a third party tool. Now we touched on this earlier and I promised I'd come back to it, but that is using portfolios inside the campaign manager in Seller Central as you scale. So Portfolios is simply a tool that allows you to group your campaigns either by brand or by product line or by supplier, by season, however you want to group your campaigns. The Portfolios function lets you do that. It makes it easier to monitor your ad spend, whether it's by segment or by brand, by product line, you name it. You can pause or you can scale specific campaign groups, not just specific individual campaigns. And it's just a tool that helps you stay a lot more organized and helps you find and efficiently manage all your campaigns in one place. All right, now a common question I get is, well, should I hire a PPC agency to just do all this heavy lifting for me? And my answer to that is it really doesn't make sense to hire an agency unless you're just scaling really quickly and you're spending at least 10K per month or more on ads. And the reason that's kind of the sweet spot is because if you're spending less than 10K a month on ads, it's probably not worth it because most agencies out there are gonna charge at least $1,000 a month minimum And that's just for basic campaign management, right? That's not to do anything crazy or anything fancy. So you certainly could hire an agency. There's a million PPC agencies out there, but it doesn't make sense unless you're at scale or you're in scaling mode and you're spending at least 10K a month on ads. Now we'll look at a couple of real case studies from two brands that I work with and the exact results of the advertising that we've done for them. Just showing you guys how powerful PPC ads can be when you're a reseller and you run them the right way. So the first, now I'll jump into my ad campaign here in a second and show you, but this is an auto-targeting campaign. Where we've spent $10,611.89 on ads to generate $135,308.89 in sales for a ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend of 12.75, which means that for every dollar we spend on ads here, we get $12.75 back in sales. Now keep in mind, this is just a simple auto campaign. We didn't have to set any manual targeting. We didn't have to choose any keywords. This is literally just an auto campaign that took about five minutes to set up. We turned it on, we let it go to work and it has generated a 12.75 return on ad spend. So if we jump in here and look at this campaign. These are the numbers. So this is our ad spend here. The amount of sales that it's generated are ROAS, which is our return on ad spend. And this is a campaign that's been running for about 11 months, right? Not even quite 11 months. So that's $135,000 in extra sales in just under a year. That's a really powerful campaign. Now the next one, it's proving to be pretty powerful. So this is a manual campaign, which obviously took a little more set up to do, but not a ton, right? And so far we've spent $537.54 on ads. We've generated $1,557.98 in sales for a ROAS or return on ad spend of 2.9, which means that for every dollar we spend on ads, we get $2.90 back. So that campaign is here. Again, we just started it in June. So about a month ago, because we just picked up this brand and it's scaling quickly. And we have a feeling that this campaign is going to do really well. So when it comes to brand direct wholesale and really just being a reseller and running these ads, this is two very distinct, very different examples too, of how effective these campaigns can be. Because Berkey for example, is a very high priced product. These are three, $400 products. And the campaigns work well for them, right? Advertising works well for a product like that. Geeky is a much lower priced product. It's a $19.99 or a $20.99 price point and the advertising works for that type of product as well. So if you're doing wholesale, bottom line, if you're a reseller in general, start experimenting with some of these campaigns because you can generate huge results and then you can show the brand these results to then leverage for exclusivity or leverage for a better deal. So I promised I'd save the best for last and this is the single biggest hack that you can implement as a reseller. Not just when it comes to advertising, but period. I promise you this is so powerful and it takes less than three minutes to implement. It is called the Catch All Auto PPC campaign. Some of you guys that have been following me for a while might've heard me talk about it, but if you have not yet set this up, Please do yourself a favor and set it up because this campaign consistently increases my monthly sales by about 10%. So how you set it up. Is you go into your campaign builder, right? Sponsored products is what we choose. Add group name. We can name it whatever we want. Now for products, we want to add every product in our inventory. So what we do is we're going to add all on this page. Let me zoom in here so you guys can see it better. So you're going to add all on this page and you're going to literally do that for every page of products that you carry. So add every single product in your inventory to this campaign. You're going to choose automatic targeting. You're going to set a default bid of five cents. You're not going to do anything with negative keyword targeting or negative product targeting. You're going to set a fixed bid. So you're going to choose fixed bid. You are going to increase your top of search percentage to a hundred percent. You are going to name the campaign name, whatever you want. You're going to set no end date and you're going to set a daily budget of $50. And then you come down here and click launch campaign. So in less than 90 seconds, you will have launched a campaign that is going to increase your monthly sales by about 10% on average. And I will show you guys my lifetime results from this one campaign. All right, so here are my lifetime results from this one campaign. So I turned this campaign on in September of 2020. So in almost five years, because we're in July of 2025, I've spent just under $20,000 on this campaign to generate $880,227.69 in revenue for a ROAS, return on ad spend of 44.8. What that means is for every dollar I spend on this campaign, I get $44.80 back. So if you have not set this campaign up, do it right now, pause the video, don't come back until you set this campaign up. All right, now I want to end this masterclass with my top three takeaways. So we just spent well over an hour going over a lot of different things when it comes to advertising for resellers. Now my top three takeaways are number one, If you have not done it yet, please do yourself a favor, pause the video now, pause the podcast now and go set up the catch all auto campaign. Just do it. All right. It takes 90 seconds. I just showed you how to do it. You're going to thank me later and then comment on this video or if you're listening to this podcast, leave a review and let me know if you have this campaign set up, how much it's generated you to date because I guarantee you a lot. I mean, I know tons of people, We're getting a lot of low-hanging fruit, easy sales from that method. Second takeaway is we made it pretty clear that you don't need to own the brand to run profitable ads. Now, because you don't own the brand, you're not going to have as much margin as you would if you were a brand owner, but There's ways to optimize your ads. There's ways to run advertising as a reseller that is profitable. And we've showed you exactly how to do that in this video. So don't ever let anybody tell you that, oh, resellers can't run ads, or there's not enough margin to run ads as a reseller. It's not true, right? Assuming you're getting the product at a reasonable buy cost. So use this as an opportunity to go pitch brands and run some profitable ads for the brands that you work with. Now, last takeaway is that optimization is where the profit lives. Rarely, if ever, are you going to set up an advertising campaign and you're never going to have to touch it and it just prints you money on autopilot. That doesn't exist aside from the catch-all campaign that we just mentioned. When it comes to manual campaigns or even auto campaigns for some of your replenishable products, you've got to optimize these campaigns over time. You've got to keep an eye on these campaigns every couple of days to at most every week. You've got to be digging into the search term reports, you've got to be looking at the data, you've got to be optimizing your campaigns to really squeeze as much margin and as many sales Out of these campaigns as humanly possible. Now, I hope you enjoyed the masterclass. If you did and you're watching this on YouTube, please hit subscribe because I come out with these videos every single week. If you're listening to this on my podcast, The Corey Ganim Show, be sure to leave a review and give us a five-star rating if you enjoyed this episode because I put a lot of time into this podcast and leaving a review helps get it in front of more people. So I appreciate you guys watching. I'll be back next week with more. Thanks.