#366 – Amazon PPC In The Eyes Of A High-Performing Agency with Elizabeth Greene

#366 - Amazon PPC In The Eyes Of A High-Performing Agency with Elizabeth Greene Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 366 of the AM PM podcast. My guest this week is Elizabeth Greene from Junglr. Elizabeth is a stay at home mom, but more importantly, she's a PPC expert, one of the best in the business, in fact. And in today's episode, she's going to provide a ton of practical advice and real world examples around Amazon PPC, the best ways to launch your products and more. I think you'll really like this episode and get ready to take some notes. And also make sure you take a note of the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. It's a totally free newsletter I send out every Monday and Thursday. It's like a $25,000 mastermind in a free newsletter. You go to BillionDollarSellers.com to get that. And on December 7th, also mark your calendars. I'm gonna be doing a free webinar about how you can actually start your own newsletter to build an audience, to crush it, selling physical products on Amazon and Walmart and everything else. I'll show you exactly how to do it, which tools to use and some give you a lot of really good ideas. So that's December 7th, totally free webinar. You can sign up for that at BillionDollarSellerSummit.com, BillionDollarSellerSummit.com forward slash webinar, BillionDollarSellerSummit forward slash webinar. Enjoy this episode with Elizabeth. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Greene from Junglr. How are you doing? Speaker 2: I am doing well. Speaker 1: You know, we've never actually met in person. Like you were just telling me that you like to network online, but don't like to really go out to the events, which is all totally cool. That means you're getting a lot of work done. You're not out there playing. You're actually getting things done. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's that's been a personal choice. I have a very robust home life and I just don't like leaving it. It's not anything against any of the networking events. I still propose if I go, I'm sure I would have a blast. I have so many good friends in the industry now. I would enjoy myself thoroughly. It's the days before and after and travel time that I don't want to deal with. Speaker 1: Sleeping in a strange bed with a strange pillow, you don't have your pets with you, you don't have all those comforts of knowing what's in the fridge, all that stuff. I totally get it. Speaker 2: I have quite a few children, so leaving them, I'd be fine, they would be fine, but personal choice. Speaker 1: But you do a really good job online. I mean I see your LinkedIn has, you have a lot of followers on LinkedIn so you do a really good job networking online. You provide a lot of value online that people really resonate with. So thanks for contributing so much to the community out there. Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. I try, I try. Speaker 1: So how do you find time for all that? If you got all these, you got a tribe of kids, you got the business, you got the free stuff that you're contributing. How do you work that all in? Speaker 2: I honestly just by cutting everything else out, that's how I do it. People ask, so my life is probably insanely boring to some, but it's a life I like. So I just roll with it. I've gotten old enough, long enough in life to realize that, you know what, if you like it, and it's working for you, just go with it. Like, don't overthink it. Unknown Speaker: I love it. Speaker 1: I love it. Speaker 2: Yeah, life is definitely it's work and family. And I you know, you have those moments of You know it feels like this is all I'm doing and you know maybe I should get a hobby and then I come back to it you know what I really I enjoy it I like the way it's set up so I'm fine with it. Speaker 1: So do you have a background in advertising or what did you do before you got into this this Amazon world? Speaker 2: I do not. My background is stay-at-home mom. I went straight from that life into this one. So it's been a roller coaster. It's been a huge learning curve. I love it. Speaker 1: So for years when you had your children, you just stay-at-home mom, didn't work, didn't do anything. But what led into All of a sudden saying, hey, I want to mess around with this, this Amazon PPC. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So like side note, it wasn't like just the whole stay at home gig. So I definitely that was like the huge everything part. I mean, in essence, that was my job. But when we got married, my husband, family, super entrepreneurial. My family was not. My dad was like, that life scares me. He had a really good job. He provided very well. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. We had a large family. Grew up in a household of six kids. We have six kids, so there's a lot of parallels there. But when we got married, my husband had a job that allowed him and me to like kind of help out. So I always was kind of the facilitator. In a lot of ways, I liked that role. And so we worked together and he was home. And I loved that, like, you know, just together families together all the time. And as we started having kids, like, it wasn't up until a couple years into our marriage that he actually like went out and got a job. Speaker 1: So this is e-commerce stuff you're doing from home? Speaker 2: No, so he did brick and mortar. I mean like his family has had everything from like running a pet store to selling sheds and used cars. Like he grew up selling used cars. He's so smart and he'll call things all the time. Like I'll talk to somebody and they'll be like, oh boo we have all these things and he's like, No, it's not. I'm like, are you serious? Like, I'm a take everyone at their word, like everything's super rosy, this is super awesome type person. And he's not a pessimist, he's more of a realist. And I'm more of a rose colored glasses kind of person. So that's been a learning curve for me as well. Speaker 1: But he went out, he was working from home as you're having starting to have your create your family. And then he went out. And then what did you do? Did you just stay? Does that when you evolved into. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was at home for a long time. And that was something that was a discussion we had long before we got married. You know, the whole discussion of what kind of kids, you know, what do you want in our family? What do you want this to look like? I had always wanted that life, stayed home all my life. But when he had him going to work, I'm like, for the first time, I'm like, he's not home. Like, this, this sucks. This is, this is what everybody does, but I don't want it. And, you know, through the years, he had different vacations, most of the time with family, like they would change different businesses and stuff. So on the back half of it leading up to this, I was in the background constantly looking for ways to do a stay-at-home gig, which that led, of course, to Amazon being one thing this was, you know, back in still like the 20-teens-ish, like early 20-teens. And so we kind of started up like, oh, there's this thing called reach our arbitrage. So I like drag all the children to like and start scanning stuff. Speaker 1: Oh, really? So you're packing them all in the car and going to the dollar store? Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to say I was still so this leading up to it was still very like small potatoes. Let's see if this will kind of work. So like trying a whole bunch of random stuff like can I sell print on demand cards on Etsy? Like can I do that? It wasn't There was never anything that was like a huge buckle down, make these things work. I think all of these, you know, retail arbitrage still works. Private label obviously still works, like we're working for people who are making it work. But so that led us into the Amazon world, which of course, then led us to doing Amazon advertising. And then when I got into it, funny enough, I never considered myself like a super data person, where now I would get like, what I do is super data driven. But I was like, Oh, these things are interesting. And I just like I liked how you would try and figure out how to make the mechanics work. And because it was in the beginning, and we were, you know, didn't have a lot of capital to invest in, you know, maybe hiring somebody to do it for us. Or back then, there was some Yeah, there was a good amount of advertising automations, but they obviously cost money. So I'm like, oh, well, I can figure this out. And so it was a lot of downloading a whole bunch of reports like, oh, well, this data source is here and just really digging into it and trying to do a lot of things really scrappy, which I look back on and I'm like, I went through a lot more pain than I needed to. But on the flip side, coming out of it, I think everything has kind of always compounded. If I feel like I've wasted a lot of time, like it's actually been really good. So I have conversations now with people who are like data analysts or You know, like really professional people like, oh, I can understand like, okay, so this, yeah, that's why this number looks like this. Or I can now go in and read, you know, like documentation on things like, okay, so that's how this thing processes. And like, it connects with this. And that's how these two data sources are different. Because it was just a whole bunch of me like downloading a whole bunch of spreadsheets and trying to like compile and make sense of everything. So it's been good. Speaker 1: So did you do after arbitrage, did you actually do a little bit of private label dabbling there? Speaker 2: So we did a little bit of private label, which wound down because I got pregnant again. And that one was twins, which was a little bit much on the morning sickness. It was pretty much double the morning sickness, double the baby, double the morning sickness. And so that kind of was like, all right, I just didn't have, I couldn't function. If we all ate, it was a good day. So there's only so much I had time for and or like the health, not health, I wasn't unhealthy, but it was just a lot to deal with. And so that kind of went down. And then trying to get back into it, you know, getting back into the Facebook groups, there was a lot of people like, oh, this question or that question. I'm like, oh, I don't know the answer to that question. And so here's the answer to that question. I remember having like, really long discussion threads about things, you know, people and then eventually that led to somebody like, hey, do you do this? I'm like, well, I know how to. And so that just kind of kept going from there, essentially. Speaker 1: So that's when like around 2018 or so, right? You started Junglr? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's around that point. Speaker 1: It's you and you have a partner? Speaker 2: Yeah, the partner is my husband, so technically co-founder. Speaker 1: What did you come up with the name Junglr? Speaker 2: That was his idea and he was looking around and I think it has some interesting meaning that's attached to gaming of some sort. I don't know. It sounded cool and the domain name was available and it's a short domain name. Speaker 1: Cool. And so you started out, where did your first clients come from? Speaker 2: Yeah, so from Facebook groups. Speaker 1: Just people that saw you posting and they're like, hey, you seem to know what you're talking about. Can you do this for us? Speaker 2: Yeah, and so for context back then, the conversations that we're having, like this was right before, slightly before the auto campaigns. We got separate targeting types for the autos. I remember when that like blew everyone's mind. So the conversations that were happening were still, do I need to run PPC? Where these days the conversations are, how do I do it? So it was a little bit different, like there's still people trying to like dip their toes in and like, do I even need this? Because there's still, the search find buys were still a thing. So people could still get up to, you know, page one using those. No one was getting shut down for that just yet. Speaker 1: So the advertising, it's come a long ways. I mean, I started selling FBA in 2015 and it was, I don't even know, I think it might, I can't remember exactly when it launched. It's somewhere around that timeframe is when it launched. And it was rudimentary. It was like super, super basic. And then around 2018, 2019, they started adding some stuff to it. Now it's gotten super sophisticated. Back then, I used to tell people, you don't need an agency. It's mindless. Just do it yourself. I mean, can you add two plus two? As long as you don't get sick six from when you add two plus two, then you'll be okay. But now it's gotten so, there's so many variables and so many things, it's almost Google has always been way advanced when it comes to advertising over Amazon, and Amazon is not quite at Google's level yet, but it's rapidly getting there. Speaker 2: No, it's getting there, and I think they're definitely gunning to be, for sure. Speaker 1: I mean, when you look at their numbers and Amazon's making 31, was it 31, 32 billion dollars in profit? Speaker 2: Something like that, yeah. Speaker 1: On the PPC side of things. I mean, I just saw some figure, I think it was recently that was over half of Amazon's profits don't come from selling products, they come from Fulfillment fees, commissions and PPC, that's where their money's in. They're in the service business, they're not in the product selling business. Speaker 2: No, no, that's definitely for sure. You can tell by how much they really started putting resources into their ad platform and then, you know, we thought they had crazy rollouts back then and now the amount of rollouts on new features is constant, it seems. Speaker 1: So what has you seen the biggest challenge that's happened over the last five years when it comes to PPC? Is it just keeping up with the latest changes? Is it the complexity? Is it the costs are so rising that you really got to get a much better handle on it now? What are you seeing as the biggest challenges from five years ago to today? Speaker 2: Yeah, I would definitely say if you ask the average seller, their answer is probably going to be the rising costs of the advertising. As somebody who's deep in the weeds, I would say it's probably, like you said, the potential complexities. That they're being introduced. So for instance, like with Broadmatch has since gotten an update in sponsored product ads that completely changes the search terms it targets. That one was kind of through everyone in the industry for a loop. Speaker 1: Can you explain that to people that might not understand what that was? What happened? Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you are familiar with the way broad match works in historically in sponsored brand ads, and honestly, I believe that broad match works this way in Google ads as well. It's essentially, so if you classic, you know, like OG Amazon advertiser, you would know that if you advertise using a broad match keyword, that each individual word that's in your, like, keyword that you're advertising, so for instance, like running shoes is one I get all the time. You know, it can be like men's running shoes, women's running, but running and shoes have to be there, or like shoes running for kids. I mean, like that would. Speaker 1: all those two words are in there somewhere, in any kind of order. Speaker 2: Right, you're good. They changed that. And the one that honestly kind of gets me, if we're being perfectly frank here, is that the fact that they didn't, now they're historically, Slow to notify us of updates. So most times, like if you're listening to anyone who's in the know, you're going to know way before Amazon puts out like, you know, some sort of update or training on their new features. But there was no, there was no updates. There was no training plan. There was no nothing. How this was found was that a bunch of us were in the search term reports all the time. We're like, Wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. So for instance, running shoes. Now, as long as the algorithm deems that the search term is, quote, related to your keyword, meaning like, so running shoes might trigger, like running shoes, like trainers or sneakers, or, you know, something that's like, yeah, I can get how those two can kind of connect, you know, maybe it's the same audience that now can be triggered through a broad match. And all of us were like in the search term, where it's like, wait, This shouldn't be here. This doesn't make any sense. And so we're all like, when something like this happens, like all of us people who are like knee deep in the advertising loop, we have our connections and other like agency founders and stuff. And I'm like, wait, you guys seeing this? I'm like, yeah, I'm seeing this in mine. And so we're all like collaborating, like trying to figure out what the heck is going on. And everyone's like, and so anyone who had access to a rep or somebody internal on Amazon was like reaching out, like, do you guys, like, is this an update? Because like, we couldn't find anything anywhere. There's no updates. None of us got an answer. People were like, yeah, we'll get back to you. And we're like, you guys made this massive change. It completely changes. The search terms we're triggering are exponential now through our broad match. This really is a huge thing. And all that happened was there was a very quiet update to the explanation page for match types. So now if you go and read it, it's updated. And we're like, really? Okay. Speaker 1: Wow. So I've just read something recently though, speaking on the three match types, that there's broad phrase and exact for those of you that may not understand when it comes to match typing as of right now. But with the new AI changes that they came up with us, I covered this in my newsletter a while back with it in my scientific paper that was presented in a big A technical conference in Japan, Amazon said that they're going to be switching the way everything works at some point. It could be this year, it could be next year. We're not sure when this is going to happen. But basically, the whole search algorithm is going to change to more AI based and where you're not going to need the three different types of keywords, types anymore. It's just going to be one type and Amazon is just going to know that based on AI data and based on past history, this is what we should serve up versus having to go in and us tell it what we want it to serve up and then trying to guess and doing some combinations. Everything, I think, is going to radically change. It's going to be interesting to see how that affects PPC or how much they will let it. Since PPC is such a major revenue source for them, how much will they let it actually change PPC? It's almost like one of those things, do you really want to use the latest technology and make it better for the customer and maybe shoot yourself in the foot on advertising revenue or do you just want to leave something that works alone? It's going to be interesting to see. Do you have any thoughts on, are you following any of that or do you have any thoughts on any of that? Speaker 2: So my thoughts, I like keeping an ear to the ground on these things and trying to puzzle out how it's going to affect what I can do. There was a lot of people, so there's a, you know, a lot of people wondering about with the new, you know, they're saying that they're going to roll out the options for sponsored products to now show up off platform. And none of us know how that's going to work or that's going to perform. And everyone's like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? My thesis on like, what am I, to answer the what am I going to do question is I have no idea. There's only so on like I'm going to be here and I'm going to swing with the platform and I'm going to do what is within my power to do. So with that off-platform advertising, will they give us maybe like placement adjustments for off-platform and allow us to start tweaking things? That would be nice. Speaker 1: Or even to choose the platform. Maybe you don't want to be on Pinterest. Maybe you don't want to be on some of the other ones because it's not your target audience or whatever. Speaker 2: Right. But what are they going to allow us to do? So my thoughts are let's wait and see. Let's see what our options are. Let's read the data. And at the very end of the day, we have our bid as a control. As much as that kind of in a lot of ways is a really sucky control, it is a point of control. So I'm going to wait to see what happens. And as far as my personal preferences, I mean like if anyone in Amazon is watching, I loved the way that they rolled out the extensions to ASIN targeting. That was great. So before we used to just have like one, you know, you target an ASIN. Now we have the option of an exact or an expanded ASIN targeting. But the way that was rolled out, it didn't affect anything that was currently running. My sort of Issues with a lot of the most recent rollouts is it's something that completely changes a lot of our current campaign structures. Because like with the broad match, now we're targeting all of these random things or sponsor brands exact match now can also target related keywords. Like exact match historically has been used to like, I want to only show up in this position and I'm going to have a lot of control. There is now Not all that much control when it comes to that targeting and that completely changes a lot of our strategy around that, like in existing campaigns. So I like the new features when I can elect to use them or not use them or like set up additional campaigns and sort of like, oh yeah, let's go test this cool new thing and let's see how it works for the account. With a lot of the current updates, it's like, hey, here's an update that's going to change everything you've already built. Have fun. I'm like, okay, now I just got to figure it out. I mean, which we figure it out. And consequently, it's not like anything is completely exploded. We're not seeing like, oh my gosh, crazy costs, you know, absolutely exponential overnight. It's just it's a point of annoyance. Speaker 1: So what is, for those that maybe haven't realized, what's the difference between the old ASIN targeting where you could pick like your competitors or pick complimentary items and now the expanded? What's the expanded actually add to it? Speaker 2: Yeah, so the expanded allows Amazons to go out and find related or what they deem as related products similar to the one that you are advertising against. Which is honestly a really great keyword research tool, like I do love it. But so for instance, if I found a competitor and I'm like, I want to dominate this, you know, this competitor search page, like I just want to show up everywhere, I'm going to use exact match because within my exact match, I know that this is the place that I am paying to show up. So if I'm going to say, set a very aggressive bid on it, I know that I'm setting an aggressive bid for this specific placement. So it gives me a lot of control of where I dictate to funnel a lot of my ad spend. If I'm doing an expanded, Amazon's going to go and say like, oh, we think this product's like this one and this product's like this one and this product's like this one. And we could perform well on those search pages, but we don't know. So if we're going to get really aggressive with our ad spend, we're essentially getting aggressive in a whole bunch of different places versus just being super strategic. So, it's a really great tool and again, you now can say, hey, I want to do this or I want to do that and your old traditional ASIN targeting that you have is all in exact match. That's like the traditional how we all knew function and they're like, oh, here's this other cool option. I'm like, great, let me use it. Speaker 1: How do you decide what to target when you're doing ASIN targeting? Is that a major part of your strategy? I mean, I've used it. I'm sure I'd have nowhere near the experience you have with it. I've used it to where if I'm launching a product, I'll either try to go on a complimentary product or if it's a competitor, if I have a better rating or more reviews or maybe a more competitive price, I'll go on them. And I also use it sometimes when I see other people launching that are either complimentary to me or similar to me and I'll target them to actually steal their traffic. I'll go and actually, they're spending money, maybe they're still doing a search find by, you're not supposed to anymore, but maybe they're still doing that, they're doing heavy advertising, they're driving traffic to their listing with three reviews and they probably have a ridiculous tacos and a cost and everything, but if I'm on there and they drive the traffic to it, I've got mine with 250 reviews and 4.7 star rating, And they have three reviews. I can steal a bunch of that away. And so I'll just piggyback off of theirs. Some people think that's mean to do that. I showed that, I talked about that once in a presentation on stage and someone came up to me afterwards like, that's really rude and that's really mean. I'm like, this is business. Speaker 2: What is your strategy when it comes to- I mean, the ad spots are there, right? So regardless if you're snagging it or if another competitor's snagging it, somebody's snagging it, might as well be you. I mean, that's my thoughts on the matter. But yeah, so I would say that that's a very similar strategy to what we use. And I mean, we've had that where competitors have tried to go after us, right? You know, they're like, oh, you know, they're the OG on the block. Like, I'm going to get in. I'm like, fine. You know, we've got a catalog. Let's play. You know, like, we're getting every single ad spot on your detail page and blocking, you know, doing the whole defensive strategy where We're trying to plug our own bad spots. I mean, you can get some really creative things with product targeting. I will say like, there is this thought process, I don't think among true experts, but in the general talk in the community, that like, Everyone has to run exact match ranking campaigns for targeting. And then like not, okay, don't quote me on that and say like, I think that's a bad strategy. It's a very good strategy. If you're trying to rank, that is the strategy to go after. But there seems to be this tendency to like completely discount all the other ad types, including like product targeting. Like you'll see, and if you go into any form or somewhere, someone's like, how can I stop showing up on product pages? I only want to show up on top of search. Like top of search is like the only placement worth anything. I would say that's not true. To me, it's an and strategy. I don't know why we have to have an either or, give me an and. We've had some instances where we did, because we'll do product targeting out of the gate a lot of times, and a really great strategy is to go and find All of the products that are ranking well on the keywords or the search pages that you want to rank on and go and target those ASINs. Now, depending on how you stack up against them, you know, you might not have the greatest performance, but we actually were able to get several Amazon choice badges strictly through product targeting. So they do work and they do add somewhat to the algorithm as far as like Amazon recognizing that you convert well on specific search pages. Speaker 1: Because you get love. I mean, if someone types in a search for dog bowl and they go into your competitor's product and you're doing product targeting and you actually end up stealing the sale away, you actually get credit for the word dog bowl. Whatever they originally searched for, it passes through. Speaker 2: Yeah, it definitely does. Speaker 1: Yeah. So what about launching? What are some of the When it comes to launching now on Amazon, a lot of people, there's some people say you got to just go crazy on the PPC. What are your strategies? Do you tell your clients, okay, you got to go and get first, go get some reviews from buying and then we'll run PPC or do you just run it out of the gate and just have like 500% ACoS while you're figuring stuff out? What's the best way to actually use PPC when it comes to actually launching a brand spanking new product? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we definitely run it without the reviews. You can do that. What I always coach people on asking in the beginning is, what is your budget? Let me clarify that. When I say, what is your budget, what can you afford? I'm not a huge fan of these blanket, here's the three types of campaigns you have to run and here's the absolute exact budget that you have to have. No, don't get me wrong. I think I have some videos out there. I should put some videos out about how to essentially calculate the advertising spend needed to rank on specific keywords, like looking at your cost per clicks and et cetera. There's mathematical ways to figure out some stuff. But what I find with like these, here's a blanket strategy, you must set your campaign budgets to X, is what happens is new sellers get in there and they will be like, oh, everyone told me I have to run the super aggressive strategy. And then they'll run it and they'll look at the ad spend and they'll be like, oh my gosh, I'm spending $500 today. I can't do this. And then they'll go and turn it off. And I'm like, you could have taken that $500 and you could have spread it out across the month if you looked down and said, okay, what can I afford? And what keyword ranking strategy fits in my budget? So for instance... Speaker 1: And how fast are you trying to rank? Speaker 2: Right. And then just taking a look at the pros and cons. So like if you want to rank a lot faster, you are going to need excessive sales velocity. Ads can get you that sales velocity at a cost, obviously, and don't expect to be profitable out of the gate, like you were saying, like really high cost, depending on how your conversion rates. So honestly, how good your product launch goes is honestly determined in your product selection. If you have good product selection and you are introducing something that the market actually wants to buy and you've discovered a niche that is somewhat underserved in the market, your launch, you're going to get Profitably so much faster than if you're just like another me too product and you slapped a logo and you're like, ah, it's good. The listing's fine. Like, you know, I just got some random guy off Fiverr to do it. Like there's good people on Fiverr. Don't get me wrong. But like, if you're not really like, okay, how do I make this good? How do I make it appeal to the market? What are people actually willing to spend on these things? I see too many times people like with their spreadsheets, like, all right, I spent this, I did this, you know, I did this, and so therefore my price must be X. And I'm like, that's cool, except for the price in your market is $5 cheaper than that. And so again, product research, like good sourcing and all that, that's actually going to help your strategy along specifically. As far as what to go after in the beginning, the one thing that we found works time and time again is focusing in on relevancy of keywords. And actually, if you go and look at Product Opportunity Explorer, I just put out a newsletter myself, I think it was like two weeks ago, talking about... Actually, if you go into Product Opportunity Explorer, it's super interesting. You will find keywords, if you go broad enough, that Amazon is saying the conversion rate is zero. And actually, that's why I put out that newsletter was because there's some people like, conversion rate is zero. And going back to like reading documentation, it turns out that that's search volume conversion rate. So Amazon's essentially giving you in product opportunity explorer, Hey, what is the conversion rate of people who are shopping, not like your conversion rate for this specific product, just people who are generally shopping using this search phrase, what percentage of them are buying? And I'm sure the conversion rate isn't zero, but it goes to like, I think one decimal point percentage. I'm sorry if you extrapolated it out, there's like a fraction of a percent or something. But what you find is that the more specific the search is, so for instance I think it was like baby items or you know like baby gifts or something, like the search volume conversion rate is like really really low because people are typing it in getting inundated with like 20 different products like oh wait no I really wanted a blanket and then they'll go back and they'll Type in something else in search. So what you find is that the more specific you get to the exact products, the higher the search volume conversion rate is. Meaning, if somebody's searching for something specific, they're probably actually looking to buy it. So if you can show up on the search pages, which again, something that resonates with that market that people actually want to buy, you're going to make a lot better conversions and, you know, conversions equal sales. Speaker 1: Do you think people should, if they're in a highly competitive niche where there's maybe three or four keywords that get a lot of searches and they're just super competitive, the people that are ranking there have lots of reviews or really good ratings or spending a lot of money, should they actually incorporate those keywords into their listing and then actually go after some of the more low-lying fruit in the beginning that's maybe not as competitive? That way they can kind of build a little history with Amazon, hopefully build up a few reviews before going after those big Golden keywords, so to speak, or something. Do you think a lot of people make a mistake by trying to go all in too fast? Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I definitely do. I think that's a great strategy. Honestly, the hardest products to rank are the ones where the search volume is concentrated on, say, two keywords and there's just nothing else to go after. In those cases, you're kind of stuck. You're not going to get enough shopper search eyes to be able on any other long tail keywords. But if you have the ability to it, then yes, definitely niche down. What we like, so I've done in certain situations, like we had a client who launched a product, there was a lot of very relevant, more specific searches that we could go after. And there was one like really major keyword had a heck of a lot of search volume on it. What we did is we created like a single keyword exact match campaign because I was looking at his listing and I was looking at the competition and there was really only one brand dominating the market. And I was looking at his listings and I was looking at the competitor listings. I'm like, you know what? Like he did a really good job differentiating. His price point is really good. He sourced very well. I have a feeling that we maybe could compete here. So if you have that kind of If you want, test it. Test it for two days. So that's what we did. We put an exact match. You can put a budget cap, right? So you're like, I'm willing to spend 25, you know, maybe go up to 30, $40, but I'm willing to spend this per day just to test. Like, can I get any conversions on this keyword? And when we did that, you know, like the conversions were great. And actually because he converted some, well, the ACOS was phenomenal. It was within targets on the main keyword. I'm like, okay, great. Positive shopper signals, increase the budget. If we didn't have those positive shopper signals, all right, great. We did the test. Pause it and let's move on to something else. Speaker 1: What's an ACOST or maybe you go, I don't know if you go by ACOST or Tacos or ROAS, but what metric do you use? Okay, we'll accept, or maybe it's sometimes client dependent, but kind of just as a rule of thumb, what do you say should be your launch, maybe the first month you're willing to accept this much, as long as you're seeing progress, the second month this, and the ultimate goal after six months is to be at whatever, 10% Tacos or whatever. What are your kind of Benchmarks that you like to go by? Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's a good question. Honestly, it's a little bit hard to determine. As far as like ACoS, we say like our goal in the very beginning is always to say, can we hit breakeven? But on launch, especially if you have no reviews whatsoever, my goal is just to say, can we get conversions? Like, can we even get sales, right? That's my first goal. And then to say, can we find any search pages where we can get conversions on? And then we can worry about the adjustments. And then going back to like setting budgets for launch, right? Because if I just said like, can we get conversions anywhere? And I'm like, That could equal a whole lot of ad spend if you don't have that cap of like, all right, I've already kind of defined budget going into this. So that's kind of how we approach it. As far as the total cost numbers, Those ones you look at versus profitability, right? Because there's some categories where they're super competitive. So maybe you have to get a little bit more wiggle room on your total A cost numbers. But that being said, I mean, if you have a total A cost that's above your profit margins, like you're losing money just to sell on Amazon. So like, why would you ever do that? So there has to be some balance there. Speaker 1: So when someone's launching a new product and they tell you my budget's $150 a day, let's say, for the product, maybe when they're doing their analysis before they launch this product, they should be figuring out, can I even compete at $150 a day? And so how do you calculate what, or I know it's complex, but what's just a general concept of how you calculate what does it take to actually rank On the top three or top five spots or whatever the number is for this keyword, if you're going to launch, if I'm looking at launching a new dog bowl and it's a slow feed dog bowl, how do I know, okay, I'm going to launch this dog bowl. I've done all my homework. I got a great listing. I got all this done. It's a great product. Everything is perfect on that side. Now I'm going to go launch it. My budget's 150 bucks a day because that's what I have, but maybe I can't even compete at 150 bucks a day because the clicks, when you look at the numbers, the clicks are Yeah, it's going to cost me this much just to get ranked on these three keywords. How do you figure out what that number is? And can you even be competitive? And maybe I shouldn't be launching this slowly. Dogwag should be looking at something else because I don't have the budget. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's actually pretty easy. So the reason why these things are super variable. So what I'm going to tell you is a very rough way to forecast it. And it's based on things that we're making educated guests on the educated guesses being the actual cost per click you're paying, and your conversion rate. If you had a definite knowledge of what your cost per click was going to be, and you had a definite knowledge of what your conversion rate was going to be, you'd be golden. Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah, those are the magic ticket. Yeah. Speaker 2: So what you need to do is you need to figure out on average, how many daily sales do I need to rank on this keyword? And we kind of can roughly use Helium 10's, what is it? Their CPR number, the eight day giveaway. You want to add some padding to this. I also like to calculate like what these numbers would be and then what they would be super pessimistically. So if I had to add additionally to this, right? So I say, okay, this is how many orders I need to make, right? Now I can take my, How many orders I need to make and then I need to know how many clicks on average is it going to take me to make one order? How you would calculate this is you're going to get your estimated conversion rates. Be pessimistic here. Everyone wants to be like, yeah, I'm going to hit a 15% conversion. Like, go super pessimistic, okay? Just, you have no reviews, you're assuming, right? But you would take your average, what your expected conversion rate is, and you can take one divided by whatever the, you know, in a decimal version of your conversion rate would be. And that's going to give you how many clicks on average it makes me, it takes me to generate. Speaker 1: How do I determine that number? Is it category dependent? Speaker 2: Is it 1 out of 10, 1 out of 20, 1 out of 40? Yeah, so I think it's category dependent. Averages, rough averages I heard were slightly below 10%. I would say if you are in clothing, if you have anything that just super style dependent, where people get like super nitpicky on, oh, that's the wrong shade of blue, like go super, super pessimistic. I would expect 5% would be good. Like a sub 5% is probably average if you're looking at clothing, unless you are selling licensed products and you have a brand name associated with it. Unknown Speaker: That's 1 out of 20. Right. Speaker 1: So 5% is 1 out of 20. Speaker 2: Right. So if I said, okay, so it takes me 20 clicks on average to make an order, and then we've calculated how many orders it's most likely going to take me per day to rank on this keyword, I can take how many orders multiplied by how many clicks. So we're just going to do super rough math because it's hard for me to math on the fly. So if we say 20 clicks on average, and let's just say two orders because it's a non-value keyword, right? So that is 40 clicks. So it's going to take me 40 clicks a day to be able to generate the order volume to rank. Now what we need to do is we need to go and find what we're expected our average cost per click would be. Again, go super pessimistic here. Helium 10 has, they have their Amazon's recommended bid. Those are pulled directly from the API. Amazon will give you the recommended bids in the API. Speaker 1: What's that recommended bid based on? Is that middle of the pack? Is that to win it? Is that an average of what people are spending? Speaker 2: You know, if you go into the ad console and you look at the recommended bids, like if you put in a keyword in your ad, like Amazon will give you kind of like the recommended bid range. You can read that. A good benchmark I've heard if you want to get aggressive is to go say 20% above the highest average recommended bid, which on some keywords can be super high. Again, Amazon is doing their best to calculate what they think you will pay. You're really not going to get your true numbers until like you actually launch these campaigns, which is why I'm saying like go pessimistic, because you'll probably plug this in for one keyword and be like, oh my gosh, the spend is way more than I thought. But if I know it's going to average take me 40 clicks to make these two sales, then I can say, okay, it's going to take me, let's just, again, let's be super average, say a dollar a click to be able to generate this. It's going to take me $40 to make these two sales to rank on this keyword. Is this keyword worth it? $40 a day. And then I say, okay, I have a dollar, you know, I have 150 budget. Okay. There's 40 of my 150. Where else can I rank on it? Speaker 1: Cool. What are like three categories that you see with all your clients are just like crazy competitive to compete in? You're like, man, this stuff is just getting out of control on what people are having to spend here. Speaker 2: I mean, definitely supplements. Supplements is a classic. Supplements and anything electronics is very hard. Those ones are specifically hard because conversion rates can be really tricky, like certain categories. I mean, you hear people all the time, they're like, oh my gosh, look at the volume on like wireless Bluetooth headphones. I'm like, nobody trusts anything outside of the name brands. I mean, let's be honest. I went to shop wireless headphones the other day. I'm like, Does this stuff really work? And I'm like, I know these other ones, at least, you know, they have a name brand behind them. I'm sure they're going to work. I think all of us have been burned too much by like, really hokey electronics before they were a little bit pessimistic when it comes to that. And it depends, right? So I'm talking about more like, specific electronics, if you had some sort of like widget with a specific function that has electronics on it, it may or may not. Also, anything that has like a lot of hype around it. So if you're trying to sell like jade face rollers, good luck. I mean, there's only so much differentiation the market cares about. That's the other thing is some people will get, you know, they'll do all this product research, be like, Oh my gosh, there's this really cool add on that I think can improve it. There's certain categories, like you might find something super cool. But how well it converts against what's already on the market is going to be dependent on how much the market actually cares about that update. So you're like, oh, look at my jade ruler. And you know, I have the whatever the face stone is, it's got this little bit different shape. But if the market's like, I already know this one, and I like it, like, they don't really care. Speaker 1: What about, what would be like a third one? So it's supplements, electronics would be like pets or? Speaker 2: Pet supplements. I mean, that's still supplements, but honestly, pet supplements can be difficult. Also, sometimes I don't know if it's a super high search volume though, but there are certain consumer good categories because of the repurchase nature. There are some brands who are just willing to pay out the nose because they realize that lifetime value of somebody is pretty significant, so cost per clicks can get pretty crazy there. Speaker 1: Cool. Are there any times a client comes to you and you just look at them and go, no, no, I'm not, no, sorry. We're not the agency for you. Does that happen sometimes? Speaker 2: It does. It does. And I think it's more, it's a lot of times more because I care about trying to make sure I do right. So if you come to me with like detail pages that haven't been updated in like two years, I'm probably gonna say, hey, why don't you go get those checked out before we sign on? Now, all of the sign on clients who like have detailed pages that don't work, they're like, all right, you know, like, we want to push this product, we know we want to push this product, we want to push this product, we know the detail pages are crap, like, don't throw money at this. Okay, so here's what we're working on, like, those kind of engagements, totally good. As long as you're aware of it, and you're working on it, we're golden. But I've found for me, And kind of getting to be the gatekeeper of who we work with now. It has been a lot more focused around the types of brand owners. And I find that the types of brand owners, because honestly, we're interested in long term engagements. We're in a month to month with all of our clients. But that being said, like, So that means I got to do right by you. So if I got to do right by you, that means I want to work with somebody who I know I can get good results for. And the clients who come to us is seeing everything as sort of a challenge to be overcome versus something that's happening to them. I find that that is quite a big determiner of success long term on Amazon. Speaker 1: A lot of people are really high on the data that they're giving you now is the search query performance report and people are saying that's like the golden ticket now if you know how to analyze that and download that and overlap it and do you know some people create sophisticated like spreadsheets and air tables and like all this stuff. What are your thoughts around that? Speaker 2: No, I absolutely love it and that was actually the whole subject of a collab call we did with a group that we have of like top Amazon advertisers were trying to dig into that. So I would agree with you. It's a wealth of information and never before have we had information on a search term level. And I think that's why what blew everyone's minds is like, you can see how you're stacking up against your competition on a per search term basis, which is amazing. For my larger brands out there, I sympathize with you. The things that are kind of obnoxious about this report is when it's not available in the API, When it's available in the API, I'm going to be one happy girl because we can pull it at mass. So you have to physically download reports, which across large catalogs can be difficult. And you also have to download it on a per-child ASIN level, which is fine up until you get into large variation products like clothing. We deal a lot with clothing. I can't download this report 200 times every week for one product. Let's just be honest, I can't. You can check Best Seller, the one that has the most information on it. There are still insights you can pull out. I find that it's much easier to really use it at scale for smaller accounts and larger accounts. But that being said, we're still constantly analyzing it. And especially if you're trying to figure out, is this a good Search page for me to invest a lot of ad dollars on it, search query report. Speaker 1: Is there something, if Amazon's listening to this, if there's something like, hey Amazon, I wish you would do this. I mean, obviously you just said one of them there with making the API for the search query performance report, but is there something else you're like, man, I just wish we had this or Amazon just gave us this data. We could just do so much more for our clients. Speaker 2: Ad spend on a per product level in sponsor brand ads. Please, Amazon, I'm begging you. Speaker 1: Ad spend on a per product level for sponsored brand ads. Speaker 2: We got it for sponsored products and we got it for sponsored display. So for anyone out there listening, know that any of your tools, and we use one who calculates it, so no hate against the calculations. You got to do what you got to do to figure it out. There is no way to accurately get total A cost if you have high sponsored brand ad spend for your products. There's just not. Speaker 1: How's sponsored video doing these days compared to the sponsored display and the sponsored ads and the other different types of placements? What do you find is where people should kind of be focused in their DSP even? There's so many different options now. If you had to pick like two, someone's new and they're on a little bit more limited budget, can't just do everything, where should they focus their energies? Speaker 2: I would still say definitely sponsored product ads. I don't think we're ever going to move past a majority of the account being in sponsored product ads. Maybe I'll eat my words in a year or two, but I would say I don't think so. Just due to the nature of search pages and shopper search behavior, I still think that's going to be a high volume mover. That being said, if you are in sponsored product ads and you're looking to move outside of that, look at your sponsored product search term reports. That's going to give you so much wealth of knowledge as to which search pages you can then use to expand out into other ad types. So that's going to work really well for you. So if you have the video ad creatives, I would definitely run those and I would look into my search term reports. What's already working? What search pages am I already crushing it on? Let me just add in this other additional ad type with sponsor brands video. Speaker 1: Is there a certain type of video ads that you're seeing work better? I mean, because a lot of people have video, but the video may suck or it's not, it doesn't capture the attention the first two seconds or it doesn't really show the differences or the highlights of the product. Is there something that, man, if you do these couple things in your video, I see every time I see someone do this, they're just, they're just crushing it. Speaker 2: Yeah, anything that grabs attention, I will say, so we pulled, and this was a little while back, I probably should do it again, but we pulled all of the video ad data for all of our clients across everywhere just to see what's crushing it, what's not crushing it, what can we learn. Honestly, it wasn't a lot. There was only one takeaway I found, but it was pretty good. So when I looked at everything, I was like, okay, so what's converting? I was looking at conversion rates and click-through rates. What's working the best? And then what's working the worst? And then kind of like looking at those ad creatives and be like, what's different? And so the only real thing I could take away from that was that the video ads that work best are the ones that bring the product into focus on the first Slide. So this was illustrated really well by actually the same account. They had a jewelry brand, right? And they had one, they were both necklaces. One video ad was crushing it and the other one wasn't. I was like, what's the difference here? And so in the first video ad, the one that was working really well, conversion rate was great, performance was stellar. The first frame was a close-up of the necklace. So immediately the necklace was in focus. I knew what the product was. It was all good. And then the other one had the model, and she was still wearing the necklace, but the necklace was not the focal point. You saw the model first. So you're scrolling past it, you're going, ah, so I'm searching for a women's necklace. Is that the one I wanted? Where in the first video, you would be like, oh, yeah, that's the exact type I'm looking for. Okay, that's what I want. And then the second video was like, oh, there's this ambiguous scene, you know, maybe it's the mom pulling the blanket somewhere or doing something you're like, is the blanket? Is it you know, like the couch cover? Like, I don't I don't know what this thing is, versus the videos that are like, oh, Here is the, and it can still be in motion, it can still be visually appealing, but I know what product is being advertised. So at least having that in your opening scene and then anything that's, you know, kind of eye-catching, so movement is always super good. Speaker 1: So as an agency, I mean you said that your agency is month to month, but your goal is to keep people long term, but you give them that option. There's a lot of people out there that bounce agency to agency. You'll hear words that, oh, this agency sucks. And then the next person is like, no, they're killing it for us. And then they just bounce and they bounce and they bounce. What sets apart, what makes a good agency? There's tons of them out there, but what makes a good agency when someone's evaluating Everybody, almost all of them say, we'll do a free audit and we'll make some suggestions and do this, but what actually truly makes a good agency when it comes to PPC? Speaker 2: So this is what I've been currently coaching my team a lot on, because I think this is what makes a pretty good account manager an absolute rockstar, is the ability to analyze the data and be able to tell a story from it. And be able to take the analytics and directly translate that into action items. That's what happens on the back end. As far as from a client perspective, it's being able to have someone that you can collaborate with. And who you feel is truly invested in your brand. That's my opinion. I'm looking back on everyone who we have really good long-term relationships with. It's that I found actually as much as a lot of new advertisers think they're being helpful whenever an agency is like, oh, here's this keyword list. Here's this thing. I want you to focus on this. They're like, oh, yeah, let me do this. Let me do this. Let me do this. Let me do this. For everyone listening who is an aspiring account manager, the only thing clients care about is performance and if you're doing right by their brands. Meaning, if you execute everything an agency owner is telling you, but at the end of the month, their sales went down and their performance is not good in the ads, they're not going to care because you'll be like, I did everything you told me and they're going to be like, I'm paying you to tell me no when something's a stupid idea because you're supposed to be the expert. So being able to have that collaborative, like we have clients all the time. They're like, Hey, you know, let's, Oh, we want to launch this keyword. We want you to test this keyword. So there's one account where we did some of those tasks and we're like, Your metrics aren't looking as good. We feel like we're spending too much on ad spend. And if we look at our organic to ad ratio, these numbers aren't as good as they should be. And you can see the definite turning point when we started launching all these campaigns with all these keywords. We don't think this is a good idea right now. Hey, let's pivot to at least maybe restrict the amount of ad spend we're using on these tests or something like that, right? So that's that collaborative. Hey, yeah, let's test it. Oh, we don't feel like this is in the best interest of your brand. Here is why. Here's our options. Let's get together and make a strategy around that. And my goal for all of our accounts is like, when you say, hey, I want to do this with this product and this with this product and these products, you know, we have to discontinue them by end of year because, you know, they're expiring or something. Can you push more here? Yep, yep, yep, yep. You shouldn't have to think about what that looks like from an ad strategy perspective. We should have it but you should get that control over your brand to say like this is what I want to happen to my brand. I need the feedback on what you're seeing because you're so close to the data and then rinse and repeat, you know, just so everything gets better. Speaker 1: Elizabeth, this has been great. We've been talking here for an hour already and we could keep going for quite some time. I'm sure we could keep digging all kinds of cool stuff up. This has been great actionable stuff that you've shared. I really, really appreciate it. I know the audience, everybody listening is probably busy scribbling notes or they pulled off to the side of the road and if they're driving and taking a couple notes, this would be great. If people want to reach out to you or follow you or learn more about your company, what's the best ways to do that? Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. The best place to follow me would be on LinkedIn. I put out the most content there, trying to get it up on the YouTube. If you have an idea that you want, like if I said something, you're like, oh my gosh, I wish I had more information, like shoot me a DM because I'm always looking for video ideas. But as far as working with us, the website's definitely going to be the best place for that. Junglr, J-U-N-G-L-R. Speaker 1: No E, yeah, Junglr with no E before the R. Speaker 2: Yes, no, definitely that. And as far as audits go, we recently did a complete overhaul of our audit because we realized that every single audit on the market from ad agencies, everyone got the same thing. And when comparing our audits, everybody else would be like, oh, yeah, I already know that. So we essentially took in, take everything that we traditionally did after onboarding to see what's up in the account and then put that in front as our audit. So we found that that's actually been really beneficial to brands. So if you're interested in working with us, that's a free offer on the table. Feel free to reach out for that. Speaker 1: Cool. Well, thanks again, Elizabeth, for joining us today. This has been awesome. We'll have to do it again. Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks so much. Speaker 1: Great stuff from Elizabeth. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn if you want to see what she is up to and she posts quite a bit of her latest discoveries and latest tricks and tactics on LinkedIn. I really like the search query performance stuff she talked about, how to benchmark against your competitors and identify the profitable search terms. Lots of good stuff in this interview. Hope you really got something from it. We'll be back again next week with our guest Yana. We're going to be talking about languages and all kinds of really cool stuff. I think you're going to get some good ideas from our talk next week. So hopefully you'll join us again next Thursday. Before we go, I've got some words of wisdom for you. This is something I believe in. Either teach me or entertain me. Otherwise, you're dead to me. Teach me, or entertain me. Otherwise, you're dead to me. See you again next week.