#394 – Insider Strategies For Amazon PPC Optimization with Neha Bhuchar

#394 - Insider Strategies For Amazon PPC Optimization with Neha Bhuchar Speaker 1: This is the 100th episode of the AM-PM Podcast that I've been hosting. I took over at episode 294 and this is edition 394. And my guest this week is Neha Butcher. Neha is from India. She used to work for Amazon and now she's gone to the good guy side and is actually working for sellers. So we talk about everything PPC. She's got some fascinating insights on how you should be doing your PPC, what's working right now and what's not. So I think you're going to learn quite a bit of actionable stuff in this episode. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce, commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, 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. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Welcome everybody and look who I have. I have Neha Butcher here with us today. How are you doing Neha? Speaker 2: Hey Kevin, I'm doing very well. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: How long have you been involved in this e-commerce space? Speaker 2: Yes, so I have been in the Amazon advertising space for over seven years now. I joined Amazon in late 2016-2017. That's exactly... Speaker 1: Amazon, actually the company, Amazon the company you joined. Just want to rephrase that. You actually worked for Amazon.com actually. Speaker 2: Oh yes, Amazon.com. I was in the India team but worked very closely with the global team also. And I joined them and I joined the advertising team. And this was way before when advertising was still in the nascent stages. And so got the chance to work on a lot of different roles while I was at Amazon. I should say Amazon.com just to avoid any confusion. So I worked in a lot of roles while I was at Amazon ads, did product management, led an account management team, led sales. So pretty much I've been around, understand the Inside out of Amazon algorithms, why we do what we do? I mean, why as Amazon, why they do what they do? And you know, how does it impact sellers? What is the thought process before any every different launch? So I think I literally understand every single thing from there. And In around 2022, that's when I actually started thinking that, you know, I've seen so many different softwares, just missing something. And I can talk a little bit more about it, you know, missing what, and that's when I actually decided to leave Amazon and start something on my own. Speaker 1: You're the co-founder, right? Do you have a partner in the company or is it just you? Speaker 2: No, I have a partner and interestingly, even my partner is ex-Amazon advertising. So we are full-on, you know, the ex-Amazon team who knows ads inside out. Speaker 1: Let me challenge you on that. When I call up Amazon's PPC people or support or whatever, a lot of times I don't think they actually know what they're doing. So a lot of times, the people that are working at Amazon may know the basics and they've gone through some training, but they're not in the weeds doing it. It's not their money like it is our money. There's a difference when I have my $10,000 budget online versus them. Oh, you should try this experiment or you should do this. Like you said, you've been in the belly of the beast. And so what's the difference? And I'm not knocking this. I'm just saying that I just want people to understand that There's two different worlds there that two different perspectives people are coming from so what do you see and I think it's a major advantage for you because you know both versus so what how do they actually teach. The people because you're when you come in and when you start an Amazon 2016, you probably had no PPC experience. I know you have, I think it's a chemical engineer or something. All these engineers are always in the math stuff. They're always into the PPC stuff, figuring things out. But how did they actually train you? Or when you were there? How did you when a new person gets hired on? How do you actually train them on PPC when it's really not their money? It's So, you know, they screw up, they're like, ah, no big deal, we'll do it right the next time. Versus I screw up, I'm like, ah, that was money out of my pocket. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'll explain. When you call up the Amazon PPC team, you're probably speaking to a support team. Now, the support team is not your account manager. The support team is talking to 1500 different brands or whatever, 20 different brands in a day, right? They don't have context. They cannot solve issues in a holistic manner. They can give you best practices and they can probably give you some SOP-driven responses that, hey, we have seen that last time when I spoke to someone or we have seen through our SOP that if you have a problem A, you can solve it using a solution B. Right? So that's how it will work. Now, if you have an account manager, a dedicated account manager who is talking to you, let's say once every week, they know... Speaker 1: A SaaS rep? A SaaS rep or a dedicated PPC manager? Speaker 2: Like a dedicated PPC manager. So that person knows... Speaker 1: Not a SaaS rep, who just handles everything, but actually a dedicated PPC manager. Speaker 2: Yes, a dedicated PPC manager. That person knows your advertising inside out. They know what your business is like. Sometimes they might even be talking to the category team about you, how to grow you. Now, this kind of treatment, of course, will be available for only the big vendors or the biggest sellers. When they get support from the advertising team who does probably monthly business reviews with them, they get the detailed stuff. They're not getting just best practices. They're actually getting customized or personalized recommendations based on their data. So, there's a difference between if you're talking to a support team who is looking at your data just, you know, for 5 minutes or for 10 minutes, right? Of course, there's going to be a difference in how they can explain to you as to what is the best course of action versus a dedicated PPC manager who's been looking at your data and your growth for months. So the account management team that I led actually did the latter, which is they actually grew brands from, you know, an X sales to Y sales using PPC. So they were catalysts in working with the agencies or working with the brand managers to do that. Speaker 1: What was an example of someone that came in on your team that maybe they were doing a million dollars in sales and as a result of what you guys were able to do for them, they're now at 20 million or something. Is there some example that you can, without naming the name of the company or something, but give? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm not going to name the company, but the examples that I worked with or my team worked with were basically brands in India. In fact, one of the brands actually recently IPO'd in India. So my team was actually taking care of that brand. Speaker 1: On Amazon India or Amazon US or all over? Speaker 2: On Amazon India. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: So that brand was selling in Amazon India and my team was actually taking care of that brand. The team used to have meetings with them once every month looking at their retail data, which is their Amazon or seller central data, vendor central data, as well as their advertising data, matching those data up and then giving them best practices or personalized recommendations as to what or how should they be improving their advertising going forward. What should they be doing? In fact, one of the things that we devised when I was at Amazon was A holistic method of advertising. And this is exactly what I talked about at the Prosper Show too. Holistic advertising means marrying signals from seller central to your advertising. So signals like what's happening to your inventory, what's happening to your search rank, what's happening to your competitors, what's happening to your content quality, so on and so forth. You look at those signals, marry those signals with advertising signals, and then tell them or give them recommendations on advertising. For example, inventory is low. Right now, you need to divert spends away from this product and put it on some other product. Or you've been spending too high on your lowest or bottom selling ASINs, which is a problem a lot of sellers do, by the way. Not funny how many times I have seen this. You need to prioritize the right essence better. So, you know, we used to do that and, you know, we've actually helped the brand grow quite as much. I think the percentages are probably there. It's been a while now. But the brand recently IPO, so they grew and they grew mostly on Amazon and one other e-commerce platform, which is here in India. So did pretty well. And that was dedicated PPC support that the team was giving to them. Speaker 1: In India, isn't the PPC a little bit less competitive than like the States, for example? Or is it super competitive in India? And the pricing is a little bit cheaper and stuff too, right? Speaker 2: Pricing is a little bit cheaper, but I mean, if you're comparing, you might not be comparing apples to apples, right? So, US is a bigger economy too. So, the prices are cheaper because that's what, you know, the market is used to over here. Speaker 1: But the products are cheaper too, yeah. Speaker 2: But then the D2C market in India is probably going to explode in the next five years. So this is prepping up for being one of the largest D2C markets in the world. The population is the highest in the world. So consumers are, I mean, you will not find a bigger consumer market than India. Speaker 1: The problem with India though, isn't it that the logistics is still the stumbling block? I think on Amazon, there's Flipkart and there's several other big ones in India. But Amazon, one of the issues has been logistics. I mean, it's easy in Mumbai or Delhi or Some of the other major cities are easier, but you have a lot of rural population that doesn't even have really an address. Doesn't really have, you know, go to the third door, pass the second cow, you know, whatever. That's where the delivery is made. So it's, that isn't that the challenge to India becoming the next big, I agree with you, India has massive potential. And then a lot of people are still unbanked in India too. So what do you think is going to transform everything? Speaker 2: So first things first, I think, didn't you put out a post very recently where you talked about Uttarakhand and how Amazon has been delivering stuff to a remote village in Uttarakhand? Speaker 1: Yeah, I did. Yeah. Speaker 2: So actually, for the last four years, Amazon has been delivering, not just Amazon, actually, Amazon and other e-commerce companies, they've actually been delivering to 99.9% of Indian pin codes. That's the difference of how, you know, logistics are improving in India. And I think the first problem that, you know, and Amazon faced when they moved them and they came to India was Indians don't pay or they did not trust paying online. And so, you know, companies, e-commerce companies, they devised something called cash on delivery. COD is what it's called. Cash on delivery means that you deliver and the person will actually pay you when the customer, you know, when let's say an Amazon representative is giving you the parcel, that's when the person pays you in cash. So they devised it and slowly and steadily, you know, people started trusting the e-commerce websites a little bit more. I think when I moved back to India, so I was in Canada for seven years, that's when I was doing the oil and gas stuff. When I moved back, I think e-commerce penetration was about less than 3%. And I think it's about 15-ish to 18% now and e-commerce penetration in India. So I think it's growing and it's grown really fast. I mean, Indian government is putting in technology, payment technologies, logistics are improving. So I mean, I think it's poised for growth. Speaker 1: And in Amazon, they're doing something like something called Amazon Bazaar or something like that too, right? Yeah, they're spending a lot of money there. They see the potential and I think it's there too. The COD, it's interesting you talk about the COD, that used to be big in the US. I mean, you're too young to know this, but when credit cards first came out in the 1950s, Hardly anybody had it. We were like India now, back then. Into the 60s and 70s, still a lot of people didn't have credit cards. They were still afraid to give the number over the phone because there's no internet. When I first started my first e-commerce, what's now e-commerce business, back then it was direct to consumer through the mail, physically sending a flyer or a brochure or something through the mail. We did COD and you would actually attach We took a credit card, but we probably had, I don't know, 20%, 30% of our orders were COD. We could mark the COD cash only, so that means they had to actually physically give the driver, the delivery driver, Count out the money into their hand or it could be a check or we could say certified check. It had to be an official bank check. And we used to do that for customers and people would send me stuff that way. So I had a supplier that didn't want me to wire the money or didn't want it. They wanted the money. They didn't want to give me their $10,000 worth of product unless they knew they had their money in their hand. And so they sent us just a quick little side story here. This is the probably 596 something something around that time frame they sent me about $10,000 worth of merchandise and said COD cash only And so you know because I was a new I was a new buyer of this supplier. I get that the order comes It's UPS that delivers it the UPS driver I give him the money, he gives me the products, no problem. About two months later, this car pulls up into our parking lot, has no white walls, no white stripes on the tire, which means government tires, government car. It looks like one of these little Cadillacs. Out come three guys in suits and come up to the door and I'm like, can I help you? We're with UPS Investigations. We're here to investigate some deliveries. Okay. So they come in and make a long story short, turns out the UPS driver stole the cash and made some sort of claim. He kept the cash for himself. And so he got in trouble. We didn't get in trouble, but they were just wanting to get some facts and some information and stuff. So yeah, so I'm very familiar with the COD system. Because I made money that way and I paid that way. But the fact that they're doing that is a precursor to what's going to happen next. So it basically proves that people are willing to do that. So the next step is, like you said, people get comfortable and they start figuring out. In India, a lot of people still don't have credit cards, but there's other ways to pay on phone, just like in China, and other ways to do stuff. So I think it's a huge market. Is it a market that you would recommend? Western sellers explore, I know there's certain rules you have to have an Indian, the owner has to be Indian, citizenship, and there's some hurdles a little bit, but is it something that you recommend that Western, and it's hard to get the money out sometimes, there's some rules on, because Indian wants to keep it, help their economy, not like help some other economy, and so are, is it a market that you recommend people look at from the Western world? Speaker 2: I think it might be too early for a US seller to do this to India. A Chinese seller might do it because Indian consumer is also very cost conscious. conscious. So yeah, I think if there's a US seller bringing in products here, one, of course, there's going to be a heavy excise duty of heavy duty on the product, which is being imported to India. And then the product becomes more expensive. And so you know, it becomes very hard to sell those products. I think there's been a recent trade partnership between India and EU and was it EU or UK I'm sorry I'm forgetting but I think that's going to make you know stuff easier for you know a trade between India and EU as well as back. Right. So I think that those kind of things really help, you know, if the duties go off, because otherwise the stuff just becomes or the products become really expensive. And then a cost conscious Indian would just, you know, now that they travel so much to the Indian US, you know, there's so much travel, they would rather just go there and buy it rather than buy it here in India for double the cost or triple the cost. There have been products which are like six times the cost through global selling. I mean, there are still products in India that you can buy, you know, via the global selling program. 6x the price and it just doesn't make sense. I think in some more time, if these duties are lifted or there is some way to bring the cost down, I think that might be a good time. But I think until then, Chinese sellers selling in India, that I've seen and that's pretty common. They normally partner with people here. So people would just get stuff from China and then white label it and then sell it or privately label it and sell it. But US, I've heard less cases. Speaker 1: So in India, is there a big push to get more sellers? I mean, like in the US, you have all the guys doing YouTube videos and here's my Lamborghini and how much money I made, take my course. You have big events like Prosper and SellerCon. You go to China, you have similar things. Every Sunday in cities in China, there's 2,500 Amazon sellers and workers from companies that meet for events. Is any of that kind of stuff going on right now in India or are young people or not even necessarily young, but are people starting to say, hey, maybe I should jump in here and start selling e-commerce? Are you seeing a trend there or is it still kind of quiet and just kind of moving along? Speaker 2: It's pretty aggressive. I think like I was saying, telling you earlier, right, the D2C market is exploding. I think India is going to overtake, you know, US in terms of the number of D2C companies that are coming up in India. Because I think there's a wave, right, that people are saying that, you know, we're going to Indianize You know, the kind of brands that are there in the US or just come up with more innovative brands that India hasn't seen before. So it's a pretty good time to be in India because, you know, as a consumer, not as a SaaS founder, but as a consumer, because, you know, there were things that, you know, you used to only think or aspire for when you would see, you know, a developed country like US or UK. But all of those things are now available and you don't really have to go and buy it from A foreign country or just and like if you're traveling, I mean, unless you are really, really looking for a specific brand, you have a lot of it available. And those are the things that are being customized to Indian tastes, or personalized to how the Indians buy. But yeah, I think, as a consumer, things are changing. So I think, and the way we are seeing the projections, India is going to be one of the largest D2C markets in the world in a few years time. Speaker 1: So I know there's people that are leading sourcing trips to India, a couple of different people lead that, but are there big meetups of like e-commerce sellers in India like we have here? Is there a version of a Prosper Show for example or a version of a SellerCon or something like that in India? Speaker 2: There are quite a few, but they're not as frequent right now as like you said in China, right? They're not like weekly, so there'll probably be about four to five different shows. There's ad tech and there's a couple more, but they're not as frequent, like I said, so there'll probably be four in a year. Speaker 1: You said you started your agency, you were doing Amazon India, you started helping people in India. So are you just helping people in India now? Are you also helping a lot of people in the US and in Europe as well on the PPC side? Speaker 2: When I was in Amazon, I was helping a lot of brands and agencies. I saw that there were softwares, but most of the softwares, they were very siloed. They would only look at PPC. So it would probably look like sometimes, you know, a bid up and down, you know, all you're doing is a bid up and down. The softwares were great. I think it's just that I thought that Amazon ads cannot be run in silos. It has so much history from, it has to take signals from how's your inventory health, how's your product quality, your content quality, product quality as well as content quality. What is your competition doing? What is your pricing like? Those signals impact advertising like there's no tomorrow. Let me give you an example. Let's say you have 150 products and you're sourcing them, half the products you're sourcing them from China and half of them you're getting them from locally or sourcing them locally. There are three products. One of them is low stock. When I say low stock for product number one, I mean that because it's being sourced from China, it's about 50 days or let's say 30 days. Actually, let's not go that high. 30 days of inventory is left. At this point, you are probably freaking out because if your inventory doesn't come on time, you will go out of stock and Amazon does penalize you for going out of stock. So the best thing to do is to lower your sales velocity so you don't go out of stock. And the only way to do it is to pause PPC at that time on that specific product. Now, for such a large catalog, you can't be doing this manually. And we've actually seen Slack messages being exchanged between brands and agencies saying, hey, pause my product because I'm going to go out of stock because inventory is low. So why can't this just be automated? Speaker 1: There's an argument there on that exact thing that you're talking about is people always, one of the ways is like you said, reduce PPC, another way is people raise their price to try to slow it down. But there's also a school of thought that says, no, that's wrong, that you should actually go out with a bang, you should actually go out. You want to go out winning the Super Bowl, not losing in the first round of the playoffs, for example. So you want to actually maintain, if you can raise your price and maintain the level, by all means raise your price. But you want to go out selling 25 units a day. It's better to do that than to be out of stock for two weeks, let's say, than to actually lower your sales to 15 a day so that you never go out of stock. There's two schools of thoughts on that. What does the data show you or what does your experience show you is which one of those is correct? Speaker 2: Anyone who is saying that may might have their own experiences, but I'll talk about mine and I'll back it up with data. So there are studies that we've seen and also real-time data. For example... Speaker 1: These are your studies or studies at Amazon? Speaker 2: A company called Profitero. I hope everyone knows about it. So they actually have done studies which tell you that when a product goes out of stock for let's say one day, It takes two days for it to come back, regain full sales volume. Once you're out of stock, and then you come back into stock, you're not going to be at full sales volume on day one itself. It's going to take two days. When you're out of stock for four to five days, it's going to take you six to seven days to regain full sales volume. And if you are out of stock for more than a week, then it's going to take you even more time. So this is an actual study where they've done, I think they've analyzed about a million ASINs, low-stock ASINs, and they've analyzed how do they perform when they go out of stock and then when they come back in stock. In fact, not just that, we've also seen, you know, the curve is not, you know, you go out of stock and you come back in stock and your sales is back. The curve is always, always, you know, very slow and steady coming back to, you know, full sales volume. So I just think that You don't lose one day of sales when you go out of stock for one day. You lose two days of sales because that's the time that Amazon is taking to actually test waters and ensure that they can show your products on search rank number one. You start losing search ranks when you're low stock already because Amazon is going to take more time to deliver the product, so on and so forth. So, those are the kind of impacts, the soft impacts that start happening to your product when you are low stock and then just to regain that back, it takes you even more time. So, isn't it just better to reduce your sales for some time? You could do it by increasing prices. I have just seen that. I've just read. I don't know about increasing prices right now. I have read this. Words with a pinch of salt. But I've just read a lot of people talking about increasing pricing may not be the right thing to do. And I don't even understand their reasons probably at the time because I mean, there are very conflicting views that I read. But I just thought that and I think that's what we understood that you know, when you are reducing your PPC or just completely pausing your PPC, that's when you know, you keep your stock intact. Don't go out of stock as soon as you restart PPC. When you're back in stock, you actually don't take time to regain sales volume. You're back in The game on day one and we are actually going to show the the graphs which show that You know you you reduced your or completely stopped your PPC when you were low stock and as soon as you were back in stock you Switched on your PPC back and you were back to full sales volume on day one Who was the company that did that study of the million aces again? Oh, it's called Profitero. Speaker 1: Profitero? Speaker 2: Profitero So that's the story about using retail signals to run your advertising more efficiently. And it also makes sense, right? Amazon itself is retail aware. Amazon does pause your ad when you are out of stock. It doesn't show your ad when you're out of stock because at that point it is protecting the customer's interest because it thinks that a customer clicks on the ad and they go there and they don't have anything to buy so let me protect the end customer's experience. I'm going to pause your ad when you're out of stock. I'm going to pause your ad when you don't have buy box. Speaker 1: Let's explain to people. Some people don't really understand how the PPC algorithm works. Since you've been on both sides of it, you have an intimate knowledge of how it works. A lot of people just think that if I bid the highest, they're going to show my product and I'll just buy my way to the top just by bidding the most. But it doesn't work that way. It's based on the amount you're bidding. It's based on sales history, your conversion. Amazon's looking at the total big picture. Where can we make the most money and satisfy the customer? And what's that balance? And it may be the guy that's bidding in the middle. He may be like the 10th biggest bidder and he's winning most of the time because he's actually converting. And when Amazon adds in their 15% plus the cost of the ad, happy customers, those customers also, I don't know if this plays a factor, but I'm suspicious that The type of buyer that clicks the ad based on their average sales volume actually might play a role as well. They're sophisticated enough to know that if Kevin's average order cart value is $82 and your average order value is $31, if I put this cart in there and I know that these other products are going to show, Kevin's going to add a couple other things to his cart or maybe there's something already in his cart or whatever it may be. I think there's a lot of things like that, but from your experience, How does this A9 actually work and what are the probably the three to five biggest factors? Is it bid? Is it inventory level? Is it past history? What are the biggest factors that are going to affect Is it your conversion rates? You know, I know Aaron showed, Aaron Cordovia showed a way to actually see how your conversion rates compares to the median conversion rate for the category. What are the five, three to five biggest things? How does A9 work on advertising and what are the three to five biggest things that affect PPC? Speaker 2: Yeah, very good question. Actually, I got so excited when you were talking about this. I was like, yes, yes, this is amazing. I love it. So I'll tell you, you were very right in saying Kevin that Where or when your ad will be shown does not only depend on BID. Basically, the formula is BID multiplied by ECTR. E stands for Estimated CTR. Okay, so E-C-T, so bid is basically defined on... Speaker 1: What is C-T-R? Speaker 2: Oh, sorry, yeah, so E-C-T... Speaker 1: Click-through rate, just to explain to people. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Click-through rate, okay. Speaker 2: It's click-through rate. I'm so sorry. Unknown Speaker: I think this... Speaker 2: Amazonians, I think they acronymize every single thing. Speaker 1: Yeah, they do. Speaker 2: And we forget that... Speaker 1: I understood you, but I just want to make sure everybody listening understands too. Okay, cool. Speaker 2: Oh, no, absolutely. Thank you for calling that out. So, when you are bidding on a specific keyword, whether or not your ad will show up, it depends on two parameters only. One is BID and the second is ECTR which is estimated click-through rate. BID depends on what you are bidding on that keyword. This estimated click-through rate, it depends on the parameters that you just talked about. It depends on the history. Let's say this is an old campaign, then it depends on the history of what is the current click-through rate of that specific keyword. It depends on what is the current click-through rate of your organic product. It depends on your delivery timelines. And actually, click-through rate depends on all of those things, right? Like delivery timelines, the product picture that you have, the product quality, reviews, ratings, all of those things. And sometimes even geography, by the way. So I think the easiest example is that you can't be a diaper company and bid on the keyword shoe. If you as a diaper company are bidding on the keyword shoe, your diaper ad will not show up there because you are not satisfying a very important criteria which is relevance or estimated ECTR. Your ECTR is going to be super low and Amazon doesn't want to do that, right? Why would it serve free impressions and not earn money? It would rather show the ad of another shoe company where it is actually going to earn money from a click. And actually also because of bad customer experience. If a customer is expecting shoes, why will it see diapers? So the relevance is the part that people completely forget to mention when it comes to whether or not my ad is going to be shown and where is it going to be shown. This relevance may depend on a lot of other factors that you specified and the list is endless. The AI actually determines which parameter is going to be higher but history is one of the highest. The history of that keyword and that ASIN that you are advertising, the relationship between them, that is one of the highest weighted parameter. Other parameters may include what is the browse node in which your product is mentioned or is housed. So that's the reason why sometimes you see Amazon changes the category or the browse node a lot of times. I don't know if you've heard this problem statement, right? So they will change it and then you will suddenly hear that a seller is saying, hey, my ad used to come on this keyword just three weeks back, but now I'm not getting any impressions. That's probably because either Amazon has changed your browse node or something else has happened, right? So those are the kind of things that impact your relevancy because as soon as your browse node changes, now Amazon doesn't... suddenly it starts feeling that you are probably not relevant or as relevant to that keyword as someone else. Speaker 1: So what's the best way to launch a new product with PPC? What would be your advice to someone that I've got a brand new product, it has no reviews, it has no ETCR, Amazon doesn't know what it is. How should I go about, should I start with like lower level keywords, like more long tail keywords that don't have as much search and work my way up? Should I start with a big thing? Should I bid high? Should I bid $10 a day and see what happens? You know, there's all these different theories. What's your recommendation for that? Speaker 2: I think some time ago I read somewhere on LinkedIn, do you know Jeff Cohen? I think he mentioned somewhere in one of his interviews that there's no PPC question that cannot be answered by it depends. And so it depends on what is your objective. If you are, you know, a Lenovo or a DudeWipes, right, you'll go all in. I mean, people do all sorts of things when they come to, you know, when it comes to a new launch, when it's a, well, DudeWipes would not have probably that those many SKUs, but you know, if you are a Lenovo or a Huggies or a Pampers, you would probably go all out for a new launch. You would bid high, you would bid the highest, actually. You would ensure that you are getting all top of search placements. You would ensure that you are on sponsored brands and you know the new product is tagged beautifully along with the existing bestsellers so that customer thinks it is an amazing, you know, an already existing, beautiful, high quality product. So you would do all those best practices that a big company would do. If you are not a Huggies or Pampers, that's when you need to start looking at how much budget do you need to or do you have to put in on a new launch versus the existing bestseller products because a new launch cannot really take away the share of sales from existing bestsellers that you have. For a smaller seller, definitely it has to be a small percentage of budget. Test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. So you test, you see whether you're gaining any steam, you make changes to your strategy, test again, learn from that or take feedback, and then that's when you scale up. Versus if you're a Lenovo or a Huggies, you just go at it in one go. Speaker 1: Based on all your experience with all your clients and working on Amazon, what do you see helps that ETCR the most? When someone comes to you like, oh, our A cost is this, we need to get this down. Well, you're not converting like you should be. And you make a recommendation, do this, this, and this to your listing. What would you recommend people do to get that ETCR up? Is it maybe you got to lower your price? Is it change your images? What do you see moves the needle the most? And helping you get the PPC rocking and rolling. Speaker 2: ECTR definitely depends on so people will click what they like, definitely depends on the image that you are that you have the main image. Now the main image has to be mobile optimized, because like, at this point, 60% of the sales or the browsing at least is happening on Mobile screens. We've actually seen cases where people are driving a lot of, you know, even though they're driving high bids, they have high impressions on specific keywords, their CTR is so low that they're not actually people are not clicking on those ads because the product looks this small and on mobile, and this happens more frequently than we can actually imagine. So ECTR will depend on how the product looks, the delivery timelines, people are expecting, you know, one day, two day shipping. So if your delivery timelines are higher than that, then the chances that they want to click on it and check the product out is very low. And also because, you know, now Amazon shows the delivery timelines on the main image itself. Pricing, you know, how competitive your pricing is versus the competitors. And I think this is one of the things about Amazon, right, why Amazon versus D2C. There's just such a big jungle with so many different competitors that you are competing against in terms of pricing and delivery timelines that, you know, you've got to stand out on both of those. And, of course, the relevancy of what you are targeting. How long tail is it? So of course, long tails are going to have much higher CTRs because you know, the customer is really looking for just that. Or if it's very broad, then of course, you're going to have lower CTRs. So the relevance, the delivery timelines, the images, One of the things that you can't control and you really have to fight with Amazon, I know a lot of sellers have to do that, is the browse node. So where is Amazon placing you in the browse node, which is their internal loading structure, which subcategory is it placing you in? It actually makes a lot of difference to the CTRs according to the keyword that you are targeting. So I think those would be the few that I would talk about. Speaker 1: So my product is ranking really well organically. It's in spot number one or number two organically. Should I stop running PPC? Speaker 2: I think it depends on what is your objective. Is your objective profitability? Then yes, you need to stop running PPC. Because you are cannibalizing your organic sales for sure. Is your objective sales or share of voice? Then by all means, if your objective is sales and share of voice, then you should be running five different ads for the same product, basically have different variations or something. You should have a sponsored product video also for that, same product and same keyword, you should have a sponsored brand, you should have a sponsored product, everything just plastered. Your share of voice is the market share that you will have for that keyword. Right. But if profitability is what you are chasing, then absolutely not. And I think, yeah, that's what we try to put in or, you know, give you some functionalities, you know, so that you can use those functionalities and avoid PPC cannibalization on Amazon. Speaker 1: When you take a look at someone's account or you see a new person, whether that's when you were at Amazon or now with what you guys are doing, and they turn over their account to you and you dive in for the first time, what are the things that raise your eyes? You're like, oh my God, holy cow. What are some of the things you're, I can't believe this. They're not paying attention to this or this is way out of control. What are some of the things that you see that are common among sellers who think they're doing everything right? Speaker 2: But I think from my experience at Amazon, when I used to look at vendor accounts or seller accounts, two, three things that come to my mind. One is as simple as negation. I mean, you know, it's like a filter that you can just put in and say, if my spend are greater than X or if my clicks are greater than Y, and if I'm still not getting sales on those keywords, It's a very simple activity. Why can't we just do that and negate keywords which are not performing? I almost feel bad when I'm saying this because it's such a simple activity that you can do. You can do it on Amazon. You can do it through a software. But I think this is one of the most heartbreaking things that I've seen. I do see inefficient spends where ACoS is high, very bad bidding strategies. But one of the most What is the word that I have to use? Most underused. Is that the right phrase? Speaker 1: Or least used? Underutilized or underused. Speaker 2: Yes. Most underutilized strategy that I have seen go wrong is the product skew that is being advertised. And sadly, no one talks about it. So what it means is that you are focusing on your advertising. with your bottom-selling or medium-selling ASINs. So you're spending more on those versus your highest-selling ASINs. Did I make sense or did I confuse you? Speaker 1: No, you're putting money in something that has less of a future runway, a future opportunity than you are. You're better to put it in a higher-selling ASIN. You may not be at the top yet. There may be a much more market share, much more sales that you can gain by focusing there versus on a middle one Where the gains are going to be smaller and incremental. I think that's what you're trying to say. Speaker 2: That's exactly what I'm saying. So when I was at Amazon, we used to do this thing, this activity. So we used to divide all of your catalog into three different bands. Band A is your top 50% by sales. Band B is your next 30% by sales. And Band C is your bottom 20% by sales. You know the 80-20 rule? So 80% of your sales, we used to actually break it down into two, which is top 50% and the next 30%. And then the bottom 20% remains as is. And so the expectation was that you should be spending more than 60% of your spends on band A ASINs. And then, you know, it should trickle down into band B and then very, very little spend on band C. What I see, sadly, is that people think that, you know, my best-selling ASINs, they're doing great. So now let me try and push the other, you know, the ones which are not doing well. But there's a reason why they're not doing well, right? It's very, very similar to what used to happen with me. I was an Instagram nano-influencer some time ago, Kevin, and I used to put cooking videos on Instagram. And sometimes just to gain followers, I used to run Instagram ads. I'm not very proud of it, but I used to do that. And I saw this, that when I used to promote a post which was organically doing great, Like the followers will just trickle in. They'll be like, you know, in one day, you know, just spending about, you know, less than $10, I would get, I don't know, some 700 followers. And then I would try to promote a post, you know, just to look good that, oh, you know what, I have these many likes on this specific post too. I would post or I would try to promote that, you know, not organically doing well kind of a post and that would not gain anything. Hardly, I would spend so much and it would hardly gain any likes or followers. That's the exact same thing that happens to Amazon sellers too, right? We have this in mind that, you know, everything should perform well. I had that in mind when I was, you know, doing my, all my posts should have at least 500 likes. But it's not like that, right? There will be some organically well-performing SKUs and that's what we need to focus on. And sadly, this is not discussed as much. It is probably not even shown as much, you know, I think Amazon should show it and we show it on Atom11. But I think it should be shown somewhere that, you know, this is how much you're spending on different kind of SKUs. So people actually pay, what is measured, it gets improved, right? So people can take proactive actions on it. Speaker 1: It should be, yeah, it should show what you're spending versus what the future opportunity is. I mean, I don't know if your tool does that, but it would be cool if there was like, okay, you're spending this much. Here's the future runway. Like you only have 2% market share. Based on our data, if you spent X amount more, you could have 7% market share. Is it worth it? Is it, you know, that would be some kind of cool kind of stuff. You mentioned earlier at the beginning, you want to talk about something about PPC that was in the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter or something. What was that? Speaker 2: Oh my god, that just made my day, Kevin. So we actually submitted, we wrote a, no, first we recorded a video and then we posted a blog post on our website about day parting. And this was the first time someone had actually used maths to show that, you know, how to do day parting the right way. It was, I think, an hour-long video and then a pretty long blog post. We had actually even shared chat GPT frameworks, or sorry, a prompt to use the hourly data that Amazon provides to find out how to set up day parting. And I think the day parting strategy that we posted, so many people have come back to us to ask about it. And this was a genuinely Mathematically proven, showing you your data, using your business data, as well as your seller central data, as well as your own hourly data, how to set up departing the right way. Because until now, what we hear is that people set up departing saying, I'm going to pause my ads at midnight and then start them in the morning. And we showed actual data to say, for example, this seller, midnight is the highest converting time. Why should he or she reduce their ads or stop their ads at midnight? So if you're not looking at Amazon marketing stream data, don't use day parting. I mean, that's better than just setting up a wrong day parting on your account. So I think that was just amazing. And after that, I think a lot of people came back and asked about this on how we set up. And so we are now kind of trying to improve on how we show the data on our day parting. So I want to really thank you for picking that up. Speaker 1: You're welcome. I'm always looking for good stuff to share that's out there. I was like, all right, this is a good one. I'm going to share this. And it's a good audience. I mean, I capture a lot of the top people in the space on the newsletter. If you're not on the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, it's BillionDollarSellers.com. It's totally free every Monday and Thursday. So I personally write it and lay it out, every issue. And so some of it, I actually write. And then some of it features, like, Your product or your stuff when I come across other people that are doing a good job and I feature them just so that make sure that people are aware because there's a lot of smart people in the space and you're one of them. So if people want to reach out and learn more about what you guys do or about you or follow you or your company or anything, what's the best way to do that? Speaker 2: The best way is to follow me on LinkedIn. I do a lot of content on LinkedIn. That is one. We do have a YouTube channel, but that's less interactive. You know, it's more like getting the information. Speaker 1: So how do they spell that? People are driving right now, they're working out, they're listening. How do they actually find you on LinkedIn? Speaker 2: Okay, so there's only one Neha Butcher in the world. You gotta spell my name out. It's N-E-H-A and then B-H-U-C-H-A-R. So as easy as that. And I am super responsive. I think you can ask people who I talk to. But yeah, I think those are the two easiest ways to reach me and always happy to answer questions. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, this has been fun. This has been great. Thanks for coming on and sharing some really cool stuff. So that's how you make everybody's favorite topic, PPC, fun to talk about. Great discussion there with Neha. It was really fun to speak with her and to get some cool tactics and some cool techniques on her thoughts on how you should be doing your PPC. Hopefully, this will help you in your business. We'll be back again next week with another great episode. Hopefully, you've already subscribed to my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. It comes out every Monday and Thursday. It's not a promotional email. It's actually full of actionable, cool stuff in the Amazon and e-commerce world. Before I leave you today, got the traditional words of wisdom. You have to let go of being good in order to be great. You have to let go of being good in order to be great. See you again next week. Have a great one. Unknown Speaker: Let's go.