#436 – The Math Behind PPC: Data-Driven Strategies for Amazon Success

#436 - The Math Behind PPC: Data-Driven Strategies for Amazon Success Kevin King: Welcome to episode 436 of the AM PM podcast. This week I'm speaking with Dream 100 member and BDSS Iceland speaker Mansour Norouzi. Mansour has an engineering background. He's a math geek. He's a massive content contributor to LinkedIn in our space, especially when it comes to PPC. So we talk about everything PPC with some very specific strategies on how you can optimize your campaigns, what you might be doing wrong, how you can take a different look at some of the reports. And everything in between. This is a great edition of the AM-PM Podcast. Make sure you listen all the way to the end. Enjoy and learn a lot. 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? Mansour Norouzi: Let's do this. Unknown Speaker: Here's your host, Kevin King. Thank you. Kevin King: Mr. Mansour Norouzi, welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. How are you hanging, man? Mansour Norouzi: I'm doing great. Thank you for having me and it's always fun and amazing to talk to you. Kevin King: You're up in Canada, is that right? Mansour Norouzi: Yes, I'm in Toronto. The weather is not as good as Austin. Kevin King: That's true. That's very true. I was up in Toronto last year in July, I guess it was. I was in Montreal and my buddy Norm Farrar lives up just north of Toronto. So I was up there visiting him. I've been up there in the winter and one time was enough. I'll go back to Austin where we don't have this white stuff. Mansour Norouzi: You can't go to the United States though, right? Kevin King: Because you're in I'm inviting you to come to something down here and you're like, I can't. But because you're originally from Iran, right? Mansour Norouzi: Yeah, I'm from Iran. Honestly, this is something stupid that has happened. I have a Canadian citizenship, but I never like talk about this, but in Iran, you have to go to military to get the passport. So it is mandatory to go to the military. If you don't go to military, you can't leave the country. So you got to go. And then the issue is that they randomly assigned you to different militaries in Iran. One of them is IRGC. And IRGC, Trump in 2019 put this in the terrorist list. And anyone, anyone who was there even conscript, we passing our mandatory service, We are now inadmissible to enter to Canada, to US. So many Canadian-Iranian have this issue we are hoping is going to get solved. Maybe now that Trump is back, Trump is the person who could solve this. Kevin King: So you could come before 2019? Yeah, from 2019. Yeah, I traveled a few times. Mansour Norouzi: I went to Boston, New York, and the first time I saw you in 20... In early 2019 in Austin for a mini-chat seminar or whatever it was, The Conversation 2019. I met you there for the first time in Austin. Kevin King: Yeah, that's right, that's right. So you were traveling there, but you can travel to Iceland because you're speaking at BDSS Iceland and coming up here in a little bit over a month. Mansour Norouzi: Yes, I travel to Iceland and I have great land, great topic for there. Kevin King: Awesome. When did you get involved with this whole Amazon deal? Mansour Norouzi: Well, I've got to go a bit back. Well, in 2015, I moved to Canada and I have a master in civil engineering, so my background is in engineering. Up till 2020, I was working as a construction manager, building custom fine homes, these luxury homes. And at some point I'm like, I'm thinking like, In the next five years, do I see myself doing this? I loved construction, but at the same time, I didn't love that location dependency. I loved being able to travel and don't worry about working. If I'm working, it's remote. I could work by construction. Of course, it's not like that. When you move from one city to another, you can't because you lose your connections, your networks, your people. Anyhow, I decided to start doing some researches and came up with Amazon I started selling on Amazon in mid-2018. I started learning mid-2018 from Helium 10 Freedom Ticket. Learned a lot from you. It was amazing. Pretty much everything I learned at the beginning was just from you, Kevin. I think I watched your videos for hours and hours with Freedom Ticket. So I appreciate that. I learned a lot from you. So I started my first brand. End of 2018, early 2019, I was selling a scratch-off match that if I go back, there is no way I would choose that product. But I still have it. So I started with that brand. I'm selling in Canada with that brand and it's kind of has become passive income generating around mid, low six figure, which is good. I'm pretty much passive. Then I went to these meetups, got to connect with some sellers. They were talking about Amazon Advertising and I said, yeah, I'm doing my own Amazon Advertising. Long story short, I did for a few of the clients or of people that now they are my clients. I went to Amazon Advertising. By the time it was easy. If you are good at math, Amazon Advertising 2019, every 2020, it was very easy because it was just math. So I was involved with that. I met Liron. Liron asked me to join the team at Incrementum Digital. I joined the team at the time. In 2020, we were, I would say, just 10 people. Now we are around 40, 50 people. I became director of advertising after a few months joining at Incrementum. Now I'm director and partner, and we have the scale, like we are managing around 60, 70 million per month for our clients. We have clients. Kevin King: 60 to 70 million in advertising or 60 million in free sales? Mansour Norouzi: In advertising spent. We are managing 60 to 70 million. In terms of revenue, we have clients from a couple of millions per year up to we had like some clients, we have some clients at 100, 200 million. One of them is actually vendor central. So if you have a very big range of the And also this year, in 2020, long story short there, 2022, I quit from my construction while I have just a single small brand that doesn't even generate me that much revenue. I'm like, I'm tired. I'm done with this. Let's move on from construction. So it works out. It worked out for me, fortunately. This year, I started also a supplement brand, which is pretty good. From end of January up to now, I got to around 500K in revenue, which I'm very happy for it. I'm trying to scale that. My focus is to try to scale that. That has been the story, but my everyday is pretty much advertising, learning about advertising, talking about advertising, and there are so many things to learn. Kevin King: You do a lot of experimenting because you're writing a whole lot on LinkedIn. And I'm putting out a lot of content. Is this stuff that you're doing on your client's account or do you use your like personal accounts, a supplement brand and a maps brand to do some experimenting on? Or where do you, where do you find all this stuff? Mansour Norouzi: I would say, actually, that's a great question because in our team, even our team or some people on LinkedIn, they're asking me, how you come up with all these new things or new features? How do you see them? Because they think I'm just doing advertising. But the reason is that since I'm a seller, every day, every morning, I just go to my seller account to see what's going on, if there's any update. I go pretty much, I go to every single dashboard menu to see what's going on. In terms of experiments, It is a combination of my own accounts and the clients that we work with. But I would say 70-80% is my own account. 30% is the clients that we are. Now sometimes, of course, our team members doing changes, they are working, we get ideas from there as well. Kevin King: And you're putting out on LinkedIn, you have a lot of followers. I mean, is that built up from Your days as an engineer, did that really start when you started publishing content for Amazon sellers? Mansour Norouzi: My days from engineering, I have 500 connections, 500 followers. Pretty much it is for Amazon advertising. It started from Then I posted about everything for Amazon Advertising and I was really bad. English, as I mentioned, is my second language. I'm not that good in writing, but over time, at least I improved. I learned how to write and become better. Still not great, but to become better, AI now helps as well. But no, most of them, pretty much all of them are from Amazon Advertising. Especially one thing that I guess accelerated that at a time was that Supa template. I don't know if you remember or not, the search query performance. I came up with a template that also accelerated my growth of the followers because I created this Free template posted there and many people liked it because search query performance is a great tool and it's very difficult to work with, but I came up with a very easy template to work with. Kevin King: Were you originally posting just for yourself or were you posting originally on behalf of like incrementum just as a marketing thing to try to help get clients? Because now you kind of mix it. A lot of times, sometimes you mention the agency you work for and other times you don't mention it at all. Just what was the, Or is it just a passion project? You just like sharing stuff? Mansour Norouzi: I love sharing. So if I want to say what is the main priority, what's the main reason? For me, generally, I love teaching and I love sharing. It gives me a joy every morning when I wake up and if I most of the time I put the time for it. So I'm like, okay, I've got to share something. It's just the joy that it's like my best part of the day for me. I just like to share with no expectation of Are we going to get clients from this or not? And I think that's the reason my audience are very engaging and I like that because I'm not selling anything. I'm just posting and giving value. That's one. But before even Incrementum, I started posting, I wasn't that active. But when I joined Incrementum, first of all, well, I have access to more accounts, more experiments. We are seeing different, broader range of clients. And also now I, when I started the supplement, again, it gives me more content, more ways to communicate with people. So I would say it's a combination of passion, And yeah, we are getting clients from it as well because they see our content. They see how our thought processes. They could trust us and they could reach out for audit. And eventually, if we are a good fit, they will work with us as well. So it's a marketing thing as well. Kevin King: You said that math and your engineering background is what fascinated you with PPC. So when you're doing it for your maps, what did Leron see in you when y'all met? They said, hey, because you were pretty new at that time. I mean, you hadn't been doing a lot of PPC. How did you convince him to say, look, let me come on and I can help you guys out? Mansour Norouzi: Great question. Before seeing, talking to Yaron from the period of, yeah, I had my maps and then I was in the meetups. I got to connect with some sellers and I remember my first client, this guy, he's my friend today. Actually, last week we went to Niagara Falls to meet up with a few of these people. He said, Mansour, I have an issue with Amazon advertising. Who manages your Amazon advertising? What are you doing? I'm like, I'm managing it. It's pretty good. Like, it's easy for me. My issue is not Amazon advertising. It's just a product that I got to fix. He said, okay, do you want to manage my ads? I'm like, sure. Kevin, you can't believe I always tell this. I charge him 200 per month to manage his account. I'm like, this is an experience. Let's see what happens. So from there, he was happy with me. He introduced me to another friend of his that he's selling right around like four or five million per month, per year now. And to this day, he's my client. I started managing an account. He's happy. We are friends. And to this day, I'm still managing his account. But during that period, I was posting on Facebook about advertising, stuff like that. That is where Liron saw my post. And actually, he was looking for someone to help creating content as well. And he said, OK, seems like you are good in Amazon advertising. Do you want to join us? We need an ad manager, also someone that could help me with the content. I was like, yeah, sure. And it was a time period that I quit my construction management and I needed something to kind of balance that expense that I had, which I joined Incrementum. And honestly, Leon is great to work with. I love him. This guy is easy to work with. And for us, we are kind of partner now as well. The reason I have been able to work with him is that I feel like we are working together. I'm not working for him. He's a great guy, good to work with. And Incrementum, what I love is that the people that we have in Incrementum, you know Kate. Kate is fun, fun to work with. Brian probably, the CFO and COO, you haven't met Brian. He's mostly behind the scenes. Brain behind all of our processes and the whole team is great. Actually, in January, 6 to 9 January, we're going to Bahamas to have our annual meeting with Yaron, Kate and Brian. Kevin King: So you took your first client, I guess, around 2019 when you were still selling. And then you joined Incrementum, you said 2022, is that right? Mansour Norouzi: No, in 2019, I started my brand, the map brand. And in 2020, right before COVID hit, a month before COVID hits, I quit my job. So by the time I just have the map, I don't have anything. From 2020 that, I don't know if it was mid-March or whatever, until August or July, I get some clients for advertising as well. So after I quit in 2020, mid-2020, I have the map and a few clients. In July 2020, I joined Incrementum. So, wow, four years. Kevin King: So what have you seen change since you started doing advertising in 2019? You said earlier it was really easy back then if you knew some math, but it's gotten a lot more complicated and a lot more options. What are some of the big changes that you've seen evolve? Because I remember when I started doing PPC in like 2015, 2016, It was extremely basic, and everybody was always saying, yeah, Google's so much more sophisticated than Amazon, but Amazon one day will catch up. And I think Amazon's pretty close to caught up, and they might even be ahead on some of the stuff that they can do compared to Google. So what have you seen? What are some of the biggest things that came that you're like, this is freaking badass, that you're really rocking it with right now? Mansour Norouzi: Something that is very new is, we have heard a lot, it's about Amazon Marketing Cloud, which takes everything to next level. So far, what we are able to do, Amazon, first of all, for anyone who doesn't know what Amazon Marketing Cloud is that, is Amazon just gives you, there is this data center that Amazon gives you every single event that you had interaction with the customer. If your ad got impression, if your ad got clicks, if the customer add to cart. So you see everything and you could query this Get these audiences, get insights from this, see the customer journey and stuff like that. So to this day, you are able to use that in DSP or just get insights, see what's happening. But now what they have released is that you can create audiences in Amazon Marketing Cloud. Kevin King: And you can create your own audience. So it's like a massive data pool. And you can go in there and type in your own kind of prompts or say, I only want, I don't want these specific parameters. And it'll go and like search and say, okay, there's this many people that are in that audience. Mansour Norouzi: For instance, I'll give you one example. People who in the last seven days, they viewed the product detail page of my product, the product detail page, but they haven't purchased. So, create audience from these people or people who saw specific, who saw they added my product to cart, they haven't purchased yet. So, you can think any way to create this audience. It is limitless. It's just your imagination and innovation that how you think about it and what is the best for your product. Kevin King: So, it's not just raising the prompts. There's five different choices. You can actually customize it to whatever you want to do. If I'm a supplement maker, I can go in there and say I only want people who have bought from me five or more times in the last six months and they bought at least two bottles at a time or I'm just making this up or whatever and it'll give me an audience based on that. Mansour Norouzi: It would give you an audience based on that. Amazon gives you some We're ready to use queries. You can use that to create the audiences, but they have a query that you do from scratch. You can't query everything. For some people, it might be difficult. And even getting access to this day for just sellers, it's not easy. We could, because we have the access, we can create that. Or there are some, I feel like, platforms that you can connect and they give you AMC data. I think in 2025... Kevin King: What do you have to have to get it right now? You have to be an agency or you have to have special know somebody? It's not so it's not open... Unknown Speaker: You have to have... Mansour Norouzi: Up to last month, you could only have access to AMC if you were running DSP. Now they have opened up to everyone in terms of if you are just running a sponsored product, sponsored ads, you could get access to Amazon Marketing Cloud. So in terms of directly for sellers, I think maybe if you have Amazon Rep, you can connect and create because it's not an easy task. You need a developer or someone that knows how to do that. So it's not very easy. Maybe you could hire if you get Amazon gives you that access. I'm not sure if the sellers, the house sellers directly could do that, to be honest. And I'm assuming Amazon in 2025 will make that easier to connect for all the sellers since opened up for sponsored ads. So going back, now what they have done, you create this AMC. Before we could use these audiences from AMC only on DSP. Amazon has sponsored product ads for now. When you go to the bid adjustments, we have for top of search, rest of search, product pages. Now you have one option on the top, one tab for audiences. Now you have increased your bid adjustments for any specific segments from audiences that you have created in AMC. So any AMC audience you created, you can see in your sponsor product campaigns. I'll give you one example. Let's say you are selling a dog vitamin. And you, from AMC, you create an audience ad. People who have viewed my product, but they haven't purchased in seven days. Then they are searching for dog vitamin, increase my bid for the dog vitamin keyword, 20%, 50%. Or this way, you could say that, Customers who are new to brand, they haven't purchased from me before. This is their first time purchasing from me. Or they haven't purchased anything from my brand. They are more valuable for you, right? You want to acquire them. Other people might know your branding. If those customers are searching for dog vitamins, increase my bid for 10%, 20%, 100% or whatever it is. In 2025, everyone telling me, oh, Amazon, With this, Amazon is just going to drive the bids higher. And my response is yes. If you apply this on top of the campaigns that you have now, You're going to drive your cost per click higher because you are adding multiplier on top of your existing campaigns, existing bids. But what you've got to do, you've got to rethink your structure. So you've got to create new campaigns, have a lower base bid for everything and start layering the audiences that how valuable they are, adding bid multiplier for those audiences. So you're not just adding 10%, 100% on top of your existing campaigns. Kevin King: So it's not just my data, right? I can target competitor stuff too, right? If I want to create an audience of people who, if I sell a slow feed dog bowl, And I want to target people who are buying certain brands of dog food because I know dogs wolf this kind of dog food down and it gives them indigestion. And I want to target them with my slow feed dog bowl. Can I do that with marketing? Mansour Norouzi: Not yet. So far, it is any interaction with your brand and product. It could be impression. It could be impression. And even here's the thing, even if they search, they didn't click, but Your ad is there. Your organic product is there. You're getting impression, right? You can still see that audiences, but you can tell in AMC that anyone who saw my competitor in DSP, you can create that. And hopefully at some point, Amazon says, okay, even if you create in DSP, because in DSP you can target any competitor, say Customers who purchase my competitors, they view, they are subscribed and saved to my competitor. In DSP you can create that. I'm hoping in the future Amazon brings those audiences also to sponsored ads. And just a side note, The advertising side is free, but to get the organic results, organic interaction, it is a paid feature, 200 per month. Kevin King: That's not bad to get that data. Mansour Norouzi: So this is just one complexity that you mentioned, how complex and how... Sophisticated it's getting. Kevin King: What's on the horizon? What are they working on that's got, like you've heard that's in beta or maybe you've seen or that you've heard that this is coming, that's got you excited? Mansour Norouzi: We just, in advertising console, we saw ads. You can create ads to the other platforms or like iHerb, for instance. I saw for one of our accounts, which they are selling supplement, you can create ad that shows in the website iHerbs as a sponsored ad. So it seems like they are, uh, working with different retailers to directly from advertising console, create ads. Kevin King: That works probably at networks that. These guys have different banner ad networks and stuff, and so they probably tie it into where you can actually advertise on those ad networks to bring it over to Amazon. Mansour Norouzi: Yes, exactly. For now, with DSP, you could show display ads to those websites, but directly from advertising console, and I don't know the format. Is it like sponsored product ads or is it a display? We don't know. That is one that just I saw today. Actually, it's very hot and it's confidential, but I'm sure it's not going to be confidential by the time this is coming up. The other thing is that I feel like 2025 will be about AI, about customization. So customization for the customers, customization for sellers and advertisers. What I mean by that is that first of all, this audience that you see, you are seeing that how we are customizing, right? From customer side, you have Rufus. Everything will be customized. The results that I am seeing with the results that you see will be different. Actually, this is happening right now. When I search for my product, not the product name, for the product, I always see my product on the top. And the reason is because I purchased it once and it shows me Organically, number one. As a seller, I love it because I'm like, okay, if a customer purchased from me, I would love every time when they are searching to see my product on the top. For the customers, probably it's going to be more customized, right? You purchased this product before you interacted with. So I think customization would be The theme of 2025 for Amazon. Kevin King: So are you doing any AI stuff now behind the scenes? You know, I know like some of the other agencies like Ritu and some of those that she's built all these like custom AI scripts and downloading the SQP reports and running them through all these like specialized, highly custom stuff. Is Incrementum, are you guys doing anything like that and using AI on your back end for your management? Mansour Norouzi: Yes, we have. We have tools for our team that they are using it. I have seen some of these AI tools that they are putting out there, but for me personally, the use cases that I see, I'm like, This is not still as good as we want. Kevin King: I agree with you. There's a lot of basic stuff that they're just playing off of the buzz around AI and it's really not even AI, it's just an algorithm that they're applying to it. Mansour Norouzi: Exactly. And the thing is that, this part is funny, to extend some type, sometimes I see they get to use AI to get that conclusion. I'm like, this is, I could just do this with a simple Google Sheet in a In a fraction of time that you are doing, but for you, since you want to use the AI because of the buzz, you are doing this. It is great to start using it, but to use cases that we want, we haven't seen. And there are some that you are using, not necessarily advertising site in the team and how our team processes in communication in the center. For instance, we have a bot that, uh, AI analyzes all our meetings with the clients for the transcript, the Slack messages, and we have this dashboard for our team leaders to understand, is this client happy or not happy? What is the sentiment of the client? For us, for customer retention, that's the best use case for AI because it goes over all the messages and says, here is a happy customer, here's unhappy customer. So we are alert that, okay, let's see what's going on. What's the issue to try to solve it? Kevin King: So what about AI though? A lot of agency owners out there are worried, or maybe not the agency owners, they're actually happy about this, but the employees that work for agencies are like, man, AI is just going to take my job. We got 70 people working for us right now, like you guys do. Some of this AI, especially with robotics, where it can do, you can have little robots, AI robots, and link them all together doing certain tasks. Like this is the SQP robot. Okay, go download, its job is download the SQB report, analyze it like this. Okay, then it passes it off to another robot that does, whatever the next step is. Another robot does, okay, adjust the bids. And another robot, you can have all these guys working together, doing the job that most of these humans were doing. So now you don't need 70 employees at Incrementum, you need 15. And those 15, four or five of them are in the weeds, getting their hands dirty, and the rest of them are monitoring the robots and tweaking them. Where do you, do you see something like that as the future? And where that, where that's going? Or are you like, no, We're always going to need, I know your employees, probably a bunch of them are listening right now. They're really sitting on the edge of their seat going, what is he going to say? But are you going to need these 70 employees as this technology evolves and becomes more and more sophisticated? Mansour Norouzi: That's a very tough question and I feel like how long we are talking about. Next year, no, it's not going to happen. In 10 years, probably many things will be AI. But the way I think about this is... Kevin King: I think it'll be sooner than 10 years. Mansour Norouzi: Yeah, I think so. I think so. It will be much sooner the speed that it's moving. But the way I think about this is that anything that needs strategy and strategic thinking, these tools are going to help you to speed up the process. Maybe they won't be able to replace you completely, but they are going to help you to do the tasks you are doing faster and with more insights. For instance, all these AI image generation, AI image editing, they're not going to replace the people who are doing this. They are just going to help them to be better, to do the job faster. Kevin King: In that video example, if I use something like SOAR or one of these other Chinese tools or PIXA 2.0 or one of these other tools that are out there, and I agree, someone behind the scenes has to prompt it and tell it what to do, so they need to have a clue. Well, you've got 70 people that know how to do that or a bunch of people in your company that know how to do that. So they go in there and they tell it what to do and then it goes and does it and maybe it's not good enough and they tweak it. And where it saves the time is they can knock this out and what used to take them a week to do, now they can do it in a day. So that means the other four days, they're either twiddling their thumbs or your agency has grown so much where you've gotten so many more clients because you can do that. But if you haven't, then you don't need as many people because They can do in one day what used to take five or in one day what used to take five people do in a week. So then four people lose their job because that one person could be more efficient. And it still takes a human. I agree with you a hundred percent. It still takes that human. To give it that thought and that strategy, but it takes less humans. These robots will work 24-7. They don't need to take a nap. They don't need to go to the movies. They don't need to spend time with their family. So they'll keep working over the weekend as well. So I agree with you. The humans still need to be there and the efficiency will go way up. But there's still a gap there. Sora, for example, you don't have the video editor anymore that's having to sit there and do everything. You have to go out. I just saw a piece that said that they just shot a commercial and they used some of these generative AI tools to do a lot of backgrounds because they need to show this car in different scenes like on the ice and on the dirt and in the desert and whatever. And they were able to do it with AI and it saved them Two weeks of shooting, production time and having to go to all these different locations and all this different expense and it looks just as good as if they were there. The agency industry is an industry that's going to be affected I think across the board, not just PPC agencies, but any kind of agency out there. You look at call centers right now. Call centers in Philippines, 200 people answering the phone to do customer service. It's down to 10 people in a lot of cases and some of these guys and it's AI doing it. Back right before Christmas, ChatGPT introduced where you could dial 800 number and actually call in and just talk to... Mansour Norouzi: Or chat in WhatsApp. Kevin King: Yeah, chat in WhatsApp. It's getting to that point. And then the AI can do a lot of bid optimization. You have certain rules and it could study the SQPs. It could study all these other reports and go, this is what's been happening for the last four years during the month of March. When is Easter? Easter is in April this year. What happened in March last year? We need to move that forward. It can make all these adjustments based on your product. I don't know. I think there are big changes coming. Mansour Norouzi: I 100% agree with you. As you mentioned, it's going to happen eventually. It is mind-blowing with what's happening and I guess in 2025, let's see if I'm going to be even more, is that you have these agents that you talked about, you have a manager agent that manages our This specific task-oriented agents, like you mentioned, there's an agent for SQP. Go download SQP and analyze it this way. Bring it back to me, which I'm an agent manager. Bring it back to me. This agent manager is going to give this information to the other one that, okay, you are doing advertising. When you are optimizing bid, consider that this market share from SQP, consider that what's happening, optimize based on that. 100% it's going to happen, but it's very difficult. I don't know when this will happen. I feel like it is very soon and it is inevitable. Yeah, it's going to happen for many people. Even me, maybe next time I'm not here, you're talking with agent man. I will be replaced as well. Kevin King: Yeah. I mean, I always say with like agencies, people always ask me all the time, like, Kevin, who's a good agency? I want a job at my PPC. And I'm like, man, there's a lot of good companies out there, but I can't recommend you somebody. I can recommend you a person. At every agency, and I'm sure this is probably the case at yours, you have people of different levels, different skill sets. I'm sure they're all good people, but some of them are just a little bit better than the rest. It all depends on who you get right now as your agency, but with AI, you can basically create that perfect person. Everybody gets the bot that's the hero. Instead of when you get assigned an account manager, maybe you're getting the person that just started three months ago and still kind of They're good. They're smart person, but they're still learning a little bit. So they're going to make it make some goose or versus the person like you that's been doing it five years. You're like, no, no, you need to be doing this, this, this and this. Don't do that. Don't do that. This is going to waste money. I have all the experience that makes a huge difference. Now, when you when people are out there booking agencies, I always hear people bouncing from agency to agency like, oh, that one's no good. And then the next person say, no, that that was a really good agency. The next person like, no, they suck. And the next person, no, they're freaking awesome. They blew up my sales. So it's all dependent there. And I think some of the AI stuff is going to help with that. But what do you guys do at Incrementum now to actually, when someone comes in, do they go through some sort of special training program? Do you have like an internal PPC training program? Are they an intern for a while sitting there over the shoulder of somebody else kind of watching and learning? Or do you only hire people that have experience? Or in some cases, that's good. Other cases, you want someone that's just good at math and good at analytical thinking. You train them up because they're not corrupted by someone else's thoughts or system. How do you guys approach that at Incrementum? Mansour Norouzi: We have very lengthy interviews. We don't settle for less. There are, I would say maybe from 50 people that we interview, one or two might be eligible for us. And there are, honestly, there are so many people writing a resume. We have like nine years of experience in PPC. I'm like, nine years? Nine years is a long time. Like we didn't even have nine years for advertising. But anyway, when we jump on a call to talk, we realize that, okay, they don't know anything about that. But yeah, apart from that, that actually we use AI to filter some of these people and the people that they go, there are different layers on how we interview. First, our team leaders interview them. If it is good, then it goes back to me. I am the last person to interview and say, okay, this person is good or not. But when they get in, yes, we have the whole training in place. They have to watch that. And usually it doesn't matter if they are a manager or they are analysts. They start as an analyst working with a manager to get to know our processes, what we are doing, how we are working, all the details. And then they shadow our managers. They are managers. They shadow our managers for one, two months until we are very positive that they could handle. They are good enough to handle the accounts. And after that, they are getting accounts. In terms of the clients, the way we look at it is that I wanted to say that we are very kind of difficult in terms of who we are hiring. And initially, it was difficult to get people a few years ago, to find people to interview. But nowadays, people know us, they just go to our website and they apply for the job. In terms of the clients, then we get clients. First of all, we don't hire everyone. We have an audit and we go over audit. If there is nothing we could do, anything going on, we're like, there's nothing we could do. We are not going to hire you because just to get you as a client. If your agency or you are doing a good job, why would you join us? It has happened. We didn't get the client because everything was good in the account. And we said, okay, we can improve your account. Then after that, it depends on how complex, based on the complexity of the account, spend of the accounts, number of ASINs, we decide who to assign from our managers that we have. And our managers have analysts working with them. So we have manager, maybe one. In some cases, we have two, three analysts working with one manager because of the amount of work that that client needs. Kevin King: Do you guys build in anything if one of your clients that you've helped Sales are company, maybe someone I come to you and right now I'm doing a million dollars a year. And because of Incrementum, you guys over the last, say this was three years ago, over the last three years, now I'm at 5 million a year. And a lot of that's because you guys really dialed in my advertising and helped me, showed me how to dial it in. Now I just sold my company for 5 million bucks. Do you guys do anything where you get a little piece of helping them grow or is it just like a pat on the back and they send you a bottle of champagne or they say, thank you very much. That was nice. We're not paying our last bill. Talk to the new person. What do they do? Mansour Norouzi: We had examples of a few clients selling or we had examples of clients weren't on Amazon. Now they are with us and they are selling 20, 30 million per year on Amazon. And I would tell Kevin, sometimes people take credit and talk post about this. We did this for this brand and it was all of us. I'm like, no, that's not always advertising. The product, the brand should be good. In this term, in regards to this brand that they are at 30 million, they are a good clothing brand that they are selling on their store, but they weren't on Amazon. They came in, they have a great product, and now we have that strategy and approach to help them. Since they have a good product, we could do that. They have some brand searches as well. In terms of what we are getting from them, It's just them being happy. I would say that's it. Kevin King: A lot of times when you take on a new client, you have to do more than just manage their PPC, right? I know Liron back when he was partners with a couple other guys on a podcast. He was doing a podcast with them. They had a software tool. I did all kinds of fancy image stuff. I don't know if that's still around or not, but a lot of times when a client comes to you and they're like, oh, my tacos are off or this last agency screwed everything up. Do other things besides just managing PPC? Do you go into the listing and like, look, you need to change all these photos. You need to change the way the copy is. You're missing this and this and this. Do you help them with that process or just advise them or do you have a service that actually will do that for them or how does that work? Mansour Norouzi: Yes, well, actually, that's a great point. When they come on board, we do audit. Before coming on board, we do an audit and our audit, I would say, I don't know if you have seen our audit or not, I would say that it's one of the most comprehensive audits you would see from any agency. Because we are not just doing audit for the advertising, we do audit for the listing, A-plus content, anything you mentioned. Here is your advertising issues that you need to figure out. And here's your listing, your listing, your images showing this, but look at the competitor, we think you have to do, you could do this. Of course, we don't do that in audit for all the ASINs. We are doing for top hero products. That's the first step. Then they get on board. So we have different services, Amazon Advertising, We have seller operation. We have brand management. Amazon Advertising, we are in charge of just managing advertising. For the seller operation, it's like the brands come to us. They don't need brand management, but they need, let's say they want to change their brand name or there is some issue with any product. They come to us, they open a ticket and our team follows up and solves that issue. With brand management, now we manage everything, the listing, all the operation. But apart from that, we also do creatives, right? We do creative for our clients and we have a good team for that. So yes, we do that for them. But if they do Amazon advertising for us, for them, it's not like, okay, we are not looking at your SEO. We are not checking your images. Our managers actually are good in recommending, okay, You're title missing these keywords. You've got to add this to be able to rank better to do this. Your images are doing this. You don't have brand history. You could add virtual bundle here or there are so many things that they give recommendations and sometimes brands do that, sometimes they don't do that. And if they want our help, yes, we have our creative team, SEO team that could implement them. Kevin King: What do you see with a new, what's a common theme that you see with a lot of people that They're doing wrong when it comes to PPC. When you're doing these audits, because I could come to you and have you do an audit and get all your advice and just go implement it myself without hiring you. Because if you're going to tell me, oh, you need to change your picture to this or you're missing this keyword, I was like, oh, thank you so much for that free advice. But what are you seeing common when you're doing these audits? What are some big mistakes that just over and over and over these sellers are making? Mansour Norouzi: We talked about the complexity of Amazon advertising, but when we want to have a good Amazon PPC, actually, I would say it's 80-20% rule. 20% that brings to 80% of the results is the foundation and the basics. What are those foundations and basics? One is that have a good campaign structure. What do we mean by good campaign structure? In one campaign, try to have one ad group and try to have one listing. I'm not talking about You could have the same variation under the same ad group, but have one campaign, one ad group, one listing. And the reason behind this is that in the ad group level, we don't have any control over the budget. So if you have three ad groups, one is performing good, you can move the budget. One is because of budget control. The second also is that Amazon gives some credit in terms of what performance of campaign is. So anyway, it's a structure. The second is very simple. The naming. Make sure the naming is good so you know what's the purpose of the campaign. Third, I would say is that we see They are neglecting negation. It is very simple. I'm not a big fan of negating related keywords. I'm more of a fan for optimization until you get to a good performance. But sometimes there are keywords that when you go to the search term, there are tens, not hundreds, depends on the account. But there are many of these search terms that are not related But they are not being negated. So that's another big mistake we see more and more. The other thing is that optimization. Optimization in reality, bid optimization is not difficult. For me, it's very straightforward, very easy. But when you go to account, sometimes, especially if you see this in big accounts, or I don't know how they are managing it. When you sort by the ACoS, you see 200% ACoS for a talent, you haven't spent. Honestly, one happened that I was just blown away. There was this term, over 30 days, spend 10,000, Kevin, with one click, with one order. 10,000 spent with one order. I'm like, is anyone managing this account? What the hell is going on? And the issue was that their spend is very high. I feel like it was 300, 400, I don't know. But the number was very substantial. This is the worst I have seen. No one is looking at this at all. So there's an issue there. Yeah, I would say campaign structure, bid optimization, negation, and the name. These are Pretty much these four or five are, if you do this, you're good. You could grow the account. Kevin King: Can you talk about what your philosophy is on how tacos should change over time from launch? Maybe tacos is higher to stability. Tacos is lower and there's not one, or maybe you believe there is, but I don't believe there's one perfect number for tacos. People are always like, what should my tacos be at? There's a lot of dependencies on that, but can you talk about how to manage that from Maybe launch where it's higher to getting it stable over time. Mansour Norouzi: The way I think about the launch is there are three phases of course. The launch phase. For me, the launch phase usually is a month, a month and a half if you do everything correct, if you plan everything, if you have enough budget and know your goal. Because many times happens that I see brands or sellers, they launch a product, they don't have anything in mind. They're like, okay, we're going to launch this product. Okay, so what's your goal for the first month? Because Dan, you better say, I want to sell 1,000 units in a month or I want to sell 3,000. You have to have a number for us to be able to reverse engineer and say, okay, this is the budget we have to start at the beginning first week, second week. So in terms of tacos, For the initial launch, I don't think there is any tacos. The only thing I would look at is the conversion rate. You could start with 300 tacos. You could start with 70% tacos, depending on how compatible that market is. If you are launching in a supplement category, Your cost per click could start with $8 and let's say your product is $25, 10% conversion rate. I'm getting to the fact that initially, since the cost per click is high, your tacos could be drastically high, maybe $200, $300. So for the initial launch, I'm not looking at tacos. What I'm looking is to the conversion rate because it's going to help you rank organically for the keyword. So you have to be very Be aware of what keywords you are going to rank for. You don't want to go after everything because my approach is that go after every related search term if you have unlimited budget because you could push them for rank. If you don't, which most brands, they don't on limited budget, you have X amount of budget, you got to plan and say, okay, that's dog vitamin, for instance, has thousands of sales per day. I'm not going to generate that to improve my organic ranking. Why I go down the funnel for the medium search volume, long search content on Keywords is that with PPC at the beginning, we are just generating PPC. Let's say we are not bringing any external traffic. With PPC, we are just generating sales and we are able to rank our products. So that keyword selection is very important. Initially, I would say there is no tacos for me. I don't even look at tacos, just making sure our conversion rate is high above the average conversion rate. From there it starts. My goal would be that, let's say Let's say you start with 100%. Up to end of the month when you're ranking, that 100% starts going down. And the reason is that initially it's 100% or more because all of your sales coming from advertising. When you start ranking, the tacos goes down because now you are getting a balance of organic and advertising. From second month to third, fourth, yeah, from second month up to two, three months, I will try to be stable around 30%, which to your point, depends totally to the brand, to the product and what that initial results are. The number is going to be difficult, but I would say usually around 30% I have seen in average, not for all of them. And after two months from that, Meaning from zero, after three months, now if everything is stable, I'm like, okay, let's get down to, it could be anywhere from 10 to 20% based on, there you are again. Like for a supplement, usually they aim for 20%. There are still categories that I see 10%, vendor centralized, the lowest tacos, which is like four or 5%. So depending on your category and also what you are comfortable with, let's say category is, Everyone is aiming for 20% tacos, but your profit margin is 15%. You don't want to lose money, so you would say, okay, guys, I want 10% tacos. Everything becomes subjective to what your goal is and also what their category is. Kevin King: What about the number of keywords? I see people stuffing keywords into their campaigns. You can go up to 1,000. What's your philosophy on how that should be broken out? You said earlier campaign structures are common. I think that's all messed up when you're doing audits of accounts. What's the ideal structure and how many keywords in each one? Mansour Norouzi: We see both sides of this that we don't agree with. One side is going single keyword campaign for all the keywords. The other side is just stuffing the keywords in one campaign. So, what we are doing is that for very important keywords, high search volume keywords, we do single keyword campaigns. And as it goes to medium and long tail keywords, we could have four or five, but we never have more than 15 keywords in a campaign because more than 15 keywords. And the reason for me is that Amazon is not going to give you impression for all of them. From experience, I have learned that Amazon is rotating which ones to get impression each day. If you look long term, because some people say, look, I'm looking at one year, all of them getting impression. What do you say? No. It's not true that Amazon is not going to get impression. I'm saying yes, long run, all of them get impression clicks. Then you look at short term, short term, you see from that hundred, 20 of them just got clicks or impressions. So that is why Amazon also rotating. Plus if there's a keyboard with high search volume, it's going to take the whole budget, right? You are not going to get benefits of showing up for those long tail keywords that you might be generating. So 15 is the highest that I would go with. Kevin King: So with these 15, how are those grouped? Are they grouped by root? Are they grouped by intent? Are they grouped by search volume? Are they grouped by how important they are to you as a seller? What's the criteria of how you group them? Mansour Norouzi: So there are different layers for me. Search volume is on the top and the intent, right? High relative, I don't want to mix the high relative keywords with low intent, low related keywords for a product. So always, and especially in the launch, in the launch, usually because of the budget again, for me, prioritization is high, highly related keywords that they cover all the root keywords. In terms of, so for me, search volume and intent is very important, these two. For the roots, I see people talk about it, but I haven't seen any results for, I haven't seen any proof that Grouping with Root helps because I have done many launch for my own product. I don't do with Root keywords. I have started re-ranking campaigns without having any Root keywords and it works. So no, I don't believe that doing that Root grouping is doing any benefit from my experience. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, Mansour, we could keep geeking out here on a bunch of stuff for a while, but we're already at an hour. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Iceland at BDSS in April. That's going to be awesome stuff. I know you've got something juicy to share that's going to be next level, but that's going to be awesome. Come and get an audit or reach out to, maybe follow you. How do they follow you on LinkedIn and how do they reach out to Incrementum? What's the best way to get in touch? Mansour Norouzi: So you could, I'm active always on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. And even on my page on LinkedIn, if you go there, there's a link to do an audit. Follow Incrementum Digital, Leron on LinkedIn. And also you could go directly to incrementumdigital.com. We have blog posters. Kevin King: For people that are maybe not quite understanding I'm Shivali Patel. But those of you listening online, it's Incrementum. Incrementum. So, awesome. Incrementum Digital. And sign up for their newsletter, too. Every, I think it's Thursday night or Friday. Towards the end of the week, I always get a newsletter. You and Leron and Katie and somebody else standing there. Against the wall, and then you have all the latest, the weekly... Mansour Norouzi: That's Kate's idea for sure. Kevin King: And then you have, you know, the weekly takes from each of you and the latest stuff, so that's worth getting too. But yeah, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing, man. Mansour Norouzi: I appreciate it. And can't wait to see you in Iceland. And thank you for having me. Kevin King: From time to time, I also feature some of Manzor's content in the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. So if you're not a subscriber, Make sure you subscribe, BillionDollarSellers.com. He says it's one of the only newsletters out there that he constantly reads. Even if he gets busy, he keeps them to the side and keeps that little dot unread so that he can make sure he doesn't forget to get to them. And BillionDollarSellers.com, every Monday and Thursday, a brand new edition. Speaking of brand new editions, we'll be back next week with another brand new AM-PM Podcast with the amazing and lovely Shivali Patel from Helium 10. We're going to talk about her journey and what she's up to these days. And how she's crushing it with some of her brands and what's up on the Helium 10 side of things too is going to be really, really good. And before we go, I've got some words of wisdom for you. You're only behind if you look back at here and you're still the same person. You're only behind if you look back a year and you're still the same person. Take care and see you next week.