#479 - Taking Back Control of Your Amazon Advertising

How to use Amazon's new sponsored product video ads. The best practices for advertising campaign structure and bidding rules. How to take back control of your own advertising after outsourcing it. This and more on today's episode. Hello everybody and welcome to the AMM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton and I'll be your host. And this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, Tik Tok Shop, and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM. Hence the name of the show. Get it? AM PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, last week I actually took 4 days off on a family vacation to Tahiti and disconnected from everything. But while I was there snorkeling with the sharks, I was still making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Guys, there there is nothing wrong with using an agency for your advertising. We have we're inviting somebody who runs one of the best advertising agencies out there, but what we have found is a lot of people don't like the lack of control, you know, and they're using agencies maybe before they should. Um, in my opinion, agencies are great when you're needing to scale. You know, like maybe you're a one or two person team and you need to focus on other aspects of your business and you've been doing your own advertising for a while. You know what's good and bad. You just like, hey, I just don't have the bandwidth. I don't want to hire. Absolutely, you need to hire an agency uh who who can run things. But what we have found is a lot of people out there that as newer sellers even before even having a full grasp or having full control over what Amazon advertising is, they're going out and outsourcing these things to agencies and then they can't even tell, hey, what's good and what's bad or like are they doing a good job? Are they doing a bad job or I'm not I don't even understand what's going on. What are they doing? You know, so we wanted to do a series here at Helium 10 where we can show you how to take control of your own advertising, whether you were just doing it with in rudimentary spreadsheets or you were outsourcing it um to a consultant or to an agency and you had no idea what was going on. That was the case of Carrie, you know, here at Helium 10 who has from the very early days been always outsourcing her advertising and and she didn't know too much. You know, she knew the basics about, you know, hey, what is a cost and what is tacos? But but she didn't know the ins and outs. And so we wanted to take somebody from an agency who could teach Carrie how to take control of her advertising uh advertising and go from having it outsourced to having it optimized because regardless this should be something you should be thinking about for but for Carrie this was especially um useful because the agency she was using kind of like ruined her advertising. So she was like I need to take control. So we are going to talk today about that. But let's go ahead and bring on our guests today. First, uh Carrie and Destiny, welcome. How's it going, guys? >> Hello. Good. >> All right. Well, we're we're here to um to talk about this this series you guys had recorded over like months, you know, because this is not something, guys, taking control of your advertising is not something that happens overnight or even after a couple days. Oh, I know everything I need to know about advertising. So, this is a process where Carrie was learning over months. Now, now Destiny, my my first question is to you, like when you first got into Carrie and her father's account and and kind of like, you know, took took a look around. Was there anything that just jumped out like, oh my goodness, what what was happening over here or what was going on? Do you remember anything? >> Yeah. Well, I I want to kind of start by calling out one of the comments you had made earlier is, you know, I do own an agency and I wanted to participate in this series because as an agency, our job is to act in the best interests of the brands we manage, which means that we turn away maybe around 70 80% of brands that actually reach out to us for for a very specific reason. And I think this was a bit of Carrie struggle in that your ads require a lot of context in order to be managed well. And that's why it's important for a brand owner to step in. There's certain scenarios that may work for one brand but not for another brand. And your agency needs to have the time to learn those nuances in that context. As a brand owner, that is what you are paying for really is time. So whether you have that time yourself or your agency has the time. I called this out specifically because something that a lot of brands see in the space and that Carrie and I got a lot of feedback from on the Q&As's is their agency would outsource everything to a a VA or their agency would never hop on calls with them and actually listen to the problems. You know, Carrie's ads weren't just completely terrible, but what was happening is the agency that I was managing wasn't, you know, understanding the context of what Carrie was trying to accomplish. Carrie had a very specific competitor come in start flooding the market with crazy ad spend, which meant that her ads that had historically worked were falling further and further down the page because the competitors were spending so much. Their CPCs were so high, right? So, I think that's really important to open up with. There wasn't anything just like blatantly we need to fix this. This is absolutely terrible. There were definite key call outs missing sponsored brands, sponsored brands video, no strategic strategy around long-term growth. But the biggest miss was the people that were managing her ads did not understand her objectives as a brand. And that's what you're really paying for. And that's, you know, why some agencies can be a little bit more expensive because you're actually paying for the talent to understand your business as well as you do, which I think is difficult to find in our space. And I'll stop there. Anything to add to that, Carrie? >> Yeah. Um, I remember also like and I think this is an important thing to just even if you have an agency to understand how to find things within the console or just you know using Helium 10 to kind of man watch because there were some really um profitable campaigns that were just shut off for no reason. Like I think one had about 40,000 in sales, really low a cost, was doing really well and it was just turned off for some reason. Um then there was also a lot of creative that was mismatched. So like um you know just not matching with the keywords. They they pretty much put the wrong products in for the videos for the wrong products. So there were a lot of these things that were just like not attentive attention to detail, but if you're watching those things, you'd be able to see that. Um and then Destiny pointed out one I think that was the VCPM via is it VCPM? BMP >> VCPM campaigns. Yes. >> Yeah. So, basically, these campaigns looked like they're doing super well, but it it wasn't actually what it seemed because it's based on um it's kind of like a defensive strategy where you put these these ads kind of show up u below in a display format under your buy box. And so, anytime somebody goes onto your listing and scrolls down, it's actually considered kind of like a view or an impression. And so, um, you're thinking, okay, you know, you're getting all this, uh, great re, uh, return for these ads, but it it was actually really not, um, it's good for like, you know, a it's good as a strategy to, you know, have an ad there to kind of do defense, but it was not set up properly in the way that would be beneficial for our brand. So, there were a lot of things, right? >> I have a comment here, Bradley. I wish you would have quizzed Carrie or given Carrie a quiz on these topics because the first call we hopped on, Carrie was like, I don't understand PPC and I don't know if I ever will. And now she's hopping on a live talking about UCPM campaigns, which is huge, I think, for her and for anyone listening as a brand owner. It's it does take time. It took a lot of time and coaching to learn everything, but it's possible. And now that she has this foundation of education and knowing how to navigate, you know, software on her own, it's pretty convenient because if she decides to outsource in the future again, she knows how to keep someone in check, she knows how to ask the right questions and that's a really big opportunity for her to again win her time back if needed in the future. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and guys, you know, we're we're talking in Car's context of she was using an agency and moved to to to do it on her own. This applies to other kind of like formats of just people who don't understand their advertising like like obviously Helium 10 has like an AI advertising, but I would not suggest you, hey, you don't know anything about advertising, just go ahead and, you know, flip it on and just, you know, set it and forget it. You know, like this applies to many different aspects where we're just going through the motions. Somebody mentioned, you know, just just trying to use the suggestions from seller central and and and the education there and that didn't work. So, if you don't understand the fundamentals of advertising, guys. >> Yeah, >> that's where you have to start. And and that was the, you know, kind of like the core here. And and that was always an inside joke here with Car. I'm like, Carrie, I you don't even know how to use our Helium 10 ads. So for for years I like well I couldn't teach her Helium 10 ads without her understanding advertising in the first place which she never you know had to do because she would always outsource it which again is fine under uh some circumstances. And >> that's something that I that was something that I think we did a great job of the series as well is we shared things live. It's really easy to listen to a guru or one of us and you know maybe try to apply it. What Carrie and I did was actually walk through accounts live and I would ask her, "Is this search term important for the well-being of your business?" And she would say, "Yes." I'm like, "Okay, the A cost isn't great, but we don't want to pause it. It's an important search term for us. What would you like to do? Should we increase the bid and give us, you know, better impressions at the top of the page, or should we decrease the bid because we want to focus more on profitability?" That context and having the brand owner speak to that. One of the things that Carrie and I talked about is they had just purchased a really large round of inventory. That's very strenuous on your cash flow. So, we made sure to build that into the decisions we were making. So, for anyone listening, we walk through that live. We talked about the context of when to increase your bid or lower to bid, when to create campaigns solely focused on BSR and organic rank versus when to pull back and focus on profitability because you need a lot of inventory to purchase. And that that context is what makes or break breaks PPC success in my opinion. >> Um rules is something that when somebody goes to software um becomes a little bit easier. I mean rules guys when we're talking about bidding rules or or keyword harvesting rules. This is not something that only exists in in software like like if you're doing spreadsheets you have your own set of rules like like maybe you make a formula or or you just have a set of rules that you you look for. If you're just using seller central, you actually have rules because you look for certain aspects like, hey, where is a cost higher? Where is impressions lower? Where's my rorowaz this or that? >> Advertising is about rules. Now, now the one thing that Helium 10 ads uh rules-based advertising makes things easier is implementing those rules. So, I'm just wondering what were some of the the things that you set that you helped Carrie set up as far as um if it was bidding rules or or you know, harvesting rules or negative uh targeting rules. Um, how did that process work with her? >> One of the most important things we did from the very beginning was talk about bid management. Bid management is one of the probably the biggest difficulties to overcome because it's not just math. Everyone wishes it was just algorithmic math. But how many people listening in have lowered their bids, logged into seller central the next week, and realize that their sales have decreased 20% because they're no longer getting impressions because their bids are too low. A lot of people. So, it's a fine line between raising your bids and getting good ad placements and lowering your bids to focus on profitability. So, that was one of the first things Carrie and I dove into was how to create campaigns for different objectives and then how to use the bid rules and even further the bid templates that we created to achieve different objectives. So, within Helium 10 ads, we we focus on a few different areas that we realized were coming up repetitively. One of them is just, you know, maximizing sales and impressions. That's a bid template. And the reason we focused on that is there were a few products Carrie had that had decreased in their organic rank because again this competitor came in and just flooded the market and was spending so much that their rank increased. When someone else rank increases, your rank has to go down. That's how a shelf works, right? So we created a few campaigns and then put bid templates that were focused on maximizing sales and impressions. On the flip side, she had a lot of campaigns where the only objective was I need to hit, you know, a 20% a cost. So, when it's really simple and your only goal is an a cost target and not BSR or impressions or selling through inventory or launching new products, the math's a lot easier. So, there we used a bid template that allowed us to just set an objective for our a cost and rorowaz and do all of the math in the back end. That was kind of our key focus. If we were launching a product, we also have a bid template for that. But thankfully, we didn't do that as well headed into Q4. That would have been a lot of chaos. But the bid management, my opinion, is the most difficult part because if you're going to do it by hand, you need to do it multiple times a week. It's going to take quite a few hours to do the math for all 700 search terms you had. But at the end of the day, you can use rules and templates that are going to take all all the heavy lifting off your plate, and you can still be a little bit more flexible with them than maybe using a blackbox software. Carrie, what what what what was interesting for you to learn about the different rules uh for advertising that um you know what was I mean I guess a lot of this was was all new to to you but but what especially um you know kind of like you're like oh man I can't imagine having to do this on my own. >> Uh well I just think I think one of the things is like you do have to kind of play with them a little bit. Um I think I kind of set a an a cost at first for a lot of things and then my tacos kind of went out of control. So there's kind of like a balance when you're first figuring it out. I think that's the biggest thing. But also, yeah, you know, you get these kind of suggestions instead of having to go individually and do each one that would take forever and ever. But I think something I just want to say is it does take a little bit of time to learn the bid strategies or bid bid optimization that's good for your business. So, >> let me talk about uh on the rules. I'm just wondering about the cadence. So, Carrie, ju just to give people a level set about how much are you spending on advertising per month like to Amazon? What? Like what are you paying to Amazon? Like like 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand. >> Well, this month is so I kind of >> this month is a crazy month. I know. Like in a in a normal month. >> Well, and then I kind of overspent a little my first month uh in like September. Like usually it's around 20 to 20ish,000 20 25, but I went way over because I didn't I'm still learning. >> That's fine. That's fine. So I just want to level set So, so a somebody who spends about 20 grand a month on advertising Destiny, what how do you set up like some of her rules and and harvesting and things like that? Like for bidding, >> should that be a weekly thing where she's adjusting the bids? Should it be every other day for for keyword harvesting? Is that also a weekly? Uh talk about the schedule of somebody of Car's level here. And then obviously other, you know, let's talk about if somebody's a lot uh a lot bigger than her or a lot smaller, how that would differ. If you're doing it by hands, you need to do it almost multiple times a week in my opinion and you need to do it based on the data you have coming in. If you're spending $10 a week, you don't have enough data to need to optimize at that frequency. If you're spending, you know, car's level, that's really at the point where you need an automation to kick in because there's just too much for you to do by hand. So from an automation perspective, if you have your rules running, then you can hop in once a week and just very quickly, you know, you mentioned harvesting, hop in, see all of your keyword suggestions, hit the check mark if you think it's good, and it already does the bid math for you because it knows your target a cost. So it's going to harvest the keyword and put it in the appropriate campaign at the appropriate bid needed to hit your a cost or rorowaz target. I I would say that one thing that Carrie and I did is we walked through and did the math by hands first. We actually I wanted Carrie to understand the mechanics behind what a bid rule does. So we opened I would say probably what 10 to 15 campaigns and we went through by hand and said hey here's the math on how to adjust this keyword for a target a cost. And once she started learning kind of intuitively when to increase her bid versus lower her bid, that's when I said, "All right, let's go talk about bid rules." Because you understand kind of how to finesse it and the philosophy and then the bid rule can take over. I think you know philosophies on timing is always a fun opinion. Bradley, you and I have talked about this when it comes to cart building. I pulled insights um actually this week for our agency. I was analyzing a brand does over a million dollars a month. The majority of their price points are around 20 to$25 low price point product. >> Impulse buys over 50% of the purchases saw over a 60inute delay in the first click of the ad in checking out. I think that's really important because a lot of people are going to get caught up with all of the science between, you know, hourly day partying and all of those insights. At the end of the day, what we've seen is customers don't click an ad and check out immediately. So that's a really big benefit. So I think fundamentally if you're a brand owner, you can manage everything on your own. Knowing these insights of maybe only once a week is really what you need. >> Now I think a fun conversation to have is when you start taking things to the next level. You know Shane has a fun comment of like Amazon's become pay-to-play platform not fun. I think that's where things get exciting for me and we had a lot of fun conversations about because now we have things like AMC audiences. I taught Carrie how to apply AMC audiences to her campaign. Again, someone who's never managed Amazon advertising before is now applying audiences to a campaign. So, that was pretty incredible. >> Speaking of campaigns, what should if somebody's taking over their advertising um from an agency or or from consultants? One interesting thing or or from other softwares, a lot of different agency softwares, they have different campaign structures. Like like there's some out there that they like to do one keyword per per campaign. You know, there's others that were like, you know what, we're just going to have these mega >> Yeah. >> mega campaigns that that have 200 targets in one campaign with with a $1,000 daily budget, you know, like >> for somebody of car's level, like like did you have to change her campaign structure? And like what's your ideal campaign structure as far as like how many targets go into each campaign and and how the the structure works? >> We didn't have to change too much. We did have to adjust a lot of the naming and cleaning up some of the SKs weren't very aligned with the targets. So there was a cleanup for sure. I would say if I'm going top down on just general recommendations, you need one campaign per grouping of SKUs per similar products, one ad group, and typically around 10 to 30 keywords in a campaign. Anything more than that, you lose all of your impressions. Anything less than that, you don't really gain as much for the operational complexity that's added. So, I would say those are kind of the basics. And then the nomenclature, that was something that Carrie spent a lot of time on. Carrie's actually working on a few projects to help everyone else understand nomenclature and naming structure as well. That part's important because as a brand owner, you need to log into ad console and know how to navigate your campaigns. So, we really worked on, you know, if you're applying AMC audiences, here's how you add it. Here's how you add videos, custom images, all those things that are going to tweak your conversion rate, how to integrate them. say you have 10 to 30 targets in a campaign, but you know, maybe Carrie notices that a few of these they're they're just not hardly getting any impressions at all. Um, what's your advice for that? Like like do you then like maybe pause those targets in that campaign and and throw them in a new one to to to kind of see if if there's they get a little bit more play or you just let it ride in that campaign because you just figure what Amazon is kind of like just doesn't think this is relevant or what's what's the strategy there? Well, the first thing you need to do is identify, are you not getting impressions because your bid's too low. Your bid is the first lever you're always going to pull. If I see one of my my targets has, you know, 100 impressions in the last week, I'm going to look and see what is my bid. If my bid is 13 cents, that's why it's not getting impressions. It's showing up in nowhere Amazon. So, I'll increase my bid. That's the first lever you always pull. If my bid is incredibly high, I'm talking, you know, $5 and I know it's not that, then I will look at increasing my budget because it's probably capping out at budget at the, you know, the time frame. Sometimes I will move to a new campaign um if one of those or either of those does not work. >> Dakota says, "What would you say is the average people spend on a month?" So, so obviously we don't mean the the number, but like the percentage wise of of sales, what what would you say is a decent target or does does that not exist? >> I I just pulled a ton of sellers on my LinkedIn a few months ago. Um the the consensus was 10 to 15% for a mature brand. It was 15 to 20% for high growth brands. They're investing a ton in advertising trying to grow grow grow is kind of that 15 to 20% range. Anything above 20% usually has organic ranking issues and or is a newly launched not mature product. Anything less than 10% we typically see is either losing market share or that brand is spending more elsewhere on off-platform traffic that they're then driving to Amazon. So they usually have a lot of branded search. Kim says, "I spend what Carrie spends and need more automation. I'm testing my first AI ads, but now I need to better optimize my manual ads with more chiseled." I like that word, chiseled. >> I like that, too. >> I've got rules in place, but they don't take into account my profit targets at the skew level. What would be a good rule template for that? Or should she make something custom? >> Great question. So, what I would do is break out all of your campaigns by skew. That's something that we almost always recommend. Let's say you have a $100 product and a $20 product. You're going to have very different margins for those. You need to put them in separate campaigns. And then it's going to allow you to put your bid rules on each campaign with the different a cost profitability targets you have. Say one of them you want to have a 10% a cost, one you want to have a 40% a cost. You can apply your bid rules with those different target a costes because they're in different campaigns. That's the best way to do it. That's what we recommend. Um, we talked about this earlier. We also create campaigns for things like organic rank and BSR. We'll put those in their own campaign and we'll typically put higher target a cost of rorowaz because our goal is sales and traffic and not necessarily profitability. >> Kim had a follow-up question. same Kim I'm assuming here was one of these agencies that had one target per campaign which you know sometimes there is it's not necessarily bad uh or unless Destiny thinks it's bad but like I I've used that sometimes if I had a very specific goal in mind or or some like hero keyword that I really needed to keep uh control over. Um, so, so talk a little bit about that strategy when you would use a one target per campaign. Then also hourly bid optimization. Um, and then you know like like the how the Helium 10 schedules and day parting comes into comes into that. >> Yeah, of course. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It won't hurt your account. It just adds a ton of operational complexity. Right. If you have one target per campaign, you're now going to need thousands of campaigns more than likely to cover all your SKs. And most brand owners can't go do that manually. You now need different bid rules and different bid templates per campaign. All of these things. And the problem is it doesn't add that much value. That's why I don't love it. It's way too much operational complexity. Does not give you that much more control. You know, I have seen multiple multiple accounts that have came from agencies or software providers that run that strategy and it's actually relatively detrimental because it gives you no control. You start forgetting where all of your keywords lie, what campaigns they're in, you don't know how to optimize unless you're using that specific software. the placement modifiers are so so messy on those accounts because now you're trying to absolutely curate the perfect placement per the keyword and your bids are low and it's it's a hot mess. Uh that being said, if it's my most important keyword, sometimes I will put it in a single keyword campaign, if my sole purpose is ranking or my sole purpose is winning top of search. If it's very strategic, I will occasionally launch single keyword campaigns because I only want to win a certain placement, you know, top of search or B2B or anything with AMC audiences. That's when I'll start applying those because I need that level of control because it's strategic. The other thing is hourly bid optimization. Again, Amazon now gives you the insights that say a customer clicked on your ad on Monday and bought on Tuesday. You can get that anywhere. Um, it's readily available directly within your advertising console right now under AMC. And I've done the analysis on, you know, over $und00 million in spend. And what we see is that most people do not click on an ad and purchase under 60 minutes, which is pretty incredible because a lot of brand owners forget that, right? So, when people do use hourly optimization, what they will do is they will say, "Med night at 11:00 p.m. my spend is high, my sales are low. pause the keyword. What happens is their sales on Wednesday decline because what they didn't account for is that 11 p.m. on Monday, people are adding to cart, but they're not checking out until Wednesday, right? And that discrepancy between how customers shop is what makes hourly day partying not as beneficial. Now, that being said, I've worked with many B2B brands who sell teacher supplies. We found teacher supplies do not convert as well on the weekend. They convert much better on the weekday, right? Maybe only homeschoolers are buying on Saturday, Sunday. So there is still opportunity to incorporate day partying, but at the end of the day, ask yourself, how many times do you go on to Amazon and click not want to buy? If a customer is clicking on your ad, they're probably very interested in buying. That's why they clicked in the first place. So if you want to find this out for yourself, Helium 10 actually offers uh day parting insights. You can only get it through certain softwares. Amazon advertising console does not give you hourly insights because it's a certain API that only softwares have capabilities for. So highly re recommend checking it out within Helium 10 before making a decision. And then kind of remembering my rant I just went on being very cautious about how you implement day parting. Now, um ju just real quick, I want to show people people might be wondering what this outsource to optimize means. So, this is actually a full kind of like course case study, I guess you could call it, that Destiny and Carrie did, and it's available for replay in your Helium 10 uh console. So, where you can get to it is just go to at the top of the screen courses and then hit ads academy. All right. Once you get there, you will go to the Helium 10 Ads Academy where it it for beginners and anybody who wants a refresher. There's a lot of stuff that Destiny recorded here u a few months ago that are just the basics of advertising. But you can scroll down if if you've already gone through this to this new section here called outsource to optimize. It's an over-the-shoulder look at how Destiny was teaching Carrie from the ground up all about um the advertising that she didn't know about and then also how to integrate it with Helium 10 ads. So again, this this if you're a Helium 10 member, you have free access uh to this. Just make sure to go to courses Helium 10 Ads Academy and then look for the outsource to optimize. Now Carrie, um you had mentioned before or or Destiny mentioned that you weren't really or the agency maybe wasn't utilizing sponsored brands. uh a lot. Uh what what did you what what strategies did you guys end up utilizing for for how you're tackling sponsored uh brand ads? >> One of the things she taught me was to use um I guess take more time than than an agency or big brand would and do creatives based on the keywords. So, for example, um like for coffin shelf, if you know if people are looking for Halloween decorations, you're looking you're going to do some sort of video or visual um with Halloween decor with the product or whatever it is specific. It needs to be specific to what the keyword is so that people are more likely to convert. Like she used the example also protein for for bodybuilders. Well, if you show a picture of somebody who's like not a bodybuilder, that's not going to relate as much to somebody who's searching for protein for bodybuilders. Whereas, if you do a picture and there's a guy with, you know, the protein shake and he's a bodybuilder, they're going to be more likely to convert. So, that's a huge thing is that if you have the ability to do this, big brands are not going to be doing it. And so, you're going to be able to take the time to kind of specialize the the graphics or guess the the yeah, the content for whatever that keyword is. >> Okay. >> Yeah. What's some advice Destiny that you can give now if anything has changed which I think it has that of how people should be using sponsored brands even more due to these new creative um you know AI creative features that that Amazon's been releasing accelerate and unboxed. >> Yeah. So Creative Studio is actually pretty incredible. Um every time I see people complaining about it I'm like did you actually play around with it? like our our agency has seen some exceptional results and split test those results against professional creatives like creatives running on very expensive TV campaigns and they do really well and it's because of Car's point. If you're able to create a graphic that aligns with a specific audience, it's almost always going to do better than a professional shot commercial that targets everyone. So, we've been using Creative Studio AI a lot. And the reason I do like Creative Studio, even though it's not quite as exceptional as like Nano Banana or anything like that, is because the LLM in Creative Studio actually pulls all of the information directly from your Amazon listing and analyzes the category. So, to Carrie's point, you upload your AS, it's going to analyze the category, find your competitive advantage, and build an ad that is within Amazon guidelines and has all of Amazon's typical recommendations. So that's probably one of the bigger ones I would I would say. >> Okay. >> Shane says, "What are the best strategies for going into offseason? You don't want to waste spend, but you still want to be visible uh visible so that you do not lose momentum when in season." >> Yeah, great question. I remember a fun conversation that was had on LinkedIn about selling swimming pools in Canada. Someone had said, you know, I really wish you could do geo targeting with Amazon PPC because I don't want to sell swimming pools to can Canadians. And I push back with, why are Canadians searching for swimming pools if they don't want one? That's the beauty of PPC and Amazon advertising. If you're using sponsored ads, at least a customer searched and clicked. So ask yourselves, why are they searching for Christmas trees or swimming pools? That being said, we do typically see a decrease in conversion rate in offseason. So what we typically do is, you know, lower our bids and adjust our creatives. So that way if someone is searching for a swimming pool at a different time of year, it's probably for a different purpose. So how can we adjust our creative to better target that person who may be out of season and preparing Christmas early or you know XYZ, all of the multiple different reasons that you could example is Christmas trees. Uh photographers will typically buy Christmas trees early early, you know, end of summer in order to prep Christmas shoots. So you could maybe adjust your creative to be focused on things like that. >> Okay. Monita says, "I'm getting a lot of impressions, no conversions. What's some of the reasons of why that can be happening?" >> Yeah, the beauty of PPC is all it does is drive traffic to your listing. So, if you're getting clicks in your spin site, ask yourself, why are people clicking but not buying? It's typically a issue with your offer or maybe your keywords aren't very aligned with your listing. Something Carrie and I talk about a lot in the video is our uh our conversation around mason jars, right? If you are targeting the keyword mason jar and your listing is showcasing mason jar wedding decor, but someone is searching for mason jar for canning, there's going to be a drop off. So, you're going to have high clicks, no sales. So, make sure that the keywords you're targeting are very aligned with your listing and your product detail page and improve your offer. >> I know this is so new that this didn't get into um outsource to optimize series, but maybe we can make some content on that later. A matter of fact, let's put that on our to-do list. Let's do an outsource to optimize thing on sponsored product video ads. But sponsored product video ads is something that was recently uh released at Unbox and just has been trickling into people's accounts. >> Uh what has been your experience so far with that? Uh, I've been asking here. >> I can answer two birds in one stone here because Sammy's in the comments saying, "Sorry to say this, but AI creative is laughably unreliable." I've actually split test both. We have taken our AI creative and ran it in sponsor product video ads. Because our AI video was so successful in our sponsor brand video ad, it drove over $20,000 in sales and the click-through rate was three times better than the account average. >> So, that was with Creative Studio. It was incredible. It was um actually advertising a bird feeder, a um AI bird feeder. So, it was a very complex video to build. Took a lot of back and forth. We took that video, we put it into sponsored product video ads. Now, the SP video ads are very limited inventory right now. So, pretty much what everyone's say seeing is it's showing delivery, but it's only getting 500 to a,000 impressions. We're not really seeing any engagement because we've only been able to spot it on a mobile device twice so far. So, I think that they released an ad console, but they haven't opened up the advertising inventory for it just yet because it was too risky to put it in the search results during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That's my assumption. >> So, for for Carrie um who amongst many things, you know, has like, you know, she has a lot of clothing products and socks and different things like that. What would somebody in the clothing apparel um or give us a preview? What are you going to coach Carrie to do for getting to sponsor product? Like, how do you pick what you're going to what you're going to target and how the creatives you uh you're going to make because it's kind of a little bit different than what you would normally do for sponsored brand video ads. >> It is uh it's pretty interesting because it actually takes your video and breaks it out into thumbnails. So, the example they showed unboxed was using a product similar to like a GoPro camera. I can't remember it was actually GoPro. You upload your video, you apply it to any of your campaigns you already have, right? anything that you're already using from a keyword targeting perspective. You just add a video to it. It doesn't show like a sponsored brand's video. Like you said, it shows in a video that has thumbnails and the customer can actually click what part of the video thumbnail they want to watch. Maybe they want to watch the durability. They want to watch the video quality. For Carrie specifically, I would say, you know, it's maybe durability and thread count or something along those lines. So, it's going to create the video curated around those callouts you have. So, I would assume that our videos probably need to be more focused on product features and call outs and competitive advantages rather than like broad storytelling. >> Henry says, "How long would it normally take to scale a brand who has been on Amazon for a year? Um, I'm using an agency and they told me up to four years. I mean, you should be scaling." >> I was like, "What is nontop?" >> What does scale mean? Um, one one of the things Carrie and I talked about this in the videos as well is understanding what's going on in your category. If you're joining a category and all of your competitors are doing a million units a month in sales and you're doing 500, it's going to take you a long time to scale and a lot of money to scale. So, that's why it's so important to understand your category analytics. And Carrie and I dove into this. How do you figure out how you compare to the category? You can go into brand metrics, insights, and planning right now and you can see exactly how you are performing compared to your category. If your competitors are on average driving 30,000 detail page views a month and you're driving 70, it's going to take you a long time and a lot of money to scale. If you're close to that, then you're going to do a lot better. So, that's the first thing. Dive into is kind of do an audit on your brand. Going to insights and planning and then use um search query performance, which is another thing that Carrie and I talked a lot about in these videos. There's other elements that go into it, too, like do you have enough inventory to go, you know, and scale dramatically. Can you replenish it quickly? There's a lot of things that, you know, go into into scaling a brand. And I've seen some people do it, but they have, like Destiny was saying, a lot of money. So, you got to just be prepared for, you know, a lot of spend if you want to do it fast. >> Here's a question that I'll take from Kim. Is is Helium 10 ads tool h has new suggestions for bid costs? How frequently do these update? Does the system use an average? Um, first of all, I'm going to say I don't pay attention too much and I'm going to explain why. But, but in answer to your question, the the Amazon suggestions, the Helium 10 suggestions, these are updated. It's based on just, you know, the data that's out there. That being said, the reason why I don't pay attention too much to the suggestions un unless just to get a you like a baseline of if I'm going into something a new niche and and new keywords I've never targeted before. Hey, you know, like like is it $10? Is it $1? Of course, you know, like I'll look at those suggestions just to get an idea. But any of you who are using Helium 10, the suggestions becomes a lot less useful because you've got more powerful things. You know, uh, some of you are worried about placement, about where your ad is showing up, like if you're targeting a keyword. And of course, the bid affects a placement and the suggested bid, you know, like you're hoping that, you know, you're not wanting to get on page two for it, right? So, use keyword tracker. All right, guys. So, so if you're like, hey, is my bid enough? You're going to know within three or four hours, literally like like even if there was no suggestion on the bids overall. So, what you do is, hey, you're targeting like these five 10 keywords. Put those 5 to 10 keywords in keyword tracker with the AS that that you're advertising for and turn the boost on. Boost is that the a little red uh rocket ship or actually now it's blue for some reason. Like there's no such thing as a blue rocket ship, but anyways, um the rocket ship is blue. You hit that button and it's going to check every single hour in rotating browsing scenarios, you know, that means different locations and different browsers where your ad is showing up. So, if if you've got this goal like, "Hey, I I know I want to be on the top of the fold, the top half of page one, and you just throw in a a dollar bid, and the keyword tracker spits out, hey, for the last four hours, you've been at position three. You're done. Like, I'm good. Wow, that's great. I I got it right." But then all of a sudden, you see position 44. Well, that means you're probably like on page three. Well, guess what? Now, you know, oh, let me raise my my bid. because a lot of times um the suggestions that you see in in Amazon especially um are not necessarily geared towards ex exact placement or or like the top of the page. And so I I don't even care too much about the suggestions because I'm using keyword trackers. So I know exactly where my bid is is showing up in the search results. Now, all right, guys, before we close out here, um I wanted to ask Carrie her final comments on on, you know, all that she's learned. But, but takeaways is at least educate yourself, guys. We've got tons of free education for Helium 10 members. this full course where you can learn about advertising and then also go through the steps that Carrie did as she was learning how to take control over your advertising which we we suggest you know like taking control is learning about your own account learning about advertising maybe before you go out uh to an agency or before you use software once you have an idea about how advertising works now you're going to be able to be much better equipped with using a software like Helium 10 that can take something that might take you 30 hours uh a month or 40 hours a month to do in seller central. Now it can be a one to two hour monthly task potentially. So highly recommend you know if you've got the diamond plan activate your Helium 10 ads take the the content so that you can learn how to do these rules that we talked about how to do the day parting how to do keyword harvesting things like that. That's why Helium 10 Ads is out there because it makes things a lot easier. I've been using it since it got started four years ago. Um, I have over 250 campaigns now that I manage in four different accounts using Helium 10 Ads. So, it definitely works, guys, but only if you know how what you're doing. It's not a set it and forget. Let me just turn this button on and and everything's going to be fine. You've got to know how to make the rules. You got to understand how to tweak things afterwards to make make sure you're profitable. You got to like look at your keyword ranks that we've we've talked about. So, this is something um that we highly recommend doing. Now, Carrie, any last words of of now that you've after all this time learned about advertising, your eyes are open to what's going on out there thanks to Destiny. Any last words you want to talk about the what you learned or or what your goals are for the future, etc. >> Yeah. Um, just that it does take a little time to learn it and figure it out. So, just be patient and maybe you'll make some mistakes along the way. But I think no matter what, even if you're not going to manage your own ads, that this is a very important thing to understand because you can help, you know, manage your own agency because, you know, if you just kind of let them run with it, then that's you're leaving it all in their hands and uh, you know, you won't know what's going on. So, I would just say no matter what, learn learn ads, the basics, at least how you can really kind of monitor what's going on. Um, but I also, yeah, I think it just takes a little bit of time, so be patient and keep going. >> Awesome, Destiny. How can people find you on the interwebs out there and reach out to you or your agency? >> Yeah, so agency is Better Media. You can check us out at bettermedia.com. But I think more importantly to to Carrie's point, there's not a onesizefits-all solution for ads. I know uh one of the comments earlier was like, hey, this is a little bit surface level in the beginning and the the more specific questions started coming in. And those specific questions matter because there's so many different ways to manage your ads and you have the context of your brand that I think is incredibly incredibly important. So, as Carrie said, educate as much as possible. Check out all the videos that we've done. You know, check me out on LinkedIn. I post a lot of new updates there. But stay in tune so that way you can better manage your account, whether it's with software, agency, or your own team. >> Awesome. All right. Well, Destiny, thank you for all your help with Carrie. Thank you, Carrie, for being open to uh you know, kind of like exposing how your lack of knowledge before on on advertising and and being open to go through this whole process. So, everybody go in and watch the full series outsource to optimize in ads academy. See you guys later. >> Thank you.