#538 - Fix These Amazon PPC Mistakes Before Q4

In this episode, we have Paige Pvak, who is a senior retail media manager at Pacview, and she answers tons of questions like how sellers should focus their funds if they have a limited budget, what are the biggest PPC mistakes sellers are making right now, and what Amazon ad features are worth paying attention to. [music] We talk about all of this and more on this week's episode. Hello everybody and welcome to the [music] AM podcast. My name is Carrie Miller and I'll be your host. And this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, [music] Tik Tok Shop, and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue [music] streams 24 hours a day during the A.M. and the PM. Hence the name of the show, get it? AM PM podcast. [music] And as a matter of fact, this last weekend, I went to a street fair here in town. And even though I was at the street fair [music] just eating lots of food and having a great time, I was still making money online. [music] How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everyone and welcome to another Tacos Tuesday. We have a really great topic today. So, I'm very excited. Um, we have a special guest and she is from our sister company which is Pack View. So, a lot of you might not know this, but we have Helium 10 and Pack View. We're sister companies and so I'm going to bring Paige on. So, hello Paige. Welcome to Tacos Tuesday. >> Hi everyone. Can you tell a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at Pacview? >> Yeah, so I am a senior retail media manager here at Pacview. So I'm specifically our managed service team. So you know brands can use the Pacview tool to run their um media strategies on Amazon. I you know specifically work with clients uh to run their media using our packview tool. So bunch of different packages there but uh very involved in the actual um client management using the pack view tool. um been in the industry for a little over five years I think. So got a lot of experience, worked across a lot of different brands, a lot of different product categories. So I'm excited to bring all that knowledge over the last couple years to today's questions. Very nice. Yeah, we're very very excited. Um one question I think people have a lot is the difference between Packview and Helium 10 when it comes to managing ads. Um can you tell us like what what kind of um clients should maybe look into Packview versus Helium 10? [snorts] pack view I would say is for brands with perhaps maybe more complicated um you know strategies maybe you know not necessarily always but larger budgets you have a lot of campaigns or managing maybe you're a brand with different product categories and you really need uh great organization uh for setting up your campaigns you want automation involved um using the pack tool to help make your day-to-day management just a lot easier we have some fantastic features that just make managing your campaigns a lot more seamless than maybe when you're doing it more manually through other forms. So I would say again branch is maybe a kind of a lot of undertaking further strategy. >> I would like to just get into some questions. Um the first question that I have for you Paige is what is the biggest PPC or what are the biggest PPC mistakes that sellers are making right now on Amazon. I think right now something that a lot of people are are struggling with is really not having clear goals set for your brand. um when you don't have clear goals of what you're trying to achieve um you don't have a strong foundation to your search strategy and when your foundation is off uh you're going to have you know a leak in the boat. You're not necessarily moving towards your goals. So a weak foundation can look like you know misallocation of your funds across targeting types. Maybe you're spreading your budget way too thin. Maybe you're trying to support um a lot of acins and maybe you need to whittle that list down to really focus on your top sellers. Maybe you have a ton of keywords in your campaigns and you're not necessarily being efficient and growing on the right keywords that you should. So, it's really about rethinking what your strategy and goals are and making sure that your um your campaigns, your management aligns to that. Um, you know, I'm keeping that very broad because I do think a lot of our next questions will help solve this, but it's it's just really making sure that you are truly aligned on what your goals are, making sure your campaigns are um in line with that. >> All right, sounds good. Um Jeff said, "I'm struggling getting the correct keywords and then overspending." What do you have any advice for Jeff? >> Yeah. Um keywords are are always um tough, right? Because there feels like there's unlimited amount of keywords out there. And I would say there's kind of two different ways you can look at look at keywords. So one, you can have a pretty limited list of keywords in your campaign for your item. Maybe that's only five keywords. And on those keywords, you're really focused on getting visibility, clicks, and therefore sales. What's great about having a more limited list of keywords is it helps that flywheel effect kind of come into into motion. When you, you know, place an ad on a couple of keywords for your product over time, the hope is is that your product is going to get more sales, get more relevant, and Amazon is going to award you with a higher organic rank on those keywords, right? And that helps that flywheel, you know, come into effect because the greater your organic rank is, now you're no longer paying for those search and grid placements for obviously organic placements. So there's more opportunities to capture sales there. And having a tighter list of keywords is going to help again really focus your efforts on building organic rank on just a couple of really key priority terms for you. Now there's other instances um where maybe a lot of these top terms like head terms are very very expensive just because other brands in the space. Maybe that's where you if you have a very limited budget right now you want to focus on um more longtail keywords. For example uh let's say you're selling water bottles. The term water bottle on Amazon, I'm sure, is highly competitive. Probably has pretty high CPCs and you're up against some major brands there. So, if you maybe get those keywords, you know, a wider list of keywords that are more along the lines of water bottle with straw pink, you know, you're including a couple of those key defining terms there. You're going to get consumers who, you know, are are more sure of what they're looking for. than not so much in the discovery phase because they already kind of know what they're looking for in terms of water balls and therefore maybe a little bit more efficient to you and probably because they're longer tail have less of those major competitors on there raising up those CPCs. So I think in those instances you can have a kind of a lengthier list of keywords to try to feel out and capture what's going to work for your brand. Yeah, I think that's really good advice to just kind of look for some of those longer tail keywords because they they do include water bottle so you'll still rank, you know, somewhat for water bottle. Yeah. Um, so that's kind of a good strategy, especially if you have a limited budget because I know there's a lot of big brands that maybe they're selling water bottles and they can come in and like spend 20 bucks a click. >> But for the smaller sellers, yeah, it's a really good idea to just kind of look at those lower hanging fruit keywords. But then obviously, like you said, the the top maybe five keywords or so that you really want to rank for, you can, you know, focus on those um even if they're kind of expensive. But >> and I will say, you know, something there is some benefit. Um, let's just say again you're bidding on the term water bottle and maybe from an efficiency standpoint it's not great. Your rows might be a little bit lower, your CPCs are higher. Just think a a person may search water bottle, see your brand but not necessarily click into the ad and then when they go and search for pink water bottle, they kind of have that um they might be more likely to click on your brand because they've seen your product before and there's a bit of that consumer bias to kind of liking to purchase things that we've seen multiple times. So that is one, you know, value to getting on some of those more trafficked, highly competitive terms is just that repetition of getting in front of the consumer. You might not be get that thing is you might not be getting uh the credit for showing on that term. You're getting the credit for another keyword, but it kind of goes all into that again that flywheel effect again. So and it might be a little bit complicated, but still something to think about. You can't always be just using rorowes and CPC as your baseline because there's some some things here that we can't take, you know, we aren't getting data to back up that it's working. >> Yeah. Very good. All right. Um the next question, if sellers have limited budgets, where should they focus first? >> Yeah. Um again, this goes back to your foundation here, and I feel like there's three different things of your foundation. One is keywords, which we kind of just touched on is making sure that your keyword list is, you know, appropriate for uh your brand and your budget. I think oftent times we want to put every single keyword possible into our campaign, likely having, you know, a list within 5 to 10 keywords is probably the best place to start here. So, if you have a crazy keyword list, uh you might be spending your budget um inefficiently and just spreading yourself way too thin. >> Yeah. The next thing you want to think about is as um support. Uh maybe you only have a handful of SKs in your catalog that you're promoting. That's totally fine. Focus on those. But often times there are sellers that have 20 products uh that they're that they are trying to push. >> And unfortunately, >> you might not be able to be able to support 20 products when your top five products are driving 85% of your revenue. That's an instance where you definitely want to make sure, okay, let's reallocate our budget away from these. Mhm. >> We we want to sell it through the inventory, but if they're not driving ordered revenue, you need to refocus that budget onto the places that are those might be those top five SKs. >> I was just going to say, is that something you guys advise the bigger brands to do as well? Just, you know, when you see kind of those things happening, you're just like, let's reallocate the budgets to the top five or the top the winners. Okay, >> 100%. That again, that comes into that setting your goals for your brand. If your goal is driving sales, you're very likely want to just want to put your budget behind your top SKUs. >> [clears throat] >> Now, if you have innovation items and you maybe launched, you know, into new product categories for your brand, maybe your goal is again driving that new product category. And that's an instance where, hey, maybe it's not yet a top selling item, but we still need to put money there and and push a good amount of our budget there. And that just again comes to setting your goals. Is it pushing new innovation? Is it pushing just total sales for your brand? Something else that I think uh you know really comes into play with um you know helping with skew management is variations. Um variation strategy is super super important. Just going to give an example here. Um if you are a protein powder brand and you have 10 different flavors, you probably want to support all 10 different flavors, but that's probably not the direction you should be moving. Probably should only support one or two the top two items. And by having variations, you're still going to be able to get a lot of great visibility for those other, you know, flavors that you have while putting a majority of your budget behind your most efficient skew, your top selling skew. And I I always, you know, urge people to think of consumer behavior. Think of your own consumer behavior on site. The amount of times that you've clicked on something like protein powder, you just click on the vanilla option because it's the first one you see a vet brand. And when you're on the PDP, you see the peanut butter flavor. You're like, "Oh, actually that looks pretty good. I'm going to get the peanut butter." So, you don't need to support the peanut butter skew or any other of these random flavors um just to get sales moving behind them. If they are variated with your top product, consumers are going to discover that product regardless. So, that is definitely a a key tip that I have is to figure out a variation strategy that works. >> So, are you saying just pick your hero um within the variation and just advertise on that? Like say it's um say it is like vanilla protein. You're advertising on all the vanilla protein keywords as well as just the regular protein powder keywords. You're doing all of that with just that one skew. Or would you say, "Hey, if we also have chocolate, we're going to do some chocolate keywords and then some, you know, maybe some matcha keywords for our matcha flavor." Like, yeah. Are you just >> Oh, matcha sounds good. I want that flavor. >> [laughter] >> Um, again, it really depends on your budget and and what you can afford to support. I you there's definitely an instance I feel like chocolate and vanilla in this instance are the two most popular flavors. So, it definitely makes sense to also support the chocolate there. That's a great instance. But again, there's probably not that much appetite for coffee flavored protein powder. And if you were to use Helium 10 to look at the search velocity of these terms, you would figure that out. So again, it's a great let's just let the consumers figure out that we have coffee while on the PDP. We don't necessarily need to support that with search ads. >> All right. When should sellers use sponsored products versus sponsored brand videos? >> Yeah, this is a a great question. Um, so what I'll say, generally what I've observed over the years of managing several brands. Um, you're typically going to put a large majority of your budget into sponsor product. Uh, oftentimes 70 80% of your budget. This is where you are getting the best consumer engagement. you're getting your most impressions, clicks, sales, CPCs tend to be lowest here. And again, think of your own consumer behavior on Amazon. You're probably nine times out of 10 clicking the sponsor product placement. So, that's where you're going to reach most customers. However, there are definitely instances when sponsored brand video might make more sense. And I'll explain with uh a little example here. So, think of a product that is, you know, a super easy purchase for consumers. uh there's not a lot of thought behind it and it's a very self-explanatory product. For example, hand soap. If someone's searching for hand soap in Amazon, through just the description of the products that appear and the, you know, little image that appears in search and grid placements, consumers can see that it's lemon and scented, that it has that it's a two pack and that it's a pump, right? We don't need a sponsor brand video to explain that to the consumer. your main priority is just appearing at the top of search because on a term like that, consumers are just looking for something that fits their price range and kind of maybe the scent that they want. They're not doing a lot of scrolling and they're not doing a lot of discovery. Now, there's also more um it's the word I'm looking for, more complicated products in very crowded categories. I think a great example of this is a vacuum, right? So, vacuum, if you search for vacuum on Amazon, there are hundreds if not thousands of products that show up. Obviously, some of those are going to be the premium high price brands that, you know, is offered. We're gonna neglect that for the sake of this um demonstration and just say, you know, consumers are looking in that $70 to $140 range, kind of that mid-range vacuum. They know it's going to be decent, but they don't want to spend a large chunk of money on it. There are a ton of vacuums on site that fit that description of kind of that mid-range vacuum. You just want it to work. And it's very hard for consumers to decide what they actually want to purchase. And so a sponsor brand video is fantastic to stand out in this category. Um especially for a complicated product like a vacuum, people just want to know it. It checks the boxes, right? So if you have a 20 second sponsor brand video that quickly explains to consumers that it is cordless, it is a three-hour battery life, it sucks up pet hair, and it is a floor vacuum and a hand vacuum allin one. And you can, you know, assemble it likewise or as you need to. Um that's a great selling point for consumers. Consumers are going to see that, you know, top of search and say, "Oh, easy peasy. add that to cart. May maybe they look at the PDP just to double check and then they add it to their cart and purchase it. So again, there are definitely instances in these very crowded complex categories for sponsor brand video is definitely the way to go. You still want to have some sponsored product presence as well. Being able to explain those really kind of different features of your product is going to be a lot easier for the consumer to add that product to your cart. Yeah, I like that you were like saying how to get directly to the point because some people try to go kind of artsy with their videos and it's like you really just have to tell them exactly what the product is super fast, right? >> Especially with products like coffee makers or vacuums, like we just want to know. Now, I understand with um you know, maybe skin care brands, that kind of stuff that does have that more aesthetically driven um aspect to it, then yeah, maybe you do need to have more of those um those types of shots in there. But for complicated products like that, you just want to show the features in as little time as possible that make sense uh for your video. >> Yeah, very good. Um, okay. Which new Amazon features are actually worth paying attention to because I know a lot of things come out, people get confused and overwhelmed. Yeah. >> What's worth paying attention to? >> Yeah, and I do want to know again there there's a ton of new features that Amazon's coming out with um or over the years there's just been a bunch. And again, you need to make sure your foundation is set before you expand into a lot of these tactics. I think you know AMC bid you know sponsored product bid boost is one of them or like make sure your foundation is set before you go into that. But one that I think is super easy for brands to hop on board with is sponsor product video. That was a newer release from Amazon within maybe the last 6 months to a year. Um and it's very easy to do this. You can go into your pre-existing sponsor product campaign. Um you click on the skew and then there's a there's a section to add that video in and you just upload your video. Um, and you know, it almost looks like a sponsor brand video when it appears on site, but it actually, you'll notice it has like I think you can put up to five videos and it allows the consumer to click on each of these videos and they're usually only like 5 to 10 seconds and you can name them with your features. So again, in the vacuum case, we can we can name one cordless and it shows how, you know, in 10 seconds how this is a cordless vacuum, how you charge it and how much battery life it has. And then the next feature and the next feature. So, it's again very similar sponsor brand where there's definitely some use cases where this will be super super beneficial. What's great about it is you don't have to create an entirely separate campaign. Um, it's built into your sponsor product campaign and Amazon's algorithm to my understanding kind of decides when to put the video out versus a regular search and grid placement. So, you're not going to completely go overboard only investing in this. And what I've seen, the little bit of testing that I've done and what I've heard from colleagues is that it it tends to be pretty efficient um and is a very low lift for your campaign. So definitely think that's a a great area for people to test out. I think something else uh that is a good feature is um Amazon's AI Creative Studio. >> Personally, I have not done testing with that. However, u I think it's a great option for brands that or sellers that do not have um obviously the ability to have their own creative made. They can't do it themselves. They don't have an in-house creative team. A lot of the larger brands are slow to adopt this rightfully so. They have their own creative teams that know exactly what kind of branding they need in their videos. But if you just want to start getting a sponsor product video running or sponsored brand video running, try the AI creative studio. It's going to be a really great way to try, you know, getting some assets up and running. They're going to look like they're AI a little bit depending on uh you know what you type in, but I think that's a great opportunity to just begin testing that as well. >> What about um audiences? Have you seen some good results with audiences with the brands that you've been managing? >> You mean the AMC audiences? >> Yeah. So the AMC audiences are they're they're a tough one because what I'll say is is if you again don't have a super refined keyword list um you might be bid boosting on keywords that and just completely increasing your CPCs, right? >> Um so you have to be careful with that. I think there's more opportunity there for you to kind of make a mistake and then increase your CPCs and bring your efficiency down. But let me explain like why AMC audiences can be great. So it just basically what AMC audience does for anyone who's not aware is it just helps qualify your audiences a little bit more when you're targeting them in search. So for example, you can take an audience, let's say it's Prime Day, right? And you know a lot of people are on site and they're kind of scoping out what brands they might want to buy, what's available. What you can do is then during Prime Day put on this bid boost that says, "Hey, let's increase my bid and make me more likely to serve my ad on anyone who clicked on my PDP within the last 7 days." So, that means consumers who are clearly interested in clicking around before Prime Day scoping out deals are now going to see your sponsored search ad appear above other brands and hey, hey, it has a $5 coupon on it now and they purchase it. So, it just qualifies your audiences a little bit more and in some cases may make your um your ads a lot more efficient and increase that conversion right there. And there's a ton of different audiences um you can use. That's just one example of them. >> Yeah, definitely. Um okay, let's go into the next one. Um, if a seller could improve only one thing before Q4, what should it be? >> Yeah. Again, I I really think it's just to reiterate, it's making sure your sales goals are aligned at Q4. Q4 is a very exciting time period on Amazon. You know, there's a ton of traffic, there's a ton of buzz, people are buying for Christmas and holidays and so consumers are on site and they're shopping and they are discovering, >> but you need to make sure that your strategy is aligned. Um, you know, for example, if you have a ton of inventory left on certain products, it may be wise to make sure that you are pri prioritizing those high inventory products in your sponsored search campaigns. If your goal is just to make sure you meet your sales goal for the year, um, make sure you're prioritizing your top selling products um, with your budget. Maybe you know you're focusing on new to brand. Look at some of your new to brand metrics, focus on those brands and so forth. So narrow those down and go into Q4 with the right strategy um so you can kind of finish out the year um you know on a good foot. >> All right, I have one last question here before I get into the audience questions and that is when should sellers prioritize immediate sales versus increasing visibility and brand awareness? >> Yeah, that's always it's always going to be a tough one because when you start to increase visibility and try to get out there, you're going to be a little shocked. You're going to say, "Oh no, my rorowes isn't as good as it was before. or oh my CPCs are a little bit higher. But that really is um you know pivotal to grow growing your brand on site. So I I think make sure I would make sure that you're covered off in the areas that you are. Like if you feel comfortable with your branded coverage, some brands may not need branded coverage, but let's say your branded keywords are getting crushed by conquesting, you know, brands conquesting you. you need to make sure you're funding that before um you're investing in you know growing techniques because you may be losing sales on your own branded terms um in the non-branded space again I would make sure that you're you know feel comfortable about your current keyword list you're growing sales there sometimes I think a good example of this is you know like we talked about earlier if you are investing on some of these longer tail keywords like pink water bottle with straw uh you might have strong return of rowas on it but your ability to scale is probably a little challenging because that's not highly trafficked of a term. So if you have kind of maxed out your ability to scale on these lower, you know, longtail keywords, uh now it's time to start investing in water bottle and aluminum water bottle and kind of growing in that way. So um just make sure your bases are covered and if if you feel the need to scale, you you have more budget and you can't quite spend it in your current tactics, now let's scale and get a little bit more creative. >> Okay, very good. Um, I've heard when assigning manual products or keywords to keep the targets under 10. Is this because more than that limits budget spread and you can't get a good read of what terms work best? If so, should I increase my daily budget? >> So, I'm thinking like like 10 keywords in a campaign, I'm assuming. >> Yeah. Um, well, honestly, one thing that why I I often say that is because when you have 10 keywords in the campaign, you'll likely notice that only the top like three or four keywords are actually getting significant spend and all the other ones are getting only a couple dollars or cents. And that is because Amazon's algorithm is prioritizing those keywords within your campaign. It's saying these keywords are driving the most sales. We're able to scale the most on them and spend on it. We're going to keep spending on these keywords. We're not going to spend on the rest of them. So that's why you can't have a 50, you know, keyword list be 50 keyword keyword list because you are just simply not going to spend on those keywords. So that's, you know, really why I would say under 10. Again, if you really want to refine it, maybe five to make sure you're getting on those other keywords and then you can have a separate campaign those other five keywords uh to make sure you're getting some coverage there. >> All right. And the next one, uh, do we put branded brand keywords in negative keywords if it's costing us? Now the question is, is this other people's brands or our own brands? Maybe you can answer for both. >> Yeah, that's actually great, >> great question. >> I guess I'll answer for both. Um, if if competitor key branded keywords are entering your campaign and performance isn't strong and that's not your priority, negatively target those. Um, in terms of your own branded keywords, definitely if I think a the worst offender of this is auto campaigns. Auto campaigns work with Amazon's algorithm say, "Oh, this product is relevant here, here, and here on site." And oftentimes when you take a, you know, peak behind the curtain, you'll notice 75% of your budget is actually just going towards branded keywords. And if you are trying to not overinvest in branded and promote discovery and expanding of your brand, you're going to want to negatively target those branded terms in your auto campaign uh to ensure you're getting coverage across more incremental placements on site. >> Awesome. Okay, next one. How does Amazon stack bid modifiers when you have multiple strategies in place? Example, placement modifier and AMC audience modifier and a dynamic bid strategy. >> I actually I don't know the exact formula for this, but let me think. >> Does it get out of control with all those? >> It does. It does. Yeah, they do stack. So, you have to be careful of that. I don't know the exact way they stack it, but that's definitely something to keep in mind. If you're putting AMC audiences on your campaigns, you might want to reduce your placement modifiers um because you're you might be completely over bidding what you think you are now. So again, I don't know the the exact way they stack. I can't remember. Uh but they do stack and they can add up. >> All right, next question. I have a couple campaigns that Amazon won't give impressions to no matter what. The keywords are relevant. I've tried bids from under the suggested bid to $1 over the suggested bids. They still sit stagnant. Is there any way to overcome this? It seems like Amazon sometimes chooses which campaigns to be to fire regardless of bid. Um yeah, I'm having this current issue right now um with a sponsor brand video ad of my own. I cannot get impressions behind it and I don't know why I keep increasing the bids. It seems like they're relevant xyz. Um and I've had this happen many times over the years. Um, I got to admit I I think part of it might be a relevancy issue. Now, Amazon doesn't have super super strict relevancy hurdles, but and I don't know your instance, but if you're trying to place a TV on the term toilet paper, um, you're probably not going to be able to surf here, but you should be able to get a TV on the term TV remote. So, in that instance, um, I'm not quite sure why that is. You might just be getting completely outbid by other competitors, like your bids at $1 and you have no clue that the bids actually are at $7. So that could be um you know an instance there. You could also always support a ticket with Amazon within the AMS UI um and there's a feature that says like my ad isn't um giving impressions and then they can help diagnose the issue for you. Um yeah, so we do have a tool in Helium 10 also called index checker and sometimes you might think that you're indexed for a keyword or a phrase and you're not actually indexed for it. So, if you go to index checker, just put um the as and the keywords in there that you're, you know, advertising and see if you're even indexed for it because that sometimes happens >> and so Amazon doesn't look at you as very relevant um on that. >> Um but it could be something more complicated. So, that's just step one to see. [laughter] >> And also just make sure maybe your maybe your product is ineligible. you probably would be able to see that if you're the AMSUI, but if your product isn't eligible to serve with sponsored product because of, you know, Amazon doesn't deem its price um profitable, uh you might not be able to serve at all. So, definitely look at eligibility. All right, let's go into the next question. What is the best approach to adjust bids when you have hundreds of targets because doing it manually takes too much time? How often do you usually do it? Daily, weekly, monthly? >> This is a great plug for Packview. Um and healing >> and um you know you can adjust your bids um in the blink of an eye um in these platforms which is really really fantastic um and just makes it super seamless um I do believe maybe within the Amazon UI there are bulk templates that you could do this with I don't have experience with that quite honestly um but yeah these uh packuilian 10 allows you to make that a lot easier >> in terms of adjusting like when to adjust your bids I would advise against doing it daily because at that point you might adjust your bid um you know 30 cents and be like oh no like performance went down but you you have one day of data right so I would give it a couple days to make sure you know if if you adjust your bid and increase it and within 5 days you're seeing a nice increase in spend and your row is actually going up hey that might work for you then maybe you go in and tweak it a little bit more so I would definitely do it not daily not monthly I think once or twice a week is is a good is a good way to go. You don't want to be making too many bids. It makes it hard for you to actually figure out what's working, what's not when you're constantly adjusting things. >> Yeah. And the cool thing with Helium 10 is you can make bid rules in ThinkPack view as well. You you make bid rules and so it'll give you suggested bid changes and so you can just look at those maybe once a week and do it in, you know, 15 30 minutes. it it takes very very little time depending on how you know detailed you want to look at it but that's really the way to do it because it does get completely overwhelming if you're doing it manually one by one that's just hours and hours of work that you can save by doing bid rules and based on what your goals are and then you're you'll get suggested bids and then you can implement those with just a click. So so yeah I would recommend looking into a software if you have a lot going on. This next one is if you're getting a good getting good conversions for a longtail keyword, does your organic rank improve for all of the words in the search term and generally how long does it take to get rank juice from it? This is kind of a strategy that I have that because I'm in a competitive category as well as I use the longer tail keywords and you will rank for those others. it. Now, I'm not saying you're going to go way to the top, but what it does is it gets you closer to like page one on some of those keywords that are really competitive. And then once you get closer, then you can put more money behind PPC like targeting those exact keyword phrases. So, for example, if it was like um water bottle, but you know, that's really an expensive keyword. You you say, you know, maybe you're trying to target also water bottles for kids. Okay? So, you're targeting water bottles for kids and you're getting a lot of conversions on that. And then as you're doing that, the water bottle gets, you know, ranked as well. Then when you see that go to like page two, then you can start putting some PPC behind water bottle cuz you're closer to the top. It's not going to be as expensive to go from like page six or like wherever lost in the oblivion wherever products go on certain keyword terms. Um, then you can start, you know, pushing to rank for that keyword. So, it it is kind of a strategy if you have a more limited budget. Whereas, you know, a lot of brands will just go all out and just cover everything. If you're if you do have a a lower budget, do the longtail keywords. See where your ranking is going for those main keywords and then as that goes up, then you can decide when you want to start pushing for that rank as well. For trend driven collaborations and new launches, what is the best practice for keyword strategy? leveraging the partners' brand awareness through branded search terms or using broader category keywords. Um I I do think using the partner's brand awareness is is a great way to get great visibility. Um using broader keywords obviously again like that's another way to reach new new customers on site and and kind of get that out there. It just might not be as efficient or effective of a tactic if you again are a protein powder brand you're doing a collab with someone else. You're still in highly competitive category terms. So getting that visibility uh but if you want to reach you know true fans of your partner of the brand that you're partnering with going on their branded terms is probably the best way uh to do that. And again maybe using other things like sponsored brands or sponsored brand videos to kind of tell more about that partnership and why it's happening and tell that story to the consumer might make your advertising just a little bit more effective. Um, when you suggest to put your budget behind the hero products, does that mean you shouldn't run campaigns for the other variations at all? Or should you have campaigns for all the variations and just put 90% of the budget behind the hero products and 10% budget behind the other var variations? Again, it it really depends on your brand. Like if if you think that putting 100% of your budget towards those hero products and you think you're going to completely crash your other products in your catalog, then then don't do that. I think it's good to start like over time increasing budget for hero products, decreasing for your your non-priority items and kind of see what that does. If you and over time you can keep increasing and decreasing as necessary. Um I want to avoid you completely removing all budget and then crashing um you know your other products here. I think why I say that is because uh you know focus your budgets because again if that's where you're driving sales that's probably where you want to focus the most of your budget for these other non-priority items. this might be a great case where you throw an auto campaign against them. Um, you could put $25, $50 a day and they're still going to get a good amount of visibility on site and that's a good way that you can maybe have some coverage on your branded terms and get that category keyword mix in there. Um, so again, it it's really up to you. There's different ways that you can kind of move that around depending on your goals. When would focus on top of search be sensible? >> Yeah, I think again think of your category, right? So, if you're back to the hand soap um example, um people are probably it's not a very there's clicky and scrolly categories. Um for example, hand soap is more of a clicky cyory. You're the person is likely not scrolling too far down the page. They see what they want. You know, it's within their price range within the first five or six placements. Maybe they'll even make it to the middle of the page and um they click and convert. That is an instance where like you absolutely want to be top of search because that's how you're going to get the most visibility. However, there are other product categories like women's clothing for example that are extremely scrolly, right? So, people are just scrolling and scrolling. They might go through five pages to find um you know the shirt that they want or the pair of sneakers that they want. Um so, that's an instance where top of search might not necessarily be super necessary. You can settle with a middle of the fold, bottom of the fold placement, excuse me, middle of search, bottom of search placement and still get a lot of clicks and a lot of conversions that work within your budget and is more efficient than a top of search placement. So, think about your category and how consumers are shopping in it. >> All right, very good. Okay, this next one is a long one. What strategy would you recommend after being out of stock for over 55 days? Before the stockout, the product was generating around five sales per day, but after restocking, it appears to have lost its organic rank and sales momentum. Uh, should I focus on aggressive PPC, coupons, lower pricing, keyword ranking campaigns, or gradual bid increases to rebuild sales history without losing control of the a costs? >> Yeah. Um I genuinely I think it top level could be a mix of all of those. Your goal here is to reestablish relevancy um for that item. So all of those things are going to help. If you again are focusing more on um PPC, you're going to get your product, you know, more visible to the consumers. They're going to purchase that um increase your sales. Again, that flywheel goes into effect again. but also coupons, lowering your pricing also might make uh consumers more likely to buy your product, increasing your sales, increasing your relevancy, and so forth. Um, so I I think do what makes sense to your brand. If doing coupons and lowering your pricing is going to make your product unprofitable for you, don't focus there at first. Focus on PPC. Um, focus on making sure your campaigns are set up as they show with the proper keywords and so forth. Rebuilding bids like you said. >> All right, very good. Uh, this one is from Mark. He says, "What look back period do you usually use to optimize? Is it dependent on velocity of the niche and keywords? What's a minimum amount of clicks or orders to make an educated bid decision?" I think so. Look back period to optimize. Like I said earlier, I think you know a week, maybe 5 days, like make sure you have time to really look at the data um and see things how things go. Um I don't know if I understand the velocity on the niche part. Um Carrie, maybe you do. I don't want to take the second question there, but >> maybe because there's a lot more like, you know, certain categories have a lot more action than others. Like there's some kind of niche categories where they're like really getting very minimal PPC clicks. >> Yeah. >> And so it does take a lot longer to kind of figure out what's going on. Um but then again, if you're in the, you know, really aggressive categories, you're going to be spending a ton of money and kind of feeling out of control. So um >> Gotcha. I see. I >> Yeah. Um again still I still maybe even if it was a very you're getting a lot of clicks and it's a very competitive category I still would rate wait maybe three four five days like you don't want to make a optimization after two days you need that to settle in also keep in mind attribution is at play right so a consumer can add something to your cart and they might not purchase it 5 days later so you might not get the attribution and for the sale on that keyword um till several days later and by then you might have thought oh no like no one's purchased our product this keyword is horrible let me take it out of my campaign and decrease our so keep that in mind um attribution is 14 days. I don't think you need to wait 14 days um between everything, but just keep that in mind. Um and uh in terms of keywords with minimal action, I guess again that's on that's on you to determine um if you think you have enough data. In terms of minimum clicks and orders, I I will say I don't know if I have the exact answer to this. I yeah, if my keyword only has five clicks, does that mean it's performing well for me or not? Compared to your other keywords, if all of your keywords are only getting five clicks, that probably needs means you need to increase your bids, quite frankly, or add in more highly traffic terms. But if you have keywords that are getting 50 clicks over the course of two days, and then you have some keywords that are only getting five clicks, um, then maybe forego those other keywords and focus on the ones that are getting more clicks. And maybe your bids are the same. Maybe you're getting the same amount of, you know, visibility on site. It's not highly traffic term and that's why you're not getting clicks. Stephen asked, "Is it possible to increase impression share for a specific keyword? For example, if our impression share is only 10% on a highly re relevant keyword that every competitor is targeting, what factors actually help us increase our share beyond just raising our bids?" Um, budget. Um, yeah, obviously having increased funds uh to increase the amount of time you're liable in that keyword. um allowing you to get more aggressive is probably going to increase your share. But something else to think of here, if you're just looking of um total paid impression share, not just sponsor product, for example, there might be the opportunity to utilize a sponsor brand banner or a sponsor brand video placement on the term. It's going to allow you to get a little bit more real estate on those keywords. And maybe there's a chance that sponsor brand video has a slightly cheaper CPC. It is more efficient for you. Um, and so investing a little bit of your budget there is actually can help you get more impressions than just sponsored product alone. So do think about the other ad units that are at play that could potentially help you. >> Awesome. All right. And before we go, people might want to, you know, get in touch with you maybe on LinkedIn. Is there any place that people could find you if they wanted to contact you? >> Yeah. Um, my LinkedIn is just my name. Um, so yeah, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. >> All right. Awesome. And thank you so much for joining us. This was really good. A lot of really good information. So, there's tons and tons of questions. I know that we didn't get to all of them, but um I think that's uh all we have time for today, but want to say thank you to the audience also for asking such great questions and then also for Paige for, you know, kind of sparking their uh thought process and, you know, asking those questions and just answering these with the full details. So, appreciate you and we hope to have you again on here some other time and um we'll see everyone else later. Thank you everyone. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Bye.