#656 - How to Rank Faster with Amazon PPC

#656 - How to Rank Faster with Amazon PPC Bradley: Today, we've got two expert guests on our Tacos Tuesday advertising show. We're going to talk a lot about how to rank when you're launching with PPC. We're going to talk about some advanced forms of advertising such as sponsor display and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Bradley Sutton. This is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the commerce world. Today we've got a two-for-one episode, half-recorded here remotely, half-recorded at the Prosper Show recently. We're going to be talking mainly about Amazon advertising and some other strategies with one familiar face to the show and then one new face. Let's go ahead and bring the new face To the show go ahead and introduce yourselves to our listeners out there. Speaker 1: Hey there Bradley. Thank you for having me So, my name is Marcin Morkulescu I'm the CEO and co-founder of IntelliRank and also the organizer of amazing days This is a show an actual event that's happening in the Balkan area So a lot of events in the US we participate a lot of them in the US but in Europe in the Balkan area This is the most important one. Bradley: So yeah, yeah, so he doesn't just organize amazing days like like literally I mean he's talking about a Show there, but I'm sure he organizes really amazing days for his family and friends as well But let's let's talk about some some some strategy But before we get in there, let's just you know, since this is your first time in the show. Let's get some background you said you're You're from Romania originally? Speaker 1: Yes, that's correct. Bradley: What city? Speaker 1: I'm from Timisoara. I was born and raised in another city and it was Dropeta Tornu Severin. That's a long name. Afterwards, I came to faculty here in Timisoara. I've been studying computer science. I'm an IT engineer and also have a mechanics faculty. I also have a master's degree in informatics. I pretty much kept myself busy. Bradley: Is that what you started working in after you finished school? Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. So I've been with the Internet ever since it was on dial-up. I was working with servers, Linux. So that's a passion that was here with me and also a very good incentive to get on board with the Internet. I can tell a lot of tales and stories of what happened back in the days, but I don't know if this is the case right now. Bradley: How did you get introduced to the e-commerce part of the Internet? Speaker 1: The e-commerce part came with myself programming, so I went into the programming space. I design my very own browser-based role-play game. It was back in the days in 2008-2009 when I started this game and that's when it came to go aboard with the actual things that were happening online. I had to market it. I had to do all the programming so it was a one-man show and it was very overwhelming but also rewarding. After that, I went into The actual e-commerce of Amazon back in 2016, that's when Hoodie was also creating the course in Romania. I'm sure you know Alex Hudson. We had a very strong community in Romania of Amazon sellers, but slowly it dissolved because no more courses. Hoodie is not organizing the course anymore and not a lot of people are tapping into that. Hence, the need of getting the people together and building up a big community here in Romania. Bradley: We do a lot of podcasts. about Romanians and ranking companies because I think a lot of the Top, you know like in history and when you know that there's been different times where different strategies are able to be used and not but you know You think of a lot of the the main companies of ranking that the one the very first one I use what was not Romanian it was it was called a Zon boost which doesn't you know, that was how I got my my start when I was a service provider, but then after that I It was the Romanians taking over the game, whether it was Rank Bell, Isabella, originally from Romania, AZ Rank, Alina from Romania, and now another Romanian ranking company. Why are Romanians so good at launch and rank? Speaker 1: That's a very good question. I guess, I don't know, we like this bit and this is the most important part of any business, if you ask me. It's about visibility, being up there in the Top of the shelves so people actually see you and actually purchase from you So I guess we're more focused on the solutions rather than the journey. I don't know. Bradley: I'm guessing okay So now I mean, you know as we mentioned throughout the years regardless of the company or whatever, you know that the Amazon rules and regulations have changed some things that were We're able to be done and we're legal. You know, all of a sudden one day became not legal. What is your like kind of like go-to method for ranking and especially for launch nowadays? Is it like a mixture of utilizing Amazon advertising? You know, now that we can't do things like, you know, maybe two-step URLs and search, find, buy and things that were very common, you know, just a few years ago. Is PPC your main source or how are you ranking these days? Speaker 1: There are two methods that we use. The main one is PPC. It's very well known for everyone. Also, we have another one that's called product testing. Bradley: When you're trying to rank and launch when you're just opening a product, sometimes We're going to talk a little bit about advertising and PPC cost and get out of control, but that's a very legal way of getting sales. How do you keep your advertising budget under control when you're a newer product, you don't have too many reviews, and so PPC spend can kind of get out of control? How do you control your budgets and your spend for a new product? Speaker 1: So, it's a matter of strategy. We always like to plan ahead and also, you know, present it to our clients and then execute. So, whenever we look at the signals we're sending to Amazon, I truly believe that we should present to Amazon no day without sales. We need to bring in sales every day from day one, and this is what we're doing. Through the product testing campaign, mainly, we're bringing in slowly sales. It doesn't have to be like 100 sales per day. It has to be something like one, two, three sales per day. And then also with PPC, keeping it under control, that's more on the, we usually start for myself. This is my personal strategy. I start with an automated campaign and also with a manual campaign on the long tail keywords. We do a very good research. This is a coincidence, but our favorite tool for keyword research is Helium 10 and we are using it on an everyday basis. Getting everything done with Helium 10 and then just implementing it into the PPC is straightforward for us and has been working for years. We're bored with it and thank you for this great tool. Bradley: You mentioned auto campaign and some exact campaigns. Michelle Barnum-Smith: What are their match types? Bradley: What campaign types are you using or do you suggest to use? Are you doing video campaigns right away or that's only until later? Are you doing sponsored brand campaigns, sponsored display or strictly ASIN targeting and keyword targeting for newer products? Speaker 1: For new products, the auto campaign is the main one and then we target keywords, but videos come later. We work through the entire funnel with Amazon. First is awareness, top of the funnel. We work through consideration, conversion and loyalty. We tap into the whole funnel and we organize the campaign slowly to target each of the steps in the funnel. The idea behind it is that the strategy is not being implemented all of it at once, so we're not targeting all of them at once. We start along a lot with awareness. Without awareness, that's the main goal, just to present the product out there. Also, we don't want to be very aggressive and put a lot of money into PPC at the beginning because we frankly don't have a lot of reviews, right? So, you need some social proof. You need some good reviews out there to showcase your product as a good product. And then, as soon as you get into and tap into more reviews through Vine, of course, You can expand and you can definitely reach out on the entire steps of the funnel and expand through targeted campaigns. So the whole idea and also the most powerful thought to have here, be aggressive, be defensive, and also target everything that you can through PPC and work your way out because at the end of the day, Amazon is putting this on the table for us and why not take advantage of all the specs there. Bradley: You mentioned starting lower with the budget. What kind of budgets for your initial campaigns do you suggest and then what does it go up to once you have more reviews? The seller's budget and things like that, but on average, you're starting off with your first auto and manual campaigns for launch. As long as the customer's budget or the seller's budget allows, what kind of budget are you allocating in the first month, your daily budget for PPC? Speaker 1: So, again, like you very well mentioned, Bradley, it's a matter of seller choice, so we work closely to the sellers. There's not one like the other. I'd say the most important part, I would refer back to the funnel. It's important for the sellers to understand that whenever we're starting, we need to invest in mainly the first layer of the funnel, which is the awareness. So, we'll be investing most of the budget into awareness. Consideration, also, we tap into that. That's mostly about the actual clicks, about the display page views. So we're tapping into these two bits for the beginning and optimizing for them. Now, in terms of budget allocation, that, again, is done based on client, yeah, let's say budget. And at the end of the day, we want to measure the KPIs. We have KPIs in place for each of the steps of the funnel. And based on those KPIs, we can take informed decisions. We do not do any guesswork here. We're mainly looking at the KPI. So the first step of the funnel awareness implies actually getting the actual impressions, the actual views that you get on the product. Then as we tap into consideration, we're looking at KPIs like the actual display page view or the actual clicks that we get. That's very important. The CTR is very important here. And then we tap into the actual conversion, which is referring to the actual sales, the actual orders and the new to brand. So, yeah. Bradley: Now, you mentioned using Helium 10 to find the best keywords that you would put in the listing and then that's what you're targeting. How do you strategize which keywords you're trying to rank for first? Obviously, you can't just rank for everything from day one. What's some of your strategy? Because obviously, Helium 10 can find a lot of keywords that are relevant to your product and relevant to competitors. How are you focusing on what are the top 5, top 10 keywords that you're trying to rank for in those initial stages? Speaker 1: At the beginning, we usually get to the long-tail keywords. We're targeting keywords with at least 5,000 monthly views and we're getting the long-tail keywords out of that list. We want to build a foundation. I look at it as building a house. You want to have a strong foundation. So first of all, we target and we get the low-hanging fruits. This also is in parallel working with reviews, which We'll come through Vine or other methods, whatever people are tapping into. And yeah, as the beginning comes, at the beginning, you want to tap into this. You need the user-generated content. You need to, you know, maybe not, why not leverage Amazon Post, even though, yeah, Amazon Inspire has been retired from the business. Still, Amazon Post is out there. I don't know for how long, but as long as it's there and it's free, why not tap into that as well, get more visibility for free. While we go with the long-tail keywords, we want to get as much real estate on those through PPC and why not through organic ranking. Later on, we will scale up and we will target more powerful keywords, more competitive keywords because we want to get more visibility, but that will happen once we get at least, let's say, for example, 10 reviews or 20 reviews. That will showcase the product in a good area and we have some social proof in terms of some good pictures, videos of the product, unboxing, anything that can help demonstrate the. Bradley: What is a couple unique strategies you think you have? It could be about advertising, could be about ranking, could be about Listing optimization, AI, anything at all, something that is a little bit more unique that you guys leverage with your own accounts and your clients' accounts? Speaker 1: I'd say it's a mix of everything that you mentioned. At the end of the day, it's not one strategy that will do the difference. It's a matter of getting them all and leveraging everything. One very important strategy I want to mention, and people are not using it so much, is experimenting. Back in the days, I got attached to my products, to my main image. This is what happens sometimes to business owners out there. We get attached to those. So, it was later that I discovered that at the end of the day, it's not important how you see it as an owner, and of course, you will love your product. It's your product, of course, but try to get the information from the clients. How we like to do that is through Amazon Experiments. It's very important also we build the listings having in mind how the client will perceive the listing. It's not about bragging about the features and everything but rather put it in the perspective that, you know, whenever someone is browsing, Amazon is like looking out there on the products and saying, what's in it for me? It's not about your brand. You have a great brand. You've built it very nicely. You've worked hard a lot, but people don't care frankly about that too much. They care about how your product is helping them. As soon as we understand that as sellers, as soon as We make the listings reflect what's the benefit, what's the value that people get out of the product. That's when we actually get the business rolling and the sales will kick in. This has been a journey for us to actually implement it and try to educate around the people how to best present the products in order not to be too braggy about the brand but rather What's in it for the customer? Bradley: Back to the amazing days. It's been a few years in Bulgaria. Why Bulgaria if you're living in Romania? Speaker 1: That's a great question. The event started back in 2020. I believe that was the first event there. It was quite a small event, like 30 people at the beginning, very cozy. It started in Bulgaria because it was started by Nikolai Ilchev. He's the actual main organizer of the Balkan E-Commerce Summit. Now, this is back in the days when we started actually leveraging the Balkan area. We started in Bulgaria, Sofia, then we shifted to Romania. The next event was in Romania, then we went to Barcelona, and then last year, we came back to Sofia. This year, we'll be back in Sofia again. Why? Because we found a very nice community in Bulgaria and also Romania is a neighbor country, so it's easy for us to just commute from Romania to Bulgaria. We found a very powerful community there in Bulgaria, so instead of getting them all traveling to Romania, Bucharest, Barcelona, and all the parts of the world, we created the core there. Now, this is one reason. The other reason is that the Amazing Days is a satellite event for the Balkan e-commerce summit. So while Amazing Days is focusing on Amazon sellers and has Amazon topics, and we'll have Amazon celebrities this year that are, you know, we have a powerhouse lineup for speakers. Also, the next days will be about e-commerce in general, e-commerce in the Balkan area with the Balkan e-commerce summit. So We linked it together to get the most out of people when whenever they're traveling to get the most out of their travels and Participating to events at once excellent now obviously I'll be speaking in English, but the rest of the event is. Bradley: For the Amazing Days event at least, will all the speakers also have their presentations in English? Speaker 1: Absolutely. All the speakers actually are very powerful speakers from around the world. We have Vincenzo. Everyone knows Vincenzo from ECOMC, so he's coming this year as well on stage. We have Samantha Tillet from Alep Group. We also have Or Shamosh, which is very powerful into the industry in terms of compliance and problems that might. This is a very powerful presentation about how to stay compliant with your listings and everything on Amazon. And we have Max Sinclair, he will be talking about AI. So everything will be in English and every presentation will be there. And the main language will be English, definitely. Bradley: Excellent. All right. So, guys, if you want more information, an easy way, easy link to go, go to h10.me forward slash Bulgaria. I made a link that will go to the website and then we can see you. The date is going to be on the 28th of April, so still time to plan and the thing I love about Europe is Regardless of where you are in Europe, you're like a 40-euro Ryanair flight away from another country or anywhere else. I was just in the Prosper show in Vegas and just to go to the airport, to any casino or hotel, it's about 40 euros or $40. It's in the Uber. It's so crazy, but for the same price, you can go from Spain to Bulgaria. You can go from UK to Bulgaria. You can go from almost anywhere. So, if you're in Europe and you want to go to an event with some great speakers, including myself, thank you for inviting me. Make sure to go to h10.me. I look forward to seeing you there. It'll be my first time in Bulgaria. I've been to Romania a few times but I look forward to it. One of my favorite sumo wrestlers originally is from Bulgaria. He was very famous in Japan for many years. I know Bulgaria is also famous for yogurt and some good things. I'll be leaving a little bit early, so my presentation will be in the morning probably because all of a sudden, last second, just like a couple of days ago, my work was like, hey, you have to be in San Diego, California, Tuesday morning, 8.30. I'm speaking in Bulgaria on Monday. How in the world am I going to get back? I hope to see you guys. I'll be there for the VIP dinner the night before so if you guys have a chance to sign up for that VIP dinner, make sure to sign up on Sunday night and then the main event on Monday. So, Marcel, thank you very much for coming on here and I'll be seeing you in a couple of weeks. Speaker 1: Looking forward to it, Bradley. Thank you for having me. One more thing I guess we can mention to everyone. We have a small present for everyone like a discount. If you input Helium 10 when you purchase the ticket with Amazing Days, you'll get a 10% discount. So, thank you, Bradley, and looking forward to seeing you soon. Bradley: Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees. Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create POs for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments and more all from inside Inventory Management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash Inventory Management. And don't forget, you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code SSP10. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Alright, so we're here at the Amazon ads booth here in Prosper Show. How has this Prosper event been for you? Is this your second, third? Speaker 2: It's my third Prosper show. It's been an amazing experience. I think it's one of the few shows out there that you really get to connect with other like-minded people. People fly all across the globe to meet at the same place. It's been an amazing experience as well. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Let's talk Amazon ads as we're in the Amazon ad period. I fear we can talk about advanced strategies going to beginners, but let me just start off with something that I think I haven't dabbled too much in. I've always used sponsored display ads, but I just do the very basic where I'm just like, you know, for ASIN targeting. Sponsored display is much more than just ASIN targeting ads, those ones that you see like under the buy box and things. What are some other ways that me and the audience out there should be using sponsored display ads? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would say sponsor display is something that I feel a lot of people, unfortunately, is utilizing. It's such a powerful type of advertising that you have within Amazon. I think something I personally love about a sponsor display is the opportunity to use audiences. It's effectively trying to reverse engineer what is their lifestyle or their context behind affairs in terms of what they're actually shopping in the platform itself, right? And you can be very clever. You can go clever in the sense that you can understand For example, let's say you're selling products in the pet space. Are you looking for people that when it comes to lifestyle has everything to do with pets, right? So now with Sponsor Display, you can find those audiences and there's a lot of audiences that Amazon effectively gives you the option to target. And then you can refine that also with specific windows in terms of what is the engagement they've been having with your product's pages, with your competitors. And that's something that allows you to go an extra step forward beyond the traditional sponsor products that you have only with keywords. Because now, usually with keywords, you're always at the bottom of the funnel. It's when people are already at that stage that they want to I make a purchase. By sponsor display, you can be very clever and interact with the customer at the top of the funnel, create that awareness effect, and try to make them into a loyal customer of yours. So it's very powerful. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Now, on ASIN targeting, sponsored display, if there's something that's not performing well, I can just do negative target or pause that target. Sponsored product, we're all used to being able to control cost because if there's something that's getting out of hand, I can control the bid. I can just pause that target and do a negative match. When you're doing audience targeting, which is not a certain keyword, How do you control it so that the spend just doesn't go crazy? Speaker 2: Yeah, so usually what we try to do with audiences, we try to test them in isolation. That's very important. I see that mistake done a lot when it comes to doing sponsor display. Usually people end up putting a lot of audience in the same campaign. Then effectively, it's going to be very difficult for you to understand what is the actual contribution of each audience to the performance that you're getting out of that strategy. So, start by doing isolation, so one campaign per audience when it comes to sponsor display. And then based on the performance, usually that's how I'm going to just effectively the bid I'm putting against the audience, right? And then you can refine that at the budget level. And then if you see that, usually I give myself 7 to 14 days because you need to let the system to effectively give you data. But if you see the consistency is not there in terms of exposure, I usually just end up turning that campaign off and then start doing more A-B testing with our audiences until I find the right one. When it comes to the KPIs, I'm looking that you're responsible. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Let's switch gears and maybe talk a little bit more about some more basic strategies and something I've talked about at different talks I've had here at Prosper. I just ask for a raise of hand and pretty much everybody says they're not doing this. I'll give one and then maybe you could give something that you think that is something that, hey, even newer sellers, they're forgetting when it comes to advertising. One, I don't want to call this a hack because it's just a regular strategy, but when we talk about product targeting, ASIN targeting ads, I think the tendency is everybody's only focused on doing like products and that's fine. If I'm selling a coffin shelf, I'm going to target the other coffin shelves that maybe are higher priced or worse reviews. Nothing wrong with that. You absolutely should be doing that. But another strategy I think people should do is in Helium 10, there's a tool called Blackbox, but then it's called Product Targeting. And with that tab, you can put in an ASIC and you're going to see the history of the last 60, 90 days of the products that have come in frequently bought together. And sometimes what you see is like, you know, people are not buying two different coffin shelves at the same time. You know, sometimes they do, but usually it's like complimentary products or like here's a coffin shelf and then it's like a skull-shaped candle holder or bat-shaped stickers, right? And then what happens is if you look on those bat-shaped stickers, you look on the skull and the holder and you look at who's targeting them in sponsored display, you look at the product target, it's just all the same product, which again is fine. You should target your competitors. But you actually have data from Amazon that says, hey, people are buying this coffin shell with this skull-shaped thing. This is not like some guess or some Helium 10 algorithm. This is directly from Amazon saying people are buying it. So now you should be targeting that and now you would be the only coffin shell showing up on a product that already there's a history of people buying it. So that's one strategy thing that almost nobody's using that you guys are, a lot of you are Helium 10 members. Any level of Helium 10 has a product targeting tab, find complementary products. What about you? Do you see some kind of what you would maybe consider a basic strategy but you think a lot of people are sleeping on? Speaker 2: Yes. I think actually the basket analysis insight, for example, you get from brand analytics is super powerful and I think a lot of people are not utilizing that. The reason why I say it's so powerful is When you're doing advertising on Amazon, specifically in targeting, I agree, a lot of people just go at the basic level, just targeting products that are exactly the same, but sometimes they don't go into the extra layer and understand what are the other products my client is buying this product with, right? And a lot of the time, what it actually allows you to do is effectively find a cheaper CPC cost-per-click, which can be huge when it comes to maximizing the return on investment on So yes, try to diversify what kind of products you target. Sometimes it could be accessories, could be compliments or products that are part of the same lifestyle when it comes to The full journey of that specific product and another tip I would like to give to a sponsor product is in targeting campaigns. Something that works very well for us is try to identify what are those listings that were just launched in the platform, right? We try to use Helium 10 to identify those and effectively what we do is by finding the listings that were just launched in the last 60 days, we know for a fact when somebody launches a product on Amazon, they're going to run a lot of advertising to those listings. But sometimes, we're going to have a very competitive offer. We might have better pricing, more reviews, and effectively, if we find those ACs and try to take advantage of the fact that you might have a better offer, that can be a better way for you to get a better return investment. Instead of trying to compete with the bigger seller on that category that might have already a lot of reviews and a big organic exposure. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Another thing I wanted to talk about today was I think everybody's favorite Amazon data point search query performance. One of my favorite ways of using it is looking at, hey, where have I gotten purchases, but my conversion rate is better than the market conversion rate? And the way you look at that is, hey, actually, in Helium 10, it's super easy. It just shows you. We have a tool for that. But if you're looking in Seller Central, you just need to take the number of page clicks from the overall, the total page clicks, and then we'll get total purchases. Divide that That's the market conversion rate for that keyword. And then you look at my product, you know, my purchases versus my clicks, and now you have yours. And so if let's say mine is a 10%, conversion rate and the market is 7%, that means I'm doing better. So now I look at my impressions and if it's less than the search volume, it means I could be leaving money on the table because I'm not showing up always when somebody searches. So that's what I want to double down on advertising and maybe increase my bids knowing that it's also going to help my organic ranking. Conversely, the opposite, if my conversion is way less and I'm struggling with profitability on a target, instead of just like insisting, oh, I have to show up on top of search, maybe I can dial back the spend knowing that, hey, it's got like a losing battle. Is there anything else in search query performance that can affect the way that you tackle advertising that you look at? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think something I also love about the search query performance report is it effectively allows you to understand how you compare against the competition, right? And sometimes if you don't take that into consideration when you structure your sponsor campaigns, you might end up effectively having a structure that is not going to allow you to maximize your return on investment because it's not tailored to counterattack what the competition is doing against you. So on the search query performance report, something that I love to see is the whole funnel exposure. So I have the impression, you have the click, you have the add to cart, and then you have I do a lot of conversions, and usually something I do quite often is I try to understand how my conversion changes throughout the whole funnel, right? So, for example, if I see that I have a very good conversion when it comes to impression, then I have a half a drop at the click rate, and then I have another drop at add to cart, and a significant drop at the purchase, that means there's something happening towards the end of the purchase that is not making the sales to go through. And usually, when I do an audit, It comes down to I'm being heavily attacked by sponsored product campaigns from my competition. They are within my product details pages. They are targeting me with sponsored display ads. So I need to protect effectively that exposure and that usually can allow you to fix a loophole within where you're losing sales. And the other example to conclude these same approaches, the search query performance report, is the inverse also happens. You may have not a lot of impressions, then they click increases in terms of conversion and they add to cart and you have a very good closure of purchases. That means you don't have enough traffic coming through your ad. That means you need to invest more into advertiser and that's usually a good way to understand where you are. How you can tailor your strategy there to affect the KPIs you want to achieve. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Awesome. Awesome. Now, for those of us who have been doing Amazon advertising for five plus years, we remember the old days, sponsored brand ads, sponsored display. There's not much room for custom creative. Maybe you could have your logo or something there or just another image that is in your image stack. But now, across sponsored brand headline ads and And sponsor display, you can do a lot of custom creatives. And even still, some people thought, oh, I can't really do it because it's too expensive to invest. But now with even AI and things like that, I think it's a lot more accessible to do custom creatives. So what direction do you suggest people go in, whether it's sponsored brand, like should they be doing lifestyle images? Should it be just product shots? Should it be something that just catches the eye? What do you usually guide your brands to do when it comes to custom creatives? Speaker 2: Yeah, so something I love about Amazon as well in this side of a type of ad is the amount of investment they have done to effectively try to give as much access as possible to people to leverage sponsor brands. Now integrations such as the one where it's happening with Canva, it's very easy to come with very nice You know, banners and lifestyle images that can completely change the perception of your brand. So I think a big mistake, going back to your question, is that usually when people do sponsor brands, the reason why they might not get the best outcome out of it is because they use very generic content when it comes to their campaigns. They don't tailor the content to the keyword they're targeting. Very quick example. Let's say we're targeting yoga mats, right? And the long-tail keyword is yoga mat for park. It's a yoga mat that's meant to be used on the outdoors. But then on the banner image is somebody using a gym, right? It's not connecting and conveying the emotion what the keyword actually should reflect. It should be actually somebody on a nice park, at the beach, something that reflects the actual usage of that keyword. So I think doing that, tailoring your content towards the specific keyword is something that for us has given us the best conversion, not only from the banner perspective and lifestyle images, What's a video? Video, oh my god, if you tailor that to a specific keyword and you convey the emotion that the keyword will reflect, video ads will be super profitable. Michelle Barnum-Smith: And Helium 10 ads, you know, which your agency uses, you know, obviously the key is like making all the rules base. And I think if we're just brand new sellers or maybe this is not like one of your hero products, there's nothing wrong with just making rules based on like A costs. Like for example, I've got a lot of rules where I say, hey, if my A cost is between 70 and 80, calculate it so that it brings it down to 60. And then if it's 60 to 70, bring it down to 50. And then if it's 5 to 10, hey, bring it up to 15 and different rules like that. But as somebody progresses with With ads, you should not be just basing things off of a cost. For example, using Helium 10 ads, we have the opportunity to base rules based on impressions, ROAS, clicks. How are you leveraging those rules? What are some things that you can make rules about that you would suggest to people that's not just solely based on ACOS? Speaker 2: If you purely focus on ACOS when it comes to doing any strategy within sponsored ads, sometimes you might end up falling into the trap of effectively stagnating the growth of your business. Because, of course, profitability is very important, but we have to understand that sometimes advertising has also to be seen from the perspective of creating the awareness that you need to consolidate your presence and captivate the market share control, which in the beginning might not be profitable. But over time, the goal is that we consolidate organically, our name is out there, people start creating their familiarity, and that's where, potentially, with the time and as a product, the acre is going to go to a point that you're going to be profitable. So, going back to the rules, usually a good rule that we try to implement when it comes to doing advertising is conversion. For us, the click-through rate is super important. Going back to what you just mentioned, With brand analytics, like if, for example, you're running advertising on Amazon and you're having a very poor conversion and click-through rate, usually what we see is that that significantly affects your exposure on the platform because it's very simple. Why would Amazon benefit a product that is effectively not converting traffic against a competitor that is maximizing every single customer that has an impression and click is being converted into a sale. So, going back to the rules, we try to maximize also conversion and this also, at the end of the day, has to be tailored to the specific objective of the campaign. Some campaigns might be purely for defensive strategy. So, right now, focusing on ACoS has to do with how much impressions and clicks I'm getting. What I ignore is about profitability. So, it's an ACoS driven rule. So, try to tailor the rules based on the objective and try to not make it generic because at the end of the day, if you End of doing some of these rules, generic. That's why we say that the profitable is real. So, yeah. Michelle Barnum-Smith: I think in the old days, a lot of people were content and it was fine to just sell in one marketplace as far as Amazon North America or, hey, I'm selling in Amazon Germany. I don't need to worry about others. But I think sellers nowadays understand the importance to diversify. And of course, for listing copy, of course, you got to localize your content. But as far as the advertising side, a lot of similar principles Are the same matter if you're advertising Amazon Germany, Amazon Australia, Amazon Japan, like ACOS, ROAS, Impressions, like the way you manage and keyword harvesting. These are like universal things. You have a lot of clients that are around the world in different marketplaces. Are there any like marketplace-specific advertising strategy like, hey, you know what? This doesn't work in Amazon Japan or this only works in Amazon Germany or is pretty much 100% of advertising the same in all marketplaces? Speaker 2: Yeah, so our e-commerce is significantly focused on localizing our strategies when it comes to advertising. I would say that when it comes to the way advertising works across all the markets where Amazon is present, it's definitely very similar in terms of how I would structure the campaigns. However, something that's significantly different is how I would target these keywords and how I would create my content. A very quick example is, for example, the way to sponsor brands on a market such as the U.S. is completely different than how we do it in Amazon Japan. The perception of branding is going to be different in terms of culture, how they actually convey a message throughout advertising. So you need to make sure, and we do that at EcomC, to use local people to reverse engineer what they have to see on a license image, what they have to see on a banner, or how they actually create that emotional connection to a campaign such as sponsor brands who work. By going back to traditional sponsored products, usually the key is to focus on finding what are the right keywords you have to go for. And just as a quick tip, let's say you're doing international expansion and I see this mistake a lot. Let's say you're jumping from the US to the UK. People sometimes assume that keywords that might work in a market such as the United States are going to work in other countries where the language is the same or they just translate the keyword and that's a huge mistake. Make sure you use tools such as Helium 10 to understand what is the actual keyword that is performing at the country level because trust me, most of the time, it's going to be different than the country where you're having the success and you end up with expansion. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Alright, let's close with our 30 to 60-second tips each. So, my 30 to 60-second tip would be, hey, if you're selling a product that has any kind of seasonality, which most products do have some seasonality, if it's not just a Christmas gift, but the keywords that people search around Christmas time might be different, do a historical search in Helium 10 Cerebro for your competitors. You don't have historical information if you're a new seller or It's a new product and you weren't selling last year, Christmas. So take the agent of a competitor, stick it in the cerebro, do a time machine, it's called the historical trends. Look back at November and December of last year. Look back at November and December of the year before. What were the different keywords that they were advertising top of search for? And probably those are good keywords to actually not, don't wait till November, start in October ranking and bidding on those keywords. So you can get some placement so that when you are having your first Christmas season, you're already like at the top of search for these keywords you know are important to your niche. You have a 30 to 60 second tip for everybody out there? Speaker 2: Yeah, so for me a tip that works very well is leveraging a placement optimization. This is something that's also very underutilized when it comes to sponsor ads. So make sure you understand what is the kind of placement that works the best for you. Most of your campaigns, if you've got the campaign level within the placement tab, you're going to be able to see what is the kind of placement that gives you the best conversion. Usually, we see for a lot of the main keywords you go for, top search is usually where you're going to have the best outcome in terms of return on investment. So make sure you leverage that. And something that we do significantly is identify the top 5 to 10 keywords, doing single keyword campaigns, maximize our exposure when it comes to top search. And we consolidate our presence and also make sure that organic exposure stays healthy. Over time. So that's my 30 second tip. Michelle Barnum-Smith: Awesome. Awesome. Bradley: I love it. Michelle Barnum-Smith: All right. What's the next few months for you for conferencing? You do Amazon Accelerate, Amazon Unbox, UDS? Speaker 2: We have a busy schedule. Accelerate, Unbox. We have a couple of events in Europe. We have a Billion Dollar Summit. Serious Sessions is in London. It's going to be a pretty tight schedule, but that's something I love. When it comes to the Amazon community meeting with our Amazon sellers, it's definitely something that I value significantly because that's usually where you're going to learn what the latest strategy is, why things are working, why things are not working. And you can stay on top of the game. Michelle Barnum-Smith: So, very excited. Absolutely. So, guys, if you're not here, wish you were here, make sure to go to Amazon Accelerate, unbox the other conferences around. You know, it's cliche, but your network is your net worth, kind of. And also, you learn things at the sessions. But for me, like the networking and being able to, you know, hang out with guys like Vincenzo, this is what makes these conferences good. So, we'll see you at the next conference or see you at Amazon Accelerate. Thank you. Speaker 2: See you. Thank you, Bradley.