#696 - Tips For Smarter Amazon Advertising

#696 - Tips For Smarter Amazon Advertising Unknown Speaker: Today, we are breaking down the newest Amazon advertising updates that you need to know to stay competitive. From a long-awaited keyword harvesting update inside of Helium 10 ads, smarter audience targeting with AMC, and new-to-brand bid adjustments all the way to Amazon's new AI audience query generator and AI video generator, the features covered in this episode are the same ones that are already reshaping how sellers can run campaigns. Speaker 2: 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, and this is a show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Unknown Speaker: And to walk you through all of that, our special guest for this episode is none other than Mr. Vince Montero, a former senior product marketing manager and evangelist at Helium 10, as well as the founder and CEO of eVinced Digital. You'll want to sit all the way to the end of the episode because he really does cover updates that quickly help you zero in on shoppers with real buying intent. Learn how to build polished short-form product ads in seconds, everything from lifestyle shots and animations to branded overlays and background music in just a few clicks. Take it away, Vince. Speaker 1: I'm excited about things I've seen both within ads and on Seller Central recently. There's been a lot of movement the past couple of months, but I know that I was excited to see something that Bradley had posted in the Weekly Buzz, I believe, which was something that I had been asking about for, well, basically since we launched. I'm the CEO of Helium 10. Helium 10 is a company that launched its first atomic or launched ads, and I know that it's something that he would want me to share here as well. But yeah, let's get into this Tacos Tuesday, but get into this new update in ads first. So you're probably familiar with ads, Helium 10 ads, if you are here on this Tacos Tuesday, which is all about PPC. So this is the solution from Helium 10 One thing that we always had an issue with keyword harvesting, which is, as many of you probably already know, is looking for search terms that have done well for you that you want to then target on their own, so on a keyword basis. In its own campaign or maybe a campaign with multiple keywords. So the keyword harvesting rules that we have and you can see a lot of this particular one. I just picked this account quite a different few harvesting rules. Basically, you want to set that up by product type. Primarily, to get the most relevant search terms to turn into keywords. But the issue is that it's kind of like this spout that once you turn on, it's kind of hard to control. Now, the whole point of finding these search terms is to test them as keywords, but you can't really do that if you've got them all in a campaign with a bunch of different other keywords, especially if they're All different search volumes. When I would do trainings at Helium 10, I would always say maximum five keywords if it's high search volume and maybe maximum 20 keywords in a campaign if it's a lower search volume. Well, we haven't really had a good way to moderate that. That's all been a manual process. That's something that Bradley talked about. I just kind of wanted to pop in here and show you something that was done recently to help with that. I'm just going to pick one of these rules. As you can see, you can automate keyword harvesting rules. I don't have any of them on to automation because I actually like to see the keywords that ads is pulling before I add them into a different campaign. Now, the other layer to that though is, well, is that keyword already in another campaign in that same grouping? I'll just open one of these for you guys to give you an idea. This is a rule for one of my client's products. It's a bike rack. It's the classic rack. So basically every single campaign that I have that has that product in it is in this rule. And what ads will do is look for search terms on all these different ad groups in these campaigns, whether it be a product targeting, so ASIN based or keyword based. You got your auto campaigns here. Those are ASINs and search terms. And if it's good, it will then transfer over to the other similar campaigns, other campaigns that are checkmarked here so that you can test it in different campaign formats and different match types, which is really important. But again, that's kind of like turning on a hose. So unless you're moderating that and watching it carefully, it can quickly go from five keywords in a campaign to 25, 30, 40, and then you're over best practices. So what they added here at the very, very bottom is in this control area and previously control was, hey, do you want to manually do this or you want to automate this? Now, they've added this new toggle, which I'm going to go ahead and keep this on. This is something that I'm slowly going through and adding to all my rules, is basically don't suggest that search term if it already exists in that same match type at least. So if it's already as an exact somewhere, don't add it as an exact in a new campaign. So if it's in the rule and you've already got a campaign that has that keyword in that match type, it's not even going to bring it up. It's not even going to suggest it. So that takes up a lot of the kind of like manual back and forth of checking the keywords that are being pulled from ads. So for your keyword harvesting rules. So this is going to save up a lot of time and hopefully it's going to stop that whole overflow of just adding way too many keywords into a campaign when they already might exist in other campaigns in the exact same match type. Really cool feature. Excited about that. And again, something that I had been asking for for a while. With that, I'm going to go ahead and then go into my slides, which I presented, which are going to be more off Amazon. Speaker 2: If you want to watch the Serious Sellers Podcast in video form, make sure to go to YouTube and check out our brand new YouTube channel. Just type in the search bar Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast and you'll see our S logo come up. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. Go to the channel and binge watch any of our episodes that we have done lately. We'll see you there. Speaker 1: What we're going to talk about today again is new Amazon ads features that sellers like you guys can actually implement. Pretty much right away, today, if you wanted to. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about, which I'm really excited about actually, is Amazon's introduction of new-to-brand bid adjustments for sponsor brand campaigns specifically. Now, this lets you raise your bids specifically for shoppers who haven't purchased from your brand up to 12 months. Now, this is a big deal because it shifts the focus from just driving sales to actually growing your customer base. If you're a new brand, that's really important for that exposure and getting that brand new customer base. One of my clients that I've set this up for who we did increase, well, we started at 30, went up 50, 100%. And once we hit the 100% new-to-brand bid boost, we saw their new customer orders nearly double. Not to say that that's going to happen for everyone, but there is the potential there. So what this graph shows is just representations. I like to give some visuals. And this is just the order distribution before applying the new-to-brand bid adjustments. The green stacked bars represent the incremental growth after the bid boost were actually applied. And you just want to notice how the new to brand segment grows significantly when using a 50% increase up to 100% bid increase. You could even go higher than that. I typically like to stay at the 100% bid increase just to make sure it doesn't actually go out of control. Now, so why does this matter for you guys as sellers? This will help you expand your customer acquisition. You're not just retargeting existing buyers. You're funding growth by reaching brand new customers, which is for a lot of clients that I have that don't sell consumables and reorders. It's really, really important that they get brand new customers all the time. And this is a data driven strategy. A lot of times with these Amazon updates, You can't really track some of the measurements that they've added. This one in particular, they actually did add it. So you can track new-to-brand metrics in Amazon Ads reports to directly measure these incremental sales. Now, how to implement this? Now, you're going to want to create a brand new sponsored product, a brand campaign. This isn't something that you can go into an existing campaign yet to add. Sometimes Amazon does add that after the fact. Right now, it's just creating a sponsored brand campaign. Enable new-to-brand bid adjustment. And again, start with a conservative boost, maybe 30% to 50%, and then scale up based on performance or your ROI. Important, you're going to want to monitor your new-to-brand orders and new-to-brand percentage of sales in the campaign reporting that I mentioned. Now again, this one has provided the best ROI so far in my testing. That's why I did want to start with this particular new-to-brand audience. But there are other ones. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is AMC, they are also now available in sponsored brands. This means that you can adjust bids for specific audiences, not just new to brand, like I just went over, but as you can see in the screenshot, you've got cart abandoners, people who basically just added your product to the cart and just maybe went away. Maybe they forgot about it. Maybe they're waiting for a sale. And importantly, past purchasers, people who have actually bought your products in the past. So this kind of targeting lets you bid higher only on the shoppers that are most likely to convert. And this change signals that Amazon's really moving towards more audience-driven targeting. We're seeing more and more audience capabilities within the Amazon Ads console. So it's definitely something that you're going to want to test, but you're going to want to test these audiences in separate campaigns to get the best data. So that's what I did. Basically, I did I'm at Descartes for one, and I did past purchases for another, and then a Nudibrand. A Nudibrand, for me and for my experiments so far, Nudibrand really did perform the best, so definitely wanted to put that out there for you guys. An important thing to note with SP campaigns in general, if you guys haven't seen within your console, current sponsor brands are what's called version three. And they don't have these capabilities, these audience capabilities that we just went over. And all those campaigns are going to be deactivated by the end of October. Amazon does that sometimes with campaign types. They'll come up with new iterations and then the older ones basically fall off. So it's happening again with all sponsored brand campaigns. So if you haven't refreshed your sponsored brand campaigns yet, now's a really good time to do that launch or Take your existing ones and move them into version 3 so that you can take advantage of the new bid adjustment capabilities I just went over. Amazon does make it fairly easy to update your campaigns. You can find them in the recommendation section. That's where this screenshot is. If you guys don't know where that is, typically it's in the upper left-hand column right when you log into the ads console. And it'll be one of the things that they're recommending because I'm seeing it more and As in this example from one of my clients, there's nine campaigns that with a click of a button, actually, I can take all these version three SP campaigns and turn them into version four campaigns. Now, it does kind of start over from scratch because you're archiving the older campaigns. So keep that in mind that you're going to want to monitor those to get them back up to maybe their previous performance. Next up is something that I'm finding interesting, again, for some of my clients is business only campaigns or business focused campaigns. This is another recent update, again, where you can really just target campaigns just to businesses and just to that area within sponsored products. Now, of course, if your products work well for professional buyers or maybe bulk orders, this really kind of is a no-brainer to test because Amazon business buyers are often repeat purchasers. They're typically a little bit less price sensitive than your average consumer, and in many cases, they can be tax exempt. In this visual, again, just a quick graphic. Just to show the side-by-side representation that these are two separate buyer groups. You've got your consumer buyers, which are just general shoppers and typically have mixed intent because they're buying lots of different types of products versus business buyers who are bulk orders, higher value growth. And so the arrows indicate just that separation of campaign targeting with a focus on business-only campaigns versus the bulk orders and B2B growth. So in general, what is it? It's just another campaign type within sponsored products for Amazon. It just excludes regular shoppers. So again, this is a feature that will help you focus on these high intent professionals. But keep in mind, it will only work for businesses. So this is a very niche campaign type. So again, how to implement that? You're in the ads console when you're creating a new sponsored product campaign. You can see you've got two options now. You've got the Amazon and beyond, which is in Amazon as well as obviously some off Amazon marketing, or you can just select the business-only campaign option. I've seen this version of the business-only selection a couple of different ways. It's either in the ad group or maybe even on the very, very first creative or create campaign page that you see that breaks down all the different campaigns. You'll see this business-only option now. Now, very important, because this is a very specific type of campaign, you do want to tailor your ad copy in the creative towards business use cases like bulk orders, maybe operational efficiency, cost savings of buying in bulk versus not. And again, always important to track your campaign performance separately from your consumer campaign. So if you've got those running side by side, keep in mind, it's not apples to apples, it's really apples to oranges. So you're going to want to measure that incremental growth separately. Now, best case scenario, and I have seen that for a couple of my clients, you will see stronger ROI for, again, for products designed for business, industrial, or maybe kind of bulk purchasing. And in some cases, improved ad efficiency with fewer wasted impressions on maybe some of those retail shoppers that are mixed intent. Now, if you're not quite sure if your product might work, maybe you're on the fence about this. I did try this with another client and it actually didn't work for them, but it might work. It's kind of a pro tip too. You can test your product ahead of time. You can add bid adjustments in existing SP campaigns. You want to just go into the campaign, into the ad group in the left side menu. Under bid adjustments, you'll now see all placements, Amazon business placements, and audiences. Under that Amazon Business Placements, you can go ahead and increase the bid adjustments. Again, I would do incrementally 30, maybe 50, then 100. And if you do actually see good results here, it could indicate that your product might be good for a business only campaign. So you could test this either an existing campaign that's doing well, or maybe a campaign that's not doing well, see if it might improve the results. Now, so again, this is just something that if you wanted to test, you can go ahead and do that. If you want to just add this as a layer to some of your campaigns without creating a whole separate business-only campaign, you can also do that as well. But as always, test, test, test. Now, again, SP campaigns also have audiences. We just went over with SP, but the audience capabilities for SP are a little bit older, so that's why we're not going to go over those audiences again in more detail today. Next up is specific to AMC, but I do feel it's important a lot more sellers are getting access to AMC, which I think is important. Again, stands for Amazon Marketing Cloud. Or you have software that actually will get you access, like Atomic has an AMC layer as well. So this is a brand new way to create audiences. And it's based on, it uses AI to do that kind of data dive into the audiences for you. So it really reduces the need for extensive knowledge of AMC, which can be a little bit complicated. And you can just type in in plain English prompts, like, I don't know, customers who are buying camping gear, parents who are shopping for their babies, newborns. The tool then recommends ready to use audiences. Based on Amazon's first party data. So this is really just a shortcut for discovering niches that you might not have thought of before. It's pretty quick and it's easy. So if you've got maybe seasonal products or product specific campaigns where you've got a limited time, this again also might be easy to then turn off. Again, the graph here is just kind of a little before and after visual showing how layering the audiences changes the targeting efficiency. So on the left, you see a typical funnel. Without the AI advanced audience targeting. So you've got the higher impressions, but then the steep drop off as shoppers move down to purchase. And on the right is the same funnel after implementing the AI generated audience segments. So just stronger engagement, fewer drop-offs, and significantly more conversions because you're really targeting the exact type of audience that you want your campaigns to be put in front of. So why does all this matter? Well, again, it removes the need for deep technical knowledge in AMC. I've been doing this for a while, since 2017. And for me, it was even a learning curve on how to implement AMC and create those audiences. And you can quickly uncover maybe some niche audiences that you might not have thought of before. So how to implement this? Again, inside AMC, you can open up sponsor brands or sponsor display campaigns. And under the creation section, you go to the audiences and then custom and then AI audience query generator. And again, type those prompts, whatever it is that you're looking for shoppers buying rechargeable lanterns, maybe traveling gear for their new baby, who knows and see what it comes up with. Review those suggestions, review the suggested segments, and then add to your relevant campaigns and then target them. And again, I don't I want to stress this again, as with all things that I typically teach and basically for all the audience features that I've talked about in today's session, you're going to want to test test multiple audiences. Don't just want it done. I've seen some clients come to me saying, oh, we tried that and we tried that, but then we stopped because it didn't work. You want to iterate, right? You want to create separate ad groups for each audience to measure performance independently, but multiple different types of audiences. And you can combine it with new-to-brand adjustments like I just went over earlier in the session. If you layer the new-to-brand boost on audiences, it'll expand your customer base. Again, review every 30 days minimum. It's not the same as maybe your standard CPC or PPC campaigns where you can kind of maybe get an idea after the first week or two. I would say 30 days is probably the minimum required time to really see if an AMC audience layer is going to work for you and then just rotate the underperforming audiences out. And refresh with new segments based on maybe seasonal trends and use video ads when you can. We've seen I've seen higher engagement rates with these audiences, especially when the creative is tailored to their particular needs. So video is and always has been and becoming more and more important in the efficiency of your ad spend because we are seeing definitely higher engagement when it comes to video. So on that note, I wanted to cover some new advanced creative tools that are primarily powered by AI. This is key. In general, creative, in my opinion, is just as important as targeting, if not more. Because if it's an individual that they see first, the shopper's going to engage with that more importantly than the keyword that you might have put in there for them to see it. So Amazon's continuing to step up their game when it comes to Today we're going to talk about AI when it comes to video and this is just another example of that. This is an AI video generator and it lets you create really kind of polished up to 20 second videos automatically. It'll include background music, text overlays, even product and use animations. And this used to require a lot of editing or outsourcing to maybe other AI tools or maybe other companies. But now you can use this to really quickly create videos for you in Amazon itself. Now the standard video builder is still there. So there's basically two video builders now in the console and I'll show you that in a second. And that's the one that just can turn your product images into short videos using templates. So you basically just select images And you can put it into a template that'll add maybe some graphic text and some video, but it's a little bit more manual and it doesn't do some of the animations that the new AI video generator does. But either way, either direction you do choose, Amazon really has confirmed that video ads consistently deliver higher engagement compared to static images. So this is really a tool that every seller should be testing. So where do you find both of these actually? You just navigate to the menu in your ads console and select creative tools. And then you scroll down to the video builder. Now, once you do that, this will open up the same page that the original builder is at, but if you click on the generate video button in the header, for right now it's only in the header for some reason, it'll take you to the new area where you're going to just select a product and run it. The original video builder is in the button below that, which is just create video. It's a little bit confusing, so that's why I highlighted this with a red box. You can see how to get into the new AI version. Again, after you select a product, I went ahead and selected a product in this example already, just, again, one of my client's bike racks. It'll look at pretty much all the images, the video and videos on the detail page, the A plus content. I even think it might even be looking at some of the ads for the product based on what I saw, and it'll provide an initial six options for you, you know, maximum 21 seconds long. And these are polished video ads. Had more time I was going to actually pop over there into that. And so you can actually see these and see how some of them moved. But I know we're pressed for time. So but you do want to keep an eye out for hallucinations. Like you can see in the first video, or yeah, well video image, you've got the guy kind of going through a door, but his top bike wheel is missing. So that wheel is still on the wall. So the AI Separated that from the wall from the bike and so he's walking away without a tire on it. So there's a couple of funny hallucinations that it did. But then there were three that actually were pretty good and it combined existing videos and ads and it sped up some of the video in some cases. So it can do some really interesting things if your product is Maybe not as difficult to explain or to demonstrate. It might be really super helpful. If it needs a lot more detail or explanation for how to use your product, this might not be the best fit still yet, but it's probably moving in that direction. So again, why does all this matter? Video ads pretty much perform static ads in sponsored brands and in DSP placements. So you can test professional quality creative without hiring editors, without going to different software. It'll speed up your video production maybe if you've got seasonal or product launches that you just need something really, really quickly. So it'll help smaller brands as well as larger brands. Or it can provide baseline video content and you can iterate that later on with a professional builder, a professional production team if you want to do that later. Last but not least, Something else that I think is interesting is performance metrics and forecasting that Amazon's now integrating into the ads console. So they're changing how we measure success. Many sellers only rely on short term ACOS or ROAS as their performance metrics. But the problem is that it's typically reactive in looking at past data and it's only showing a part of the picture. So now we have LTS, which is long-term sales metrics, and forecasted ROAS. These track the influence of ads over a 12-month period and it captures delayed conversions, repeat purchasers that sometimes get overlooked when looking at ACOS and ROAS metrics alone. Here's what that looks like in practice. Again, just a visual. The red line shows short-term attribution where sales spike quickly, but fade pretty fast. The green line shows longer-term sales, slower up front, but continuing steadily for months after that. This really kind of shows a bigger extended impact of your ads, which is why I like it. When you do start using these LTS metrics, it changes the conversation, at least it has with conversations with my clients. Ads don't look just like a cost center anymore. They are a cost of doing business, that is known, but we can really demonstrate how they become long-term growth drivers, which is important when you're trying to explain what maybe the strategy is and projections maybe forecasting for the year. How to implement in the Amazon Ads console, you guys should be pretty familiar with all the different columns. You hit that columns button and then you can see the LTS metrics, LTS ROAS is there as well. I didn't put that screenshot in here because you guys know how to find things, but I do want to show you the kind of the results of what that looks like. Now, currently these metrics are only available for sponsor brand and sponsor display. But that could be changing. That could be coming for a sponsored product as well. As we know, Amazon likes to add things and then increase its reach over time. So once you do enable those metrics, you can really compare, you know, against your standard ACoS and ROAS to identify campaigns, maybe some long-term payback. And then you can use those insights to adjust maybe bids, budgets, your strategy, maybe with that campaign. And focus on customer acquisition over short-term profitability. Now, when looking at this small sampling of campaigns, I recognize that the top two campaigns had a higher ROAS over time than maybe some of the ones below. So having that insight makes you look at campaigns a little bit differently and what the forecasting might be for those. You maybe change your strategy a little bit for these campaigns. If you didn't have this data, this additional layer, you might do a different strategy with those campaigns. So again, the more data, the more information that you have in your pocket, the more you can make accurate decisions for all your PPC campaigns. And that's kind of it. That was my five major updates that you can, well, six, because I also talked about the update in ads that just happened, what, a week and a half ago. But you know, you can implement these today for across smarter targeting. New audiences, you've got the AI-driven discovery, better creative tools, and now some maybe long-term measurements. So the common theme among these things that I'm sharing with you guys is that Amazon is definitely moving more audience-driven and AI-assisted advertising that look beyond just the short term. So make sure you guys are taking a look at all these things that are available to you within the ads console. Unknown Speaker: Amazing! And there you have it, guys. That is a wrap on today's deep dive into all the latest and greatest Amazon ads updates. Go check this out for yourself and we'll catch you in the next episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast.