Amazon PPC Launch Strategy Top Sellers Don't Share

Amazon PPC Launch Strategy Top Sellers Don't Share Speaker 1: Let's get into how the PPC should work for a product launch and specifically for the purposes of ranking because your Amazon PPC during launch is not the same as normal PPC. Your PPC when you're maintaining campaigns is going to be very different than your PPC during a launch or when you're trying to rank. These are two wholly different structures and we go really, really deep into this and I'm going to walk you through exactly why they're there. So steps for a launch. First of all, back in the day, The way to do a product launch with PPC on Amazon was we would turn on an auto campaign so that Amazon could find the keywords that perform best. Then we would take those good performing keywords and put them in their own campaign. And then even in those own campaigns that were brought in phrase match, we would then take the exact search terms and put those into their own exact match campaign. And then we would juice those terms. That's how we used to do PPC for products and even launching products. That's not the way to do it anymore. And the reason is this is a great way to allow Amazon to spend all your budget on keywords that aren't good. So the way we do it now, is do deep keyword research upfront so that you already know what keywords are going to perform. And AMZScout is a great tool to use for this because it allows you to find keywords that you know will perform well. And that's super critical because then you don't need to pay Amazon for it to just waste your money on all these keywords that don't perform well only for you to not use them anyway. So the way we do it now is do deep keyword research upfront before you start the launch so we don't have to pay Amazon to do our keyword research for us by spending our budget on auto campaigns. Then you optimize your click-through rate. This is super critical. Like I said before, there are two foundations on which your entire launch sits on and that's click-through rate and conversion rate. Both of these are an entire science and I have whole presentations on each of them and even specific elements of each. So we won't be able to go insanely deep on all of them today, but I'm going to give you guys the fundamentals on each. So when it comes to click-through rate optimization, The primary thing that determines whether or not you'll get the click is the primary image. So I can't stress enough how important it is to get the best primary image you possibly can. And I'll even say that again. It is critical for the launch and for the product success on Amazon in general to get the highest click-through rate primary image possible. This is something that should not be overlooked. If any of you guys have ever dabbled in YouTube before or know about the science of making content on YouTube, the thumbnail of the YouTube video is the number one thing that determines whether or not it will get clicked and hence whether or not it will get views. So YouTube creators, Well, they'll make their video but then they'll spend most of their effort and time messing around with the thumbnail. Yes, the thumbnail, that little image that you see in the graphic of a YouTube video before you click it. It's the same exact thing on Amazon. This is like a secret because I would still say probably 9 out of 10, maybe even 49 out of 50 sellers that I know They don't focus on the primary image. They just do it the way Amazon says, which is a solo image of the product on a white background and they say, okay, well, that's the only option we have, so I do it that way and that's it. No, you should be split testing that primary image nonstop. And there are tools that allow you to do this. One of them is called IntelliVie. There's a simpler one that's I think a little bit cheaper as well called PickFu. But IntelliView is the one we use because it's very in-depth and very thorough. It actually allows you to test with real shoppers which image they would click and it puts them alongside one another in a simulated Amazon environment. I'd highly recommend you guys use a tool like that to split test primary image or if you're already selling on Amazon, Amazon has its own tool for split testing primary images. It's called Amazon Experiments and you'll find it inside Amazon Seller Central. This allows you to find what primary image is getting, will get the most clicks or is getting the most clicks on Amazon. So this is a super, super critical step and I really can't stress it enough. You should spend as much time on the primary image as you do on the rest of the entire listing. That's how important it is. And the reason is because if a shopper never clicks on your thumbnail and search results in the first place, they'll never even see your listing. So it doesn't matter about Anything that's in your listing if it never gets clicked, right? So that's why it's so important. If you don't get the click, you don't even get the chance to get the sale. And yes, I will link to those tools that I mentioned. I'll link to them in the chat for you guys. I'll do it at the end of the presentation when I'm done with the slides because I'll grab the link and I'll drop them in for you. So click-through rate optimization, so critical. Primary image is the main thing and actually I have an entire article about this that I'll link to you guys as well that leads you through every element of optimizing the click-through rate. There are other things that you could do as well. Getting badges. There are tons of badges. There's the Climate Pledge Friendly Badge, the Small Business Badge. There are specific badges like the Black-Owned Business Badge. I think there's a Women-Owned Business Badge now. There's badges about what country it was made in, like Made in Italy is a badge. There's a bunch of badges that you can get. And then there's coupons, so clickable coupons, which makes like a bright green banner. Then there's price split testing. The price has to do with your click-through rate. Obviously the review number and the review rating has to do with your click-through rate. Oh, I see the question, what is the Amazon tool? The Amazon tool is called Amazon Experiments and you can find it inside Seller Central. So all these things, oh, and also the title. So the title and the order of the words in the title. It's not just about having the right keywords in the title, but the order of those keywords. You should have the highest relevance, highest volume keywords first that are providing most of your sales. So that's click-through rate optimization. When you have that right, it gives your PPC a chance to have a successful launch. And this is the part that you're not going to find in YouTube videos and other presentations and stuff like that that you're getting from the source here, from I'm a guy and a team that's running dozens of launches every single week. This is what the professionals do. This is what the eight-figure and nine-figure businesses are doing. They're split testing everything to make sure they get that click. And actually, if you search ZestyPause, AJ Patel's brand that I mentioned earlier, if you search ZestyPause on Amazon, you'll see this. You'll see, oh, obviously they're getting all the clicks. They take up the entire thumbnail. The text on their packaging matches exactly the keywords that the customers are typing into search bar. It's a bright orange color that you can't miss. All the text is readable from the thumbnail because it's big enough. They've optimized everything about the click-through rate. And that's how they grew to a $600 million exit on Amazon. And I know most of you would probably be happy with a 10th of that or a 100th of that or maybe a 200th of that. So we don't need 600 million, do we, to retire in comfort? So yes, but you still want to model the best, right? If you get one or two products going really, really well, it can completely change your life. So that's click-through rate optimization. That's one of the foundations on which your entire launch sits on. The other one is conversion rate optimization. So if you're getting all the clicks, Now that they're on the listing, because you did your click-through rate optimization properly, now that they're on the listing, we need to get the sale, right? And that comes down to all of the content on the listing and in order of importance, that is secondary images, A plus content, brand story, top voted reviews, review number, review rating. The reviews are above everything else. The review rating and the review number is before the listing content, but everything else is in order. The secondary images, A plus content, brand story and then the text on the listing. Really has a very small impact on the conversion. That's based on our testing. So yes, write the bullet points, make them good and all of that. But in reality, what's doing most of the selling and affecting the conversion rate most is the A plus content, the secondary images, the brand story, the top voted reviews, the review rating and the review number. Those are the things that are affecting your conversion more than anything. And the text of the bullet points in the description is last. The biggest impact you can have is creating A-plus content and brand story and the secondary images. So if you do those three things really, really well, you can go a really long way in increasing your conversion. And by the way, you can use Product Opportunity Explorer to find the benchmark for conversion for your space. And Product Opportunity Explorer is the tool inside Amazon Seller Central that you can access inside Growth Tools. And there you'll be able to see, okay, what conversion rate is average? As long as you make sure your conversion rate is above average, then you know you're in a good place for the launch. So that's a good way to know, okay, am I in a good spot to To nail this launch or am I going to drive a lot of PPC traffic, dump all my money down the toilet, rank and then fall back down because I have a lower than average conversion. If you have a lower than average conversion, it's not worth dumping a bunch of money into PPC because even if you do rank, you won't stick the rank. You'll drop back down because Amazon sees, oh, this is a lower than average converting product. We don't want to show it to customers and they'll continuously push you down in the ranks. So, Utili had the question, what was the other tool? It's called PICKFU, P-I-C-K-F-U. And then somebody asked, was ZestyPaws the brand you mentioned? Yes, it's called ZestyPaws. That's a $600 million exit. You can find it on Amazon. If you search it, you'll see exactly what I mean. The click-through rate is dialed, dialed, dude. Alright, so once you've done deep keyword research, you optimize the click-through rate of your thumbnail, you optimize the conversion rate of your listing, the next thing is to set up your PPC with rank-focused campaigns and rank-focused campaign management. And we're going to walk through in this presentation what that means. So you guys will come out of this with clarity on how to set up rank-focused PPC. So I'll dive into that in a second. And then the last one is a feedback loop between your PPC and your conversion. So once you start running PPC to your listings, you get data back from that. You get a lot of data that comes back from that and you can then use that data to optimize your conversion rate even further because you're going to see which search terms are converting best, which should be converting best but aren't, which are getting the most clicks, which should be getting clicks but aren't, and then you use that data from those search terms from your PPC And you change things about your listing content and you change things about your thumbnail content so that you can convert even better based on what data you're actually seeing from the real shoppers. And by data, people throw around this word data. I mean this in a very specific way of your search term reports, your Amazon PPC search term reports. So when you're running a campaign, you can download search term reports from your PPC and it clearly shows you what keywords drove the most traffic, what keywords drove the most sales and what keywords had the highest conversion and what keywords had the highest click-through rate. And that allows you to make decisions because you say, okay, if this keyword, say I'm selling a phone holder and what I find out that wooden phone holder What is most of my traffic? Well, I didn't realize that the fact that my phone holder is wooden was so important to shoppers. So now what I'm going to do is go into my listing and I'm going to highlight the wooden aspect of everything because that's what the shoppers want, right? I see it right in my search term reports. So I'm going to zoom in on the grain of the wood. I'm going to put part of my A plus content all about the type of wood and the fact that it's wood and zoom in shots on the wood. This is the feedback loop between PPC and conversion. You take the PPC data, you determine insights from it and then you use it to change the content of the listing to make it convert even better and you continuously do this And what this does if you keep doing this feedback loop is it means your listing gets more and more and more and more relevant to shoppers. And so Amazon can't help but rank you. It makes it inevitable as long as your product is delivering a good experience, right? And it's not defective and it's not a bad product. If you keep doing this, you don't give Amazon any choice. They have to rank you because you're continuously making everything hyper relevant to exactly what the real shoppers are actually doing. So this is the secret, guys. If you pull anything away from this, I hope you pull that. My headphones are getting screwy on me. So let's move on. I like to do a little bit of reframing here. So instead of thinking of PPC as a cost, think of it as an investment. Like when you put money into PPC, you are essentially, you're making an investment in an asset. You're putting money into PPC so that you can get ranking and that ranking spot gives you an entire flow of capital. It's like a cash flow that you get from it. So think of your PPC cost during rank as a PPC investment, not a PPC cost. That's the proper way to think about it. When you're making decisions on whether or not to turn on or off campaigns, whether or not to negate keywords, what bids to change and things like that, always do it based on the data. So use the data to make all your decisions. Once you start running your launch, you will get tons of data back from your PPC. You should be looking at your PPC data, your search term reports and the Amazon PPC ad console. To find out what to do, just let the data drive everything. If you don't know what to do next, just go into the data until you find a pattern like we mentioned before in the example with the wooden and then make a change based on the data. Everything you do should be based on the data. The more time you let the campaigns run, the more data you get. And the more data you get, the more changes you can make. So this is how the feedback loop works. During a product launch, you're not going to profit, likely. We do have launches that end up being profitable, but I'd say it's one out of 10, maybe, that are profitable during the launch phase in that first 30 to 90 days. Most of the time you're going to be breaking even or losing money during this initial launch phase because you have to pay to get this momentum. You have to pay for the traffic so that you can get your orders, get some initial reviews, get some ranking spots and that's just how it works. So you really want to measure the success of your launch based on the ranking impact it had rather than the profit you were able to pull out of the business. Now that being said, your economics shouldn't be crazy out of whack. You shouldn't be spending like... 300%, 400% ACoS and just losing money hand over fist, that's a bad indicator. But if you're not making money or you're not able to pull money out and you're not profitable, that's normal. That's completely normal. You're paying for this traffic so that you can get ranking spots so that you can then in the future start pulling money out of the business. The metrics you want to worry about are the daily units sold and the TACOS. TACOS standing for Total Average Cost of Sale, meaning what is my ad spend divided by my total sales. Not my ad spend divided by my ad sales. That's ACOS. My ad spend divided by my total sales, organic and paid sales. That number, TACOS, is the number you should be obsessively focused on as well as your daily units sold during a launch. So those are the most important metrics that you should be measuring and that's what tells you whether your launch is going well or not. So TACOS is like the king of all metrics for us. All right, so when you're doing a launch, there's three types of Amazon advertising, right? There's sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display. During a launch phase, you really only need to focus on sponsored products. If you have video assets, like you did a product video or you have the ability to do a product video, then yes, it's worth running up sponsored brand ads during a launch. But most of the time, you're going to be spending most of your budget on sponsored products. And the reason is because you have the greatest ability to impact ranking with sponsored product ads. And the types of placements that greatest impact ranking are top of search and rest of search. So when you run any kind of sponsored product ad, Whether you're targeting a keyword or you're targeting an ASIN, your ad can show up in any of three places. One is the top of search in search results. The second one is the rest of search results down when you scroll down. And the third is products pages. So like other people's ASINs, other people's product listings. Even if you're just targeting a keyword, your product can still show up on product pages. That's a weird thing about Amazon that whether you're targeting an ASIN or you're targeting a keyword, Amazon can show you any of those places. So it's weird. It's not funny. That's how Amazon works. So if I target the keyword wooden phone holder, I still might show up on product pages. It doesn't mean I'm only going to show up in search results for wooden phone holder. Amazon can show me for product pages even when I'm targeting a keyword. So the placements that My greatest lead to ranking impact are top of search and rest of search. So what you want to do is set the bid adjuster. So inside a campaign, you have bid adjusters where you can adjust the bid. You used to only be able to adjust the bid for top of search. Now you can adjust it for top of search, rest of search, product pages. You want to adjust the bid so that you have more placements coming from top of search and rest of search, not product pages because these more greatly lead to ranking impact. Product pages, it's still fine to get placements on product pages and it still has some impact on ranking because it's sales velocity, right? And it's sales velocity coming from keywords. So it's still helpful and it still works, but you want to weigh more of your sales coming from top of search and rest of search. All right, so let's talk through how to set up the campaigns during a launch. So first of all, good etiquette is to have one portfolio per product, one campaign per goal. And what do I mean by goal is, well, a goal of one campaign might be to rank for one very important keyword. For example, wooden phone holder. If wooden phone holder is a really important keyword for me, I'm going to have a dedicated campaign just to rank for that keyword. And that campaign is gonna be a single keyword This is an exact match campaign that only targets the term wooden phone holder and that's one goal. I might have another campaign whose purpose is to source new keywords. That's an auto campaign. Now, I know I was shitting on auto campaigns earlier in the presentation, but what I was actually shitting on was not auto campaigns in general. It was allowing auto campaigns to do all your keyword research for you. It's still fine to have auto campaigns because they do allow you to discover new keywords, but you want to keep them at a low bid and heavily negate them with all the keywords that you already know are bad. And all of the keywords that you already have other campaigns for. So it becomes a very restricted auto campaign, which is good because that keeps Amazon from going wild and spending all our budget, right? But one campaign might be for the purpose of finding new keywords using an auto campaign. So that's going to be a single campaign because it has one goal, to determine new keywords. Then we might have a campaign whose purpose is to run traffic to a family of keywords. And we're going to go into later how to organize your keywords and campaigns. But you might have a whole family of keywords. Like another example, if we go back to the phone holder. There might be a whole family of keywords about travel. So it might be travel phone holder, phone holder for travel, phone holder for car rides, phone holder for airplanes or phone holder for trips or whatever. All of those have to do with travel. We're going to group those together because we know that buyer intent is all the same with all those keywords. So we'll have one campaign that groups together those keywords with the same semantic core, the same buyer intent. And so that would be one campaign. So this is how. You keep your campaigns clean and you keep your PPC clean is through proper campaign organization like this. So you're going to have, during a launch, you're going to set up exact match campaigns for each primary keyword. So you're going to have somewhere between five and 15, usually it's like half a dozen, keywords that are super highly relevant, high volume, like prime alpha keywords. And these are kind of like the indicator keywords that you know, you have to rank for that are super duper important. And those ones you're each, you're going to have one campaign per keyword, one keyword per campaign. And you're going to, keep very tight control over them. So the bid adjusters, the bids themselves, you're going to control everything very, very, very tightly there. Then for lower volume keywords, like I said before, you group them. So you have all the keywords in a certain family in one campaign. Then You can spin up broad match campaigns and then later auto campaigns. But in the beginning, we don't just spin up auto campaigns and let Amazon spend all our money. That's how you end up flushing a bunch of money down the toilet. So, this is the order of operations. You start after doing your keyword research with targeting the keywords that you already know are important. The most important ones get their own campaign. Then the rest of the keywords you found in your keyword research, you group by semantic core and you make one campaign per semantic core that groups all the keywords in there. And then later on, you spin up broad match campaigns and even later then auto campaigns. And you can also include ASIN targeting campaigns and sponsored video campaigns, but this is dependent on the niche. So if you know that you have a product, for example, that has features that a lot of other companies or products don't, then an ASIN targeting campaign can do really well for you because you target just those ASINs that don't have the feature that you do have, right? And that's really helpful. And again, like I said before, if you have video assets, a sponsor brand video campaign can be really, really helpful. So, that's the basic structure that you want to go with when you're executing a launch. And, you know, this is again another topic that just the PPC structure itself during a launch could be its own whole presentation. I actually have like cheat cards on this that show exactly how to set up each and every one of these campaigns and have a GIF that scrolls through Amazon ad console and shows how to set each and every setting. So, here's your goals during a launch. You want to establish rank, get sales velocity. Your North Star is to achieve profitable tacos, meaning my margin for my product is at or above my tacos. If my total advertising spend as a percentage of revenue is less than my margin, I'm good. I'm now not losing money with this product, right? If I'm not spending more on ads than I make per unit in profit, then I'm good. I've now exited the launch phase and I've entered into the expansion phase. Until that point, I'm still in launch phase. I'm still losing money every unit I sell, but I'm gaining rank and I'm gaining momentum. That's the whole game. Finally, during a launch and during a ranking campaign, we're collecting data. So these PPC campaigns that I just mentioned in the last slide, you're going to be every twice a week at least. I mean, when we're at a launch, we're in it every day. We're in the campaigns every day, checking the data, adjusting the bid adjusters, adjusting the bids, spinning up new campaigns if necessary, negating keywords in the auto campaigns. A launch is a time where you really need to be in there every single day. Once you're out of the launch phase, then you can start optimizing your PPC twice a week. And that's a normal cadence that you can continue throughout the life of a product is optimizing everything twice a week. But during the launch, you want to do it every day. And you're going to be collecting data about what keywords are performing well, what keywords are not performing well, what keywords we didn't account for but that are coming up in the auto campaigns and the broader campaigns. That's the last goal. And then finally, what's not on this slide is you then use that data to change the content in the thumbnail and change the content in the listing. All the eight-figure sellers I know and all the eight-figure brands that I work with or sit on the board of, they all do primary image split testing. Primary image split testing before a launch and after a launch and during a launch. Because if you don't get the click, you never even get a chance to do the sale. So, you'll find tons of content about conversion rate optimization, everything about the listing, the A plus content, the brand story, how to do images, how to write the copy of the listing, all that stuff. But for some reason, nobody focuses on the click. And this primary image is the critical component. Like I said, in YouTube, YouTube creators, they'll spend 10 or 20% of their time making the actual video and then they spend 80% of their time split testing the thumbnail, just that little image. It's so important. It's like the important thing. Your conversion rate I said 20-30% here. Honestly, that's a bit high. These days with Amazon taking into consideration mobile sessions, your conversion rate looks a lot lower than it used to before Amazon started including mobile sessions. The critical milestone is having your conversion rate above the average for the space. And how do you know what the average is? You use Product Opportunity Explorer. That's a tool inside Seller Central that you can access. You just go to Seller Central. I believe you go down to Growth Tools and then you'll see Product Opportunity Explorer. You all have access to this. And then inside Product Opportunity Explorer, if you go to the search term view, you can see what the average conversion rate is for the primary keyword, for the products of the primary keyword that you're working with. You want your conversion rate to be above that. That's the critical thing. So go to Product Opportunity Explorer. See the average conversion rate for your product, your space. Make sure that your conversion rate, and your conversion rate Amazon calls unit session percentage. That's your conversion rate. You find that in business reports inside the reports section. If your conversion rate is above the average conversion rate for the space, You're good. You're in a good space for the launch. If you're doing that and you're getting a high click-through rate because you did your split testing of the primary image, you're in a good position to have an excellent launch. Review milestones. So the first review milestone is you get to five reviews. You're going to see a huge jump in click-through rate and conversion rate once you get to five. Then the next review milestone is 21 reviews. Inside a shopper's mind, it just thinks of a couple dozen. And you'll see another jump there. And then the next big milestone is once you cross a hundred. And the next milestone after that is in the mid hundreds. Once you get to like three, four hundred, you also get more clicks from that. And then after that, once you get above a thousand, that's the next big milestone. Somebody asked, can you use manufacturer's images? So I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I would actually go really deep on this by studying the images of every single seller on page one for your space and see what they're doing because they will have tricks. Trust me. They're checking it out, the top sellers in your space. We are trying this. So you'll get some good ideas from them. They might have tried putting a hand in it, holding the product. They might have tried putting a badge on it. They might have tried showing the packaging and then putting the keyword that most people search on the packaging to kind of trick the shopper to be able to see exactly what they just searched in the image itself, making them subconsciously think it's the right choice for them. You'll see a bunch of this. You're going to see it all. Get some ideas by looking through the competitor's primary image and you'll see what I mean. Oh, and then your review rating needs to stay at or above 4.3 stars. That's the other critical piece for the launch. If it falls below that, you need to beg, borrow, steal, do whatever is necessary to get it back up. Get more reviews and get it back up. When you fall below 4.3, if you're 4.2 or below, and the reason it's 4.3 is because 4.3 is the threshold to get to the four and a half star icons. So those golden stars that you see, it needs to show four and a half golden stars in order for you to get a good click-through rate. Once you get down to four, and God help you if you get below four, I mean, it's very difficult to bring a product back that's got in the threes or in twos, you know, that's almost impossible. You can bring it back by getting the review rating back up, don't get me wrong, but it's very hard to make it economical while the review rate is low.