Amazon’s AI Is Hiding Your Listings | Colin Raja

Amazon’s AI Is Hiding Your Listings | Colin Raja Speaker 2: Most people think launching on Amazon is simple. You pick a good product, you run some PPC, you get some reviews, and you're all set. Well, if you're thinking this way, guess what? You're wrong. And here's the truth. Most launches that are not optimized to win will probably fail. Not because of bad products, but because of ongoing changes with this little thing called AI. In this episode, we're going to uncover why your best listings might be invisible, how Amazon's new AI-driven search is quietly changing the rules, and why old-school tactics are no longer effective. This episode will change how you're launching your products today. And if you're not implementing these changes, well, guess what? You're already behind the eight ball. Our guest is the founder of Launch Lab and a veteran of the Amazon space with nearly a decade of experience. After building and scaling multiple seven-figure brands, he now helps other brands launch and relaunch products with data-driven strategies. He's led over 150 successful launches, including a 4 million, this is pretty cool, a 4 million recovery for a single ASIN, and he's a sought-after consultant for advanced ranking, listing optimization, and Amazon growth hacks. We're going to welcome today, first time, I've been chasing this guy for a long time, Colin Raja. So he'll be on in a second, but first let's have a word from one of our sponsors. Are you spending more on Amazon ads and getting less return? There's a smarter way to grow and without increasing your budget. Levanta's Affiliate Shift Calculator shows what you could do if you really allocate just a portion of your ad spend into affiliate marketing. If you're an Amazon seller doing over $5 million a year, This is for you. And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is click on the link in the description to go to your custom forecast today. Welcome, Colin. Speaker 1: Thank you, Norman. I appreciate it. Speaker 2: You're here. Speaker 1: It took so long to be in your pockets. You know how long I'm chasing? Speaker 2: Yeah, since that meal in New York about five years ago. You are in the big leagues. You're an advanced listing optimization expert. What are you doing so differently that are making things happen? Because a lot of people are finding it very difficult for a successful launch right now. Speaker 1: Yeah, so what small shift what we've done is like instead of focusing on hacks and tricks actually we focus on completely on the data. We measure so much data completely to identify what is wrong actually. So what we started doing, I apply my spiritual life into Amazon business as well. So I want to know If I fail, why am I failing? If I'm successful, why am I being successful? Since we have done for so many 150 products actually, within a 30 to 40 product launch, we were able to figure out the test what we put together and why we fail and whatever failed reason we have and we can able to turn into success by fixing that failure problem. If the test was successful, we replicated for all the 50 products what we have done actually completely. So, with that said, we're not dealing with one category. We're dealing with multiple categories. The reason why I'm talking about the different categories is like if any changes comes in, it comes into like a first baby and health and now supplements and after that comes to kitchen and that's the lineup which comes up. Any changes comes in Amazon. So, when we're dealing with the baby products, we know that one, we're going to encounter every new problem that way. So, once it's done, three months later, you're going to get into the sports and outdoors. Four months, five months later, in industrial scientific, all the same problem what we're facing in the baby. So we were able to measure the data and able to come up with the logic of like how we can able to execute everything with data. That's makes us super unique right now because the failure I find fail is a stepping stone of like a success. So I we take that as a stepping stone. What's the problem? How we can able to take that as like a step to move forward towards the success on the launch. Speaker 2: So I've got a product that's given me a ton of problems over the last two or three years. Now, the reason for it is the, and he's probably listening, don't worry, I'm not gonna say your name, but, oh, there goes my golf. There we go, lucky I had the cap on. But the product went out of stock 11 times. Okay, big problem. Speaker 1: That's a big problem. Speaker 2: Okay, and it's always been a problem. So finally, and this was a cash flow, so the guy just spread too thin, brought in 11 different products, and finally just said, look, you gotta cut it. Like, get down to two products, make sure you got inventory, and start moving. The problem is, organic sales aren't moving, okay? Well, it's kind of proportionate. Cut back the PPC because the PPC, you couldn't get a sale. Yet, get this Colin, on the one product, there's 1,300 reviews, all real reviews, with 4.7 star rating. It can't be a better product. And it was selling like crazy. I remember one day this thing, there was 1,200 units sold. Now, you might get one. Speaker 1: All right, let's break it down that one right now. Okay, let me ask you a couple of questions. Sure. Is it like, if you put together the product in a one sheet actually, would you be able to differentiate from your product and your competitor product first of all? Speaker 2: I'd say yes. Okay, all right. Speaker 1: That's a good thing. The second one is basically, this is what happens. This is why most of the people got into a problem in 2021 actually. A lot of people were not able to record the product 2021-2021. This is the reason. They went out of stock. What happened during the went out of stock season? So your foreign nation, so let's say that your product is selling good, really good, right? It doesn't care about Amazon compliance in terms of like scores. There are like a five items is most important. One was like your backend item type score, product type score, browse node score, and also like your sales velocity score, your relevancy score, those scores that exist. Each and everything has like a certain pointer. With that one, your sales score has like a 2x pointer. If your sales are higher, all of the things can be suppressed. Your sales could be able to lead to a better direction actually. Your ranking could be much better. You're not going to have any problem. Assume that your sales went down automatically. Your sales went down to zero. There are two things that happen. If your backend product item type and GL and all the relevancy cumulative of your sales is zero, so it can take over the compliance actually at that point. If your backend is messed up during that point of time and you're probably never going to able to get that product up again. I'll tell you why the backend problem will mess up actually. So when you go out of stock, what will happen is like your foreign ASIN, for example, if somebody, someone bought, there are a lot of bots available in Amazon, the wholesaler would take the ASIN and then sell it in a different market by buying it from US market actually, right? You know about that. So when they're updating it, it's automatically updating the garbage information. They're not doing the optimization. Why? Because they're uploading 10,000 listings at the same time. Whenever the new listing comes, they publish in multiple places. They're updating garbage information. When your listing goes down, all the information which is not filled up here, it gets filled up here completely, in your US market actually. Based on this information what you have, right now Amazon AI can update every single thing in your listing. So because of that reason, your listing backend will mess up so bad. I have seen hundreds of listings just like that. We track 360 checkpoints every single day basis for the ASIN. We have seen random attributes are getting updated. When we go back and trace back, we see Some of the data has come from Mexico. Some of the data has come from UK. Why? Because Amazon cannot touch your listing. That's their compliance for them. But the same ASIN, whatever you have in the past, it can able to touch that. So that's the second issue what you have, right? Speaker 2: So you're saying that if you've got a crappy listing a year ago, it can go and update based on the criteria back then, the attributes and update rather than whatever's on the listing right now? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Worried about Amazon's new compliance rules? Should you change what's working or play it safe? Well, Colin Raja and I are going to break it down right now. Speaker 1: It is happening. This is like, and also this is one of the Black Hat service Chinese are offering right now. They're offering to people We can able to hack your back-end data. They can able to corrupt your back-end data completely, like in terms of attributes and refinements and every single aspect of it. Speaker 2: So even though contributor rights, so you've been keeping all the fields filled in your North American account, they can still go back? Speaker 1: No, when you filled it, it rarely happens, but most of the time people don't fill those information. Speaker 2: So let's talk about contributors' rights, just so people know what we're talking about. Contributor rights, it would be the person who is constantly or consistently updating. And then beyond that, you want to make sure, you know, Vanessa Hung talks about this all the time, where the flat files always had every attribute you could possibly have filled in. So that was back a couple of, probably a couple of years ago. Now, there are a couple of updates to that, but contributors rights are still one of the main reasons that your account doesn't get hacked. Speaker 1: I mean, that's not hacked, I would say. This is called the terminology what they use in seller central called winning contribution actually. Who is the winning contributor for that product specifically, right? When Amazon touch your listing in terms of like size, in terms of like anything that they're updating in your listing, if you're not updated, They take the winning contribution. When it comes to winning contribution, there are crucial areas in your listing cannot get updated. For example, images, title, bullet points, and then the search term. There are few things, few information you cannot even touch it. For that, you need to go on and request them to get back your winning contribution. And after they get the approval, then you can able to update it completely. Let's go back here into the issue that what we have, right? That's the second thing what we talk about. The third one is basically when you have the mess up back-end data, your PPC never gonna be performed pretty good. Your PPC will mess up because the relevancy has a problem. We have compared Apple to Apple product completely and where one has like a better relevancy, other one has like a worse relevancy, the CPC higher for the worst relevancy completely, better than the good I'm a relevant product at that point. So fourth one is basically if your listing was like really doing good before and you don't go good because right now we are in EQR dynamic re-ranking model. Before, we are in relevancy model. How the relevancy model works is like the number of times you repeat the words in your listing, you get the higher relevancy and you get higher ranking. Right now, you need to have like a natural language processing model. If anytime that you're updating your listing with like a multiple words, right now, Amazon implement that one. That happens one year ago. Right now, Amazon put a policy at this point like you cannot repeat more than two words in your listing title, right? So, if you don't do this one, if you have the listing was really good and then you don't change this process, natural language processing, you're still in a relevancy model actually. Anybody who has like a relevancy, they moved from relevancy to EQR model, they can able to take over your sales at this point. Speaker 2: I've talked to a lot of sellers and when I talk to them about these new compliance issues, not repeating keywords or the 150 characters in the title no longer, like they wanted 150 characters or less. People are worried that, hey, this title has been working for me. I don't want to touch that title. I don't want to do the 150. I don't want to just have that one keyword in there and not repeat it. So that's a real fear for a lot of sellers. Speaker 1: Totally. I get it. But if you don't follow that process with the latest algorithm, I mean, you gotta go in and check it out what is EQR model is. You gotta check what is NLP model. That is completely against the natural language processing. And also Rufus and Cosmo, if you don't fill up the appropriate information, you'll end up not able to take advantage of it. The one thing I would say is basically, indexing is not anymore a factor for ranking. We'll never be indexed for a keyword, but we're still able to rank for the keyword. That's what I'm saying. I mean, we rank for brand name like crazy. We were like in a brand name third position actually. So, because if you semantically mapped all the keywords completely, then you can able to rank for a multiple semantic level. For example, if you rank for space, you can index for earth, you can index for sun, you can index for clouds, you can index for all the components related to space. It's also reverse. If you rank for earth, you can also index for space as well. So it's a vice versa thing. It's like, for example, right, let's go into Amazon, a little bit of like Amazon algorithm aspect of it. When you put up a title, when you put up like a keyword in a search algorithm, Amazon split everything into n-gram, right, each and every characteristic. And take a semantic level of keyword, let's say that they take a space and they take earth and everything, let's say they check if you're relevant on that one particularly. If your images, if your title, your bullet points, your reviews are completely talk about that particular context of that product. So that's why right now what we focus is called multi-model semantic mapping basically which is like you don't focus on title, bullet points, key and description and back in search terms. You focus on all the things what you mention. You mention your images, you mention in your videos and you mention your Q&As and you mention your somebody who's like posting about things in the reviews. Those are all the things that matter at this point. Speaker 2: We talked about not being able to change things. Let's say images. That's usually one of the common ones. You can change maybe the title content, but you can't change the images because of one reason or the other. Who do you contact? Speaker 1: Amazon. Speaker 2: Yeah, but is there a specific department that you can... Speaker 1: I will give you guys a quick guidance on that one, actually. You go on a call, ask them about questions. The best way to get better response from Amazon is to ask questions. If somebody was responding to you with a general you don't wanna talk to them. Hang up the phone, call again. So the best question what I ask him is like, hey, have you ever dealt with this issue actually? They're like, no, I can help you. Then you don't wanna talk to that guy. And second question is like, do you know about winning? What is winning contribution? If they say, oh, no, I don't know anything about it, but I can find out, I can help you, actually. Hang up the phone, call again. So we do like a multiple calls like this. The end of the day, you can able to find one person who will say yes for a lot of answers, actually. So somebody says like, yes, I know, I did the winning contribution. I know how to change it. Well, because winning contribution, they cannot change it. They need to rise it to a brand analytics team, actually. No, sorry, brand registry team. If somebody's not telling like, oh yeah, I can raise a case to a brand registry team to change it and it will take like four to five hours to make the changes at this point. If they say like 72 hours, if they say 48 hours, no, they're just creating the case. That case is not even being escalated to change it. They create a case. They didn't escalate to the right team to make the changes. We changed hundreds. I'm talking about like more than a hundred listings. This is what happened. We were able to make the changes like really good. But again, you need to use the right language to the Amazon seller central and find out if they understand your language. What are you talking about? Speaker 2: That's a great point. And here's another point that we used to I don't know why we haven't talked about this in a while, but If you find somebody good, just like Colin was talking about, somebody that can solve that problem, and usually that one person is just somebody that's very helpful too. They might know, but they're also, and I've just found this where you've got that one individual at customer service that really knows their stuff. Well, what we do is we put together a list of questions over a period of a day, a week, a month, that nobody has been able to ask and we wait for that one person and then, hey, would you be able to help us out with X, Y, Z? And usually, It works. Speaker 1: They would do. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: They totally would do it, actually, for sure. We use the same strategy. If I got them in a call, we're going like, hey, can you take a look at this case ID? Can you check it out? What's going on? Are we appreciated? And then we are like, okay, you're doing my life much better. And they were able to, they ask you to assign, they ask you to send that one. They'll assign it to themselves completely. They can able to get that done, actually, very honestly. But out of five calls, if you make, you can get one person. Out of five calls. That's where our thing is. My team go and then make the calls and say, okay, if they don't answer, hang up, hang up, hang up. You don't want to waste your time. Again, call again. Out of five calls, you can get one guy. If you try for one guy, keep him in the online, ask him for escalation, ask for like a supervisor, that doesn't work out actually, really. So, speak the language, understand, because you speaking a different language, from the seller center perspective, from the seller perspective, completely different language. So, understand the one thing, winning contribution. If somebody doesn't know winning contribution, hang up the phone and call again. Speaker 2: Colin Raja and I are about to dive into what sellers should be doing right now to prep for every new product launch. Don't miss out on this part. Is there a list of three or five things a seller should do now for preparing for a launch? Speaker 1: First thing first, the most important thing I would say, what most of the sellers doing wrong at this point is. They are not focusing on one or two segments of buyers. For example, we have like seven types of buyers. We have a professional buyer, We're a value buyer and we have like people who's like a gift buyers, seasonal buyers. So there are like seven types of buyer there. If you go into like a professional buyer and a value buyer, so professional buyers, they are very low price sensitive. They don't care about the pricing. They're looking for a better results, what they can get out of the product. But if you're looking for a value buyer, they're very high sensitive, price high sensitive. They look for maximum out of the buck what they can try to get. So the image is how you create it. It has to be changed from this value buyer and a professional buyer. The professional buyer's second image needs to be like so much in detail about the product. But the value buyer, you're like give like cover, cleaner and the wipes and everything together as a bundle. It's a value add for them. If like, oh, I get everything and then I can get by the product. So that's how you get the conversion on increasing on your product actually, literally, right? So focus on one type of buyer, one or two types of buyer. You don't want to focus on creating a generic listing and completely going for all the keywords, focusing on all the keywords. It kills your momentum. So, you have to very predictably create a listing in terms of like what are the keywords you're going to focus on, what type of buyers will search for that type of keyword. For example, magnesium. Magnesium has like five types of buyers, which is like woman wellness can be gone, sleep, and also like athlete, and also body sore, and also like anti-aging process as well. So, if you go for sleep, it's only like $15 to $19. If you go for like anti-aging, it's like $65 to $75 product. It's the same product with a different configuration, makes a different pricing. When you're creating the product, you take a look at like where you can able to place it. That's the most important thing what you need to change it. That's what the EQR model, it's required for at this point. Second thing, what is that? Yeah, go ahead, Norman. Speaker 2: No, I was going to say with that model that you're talking about, you've got a single listing though. So in your stack or your slide deck, you can only really target that one persona, correct? Well, you would be targeting that one. Speaker 1: I would target like a one or two, actually. Speaker 2: One or two. Okay. All right. Speaker 1: Usually you have like a five personas. You will get like a five to six personas based on the keyword. Out of that, I choose two and I will choose which one is easier for me to build the momentum first. And build the momentum, you can focus on, once you've ranked on these two buyer persona, you can able to rank for multiple keywords. Why? Because people would resonate your listing completely, right? And you can increase the pricing because you already built the momentum at that point. Speaker 2: Alright, we're gonna come back. We're at the bottom of the hour. So if you're new to the podcast, we do something at the top of the hour called the Wheel of Kelsey and that's a giveaway that usually our guests provide and today Colin's got a great giveaway. So Colin, what is it? Speaker 1: Alright, so the giveaway what I got is basically if you are having a problem and if your product was selling really great and it went down for some reason, you can come and then talk to me and then I can have like a one-hour strategy call to find out what exactly happened in your listing and what exactly you need to do and what keywords you had dropped and what segment you need to focus on. I can give you like a free audit call which is cost like $1,500 usually we do it for the audit, deep audit. We'll give you for free for the Norm audience. Speaker 2: Perfect. And as you can tell, Colin knows his stuff. So if you're interested, either hashtag WillitKelsey, tag two people, you get a second entry as well. Now you can enter through the newsletter. So those are three different ways that you can get an entry. I would highly recommend that you do this. If you've got a product that you have an issue or having issues with, Colin can help you solve that issue. All right, Kels, let's go to a sponsor. Hey Amazon sellers, if you've listened to the Lunch With Norm podcast over the years, you've probably heard me talk about FlatWorld Network and some of the services that we use to help brands find and maintain serious growth. Well, if your sales have plateaued or you feel like your listings just aren't converting, you're not alone. I've built a proven system over the years to help sellers increase conversion and unlock more sales. I'm going to be giving away a free audit to show you exactly what's wrong with your listing and how you can improve it. In fact, I'm going to be completely transparent and I'm going to let you know the good, the bad, and the ugly. So if you can handle the truth and you want to scale, hit the link in the description or go to flatworldnetwork.com and grab your free audit today. And by the way, I'm going to be just passing those audits off to Colin from now on. Speaker 1: I'm about to take care of the talk. It's all good. Yeah. Speaker 2: All right. So let's get back to it. I think we got stuck at number two or number three. Yeah. Speaker 1: So now we're going on a number. The first we finished like a personalized listing. The second one is you're focusing on. So when you build a momentum, you take those keywords, you focus on the keywords and run those keywords, right? This is where the number two strategy comes in place. You don't want to take random keywords and rank for it. So Amazon EQR model, the major focus is higher purchase intent. Before what we do, you take a one or two browse keywords, give away like 100, 200 units, all the purchase keyword will get ranked for it and you're good actually, right? That we have done it in a relevancy model, it works out really well. But right now, you go in like opposite way completely. You create a supporting keywords, all the purchase keyword, high purchase intent keyword, take those keywords, rank for it and your browse keyword automatically able to get ranked. You don't get ranked for like top 5%, you will able to see like top 15%, 20% actually. When you see that, that means whatever you're doing is right. If you had this not coming, that means you missed a few more keywords. So you got to go dig back and rank those keywords. And also your launch get very less expensive when you're focusing on higher purchase intent keyword. If you focus on like a higher low, the browse lower purchase intent keyword, it's called like a browse keyword. You end up in like spending crazy amount of money on that. Rather than you do this in the opposite way, it works out pretty well actually. So the fourth one, third one, we finished the third one, right? The fourth one, what's most, most, most, most important thing, I would say in life, everything we got, success leaves a clue actually, right? That's a philosophy in my life. What success, what Amazon in your listing, the living clue and how you can build a momentum out of it. You win small and then you win bigger actually. If you focus on winning bigger, you'll be like very tough to reach anything. Focus on winning small things one at a time and then you will able to win bigger things in your life actually. So what is the small win what Amazon is giving to you? At this point, you can able to go and find out like Amazon is already giving a signal of like how many keywords in a day, how many keywords when you'd launch the product, how many keywords you were able to rank as soon as possible. You do a proper SEO, you will able to see your most like at least 10 keywords on the first week of it, able to see that one in your top 45 pages. If you see that, that means that Amazon already giving you clue that these keywords are very relevant for you. If the keyword is not right, you got to go and then fix your listing. If the keyword is relevant, take those keywords as Amazon-recognized keywords. That's what we call Amazon-recognized keywords. Say that, okay, go back to the Browse keyword, download all the Purchase keyword out of it, rank that particular face of keyword, batch of keywords. You get ranked 70% higher than a regular keyword you can able to rank for. We were able to rank in a three to four days by using this strategy. It's a very powerful strategy. Then you don't have to go for a guesswork. You don't have to go for like a breaking your head like what keyword I need to focus on. As long as you already batch your keywords into like phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 and you wait for Amazon to give you a signal and take those batches. Let's say that it's in a fifth batch where you have fifth phase but Amazon is already giving you the relevancy for that. Take that fifth phase 5 to phase 1, launch the whole thing and the second one, second phase will be the same. When you rank a set of 10 keywords, Amazon is already giving you like another 5 to 10 keywords ranked on like top 45. So take that one, higher relevant, and do that one repeatedly completely. Speaker 2: Now, are you doing that with product giveaways or are you doing that with other forms of launch strategies? Don't forget to subscribe and leave me a comment saying, I subscribed, and I'll personally reply to your comment. Speaker 1: All right, the first thing first, I have like a criticality one to seven actually on the keywords. The first criticality is like when you do a SEO, proper SEO, you can able to rank keywords, set in keywords super pretty good actually, right? The second one is basically like you need to do a proper SEO and PPC. The third one is like you need the proper SEO, PPC, and also external traffic. And fourth one is like you need to do a proper SEO, PPC, plus external traffic, plus some kind of giveaways. So there is like a level of things that you go through each and every level actually. It's not a product launch. We need to change that one to a product launch to it's a keyword launch. You take each and every keyword from pre-launch, launch, maintenance, growth and growth maintenance phases. Each and every keyword has a separate KPI. You don't want to mix your KPI as well. At the end of the, for the beginning of the launch, your KPI should be like, I need to get like traffic. If you have like enough traffic on your listing, you will able to rank for your listing without a sales. But if the second week, second phase of the launch, if you don't make sale for that keyword, you're probably going to go down to where you are before. So the transition one start from pre-launch to growth growth actually completely. Speaker 2: All right, very good. Now, there might be some confusion out there because of what we were talking about at the beginning, that you're not allowed to repeat a keyword. They're not looking for repeated keywords. So let's just take the bully sticks, for example. Well, you've got an odorless bully stick, and this might've been something that could've easily been in the title with three phrases, but odorless bully stick, made in the USA bully sticks, grass-fed bully sticks. Six-inch bully sticks, like there's a ton of keywords for bully sticks and pizzle and whatever it is. They're not going to be all these phrases back to back to back in the bullets in the title. So when we're talking about this now, we would talk about an odorless, the bully stick might be odorless or it might be another bullet about grass-fed or the health. Now, for your dog, you're not seeing repetitive phrases, correct? Speaker 1: This is where I was coming in a place of like, this is where you need to understand what is NLP looks like, natural language processing, right? What is natural language processing? How EQR is supporting towards a natural language processing? This is how it works. As I mentioned before, you don't have to index your keyword. See, first of all, why we need to do multiple keywords, first of all, because we want to get indexed. Why you need to get indexed? Then only you can able to rank, right? Are we on the same page on that, right? So, if the indexing is not anymore a factor for ranking, why would we need to do that? So, what I'm talking about is like, when you, I'm not sure what is bully stick, can you help me out with this? Speaker 2: It's drag bull penis. Speaker 1: Okay, all right. All right, so let's say the boy stick, right? So the point is what kind of dog use that one? Speaker 2: All dogs, but let's say a Golden Retriever. Speaker 1: Okay, all right, the Golden Retriever, right? So let's say we divide into braids or we can divide it into weight category. We divide it into small and height or whatever category actually, right? It's based on that you can able to say what type of people buy this kind of dog? Is it a woman or men? It's a family dog basically. When you have the family dog, so that means you need to have a contextual of all the things, not about the product only. You don't want to put like a bully stick with a flavor, with all these things for this dog or all the things. You talk about the product name. Features and benefits of why they're buying the product actually. None of the time you're mentioning anything about repeating the words. Why? Because if you don't have the index for a keyword, you would laugh to like a contextually index for it. If you're semantically map it for the overall listing, that's the most important thing what you need to do at this point. Speaker 2: You'll see this happen with Google as well. Google have all these, we call it just click list searches. If you have an article that you publish, It's a great, really good quality. It might be, I'll just use knives for example. You might be talking about a Damascus knife or that are used by chefs and all of a sudden you're going to start ranking possibly for carving knife, sushi knife. You know, and Google say this is relevant because the quality of the article will also provide the person who has an interest in Damascus knives with these other keywords as well. So Google's doing this right now. Speaker 1: See, there is one more thing what Amazon adapt to the Google is like a bone straight Ashley. So, right now, so since why I say do not create a generic listing, it's a one reason. If your audience come on your listing and they didn't, they are not relevant with any one of your product, any one of your images, any one of the video what they have, the bounce rate gets higher. When your bounce rate gets high, your relevancy gets down. This is exactly what happened actually. If you create a personal listing and focus on the keyword that who's personalized for basically, you get the lower bounce rate at this point. So you get the higher relevancy and you can able to rank for it. You need to let the user to the browsers who are coming into your product. They want to check multiple segments which is like they're checking the first image, they're checking the second image, they're going through a videos, they're checking the relevant products actually in the bottom, they're also checking your EBC and they're also checking the reviews. You need to have these many actions needs to be in place actually. Not like they're taking a five seconds decision to launch. That's like a impulse purchase basically. You don't want, those guys will like able to purchase it because of like the price points and also they are like, it's like a browser. It's like basically like they are not really like a relevant audience. They are like, they're buying for somebody else. If you're buying a product for $50, right? Would you spend a little bit more time on the product? Would you like, okay, let's say that I'm buying a glasses actually. I mean, I have to check if it's a good fit for me. Is it good for my eyes or whatever it is, right? You will go through more in details if you're a professional buyers. So what about like anybody, there are certain number of 30% of people who purchase just like that. And they're written just like that as well. You focus on who you want to be served to. That's the most important thing right now with the EQR model. Speaker 2: Okay. You gave a great explanation of this launch model. What about the maintenance model? What are you looking for as the product goes on? Speaker 1: There are two important things. One most important thing is Amazon placements. Amazon placement is like inventory placements. There are close to 350 warehouse, I guess. You can able to see Amazon give you a placement only like a 40 to 50 when your product is like initially there. When you keep ranking and when you increasing the sales, they give little by little by little actually. So when we did the four phase of launch, we get to 150 placements. When you increase to 250 placement, you get One day shipping for most of the locations. How we can get that from 100 to 150 locations? What is the secret we found is like a lightning deals and best deals. We found when you run a best deals and lightning deal and you're being very aggressive on external traffic or giveaways or something that you're doing in terms of like a PPC aggressive, based on your previous success, they give like a better best deal on the next time. When they're placing your next best deal, they prepare you for more inventory places. When you get there, you stop there. It does not mean that you're going to be after the best deal, you're going to reduce it. The point what we saw is that you stop there and anytime after that, they distribute to multiple locations at that point. When you do that, you automatically grow actually. The other point, What we do is like when you finish the four phase of the launch, we get that most of the time. 95% of the time, we get the lightning deal and best deals actually. And if you don't get the best deals, there is a way to get it. You need to escalate it multiple times to talk to the team, you can able to get the best deals now. When you get there, you just keep running as much as best deals as possible, as much as lightning deals as possible for the next three months to increase the inventory placement in the warehouse completely. That's the first thing. Speaker 2: Have you ever wondered if you should pause or stop your PPC campaigns? Colin Raja and I get into when, if ever, it actually makes sense to pause or stop your campaigns. Speaker 1: The second thing what you need to focus on is like a cutting down on all the ad spend, whatever you're doing actually, literally. And also, what is the worst thing what people are doing at this point? When they run the launch, They run the heavy PPC. On the day of they finish the launch, they rank the keyword, they cut the whole PPC completely. That's the bad things you can do for your listing. When you do that, your relevancy goes down. Well, because what we found is we have not officially confirmed this. We're still testing this, really. But what we found out is when you cut down the keyword, That performing really well or not performing really well, what are you telling Amazon? Amazon taking that as a signal is like that keyword is not relevant for you. Your organic ranking is dropping down like so crazy. So what we started doing is basically like slowing, lowering down the cost. It doesn't matter how much bid it is, we keep the bid as it is. Actually, let's say that we're spending $100, we reduce to $80, then we reduce to $70, then we reduce to $50. Like a slow drop will help you to stay in ranking. If you're like cutting down immediately, that's the worst thing what you can do for your list. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And that's always been the case, just cutting it off. And I don't know why a person would do that. You know, I've heard of Neil Toit came on the podcast and you know, it was controversial. He just said, look, if I've got a great product that's selling and this could be a year into it and I'm on page one and I've got any PPC on it, I'm turning that off. And he says, a lot of the times I'll see the sales continue. And then I had other people come back and chat and start talking saying, regardless, I would, just what you said, turn down the bid, maybe not make it where it's always showing, but still have the PPC on, don't turn it off. Speaker 1: No, it's also like it depends on the product as well. So for example, right, if you have like a better product, it's a unique product, you're like doing pretty good on the product, you are on the first page, and also the first page, it's perspective. If you are in like a fashion category, first page is good. You don't have to be on the topic. People will like go through until third three pages. If you are like a design product, people go through up to three pages. If you are like essential product, if you're not in like top two rows, you're dead completely. If you're like a commodity product, if you're not in like top two row, top one row, you're dead. You're not making good amount of sales, actually, on most of the keywords. So when you have like an amazing product, which solves a major problem, right, and you can cut down the PPC. We have done it for a couple of products like that. It's not gonna, people, once the eyeball is coming to your product, you're automatically able to get that momentum going pretty well. But even for that product, I would get multiples Better for PPC, with a PPC, than without a PPC. Speaker 2: We've gone through this, but I'd like to go through it again because it's so important, and we touched on this, but back-end optimization, it can be the silent killer. If this is happening, how do we fix it? Speaker 1: Oh my God, that's a one-hour topic, man. Speaker 2: It is, it is. Speaker 1: It's a very big topic. So let's go through this quick, actually, right? I will give you seven most important things What is required for backend optimization and whether your product has a problem or not actually, right? Let's start from the problems, right? Let's say your product was selling really good and you automatically like losing 10% of keyword ranking all the time. You definitely have a item type problem completely on your listing. There are seven attributes, what is most important thing. First, product type, item type, GL, DOW and refinements and the browse nodes. This has to be aligned with, so the browse node aligned with the product type. Product type aligned with like a sorry the browse node need to be aligned with the product type and then at the browse node need to be aligned with the GL. Your GL needs to align with like a DOW and each and every item type will have refinement specifically and the rest of refinement needs to be filled up accordingly to the Amazon optional data's what you have. Speaker 2: So, I just want to stop you there for a sec. Can you explain, there's a lot of listeners here that might be newer, what the acronyms stand for? Speaker 1: Okay, sure. Okay, when it comes to a browserie, there is a three objects there, three elements there. One was like a root, branch, and leaf. You don't want your product in your root and branch. You always want your product in your leaf node. Leave node will always have an ID. With the Browse node, there is something called Item Type Keyword. Item Type Keyword, why they introduce? Before like 2016, 2015, you can able to put your product in a different category and rank for it. Even if you're in a home, you can go on like a cell phone to get the bestseller batch. They do it. How Amazon Avoided is basically based on my understanding is they come up with like a category based keywords. If you are in this category, you can only able to rank for certain keywords. You cannot able to rank for all other keywords, right? So how they avoided it using item type keyword completely. Item type keyword, you can able to find out when you're uploading your product, you can able to find out your browse node, your item type in the exactly on the upload feature, literally. On that one, you can able to find out what is the product type of it. You can able to go and check it out in a BrowseTree guide in Amazon. Go on and check help. Check BrowseTree guide for that particular category. You can able to find out so much information. I'm not sure how many people know about this particularly. Speaker 2: It's a full guide. Speaker 1: It's a full guide completely. You will able to find out what BrowseNode, what is this node ID and what is that item type and what is the particular refinements we need to have. So with that said, What is GLS? This is called general ledger. General ledger is basically, let's say that if you are in sports, your general ledger will be like in sports. It is to define your fees in your Amazon categories. If it's in health, it has to be in health. If you are in drugs, if you are in supplements, sometimes you focus on drugs. And here's the problem. I'll tell you what's the problem. The expiration date, we recently going through this problem. Our supplement is like, let's say my supplement is a magnesium. I supposed to be in like GL health, okay? But if they point you to GL drugs, what they do is like you need to be in like a expiration date should be like 150 days or 950 days period. But if it's in a GL health, you can have like a thousand days, thousand days as the expiration days actually. Think about it, the one deal, how it's related to expiration problems. If your product was there for quite a thousand days, right? And if the deal was changed, that product will be going into like a trash completely. They're going to remove those products completely. So, it's because of GL. You will be like, assume like, what the heck? My product is good. My expiration is good. Why it says on it? It's like expired. So, the problem is your GL. If your DOW on GL is, DOW is like a display on website. If that would be available on the front end of Amazon or you can call Amazon, talk about all these things. If your GL and DOW was mismatched, your listing split. Your listing was showed together in your back end but in the front end, your review split happens. Your review is like split separately and everything will happen because of that. So the combination of issues there will create a lot of chaos in your listing. Speaker 2: All right. Now it's time. We got a question from Simon. Kelsey? Speaker 1: Yes. Unknown Speaker: So Simon is asking, can you force an update by deleting all attributes and then upload the complete flat file? Speaker 1: You could do it, but why would you need to do it? I mean, if your product is doing pretty good, why you want to delete all the attributes? All you need to do is like just update completely. Download the data and update all the data. Go and then check it out what it is there and upload it. That's it. You don't have to completely delete it. That's also create another chaos. You don't want to go through that one as well. Speaker 2: So the flat file can be arduous. It can be very tough if you don't know what you're doing. And I'm not just saying this because I want to push some business your way, but if you're not an expert with flat files, I would highly recommend that if you're listening to get an expert to do that for your listing because you could mess it up even further. Speaker 1: Yeah. The problem is not a problem. The problem is the recording time. Anytime this problem goes through, you end up in like burning your head like what happened actually. That's what we track like close to 350 data checkpoints. We're coming up with the SAS soon actually. I'm not sure when. If that happens, you end up in like able to take 24 to 48 hours what happened and another 72 hours to a week to fix the problem. Think about how much money. Let's say you're making 500 sales or 100 sales a day. You're losing literally like 700 sales, which let's say even like a 50 bucks, which is like $45,000 you're losing at that point. So you don't want to go through this one issue. Like you want to make sure you stay on top of your listing and the backend data, especially, oh my God, you have no idea how much issues I have gone through so far. Speaker 2: Look at me, Colin. I lost my hair over it, but. Speaker 1: Oh, you want to lose the hair purposely. You want to look stylish. Speaker 2: Oh my God. Yeah, there we go. All right. So we are at the top of the hour. We're going to head over to the wheel. But before we get there, Colin, how did people get ahold of you? Speaker 1: You can reach out to me either Facebook Colin Raja or you can reach out to me. You can go to my website ColinRaja.org. You can able to reach out there or you can find me in the YouTube. I talk about all these latest strategy, what's happened, case studies and everything there more in detail. And if you want to go through the GL issue back in optimization things, you can go and check it out. There are videos available to go on and take a look at it. All right. Speaker 2: Fantastic. All right, gals, let's go to a sponsor, then over to the wheel. Unknown Speaker: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell, and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters, over 30 illustrations, 180 call-outs, and we quite frankly made this book for the ADHD entrepreneur. It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on eBook, paperback, hardcover, or Audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 2: All right, let's get over to the wheel. All right. The wheel of Kelsey with his corona hair. Unknown Speaker: So this giveaway, it's a little confusing. This is for Colin Campbell's giveaway. The signed copy of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. Colin Raja's giveaway is next week. I forgot. Speaker 2: I wouldn't even have said anything, but yeah, okay. Speaker 1: Here we go. Speaker 2: So here we go. Unknown Speaker: This is for the signed copy, original copy of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. And let's see who the winner is. Steve. Steve Billion. Speaker 2: All right. Unknown Speaker: All right. So, Steve, if you can email me, k.lent from norm.com, we'll hook you up with your new book. Speaker 2: Let us know what you think of it as well. All right, Colin. Speaker 1: That's amazing, man. Speaker 2: Next week, you're going to hear from us about the wheel. Speaker 1: All right. Awesome. I love that. I love that. Speaker 2: All right. I'm going to remove you. Don't go away. I'm going to come right back. But that's it. Thank you so much, Colin. We will talk to you soon. And it was fantastic. A lot of high level stuff here and probably a lot that this is the first time people have heard of it. So thanks for coming on. Speaker 1: Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. I had so much fun here. Speaker 2: Ah, cigars on me next time. Next time we get together. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 2: All right, everybody. We will see you next week, next Wednesday at noon. See you later.