EP #320] [ENG] - Top strategies to optimise your ppc campaigns - Chris Rawlings

EP #320] [ENG] - Top strategies to optimise your ppc campaigns - Chris Rawlings Speaker 1: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello, guys. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where everything related to Amazon, FBA, Parallel and Ecommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy, and today we'll bring another special guest. His name is Chris Rawlings, and he's the founder and CEO of Selfie Society, which I will say is one of the top agencies out there when it comes to anything related to Amazon PPC. And that's why I wanted to bring Chris today. We have so many, you know, things going on in the Amazon space. PPC keeps changing pretty much on a weekly basis. So you really need to be on top of it. Otherwise, you know, competition is definitely going to crush you. So hopefully, you know, some of the things we're going to be talking today about the latest changing, what is working, what is not working. You can provide us with some good insights about the whole thing. And there you see the cat going through the screen. So, Chris, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? How's everything going? Speaker 1: What's up, man? Yeah, I'm glad to be here. The three of us. It's me, you, and you. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Unknown Speaker: How are you doing? Speaker 1: I've been good, dude. I've been good. You know, we were chatting before this started about how... I mean, Vincenzo is like my guy whenever we're at an event. I look around for Vincenzo because I know he's going to make it a fun time. So it's always good to have Vincenzo around. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny how people rely on me. Like, the conference is over and things like, what is happening next? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, because at this point, like, you know, everyone expects you got a plan. Yeah, you do pretty much always do. Speaker 2: I know, I know. But, you know, it's definitely great to have you. You know, I've always been following you for a while now and I always think, you know, you put some great content out there. So definitely a pleasure. So I guess, you know, for those that might not know you, just give us a quick intro by yourself and then let's dive into the topic. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I've been in the Amazon space for a long time. I started my first brand 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago now. I've had software companies in the space, a fund, and Soapy Society, which is like my primary focus now, where I partner with brands, grow them with PPC. And yeah, just obsessed with this space. Love getting into it. You know, we're chatting, you know, industry shop talk before this. Dude, she just goes the same way every time. I feel like it's like groundhog day. Speaker 2: No, I don't know. Today is more than usual. Speaker 1: She just wants to be part of the conversation. Speaker 2: Yeah, she wants to talk about PPC with us, you know? Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: That's my expertise. So yeah, I'm stoked to get together and chat in the digital realm since we normally, actually it's the other way around for a lot of people in this space where you know each other digitally but you never meet physically. For me and you, it's the other way around. Speaker 2: I know. Speaker 1: We only have hung out IRL. I think this is the first time we've done anything digital together. Speaker 2: That's true, that's true. So that's why I'm very keen because, I mean, as we were discussing before going live, like there's so many things that have been changing in terms of now how PPC is heavily tied to audiences with Amazon Marketing Cloud, how their part is more important than ever, all different things going on in general with the new type of updates. So just want to have a quick refresh with you, things that you're seeing that are working, that are not working anymore with the brands. And hopefully we can make a, you know, insightful episodes for people to understand in 2025 how they can, you know, stay ahead of their game, you know. So I guess, I guess a good point to start the conversation is, you know, how potentially a Amazon marketing client is definitely going to change the game. Like I'm seeing more and more brands started to start adapting, you know, bringing audiences potentially to sponsor products. Like not everybody's doing it, but that's definitely that it's becoming more known. Across the space, what are you seeing with that new change now and how you see brands leveraging that new opportunity? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting. Just having more data, audience targeting in general. It's cool to see Amazon kind of following the same progression that other advertising platforms have before. You know, like with AMC, it's basically just more access to data to make better decisions basically, right? And have better targeting. And if you look at like how Meta evolved and how Google and YouTube advertising evolved, like other major platforms of advertising on the internet, it's like basically Meta, Google, and Amazon. Those are like the three biggest advertisers online, right? So Amazon was like the latest release out of all those three. Google and Meta are older. I think Google and Meta went through the exact same evolution that Amazon did where they started where like the targeting was like really specific and then they shifted more and more towards having broader targeting where the algorithm has more leeway to do what it wants. So if you look at Amazon where like at first all you could do was target A keyword and then it's like keywords and products and then keywords and products and categories. And then there's different, you know, match types added and then bid adjusters for different placements and they just keep adding more complexity to it, but allowing the advertising like targeting to be broadly expanded. And I don't know about you, Vincenzo, you can let me know if you're seeing the same thing, but For us, we saw like a very clear change over the last like 12 to 18 months where it shifted from the best performing ads being like really hyper-targeted and it was all about like really intense keyword research and hyper-targeting exact match all those search terms to rank and drive keyword velocity, drive sales velocity. A lot of the more general targeting types now work better, like category targeting, broad match, expanded product targeting, and things like that, because they give Amazon more leeway to show the product when and where its algorithm thinks is right, instead of us thinking that we're smarter than the algorithm, trying to exact target the things that we think will perform best. This is just another step in that progression, and I think it's good. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think to add on that, I think the future for PPC, and that's something that, of course, we can go a little bit deeper around that, is definitely along the lines of going from being keyword-based advertising to programmatic advertising. I think that's why Amazon is putting so much effort into reverse engineering how you behave as a shopper. And that's the whole, I guess, goal behind Rufus. They want to make sure that every single time you jump on the app, They can essentially nail down every single thing that you have to see to spend money on the app, right? They want to see your behavior, like what is your interest, why you usually buy on a recurring basis, how sensitive you are to pricing and things like that. So you see on the screen what they know is likely for you to make the click and the purchase. And I think as it's going, as you mentioned, we're seeing the same, like now that we're focusing more on audiences, We're definitely starting to see some good results in terms of return investment because I guess Amazon now is getting very clear to tell you, you know, are you looking for people that like pets? Okay, then this is the audience you have to target. Right now, try to compete on CPC, that sometimes is impossible. You try to compete on behavior, which you did a very good job, I guess, on your pro research and you really know your avatar. You can really maximize, you know, the results you can get off your ads, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's the cool thing, seeing Amazon giving us access to these audiences. You could do audience targeting in Sponsored Display for a long time and DSP, but you could never do audience targeting in Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products. And seeing that come out, I mean, it's not technically the targeting, it's the bid adjustment, but it's effectively targeting, you know, it's paired with the targeting. Being able to, you know, go after shoppers that Amazon thinks are highly likely to purchase your product just based on their shopping behavior. Not based on their keywords, not based on the products that they're on, but just based on a series of actions that they took that their algorithm has determined make it more likely that they're going to purchase your product. That's like, wow, we've never really had access to that anymore for these high volume ad types, you know, and so it's pretty exciting. Speaker 2: Yeah, which I guess my question to you when it comes to this, like, I know that they, with everything around audiences, specifically Amazon Marketing Cloud, it's all about you have to nurture this, like you have to gather data, create the audiences, which over time is what is going to make it very accurate. But I feel this is also a race to the top in the sense that the few brands that are adopting it now, They're going to have a compound effect with the data that people that they start later on, they're not going to be able to catch up because then they have to go through the same nurturing process to get the same data and get very accurate. It's like the same with meta, right? Brands have doing metads for It's eight years now. They're going to be much more profitable and accurate as a guy that just launched the first Facebook campaign yesterday, right? So do you think we're going to potentially reach a situation in Amazon where, you know, five years from now, guys that really create this kind of, again, like vaults of data are going to be pretty much dominating categories and it's going to be very difficult for you to compete against them? What is your take on that? Speaker 1: Yeah, 100% it's a factor. It's totally true that the amount of data that you build up just grows over time and that allows you to sell more accurately, especially with the tools and AMC that Amazon has given us access to now. I do think that new incumbents have their own strength profile and that they can kind of disrupt things by doing things totally different and they can overcome that lack of data, but it's 100% a factor. And it's just yet another reason why I'm sure you come across this too. I'll come across brands every few weeks that are super successful without PPC and think they don't need it because they just have a lot of brand recognition off Amazon and Amazon is just one of their channels and they're pretty big. And they think, why should I give Amazon more money? Why should I use PPC? And it's like, you know, I feel like I have to like go into like teacher mode, like advocate mode, because if you're doing really well without PPC, Like, it means that you're just leaving a ton of money and growth on the table. Like, if you try to just, like, maximize your Amazon profit, you're already, you know, butthurt about the big storage and fulfillment fees that Amazon is charging you and the, you know, inventory check-in fee and all that stuff. So you don't want to pay them even more money. Fine, and maybe you do get off Amazon traffic that helps you to keep that alive, but somebody else is going to be running that PPC. And like you just said, they're building out a vault of data. They're learning what campaigns and keywords perform best, what product targets perform best, what categories targeting performs best, what creatives We are connecting best with our shopper avatars, who their shopper avatars is. They're getting all of this information, all of these like, you know, secret sauce insights that they can use to boost their sales both on and off Amazon that you're not getting if you're not running PPC. That just alone is worth it. But plus, if you're not running it, you're just not running as much sales velocity. And hence, you know, you don't have as much control over changing your organic ranking. So that is going to hurt you in the long term, too. Speaker 2: I agree. I agree. Yeah. Sometimes brands, they have this philosophy that, yeah, we're just big enough. We don't have to run any ads. Everybody knows. But I have seen that so many times. I'm sure you have as well. Brands that were dominant in a category, over a span of two to three years they became not the dominance anymore because over time you let these small brands take a little bit of your pie and then it's a compound effect. Like they take a bit from your PPC here, they take a bit from PPC there and you just rely on organically and then overnight it happens then you have somebody on the groups on WhatsApp and everything. I don't know what is happening like We just have a sudden drop in sales organic is having a drastic drop and it is like yes because you allow competition to have attribution towards the history on a positive way that you never essentially mind maintain. And overnight you then see those drops because then the system readjusts itself about who is the new winner, who is the new one that's converting the traffic the best. And that's when then it's going to be a spiral towards that, right? Then it's too late for you to catch up, right? So I agree, like BBC has to be part of it all the time. Speaker 1: Yeah, it has to. It's similar to the, this is another conversation that we have pretty frequently is Like my stance is that, and our stance is Ovi, is that in a majority of cases, probably even a vast majority of cases, it does make sense to do brand defense advertising. It's only like very small, like once in a while where it actually doesn't make sense. Almost all the time it makes sense to do it. But a lot of brands are really hesitant to do this because they don't want to pay for sales that they think they already would have gotten. Like, oh, they're already searching for my brand. Why would I pay for that? You know, and make an app show up that I have to pay, you know, whatever it is, $2 per click, instead of them just finding it organically. The reason is because, you know, we both know, because we do brand offense advertising, it's easy to steal another brand's sales sometimes, especially if you have a better offer, either on their keywords or on their listings. And so this is, you know, it's similar to the conversation we were just having where it's like, Look, you know, you can either use ads to defend your branded search terms and your actual listings, or you can just let other people take them over and like steal your sales. And it's like, you know, that's one where you get like a double benefit, right? Because not only do you get some sales from it, which is nice, and maybe you could argue, yeah, I would have gotten the sales anyway. Okay, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't, we don't know. But you also get to at least keep somebody else from taking your sales. So the same ad that's getting you sales is also doing a double job of keeping somebody else from getting your sales. And that's like a loss that you never would have seen. It's just the way it goes up is it's just a lower click through rate, lower conversion rate, lower overall sales than it would have been if you were doing it. Speaker 2: Yeah, and in fact it's even more negative if you have lifetime value, which I'm sure you have seen. Like you lose a client and then that's a lifetime value compound effect that you are not even factoring in, like supplements and things like that. It's even worse in those cases. Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's like exponentially worse because the first sale is just like the doorway entry into a long-time customer. They might purchase five, seven, nine times throughout the year. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I know. But it's good that we bring this forward because I'm sure you have this conversation on a daily basis, people thinking. Some people even think, oh, this is a scam. It's like, no, it's not a scam. You definitely just haven't been implementing it properly, which is why you have bad experiences in the past. It's just something you have to factor as part of your margins, and if your brand is not built for sustaining marketing as part of the margin, that means fundamentally there's something wrong with how the brand was built in the first place. All brands have to have margins for marketing. Otherwise, it's going to be a matter of time before somebody takes over. Now, another conversation is we're discussing about departing. This is something that, of course, has been out there for a bit now. But I feel the part thing and also hourly bidding and all of that is something that's becoming more and more important as competition gets more fierce, categories get more saturated and CPC gets higher, like you really need to be on top of it to maximize every single dollar. But again, it all comes down to what kind of software you use, how you essentially adjust it on the fly. And at the end of the day, not all brands also benefit from it, right? So what is your take on this topic? Are you seeing that more and more brands are still doing this? It's not a hot topic anymore. What are your comments when it comes to that? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. I've seen it actually become more and more effective for our brands. And the one thing that makes me really hesitant about it is that for whatever reason, day partying has taken on this kind of like sexiness in our industry where a lot of brand owners really think it's like their life-saving, you know, secret pack that's going to completely turn around their ads. And there are times where it can make a really dramatic difference. I won't lie. That does happen. But a vast majority of the times, brands that we have in our portfolio and brand owners that we work with and that I coach, They focus on it too early. They think like this is like the hack that's going to like make their ads profitable. Well, no, like, you know, you're targeting your creative, the ad types themselves, the optimization of the thumbnail and the listing. Those things go a much further way than that. Dayparting should be something that you tap through. You've done all that. But given that you have done all that, so say you've really focused on all the fundamentals, your click-through rate's above benchmark for this space, your conversion rate is above benchmark for this space, your targeting is totally dialed, you've already done a lot of testing for different targeting, different ad types, you've Implemented creative and specifically sponsored brand video. That's absolutely, if you don't do that, you don't have a sponsored brand video and you're trying to mess with day partying. It's like, what are you doing? You got your priorities all messed up. But assuming you've done all that, you're totally dialed. Okay, then yes, day partying might be one of the next things that will help give you that edge. And sometimes it can be so, you know, the very basic thing that anybody listening to this can do even before you actually dive into day partying itself using a software like. AdTomek or AdLabs, we use AdLabs, is just download your report. If you go into Seller Central, the ad console, you click campaign reports, and then you click campaign. So the report type, you click campaign, and then you click hourly, and then you download the report. You can only do two weeks at a time, so download the last two weeks, and then download the two weeks before that, and then you combine those both reports, so you have a full month of data, right? And you should have significant sales. If you're not doing like Minimum 20K monthly in sales. That's really like the bottom edge. You probably don't even have enough data to do this. And it's gonna lead you astray. Because if you don't have enough data, you'll see them because you're looking for them. And then they'll be wrong. So you'll actually fuck up your ads by trying to do day parting. So you gotta have significant sales for this to even matter. But download those reports, pop them into Google Sheets, Do some custom formatting on them. I have a YouTube video on this on my channel. Speaker 2: Then we can put it down in the description for people to find it. Yeah, totally. Speaker 1: You can see custom formatting then you have green to red what's good and bad for a cost for click-through rate, for conversion rate, for revenue per click. And then it becomes very clear. Then you can see certain bands of the day you get all green. Best click-through rate, best ACoS, best conversion rate, best revenue per click. And there will be bands during the day where it's very clear that it's bad. It's all red. Worst conversion rate, worst click-through rate, worst ACoS, worst revenue per click. And if you see a pattern like that, Then you know that you do have an opportunity and then you can explore it. If you're like, I don't really see a pattern in this, I see some red, some green, like all over the place, then don't even worry about it. Date parting is probably not going to help. So that's the first thing everyone can do. Just like look at your own data and anybody can do this. You just go into your, you know, your ad console and click hourly and boom, you got the data. You just have to format it properly. Once you do that, then you can actually, if you validated that for sure there's a pattern and you've done that, you know, multiple weeks in a row, you're like, okay, I know for sure this band of the day from whatever it is, like 9am to 4pm, is always better, significantly better than the other hours, then yes, use something to adjust the bids. You can do Amazon itself, but obviously Amazon has their own incentives. All you can do is increase. So if you're day partying with Amazon's own rules, you can only increase everything. So it's better to use some kind of software. We use AdLabs for this. Adtomic is another one people use, but a lot of the softwares have day partying options built into it now. Speaker 2: Interesting. And I guess, of course, it comes down, and you mentioned that, to the amount of data because you need substantial amount of consistency across a specific key or a specific kind of metric to make a decision. But I guess, taking consideration that you have done this with so many brands now, do you see any clear pattern towards specific category where departing is more, creates a bigger influence in terms of the impact towards conversion? Like, for example, do you think this is more impactful for supplement brands or is more impactful for toy brands? Or you see this affecting all brands equally if the amount of data is substantial? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really weird because like you would think maybe that you would find like this similar pattern across a lot of brands, but it's always different. Yeah, it's totally different. I mean, I just subjectively I've noticed that our skincare brands tend to have a pattern that can be leveraged or exploited. That there's some time of day usually where Whatever reason, you know, I wouldn't even say skincare, but beauty and personal care as a whole seems to be more pattern based. We definitely see consumables and supplements. I've seen a lot of patterns, but there are a lot of brands that don't have pattern that you just, you can't see anything in the data that really is definitive. That would make you think, okay, yeah, for sure. Dayparting would help here. And we've had some cases where We thought we saw a pattern. We implemented day parting with either day by day, hour by hour bid adjustments, and it made the performance worse. So it doesn't always work, but we also have cases where it really made a massive difference. We have some cases where it made all the difference. Speaker 2: It pretty much saved the brand. It pretty much saved the brand in some cases. We have seen the same in other cases. Totally. Speaker 1: Sometimes you do it at the last resort, right? You're like, well, we tried everything else. Let's try day partying and see if that helps it. And sometimes it really can pull the nose up. Speaker 2: Now, I guess another thing I wanted to ask you is, of course, to do with the part in the source and coming back a little bit back to You know, being dynamic with the bids and everything, which is placement optimization, right? We also have seen that that can create a huge impact on the performance of the campaign. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you find some keywords that perform better at the top of the search, the rest of the search, or vice versa, or probably those pages. It can also vary from keyword to keyword, category to category. So my question to you is, when it comes to The way of automating this somehow or just coming up with a system that you can effectively essentially nail the right placement for each keyword when you manage your brand. Is there some advice or some tips you have come across when it comes to that? Or what is your take on that on placement optimization? Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean, we use AdLabs especially for our super high ASIN count brands so that we can apply automations based on rules and we just set the rules based on what criteria we see performing through direct observation. And then it's like bulk bid adjustments the way we work. So it's not that like bid adjustments are made automatically on a rule based system. We still push the changes, but we push them in bulk. So we kind of have a fusion strategy where like we always like to have eyes on everything, but we're just more efficient in making the changes rather than setting up a bunch of rules that set bids without us even looking at it because we've tried that. We've tried everything. We've tried AI-based, black box, bid automation, campaign, auto campaign creation. We've tried rule-based, where you set up rules and bids, most importantly, but also bid adjustments, budgets are optimized based on the rules that you set up. We're hitting certain targets. And then we've tried the way that we're at now, which is basically a glorified version of bulk uploads, where you like set parameters, and then you push changes. But you have to do that yourself manually each time you want to push changes. And we found that works the best. Because when you set rules, Like, they can just go off the rails. Speaker 2: I know. Speaker 1: And then you have to keep going back in and then you become like a rule manager instead of a campaign manager. Speaker 2: Yeah, you become a firefighter. You're now trying to control the rule itself rather than the rule making a better job, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, you're just trying to keep it from fucking things up. And it's the same with, you know, the black box AI, you know, campaign creation, bid automation, like full automation, is that they can just go off the rails and that's the first time it messes up. Can wreck your whole year. So it's like my dad says, you know, I bought a motorcycle, right? My dad hates that I ride a motorcycle. He likes to say like, you know, the first accident you get in is the one that kills you on a motorcycle. Speaker 2: Yeah, you have one shot. Speaker 1: Yeah, you have one shot. First accident is your last accident. And he's right. I'm really safe. I don't ride very often anyway. But that's like, you know, when you're entrusting your campaign creation, your bid automation stuff to, you know, automated system, the first time it messes up could mess up your whole year. And we have a lot of brands in our portfolio that came from, I won't name any names, but you know, these AI tools. Speaker 2: The magic AI PPC tools. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know the ones. I don't even have to say them, you know what I'm talking about. And they just got wrecked from it and they're looking to repair and we get them back on track. But that's how we do it. That's our philosophy. I think now more than ever, especially if you don't have a super high ASIN count, like if you have hundreds of ASINs, okay, you need to have like bulk changes somehow. or some kind of automation. But if you have like a couple ASINs or a couple dozen ASINs, say like five, six ASINs or even like 40, 50 ASINs, you should be looking at the data. You should be managing them independently because it gives you a lot back. Like, especially now that you have, you know, you mentioned top of search, rest of search, product page, bid adjustments, right? But now we also have audience bid adjustments. Now we also have business buyer adjustments. So it's like you've got to be in there. You've got to look at it because if you don't know how those things are performing, you don't know how to like act in your business. If you like, for instance, if I see that one of my ASINs My business buyer placements are performing way better. Well, that's not just a PPC thing. That's a whole business thing. Now I know that. So I'm going to be targeting more business related keywords and bulk purchase related keywords. I'm going to be targeting Amazon's business value days and doing big promotions during those days. I might even, outside of Amazon, I start focusing on B2B buyers in my other channels like retail or off Amazon ecom. So if you're not in there, you don't get that data. You don't get those insights. It also allows you to change your thumbnail and your listing, right? Because now if I know business buyers keep coming back, I can put some dedicated content or images that sell to those people that like make them feel like, yes, I'm in the right place. This is the type of product that I need. So if you're not in there doing it, you just don't get that data and you can't make good decisions. Speaker 2: I know, I know. So, I mean, Chris, it's been a great conversation and thank you so much. I know, I mean, we're only touching a few points of the vast universe of PPC and I just had to... Speaker 1: We could talk all day, I'm sure. Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. And I really, I really, you know, I always have a great time having these conversations with you and getting your insights. I'm sure a lot of people might want to have, you know, a deeper conversation with you and go more in depth or to explore your services. So, you know, tell us how people can find you. Speaker 1: Yeah, you can find me on sophiesociety.com. That's the best place to find me. It's S-O-P-H-I-E-S-O-C-I-E-T-Y, sophiesociety.com. You can get in contact with me there. Also, my YouTube channel, it's just Chris Rawlings. If you type Chris Rawlings into YouTube, you can find me there. That's probably the best place because I post there. Speaker 2: I'm going to put all the links and everything in the description so people can find you. But other than that, Chris, it's a pleasure as usual. And thank you so much for your time. And hopefully I get to see you soon at upcoming events. Yeah. Speaker 1: Totally, dude. Yeah, it's been great doing this with you, man. Thanks everyone for listening. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. Have a good one. Speaker 1: Bye-bye. Speaker 2: See ya. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at EcomCy.