EP #348] [ENG] - Tips to optimise your Amazon ppc campaigns - Vadim Soin

EP #348] [ENG] - Tips to optimise your Amazon ppc campaigns - Vadim Soin Speaker 2: 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 3: Hello, guys. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where everything related to Amazon Private Level and Ecommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, Founder and CEO of Ecomcy, and today we bring you another special guest. His name is Vadim Soin, and he's the Founder and CEO of PPC Jumpstart, where they specialize in everything that's to do with advertising around Amazon. And today's conversation is going to be everything around Q4. Essentially, we're in Q4 already, and a lot of the conversation is around, you know, how do I make sure my PPC It's ready for it. Tips when it comes to optimization, how can maximize the most out of it. And today, hopefully, with some of the insights that Vadim is going to share with us, he's going to make sure that journey is as efficient as possible. So, Vadim, welcome to the show today. Thank you so much for being here. How are you doing? Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. I'm very, very excited. We finally got on this call. I know, you know, we're both busy guys. You know, you have a lot of presentations. And, you know, just a few weeks ago, we met up in Seattle. It was good to see you in person. You know, I'm doing very well. You know, we just finished with Prime Day. You know, there is a lot of holidays upcoming, like Friday, Saturday, Monday. Very busy season, but I'm excited we got on this chat finally. Speaker 3: Awesome. Same here, same here. I know we've been going back and forth to make this happen, but finally we're here and I'm super excited about that. So I guess to kick off things, just give us a brief intro about yourself, your company, and then we can get started. Yeah. Speaker 1: The brief intro about myself, I actually started as a seller myself. I didn't get into this advertising world just by learning or just watching YouTube videos, thinking, OK, I'm going to be a service. I started selling my own products. So I had, you know, I'm into working out. I go to the gym a lot and I thought to myself, okay, I want to create this premium version of workout gloves, something that lasts long, does not rip, because everything on the market at the time was just cheaply made. I'm a weightlifting lab, you know, selling for $10. So I came up with this product. I found a factory in Pakistan. I imported it and, you know, and I got, I got it going. Everything was working well until I realized, you know, that the PPC part is like literally half of the battle and Amazon PPC. So that, that kind of what got me started into this business. And then, you know, at the time when I was selling my product, you know, I had like a few people who I was talking to at the time, like they asked me, Hey, can you manage our advertising? Right. And I mean, I've never done it for someone at the time. So I said, sure. Right. And I, you know, I did manage their ads and it's been like, it worked so well that they, they told me like, you know, hiring you was like the best business decisions that they've made at the time. And you know, it was also around Q4 and just like for a five-year-old business, because they're a pretty established business and we are like seeing like, you know, first month I'm working with them, it's like a best month. Second month is another best month. I'm like, I think I'm like onto something. Like, why don't I just go and like help other people? Yeah. So this is where I started, you know, being a seller myself and then just taking the skills and applying to help other sellers. Speaker 3: Awesome. Speaker 1: I love it. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I mean, especially even myself, like, you know, when you come from a seller background, I think the beauty of that as well is that you understand the struggle of being a seller and you can also understand the perspective of being a client. So yeah, I think it's something that if you know how to reverse engineer and put that from the perspective of other value as a consultant and a service that people definitely can see the value in that as well, you know, they can see where you're coming from. Yeah. Speaker 1: And yeah, and sorry, speaking about reverse engineering, I think your background, you're an engineer, right? Speaker 3: Yes, that's right. Speaker 1: I was also an engineer, so I was in the different space, like mechanical engineering, so maybe somewhat related to aerospace. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, for us, actually, myself being an aerospace engineer, I remember seeing some of the modules from mechanical engineers, so there's definitely some overlap. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really cool. So we're both ex-engineers, you could say. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's, I think, another value that we bring to the table. I think being engineering, kind of with engineering mindset, it helps a lot with numbers, especially PPC being so numbers driven. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And I think it also helps a lot in troubleshooting, figuring out what works, what doesn't work and go from there. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. And, you know, I really enjoyed, like I said, coming from engineering, like we were already dealing with a lot of charts. Numbers, calculations, formulas, you know, analysis, forecasting. So this is just a second. It's like a second nature, except it's like it's not engineering. It's not, you know, materials. It's numbers. It's sales. It's marketing. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, I guess diving into the conversation today, which is, you know, PPC around Q4, I think something that I would like to start with is, you know, what are some of the things you would say from a preparation point of view sellers need to be aware of? Because I think, I mean, we're already in Q4, so for a lot of people it's late if you haven't done anything at all, but, you know, you're still in time to kind of rectify certain actions. So what is your advice when it comes to that and what is usually your recommendation? Speaker 1: Yeah, well, like, you know, starting with the very basics, like, As a PPC manager, you're not managing just advertising, you're also looking at it holistically. How is the overall market doing? Everyone should have some kind of a spreadsheet or a document that has their competition, has their BSR, and just to know when these guys are having the deals, when they reduce the price, etc. I would say this is number one, just looking at the market overall. This could be a weekly exercise. Speaker 3: Cool. And I guess in terms of preparation as well from the perspective of budgets, how you should recommend people as well to handle that? Because what people is also not aware is that, you know, things such as the cost per click is going to be increasing significantly, which means you need to be more out of pocket to keep sharing keywords and keep consisting winning the placement. So do you also budget for that? And if so, what is usually I guess the increment that you advise when it comes to. Yeah. Speaker 1: So, you know, we should definitely identify our like goal, like our, you know, like what is the end goal? Obviously, increasing sales profit, then we identify what is our keywords that we own, what is our keywords that have been working for us consistently. So, these are the kind of campaigns that we are going to fight for aggressively, you know, despite the increase in PPC. Because we know that during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these are the exact keywords that are going to move the needle, that are going to move the business. And just getting like super technical here, From what I see, you know, how different placements work maybe leading up to Events like Black Friday, typically top of search is going to encounter a lot of window shoppers, people adding to cards, browsing. So maybe we want to let go of the throttle on top of search, maybe bid more on the rest of search, etc. But during this day itself, you'd better have your top of search bids maxed out, especially on the keywords that you're already winning before. Yeah, cool. Speaker 3: And I guess in terms of a history. I'm also keen to learn about this because I know historically by talking to people when it comes to getting ready for Q4, one of the methodologies as well has to do with essentially analyzing what has been happening in the last years and then trying to learn from it, especially by having a look at things such as brand analytics or even looking at your own historical data. So how you also advise people using their kind of past performance to kind of emulate that into the future and what you could potentially be doing as well. Speaker 1: So the very helpful report is you already mentioned that brand analytics. Honestly, I think this is one of the useful things that you could find on Amazon. Brand analytics, we look at yearly, year over year, you know, change on specific keywords. Let's say it's something like wood carving tools. So we would look at the previous, say, October, November, December, and then we are seeing like what kind of increase this keyword is getting. And if it's something like, say, this keyword is going from 100 sales in October to 300 in November and 600 in December, which is actually the case for that niche, you know, this keyword will be at the very top of our advertising. Not just, you know, not just running PPC, but specific focus on the ranking, making sure that, you know, we are in the top five before, you know, before that huge increase in traffic. And sales. So brand analytics, you know, it gives you the forecast. And this is, like I said, it's a very useful report. Speaker 3: Cool. And I guess in terms of as you have a look at historical performance to get ready for PPC, how you also potentially You with your clients, so in terms of what you have seen in other people in the industry, under consideration of organic, because we know, of course, the conversation today is about how we can get ready from a PPC perspective. But from an organic perspective, do you also recommend people to maximize as much as possible what they're doing with their listings, how they're controlling certain gears, because we all know the influx of traffic on Q4 is higher. And I guess being fully optimized on that front can also help significantly. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I will give a few pointers here. So the first one is, like you mentioned, the front end of the listing. What I find really helps is optimizing your listing. Say it's approaching Christmas, right? I already see some listings who are selling very well. They have this Christmas theme on their images, like a bell or a Santa Claus, something basic like that. That helps a lot. And like, okay, and let's say we speak specifically about PPC. What I also find helps is like, do you run any like, you know, hourly or day parting on the accounts you manage? Speaker 3: Yeah, so we do. I mean, just as a feedback, that's something that we do and I'm keen to hear your thoughts. Like I think that can be a game changer, especially if your budget is limited, right? Like that can significantly impact performance, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the most common way of day partying is just day partying things at night where we run reduced advertising. But, you know, during the holidays itself, you know, I find for accounts that usually work very well, we just reduce the day partying hours. So say we're advertising from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. during, say, Black Friday, it's literally going to be whole day. Something like that. We reduce the day partying. And that also works other way around. Right after Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you know, we are entering that slump again, where everything goes down temporarily. This is a good time to have more day partying. Say, we're only running ads for like six hours a day. And this is just like another lever you can pull besides budgets. Speaker 3: Yeah. Cool. And I guess on this strategy, when it comes to You know, leveraging, of course, seasonality, keywords and all of that. Out of curiosity, do you also take in consideration, for example, on the minks, especially because now we can get the data, Amazon Marketing Cloud, because now with Amazon Marketing Cloud, you could potentially also historically look at, you know, what has happened last year or have some audiences that you could repurpose for Q4. Like, what are your thoughts with Amazon Marketing Cloud being embedded on this methodology as well? Speaker 1: I'm, you know, I'm still very much, you know, testing Amazon Market Cloud on a small scale. Like, I have a few audiences set up, like, basic things, like, added to cart, but didn't purchase. So I cannot speak too much on that point yet. And have you already using it, like, in full force for your accounts? Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, for that, actually, we've seen that it's been very impactful because just as I was building the question, like, for us using that kind of what happened in the past, Today we're going to talk about behaviors around purchases, abandoned cards, so seeing different competitive brands. Now we can essentially reverse engineer certain behaviors and kind of the ideal avatar that we know is going to be the highest converting when it comes to buying from us and then we can use that to leverage our campaign. So that's why I was keen to know if that's something you think people should also be leveraging into Q4, you know? Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I'm again, I'm not probably the best person to ask, but I think there should be like, like I said, I'm already starting to look into it and ideally like expanding more into that before Q4. So, yeah, there should be, there should be. Speaker 3: Awesome. Now, I guess in terms of going back to PPC now, building into Q4, let's say when it comes to optimization, because what's going to happen for a lot of people during Q4 is that given that they're getting so much engagement because of the extra influx of traffic and most likely they're going to spend more money, people is going to get very reactive and sometimes been driven by emotions when it comes to optimization. And we both know that's not the most efficient way to really maintain, you know, campaigns on a good trajectory, because if optimization comes from a reactive point of view, right, and focusing on real data, it can really spiral the performance into a negative path. So what are your thoughts on that? Speaker 1: I have a lot of brands that I manage. There is one example of a closing brand. They're selling yoga pants. Also, that is Q4 and most of the brand sales are going to go up. For something like closing, especially a summer item, it's inevitable that the sales are going to be down. We manage it for brands with different expectations. For something like closing, We are expecting that the sales are going to be down, so we're not going super aggressive for anything like rankings, etc. Instead, we have a lot of discovery. Lately, I've been finding that broad, much-modified campaigns work well, auto-campaigns work well, just giving more control to Amazon in general. Instead of just relying purely on exact match type, which used to be a thing in the past, where everyone suggests use exact match type, run keywords, et cetera. Is this something that you find as well? Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, for us, To be honest, exact magic is being the main source of essential outcome when it comes impacting organic ranking. So that's always one that we're going to advise people to go for. Yeah, especially if you go top of the search where conversion tends to be higher. And we both know by spiking conversion that can build a good history for you that ranks you organically more. So, yeah, it definitely has to be part of it. But I agree with you. I think people should be leveraging more also face and broad because sometimes with the same keyword, And sometimes with the same placement, you could end up paying cheaper CPC just because of where the targeting is happening from. I don't know if you have experienced the same as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, and there is, you know, there is also like a common school of thought, like people ask, should we be negating keywords that converted in broad? And since we moved them in an exact match type, let's negate them in broad. My answer is always no. And there is a few reasons for that. Like you said, the first reason you could always get it at the cheap request per click in broad. The second reason, there is already a good history why would you negate it. Like the chances they're going to compete is so slim because broad is pulling so many different search terms, right? Like say 50 different search terms and the chance it's going to compete with exact, it's pretty slim. So yeah, my thought about negating is we never negate good keywords, no matter what kind of, you know, transitions we do, exact to phrase, exact to, I mean, broad to phrase, broad to exact, phrase to exact. We never negate good keywords. Speaker 3: So sometimes even if let's say the queue is performing very well on broad and you move it to exact and the next start performing bad on broad, will you still keep the broad open or you will eventually then negate that one? Speaker 1: I'm, you know, I'm still keeping it open because, you know, if it's working already well on broad, there is no reason to negate it. You know, like, you know, people say, okay, we need to give more traffic to exact match type campaign. Sometimes it happens like this keyword work well and broad, and it's working bad and exact, like, there is no explanation for that. It's like, I think Amazon Ads is still a bit of a black box when it comes to match types. But I don't negate good keywords. Speaker 3: Yeah, for us it's the same. Like for us negation is strictly only if keywords that are underperforming keep showing up no matter what, even lower in price and everything, then negation is required because I was, it depletes the budget, but yes, if performance is good, there is no need for negating. I agree. Speaker 1: Yeah. And something useful I wanted to share on this podcast as well about negations, like, um, do you know about the thing called N-gram analysis? Speaker 3: Yeah. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Might be good if you can explain it maybe for people that is not aware. Yeah. Speaker 1: Ngram analysis is not a very exciting task that you do, but all you're doing is you're grabbing your entire search term report list, you're putting it to a tool called Ngram, and it's showing you how individual phrases work. Let's say you're selling, I don't know, golden spoon, and you have a lot of phrases that are search terms that has silver. And you know, the N-gram analysis will tell you, okay, for anything silver, you'll typically have 100% ACOS. And with using this kind of tool, you can quickly identify the phrases that result in, say, zero orders, highest US search terms, et cetera. And you can build this, I call this negative targeting list. Ideally, you have it for every individual product. And this is like your list of phrases that you never want to show up for. Do you apply it to any of your older campaigns, any new campaigns? And you know, if you manage advertising this way, that helps you a lot to remove irrelevant clicks and traffic. Speaker 3: Yeah, especially because I think something very relevant to mention here is a negative phrasing can also be very powerful. Like the example you gave, you were selling something made of gold and you keep getting keywords that have to do with silver. You want to put silver as a negative phrase because anything that has to do with silver is never going to be good for you, right? Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: And also to take it even further, like you don't have to use in-gram analysis, just looking at what you're For what keywords your product index is for, you just grab that list, you put it in, say, Helium 10 Frankenstein, you look at all of the individual phrases and you ask yourself, like, is it even relevant to my product? And if you do this kind of prenegations, you know, I guarantee you the results are going to be better versus if you just had no negative list and just ran out the campaign, you know, just to search data or mine data. Yeah. Speaker 3: Thank you Vadim for that. So I guess to start coming to a closure in terms of tips, like what would be your last tip that I guess or advice? That you would say people should be aware of when it comes to entering Q4. Any last piece of wisdom, tools, things you want to share? Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I do. During Q4, like say Christmas, et cetera, like, you know, there is already access to Helium 10. We can look up search volume, et cetera. We can find these large keywords. But what happens during Christmas is that there is so much traffic that there is going to be keywords that didn't even exist in the first place, like phrases or keywords. And to really get advantage of this, you don't just have exact match type campaign, you know, working on this large search volume. Of course, it's going to be there. But what I really advise is you have a broad campaign targeting like, say, that's just one word related to your niche. Let's say you're selling something for sleep. So it's going to be sleep in a broad match type. And obviously you have good negations for that. And this campaign, you know, you'll set it up a week before, I don't know, Black Friday, Christmas. You know, it's going to be quiet. Nothing really going to happen. But when Black Friday hits, you'll see how it starts to pull all of these search terms that you didn't even know existed in the first place. So in this way, you can expand your reach, you know, like really far. When that surge in traffic comes. Speaker 3: Cool. That's good. That's good advice. Thank you. I'm going to make sure that, you know, if people want to reach out as well, because I'm sure they want to have more questions about this or explore how people can work with you. Tell us more details about that and how people can find you as well. Speaker 1: I'm very active on LinkedIn. People can find me on LinkedIn under my name Vadim Soin. I'd be happy to get on a call whether we work together or not. I'm always happy to get on calls with clients and just give them a few tips on how to take advantage of this upcoming surge in traffic and Q4. Awesome. Speaker 3: I appreciate that, Vadim. So I'm going to make sure I put all the information below. As we both know, we are just with the tips given today. We're only scratching the surface. So if you have more questions and everything, everybody watching and hearing, feel free to reach out. And other than that, Vadim, hopefully I see you soon at upcoming events. And it's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here. Enjoy this podcast. Speaker 1: Thank you, Vincenzo. Speaker 3: Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 3: Bye-bye. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 3: Bye-bye. Speaker 2: 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.