Episode #111 - This One Quick Tip will INSTANTLY Make You a Better Amazon PPC Manager

Episode #111 - This One Quick Tip will INSTANTLY Make You a Better Amazon PPC Manager Speaker 1: Today, we're giving away one quick tip to help you immediately become a better Amazon PPC manager. Speaker 2: We have never shared this before, but in the next few minutes, we're giving you something that took us way too long to learn, so pay attention. Speaker 1: We're discussing the 2x Half Back Technique, which nobody knows except us and now you. Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing That Amazon Ads Podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to That Amazon Ads Podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 2: Alright, we're going to be talking about the 2x Half Back Method like Stephen mentioned. Stephen, you brought this idea up. Tell us a little bit about it, where you heard about it to begin with. Speaker 1: So this is something that maybe some people might know somewhat slightly intuitively, but I don't think is very widely known or at least has not been I would say synthesized in in a good way to make it memorable. You know, I think fun random fact a lot of information people like they know, but they haven't properly like synthesize and categorized it mentally to make that information that they know that knowledge easily accessible and more Just being better at applying it. So in general, I think it's always helpful to label terms and techniques so that it actually becomes a tool in your tool belt and not something that you accidentally do sometimes. So with that, the 2x Half Back Method is also known as overshoot and correct. And this is actually something that I learned when I was doing my, I started working on my private pilot's license. I was going through aviation school. And what my flight instructor told me is that if you're flying at say, you know, 3000 feet, and you want to climb to 3500 feet, you can't just give it a little bit more throttle to try to start the climb. He would say give it twice the amount of throttle that you think you need. And then as soon as you start to achieve a positive climb rate, then cut back half. And now you're at where you actually should have been from the beginning. But the whole principle is why do you give it twice what you think you need from the beginning? And there's two reasons for this. Number one is to overcome inertia. And as you may know, inertia is a property of matter. And the second reason is to overcome the risk of potentially just Under adjusting and not giving the plane enough power to actually begin the climb. And the same principle applies in a descent as well. So if you're at 3000 feet and you want to drop by 1500, if you just pull back a little bit on the power, you still have a lot of positive momentum and glide. And so cutting back half of that until you start to decline and then push back in half of what you took out will allow you to successfully begin that climb or descent. Now, let's bring this back into the Amazon space and how this applies. And it essentially is when you are needing to make an adjustment to your spend or sales or ACOS. So if the, let's just say you're currently at a, you know, 30% ACOS and you know, the client wants to start like pushing more aggressively, they want to start working up towards 35% or something like that. Actually, okay, well, we already started this. So we'll continue with the climb instead of the descent. What we see too many managers do all the time, and this is honestly like where churn comes from a lot of the time, is the managers are afraid to spike the ACoS as they try to push a product from 30% to 35%. So they'll just do like a 5% increase on bits. And then they wait a week, and then they increase another 5%. And software automations do this too. So you're either automating the software, you change the target ACoS on the software, or you're doing things manually. And you're doing these, you know, Over the course of several weeks or months, you're slowly raising it until you get there and it took you two months to get to the goal. And if the client after month one just thought you're not doing anything, they're just gonna fire you. But I think a more probably appropriate example is if you're trying to reduce that ACoS. So let's just say you're currently at 40% ACoS and the goal is to get it down to 30% ACoS. What a lot of people do is they'll pull back on the bids a little bit, try to target a little bit lower, And next thing you know, the next few days, the ACoS is still at 40%. And you're like, okay, well, it's just sales attribution delay, like that ACoS is gonna come down. So you give it a few more days, and it's still at 40%. You're like, okay, now I'm gonna try to pull back a little bit more. So you pull back a little bit more, maybe you forget to like adjust your placement setting or something. So now the next week, it's at like 41%. And you're like, oh, shoot, okay, now I'm gonna pull back a little bit more. You run into all these problems, and it can take you months to actually get down to that 30% ACoS. Whereas what we're trying to advocate for, Whenever you're trying to, within the next week or two, change the A costs substantially or the spend or the sales, like your investment levels, whatever, get momentum, give it twice the amount of adjustment that you think you need. And then after you start to see some movement, cut back half. Speaker 2: Wow. I don't know if I could have said it better myself. Speaker 1: Yeah, I should have. Put some brakes in there. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, well just to kind of recap some of that, I mean, this is something I had never really, I'm not, I've never been to aviation school except I am a licensed drone pilot. Uh, not, not a real pilot, but, um, I had never heard this 2x halfback method kind of described or at least incorporated within Amazon, but it is something that I kind of intuitively did. So when clients try to ask you to get things moving in a certain direction, better to kind of get your way there a little bit more quickly and course correct from there. I notice this a lot in product launches, like when you're launching new campaigns, sometimes those suggested bids can be way off. Like I was just working with a new product launch and I initially looked at the suggested bids. They were like $3, $3.50 and we launched the campaigns kind of right around there and weren't getting any impressions. So we had to like really crank up the bids, running multiple bid increases a day, trying to get things up. We didn't start getting visibility until like $6. Now we did that over a period of like a day or two, but if you can imagine only doing that like once a week, as you kind of described, That could be a problem, especially with this particular client was very high pressure, high stakes kind of product launch and it was important that we got the bids dialed in, got the spend going and really ramp this product up from the go. This technique kind of allows for that and helping you kind of push things a little bit further, a little bit faster until you start getting some visibility and then you can kind of gauge and adjust as you need from there. Speaker 1: And the reason why I think this whole inertia principle carries over well to Amazon is because inertia is an object's resistance to change. And Amazon's algorithm, I would say is very similar where there is things kind of settle in to a little bit of consistent state. And so when you were trying to create a change there, like affect the BSR or affect the spend levels, whatever, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to quickly create an impact and that's what we're giving it. So if your bids are currently at a dollar and you're trying to increase the visibility on this product and get more spend behind it, increase the bids by twice the amount that you think you should increase them just to kind of overcome that initial like need to get that momentum up. And do not just stop there. That's very important here. It's not just, we're not saying always do twice what you think you need. We're saying, and then cut back half as soon as you see the impact. So if you increase the bids, let's say you think you should increase bid by 25%. Instead, you're going to increase them by 50%. So now you've got a dollar 50 bid. And the next day or two, if you see that the spend has successfully increased, now you can dial things back to that $1.25 to where you actually think it should be. But if you just go from $1 to $1.25, the two potential problems there are number one, that might just not be significant enough of a change to overcome like ranking and momentum, BSR, all that kind of stuff. Amazon's very momentum centric. And the second thing is, Sometimes you just underestimate, you know, you're just you're a little timid, you're afraid to put too much throttle into the plane. And so you hesitate. And sometimes that's that's what we also found, like in flight schools, you give it twice what you think you need. And that just ends up being actually how much you needed. And then you don't have to cut back because you got the results. So in this case, like you're trying to increase visibility on this product, you're at $1 has no visibility, you increase it to it, you think you should go 25% higher, instead you do 50 cents higher. And now you're actually getting a good amount of visibility, the A cost is okay. So actually now you don't need to cut back. So that can also sometimes happen. So it's those two primary reasons. It's the momentum, principle and then it's also just protection against you being too timid with your changes because sometimes just being too timid, too scared, too hesitant can just result in nothing getting done in the account even though you're working tirelessly trying to analyze everything and maybe getting analysis paralysis and monitoring things like a hawk and just every week doing 5% more, 5% more, 5% more and then the client's like, all right, you're fired. So that's what we're trying to guard against and That's it. So I think short episode, Andrew, any final concluding thoughts? Speaker 2: No, I mean, I can see ways that this could apply to a lot of different aspects of PPC too, like the bid increases, decreases, trying to get spend up, aid cost down, all these types of things. That's important. I think it could apply to like keyword selection too, even like, you know, there's times where I'm doing keyword research and it's like, I'm not sure if that's like 100% relevant for this product or not. Just throw it in there and test it out, see what happens. You might be surprised at some of the stuff that converts and that works. So yeah, great episode, really short and sweet. Love this tactic. It's super impactful, super helpful for Making sure that you're getting where you need to go with your Amazon PPC. Speaker 1: Yeah, just so you know, Andrew, when I say any concluding thoughts, you can't say no and then give a concluding thought. Speaker 2: Well, that's what I just did so I can do whatever I'd like. So thank you very much. Speaker 1: All right. And last thing you might notice, Andrew has a mustache now and my beard got shaved because we were filming something very special. So you'll see, uh, we will post it on the YouTube channel of what, what was going on with our, uh, why we look a little different from the last week's episode. So make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it when it drops in a couple of weeks. And we'll catch you guys next time on That Amazon Ads Podcast. Speaker 2: See you next time.