Finding Your Zone of Possibility for Amazon PPC Rankings

Finding Your Zone of Possibility for Amazon PPC Rankings Michael Erickson Facchin: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den Podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today on the show, we have Sean Stone, my dear friend, coming back to the show and we're going to be talking about a topic that I think he's done a great job outlining, which is there are many, many keywords that you can appear for for a product. Which ones should you focus on To be a realistic ranking opportunity. We're going to jump in here and piece this together here for you. I absolutely love the way that we walk through this topic. So let's jump in The PPC Den podcast. We've been podcasting a long time. This is episode 327. So if you want a categorized and organized view into all of our podcast episodes, Check out the link in the description, which is a big spreadsheet checklist, which categorizes and organizes our episodes. So if you're looking for the SEO episodes or the bidding or the placement biddings or the keyword strategy, check that out. This will certainly be in there under the SEO strategy, which is all about finding keywords. You have a higher than market conversion rate. Let's jump in. Sean, I need to start with some hard-hitting questions. Alright, I'm ready. This is a gotcha show. Oh no. I need to know a couple different things. Number one, can we talk about this mug that I just saw? Could you pull this mug on screen and describe it for people who are listening audio only? What are we looking at here? Sean Stone: We're looking at a Walt Disney mug. Actually, one that only came into my life once I married my wife. Michael Erickson Facchin: Okay. Sean Stone: She worked at Disney when she was just fresh out of college and I wouldn't say she's a Disney adult, but she definitely likes Disney. And because of that, I have a great mug for my coffee. Michael Erickson Facchin: Very interesting. And my second hard-hitting topic is you've got some pillows over your shoulders here, similar to if it's like a good angel and a bad angel over your shoulder. Which one of these is your good angel? Sean Stone: This is gonna sound like a wife appreciation episode, but my wife bought these two pillows for me and didn't tell me that they were coming and then set them up in the office and said, oh, you now have co-workers. And so my co-workers are Nicolas Cage and The Rock. I think it's pretty obvious that Nicolas Cage is the evil angel and The Rock is the good angel. Michael Erickson Facchin: Who do you think would be more successful on Amazon? Sean Stone: The Rock, for sure. Michael Erickson Facchin: You think so? Sean Stone: Well, Nicolas Cage has a history of bad decision making. Michael Erickson Facchin: He does. Sean Stone: And The Rock does not necessarily have that same history, which is why I would... The only thing that Nicholas Cage might have on The Rock is he just understands excess better. And so there's a chance that Nicholas Cage would invent a new product category that would just absolutely crush on Amazon that The Rock maybe couldn't do. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, I can see The Rock getting really good popular product that people already want, whereas Nicholas Cage is launching a Kickstarter for something that's like, it's mushrooms, and they play music when they're fully grown, if you put a copper wire on them or something like that. Sean Stone: I think The Rock would dominate the protein pancake category, and Nicholas Cage would invent the new pet rock. Michael Erickson Facchin: Well, thank you, Sean. Let's jump into the meat of this episode, which of course is I think it's a fantastic question. I feel like people don't consider this enough. I see a lot of people get on the phone, tons of people I talk to every single week, and sometimes they say, I want to rank for this, I want to rank for that, I want to rank for this, like they're going shopping. And I also hear people, I want this ACOS, I need this ACOS, I need this total ACOS. What I have experienced in my years of doing this is that there is a zone of possibility in which someone can currently achieve With who they are in their business right here, right now, that's a combination of the market, their skills, their product life cycle, all this stuff where certain things are possible at our current stage. Maybe later after we achieve something, we can move up the ladder and something else will be possible. But there's a zone of possibility of what is achievable from where we are. And I think a lot of marketers Think this way, where it's just like, okay, I'm at point A, I'm trying to get to point B, and then I'll be at point C. And a lot of times businesses often think of, we need to be at Z now. And I think it's an interesting concept of like the zone of possibility, specifically what is rankable and what is Not so like rankable, I think it's a fascinating word that people need to use more frequently. But what is rankable even mean? Sean Stone: I mean, for us, we try to define it fairly narrowly. And the instead of saying unrankable, which is what we used to say, we've decided to call it incremental. And so what's what's rankable mean? Regable to us is a product that using a combination of Amazon PPC and promotions or some kind of advertising and promotions, you can take some actions and drag yourself up into the top five organically on Amazon. So kind of a narrow definition, and it's one that we found to be quite worthwhile. I completely agree about the zone of possibility. But I think that once you start to accept what you can and cannot do, and once you basically evaluate which keywords you can and cannot rank on, or if the product is not rankable at all, once you have that knowledge, you can use that to start really Going after the keywords that matter for you, which may or may not be the ones you thought they were before you evaluated different factors that go into it. The other thing is you can start to make a plan and kind of use a pretty well-established playbook about what to do in order to grow your business without having to launch a new product. This is like, how do you get more out of what you already have? And that's something that over the years, we've definitely had to do time and time again. And so that's the thing where we really developed this framework for. It's like, how do you get more out of what you already have? Because You know, we, we run ads for people, but there are a lot of things in people's businesses that we're not allowed to touch. It's like, how do we, how do we draw a wall around things we can control and then maximize them? And that's how we kind of came up with this framework. Michael Erickson Facchin: What is the high level overview, like your gut check when you're scanning through a product and keywords that they appear for? I have the first question, which is, are you using like the search query performance report to just get a pulse check of What keywords a product appears for? Is that the first step in sort of just establishing a keyword profile for a particular product? How do you establish that? And then from there, what is your gut check like? For rankable, incremental, rankable, incremental. Sean Stone: The way that we do this is, and we have a video and a free custom GPT you can use. It's on our website. There's no email signup. It's stonesgoods.com. It's under our blog. Really easy. We're not trying to get anyone to do anything. We're just trying to actually help. There should be a YouTube video by the time this comes out as well. But generally, what we do is we blend the search query performance report with the search term report With the Amazon top search terms report, and then with the Helium 10 Cerebro report, really what we're trying to do is get a sense of what is the market doing, and then how is the market's conversion rate, and then how does our sponsored products conversion rate stack up compared to The market. Another way we do this, and again, I wanted to talk about the freeway, but you do have to blend some reports, and so if you don't want to use our tool or you just don't want to use Excel, then the other way you can do this is we use a tool called Datarova, and they give you the top competitor ASIN conversion rate. Again, that tool costs money, and I have no affiliation with them other than I use their product. Generally speaking, What we're trying to do with all these efforts is we are trying to find out what is the top seller's conversion rate in this market. And then once we found that out, we want to compare our conversion rate and we want to do this on a keyword by keyword basis. So you can do this in a spreadsheet. But once you have your top competitor's conversion rate, you want to put your conversion rate for that search term or keyword right next to it. And then once you've done that, the easy thing for you to do is say like, Am I within? Am I about the same? Am I more than 5% below? Am I well above? Because once you look at that, you can kind of decide, okay, great, could I rank on this keyword by spending a lot of money on it or not? Because the conversion rate is going to be what really drives you up. You want to have a few sales on this keyword. You don't want to just be like, I got two clicks on this keyword and one sale, so I have a 50% conversion rate. I'm amazing. No, it's like, did I get at least 30 clicks? And of those 30 clicks, how many turned into a sale? That's kind of the thing you want to be asking yourself. And then once you have some good data around this, you want to be choosing keywords you can go after and try to rank on. And then if you're thinking about this more from a product perspective, the first thing you want to ask yourself is, am I rankable for my main keyword? Am I rankable for my sub-keywords, like maybe the phrase matches of my main keyword? And then if the answer to any of those is yes, then there's a good chance your product is rankable. Again, it's not binary. It's more like a sliding scale. And then if you don't have a good enough conversion rate on any of those keywords, then we generally would consider that to be an incremental product instead. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah. I mean, not a lot of people know this too, but the Search Career Performance Report, the thing that's right inside of Amazon, It doesn't tell you directly what your conversion rate is for the keyword. You have to download it, but then you just add the column because they give you how many clicks you have for a keyword, how many orders you have for a keyword, and then from there you can do your conversion rate. So it'll actually tell you right from there. So basically what we're looking for is when you add those extra columns, you are simply seeing where your conversion rate is better than the competition. Sean Stone: Yeah. The cons we're actually doing, if you're good at Excel, all you need to do is take in the Search Query Performance Report and then the Amazon Tops Search Terms Report, which used to just be called Brand Analytics. Look at them for the same period. And then what you want to do is for each keyword, Find the top ASIN, find their click share, and then find their conversion share. Now, what you want to do is you want to multiply the top ASIN's click share by the clicks column, and the top ASIN's conversion share by the total conversions column. And then what you get there is an approximation of total number of clicks for that product, total number of purchases for that product by that keyword, And then you just divide those two numbers to get an approximated conversion rate. That's kind of the way that we find that benchmark conversion rate. And again, if there's any data scientists, people listening to this podcast, they're going to be screaming, the definitions don't line up. And I'm like, we're doing this for approximation. I'm not certain that this is exactly what the conversion rate is, but it's probably directionally correct. Michael Erickson Facchin: Absolutely. So you sort of have that, that basically it's, it's a way for you to assess keywords that you probably have an advantage of, which, you know, by definition, you know, Amazon wants the highest converting products, the things that people are going to buy the fastest, the quickest, the easiest. They don't want them searching around, clicking around for eons. They want them to Buy something as quick as possible because that's how Amazon makes their money, right? So if you have a keyword that you generally do well for, and we're defining well, we're defining a keyword that you are good for as one that you have favorable conversion rates compared to what's out there. Absolutely. So when you identify that, what do you do next? Sean Stone: By the way, we call it benchmarking, but favorable conversion rate, whatever you want to call it, I'm definitely, yeah. So once we figure out if we have favorable conversion rates on keywords that matter to us, that are highly relevant to us, because you don't want to do this on category keywords. That's another disclaimer. It's like, unless you're really ranky on that category keyword, then go nuts. Michael Erickson Facchin: Well, it's harder to have a Higher than competitor conversion rate for a generic category term. Is that why? Sean Stone: I think that when it comes to ranking, Amazon has some kind of relevance factor built in. Because basically, we ran an experiment where we tried to rank on a category term. It didn't really go that well. And then we tried to rank again, once we had already ranked on all the other terms, and we were able to break into the category term. And the difference, I think, is like, if you're not winning on the general terms, Amazon, even if you have a favorable conversion rate, Amazon doesn't seem to be that willing to drive you up the other terms, because we've tried it. Michael Erickson Facchin: I've also observed that as well where you identify easier terms in the beginning, build up the listing, and then it makes it easier to go after harder, more challenging terms later on. Ideally, the conversion rate improves as you continue to Build up a listing and gain your market strength. Sean Stone: That's exactly it. So we have a little framework for this. It's like benchmark, compare, isolate, and then track. If anyone wants to come up with a better acronym for us instead of BKIT. So we've already benchmarked by finding out our competitor's conversion rate, and we've also compared ourselves to that. So then isolate is the next term. Or the next step that we generally try to use if we're going to try to rank a product. Once we've decided or once we've kind of assessed what each product is, we kind of need to develop a little bit of a playbook. And the playbook needs to be based on data as well. Like what can you afford to spend? Like what kind of Acos or Tacos or cost per order, can you afford to have? Because that's going to be a big factor in what direction you go next with these products. So you got to figure that out. Generally speaking, considering whatever the margin is, and then making that your target Acos could work for a Incremental product or your target or your margin minus 10% could be it. It's kind of, there's a lot of trial and error that needs to go into this. But generally speaking, we choose some kind of margin that makes sense. Or if we're going to go rankable, we kind of need to start isolating the keywords that we think we can rank on. And then once we've isolated them, we want to track them to make sure that the performance is there. Michael Erickson Facchin: I want to pause on that question because I see a lot of people have trouble with this in the sense of, okay, I've identified a keyword. I'd like to use the phrase too, like unfair advantage. Unfair advantage is like we convert better than others. We have a better conversion rate than others. So people have sort of gone through the exercise and identified a keyword that they convert well for compared to competition. And then they don't exactly know how to set a budget for that. It can be pretty tricky because to your point, those are different metrics. So you have You know, conversion rate over there. And then you have to go into your advertising campaigns and like pick a budget for it. And then you're setting a budget for like an individual keyword, you're isolating it, of course. So you're setting a budget for a keyword. And then you also have a whole bunch of other traffic that this product is generating and other keywords inside your PPC campaign. So it's like, I understand why the isolation part is so important because you want to put it in a box and put a circle around it, like this is how much we spend on this ranking effort. How do you determine that amount? I know you mentioned a couple of things about margin, but perhaps another way to think about it might be like percentage of ad spend or percentage of ad cost of total sales. How do you generally pick that number? I feel like that's a thing I wanted to go a little deeper on. Sean Stone: Yeah. So generally speaking, we assume that if we can rank on this product, that we're going to make a lot of money on the back end. And so what we'll generally do is we won't necessarily, we'll choose some kind of budget, but the budget will often be based off of either the Helium 10 CPR number. Yeah, the number that is like this number of sales over eight days or seven days or whatever that is. So you want to choose the total number of sales and divide it by seven, and then divide that by your cost per order. And that, generally speaking, is how we set our budget. Michael Erickson Facchin: Because you can get a pulse check of like, if I rank there, how many sales will I have? What's my margin? Okay, that's how much I can spend. Sean Stone: Yeah. So, well, it's not even about, we're not even If we're ranking, we're not even factoring margin in because we're thinking we already have a favorable conversion rate and we don't know what our new tacos will be once we drive ourselves up on the rankings. So why don't we choose a very short period of time where we go absolutely nuts on this keyword? Obviously, top category keywords we might not try to go absolutely crazy on, at least not right away. We'll look at our DataRobo has daily sales rank, Helium 10 has Cerebro CPR, and we'll look at either those numbers or both those numbers. It'll tell you the total number of sales you need to make on a keyword. In order to rank according to them, and we'll say, okay, our cost per order is X. The number of orders we need per day is Y. So X times Y equals this budget. Now, are we comfortable spending that much money? Yes or no? The answer is no. Cut it in half, make that your budget, and then let your campaign run out of budget every single day. And while that happens, we also want to watch what happens to our keyword ranking. Because realistically, I don't want to spend that much money if it's not going to improve our keyword ranking. But if it does, then we're highly likely to start spending more money on this keyword and potentially getting Better and better keyword rankings, better and better outcomes. Michael Erickson Facchin: There was an interesting post that Brent posted inside Quora recently, which was like, are you setting budgets top-down or bottom-up? And I think most marketers prefer bottom-up, meaning like, what does the data tell us? Let's use that as the budget and send it back up top, and then that new data will influence the overall business budget for advertising, as opposed to, I think marketers in general don't prefer Bottom down or top down, which is like company CFO sets a budget and that's it, like make good use of it. And it can sometimes feel, I don't know, it feels a little constrictive to me sometimes where it's just like, ah, like we see this opportunity, we really want to push it. In isolation, we're just looking at this ranking effort But we also have to balance that with all the other things that we're doing and the top level budget that the company gives us. So it could be a little push and pull sometimes when it comes to setting these budgets. But I think the way that you're describing it of like potential sales and like ranking opportunity, I'm curious too, do you prefer in your day to day, am I right in my assumption that most marketers Do you prefer the bottom-up, which is like, what does the data tell us? Let's use this to set the budget for this thing and then like send that back up top. Sean Stone: It's weird because I kind of feel like we use both at the same time. We prefer bottom-up, but then we need to also consider top-down at the same time. It sounds like a cop-out answer, but we do bottom-up first, then we check if it passes top-down. And then if it does not pass top-down, then we make some tough calls. We try to check our own work before we send it back up. Also, important to call out that if you don't have the budget to go crazy on multiple keywords, it's better to choose one keyword at a time and just test. So it's better to spend more money on one keyword than less money on several keywords in our experience. Michael Erickson Facchin: Of course. Yeah. So we've identified a family of keywords we want to go after. We've understood that we're early in our ranking efforts. We're probably going to have to go over, like you'll find the biggest opportunity for you, where you have the biggest unfair advantage. We have the most favorable conversion rates. I just let you zero in on that. We sort of pick a budget for that, keywords, ranking efforts. And then what does your PPC efforts look like? Sean Stone: Traditionally, what we have done is break those keywords out into single keyword campaigns using exact match. However, we have also seen great performance breaking out a single keyword campaign into phrase match. Often, what we'll find is We'll do both instead and we'll just negative exact the exact keyword in the phrase campaign. So black shoes for men in exact match in one campaign and black shoes for men in phrase match in another campaign, but then black shoes for men is negative exacted in that phrase campaign. So you don't duplicate your spend because that's a big factor when it comes to Trying to rank on a product and trying to rank on a keyword is not duplicating your spend as much as you can because what you want to do is have a single spot where this keyword lives and a single spot where this keyword has its own little budget. And we try to maximize that budget and not have that appear anywhere else for that product in another campaign. Excluding catch-alls, because catch-all campaigns, I hate that they work so well, but they just keep working. Michael Erickson Facchin: I described catch-all campaigns, I just described to someone on call earlier today, the Amazon algorithm It has a lot of quirks to it. One of those quirks is if you bid $5, Amazon will probably find $5 bids for you, $5 clicks for you. And if you bid $0.30, they will find $0.30 clicks for you. So you need a campaign, a low bid automatic campaign. Still to this day, 2025, just have a low bid auto campaign. Sean Stone: I would argue it works better in 2025 than it did, which is the infuriating part because I gave them up for a long time. And then I brought one back and it outperformed. Michael Erickson Facchin: You ever see this meme where it's like someone's just getting started, they don't know anything, and they're like low bid auto campaigns. And somebody's in the middle phase and they're like, I'm so sophisticated, down with low bid auto campaigns. And then the other end of the bell curve, it's like low bid auto, where the most advanced person and the newbie both agree on something. Sean Stone: It's called the MidWit Meme, and I've gone through the entire bell curve, and I'm now on the other side, at least. Maybe I actually reverted, but I didn't even make it over the top. But yeah, the MidWit Meme, that's exactly... Michael Erickson Facchin: So, exact match, single keyword, sponsored product campaign, Phrase match with that word exact negative sponsor product phrase. Sean Stone: Yeah. Michael Erickson Facchin: You apply your budgets. You hit that. Are you doing any placement adjustments out of the gate? Sean Stone: The main thing that's important to think about is if we're trying to rank a product, we want our product to appear in search, right? That means that it really doesn't make much sense for us to spend money on product pages because it doesn't matter how good our conversion rate is there. We're trying to get Amazon to show our product in the search results. So traditionally, we've seen the highest conversion rate at the top of search. However, there have been rare circumstances where rest of search actually outperforms top of search. The other factor to consider is often you'll get much cheaper clicks at rest of search than top of search. So if you're struggling to afford clicks, there are some niches where there are $10 clicks And that is just something that we've come to accept with Amazon Advertising. So generally speaking, we are trying to maximize for search and then specifically going to try pushing top of search because that's where the best conversion rates are. And again, the unfair advantage is the high conversion rate that we already know we have on this keyword. So we might as well try to maximize our conversion rate at the place where we expect to have the best conversion rate and then put as much spend as possible behind that placement. Michael Erickson Facchin: I dig it. So just to go back to that question, a lot of people, they just want the thing. So when you create those new campaigns, are you setting a top of search 50% out of the gate and then modifying it from there? 100% out of the gate? What's your out of the gate answer here? Sean Stone: Low bid. So like whatever the bid range is, take the low end and then cut either 10% or 10 cents, depending on which is bigger, off of the low end of that bid. Then 100% rest of search, 200% top of search. Michael Erickson Facchin: Cool. I dig it. Sean Stone: Yeah, and then check every single day and adjust the placements based on results. Michael Erickson Facchin: Now, there's two scenarios after doing this. Scenario number one, you begin to rank higher. Do you leave that campaign running? Forever. Sean Stone: Yes. However, once you really break into the top keyword rankings, what you want to do is start, like, not change the placement. Even though you're getting expensive clicks, what you want to do is try restricting your budget to see if you can spend less and less on that keyword, which is, again, why it's important to isolate against all the other campaigns. And then once you hit some threshold, The next thing you want to do is start trying to chop away at that budget and see if you can stay in the top five for that keyword. Michael Erickson Facchin: While having total sales stay where they are. Sean Stone: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then the other thing that's really powerful about that is if your ranking slips, you know exactly which lever you need to pull. You just need to pull that increase budget lever and that should get your keyword ranking right back up. So if you end up in a low stock situation, this is really handy where you just start to restrict, restrict, and restrict that budget because you know you can't afford to sell that many units. And then once you come fully back on the stock, Move that lever right back to the budget that makes sense. Michael Erickson Facchin: I have an observation. I have an experience which is the only time it's ever true to the answer to the question, can I decrease my PPC for this keyword and not lose any sales? The only time that is true is where you do have that unfair conversion rate advantage because there's a distribution of clicks that just generally happens on anything. So like you make a search on Instagram, Amazon, Google, whatever, the things up top generally get the most clicks. The things down below get fewer and fewer clicks. That's just generally how people interact with interfaces. You make a search, you click generally on the first things rather than the last things. So in general, having two boxes of things is better than one. And so having the paid and the organic We'll almost always get you a net improvement of clicks. I know I talk about Google sometimes on the show, but Google actually has a report that tells you what that incremental gain was. Because when they rotate, switch up search results, sometimes they only have one. Sometimes they show your ad, they show your organic, they show both. They'll actually tell you your net click increase. And in my lived experience, most of the time, having the ad and the organic nets you clicks. And I've seen that a lot with Amazon PPC as well. The only time that is not true, meaning you can get rid of the PPC, And not lose any sales is when you are dominant on your conversion rates. Because people will step over whatever ad takes your place, click on your organic listing. It's the dream scenario. The dream scenario. But I've generally found that you do need to be dominant conversion rate-wise, which is the start of this whole exercise in the first place. Sean Stone: Yeah, exactly. And you know what? People can use this to determine that. They can use the BKIT process that rolls off the tongue to ask themselves, can I spend less on this keyword? Well, benchmark yourself, compare your sponsored products conversion rate to the competition, make sure you're isolated, and then track what happens when you spend less on this keyword. Michael Erickson Facchin: You can use Brand Analytics top terms to find that. Product Opportunity Explorer will also give you some insight into who's got really good click shares and conversion shares. There's ways to suss this out. Search query performance will give you some idea here too. Lots of data available at your fingertips to identify those. I want to talk about the flip side of this scenario where you do all these efforts and Learn, unfortunately, that, hey, I did all this. I calculated what my budget should be. Maybe I am getting more sales for this, but I'm still in organic position nine. That happens. Sean Stone: Yeah. Michael Erickson Facchin: Happens to everybody. Where you believe a keyword is rankable, but it is in fact not. What's your take on those scenarios? Sean Stone: Since we started more aggressively benchmarking, it has become rarer and rarer that this happens. But if this is a scenario that does happen where we can't break our way past 10, and our conversion rate is better than benchmarked, First, we'd say, are we actually hitting the minimum effective dose? Sure, our conversion rate's higher, but are we getting enough sales to actually drive ourselves up? If we did hit the minimum effective dose, like we're Machelium 10 CPR or daily sales to rank, if we're past that threshold, spending money, and our ranking's not moving, It generally means one of a few things. First thing is the conversion rate could be wrong. So we don't want you to blindly trust benchmark. So because there are sometimes keywords where you're better than the benchmark, then all the other keywords have much higher conversion rates. Sometimes that just means Amazon's data is kind of wonky or Amazon is saying that somebody's conversion rate is X, but it's actually Y. Michael Erickson Facchin: I have another example. I see this a lot where people have higher priced products than the rest. So like their product might be 20-30% more expensive than the rest. Which means they get fewer clicks, but they actually convert better than others because anyone who clicks on it wants that price point. And Amazon will not generally rank a really expensive product in a tough spot because most people on Amazon are bargain shoppers. They like lower prices. I've seen that before where it's just like, ah, we have this product. Yes, it converts well, And like when we look at search group performance, it ranks well. It converts well, better than the rest, but it's not going to match the volume. It's not going to match the click share for some of that. So that's another scenario where I've seen it be a little tricky to rank. Sean Stone: So I haven't necessarily seen that. Often what will happen, even though we have a great conversion rate, The top competitor still has an even better conversion rate, and that is a symptom driven by the lower price. In a scenario like that, if we have a higher priced product and we're not able to rank, even though our conversion rate says we should be able to rank, I would be checking the second and third place competitors to see if their conversion rate is better than ours, and maybe the first place conversion rate is just getting a ton of external traffic, because there are other factors that go into ranking. Maybe the company that you're talking about is just pumping TikTok traffic. So again, there are external factors. One of the examples is external traffic, especially TikTok. TikTok has had a crazy impact on Amazon, but Those are the kinds of examples that I would be looking for. I would be kind of evaluating my competitors really closely, both on Amazon and off Amazon, because if the numbers say that we should be able to rank, Nine times out of 10, 90 times out of 100, it's worked for us. We do this a lot. The edge cases are always very interesting. And nine times out of 10, when we find an edge case, it's driven by some other factor. Michael Erickson Facchin: In that example I was mentioning, they were not able to match the top ranking orders per day or like sales to rank metric because they were more expensive. Sean Stone: Yeah, so there's some threshold they weren't able to meet. Michael Erickson Facchin: Right. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Michael Erickson Facchin: After this gets established, in a perfect world, you go back to your benchmarking and you observe that your conversion rate has improved on some of these other terms as well. Is that generally what happens? Sean Stone: Yeah, but I think it's like the Matthew principle. He who has everything will be given more. A better way to describe it is the power law. Once a product is doing really well, it starts to get even more momentum and Amazon's flywheel starts working for it and it starts doing even better on all the other keywords. Generally speaking, that's what ends up happening. You start ranking on some of your top keywords and then your rankings on everything else start to climb as well. That's generally what we've seen happen. And yeah, it's been Pretty consistent. Again, there are always edge cases, but generally speaking, if you are seeing good conversion rates and you are seeing good sales velocity, the flywheels just kind of start doing the work for you. Michael Erickson Facchin: You know what I love about this too is that We started this conversation by talking about the zone of possibility. And a lot of times people will approach Amazon and think, sometimes they either think it's going to be too easy, or they don't exactly know where to focus on. And I think that conversion rate is such an easy way to cut through all of that, which is just like, hey, we would love to rank for this, that, and the other thing. But product-market fit is a big factor of influencing conversion rate. And it's like, well, guess what our conversion rate is for these terms versus everybody else? And it just sort of puts the... Because a lot of times it's like, oh, well, I don't know, the market really likes this kind of product. And it's almost like qualitative. But the conversion rate per term, it really quantifies it. It really cuts out all the noise. And I think that's a really powerful way to view Organic growth, which is, hey, like, you know, of course there are market-based factors that influence a lot on Amazon. You know, a lot of companies that don't know left from right on Amazon just put a product up that just happens to have, they just walk into like incredible product market fit. And with rudimentary campaigns, you're just like, wow, like how are they doing it? They're just crushing it so much. People just absolutely love them. This is a way to quantify all of that market interaction, which I think is really powerful. Sean Stone: It's born out of necessity. We worked with a lot of companies over the years, and one of the things that is an often recurring theme is when you work with a company that has other channels aside from just Amazon, One of the big things you need to consider is your promotional strategy and your pricing strategy. And when you have a company that does a lot of performance off of Amazon, they don't really want to do anything to disrupt all their other channels and steal from potentially more profitable own channels because Amazon is more of a rentable channel. In order to maximize your performance without being able to pull the pricing lever and kind of the promotional lever that we've seen work really well on Amazon, the next best option is to evaluate each product individually and determine if it can or cannot rank for non-branded terms. I guess we didn't call out in the beginning non-branded terms, but that's primarily the way that we want to focus on. These ranking efforts and so if you have one or two products that can rank, you want to definitely go crazy on those. Then you want to treat each other individual product with a more incremental approach where each campaign should add to the performance and you should be trying to maximize your sales through advertising and better placement on Keywords that maybe the ranking doesn't matter so much. That's kind of our approach and that's the way that we've kind of come up with this strategy because it's objective and it's obvious and it is hard to argue with. Michael Erickson Facchin: I love it. Well, Sean, good people out there in Badger Nation. What you're up to and where they can find you? Sean Stone: We have an agency called Stones Goods. Not really looking to take on too many new clients right now. Reach out to us. We provide free audits just to help people, even if it doesn't make sense for us to work together. The other thing that we're doing that I'm very excited about is we're launching a YouTube channel because just like before where I said we try to help people a lot, we also try to help people through our YouTube channel. We're going to be teaching a lot more. And so by the time this episode comes out, we should have a YouTube channel for you to go check out. We've got a bunch of handy custom GPTs we've built over the last several months. You can find them on our website, stonesgiz.com. There's no email signup. You can just click through and play with the tools. And yeah, more than anything, just want to give back to the community because when I first got into the Amazon space, I had someone really take me under the wing and help me a lot. And so I want to try to pay that forward. So that's why I'm always trying to be on these podcasts. Michael Erickson Facchin: Awesome. Well, Sean, thank you so much. Everyone else. I'll see you next week here on the BBC 10 podcast. Unknown Speaker: I've made mistakes. I've made a few. I've had my share of broken words. But I've come through. We are The PPC Den, my friends. And we'll keep on amazing. We are the PPC dead, we're talking about Amazon. No time for medicars, cause we fixed the gambit of war.