Five Practical Fixes for Messy Amazon Accounts

Five Practical Fixes for Messy Amazon Accounts Speaker 2: What's going on, Badger Nation? Today, we are going to dig into five things to get ahead of your competition on Amazon PPC. We're going to be covering Amazon AMC audiences, product targeting placements, the return of auto campaigns, how previously viewed audiences are actually really interesting, and creator connections. It's one way to potentially get a 15 or 20% ACoS and incremental sales. I have a special treat for you because we have Clifford Donovan, who's the lead media buyer from Pilot House Digital back on the show. He's one of the most experienced people I know in the game. What's really, really cool about having someone like Clifford on the show is that he is in it. He is inside Amazon every single day working with incredible brands, really pushing the limits of what I think great PPC optimization looks like. So Clifford, thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone else, be sure to tune in because we've got five ways to get ahead on Amazon PPC right here, right now. We're covering what's new and how to get ahead. Let's jump in. Clifford, thank you so much for coming back on The PPC Den podcast. You work at what I consider to be definitely one of the top tier agencies and you are a big part of that, Pilot House Digital. How is everything going? How have you seen Amazon PPC sort of progress high level in 2025? Wow, just starting with the really easy questions. Speaker 1: Everything's going pretty good. Obviously, a little bit of a mixed bag this year with A little bit of tariff madness going on, but overall, the PPC side is, I'd say, relatively unaffected. Prices might change a little up and down, but I feel like PPC is still the same. As a whole, I'd like to say that PPC remains relatively simple, but also incredibly complicated. I think it's very easy to get into and do a pretty good job. A lot of, we'll have new buyers come on, That have a little bit of experience, it's easy to do a pretty good job audits of accounts. And it's hard to tell a brand that's a potential client to say like, well, your PPC is pretty good, like we'll make it better. But as it stands, you're hitting the right keywords. You're not hitting them the way I would like you to be hitting them, but they're being hit. You're showing in search for a lot of the right keywords. The spend split is weird, but a lot of what you're doing is okay. It's just not the way I would do it. Speaker 2: I love this question, which is, what do you think separates a good manager of PPC versus a bad one? So like a good and bad split. I have my own answer to this, but I'm curious what you think. Like when you are looking at an account that's good or you're looking at an account that's bad, what would you generally say is the missing Ingredient. Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say they know where the spend is going. It's very simple. There is so many accounts that are very clearly they don't know where the spend is going. Like their top spending campaigns have dozens of keywords in them or they're like broad match with search terms that are all over the place or autos that are all over the place. Like there's a lot of Not cleanness, like a lot of messiness in the data that they have. And maybe it makes sense for them, but I would bet if you were to ask a PPC manager with an account like that, like, where is your spend going? They don't know exactly. They come out with an okay ACoS at the end of it, but they don't really know where the spend is going. And I think as the site gets more and more competitive, You have to be pretty confident that your top spending search term is the search term you want to be spending the most on, and you're landing in the right placement that you want to be landing on there, whether it's top of search or rest of search, and probably not product pages. And a lot of times, placement percentages, or bid adjustments now, are just left at zeros. And keywords are not specifically exactly hit and accounts end up in this like messy situation where it's like, well, you're targeting the right keyword, but it's all landing on product pages. Like where is this spend going? And I think that like confidently being able to say that like, yeah, these are my top five search terms. And the majority of my spend landed in top of search or rest of search on these terms is That is my measure for like, okay, at least have a handle on what's going on here. Speaker 2: I love it. That's really well said. PPC is nothing more than sort of casting a net and then amplifying what works. And if you don't know, and then getting less of what doesn't work. And if you don't know how your spend is being spent, you cannot do that fundamental practice. And I think it's cool for what we're about to talk about today. We are rounding the corner on 2025. I think it's a really cool time for a little checkpoint. And to prep for the show, I asked you like, hey, what is up for you right now? What feels really relevant? What feels like it's working? Well, like those kinds of things. So I'm really excited to get into this. Five things that are working right now on marketing in Amazon. Let's jump into it. So this first one you called an anti-Amazon Marketing Cloud, so anti-AMC audience. What does that mean? Speaker 1: Okay, so AMC audiences are the big hype in the sponsored products game, the Honestly, the first thing they've added to sponsored product in a long time. I feel like placements came in a while ago and were very exciting and now... Speaker 2: Yeah. Audiences are amazing. Very excited about audiences. Speaker 1: Yeah. We've tried them a little bit. I'm not going to say, oh, we've extensively tried AMC audiences because they're still relatively new. And I think there probably is some things that will eventually turn out to work well and people will figure out good ways to use them. But What I think is missing from the conversation of AMC audiences being this big, amazing, groundbreaking thing is you are taking your ego and saying, I know better than you, Amazon, of what shoppers on this keyword We'll buy my stuff. That's a pretty strong, aggressive take to say, hey, Amazon, I know this like relevance engine that you've built with thousands of features and your vectors and all of this AI and machine learning that you've put in to figure out which products to show to someone. Well, these people added to cart, so I'm pushing them first. If it was The place where I see AMC audience is working okay and where it makes sense to do that sort of siphoning down. is in a much broader targeting area. So in something like DSP, where you're just kind of mass targeting people, you could be mass targeting people using a siphoned down audience makes sense. But in sponsored products, the keywords are already like they've done that filtering for you. Like a lot of the filtering that you would need to do is done because someone typed in your keyword already. So now you're taking the people that typed in the keyword and you're deciding, okay, out of the people that typed in my very relevant keyword for my product that I've decided is my big keyword, take a whole bunch of them away because I am deciding that I don't want to show to them, which I think is a very Scary thing to do. And I've tried it on using lookalike audiences. I've tried it using a couple different in-market ideas or lifestyle ideas. And every time it kind of comes out equivalent or a little bit worse. Because the problem is that What I just said isn't really the case. You don't actually take them out. There's no negative multiplier for audiences. There's only an increase. So you're actually deciding, oh, out of these ones, bid more. And Amazon does seem to bid more for those audiences. It does seem to do it. Unlike some placements where sometimes you can ramp up that placement percentage and it just won't go higher. On AMC audiences, it definitely seems to bid higher. And I've just had lookalikes bid more, have a higher cost per click, And just get a worse ROAS. Speaker 2: I think back to, I've done a lot of Facebook meta ads over the years. And one thing I think was interesting about the arc of Facebook ads was that they added the ability, you know, the power of meta ads is the ability to do any kind of audience targeting that you can potentially dream of. And let's say, you know, you are a electrician, and you want to like go and target certain demographics of homeowners in a certain area, you could create this really nuanced, like within a certain income bracket, within a certain neighborhood, like all these different things, within certain qualities, you know, not a DIY or, you know, all these different things. And then over the years, what ended up happening is like, Meta is like, hey, you don't need to pick audiences. We got you. You ask most Facebook marketers, like the sort of more automated audience identification generally works better and uncovers more things than picking the individual audiences. So I thought that was, you know, a little interesting that, you know, potentially the same thing happens on Amazon for all the reasons that you mentioned, meaning, you know, Amazon's incentivized to serve the most relevant things to the most hungry to buy individuals anyway, like that's their goal. And they're investing a lot in it. I do think in the pre show notes, you did mention one thing that I did do think works well that I have seen, but I don't think it's, you know, it's just incremental sales. Like this isn't going to be make or break, which is like narrowing down. So, one thing I thought was interesting about AMC is that you could take a term that maybe is generally too expensive for a purely cold audience and you can sort of apply an AMC audience to it. You know, they've done something. So maybe they did add it to cart and they're back on Amazon and they are searching a word that maybe you wouldn't want to search, wouldn't want to target because it's too expensive in the first place. I have seen some cases there. But again, to your point, it's not make or break. It's sort of like you're getting some incrementality for your sales. So I think that's a really interesting point about audience selection. And I would say that'll never be The first thing to begin with, right, like you want good PPC foundations. And then once you have all these good foundations, then you could begin to say, well, maybe I can launch. And again, you know, it's a modifier. So like you have to bid on the keyword anyway, and then you apply a modifier to it. So I think that's really interesting that you mentioned that just sort of like properly understanding where things go. There's so much hype In our industry, where something gets talked about and it's like the new hotness and like everyone flocks towards it, and then after a while, it sort of settles down. So yeah, I mean, you see so many accounts, I think it's really interesting that you have that take. And I think you've done some, yeah, I think you've broadened my view on it as well. So thanks for doing that. So anti. Speaker 1: There's a little bit. I don't want to say that I don't think they're completely useless. Again, you can't do negations with it. I wish you could. That would be, I think, a more interesting way to do it. Speaker 2: And you can't do specific campaigns just for that audience, which would be really cool. Speaker 1: Yeah. What I really wish you could do is multiple audiences because then you could actually test this audience versus this one within a campaign. That could be interesting. Separating them out, you're not going to get clean data with that. But you could do like actually new to brand, which is interesting because you can, you know, your running shoe example that you always use, like you could do, they're in market for sports outdoors or something, or in market for shoes, if you can get that granular with the audience. And then they haven't viewed any of your brand's products, for example, as audience. Then you're actually new to brand rather than It being some mix of people who have bought one of your other products before, have already added to carts and you're just paying to hit them again when they already would have clicked on it, things like that. Speaker 2: Yeah, to your point, I I actually completely agree with what you said. I think there's some audiences that are worth trying for most use cases to get some incremental sales, but I would say you don't need to sit there every day and have a list of 100 audiences. That's going to be really low ROI for you, meaning the time that you take to think of and concoct all these audiences, you really just need a few, which is like You know, retargeting is generally pretty good. And then a behavioral type audience, like they've already searched something or they've added to car, but now they're back on Amazon. I think it's interesting too, like it's actually quite difficult to do retargeting properly on Amazon because generally with retargeting, like on an e-commerce site, on a Shopify store, if somebody doesn't buy from you, it's usually for a reason. And if you're just going to serve them the same product or like with the same landing page again, You generally have a lot of missed potential. So generally what will happen is I go retarget them with a coupon offer or we'll retarget them potentially with something different. So Amazon isn't necessarily built for that. Speaker 1: You're reading my mind with that because I was about to say that I'm also pretty not super for a lot of the common audiences like the add to carts or the PPC view because I'm Like again, it's not like you can do that with Sponsored Display. You could hit someone who's viewed your page before, but with Sponsored Display, you're following them somewhere else. With Sponsored Product Retargeting, they're coming back and searching the word again, or it's a different word or whatever. And so if they're searching the word again, I don't think they want you. They would have bought you. Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, the whole thing with AMC audiences, before we move on to point two, I was on the phone with someone, they were spending like $2,000, $3,000 a month. And they had this search term that was spending a couple hundred bucks with no sales. And I'm like, look at this, this thing's got to go, right? Really basic meat and potato style PPC optimization, looking at search terms with a lot of spend and no sales. Their response was, but how do I know that they don't convert later? Don't I need to do some kind of retargeting AMC audience? And I'm like, that was difficult for me to hear because it's like, wait a second. No, it doesn't matter really because you already spent the money on these people. And for the stage that this advertiser was in, it just wasn't the right thing to focus on, which is really, it's tricky, right? So I would say in general, Explore AMC with like some basic foundational audiences, which we talked about on the show before. It's not going to be a lifeline that like completely turns around a PPC account. So I think that's interesting to sort of mention this. And I think it's with everything, right? Like something comes out, this shows a lot of, you know, there's a lot of excitement, a lot of hype around it. And then eventually it settles to, okay, like, This has its place sometimes. And with that, let's jump to point number two. Alrighty, Clifford, talk to us about product targeting. Speaker 1: We audit a lot of accounts from potential brands that come in. Usually it's myself or Another one of our senior buyers that are diving into their PPC. It's difficult to get a grasp of someone's, I'm sure you know better than anyone, it's difficult to get a really good idea of how someone's PPC is doing or what can be improved or changed within like a small window of time of you're like, basically, you know, I'm sorting by spend going through their top few spending campaigns. Okay, what are they hitting? What can be changed? Is there common themes across these campaigns that are missing? One very common one that is coming up All the time is product targeting is one of their top spenders. And the product targeting is not landing in product pages, it's landing in rest of search and top of search. And the ROAS is pretty good. And this is an interesting problem because if you look at search terms in these product targeting campaigns on sponsored products specifically, they don't give you search terms. They just give you the product again. They say that you targeted a product and the search term was a product, that same product. But it landed in search. So clearly it wasn't the product. I don't think there's thousands of people searching ASINs on the website. You end up in this weird thing of where is this landing? Speaker 2: And just for clarity, in case people aren't aware of this, so they're targeting a product. So it's like they're targeting some kind of product targeting. And then how would someone know that it's actually landing on Rest of Search? How could they verify this in their own account? Speaker 1: Yeah, if you just look at your bid adjustments inside that campaign, it will show you that the majority of your spend, and it's almost the case in every single product targeting campaign, so I bet if you do this, it'll show this. The majority of your spend, and especially the majority of your orders, came from Rest of Search and Top of Search. What's Interesting is in the sponsor brand side of things, if you product target on sponsored brand, it will give you search terms from the products that matched. So you can try a fun little experiment, which I've done before a couple times, which is make that same product targeting campaign, or at least take out the top spenders on it, make it in sponsored brand, see what search terms you get. Because what I've found time and time again, when I've tried it, is there is an annoying mix of branded and non-branded terms in there. And the branded ones make the ROAS look good. So you'll end up with like a, say a one ROAS or 100% ACOS on the good prospecting search terms, the ones you want, the good meat of where you're trying to be, like no better than your normal sponsor product, if not worse, typically. But then your brand, it will be like a nine. And the overarching campaign, if you look at it at the campaign level, is that like a three ROAS or a 33% ACOS. You're like, okay, it's hitting my competitors. That's a pretty good return for targeting competitors. But it's not targeting competitors. It's targeting your branded terms and a little bit of not branded terms. However, that's what I find is like the majority situation. But there are a lot of niches where you don't, there's not really a brand, like you don't really have a brand, like, I don't know, in housewares, for example, a lot of the time, people aren't looking for a specific brand of sheets. There's like one brand of sheets I'm thinking of actually that people probably are looking for. But people aren't really looking for like a brand of sheets. So if you're selling sheets, then People probably aren't searching your branded term. And if you're very confident that your brand terms have like no search volume or very little, maybe it's not landing branded at all. And then in those cases, sometimes it still ends up with a decent row as. And I think there is a little bit of a weird relevancy going on where you are more relevant to These products, then you might be to the search terms that it's showing you for. And Amazon's giving you a little bit more exposure because you're targeting the product rather than target search term. But that is very conspiratorial. It's made up and it's not based in any real data. Speaker 2: And there's plenty of those. I think this is one of the most interesting and frustrating parts of Sponsored products, which is the sort of like data murkiness that you bid on a keyword and you get product page impressions and vice, you bid on a product and you get search result impressions. It's really difficult to understand that and control that. And it's also really difficult, just like you mentioned, that different campaign types behave differently. So sponsored products might behave differently than sponsored brands. And there's all these little uniquenesses that create a lot of challenge, which is to your point about the very first question that I asked you, which was understanding where your spend goes is such a huge part of being a good PPC manager. So the recommendation there is really what should someone do about this? Speaker 1: Usually the answer is like, don't kill it because it's doing something right. You don't know what, unfortunately, which is super annoying. But what is the solution is target the right keywords in your other sponsored product campaigns. Hopefully increase their bids. And make sure that they start to take over because it seems to be able to be the case. As you separate out branded, this is what I typically find, is we'll separate out branded and make sure that a branded sponsored product, exact or phrase match, has high enough bids and top of search modifiers and whatnot to be the one that grabs those. And it seems to take over and that product targeting campaign does significantly worse. And it's like, well, That's a pretty clear indicator that that's where it was going. So usually it's build that and that fixes it or fixes it. Unfortunately, you end up again in this weird scenario where even once you're targeting the right keywords with exact match campaigns and branded and non-branded and those are the majority, your product targeting one probably is still doing okay and it's still finding these weird Spots and getting some search spend and a good ROAS. It's like, well, where are you getting those? And my assumption is it's getting them from those same terms. It's just for some reason, Amazon decided to match them on there instead of your exact match, which of course muddies the data on your exact match and everything else because now maybe it had some really relevant shoppers that Amazon gave to your product targeting campaign that it would have gave to your exact match campaign to make its ROAS look better. And now it didn't. So you have to kind of just be aware that that's there and probably leeching some of those sales and ensure that you're not Over-reducing the exact match version when you're matching in other places. Speaker 2: I hope you're enjoying this episode as much as I am. I just wanted to mention a couple connections here between some of the things that Clifford's talking about and some of the things that we have inside our Ad Badger Amazon advertising tool. The first thing is that all customers of AdVenture do get access to AMC audiences. So we can help you create an AMC instance and help talk you through what kinds of audiences to launch. We do have duplicated search term analysis. So basically what this allows you to do is when you have a search term that appears for several different placements, you're able to see it as a singular line. That way you can see the search terms overall performance and then you can click into it and see every single place where that search term is appearing. So like your auto campaigns, your close match, your loose match, your product targeting, and your direct search targeting for exact broadened phrase on and so forth. You'll see the differences in how those things are performing, which can be really insightful at helping you sculpt a really high ROAS campaign so you can follow that traffic to where it's performing best and make some optimizations to where it's not performing. So well, anyway, let's jump back into the episode. If you have any questions on that, be sure just to go to our website at azure.com and go check it out. Let's jump back. Here we go. And that's a great segue to point number three. Auto campaigns. One of the fundamental campaigns inside Amazon. You think that there's a return of auto campaigns. Is that right? Speaker 1: Yeah, our auto campaigns are across I'd say almost every account taking up a larger share than we used to. Auto campaigns, we used to use them two years ago, three years ago as, okay, we have all our keyword research done for this product. We put all that into exact and phrase match. And the auto campaign, we do a mass negation of all of those. And all that's left for the auto campaign is to go find us new terms, find us new competitors that it can match on. Now, Auto campaigns seem to find cheaper clicks on the same terms. The problem is, again, with the murkiness of PPC data, is when we turn them off or negate those terms, for example, it doesn't seem like the exact match version of that gets all of those. It's not like it migrates over. It's almost like the auto has some special. Speaker 2: Special auction, a unique auction. Speaker 1: Yeah, a unique auction that it gets to be a part of where it gets some clicks on its own. But when you negate it though, the exact match typically does do a little better. So it's not like it's entirely separated and it does muddy your data a little. So I think the recommendation is just look at the search term as a whole and And don't worry where the match is coming from, whether it's from your exact or phrase or broad or auto. Look at the search term as a whole and look at its performance and try to ensure that you're adjusting bids appropriately. Speaker 2: I think there's levels of search term analysis. One of them is just purely the search term report where you're looking at your list of search terms broken out by whatever ad group they're triggered in, by whatever target triggered in. You can theoretically have The same search term within the same ad group triggered by a close match and the other one triggered by a loose match potentially. So there's like search term analysis and then there's also like duplicated search term analysis as well, which is what you just mentioned where you're like, well, what is the search term doing in aggregate for across my entire account? And it does seem sometimes that this, I mean, many times actually, where like the auto campaign gets its own lane, gets sort of preferential treatment. One time I opened up an account And the person managing it accidentally gave their auto campaigns like a huge budget and a huge bid, like normally getting clicks for like 50, 75 cents. And then they accidentally gave it like a $10 bid. And the amount of traffic that it generated was astounding because at a 75 cent bid, like it could never reach its maximum budget. But all of a sudden when it went to this gigantic bid, all of a sudden started appearing for things That were untapped and it actually did find some extra things out there that like we never captured in any other way. And I thought it was really, really fascinating. So auto campaigns, I do believe they've also had a resurgence as well. So that's awesome to hear. Love that you are thinking of that. With that, let's jump to point number four. Alright, this one is interesting. Previously viewed preference. Talk to us about this and What it does to results. Speaker 1: Yeah, so this does, it's a little bit of a throwback to the AMC audiences where we talked about add to cart, retargeting, things like that. I'm finding, I have one relatively large brand where they've had a budget pullback recently for a lot of their spend. And To do that, we've turned off a lot of campaigns, unfortunately, as well as pulled back bids on some of our top spending campaigns. But some of those top spending campaigns were on pretty big keywords, pretty big search terms, very competitive, very high search volume. Speaker 2: You had to bring down the bid and the budget. Speaker 1: Yeah, bring down the bid, bring down the budget, bring down the placement percentages, everything. And those got a significantly better ROAS, which was weird to me because I'm like, well, we're targeting this. We're landing in the same placements because I looked at the bid adjustments and look at the placement spots we're landing in. It's not like it's pushing us down to product pages and that's why. It's like, no, it's still in rest of search and still on top of search. There might be a little bit more of a split of rest to search, but not enough to make that big of a difference. But its ROAS went from, say, a one to a three, like a big difference. And that change, my assumption, and the assumption of the client where I was discussing it, an intelligent client, was that the share of the shoppers that it's landing on is now a higher share of previously viewed. Because if you ever go on Amazon and you go search a term and shop around a bit, look at a few products, you know, maybe you do add one to your cart, you leave, you go back and you search that term again. All the ones you viewed before are at the top of your search, some of them even in sponsored spots. So my assumption is That if you reduce your bids enough, you'll only be previously viewed or at least a large chunk. So like some share of your current PPC to a certain keyword is previously viewed top of search spots. But as you reduce how much you're spending on that term, The share of how much of it is previously viewed is a higher percentage. Similar to like if you're running broad match or autos and it's like, well, how much is branded? Well, we keep reducing our bid and now it's all branded. Same thing, same concept here with previously viewed is there is some share that is previously viewed. In the past, I feel like it was less clear because Amazon didn't put a nice big gray previously viewed badge on the products that showed up. It might have gave you some more relevance if you were previously viewed, but they didn't make it so clear. In the past year or so, they added that little previously viewed badge. And especially as PPC managers, when you're operating a brand, And you're clicking around its products and making sure things look good. And you go search your keyword and you have multiple products that are all advertising on one word. And your brand's taking up the entire top of search because they're all previously viewed. Well, that's weird. Amazon's really pushing this previously viewed section because this is all my brand. And when I hit an incognito window, None of my brand's products are atop a search. So clearly it is previously viewed as some big relevance to it. And if I'm pulling back bids and getting a significantly higher ROAS on the same term, I have a feeling that means a good chunk of them are just more of those previously viewed. Speaker 2: That's fascinating. So, I mean, similar to the previous point about how auto campaigns get their own sort of auction, this is somewhat related in the sense of, I mean, you said it so well, where you keep on reducing your bids and you are reducing your budgets for something, and then you only get like the highest quality Impressions from that, like the ones that are the easiest for you where you have the highest click-through rate, where you have the highest conversion rate due to the PPC is really like your bid multiplied by a quality score. You can't bid on something completely unrelated to your product even if you're bidding A million dollars on it, you won't get juicy impressions. In the same way here, you'd likely have a really, really high click-through rate conversion rate for previously viewed. That's actually really fascinating. And again, it's such a bummer that we don't get that data. But the thing that comes up for me when you mentioned that is the It would be hard to capture in the world of like, if you're only tracking rank, you might miss that, right? Like your share of your conversion rate for a particular keyword is sort of almost unrelated to the actual rank. And you would never be able to capture that. In like a rank tracker. So I think that's really interesting. And I mean, you wouldn't be able to capture it on Amazon because they don't necessarily tell us that information. I think it's more, you know, just an indicator that like, hey, different people's search results are going to be very different. And that is something to consider and keep in mind in the world of Amazon. Would you say that part of the benefit of search query performance data, because it'll actually tell you your amount of sales from a search, which again, they're not explicit about it, but I would also imagine is going to capture If it says previously viewed in the sense of like those sales will be in the search query performance report. Speaker 1: Especially comparing click share percentage to your purchase share or even just add to cart, like especially higher priced products, purchase share percentage isn't always super useful because there's not a lot of purchases for some of those really high ticket items. But yeah, comparing your click share percentage to your add to cart percentage share of your brand, . ..could be a really good indicator. Like maybe on that same brand that I was using as an example, their click share percentage is not high for that word. I was seeing a three rows on it. If you were to go look at the ad console only, you'd be like, wow, this is a great keyword. I'm like, no, that's a 500,000 a month search volume keyword. We can't, if we spend more there, our ROAS is tanking. But if you go look at click share compared to how we're doing on it for efficiency and how good it's doing, you would say, oh, wow, you have to drastically increase your click share. But if we start increasing bids, there are placement percentages. That performance completely falls off a cliff. And it's because we're in that little pocket of click share. And that's kind of all we can operate in at that efficient ROAS. If we want to scale past it, then the click share percentage will go up, but our purchase share percentage will not follow by nearly as much. And you can kind of watch those differences from the search query performance. Speaker 2: Well said. Let's jump to point number five. And this one's interesting because it came from a conversation that we had in Core where someone asked about Creator Connections. And they were thinking about trying it. And then you just came in and you're just like, It's so good. So I think this tells me so many interesting things that you as a media buyer, which I think is a slightly different, you know, mentality than just pure like PPC manager. So I'm curious if you have thoughts on that, but like getting exposed to Creator Connections or I guess the first thing I'd say is like, what is Creator Connections and what's been your experience with Creator Connections? Speaker 1: Yeah, so Creator Connections is a platform, I would say, within Amazon is technically inside the ad console, inside advertising, inside that little like brand content section. There is stores and then there's Creator Connections beside it. Not every brand has access to it still somehow. They were supposed to at the beginning of this year. They still don't all have access, but a lot do. Beta access started roughly early 2024. I actually got access from someone in core that Thankfully shared a fun little survey that got us access for a couple of grants. But affiliate marketing is probably the best way to put it because it's basically you make a campaign, they call it a campaign, which is just an offer to whoever wants to take it that you will pay them more if they Send traffic to your product. Currently, Amazon Associates exists already. It's been a thing forever. The blog world runs on it. Whenever there is a top 10 Prime Day products, They are all Amazon Associate links. They make a decent percentage, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2% to 4% typically, and Amazon doubles that for events a lot of the time. So they can make like 6%, 8% on products. It's a good commission. Creator Connections, you're setting that commission directly for your product and you're the one that's paying it. So instead of Amazon Associates paying it, You're saying, hey, if you actually sell mine, I'll give you 15% commission. So from an influencer standpoint, I shouldn't say influencer because it's much less influencers, which I'll get into a little bit. But from an affiliate standpoint, well, why would I push this other one that's going to give me 6% when this one's going to give me 15%? So it's going to ruin, you know, it ruins the Internet's relevance of Who's saying which product is the best? Because a lot of them are just going to say the product that pays them the most is the best, unfortunately, but that's always been the case. But you can set up that campaign, you pick the ASINs you want in it, you decide your commission percentage, minimum of 10%, and you set a budget and you let it run for however long you want to offer that for. That's the bare bones of it. It's very janky. It's not great. The reports break all the time. The messaging is just garbage. A lot of it is very broken and very clearly like in a beta stage. But it does have some strong affiliates in it who can generate a lot of traffic. But their side is bad too. I'm an Amazon associate on my personal account, mainly to get into these things and see what it looks like. Their side's terrible. So you kind of have to like make your campaign offer attractive. To try to bring people in, but what's really interesting to me is if you don't think of it like this big commission thing that you're doing, and you think of it like an extension of your PPC, a 15% ACOS is fantastic. Like I would do 15% all day. So a 15% commission, if you just think of it in that way, it's a broad match campaign, basically. I don't know where it's getting it, but if it can bring that in, that's great. And yeah, over the past, we started in early 2024 with it. We brought in about just over $3 million, I think, total of revenue from Creator Connections over that time. The biggest insights One, you don't need to give out samples to anyone. Sorry to the influencers out there, but the large majority of them have no audience. They're not talking to anyone. They don't need free stuff. And the ones that really drive the sales are not the influencers. They are the, one, a huge chunk of it are sites like bestreviews.com, topreviews.com. And they're just running Google ads. They're just Google ad buyers that set up a very rudimentary landing page. And when someone goes to Google and searches for best running shoes, they Have a search ad there and they then take that traffic and they bring it to Amazon for you. But the difference is they're giving you the opportunity to be the best running shoe. Which you didn't have before. Yeah. Speaker 2: They're also probably bidding on your branded name too. Speaker 1: Yeah, true. Speaker 2: On Google. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Just breaking this down. It used to be, if you wanted to work with influencers, you know, years and years ago, you would have to either do some legwork yourself, like go on social media, find relevant people, ask them, like, hey, do you want to be my thing? They would respond and be like, I'll do it for this much money. And like, you'd have to go back and forth with some kind of negotiation phase. and search phase to find these people. Or you use like a non-Amazon marketplace. There's marketplaces where you can go and try to find influencers. But then again, there's sort of the same kind of thing. It's like some kind of conversation or setup. This is baked right into Amazon, which is really convenient. And I think it's a really, it's relatively simple, right? You just go there and create your offer and then there are people out there, whether they're blog writers or influencers, try and just see what is relevant and worthwhile to them to create. I mean, would you say this is like a no-brainer for anyone? I mean, Like, you don't have to think of creative yourself. Like, you don't have to, like, I don't even think you need to talk to them, right? Like, they just come in. Speaker 1: No, that was another piece of my advice was going to be, don't even talk to people on there. The messaging is so bad, it will frustrate you because you'll send a message, it'll disappear. Like, it's very bad. Don't use it. Who cares if they message you? Like, it's kind of rude, but I wouldn't try to respond because it's so bad. It's going to take a bunch of your time. Make your offer very clear. Make any instructions that you need them or anything you don't want them to talk about or post. Make it all in your campaign very clear and you shouldn't need to talk to anyone. The rest is pretty simple. Don't lump it in with influencers too much because the reality is there's not a lot. Speaker 2: There's always so many Kim Kardashians. Speaker 1: There's a lot of brands we've run this on. And yes, some influencers have come in, you'll get like a little hit for a week from that influencer. The reporting is very bad, so it's not amazing. But you'll get a little hit for like a week from an influencer here or there. But the real ones that drive your sales are like Affiliate sites and then like big blogs like Forbes, BuzzFeed, things like that. They're the ones that drive big traffic. Wirecutter, all these kind of big review sites. If you have a relatively strong brand or product and a decent commission offer, You're in like a good sweet spot for them to make you their top pick or at least one of their picks on a site that gets a huge amount of traffic. And those are the ones that really drive the sales. The influencers will drive a little bump here or there, but it's usually obviously once in a while you'll get a very lucky huge one that comes through and finds yours and likes your product and Does some great things. And maybe that's a reason you pay attention to the messaging is because once in a blue moon, there might be one in there that's a unique gem. But from what we've seen, it's all those different kinds of blog sites. Speaker 2: Would you say this is a must do? Like if you're running PPC, like you should also run Creator Connections. Speaker 1: I don't see why you wouldn't do it. There's no, it's simple to set up. There's no downside because you only pay the commission when the sales happen. Like It seems pretty no-brainer to me. Speaker 2: And Clifford, with that, I think we've given people five really actionable things to go and do inside their campaigns. You have so much experience and I thank you so much for sharing it on The PPC Den. You are the lead Amazon media buyer at Pilot House Digital. Any parting words for anyone if they wanted to get in touch with you? Speaker 1: You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm Clifford Donovan on LinkedIn or podhouse.co. We do full-serve Amazon management, which can mean anything you want at this level pretty much, which means driving into Creator Connections. New random things come out, we'll be on it, and any other digital marketing needs, Pado's handles from Amazon to Google to Meta to TikTok. Speaker 2: Exceptional. Clifford, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: And picked keywords I've got my bids Set placements too Now bad mistakes I've made a few I've had my share of rankings Thank you. The PPC Den, my friends. Father, be preceded. We've taken part of a time, a new time We're the medicals, cause we fix the game.