How Can An Amazon Campaign Audit Help My Business? (Classic)

How Can An Amazon Campaign Audit Help My Business? (Classic) Unknown Speaker: What's up, Badger Nation? Hold on to your hats because we're about to unleash a ferocious classic episode from the deep dark archives of The PPC Den podcast. This episode is guaranteed to set your Amazon PPC instincts on fire. Get ready to navigate the chaos, madness, and mayhem of Amazon advertising and unleash your inner badger. Speaker 1: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast, where for over 200 episodes, we've been your home for all things Amazon PPC tips, tricks, strategy, Perspective to make your Amazon advertising a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today, I just finished recording with Mina and I had a fantastic time. It was the first time I had ever talked to him. We talked for 20 minutes before the show. I think we have a lot in common. I really enjoyed the way that we talked about campaign auditing and I was curious on how he likes to approach new campaigns. Some really interesting things, some thoughtful things to the point where we took what can sometimes be maybe a basic topic. And I think I plucked out a couple of really interesting gems there, which push your Amazon advertising a little bit further. So I hope you enjoy it. As always, you can get a link to all of our episodes in the show description. But what we also have is a Google Sheet with all of our episodes organized by topic, by sort of We've got experience level with Amazon Marketing. We have an SEO section. We've got product optimization section. ROAS optimization sections. So check out that Google Sheet as well, because I think it'll really help scaffold your learning. And if you're ever curious, like, oh, I want to learn, or I want to go a little bit deeper on this topic, it'll be really helpful. But a special thank you to Mina. He woke up at 7 a.m., which is always, you know, it's 9 a.m. Austin time, 7 a.m. California time. So shout out to Mina. Thank you for being flexible and waking up early. Have a good one, and I'll see you inside the Badger Den. Unknown Speaker: Hello. A creepy suit in my frame. Two are the PPCs and we talk about Amazon. No time for Medi-Cons, cause we fix the game. Speaker 1: Mina, thanks for coming on the show. I'm happy because we have talked to each other online here and there. We've been circling and we finally got you on the show. Welcome. Mina Elias: Congrats on having the kid. It was worth waiting. Definitely worth waiting. I'm excited, man. I think today is going to be a really solid episode. So I'm very excited. Speaker 1: Oh yeah. I also, I'm a bit of an audio visual nerd. And I love your lighting and anyone who's watching on YouTube can see that it looks like Mina is in the, maybe the Burj Khalifa on the 75th floor and the sun is setting to your left and it looks, you have amazing setup over there. Mina Elias: That's exactly what's happening right now. No, no, it's the sun is rising. So that's the only, and I'm not in Dubai. That's the only two things you got wrong. Speaker 1: Yes. And thank you so much for being flexible. I'm on a very strange schedule right now with a new baby. So you actually, you're recording at 7am, which is a crazy time. So I am Very thankful for your flexibility. Mina Elias: My pleasure, man. I'm excited. I've been watching you and Elizabeth for a while and I love your episodes and I love her stuff too. So I was like, man, we really got to get an episode together. Speaker 1: We're doing it. I also want to ask you about your MMA background. And you know what's funny? I feel like a lot of people who are digital marketers, especially technical digital marketers, have something that they do that almost scratches the same part of their brain that makes them good at doing technical marketing, which not everyone resonates with, like downloading spreadsheets and sifting through stuff. So I often feel like for me, it was like real-time strategy video games. I love playing StarCraft where it's like you versus a competitor and you're trying to figure out how to use your resources better and clicking all the buttons very fast as you can to outsmart and outpace someone. And for me, that's the same part of my brain when I'm looking at a campaign where it's like, how do I work on this faster? How do I do more stuff in less time? How do I get the biggest bang for the effort? Have the same kind of connection to MMA or is that as like a completely different part of your brain? I'm so fascinated. Mina Elias: No, it's it's the same part of the brain. I don't know how much it relates to You know PPC, but it but it does relate to business because it's like it's it's always like it's all the same Principles, it's almost like when I'm in business and all the things are going wrong It's like the same coach is saying like it's on you. It's on you. You didn't put the reps in like don't look outside like The answer is not outside. It's within you sort of thing. Don't quit. Keep going. And so it's like all of these things, like right now, as we grow, I'm sure you've experienced this. At certain stages, there's a lot of discomfort where what was working a few months ago is not working now. That's where that kicks in because MMA for me is just a lot of discomfort all the time and just continuous improvement. Those kinds of concepts are what carry on. It's mainly with business. My chemistry background is really what helped me with PPC, which was we did so many experiments and we would sit down and we would have to have the discipline to test one thing at a time down to the amount of time. You're going to put a chemical in another chemical and you're going to wait 15 seconds. Then you're going to wait 35 seconds. The temperature is going to be 28 degrees, then it's going to be 48 degrees. And so it was so painful, but it teaches you to like have that discipline of like changing one thing at a time. I think that was one of the biggest things. There was like you test all these different things, you change one thing at a time, you try to start making like patterns and you understand like what affects what. And I think that was also a big thing that helped with the PPC. Speaker 1: Yeah, totally resonate with the physical challenge of MMA. While I don't do MMA myself, like, I run a lot and I think it's a perfect corollary. I was in a mastermind one time and the question was, what is one thing you do outside of business that helps you in business? And almost everybody said exercise. It's like pushing yourself mentally, makes you a little bit more fortified in the battle of business. And that's very cool. You have a chemistry background. I went to college for biology. Mina Elias: Oh, so, I mean, very similar, right? Like, you know the tests where you couldn't change too many things and it was a controlled experiment. Same thing. Speaker 1: I mean, I mentioned during the intro that you are an Amazon seller yourself, and you also started an Amazon ads agency. Do you guys do just ads or do you expand beyond it over a Trivium? Also, tell me how you came up with the name Trivium. Mina Elias: So I was looking for a cool name that had some... Speaker 1: That's why I asked. It is a cool... It is like... Mina Elias: That has some relation with like the Trinity, like, you know, like, you know, so I can be religious and like protected. So like I found the word Trivium, which means the intersection of three roads. And I'm like, cool, that relates to that. But also, it's like something that you're passionate about, something you can be the best in the world at, something you can add a lot of value. I got that from the book, Good to Great, I think. Speaker 1: Yeah, the hedgehog concept. Mina Elias: Yeah, exactly. It's something that you can be, it's something that you're passionate about, something that you can be, because when you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing it, then something you can be the best of the world at, because that's like, if you have the opportunity to be the best in the world, then it's worth pursuing. And then something that adds value, that you can measure, because that's how money works, right? It's an exchange of value. I make your PPC better, you make more money, I get money, like that's how it works. So I kind of like was looking for something that had like a three in it or like a, and so Trivium was the intersection of three roads. Speaker 1: I'm curious. So this is, so I picked AdBadger and I had a second, AdBadger was actually my second choice. And actually it might've been my third choice. I wanted AdRabbit because I was like, oh, rabbits are like quick and fast. And like that was taken. And then I wanted like Komodo ads, like the Komodo dragon, like very badass animal. I already got the domain, so I might use it in the future for some other thing. But yeah, I liked Komodo. And then I was like, oh man, but it like spelt strangely. And then I was like, okay, Badger, Badger, you know, everyone knows that. Mina Elias: AdBadger is like also very clean. Like it's simple. Like you know what these people do? They do ads. Like it's not, you know, Trivium, So Trivium is also a band, which I, like, unfortunately learned later that it's like a band. And I was talking to my SEO guy. He's like, yeah, like, I think we can get the number one position maybe in five or 10 years. Like, don't worry about it. Speaker 1: Oh, my gosh. Mina Elias: I'm like, what, bro? But it's okay. I mean, you know, it doesn't impact the business at all. But it's like, it's a band. They have a Wikipedia page. And I'm like, oh, man, I should have learned. Speaker 1: I'm sure there's a Wikipedia expert somewhere that is like, Did you mean Trivium the band or the marketing agency? Maybe. So I'm really excited about the topic we're going to talk about today because we haven't done it in 2023. And I think it's revisiting this topic, which is I feel like for a lot of PPC professionals, I never like the word PPC experts, but a lot of PPC professionals, like people that do PPC professionally, at least for me, and I don't know about for you, but if I'm on the phone with someone and they're describing their problems like, oh man, like my ads were better in the past, they had a lower ad cost and now I just can't seem to get them where they were or like I'm having trouble scaling. I already know what the problem is before I even log in often. Like I sort of like know what to go look for. I'm curious if you have that same sort of intuition, and I wanted to just see, because this is really our first conversation, I would love to just get that view. When you first talk to someone, maybe even before you look at their account, and then once you do get in there, what you are sort of like Checklist is for digging around for like finding that those common problems, right? So like finding those common areas where people just sort of stumble and you know, whether it's like the immediate cause for a problem or maybe there's a problem with like organization and then other issues pop up later down the road. I would love to sort of like do that because it's such a cool topic. Mina Elias: Yeah, so when someone says that, like I first want to take a macro view and then a micro view. Like the micro is what we're going to talk about in a second, like the portfolios, campaigns, number of ad groups, number of keywords, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like how many search terms are spending money, not making sales. That's micro. But first I'm like, I have this sheet, this template. I don't know if you've seen my analytics template. If someone fills it out, I can tell. I developed this because as I started managing more brands, I'm like, guys, I need something where I can just really quickly diagnose the problem. What I need to see is your ad spend, your sessions, your cost per session, which is your ad spend divided by sessions, your total sales, and this is trending every day. If you're like, oh, my PPC used to be so much better. I'm like, okay, cool. Just do one week, one week, one week, one week, and give me these numbers, your ad spend, your sessions. You're cost per session, your total sales, your click-through rate, your conversion rate, and then we can put the profit too. That would be nice to see. Then I start looking at the trends. You're telling me your PPC is bad. The cost per acquisition, which is what makes the PPC good or bad, is a function of your conversion rate and your cost per session. What I mean by that is if you're trying to say, what is my cost of acquisition for a product? You're spending $100 on ads. You're getting 100 sessions. So you're spending $1 per session or $1 per person to come into the listing. If your conversion rate is 10%, it means you need 10 sessions to make one conversion, 10 sessions to make a conversion times $1 per session, $10 to make a conversion. If you have whatever, like $10 in profit per unit, you're breaking even. So to drop that cost for acquisition, so it goes from bad PPC, or from bad PPC to good PPC, it would be you either increase that conversion rate to go from 10% to 20%, and then that means that your cost of acquisition goes to $5, Or your cost per session goes from $1 to 50 cents, which means, again, your cost per acquisition goes to $5 because you half the cost of the traffic. So you either double the conversion rate or half the cost of the traffic. And so when I have those metrics, I start looking. I'm like, what happened to the ad spend in relation to the sessions? If your ad spend is flat and your sessions are going down, you are losing organic rank. Thanks for watching. If your click-through rate is going down too, that's also a signal that maybe you used to be the nice one and then everyone around you became nicer and then you started becoming the uglier one. Your price became worse. Everyone's main images started becoming better. Your reviews start stagnating. You went from a four and a half to a four star, something like that, right? So I'm looking at the trend of ad spend. So if my PPC spend is going up and my sessions are going up, I look at my cost per session. Is my cost per session stable? If my cost per session is going up, it means that I might have been overspending for ads. If my PPC spend is the same and my cost per session is going up, again, that means that I'm not as attractive. My click-through rate is going down. Something's going on. If my PPC spend is going down and my cost per session is the same, Then again, I'm overspending because for the same amount of, I'm spending less money and I'm having to spend more per session. So I start looking at the relationship of the spend and the traffic. What's going on there? So that's my first macro thing. And then the second thing is I look at what's happening to my conversion rate. And then if my ad spend is the same, And my conversion rate is going down. Okay, that's why your PPC is going. If my ad spend is the same, my cost per session is the same, my conversion rate is going down. Okay, there you go. If my ad spend is going up, my conversion rate is going down. Okay, maybe you started targeting things that are not as well converted. If my ad spend is going down and my conversion rate is going down, again, that means like something's happening to your product. It's becoming less attractive. Maybe you went from a four and a half star to a four. Something happened. So that's on a macro scale. Very quickly, I can look at that and diagnose the problem. So I either know it's like a traffic issue or if it's a click-through rate issue, it's either your main image, your price, or your reviews, 99.9% of the time. And if it's a conversion rate issue, then okay, let's diagnose what happened. Why all of a sudden your conversion rate is going down? Is it everyone around you has changed or is it that you went from a four and a half star to a four star? Is your price no longer competitive in the market? Was it a trend? Did you have like a trendy product and that trend is fading? Is it seasonality? Go look at the search history for the keywords. Go look at the BSRs of everyone. Is everyone trending down? If the answer is yes, then it could be nothing's wrong with you. You just have to weather this period, be profitable as much as you can, and then it's gonna improve. So that's on a macro scale. And I'm here to kind of figure out, okay, what's going on? And then it's also important because a lot of people come to me and they're like, my PPC isn't as good. And then I realized that they ran out of stock at some point, or they were like super low stock. And it said like in stock May 13th, something like that. And then you're like, okay, that has a huge impact. Their cost per session used to be 18 cents, now it's 36 cents for the same ad spend, meaning that they lost a lot of organic rank. Or they weren't getting the same effect that they were getting from their organic placements. So that's how I figure out where the issue is. And then we go into, okay, let's dissect your, I'll pause for a second to hear your thoughts. Speaker 1: Yeah, so just reflecting back, I think it's really valuable People don't jump the gun. And what I mean by jump the gun is they go straight into their campaigns and they begin to like blow it up because they think that, you know, there's, I can't tell you how many times people misdiagnose the issue. And I can tell you, here's an unpopular PPC opinion. I think most people working on their PPC campaigns, even professional PPCers, like professional marketers, not just Store owners, I think people working on PPC campaigns are way more emotional about it than they would say they are. Meaning, what I mean by that is like people go into their campaigns and it's like, oh, I feel like this. I feel like this. Let me go like do this. Let me go do that. If you were to sometimes force some PPCers to write out the almost robotic process to get to the issue, they'd be like, no, you need to go over and sometimes I'll do this and sometimes I'll do that. It's like, well, actually, no, you don't need to do that. Just start at the macro view. Start with all these numbers. Then use that as your indicator, your jumping off point to go in further. So just to, so I think it's great, right? Cause it helps direct you where you need to go. And the other thing I'll say too, is like, I can't tell you how many times too, I'll talk to people that are like, my PPC is worse now than it was later. And it might be quarter, they're comparing quarter one to quarter four. And it's like, well, or they're, you know, comparing, you know, 2020, Peak conversion times versus 2021 or 2023 where things are different. And maybe they're missing context or they're looking at too short a timeframe or too long a timeframe or they're not taking into account different levels of competition. So before we go any further, just talking about this macro view, because maybe people are going to build their own macro views or like in your analytics template. Did you share it on LinkedIn? Because if so, we'll put it in the show notes. Mina Elias: Yeah, I'll send it to you. You can put it in the show notes. It's a Google show. Oh, cool. Speaker 1: Before you get into it, I'm curious how you thought about how long you should go back in time. Do you do it daily? Do you have like 180 individual days? Do you have like 12 weeks, three months? Tell me about your timeframe and what you found personally most valuable. How does your brain work when it comes to picking a timeframe and picking a time interval? Mina Elias: Yeah, so I like honestly the one thing I'll tell everyone like stop living in the past like It does not matter what you did in the past like stop thinking that you can you like You knowing that something happened like does not mean anything It doesn't like you're like all but you know, we have you we stopped 15 20% the echoes, whatever It doesn't matter like so what you know, it's like Like how does that help? It just makes you, in your heart, emotionally, really long for that. Speaker 1: Anyone who's a savvy investor will tell you that past performance is no indication of future performance. It's like, well, it went up 50% last month. It's like, is it going to do that again? Things like that. Mina Elias: Yeah, 100%. And so, most of the time, it's just... I'm trying to figure out what I can do right now. So when I do look at historic performance, we have everything from the second that we start working, like 30 days or so before we start working with a brand, and then we have all of that historic data. And a lot of times I'm scrolling and I'm like, All of that stuff in the past, it's done. Yeah, it went up and it went down. Sometimes I look at trends and I'm like, how did the product react? As we scaled, how did the product react? As we optimized, how did it react? Then I notice, I'm trying to notice, is there any red flags? When we scaled, immediately conversion rate tanked. And it was like, maybe it's a product that works very well with niche keywords, but the second that you try and go broad, it doesn't work anymore. And so I'm looking for that stuff. But usually, I just look at the last 14 days. I'm like, what happened in the last 14 days? If spend is flat and everything is flat or whatever, I'm like, okay, cool. We have one of two directions. We're either gonna optimize for profit. Go in look for any opportunities like keywords that are spending money with no sales, etc, etc. You know add them as negatives things like that or Because the profit isn't that good look then we only have one direction to go which is scale So let's you know 1.5x our daily ad spend but launching new campaigns Spending more money on keywords that are currently working increasing budgets for campaigns things like that increasing bid by placement And spend more money, get more sessions, and then see if the revenue reacts the way we want it to. Because if you spend more money, you're supposed to have More revenue, if your conversion rate holds up. So more spend, more sessions, more revenue. Not all of it's gonna be profitable. But then once you're at that higher revenue, you're hoping that also you're gonna get some organic rank benefit. And then when you keep the things that worked, remove the things that didn't work, you end up with more profit net. Because you discovered, you launched 50 keywords, 25 of them were profitable, 25 were bad. So when you cut those 25, you're going to be left with 25 more profitable keywords, which means you're going to have more profit. And so that's what I'm looking for. I'm just looking in the last 14 days, what happened and what can I do now? Because at the end of the day, we can decipher the past, but the question remains, what can I do now? And it's always one of two things. Do I need to clean up and try and go for more profit or do I need to scale because it doesn't seem like we can squeeze any more profit out of this? If you're spending like $70 a day, What are you gonna do, save $15? That's gonna be your profit? Who cares? You wanna go from 70 a day to 250 a day, and then hopefully 150 of those dollars is now profitable. So when you clean up the 100 that wasn't, you're left with $150 of profitable spend a day. I always look at it like, what can I do now? And the number one thing I'm always cautious of is Is this actually not a PPC problem? Because the last thing that you want is this is a click-through rate problem, conversion rate problem, and you're just forcing PPC, trying to make it work, and it's not because it's a funnel. It's like you get views, you get impressions. A certain number of those impressions click on you. That's how you get the sessions, and that's the click-through rate. And then a certain number of those people that come into the listing sessions will convert. That's the conversion rate. If the click-through conversion rate metrics are broken, No matter what you do, have like a 10 cent auto campaign, hack, all of this stuff, nothing is going to do anything. Those metrics are broken. If those metrics are fine, okay, cool. It's time to work on the PPC. And also, if you improve those metrics, all of your PPC improves. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think growth on Amazon is like a decathlon. It's close to a decathlon rather than a marathon. It's like not just running. It's like, well, actually, you need to be fit. You need to be able to have a really high jump. You need to be able to swim, all these different things. And I think like, yeah, you want to talk about the most common problem I hear. It's like everyone thinking that PPC is the only thing to do. And it's like, well. Mina Elias: Actually, you know, actually I also started noticing, I started noticing if you have less than 30 days of stock of a product, it starts performing worse. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. Mina Elias: You know, like we only noticed it because we, we have like a, on my real profit, there's like this trend line of like your inventory and then your sales. And we started seeing the second that we hit 30, like you start seeing the sales go down. And I would tell the team, I'm like, did you guys optimize this week? They're like, no. We kept everything the same. I'm like, weird, why is sales going down? And then I started looking at all the different scenarios and I'm like, everyone who timed their inventory too tight so that they were getting it like when they only had 15 days of stock, from day 30 to day 15, or like the 30 days of stock to 15 days of stock, it's all downward. And I'm like, There's another thing that's completely unrelated to PPC or your conversion rate that will affect your performance. It's all of the things. Speaker 1: I think for this first section, Whenever we approach, it's like take the macro view and try to find out what path to go on. And I'm curious too, because there's so many different paths. There might be stock issues. There might be a review issue, competitive issue. If you were a betting man and like the next campaign, the next account you look at, what would you guess it is? Like, what do you think the most common one is today? Mina Elias: The most common problem? I would say probably like too many keywords in campaigns. I think that's like the number one thing that I see is we look at campaigns and it's just like keywords are stuffed, like tens, dozens of keywords stuffed in campaigns. And I think that it gives Amazon too much room to do the random stuff that Amazon does. I don't think conversion rate is drastically changing or click-through rate is drastically changing. But I think the most common thing that I see is just like, The campaigns aren't structured well enough, like the multiple ad groups, low budgets, like $25, $30 budgets, thinking like you're on Facebook when it behaves completely differently on Amazon. But I can walk you through the audit if you want. Speaker 1: Sure. Unknown Speaker: So let's do that. So you take your macro view and does your macro view Is the macro view dictate what you do next or is it more so like mental note, they probably have this going on? Mina Elias: Yeah, so, okay, macro view. We look at the macro view. Conversion rate is fine. Click-through rate is fine. I look at my cost per acquisition. It's a normal cost per, like I have $15 profit per unit. It's a $7 cost per acquisition, no problem. We can probably shave off a little bit when we look at that. So my next step is, okay, I'm going to do one of two things. Like I said, I'm either going to scale the revenue or I'm going to optimize for profit. If you feel like you've already optimized, then scale for revenue so you can identify that next $100 of profitable spend a day. If you feel like, no, it looks like there is inefficiencies, It looks like the cost per session went up over time as the PPC spend went up. Okay, let's optimize first. So those are the two things that I'm looking for. Then when I go into the audit, step one is like what are the like housekeeping, you know, kind of like too many ad groups, too many keywords per campaign, low budgets sort of thing, right? And then the second thing is like as I go through everything, what's my goal? Is it to scale? If it's to scale, there's a certain set of things I'm doing. If it's to optimize for profit, there's a certain set of things that I'm doing. And I can walk through that. First thing is organization. Let's look at portfolios. Are you separating one portfolio per parent ASIN? I don't separate child ASINs because what we realized is you have all these different child ASINs that you're running ads on. They all send traffic to the same listing and different listings get the credit. So to avoid that, we just pool it. If you want to have certain campaigns for certain child ASINs, go for it as long as when you evaluate the performance, you evaluate it at the parent ASIN level. So that's why we do the different parent ASINs for each different portfolio. We don't break out like a portfolio for auto and whatever. That's where the second step comes in, which is campaign naming. We have like really strict campaign naming so you can easily sort like when you type in the search like auto, it will show up only the auto campaigns. The way that I name the campaigns is a product code, so a code for any random code you want that's easier than the ASIN. The type of campaign, is it close match, loose match, complement, substitutes, broad phrase, exact, product targeting, expanded ASIN, category targeting, whatever it is. The purpose of the campaign, if it's a ranking campaign or something like that, and a source of keywords or any other unique identifier you feel like is necessary. Then I go look at the budgets. Any campaign that has like low budget, right off the bat, I know that that's probably what's hurting performance. Now, if I'm in the scaling phase, the first thing I'm going to do is, okay, show me any campaign with like, let's say like a 4X ROAS or more, you know, 25% ACOS or less. Let's increase the budget. You know, get it to 100, 150, 200, if I'm scaling. If I'm not scaling, I'll hold off. That could be another tool because when you're optimizing for profit, you really do want to just reduce the ad spend while keeping everything the same. Then I click into the campaigns. We go into the campaigns. I'm like, do we have multiple ad groups? Campaigns that have multiple ad groups, that's where I see issues where the ad spend is being split into different ad groups unevenly. An ad group that has better keywords is getting less spend. The unfortunate thing is you don't want to pause something that's working. So we can't pause anything that's working. But if there's anything that's not working, you can sort by spend in the last 30 days, sort by sales. If it hasn't generated any sales, or spend, pause it. It's pointless. So at least clean up those keywords. And then later on, if you see a keyword that's profitable but getting three sales a month, and the search volume is like a 10K a month search volume, you know it has potential to do more, you can later on gamble by pausing that keyword and putting it in its own campaign. Then I look at the number of keywords. Again, I'll sort by sales in the last 30 days. Anything that's no sales, that's an easy pause. It's an opportunity now to take those keywords and launch them. If I'm optimizing, I'm just pausing. If I'm scaling, then I'll pause and then take those keywords and give them another opportunity in more campaigns, but probably I'll go first for ones that are search terms that are profitable first. Then I clean up and now we have a good campaign structure. Next, I go look at the placements. If we're scaling, then any campaign that I noticed had good performance for like let's say top of search or product detail pages, I'll increase the bid by placement. If I'm optimizing for profit, I'm looking for the inverse of that. So any campaign that has a bid by placement, but the ROAS is not great in that placement, I'm going to bring the percentage down to zero. So you're not spending more to show for a placement that you're not doing that well on. So now we cleaned up the campaigns. My next step is if I'm scaling, then I'm like, okay, let's identify profitable search terms that I can launch in their own campaigns. I'll go download the search term report, identify, let's say in the last 30 days, any keywords or search terms that are unique. And let's say, for me, profitable between 1% to 25% ACOS. You can do one sale. You can do a minimum of two sales. It depends on how – the more conservative you are, you add more parameters. Like I wanted to have at least two sales and between 1% to 15% or 1% to 20% ACOS. If you want to be less conservative, more aggressive, you can start with being more conservative and then you're like, I wanted to increase my daily ad spend by $50, but I only was able to get $15. So you can then loosen up the criteria. Launching those campaigns, one campaign, one ad group, up to five keywords and grouped by a similar search volume. And I'll take the same cost per click that I found in that search term and launch it there. If I'm optimizing for profit, then in the search term report, I'm identifying all the search terms that spent over a certain dollar amount, let's say $10. If I have a $30 product, probably I can tolerate the $15 and no sales. $15, no sales, or ACOS is over 100%, take those keywords, add them all as negatives to stop spending on those keywords. Then, finally, it's like, okay, let's start doing some optimizations. So, you know, bulk sheet, look at all the keywords and product targets I'm currently targeting. If I'm scaling, you know, then I'm identifying anything that was profitable, increasing the bids. So anything, let's say, between 1% to 30% ACoS, increase the bids by 5 cents to get more visibility on something that I know is already working. Or if it has very low impressions, increase the bids by like 15, 20 cents to give it – maybe it's just a low search volume keyword or maybe it just – the bid is too low and it didn't have a chance to show up high enough. If I'm optimizing for profit, anything that has a high ACOS, I'm going to lower the bids. So let's say, again, you could be more conservative or less conservative. You can start at 100% or more ACOS, and then you're like, oh, I only was able to shave off $10. I want to shave off more. You can go to anything above 70% ACOS. And then anything that's spending money, not making sales, lower the bids there. And then the final, there's a few things that I also look at that are outside of that, which is, so one thing to keep in mind is if you have a sponsored video, a headline search ad, and a sponsored product, regular ad, the same person could click on the multiple ads and charge you money, and it's the same session. It's only gonna be maximum one conversion. So in cases like this, I like to, if I'm optimizing for profit, I'll go look at my sponsored video and my headline search, And where I have high sponsored rank, I will attempt to say, okay, and again, this is one thing at a time, so I'm trying to maybe add negatives only, and then three, four days later, lower the bids. Three, four days later, identify all the sponsored video that also have a high sponsored rank, and then lower the bids there. Maybe take it from a page one to a page two. And then see that drop in ad spend, did it result in a drop in revenue? If it did, I'll bring the spend and the bids back up for the video. If it didn't, if I just dropped my ad spend and the revenue stayed the same, then I wasn't really generating additional sales from having that video. Same with headline search ad. And then finally, I do the exact same thing with organic rank when I'm trying to optimize. So do I have a high organic rank and high sponsored rank? If the answer is yes, let's test lowering the bids, getting a lower sponsored rank and maintaining the organic rank and see what happens. Sometimes we can drop the spend and maintain revenue. Sometimes revenue drops, bring it back up. Sometimes you drop the spend, revenue stays the same, but a week later the revenue drops when the organic rank drops. Again, then you know what happened, then you can bring it back up. And then obviously when I'm trying to scale, it's like the vice versa. Where do I have low organic rank? Let's bring the sponsor rank higher artificially for a while to get more conversions to rank higher organically. And I make sure that I'm tracking the organic rank and I'm actually getting a benefit. Usually I wouldn't do this for more than like three keywords at a time so I could actually know that it's working or not working. But that's my audit process and that's like going through a brand new campaign, a brand new campaign manager and going through step by step based on either my scaling or optimizing goal. And what I would do in each scenario. Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you some rapid fire follow-up questions, if that's all right. Mina Elias: Yes, let's do it. Speaker 1: Portfolio structure. You group by product, is that right? Mina Elias: Yeah, one parent ASIN per portfolio. Speaker 1: Got it. What do you think of people that do... I don't do it, but some people do. I'm curious if you have any feedback for them. I see some people do portfolios almost by like goal, like they'll put all their ranking campaigns in certain things, their branded campaigns in a certain, their non-branded in a certain portfolio. I'm curious why you choose the way that you do, because I also do it by product, but I'm just curious to get the conversation going. What would you say to someone that's like grouping their portfolios by goal, something like that? Mina Elias: I think it's unnecessary because you can have the goal in the campaign name and then you can just go into that portfolio. When you click on the portfolio, you want to see how your entire product is doing at a glance. My HydraLite Unflavored, this is how it's doing, just at a glance. And then if I want to know how the ranking campaigns are doing, I'll just type in ranking in the search and then it'll show me how my ranking campaigns are doing. So it's really not necessary to... You'll end up having so many different portfolios, it becomes pretty messy pretty quick. Speaker 1: Hey man, so yeah, I'm on the same page with you. Talked about campaign naming many times on this show for sure. You mentioned budget issues, finding good ROAS campaigns with a low budget or limited by budget. Do you use Amazon's budget tab where they try to tell you how often you're in budget, out of budget? Mina Elias: Yeah, I mean, we look at it, but honestly, I don't trust the Amazon stuff that much. I just trust if I make a change in the budget, what actually happens. That's the only thing. Because we've been I lie to buy Amazon so much. You see one thing in the data and then you realize it's a different thing. You notice like a keyword is super high ACoS. You lower the bids. You notice you lost 30% of your revenue and you're like, what the hell happened? I thought this was, you know, it wasn't converting that well. So it's like, because of that, I only trust the things that I can control, which is like, I can control the budget and I can see the outcome in the total revenue. So, I mean, the budget tabs is good to look at because if Amazon says, oh, spend more, then you can definitely spend more. If it doesn't, it doesn't mean that I'm not. I'm also gonna increase the budget. I like to be at a, like the floor is $100 a day. And then, you know, if I see good ROAS, scale it to 5,000 a day, whatever, so that Amazon can spend as much as long as we're, you know, the ROAS is good. Speaker 1: Yeah, two comments there. There are a lot of ghosts in the machine for Amazon advertising. Just Amazon in general, you know, you mentioned another one where like stock issues somehow impact visibility and like, so absolutely couldn't agree more. The other thing too, with what you said about Budgeting and the opportunity to spend more. Every once in a while, I'll hear from someone, it's like, oh, they typoed their budget. So they meant to write a hundred, they wrote a thousand, or they typoed a bid and their bid was much higher than they thought it was. And what happens is they get the traffic. A lot of times the traffic is just out there. So I always think that's interesting. You also mentioned Placements. I'm curious if you could comment on placements, top of search, product page, rest of search. In terms of, I guess an interesting question. I always love to ask this. Walk me through the last time you changed, if you can remember, the last time you changed a top of search placement, whether you increased it to a certain amount or decreased it to a certain amount. What indicators were you looking for just with the top of search? Because so many people focus on top of search, but I feel like a lot of times people are sort of making arbitrary movements like, okay, top of search, that's 100. Enter. And I want to give people maybe a little bit of a framework to make a little bit more informed decision. How do you like to cross that gap? If you can recall the last time you did that, what you noticed and what you did because of that. Mina Elias: Yeah, so what I'll do is I'll go and look at a campaign and I'll look at the, you know, placements tab and then, or obviously I do it in the bulk sheets, but then I'm like, okay, let me compare top of search with the rest of search. If top of search has a better CTR, better ROAS, you know, than the rest of search, then it makes sense that if I show up more in the top of the search, I'm going to get more people coming in at a better return. And as a result, I'm like, okay, cool. If my bid is $1, I want to increase by something like 30%. Every time that I check this, I'll increase by 30%, so let's say I check it like once a week, that's like 30% a week as long as I keep seeing that the performance of like the top of search is still better. It's still better CTR, it's still better ROAS than the rest of the search. So I'm willing to spend 30% more to show up there because I know I'm gonna have a better click-through rate and return on investment. Speaker 1: You know what I like about what you just described, and you mentioned it a couple times too. You mentioned it in the, if you rank high organically and you rank high through paid, you'll take certain actions. I like how, and maybe this is a connection to the MMA perspective, you seem to I like pushing things, finding the point of diminishing returns, like where is the maximum I can hit it? And then where does it drop off to the point where it's not worth it anymore? Because you mentioned it when you were talking about ranking high, organically unpaid. You mentioned it just here, like I'm going to push top of search, check performance, check a week again, push top of search, check performance. I'm going to push it until I hit that switch point at which I'm like, oh, I'm going to back off of this. I'm curious if that was like a conscious decision, because I'm always so fascinated. I talked to so many PPCers internally here, externally, like conversations like this. And I always am so fascinated by how different people's brains approach similar situations. So other situations that I've asked that similar question, like how do you optimize title search? People have answered in many different correct ways. And I think that what you just described is actually really fascinating and probably works super well. And other people have given other answers that are also fascinating and also probably work very well for them. And I think like, is that a conscious decision you made? Like, I like that, like, push it until you can't push it anymore. Find that switch point. And then, you know, take it, take it back down. And then you found your, your, your zone of optimal, the optimal zone. Mina Elias: Yeah. So this actually came from engineering. When you can't find an equation, have you ever tried like iteration on Excel? But when something does not have an equation, you use iteration. And what I started realizing is on Amazon, you can't come up with an equation. So double your bid does not mean double your spend. So since we don't have like a linear equation or even anything remote to an equation, and a lot of it stems from it's human behavior on the other side. So it could be that when you increase your bid, It's just your luck that it's 60% more women are clicking now, this week, something like that. So because it's so completely random, you cannot find an equation. And the solution when you can't find an equation is to iterate. And so iteration basically means you change and you measure, you change, you measure, you change, you measure. And so it would look something like this. If I'm trying to aim something at a bullseye, And so I'll turn a knob and I'll see, did it get closer, yes or no? If the answer is yes, turn it more. Did it get closer, yes or no? Let's say we have four knobs. Turn it. Did it get closer, yes or no? And you just keep turning these things. And if the answer is no, you turn it back. If the answer is yes, you turn it more. And you do it small, small, small, small, small, many, many, many times. And eventually you're like, okay, what equation did I follow? There was no equation. It was iteration. It was make a change measure, make a change measure, make a change measure. And because I can't come up with an equation for Amazon, I don't think it's possible. And because nothing works linearly or anything like that, then I'm like, okay, we're going to take an iteration approach. Speaker 1: I'm off the charts resonating because so, you know, AdBadger software, it like optimizes like almost 2 million bids a day using like our algorithm. And what I think is so fascinating, we've been working on the thing for years. We started in 2017 and we were making all these really thoughtful iterations and there were still some areas where it was like, what the hell do we do with a keyword in a campaign that matches these scenarios? It's like, what steps could we give it to get to maybe where we'd want it to get to? And we had a mathematician come in and he's like, there are times where you cannot do that, where literally you just guess. At what it could be. And then you guess again. And there's actually a mathematical concept behind that. It's called the multi-armed bandit, where basically like literally any guess is as good as the next one. You just need to pick. So for example, one thing we were doing was like brand new campaign, no data, start the bids really low and then push them up a little bit, push them up a little bit. And it's like, Where is the point at which it starts to begin to make sense? And in terms of time to get to a good answer and time to get to a good performance, you could have done that little tiny step, or you could have just picked a number, started from there and then picked up maybe a randomly different one. And then you would have gotten there faster with a higher degree of confidence. So yeah, so what you just described is a thing I've learned in the last year or so, that multi-armed bandit. There is no equation and some things you do have to guess. And I think this is like Amazon marketing at an advanced level. Because it took me a long time to realize that where it's like, oh, we want order so much. We want to define everything so perfectly. What is the perfect equation for top of search? And you know what? Sometimes the answer is like... Mina Elias: No equation. Speaker 1: Is it good to do more of it? Yeah, exactly. Sometimes it's like guess and reflect and iterate. That is the true thing. There is no perfection. There is no ultimate equation. Mina Elias: It drives me nuts when I see the equations on Facebook, in the Facebook groups. It's like 1 minus ACOS divided by ACOS this, that, and I'm like, I mean, dude, it's not possible to come up with an equation because there is a massive variable that you can't control or two of them, Amazon's algorithm and like the shoppers. Both of those are completely random. If you get a bunch of shoppers that were between 50 and 60 years old versus 25 to 30 years old, the behavior is different. Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the bell curve meme where it's like IQ bell curve, and then like really low IQ on one side, really high IQ on the other side, and in the middle where most people are. And then there's like three people on it. And like in the middle where most people are, they're like crying. And basically what it is, it's like, when you first get started, you don't know what to do. Then you try to figure it all out. You're like, oh, I have everything figured out. You follow all these rules. And they're in the middle and they're crying in pain. And then this super high IQ person is doing something similar to the low IQ person. And it's the same thing. In this case, it's like, What is the perfect bid? It's like, I don't know, just guess. That's what the person at the beginning is doing. And that's what you get to when you're super advanced. And everyone in the middle is trying to guess. I talk about what a bid could and should be on this show a bit. I do think there's some room for people to understand a little bit more that, yes, you want it to be influenced by performance. Yeah, you know, for some people's an equation is probably going to be better than like nothing at all. Yeah, right. Like there's there's an area in your professional trajectory where people are probably they're not randomly guessing, they're guessing poorly in the beginning. Mina Elias: This is a good starting point. This makes sense. Don't put $5 or don't put 25 cents and use this. This helps. Yeah, totally. I agree. Speaker 1: What I thought would start and be a fairly straightforward episode, we talked about some really deep topics. I'm really happy that we Had a chance to connect. These are some things that I haven't necessarily talked about on the show before. And I don't know if you've ever talked about the power of this sort of randomness and jumping on that and finding that point of diminishing returns before on a show. Mina Elias: No, I think not a lot of people talk about it. And I think I haven't touched enough where it's like, Don't worry like the answer like it's there. You're not doing the wrong thing. You know, it's the no, I don't have like the secret answer, you know, the experts or the professionals, there's no secret answer. It's like, yeah, sometimes it's comforting to know like, Your guess is as good as mine. We're all in this together. Speaker 1: Shrug your shoulders and have a good guess and go do that. I think the thing too, this comes from the days where I did Google Ads. This company, WordStream, they had some tool where you can opt in and get a free analysis. And Google Ads is like, Because everyone can do Google search ads, your local plumber can do it, but they can't be on Amazon. Anyway, at one point in time, WordStream had tens of thousands of accounts worth of data. And when they did this little analysis, they asked people to assess their performance, what's their target and where they're currently at. And what they found was that the accounts that were close to their target had one thing in common, which was they were very active. Like if you looked at the amount of changes per day, it was much higher per amount of ad spend than people whose accounts were way worse. So basically what they came to the conclusion was, and I swear by this to this day, was that if you are more active in your account, if you just literally log in and look at it and be like, I think this, let me change this. I think that, let me change that. You will be better off because you'll catch things and you'll tweak and you'll react and you'll, you know, it's like you're sailing a ship from, you know, I don't know, Europe to America. It's like you're, you're checking your trajectory every single day. You're able to get to where you need to get to, or if you're flying a plane, you know, you're able to get to where you get to, as opposed to if you just do it like once a month, It's like that's too much time for you to look, tweak, take action, tiny action, repeat it over time. So that's a big philosophy of mine. Slow and steady, repeated action more frequently is way better than setting it up on the first of the month and not checking it until the 20th of the month. For sure. Mina Elias: Definitely. And track everything, like note down everything so you know, like I changed this, this happened. Okay, I changed that, this happened. And every single product is unique. So we run like so many products and everyone has its own life, its own history. It's like a child, you know? Like they have their own like personality and everything and you're just taking notes. You're like, okay, cool. Like when we did this, this happened. When we did that, this happened. And it's like it has its own life. Speaker 1: I'm going to leave it at that, Mina. Mina, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was an absolute pleasure. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope the people out there in Badger Nation did too. We have a link to your LinkedIn. LinkedIn's popular for Amazon marketing. We have a link to Trivium in the description. Unknown Speaker: Thank you so much. Mina Elias: My pleasure. If you have any questions, hit me up, guys. Happy to help.