How to Balance SOPs and Strategy in PPC

How to Balance SOPs and Strategy in PPC Speaker 1: All right, Abe, before we get started, you live in my home state, which not many people leave New Jersey. Like here in Austin, it's very rare that I meet someone from New Jersey. And when I do, it's a strong connection. So how are things in New Jersey this time of year? Speaker 2: Quiet. So as winter starts to set in, you sort of have the winter birds that have just left town because everybody's leaving in October. So that segment of the population just bailed. And also, you know, I don't know how evergreen this is, but, you know, we're talking at the onset of winter, which happens every year, I guess. And people are sort of looking ahead towards their next sunny vacation. They're sort of like hunkering down a little bit as it gets colder. The kids are not out. So it's a quiet place these days. Speaker 1: You know, The PPC Den podcast has a wide audience all around the world. What do you think people should know about New Jersey? Speaker 2: I would definitely say New Jersey has a worse reputation than it deserves. I sort of play into it because I'm from Brooklyn and I will always call myself a person from New York or a person from Brooklyn first, no matter how many years I've lived in New Jersey. But the truth is, It's pretty nice. There's a lot of good things about it. You can be close to New York City, but you are not in New York City. You are as close as you want to be to the ocean or not. There are super, super nice neighborhoods and there are neighborhoods of every personality. There are a lot of states which have a sameness to it. For better or worse, if it's the sameness that you want, that's perfect. So that's perfectly fine. But New Jersey has a lot of flavor to it. And it's also got four seasons, which I've always had four seasons, but apparently this is a novelty for a lot of America. We've got seasons and beach and sort of New York. Speaker 1: I'd love that you said that because I couldn't agree more. I took New Jersey for granted. I lived there till I was like 27 or so and I took it for granted. I didn't realize how good New Jersey truly was. And you're absolutely right. Like one time a couple of years ago, I was like, man, like where should I live? Like what's a perfect location? Like it would be close to like an amazing city and you'd have the ocean and you'd have like green spaces and you'd have like mountains nearby and it's like that's literally New Jersey. It's pretty great. It's pretty affluent too. It's like a pretty solid spot. I think I took it for granted living there. Speaker 2: You're always welcome back. Speaker 1: That's right. My mother would welcome me back with big open arms for sure. Speaker 2: Right into your childhood bedroom probably. Speaker 1: Yes. So yes, I think I attribute a lot of my success and I think New Jersey gives you like that whole area, the New York City radius gives you a lot of like inertia and gusto and personality and like force to be reckoned with. You know, New Jersey doesn't raise a lot of passive people. Speaker 2: Oh, no. The song about New York definitely applies to New Jersey also. You have to have sharp elbows to make it. And if you've made it, you are a doer. Speaker 1: Yeah. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. I think it's really funny. One last thing I'll say about, I'll talk to people sometimes like, oh, yeah, I lived in Hoboken. And someone will be like, what's Hoboken? And I was like, picture New York City. But everyone's from New Jersey. Yes. Speaker 2: So that's it. It's like New York City light. It's sort of like the storybook version of New York City where everything is sort of clean and nice and posterized. Speaker 1: Right. I think we have a really cool topic that we were talking about before we hit record. I see this a lot. In fact, I think it is one of the most important things for any organization, any e-commerce brand, anyone who's doing digital marketing. It's one of the most important things, which is the dichotomy of How structured are you making your optimizations? And what's the connection between who's pressing the buttons on the keyboard to business goals? I think that's really tricky. Meaning you can be the founder of a company, whether you're a founder of an agency or the founder of an e-commerce brand. And you have all these goals. So I want to move market. I want to increase my market share over here. I want to do it with a certain margin. I want to do this. I want to do this. And you have all these business goals. And it's really tricky to translate that into, okay, I'm looking at a keyword in my account. What do I set the bid to? You know, like connecting all of these dots is really tricky. And there's lots of different ways, there's lots of different angles to this, but I almost feel like A good episode title is what your PPC system is missing or like what your Amazon marketing plan or what your Amazon marketing technician, the person who's actually pressing the buttons on the keyboard, what are they missing? So I hope we can bridge a little of this today. And with all the new advancements that have come out with Amazon marketing, Hopefully, we can put some dark matter connections, the fabric of the universe. Hopefully, we can help people see everything. So whether if you are a strategist at a company like the founder of an agency or the founder of an e-commerce brand, or you're the person who's actually looking at spreadsheets and looking at ad console and making decisions on the day-to-day, hopefully, we can help Both of those people understand each other a little bit better to get better results. And so this is a concern for you too. Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a subject which is near and dear to my heart. It very much influences the way that I run my business. It influences the way that I run my agency. It influences the way that I work with my team. And it really, it is the difference between success and not success. I don't like the bad words, but it's the difference between success and not success. The ability to think with flexibility. It's like the polar opposite of having a structured SOP for every possible situation. But if you don't have that flexible thinking, you're done. It'll never work right. Speaker 1: So how has this come up for you in your career? Speaker 2: Oh boy, it comes up endlessly. It's actually coming up right now with a brand I work with, interestingly enough. If the brand owner hears this episode, he'll know I'm talking about him. So, I work with a brand that has a very large account. You know, they're mid to upper eight figures. And there are a lot of moving parts. There are hundreds of parent SKUs that are all expected to be successful SKUs. There's no 80-20 or 90-10 rule. This is probably like, it's probably skewed the other way. You know, it's expected that most SKUs are expected to be successful. There are a lot of moving parts and we need them to be technically proficient also because a lot of the conversations have details in them. They hired a PPC person. We had been their agency since they were very small up until they're a good size. They hired an in-house person just because they needed somebody that could actually have proper conversations with us. This person has come in like a mad scientist. And has kept bringing up things to do. And the brand owner will just relay the messages. They'll go back and forth. And they'll say, hey, build a campaign to do this. Or, add these keywords to this campaign. Or, why is this keyword running? You should make it negative. And I'm looking at these things. And at first, I said, listen, we should defer to the brand owner as long as it's not technically incorrect. You know, they are the brand owner. It's their company in the end. After three or four of these, I said, listen, we need to get on an alignment call because we need to discuss strategy. And the brainer says, why? These seem like inoffensive things. They seem like small things. And then I explained. I said, listen, if you don't know why you're doing things, all of a sudden you will have 70 small things that seemed like a not big deal, but then you also have 70 campaigns for a SKU that are all bumping into each other with intention. And I pointed out one of the SKUs they have. They have a pair of SKUs. One is super successful and one is not. They're pretty similar SKUs, but one has taken the dominant position on Amazon. The other one came later. It was really support. If you would imagine in apparel, one is like a bright white T-shirt and one is like an off-white T-shirt. The bright white T-shirt is the winner. It is. The two are very similar. One's the winner. Anyway, the brand, and we treat it as such. The winner gets the love because every percentage point represents a lot of sales. The other one, less so, simply because the results we will get from the time and effort will not match. They simply will not. So, this new person comes in, this mad scientist, and says, hey, you should build a campaign for the lower performing SKU, which has this set of keywords in it. And it's all of the good performing, but medium volume keywords that our other SKU is winning on. And this is the point where I said, Hey, we need to have a conversation about this. Why are you suggesting we do this? And they explained, they said, listen, they are winners for the other SKU. So maybe there'll be winners for the second SKU. And I said, here is the problem. That sentence on its own sounds fine. Use the keywords that you know work. But it is missing the fact of actually looking at the search results for any of those keywords. When you run that keyword and do a search for white t-shirt, you will see your SKU, winning SKU, which has 7,200 reviews. You will see four other SKUs, all which have over 5,000 reviews each, all 4.7 stars, including yours, which is one of the winners. And then you have the other one. The other one is not a bright white t-shirt like the five winners. It has 176 reviews. It is a quarter of a point lower. It's like a 4.3 instead of a 4.6 and I can run that keyword. There's no problem. It's eight clicks, but I'll tell you now it's not going to perform because when you put that SKU up next to the others, it will not look as good. It is not a perfect match for the search result, even though it's a similar product. And if you don't have clear thinking about why you do the thing that works and why you do less for the other one, you will end up spending on that. And they appreciated that feedback. Now that's where the thinking, Bumps against the SOP, which would say take the winning keywords and apply it to a newer product. You've got to have strategy in there and you have to have thoughtfulness about why you're doing it and what the larger landscape is. Speaker 1: I was taking a couple of notes as you were talking there. The first thing I heard was really like, if you are an Amazon marketer, it doesn't matter where, if you're an agency or an in-house person, there's actually a huge detriment to being a yes man or a yes woman, meaning Goals are great. It's like, oh, I want to grow all these SKUs 25% over the next 12 months. Goals are fantastic and how we're going to do that might be different than what should actually be done, right? I hear this a lot where it's like, Especially with like agencies you want to be a good agency like you want the client to. You want to be you want to be able to say yes you want you want to be able to like make the client happy in some ways but. I've seen a lot of great talented. Today, we're going to talk about how Amazon Marketing Managers get into a lot of trouble because the client might suggest something that they don't feel is correct, that they don't feel is right, that they actually think is counter to what the client actually wants, or even sometimes what the client actually wants. It might not be realistic or it might not be a good idea or, you know, what's coming up for me. Speaker 2: You watch the YouTube video about the four tips to launch your SKU to the stratosphere. Right. Speaker 1: What I think is really fascinating. I talked to another person, a brand owner. And actually they had a completely different goal set. They actually went in with the idea of like, Hey, I'm going to be launching a bunch of products. I fully expect 50% of them to not be marketed a year from now. Meaning like, I'm going to like not, I'm going to like call the SKUs that aren't working well. And I would like, what a different goal than what you just mentioned, where it's like every SKU needs to grow. So it's like, How do you navigate those situations? You don't want to come off as being defensive or you don't want to come off as just saying no to the client all the time. They feel like they can't work with you. Because what happens is if something goes wrong in the account, like maybe performance dips for whatever reason, They might look at that and be like, well, that's because Abe's not doing what I asked. That's because Abe's always giving me a hard time about this kind of stuff. So it's really tricky, right? And on the flip side, it's like Even if you do say yes, it could still not work. And then they're like, you know, why didn't Abe tell me? You know what I mean? It's a really tricky situation. Speaker 2: So this is very much a personality situation. This is a relationship situation. So it very much relies on the person with more expertise having authority in the relationship and the conversation. So I've been working with this brand from being small all the way to being large. Plus, I am known in the space to have experience. What's interesting, like from a bunch of different ways, I come to the conversation with authority. So when I stick my nose in and say, hey, I strongly have an opinion here, he gives me the space to listen. That's not always the case. So in a lot of relationships, if people don't fully trust the person who's running the ads for them, or they think the person who's running the ads is interchangeable and all of these people are quote unquote the same, that person is not going to have authority. The other side of it is the person who is supposed to have the authority needs to be careful in how they exercise their authority. If you say no to everything all day, you will be annoying to work with and you'll be so smart but not having the account anymore. Congratulations. Or you can do everything they say and telling them that, hey, you told me to do this all the way until the performance is terrible is not going to be the answer that saves you either. You have to be And there's no SOP for this. The SOP is your personality has to match the personality of the person you're working with. Your authority has to be something that they respect, but you also have to respect them as a person and understand what's important to them. And I'm not perfect at it. I'm better than average because I have a decade of suffering doing telephone customer service. You learn empathy, even if it's not inherent to you. And you learn how to find the balance between you being right and them being right. It's not true that the customer is always right. And it's also not true that the customer is always wrong. There's a balance in there, and if you If you can figure out the balance, that's really what builds not just a successful account, but a successful relationship. You can be a super winner, but if the person thinks you're interchangeable, you'll be a super winner all the way until they don't work with you anymore. And the opposite is true also. Speaker 1: One of my favorite interview questions is always, what do you think is more, like if I'm hiring like an Amazon marketer or just something like that, I'll ask the question, What do you think is more important, technical skills, like knowing all the ins and outs of Amazon marketing, or client relationship skills, being able to navigate those tricky situations? How would you divide that up? If you had 100 points, how many points would you give to technical skills? How many points would you give to client relationships? I'll be honest, like an answer that I like is typically like either 50-50 or 51% client skills, 49% technical skills, meaning like understand because I feel like goal setting and being able to navigate the ups and downs of any Amazon account. Oh, this listing got suspended. Oh, there's a new competitor. Like all these crazy things are happening all the time. That being able to have someone know, like, and trust you, I feel like is super valuable than just, like you said, being the most knowledgeable person about anything. It's like, well, great, but now nobody wants to work with you. Do you agree? How do you answer that question? Speaker 2: Okay, so I agree with you. And I am of the opinion that you cannot find this in any one person. There is no split that works. You actually need two people. Now, you need one person who is going to be the people person, who is going to know when to push and when to concede, who's going to be agreeable most of the time, but disagreeable just enough of the time to make everything have energy. But you also need the person who just does what he's told and is super mechanical and is reliable. And those are two different personalities. That's why there's a stereotype of the computer engineer being the person that just has headphones on all day and is not really talked to. But that person is the person you want doing the plumbing of your computer system. You don't want to go out to beer, you know, you don't want to go... Speaker 1: You don't want the friendliest person, yeah. Speaker 2: Right. He's not the friendliest person, but he's absolutely a 100% as valuable and the most valuable person for that. And you need each of those. Speaker 1: Let me ask you this question though. Because I think it's like the real crux of what we're talking about, which is the person who's really good with client relationships, they understand what the client wants. And if it's an in-house brand, they understand what the company's goals are. So they understand it. How does that person turn around and go to the technical person and say to the technical person, and here's an interesting question, that technical person It's either sort of one or two, or maybe there's a spectrum. But that technical person either has a huge list of SOPs that they just run through. Mondays, I do this. Tuesdays, I do this. And it's almost very mechanical. Like, okay, I decrease bids on keywords with a cost 80% or more on Mondays. That's just what I do every Monday. I don't even think about it. versus someone who on Mondays looks at their keywords and squints and thinks and ponders and looks at placement settings and audiences and the trend and organic ranking. You know what I mean? Really informed decisions. How do all these moving pieces work? Both the customer-facing person, the person who feels the goals, turn around and tell the technical person, and the technical person Do they just follow SOPs or are they doing things bespoke and exploring and researching? That I feel like is a really delicate balancing act. Speaker 2: So here's the thing. Amazon PPC is not like cybersecurity. It is not like computer networking. It is not like standard computer programming. Amazon PPC behaves unpredictably. As much as there are standards and as much as there are standard actions to take and a proper structure to things, there needs to be built in a flexibility to the way that you work to understand that things will not always work the way they're supposed to. We all know, I don't know how we all know, but it's a generally understood thing that if you have a campaign that's running with a certain performance, you cannot delete that campaign and rebuild an identical campaign with every bit and keyword and setting and you have the same performance the next morning. It simply won't do that. If it's identical, you cannot delete and replace identical. a computer programming, yeah, I can delete this program and just re-upload it and, you know, just do the same thing the next morning. There is a lot of fuzziness built into the system and as much as you need a person who is more geared towards the technical, even that person in the scope of Amazon has to have flexibility built into them. They have to know that sometimes a keyword will have every checkbox marked off and you still might not want to do the standard thing. So a good example is a keyword which does not have good performance but is super relevant. A lot of times we will let those run longer than the specific conversion rate would dictate. So if I normally would make a keyword negative after 1.5x the conversion rate or 2x the conversion rate, I would let this hyper relevant keyword run longer. Now, it'll get a different evaluation. Instead of just simply being turned off, if you get X amount of clicks without a sale, I'll let it run longer, and then I'll also try to figure out why it's not working, instead of just mechanically saying, this is bad keyword X. No, I'm going to say, hey, this is supposed to work, and I've actually given it a long leash. Why isn't it working? This needs more than 11 seconds of action. This needs a few minutes to consider why it's not working. Something wrong with my listing? Is the keyword missing from the title? Does something not explain to people that my product should be purchased by them right here? Why is it not working? As opposed to, oh, my t-shirt is white. This is a keyword for black. You know, that's it. It doesn't work. X, Y. And you don't even need to, that will even happen with automation. But the other stuff needs consideration and even that technical person needs to have enough flexibility in their head to know when that extra evaluation is needed. Speaker 1: I think I've got a hierarchy here. The worst is having no plan at all. Meaning like someone isn't paying attention like, oh, what's the last time I asked someone recently, which was like, you know, how often do you look at search term reports? And like they couldn't really tell me when. Speaker 2: Which means never. Speaker 1: Right. So I would say that having these sort of robotic actions of like, okay, I download my search and report once a week and I negate anything over 20 clicks and no sales, like that is better than not doing it. But then I think slightly better is taking those SOPs and customizing them for business goals. So like, where's the line in the sand for negating something? But even with that sort of like customized robotic action, there's something even better than that, which is learning the intricacies of the business, the goals, the market, the customers, the competition, so that when you're looking at that search to report and you see something with over 20 clicks under sales, you're actually able to know We're going to talk about the goal of that particular campaign or the goal of that particular keyword or the search term with that particular product. And you're able to judge, do I want to let this go a little further? Do I not want to let it go a little further? Like sort of do that investigation. Like what did the search term do last month versus this month? I think that's where the magic happens. So really you need all of it. You need like an ingredient of, I'm going to be scheduled and robotic, meaning I'm going to log in and do this every time. I'm going to customize that process for the business goals. And then the tip of that pyramid is going to be, I'm really going to take time to understand what makes this account tick, what makes these products tick. Because I say this all the time, you can have two people doing exactly the same systems in two Similar companies, same niche, and they will have different outcomes because the lifecycle of the product, the brand recognition of the brand, all of these things matter a lot to your point. It makes it seem like it is unpredictable. And on top of that, there is a degree that is absolutely unpredictable, which is the Amazon inner workings. So when you combine all these things, you really do need to get to that point. But I have a question for you. How does that person who I just described, like they're considering the market, they're considering the competition, they're considering the customers and the lifecycle of the product, how do they So, how do people practically get that information, like meaningful market and meaningful bits about their customers and competition? How do they get that from somebody else? Is it a weekly meeting? Is it a brand sheet? How does that information get transferred, do you think? How can a client give it to their agency? Speaker 2: When you figure it out, let me know. This is ever-evolving. There is no set answer to that. So as an example, some brands have very little infrastructure of their own. They're relying on the people they work with to do everything for them. Some companies have a large technical infrastructure of their own. Some people are able to interpret the data that you give them. Some people are not. They're just like, I don't know all this PPC stuff. Just do what you think is best. So any answer I give you, what about the other guy that you're working with? Some people need weekly calls to discuss how their account is doing. Some people literally quarterly calls. We have messaging for stuff, but an actual meeting is not really needed because everything is Everything can be handled through a less personal communication than everything runs effectively. Everybody is different. So there really is no set answer. Now, you still have to start somewhere, of course. So the place to start is with what we would consider standard communications, and then we customize. So for us, our standard communications is we will set up Today, we're going to talk about a Slack channel. We will give clients access to a portal, which shows them the data about their account. Of course, you get it from Seller Central, but presenting it to them in a way better than Seller Central is going to be more effective. We will have email, of course. We're going to be doing weekly meetings, but the standard probably is going to be either bi-weekly or monthly, depending on what the account needs. And that's the starting point. If you had to ask me, what do we do for brands? This is what we do for brands. And then we customize. Hey, do you not need bi-weekly or monthly calls? Adjust. Do you need daily data reports on launches? Adjust. Do you not like using Slack? You absolutely can only use WhatsApp because you have a weird flip phone? Adjust. You know, like every single person, depending now, in some cases, it's not worth it for us to adjust. We'll push back and say, no, you adjust. Install this app on your phone. In some cases we adjust. So as an example, I have one brand that I work with, which is very large and they run on Microsoft Teams and we use Slack and they're not seeing our messages and it's leading to issues. And we had to figure out the way to balance this because a couple of the people had Slack, but they're also missing messages because they're flipping back and forth between messaging apps all day. It turns out that if you are really interested in figuring this out, you will discover that there is an app called Conclude. And for $6 a user a month, it acts as a bridge between Slack and Teams and the messages move between the two. All right. We made adjustments, but I'm not offering to pay for a conclude subscription for every single person that just says, I use Teams. No, our default is the messaging app that we use all the time. So we can do everything for everyone and we have to figure out what is the best balance of can do and should do. That's a long answer, but it really does matter who we are and who the brand is and what each person needs from the working relationship. Like you said, you can have two brands competing with each other. You can do all of the same things. The brands will work. Everything is the same. They will run differently. The same thing with humans. Speaker 1: I think it's so important to sort of understand that. And I think if I were to give some advice for any technician, so whether you're an in-house technician, you're actually pressing the keyboard inside Amazon to try to get more sales. I think that being curious really needs to be a trait. And you obviously wouldn't do this for every keyword. It's sort of like point of diminishing returns. It wouldn't make sense to have so many people working on an account that every single product could be analyzed in this way. But I would say there's a degree of being curious, always trying to ask why are results the way that they are, being unsatisfied with surface level Data and always trying to dig into it, I think is really a valuable skill for any marketer on Amazon where it's like, oh, okay, results got worse. What is my decision tree that I'm going to be evaluating? I'm going to look at search query data. I'm going to look at product opportunity explorer. I'm going to look at the search result. I'm going to look at competition. I'm going to try to figure out why performance is the way that it is. Relay that to the goals person who's setting goals so that they could We're here to help you understand what's going on on the ground a lot more. I actually think the flow of information needs to flow from the technician. Like it needs to come from the technician. And I would say if the technician isn't telling the brand about intricacies themselves, that they are not like a 10 out of 10 marketer, where it's like, hey, results got worse. Like the A costs went up, total A costs went up, like profitability went down. The technician is really the person who should have that answer as to why. It's like, oh, a competitor went on sale or this kind of thing. That's really good intel, which then in turn informs the next action, informs the goals. So that's sort of like back and forth. I think it needs to come from the technical person. You need to be able to share intricacies that no one else could know because they're not in the data. And I think that that's my parting words, I think. I actually didn't know that was the answer to the question until we started talking about it. But I think that the times where I've seen that, the times where I've been able to do that with clients, where I'm teaching them something about their own niche or their own product and how it works in the market, have been really valuable to clients as opposed to just like, oh yeah, I log in once a week and I do search term reporting. And I never think deeper than that. Like that's how you become a 10 out of 10 marketer. Oh, I like that. Speaker 2: Yeah. I like that too. That's a, you put your, you know, you hit the hammer on the head, the nail on the head. Yeah. Speaker 1: Hammer on the head. Speaker 2: Yes. You did the thing. Speaker 1: Yes. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I, I would. So like, to me, like when I think of like systematizing everything, I almost think that's like, That could be an SOP. And it's a little harder of an SOP to do than just log in, bid down on ACOS over 80. But you could still systematize this, I think, which is, is there any product in the top 10% of products that had a sales decrease of more than X? Go and investigate. Find reasons why that happened. GiveRecommendations or something. That's a loose SOP, but I feel like something that could be something that could go on a calendar. You just check this at reporting time for those things that are underperforming or overperforming and you're able to explain why. Ooh, that's a good marketer right there. That's a good marketer. Okay. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. The balance between technical and open-mindedness. Yeah. If you can figure out an SOP to balance the two, you're in good shape. Speaker 1: We've talked a lot about this topic and I hope that we've been able to sprinkle some connective tissue on both the technical marketing and the strategic part that's necessary for marketing, the yin and yang of marketing. Any final words? Could be about New Jersey. Speaker 2: Oh boy. Oh, you put me on the spot. I should have thought about my final words in advance. The truth is the best thing that I can suggest is be flexible. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Anything that you think is an automatic rule, throw that out and realize that you might have to be flexible with anything that you do every single day the same way. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, well said. Speaker 1: Abe, where can people find you on the intranet? Speaker 2: Three places now. It used to be two, but now there's three. Number one place simply is LinkedIn. If you search my name, you'll find me. If you'd like to work with my marketing agency, it's at xpstrategy.com. And the third thing is a little bit new. It's a training platform for businesses that want to level up. It's really not entry level. It's definitely advanced. It's called Right Click Advisors. And it's an interesting project, which we've been getting some good feedback about. Speaker 1: Cool. Well, Abe, thank you so much for coming back on The PPC Den podcast. Hope to see you again sometime soon. And everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den podcast. Speaker 2: Thanks, Mike. Unknown Speaker: I've launched campaigns and picked keywords. I've got my bids, some placements too. And bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of wrong keywords. And we'll be suited, my friends. And we'll give an amazing... You are the PPC. No time for medicals, cause we fixed the game.