How to Scale Your Amazon Business Globally: The EU Expansion Guide

How to Scale Your Amazon Business Globally: The EU Expansion Guide Speaker 2: What's going on, Badger Nation? Welcome to The PPC Den podcast, the world's first and longest running show all about how to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. Today, we have a great one in store because we are going to be learning from an Amazon agency leader of a company of 80 people who manages Amazon PPC campaigns all over the world. We're going to be talking to Emanuel Popescu from AMZ Global Advisors. Welcome to the show, Emanuel. How are you doing? Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks, Michael. And it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me on. Speaker 2: An absolute pleasure. I'm really excited to have our conversation today because I think it's going to be a really good topic. So many people I find it's really good to optimize what you got. And I feel like a lot of people focus primarily on USA-based optimization. And then they take those skills that they've learned from USA-based Amazon PPC optimization and they take them to Europe. Potentially not being aware of some common pitfalls that people can fall into. And today, I'm really excited to have you on the show because can you explain for our listeners like what your role is at AMZ Advisors? Because I'm really fascinated by, we've been working together for a while. So I'm really fascinated with the setup that AMZ Advisors have. And I think it's really smart to have like a regional expert to sort of manage the like EU side of Amazon PPC. So yeah, walk us through Let's talk about the structure because I think it gives some good context about what we're going to talk about today. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So I'm leading the expansion department of the company. I'm the director of account management. So my focus is just making sure that people have a seamless experience while expanding to different markets while they'll also understand the opportunity and the principles of an expansion. AMZ Advisors have been on the market since I think 2014. So for a really, really long time, about five years ago, we have opened up the global division just because we saw and people that are listening here will see a lot of emails from Amazon saying, hey, you got a great opportunity in Europe and the UK, you should expand there and just account managers pushing for that because Amazon really wants to go global as much as possible and increase the selection all over So this is what we do. We help brands expand from the United States, because we already do an amazing job in the United States. So we get those brands that are already successful in there, and we just help them go to any place in the world, honestly, because obviously I've mentioned UK, Europe, but we're also speaking about Japan, Australia, UAE, India, and so on. Speaker 2: So this is very interesting. So this is really cool. So let's just jump right into it. So let's actually start the show and talk about If you've expanded your Amazon PPC into Europe, let's talk about top five mistakes that people make and how to fix them. Speaker 1: Number one, because to have a successful PPC journey, you need to make sure that everything else is in order before just burning money. So I'd say number one is copy pasting your US listings into the other markets. This is probably the fastest way to lose money. Just getting your listing the same exact one on one and giving it to UK, Europe and Any other markets to be frank because of. Well, first of all, translation is definitely not localization. I hear a lot of people saying that, oh, I'm just going to translate my listing. I'll take my titles, my bullets, my gallery images, translate them and move them to Europe. Doesn't really work that way for a variety of reasons. But the first one is people do have different search habits, first of all. So they search everything differently and more often than not in these markets compared to the US. Best example I can give you is Jump Rope. So it's called a jump rope in the United States. It's called a skipping rope in the UK. So you might go in there and see a lot of searches still for jump rope, but the main market that you have is skipping rope. So that's really, really important to make sure that you get that right. And that your listing is SEO optimized with what's in that market, with how people are searching in those specific markets. A lot of the time, the keywords that have really, really high search volumes in the United States will be slightly lower in these markets because They just search things differently. That's one thing. And then the other thing is just making sure that your visuals look appealing and look natural to the people from those markets. I think about it as you have lifestyle images a lot of the time in your listings. Make sure we're looking at the place in the UK or in Germany. So it feels from the person who's looking at that, it feels, oh, this is a product from here. I couldn't even tell it's from the United States. It's a foreign brand. So that makes a significant difference because you're starting to build up within the culture of the market and it makes everything be a lot easier when converting and for your conversion and click-through rate. Speaker 2: I feel like we can end the episode right there because that is such good insight. So I feel like everyone sort of knows that translation is not localization. But you brought up a great point about the jump rope and how if you were just to punch that into anything and translate it, it wouldn't be relevant to the people searching on it. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: So right then and there, that's great. Localized keyword research, also super interesting. A thing I've never It makes so much obvious sense. I've been doing Amazon PPC a long time. I have never once heard anyone mention localized images. If you are selling a jump rope and you're selling it in the US, you might have a typical American household in the background for a lifestyle image. And then when you take it somewhere else, it's adapted to what It looks like in the UK or Germany or whatever. What a subtle, cool optimization. Speaker 1: And the more different the market, the more impact you need to go with this type of stuff. And the best example is Japan, because Japan has such a different culture than the Europeans and the people from North America. It makes a lot of sense to do everything differently. I always say, put a lot more colors. That's already an improvement for Japan because they really like to see visually a lot of punch in the colors that they use to do their designs. And that makes a significant difference already to make you stand out from the other brands that are not doing it properly. Speaker 2: Oh my God, I love it. So point number one is really the mistake is just copy and pasting the listing, including Words as well as images and just sort of localizing them from the get-go. I love that we have, just in that very first point, we've got a strategic component about understanding who you're selling to. We've got an SEO component about optimizing keywords and then like optimized images are like SEO and conversion rate and click-through rate for images, which is really cool. So that's awesome. Let's jump to point number two. Speaker 1: So point number two is I'd say expanding too early. That's one of the points that I want to bring out as well and treating expansion like doesn't really matter what I'm doing right now in the United States. The way we're looking at this is your business on Amazon in the United States right now, especially if you're a well-established seller already, it's about optimizing a lot, right? If you're going into a foreign marketplace, It's just about expanding and having this as a growth lever. So I always say that what you're doing currently in the United States is more of a marketing perspective. What you'll do in expansion is about business perspective, right? You're expanding your area of growth and the potential that your business have because a lot of the people will see that you keep pushing on PPC and everything becomes more and more expensive. Right. Everyone has seen the cost per click going up, the returns not being as good as they were five, ten years ago. And this is the area that people need to be thinking of is expanding into another market and opening up a lot more doors for themselves. Speaker 2: Tell me if I think about this correctly. Sometimes I think of people in the U.S. and they want to expand to Canada. I sometimes say, Oh, it's like another state that you're getting. So instead of like, you know, having 50 states in the US by tacking on Canada, it's sort of like you gain So, you gain that, but what I think is also really interesting is, explain this point a little bit more. So, if you're just selling in the U.S., people are going deeper and deeper and deeper into optimization. So, it's like you're zoomed in on optimizing the U.S., which is the way that I interact with most accounts myself. Someone will contact me and like, hey, our A cost is not good, or my conversion rate is slipping year over year, CPCs are going up. We're zoomed in on the US trying to make it better. But what I think is really cool is these are all PPC decisions that I'm making. And you were like, oh, if you step back, you can almost look at this as we're improving the structure of the business by having more regions that we're able to market and get sales in. That are almost like somewhat independent of each other. So like if the U.S. experiences a lot of inflation, maybe another country doesn't. So like you can have a more diversified setup. Was that the point there? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the point. And also, you mentioned Canada, right? So just to give you some numbers, there's 12% of the United States brands that are selling actively in Canada. Currently, there's 3% that are selling outside of North America. So really, really low number. But it's even really low for Canada. And the entry point to go sell in Canada is not as high as going to sell on the different continents, right? It's a lot more straightforward. And what I see is, and that's why I mentioned the when brands are going at the expansion too early, because they're not ready from a variety of reasons. Either their supply chain is not fully great for an expansion, they're not prepared, they're going to run out of stock, which As you know, in the United States as well, it sends you 10 steps back from your progress if you run out. They don't have listings that they don't extend with the proper listings, the ones that have good reviews, good ratings that gives them already, because they can get that from the United States and put it in the UK, right? And you start your UK journey from 10,000 reviews already that you're already on top of. Most of the sellers that are selling in there. And then the last point here is not having good enough profit margins to build in your other costs for an expansion. Speaker 2: Reviews, dial in your margins, work on your supply chain, as opposed to, I imagine if someone goes too fast in this arena, they can almost like fall over themselves, like on some of these issues that should have been corrected a couple moves ago. Exactly. Exactly. Well said. Let's jump to point number three. Speaker 1: Point number three. So point number three is one that's a bit more general and we'll go into a bit more in the PPC in a second, but treating dispensers like a side project. That's one of the things that will definitely kill your performance abroad. If you're just using it as, oh, I'm going to get my listings, put them up in there, send a couple of stock and we'll see what's going to happen. What's going to happen is you're going to lose money. There's just no neglect. Speaker 2: I see a lot of neglected for international ad accounts where everyone spends 99% of their time thinking of their USA PPC account and almost no time at all. Speaker 1: And PPC is also a method because you're not going to have one advertising account, right? If you're going to expand in Europe and the UK, that's already 10 advertising accounts that you need to watch over, right? With all of the countries. Let's say six, if you're just taking the main marketplaces that you want to be selling in there. And that's a bit of work that you need to pay attention to and make sure everything is, not to mention the language, where you have different keywords, you have different phrasings, you have different cost per click from market to market. And you need to always be on top of that and make sure you're prepared to do that. Because if you're not, then what's the point, right? Just one thing that I want to convey clearly is if this is not taken care of properly, will probably not work. Because the international markets have a really great opportunity. Just for reference here, Germany is the second biggest selling marketplace in the world after the United States. UK is the third. So really good markets to expand to, but you need to make sure that the same attention that you give to your United States business in terms of like the PPC and the daily optimizations that you do or weekly or whatever it is, you're doing those per country to where you're expanding. Speaker 2: Incredibly well said. Giving it the time and attention it deserves. I think sometimes people think about it the wrong way, which is related to your first point where they just copy paste, they put their stuff over there. Maybe they translate their keywords. Okay, cool. But then they're still spending 99% of their time looking at their USA account. And if you think about it, it's like there's other brands you're competing with, where their German account is not a side project for them. It's their main account. Like, how are you going to I think everyone understands you can't compete with someone whose primary project is their German account and you're competing with them now. So they understand all the things that relate to... So you're almost at a disadvantage unless you have your localization dialed in and your PPC work dialed in too. Because I think you're competing with other people who it's not a side project for them. They are focused on it. They are checking it on the daily or weekly optimization cycle. So you need to know. I think people understand this in the US, right? Like no one would be like, okay, I'm just going to launch my PPC account in the US and never touch it. People touch their PPC accounts a lot who are on Amazon, but then they might launch in other countries and be like, oh, that's, you know, I can look at that one tenth of what I do in the US or something like that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Speaker 1: And even though the markets are smaller, they still need attention. It is a matter of always just switching in between them, see what you learn in one and try to convert it into the other. Because I'm not saying that if you expand, then the lessons that you've learned in the U.S. are quite valuable in the foreign marketplaces as well. And also to your point about competitors that are focusing fully in there, most of your competitors that you have in the United States will change when you go to those markets. And you need to understand that as well, that you're competing with different sellers. As I mentioned, 3% of US sellers are abroad. So chances are most of them will not be there. Most of them are competitors. So you need to focus on different ones and start to battle those. Speaker 2: Very well said. That's almost like a sub mistake that people make, which is like not recognizing the local competition. Because I think it's a really good point that if I'm an American seller, I expand into Europe. Only 3% of USA brands I'm actually competing with over there. So I'm competing with 90% plus localized brands who know the market a little bit better than I do. So understanding that component, it's like, Pretty interesting. So like 90% of the people you're competing with are not treating it like a side project. Speaker 1: Yeah. And also the last point I'd say here is that those competitors sometimes might not even do that well in those markets. They might have competitors that are killing it in the United States, but they expand and going back to the other point, they treat it like a side project. And then that's not necessarily your main competitor in there because they're not doing a great job. Speaker 2: Well said. Let's jump to point number four. Speaker 1: Point number four is about PPC. And the biggest mistakes I've seen in PPC is treating your PPC campaigns for the launch exactly the same as you treat it for the United States. And one of the main things why that couldn't work is because, first of all, you have no data. And second of all, the sample size of data will be a lot smaller. There's a lot less keywords and there's a lot less keywords with that high amount of search volumes that you can focus on on those markets. So my advice in when launching in a foreign marketplace is focus a lot on discovery from the beginning. Just don't even try to go anywhere else. Just start with Auto campaigns, broad campaigns, you start to mine as much data as possible, at least in the first 30 days to get as many insights as you can about what's the search behavior there. How are my CPC looking like in these markets compared to what I'm used to? What's my click-through rate? Am I converting well enough on all of these keywords? And start making adjustments based on that. This is what I'd advise people to do for launching rather than because you're so used on Because you already have arguably a pretty well-established advertising account, possibly in the United States, if you choose to go abroad. And you're used to just, oh, optimizing, finding more keywords, getting all of that into the United States. Whereas if you go here, you need to start essentially from scratch. Now, obviously, you have some lessons that you've learned from the United States that you can convey into this market. But it's all about research and discovery in the first phase and go hard at it. Got it. Speaker 2: When you do launch in the EU, so like what is, give me a mix, like an approximate mix of like campaigns that you're launching for tapping into that discovery. Like what kind of campaign types? Speaker 1: Well, I'd say the auto is definitely one. We normally launch with auto, we launch with broad, we launch with category targeting as well, just to get as much data as possible. And depending if we've already, generally speaking, before launch, we do a really, really in-depth market analysis on the market. So we try to get as much info beforehand as possible. And if we see there's Clear winners that we know for a fact that they're going to work for us. We might start some ranking campaigns with those, but not always. It does depend on if we know for a fact that those will work. And sometimes we can make that decision because we're also managing a lot of different accounts and we started to understand really, really well what works and what doesn't in those markets. But this is where I start off with and a really important part is just not throwing them in there. Optimize consistently, change your bidding, negating really, really aggressive because you'll get a bunch of crap into those campaigns if you're not in these markets because there's so many searches that you might not even know. You'll be looking at it and you might not even know what they're looking for there because of the different language and all of that. Speaker 2: So I like that the search volume will be smaller and you might not have as much keyword research data like we do in the U.S. where you have such bigger search volumes. So like launching with a good mix of discovery-based campaigns, auto, broad, category. Based targeting. If you do have some data, you can start with some ranking campaigns as well. And then you mentioned the negatives. I see that a lot with people who have expanded internationally. Sometimes because the CPCs are so low, they're not nearly as aggressive with their negation strategy as they are in the US, where CPCs can be several dollars. Whereas in a lot of regions, they're like, oh, the CPCs are so small, it's not even On their radar sometimes, but I think of like this is just like good PPC practice to to scan through that. And it might be hard for them to scan through because of this, you know, potentially the terms are in a foreign language, too. Speaker 1: And there is also the the amount that you spend, because, as you mentioned, first of all, the budget in just in general will be smaller. And I do advise everyone to start small and build up from that rather than go too aggressive in the beginning. There is a lot of money on just discovery. But because CPCs are, generally speaking, lower, your wasted ad spend in terms of value, let's say, will be significantly lower from the U.S. So you might look at that and say, oh, I'm going to leave this running because it's not like wasted ad spend for me because I'm thinking about a comparison of one-to-one to U.S. with this market. But then you realize as a percentage of wasted ad spend, that's quite high compared to what you're currently spending at the account level. And you need to be very, very careful with that and make sure that you're not only looking at the cost per click, but conversion and click-through rate matter significantly. You have, and as I mentioned in the beginning, you have the advantage of expanding with something that already has a bunch of reviews. So you're not starting from scratch. So your chances of ranking really fast It's really, really good. I mean, most of the brands that we expand into these markets, we rank on the best-selling page in the first 30 to 60 days with the products that we do more often than not. And we close in probably the first 45 days at around 15% of the revenue they generated in the United States. So things can happen really, really fast in these markets if everything is done right. Speaker 2: Beautiful. And with that, let's jump to point number five. Speaker 1: All right, so point number five is expecting immediate profitability and expecting the same profitability that you have right now in the U.S. to just transfer magically into the foreign marketplaces that we are selling, which will not happen. And first of all, you need to make sure that you have a really good on-point pricing strategy for these markets because there's added cost, there's different taxes, there's different tax system that will get on top of your profits there. And you need to make sure that you take that into consideration when calculating your profit margins because now you have added cost. So maybe a tacos that's 15% might not do the same as in the United States. You might look for a tacos of 12% to be profitable in there, depending on how you change your pricing. And something, just one quick point here. I advise everyone not to do currency conversion from Amazon. When you expand your listing, you can go there and just tell Amazon, just convert the currency from the USD into all of the other currencies. First of all, that looks bad on the detail page because your pricing will be 23.24, which just looks odd. The second of all, you need different pricing strategies. An example that I always give is UK, generally speaking, has less FBA fees. So the FBA fee that you pay Amazon is slightly lower than it is in the United States, which gives you a good advantage there. But then you have some added costs like the VAT, which is 20%. You need to take that into account. For people that are not familiar with that, the VAT is essentially the sales tax in the United States. The only difference is sales tax is applied at checkout. The VAT is built in within the price of the product. So profitability is one that needs to make sure that you're putting your expectations where they should be. First time, let's make sure that we are testing the market properly. Let's make sure then that we're learning a lot from it. And you're probably not earning a lot in the first 30 to 60 days while you're learning, you're building up your stuff. And then make sure that you're building out your pricing well enough for the long term to be able to be profitable. Speaker 2: Very well said. You know, this brings up PPC fundamentals about understanding your breakeven A costs, right? And typically, as a PPC manager, we look at that breakeven A cost and we sort of understand where that is. And typically, like the cost is And I'm going to be talking about an aggregate of a bunch of different costs for the simplicity of like a break-even A-cost. Meaning what is the A-cost where I sell a product that I make no profit and I incur no loss. That needs to be translated into the European marketplace too of like, what is my new break-even A-cost with some of these different fees where maybe FBA fees are lower in the UK, but now there's a VAT. We're going to talk a little bit about how to break even ACoS now. What is my target ACoS? Am I tracking profitability correctly? Am I thinking of how to incorporate a total ACoS into my strategy as well, which informs every single action that you would do inside your PPC account? Speaker 1: People need to understand that when you launch in these markets, when you launch your PPCs there, you're not doing it to build for, they're not built for efficiency from the start, right? They're built to identify where the conversion exists, where the CPC is inefficient, just a learning curve up until you can start optimizing for that efficiency that will help your profitability grow more and more. But as you mentioned, really, really important to get your target A-cost properly, because it will be different from what you're looking at in the United States. Some of your costs will be higher. Some of them will be lower. Like as we mentioned, cost per click is probably lower in those markets. You have a better conversion rate, then that's a win for you. But you have other things that you need to worry about. Speaker 2: This is brilliant. Let's recap these five points. Unknown Speaker: Alrighty. Speaker 2: So you can open up your computer today and do these five things to improve your internationally expanded Amazon PPC performance. Number one, we had, I think this is a really cool takeaway. Number one, do a little localized research about how people refer to your product, what they call it. So that not only is it translated, but it's also localized. You had a great example with the jump rope. And I also love the takeaway too, of localizing the images for the people in that particular marketplace. You know, probably doesn't make sense for you to have the exact same jump rope picture that you use in the US as you would in Japan. So obvious. So that's point number one to do. Point number two about expanding too early. Was there any action item that someone can take? Maybe they did expand too early. What was the action item there would you say? Speaker 1: The action item there is to make sure you're assessing properly what you currently have in the United States. So make sure you assess your ratings, make sure you assess properly what are the SKUs to expand, and my best advice here is start with lower amount of products. Always better for an expansion just to test out the waters. And supply chain, really, really important. Make sure you can get inventory sent in there at all times to not run out of stock. Speaker 2: And do it profitably. Point number three, of course, just by the very nature of listening to this episode, you will stop treating your Amazon PPC in different marketplaces like an afterthought. You'll actually be doing it. Point number four, launching strategy, ranking strategy, how to divvy up your ad spend when you first launch. If you are launching a product in one of these international marketplaces, put a little bit more focus on discovery, auto broad category-based targeting so you can really learn what makes that marketplace tick. And number five, go and study basically your P&L, your Amazon PPC P&L in these different marketplaces. Maybe recalculate your breakeven A costs and try to understand what goes in to these costs. Emanuel, Fantastic episode. I also think it's interesting to ask people, because a lot of Amazon PPC people will listen to this episode, and I always think it's cool to get a little inside look into who's coming on the show. So when you're not optimizing Amazon PPC accounts, what is it that you like to do? What's a personal highlight? Speaker 1: That's an interesting question. I'm really into my work. I do it with pleasure. I love doing what I do. I got started with Amazon because I worked at Amazon in Europe. I was a vendor consultant and catalog manager there since I started my journey into the whole Amazon. But what I like is art. I was a graphic designer before moving into the Amazon space. Then I own a branding agency, so I really like creating stuff. I play a lot with that. That's one of the things that gives me a bit of joy whenever I'm not at work. I love just designing stuff, creating new stuff. Sometimes I might paint something just for cleaning up my head. It really gives me some peace of mind. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Emanuel from AMZ Advisors. Absolute pleasure. Hopefully we can have you back in a couple of months. Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Michael. And please for anyone that's listening that have any type of questions related to expansion, they can email me. It's Emanuel at amzadvisors.com. Just shoot me up a quick email. I'll quickly respond. We can even hop on a quick call to answer anything that you'd like. We love to help people that want to expand and Just respond to anything that they may have. Speaker 2: Fantastic. Thanks so much for that offer. Really appreciate it. Well, Badger Nation, you heard it. Contact Emanuel. Have a good one. And everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: I've launched campaigns 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 pride. Hello. I'm reaping soon and my friends Two are the PPCs and we're talking about Amazon. No time for medicars, cause we fixed the game, baby.