How To Use Psychology To Master Amazon PPC (Classic)

How To Use Psychology To Master Amazon PPC (Classic) Speaker 1: 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 2: Let's take two Amazon advertisers, Scared Sammy and Aggressive Andy. They both see search terms with 10 clicks and no orders. Scared Sammy immediately decreases the bid. Aggressive Andy increases the bid. Who made the right move? By the end of this episode, we'll help you understand what decision to make and when and how to elevate your Amazon PPC management. I recently read the book, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, a personal finance book. But if you're like me, when I read this, I was taken back by how similar this book about money was to the ideas behind Amazon ads. This book is so fitting because most Amazon PPCers think that Amazon ads is all about numbers and rules. However, the reality of the situation is that most decisions in Amazon PPC rely heavily on the individual psychology rather than PPC skills. Here are my two biggest takeaways from reading the book as well as a strategy that I use to better manage my keywords and search terms and Using psychology. The first takeaway I took out of the book was the importance of luck. It talks about famous investors and stories you hear from friends and most of the time it involves about luck and just happening to get timing right as opposed to skill. This happens all the time in Amazon accounts that I look at. One thing that becomes abundantly clear in my checks is that there is a huge amount of luck when it comes to any Amazon PPC account. And I came to this conclusion after seeing so many accounts that are untouched for months, riding at a steady 15% ACOS, and they didn't have fancy things like negative keywords and bid optimization or placement settings, good campaign structure, nothing. Just an insane product market fit, and it happened to be luck their niche wasn't so competitive. The second thing is the concept of time horizons and risk tolerance. This section of the book was really interesting. For example, if someone was a day trader, they'd buy and sell a stock. They only care about the price for the next hour, not the price for the next 30 years. Whereas a long-term investor cares about what the price is going to be in 30 years, not the next hour. This applies to Amazon ads in such an obvious way. If you're a first-time Amazon-based entrepreneur and you're launching a new campaign on a tight budget as a side gig, you're going to have massively different temperament when it comes to profitability and launching products compared to a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur who's going to run an 80, 90, 100% A-cost in the first few months to rank a product really well. This segues into the third concept of the book, the bias of recency. It basically says just because a stock went up a lot recently doesn't mean in the long term it will. And conversely, just because it was bad in the short term doesn't mean it'll be bad in the long term. This immediately rang some bells for me when it comes to Amazon ads. Think about the way that 99% of Amazon marketers look at their search term reports. They download a search term report from Amazon and they're usually looking at like 60 or 90 days at a time. And if you're making decisions based off one single search term report, you're going to be making decisions on incomplete date ranges. It is why for years I have recommended everyone in the Amazon space combine their search term reports in some way that you can combine your sponsor product and sponsor brand search terms. As well as look at date comparisons for really long periods of time because I'd be willing to bet that any advertiser who compares just 30 days of search term data versus one that is looking at over a year of search term data, the person who's looking at long time frames is probably gonna have a much better grip over their ACOS and their campaign performance. Personally, I I do not make decisions on negating, bidding, anything really, on a single 30-day time frame, and I don't think you should either. With search terms, you miss a ton if you only look at a 30-day time block. The first thing you miss is what I refer to as tiny but painful search terms. This refers to search terms that get two or five clicks a month, maybe $5 to spend a month, but just never convert. So after a year, you spent $60 on them. For large accounts, you're multiplying this tiny but painful search term by 10, 20, 100 search terms amounting to potentially thousands a year. The second thing you gain when looking at longer timeframes is finding quiet winners. Every single Amazon advertiser is looking for more winning keywords. But what do you do when a keyword converts just once a month? Maybe you only get four or five clicks a month. It's a low-volume, high-converting, long-tail term. You want to find and identify those. And if you're only looking at one search and report, you're going to be missing these. You're going to miss those quiet winners. If you want to know how I manage this, let's jump over to this screen over here. So the first thing that I'm looking at, I will go to all my search term reports. And what this does is this combines my sponsor products and my sponsor brands. There's lots of ways to do this. This is the way that I do it. The next thing that you would do is essentially start at the 30-day timeframe. I like starting here to just get a good monthly pulse of these search terms. And you can see that if I were to go into Amazon, sometimes it can take minutes to download these big search terms reports. In this particular case, I've got 15,000 of them. Now, in order to find some of these The terms that I'm looking for in terms of the quiet winners and the tiny but painful, I'm going to need to, after I do my sort of 30 day time scan, I'm going to need to go to a longer date range. So I'm going to select year to date. In this case, I'm recording this in September. So I've got 257 days of data to look at. So what I'm doing right now is I'm basically combining those search term reports. Imagine if I were to download a spreadsheet and add it to another, add it to another, add it to another. I'd be looking at a huge swath of search term data. What I can then do is basically run my filter. Is there anything in here that's above my threshold of maybe 20 clicks without an order to consider to negate, pause, restructure in some way? So I would go ahead and do that. So once I do that, I can see these terms that have cost me money without orders. You know, every single one of these terms is going to have 20 clicks without any orders over the course of the last 257 days. I can then go in here and I can sort of scan one by one and I can go ahead and block these search terms. I can add these as a negative exact to the specific ad group that they were in, which is really nice little thing here. So go ahead and do that. So a couple of those get a little summary. Okay, that's great. Now the next thing I would want to do is find those tiny winners. So those tiny winners are going to be terms that when I look at it over a short time frame, I would miss, but over a long time frame, I want to find things, you know, between five and 10 orders over the course of a year. So I could go ahead and run that from a similar filter, but this time looking for those tiny winners. So I would go in here. And instead of orders equals zero, I'm going to do clicks above 20 and then orders over one. And also orders less than 10 because I'm looking for those tiny winners, the ones that over the course of, you know, 10 months here, eventually get at least one order a month with a meaningful click volume of about 20 clicks over the course of a year. Again, what this allows me to do is basically find these tiny winners that were hiding potentially in my campaigns so that I can make some decisions. I can pull them together into a modified broad or a broad or a phrase. I can decide what to do with them or I can simply just promote them to keywords or promote them to targets, you know, as an exact match directly from here. So finding quiet winners in tiny but painful search terms is one of my favorite parts about combining search terms from sponsored products and sponsored brands using a long date range. So when it comes to who was right, Scared Sammy or Aggressive Andy, personally, I actually think they're both kind of wrong. Because if something only has 10 clicks without an order, the next thing I would want to do is see what it does on a long-term basis. But again, that's just my psychology of Amazon PPC. Have a good one. And I'll see you next week here on the PPC Den podcast.