How We Scale AMC, SQP, and Strategy

How We Scale AMC, SQP, and Strategy Speaker 2: Bye. Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have one of my favorite guests on. Dustin, I don't even know how to intro you at this point. Your role, obviously, within BTR Media is very noticeable, but you're a leading influencer in the space, which is fun. Do you tell your family you're an influencer? How does that work? How does that translate? Speaker 2: Yes. In my circle of friends, I tell them I'm LinkedIn famous in my sub-niche of a sub-niche. So, yeah. They don't really understand what that means but it's still fun to say it. Speaker 1: It's a big niche though and it's incredible I think. That's been one of my favorite things of your journey. I mean, you've always been good at tech, product, code, all of that, but seeing it translate to the community you built on LinkedIn has been really cool and really exciting. You are a diamond in the rough and you are attracting a community of similar like-minded people, which I think has been really valuable. I think we've been able to learn a lot from the community, but it's opened up a lot of opportunities for us, I would say. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. Definitely get the imposter syndrome that many of us suffer from in the space, being a self-taught developer, as I've gleaned from a lot of people and just try to give it back to the community in any way that I can. And so far, people seem interested in reading posts about API docs and other tech that we're rolling out. So I figure, hey, I'll just keep doing it. Speaker 1: That's actually a great stopping point for everyone listening. Pause this episode, go follow Dustin on LinkedIn. If you're listening, you're probably interested in tech in one way or another. We're going to dive into a lot of our Better Media tech on this episode, but also zoom out and just talk about the industry, the API changes we've seen in the last quarter, just really give a high level overview on Q2. So even if you don't know how to write a single line of code, no idea what SQL means, that's me. I think you can still find a lot of value out of Dustin's post and how we view the industry, but also how we view things like agency scale and operations, because that's another cool area of your development. Started as a seller, started building self-taught development work and Better Media product. And now that's expanded to so much more. You're one of the fastest growing teams within Better Media as a whole. And you're also doing a lot with like AI and agency operations. And that's been really fun and cool part of your journey. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of fun taking it beyond just the buzzword and trying to really implement it. Not so much for bids and budget adjustments, but operationally, there are so many valuable things. And just going back to what you said about LinkedIn, I'm always happy to help anybody running into problems. Send me a DM and I can usually respond pretty quickly. It's been a fun journey. And now with ChatGPT and Anthropic to be able to help us code, anybody can get into this so much easier than it used to be. Speaker 1: I think that's a good starting point for the next part of this conversation. Q2, a lot of chaos. Your team's grown a lot. You obviously have the difficult job of translating my five to ten year vision into baby steps and making them actionable. What are some of your most exciting updates from the last quarter when it comes to Better Media Tech Nexus? Speaker 2: Oh man, there's a lot of them. So I'll just stick with the ones that I think people would be most interested in. So now that we have the SQP API, it does have a little bit of disappointing limitation to it, but is very helpful and was very much looked forward to for years nonetheless. As you know, many of our clients, the topic that we heard a lot about is category insights. That seems to be something all throughout the space that people are talking more about. So being able to integrate that in along with things like brand metrics to just create kind of category insight overviews is something that we've been heavily working on and just rolled that into production like midnight a few hours ago. Yeah. Did you want to dive any deeper on that one? Speaker 1: Let's dive deep on that one. In my opinion, search query performance report being opened up to the API was one of the just biggest industry rollouts as a whole. It's been a major limitation trying to figure out how to scale SQP. I mean, logging into Seller Central and looking at SQP is not really intuitive. I mean, how they structure the columns, how they summarize the data. What we have taken an approach on is basically, what are our brands coming to us asking for more of? And as mentioned, it's category analysis, right? My difficulty with using external tools has always been that it scrapes. That's a whole TOS conversation for one, but two, there's so many discrepancies across whatever softwares you're using. If your brand is using a market share analysis software and you're presenting on a different set of data or inputs, it just It wasn't a great conversation. So we've always tried to take the first party approach when possible. We leaned into a lot of brand metrics data to give us category median versus category top when it came to things like detail page views. The limitation with that is you can only niche down so far and it was on the brand level. So we were really wanting to dive deeper and give our brands the opportunity to understand on an ASIN level or on a search term level. How are you competing compared to the category? So the approach that we've taken for those listening in is starting high level with as a whole, as a brand, here's how you are competing relative to the category when it comes to detail page views and conversion rates. Then we give brands the opportunity to drill down a step further on the search term level. So as a brand, here's how you are dominating this search term. And then I think there's two different segues you can take there. You can drill down to the ASIN level using the SQP insights and you can overlay. Here is how you are doing on a search term to search query performance perspective. Again, using detail pages and conversion rates are driving metrics because as everyone knows, those are two of the most important variables in my opinion when it comes to organic rank. But I think what it allows us to do is it makes that data so much more actionable, right? It's something that we probably prioritize more than anything else when it comes to viewing the industry, when it comes to our AMC rollouts, which we'll also get to, but also just our category analysis and our reporting as a whole. Anything else to add to that? Speaker 2: No, I think that covers it really well. Just if you're pulling the SQP data in, being able to show it across the time series alone is going to be beneficial compared to the tabular format that we currently have in Seller Central. A little bit unfortunate that through the API, we can't pull in the brand view of search terms because so many people find that valuable. But, you know, we'll take what we can get. And I think we're making really good progress with it. And so far, people are happy. Speaker 1: Amazon, if you're listening, that's a really small request that I think would add a lot of value for an agency like ours. But that's actually a really good point on like a time series perspective. So brands, if you're listening in, something that we've found to be beneficial is let's take the term toothpaste. If your sales increased for the search term toothpaste 10% quarter over quarter and you're happy, but then you compare the category and you see the category increased 20%, That's a negative. So that's really some of the insights we're wanting to unlock as well as understanding if we improve our organic rank or organic positioning on certain terms, how much share could we make up? So these are a lot of the projects we're working on. Search query performance was the biggest update in my opinion when it comes to the last quarter. The second one I think has been really beneficial is AMC. Not necessarily new, definitely still a shiny topic, but you have implemented a lot of different AMC assets into our tech nexus. What are your favorites or what has been your biggest difficulties? Two very different questions when it comes to AMC as a whole and our tech. Speaker 2: Yes, everything. Difficulty and the benefits of having it. So starting off on the audience side, we've implemented being able to build out Campaigns in the bulk launcher and search term scraper, adding them to audiences, and then as that flows through the account, coming into reporting. So, now that you can pull through normal V3 reporting in the API, where you can pull those audience segments, just like you would look at in the placement modifier section of the UI, where we can see the difference between The part of the campaign with the audience versus I think the whole performance. So I'm basically netting those out and giving a really great time view on a chart that says, you know, here's a good comparison of that audience as a whole across all campaigns versus here it is on an individual basis. And there's a lot of different ways to drill down on this to see how this is really helping. I think my favorite one is the Customer journey sales funnel approach. Because of our tagging system, we're able to tag all campaigns based on where they're trying to serve impressions in the customer journey. So if we can look at that, a lot of the time when you build out AMC audiences, you're doing it on a customer journey basis, like which ASINs have really good loyalty attributes to them or conversion attributes to them. So we can tag those accordingly. Group all that audience performance as far as where it lands in the customer journey funnel and give our clients a really good, intelligent, actionable section of our report that they're liking so far. Speaker 1: Those are incredible rollouts. Let's talk about why they're so beneficial for brands and also just agencies in general. One of the biggest limitations with AMC audiences, in my opinion, has been scalability. And not necessarily scale in terms of serving impressions, that's its own limitation, but scale in terms of operations. I am auditing brands every single day who still aren't utilizing AMC audiences. And why? Well, it's a lot of work on an agency because there's a million, infinite different amount of ways you can segment audiences in order to target and overlap with a keyword. And that's how bid boosting works on search. You select a keyword, you apply an audience overlap to it, and then you bid boost to serve that audience, right? What Dustin has made scalable for us is the Bulk Launcher. So Bulk Launcher is how we pretty much go zero to a thousand for any of our brands. We are really fantastic at keyword research. And Campaign Structure. We're now able to take that same approach with audiences applied. So we can at scale identify what audiences are going to drive the 80-20 approach for brands and then apply them directly to campaigns. The next step to that is the reporting methodology. I have found a lot of brands are struggling to get their agencies to apply AMC audiences and then report on that because it's not easy per se. But to your point, we're able to tag appropriately. What that means is, let's say we're going after a new audience, right? That's the audience we've decided to target within AMC. That's probably going to have a lower ROAS than normal. So what we do is we actually break that out into our reporting so we can go to our brain and say, hey, when we're targeting net new customers or we're targeting customers that haven't purchased in X amount of time frame, Here's the performance. ROAS may be lower, but value and incremental sales are going to be higher. On the flip side, AMC audiences can be great for just general retargeting. It's what a lot of people use it for on the DSP side. If you're running a general retargeting audience, your ROAS is probably going to be a little bit inflated. The audience isn't going to be net new. You're just serving it with probably higher frequency of touch points. We're able to segment that out into a loyalty bucket. So that way we're not skewing or inflating our overall performance to a brand. We can go to our brand and say, hey, here's our general targeting from a keyword perspective. Here's our audience targeting. Here's how that's broken out stages of the funnel. That allows us to be really, really reactive to a brand's needs. You know, if a brand has aggressive growth goals, we can come to them and say, hey, we're always going to lower. But we can promise you we're driving new customer acquisition through these strategies and here's the reporting breaking it out so you know exactly where your budget is being deployed. Anything to add on that? Speaker 2: Yeah, I like everything that you said about why people aren't doing it, but another huge one is they can't. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Because they don't have an instance. Speaker 1: That's a good point. Speaker 2: That's still something that I massively get questions about and so that kind of dovetails into the second part that what I'm excited about. This was a pretty large build-up for us was the ability to now launch instances for each of our clients to create the reporting and the audiences that gives them the access to be able to do this. I've made several posts on LinkedIn about this, so if that's something that you're interested in, just look up my past ones and I'm happy to help out with that. But that really is the gateway that I think is the most difficult thing to get past because there are so many templated queries, IQLs, for the reporting side and the audience building side that For the most part, you can get a lot of what you need just by using those and knowing NoSQL. But that initial starting point of actually getting the instance spun up, that can be tricky if you've never had to do that. Speaker 1: That's actually a fantastic point. Something I will shout out is AMC can seem incredibly overwhelming because of things like, how do you get your instance? It's the most basic question to getting started, but there's still not a great answer anywhere for that or a great answer to the roadmap either. The second aspect is when people consider clean rooms, I think they still do correlate it with knowing SQL. Amazon's done a fantastic job of releasing multiple templated no-code queries to the point where every single person on our team, I believe, I can boldly make that statement, maybe not our newest interns, every single account manager on our team has implemented AMC audiences to their brands. Why? One, it's the most powerful rollout I think we've seen when it comes to search. Two, it is that easy if you have proper training and proper tech. The training side, I think, is a big part because it can be overwhelming and confusing, but the tech side has been the biggest unlock. Our smallest brands have seen a double in conversion rate and our largest brands, I think, have seen a much more segmented targeting, which makes their budgets, they're typically on fiscal capped budgets, much more fluid and much more aligned with their top line goals. We're no longer just targeting the terms probiotics and protein. We're now targeting those terms with an audience overlap that allows us to inherently drive so much more control with our budgets being deployed. So on the topic of AMC, another aspect of our tech that has seen massive improvements in the last quarter is definitely our AMC dashboard. This has been an area of the business where audiences, 100%, I get it, sold, easy-ish to scale. I mean, easy-ish when you have a Dustin. AMC analytics I think has been a really interesting area because I have found so many brands have so many different needs and it's hard to make it actionable. How did you approach building out our dashboard in a way that gave strong insights for brands but also made it actionable for our account managers? Open to the question. Speaker 2: I went to the template of queries first because why not just look at the lowest hanging fruit that's done for you and said, okay, if I was managing accounts, which ones would I want to start with? And just went to the team and said, okay, are these ones that are just going to have a bunch of clutter that is of no value? Or are these actually going to be actionable and something that the client cares about seeing? And if they're not exactly what you want, what would it take To customize those, you know, I could just go in and not just go in, but it's a little tricky, but just go in and tweet them and say, OK, for instance, the path to purchase has We have a lot of metrics in it that aren't necessarily useful to everybody, but we can go in and tweak those so we can actually see the path to purchase on a conversion rate or CPC or things that are a little bit more meaningful. So I just went through all the templates and did that. And then we had several meetings and said, okay, like, does that cover all the gaps for what we think our clients will need? No. Okay, well, what else are they going to need? And just incrementally took steps towards building what I think is now a pretty robust report. Speaker 1: Absolutely. That's an approach we've taken to running the business. And I think it's trickled down to every area from our tech development, from our marketing is a lot of 80-20. I think that's an area where brands are 100% struggling. A lot of the mid-sized brand calls or RFPs I've been in the last six months, everyone wants perfected clean room setup capabilities. And then I'll be like, are you using AMC audiences? And the answer is a no. And it's 80-20. It's like, how do you balance the shiny objects in the space with the actionable step forward? And I would say that's the value of working with an agency or knowing an agency or partnering or consulting. With an agency, agencies get a broader view of the category and also brand needs. When you are siloed on brand side, sometimes it can be difficult to get out of your brand's request and understand what's the thing that I can implement immediately that's going to drive the most immediate value. And that's the approach I would say we've taken almost across the board. It's like, how do we take this, make it immediately actionable to drive top line? Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I mean if you're building out your own report and there's one thing that looks valuable to you, then your report has one section, so be it. At least it's something that's actionable and you're taking incremental steps to add additionally. I just, I personally can't stand when a report just has tons and tons of information that isn't actionable. I think it actually is detrimental because it can cause that analysis paralysis and it's very easy to With AMC, just because of the enormous amount of data that we have to just go way overboard with it. So just scaling back and looking, okay, what do I need and what can I actually increment on that is the most valuable approach? Speaker 1: Absolutely. I think a few things that we've seen be more actionable for our brands, or at least the conversations we're having with brands, Having access to a five-year look back. I think that's been pretty beneficial. Again, I see people using it as a shiny object and it does cause a lot of analysis paralysis. That's a lot of data to dig through. Ad type overlap. That's always one of the first ones that I recommended. I think ad type overlap is great for justifying use of creatives, but also understanding the customer journey a little bit better. A lot of people don't realize the amount of touch points your ads have with an individual customer. So being able to expose them not to just that sponsor product ad, but also the video ad and the display ad and seeing how all of those work together and how frequency plays a role in customers, majorly beneficial. Time to Conversion. This is one that you recently rolled out that I actually really, really like. Amazon's released the data outside of ads. I want to say they said the average time to conversion is over five days. We don't see that as a whole with our specific brands. I think we see a much shorter time frame, but it's eye-opening to brands, especially those who think that customers click and buy. That's not exactly how it works. We see a lot of cart building. A lot of people add to cart and purchase maybe when they have a larger cart or maybe they add to list or just exposure in general. They're exposed to a video ad and don't purchase for a few months. That data has been really impactful, in my opinion, for how we've led our lead-in strategy, but also our DSP strategy. The basics, if you have a higher price point product, your time to conversion is going to be much longer. That's going to influence, I would say, the amount of touch points and your retargeting strategy more than anything else. Anything to add on that one? Speaker 2: One thing that I'm experimenting with and I think a lot of people would find kind of fun is that traditional 48-hour window where we're supposed to ignore for attribution. Well, if you look at the time to conversion, that actually gives you a little bit more intelligent of an approach on how to do that because if your time to click is between click and purchases a week or two, You might want to extend that 48-hour window, and if a lot of brands that we see, it's less than one minute, so you're definitely safe with that. Fun little caveat that I haven't implemented yet, but I think that there is a use case for it. Speaker 1: Absolutely. That is a really fantastic point. Other small things. We've been working a lot on like customer acquisition costs, incrementality. Those have been fun projects I would say we're working on. One of the biggest ones I see coming up all the time is LTV. I think that one's one of the more difficult ones to scale out because you have to hash your audiences, I think, from your fulfillment orders. That's something that we've seen kind of across the board in this space. Any comments on that? Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't gotten into that and from what I've We've researched quite a bit the subscriptions within AMC definitely unlock the ability to get a lot more intelligent with that. So out of the box, I'm not saying you can't, but I think that with those subscriptions, it's going to definitely make it more meaningful. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I just chatted with Mansoor about this today. Shout out to him. He's also another good follower in this space. I believe he said the paid insights that unlock LTV data is around $200 a month on top of. Not that bad for someone who's really looking for that, but AMC, go ahead. Speaker 2: It depends on the brand. So some of our larger enterprise brands that we've had in the past, I know when I looked at theirs, it was about $14,000 a month. So it does change based on, yeah, it's entirely dependent on volume. $14,000 for that brand was nothing. Just like for most brands, $200 is probably not that much compared to what you'll get. But it does appear to scale based on that. Speaker 1: Amazing. That's a fantastic call out. And it really goes to show I think there's a lot of opportunities with AMC. But again, if you think you are ready for perfect lifetime value analytics, yet you have not incorporated AMC audiences to your search, let's work on your prioritization. And I will boldly make that statement based on all of the calls I've had in the last six months. And if you don't know what you don't know, reach out to brands, ask questions, send us messages in LinkedIn. I think that's one of the most valuable assets of having a strong network and community like we do. That being said, what other fun things have we seen in the last quarter? Is there anything just point blank? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, that AMC AI generator looks really intriguing. I admittedly haven't messed with it yet, and I believe when I talked to Gloria Steiner, she said it was just for audiences, and she's kind of the AMC expert, so I'll take her word for it. I was considering trying to build my own for the reporting side, but we'll see if Amazon rolls it out and how accurate it is. Otherwise, Maybe one of these dev summits I'll try to build that as the project. Or maybe I'll just build it and release it to the community for fun. Speaker 1: I want to give you a huge shout out. The last Dev Summit Dustin was at, Amazon posted a small little competition. I will say small little because it seemed to be a little bit on the fly and Dustin challenged himself. He said, if I can come up with a really good submission for the competition on my flight home that I think will run with, I will build it out and apply. And you did. You came up with an idea on your flight home and you won the challenge. And I shout that out because a big focus of ours at BTR Media is one, not trying to reinvent the wheel or compete directly with Amazon. Every single one of our team members has to be hands on keyboard when it comes to advertising console. Amazon still does roll out a lot of ad console first capabilities from what we've seen. And or it's easier to access an ad console until our team's able to mimic and build out on that side of the business. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So your ability to think outside the box and get creative with reporting in the API is one of our biggest assets in my opinion. We're able to take data that everyone has access to and put it together in a way that not only satisfies our core clients needs, but makes it incredibly actionable for our team. So I'll just give you a huge shout out for one that win. But also how you're able to view the business with your expertise. Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that. I've finally found my mentor. If you don't have a mentor, you need one. I don't care if you work in tech or not. It's such a valuable thing to have. And they were able to just point out the areas that I'm strong in, that I'm weak in, and how to focus more of my time through delegating and team building to really be able to focus on those things like Dev Summit competitions and more LinkedIn content and AMC reporting and whatnot. So it's been a blast. Speaker 1: It has been a blast. I think just seeing our development, our maturity in this space driven by your team scaling has been huge. I mean, that was one of the biggest weaknesses we identified is Dustin was the bottleneck and in a good way because Dustin was a seller in the past. So small capabilities that maybe I struggled to articulate to our previous devs. You were able to jump into because you understood both the advertising side, the seller side, but also the development side. So being able to scale that past your brain and now build out a full team that's able to adjust and accommodate on a lot of our brand needs is huge. A big part of the Better Media vision is, you know, we want to be the Ritz-Carlton of agencies. We're not trying to be the biggest and serve everyone with a diluted solution. We're trying to be the best. And with that, Dustin gets a lot of customization questions. And I think that's where we've really been able to kind of find a good balance of, you know, how do we customize our solution to fit our specific brand needs, but also do it in a way that scales. So really big shout out to you again there as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that definitely summarizes us the best. When I describe our agency without bias, I describe it as giving the white glove treatment and tech is such an important part of an agency and the ability to be nimble and be able to modify things like if a client asks for a specific column to be added to a report that has this metric or some new module in AMC, We're able to do it quickly. We don't have to go through a long huge process. I can typically jump in myself but can delegate it to our small and nimble team and so we are really able to serve our clients Very well in that way compared to I think if we were using big box software that is, it's good, but it's also very rigid and it does have a black box effect to it. So typically when the account managers have specific questions or a brand owner has a specific question, they can come to me directly or the account manager can and we can serve them not only well, but quickly. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Couldn't, that said it better myself. Anything we're missing? There's been quite a few small rollouts all trickle in there just from the ad console front. B2B placements with bidding has been a big one. Have you rolled that out with Nexus as well? Speaker 2: Yeah, we rolled that out along with the combining with the AMC audiences. We also rolled out the B2B modifiers and I think there was also a rollout as far as budget allocation for where the campaigns are serving that we rolled out as well for optimizing towards off-platform or minimizing spend. Speaker 1: We've seen Gen AI rollouts. Those are primarily ad console right now. We sponsored Brandon's video Gen AI update. If you haven't If you haven't seen my content on that, for sure give it a follow. It's probably one of the more exciting updates in terms of the future of Amazon advertising, in my opinion. I'll shout it out as a Q2 rollout just because it was announced at Cannes. Amazon's partnership with both Roku and Disney, opening up a ton of capabilities on the video front. This is a really exciting frontier for Better Media and our tech will also follow, is the allocation of capabilities to better align creative with audiences. And what that can mean for DSP. We are also, you know, very heavy on the DSP front and all of our tech is DSP enabled as well from a combined reporting perspective, from an audience reporting build out. Everything DSP Dustin has covered. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, I think that's it. Speaker 1: I mean, there's 1,200 things that people are going to call it that we missed. But again, focusing on 8020, I think this episode has covered all of that. Do you have anything else to add? Speaker 2: Oh, man, there's just so many updates. We would be here all day. I'm just scrolling through the update channel. Yeah, so I'm like, okay, which ones do we talk about? But I feel like we covered the biggest ones. Speaker 1: We covered the biggest ones. I think sponsored brands without custom images was maybe deprecated, but Everyone should have that one in place. That one was kind of easy to identify. Speaker 2: Yeah, they just updated their placement modifiers. That's really nice because it was always kind of, you know, backwards from SP, so they finally added that top of search functionality. That's a big relief. Little sad about his posts are going away, so never got to get into them too heavily, but yeah. Speaker 1: I'm curious to see what they do in the social commerce space because I Amazon Post, I think, struggled from a visibility perspective, but they integrated it into stores when customer engagement was a thing, which was also depregated. Amazon Post drove brand follows. Brand follows drove customer engagement emails. So it's a big opportunity, but Amazon's struggling in the social commerce first front. So I expect to see a transition. I don't think they're going to They're deprecating posts, but I don't see them leaving that space, so I'm expecting something new to probably roll out and be pretty exciting in the next few months. We do have Amazon Accelerate and Amazon Unboxed coming up, so we know they have some exciting things cooking that are probably going to completely change the game, as always, with what we're doing. Speaker 2: Yeah, looking forward to it. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Again, follow, send us DMs. We're always more than happy to answer questions and talk about the future of retail media. And thanks so much for joining, Dustin. Speaker 2: Thank you.