Kevin King: Discovering Amazon Keyword Trends In Real Time, Amazon PPC Vs Organic Changes

Kevin King: Discovering Amazon Keyword Trends In Real Time, Amazon PPC Vs Organic Changes #amazonfba 00:00:00 How you been doing? I'm doing great, Kevin. This is David Goldenberg, and I'm joined by Kevin King from Amazon Marketer and the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And as somebody who's had the pleasure to participate in some of that, I can tell you, Kevin brings some of the best content you'll find in the industry. It's advanced stuff. When I gave a workshop here in Israel a few years ago, just, you know, blowing your mind one thing after another that you didn't know that you didn't know. Back-end tricks, improving your profits, improving your traffic, you know, improving your listings, all kinds of different techniques. And he brings the best speakers with original ideas, not the same rehashed stuff you, you know, found on YouTube or at 10 different conferences. 00:00:47 And so I'm excited to be speaking with him. And we're going to go into a bit of keyword and PPC chat today. And Kevin, thanks for joining us. I'm glad to be here. How are you doing, man? I've been doing great. I've been doing great. You know, it's fun working on Amazon PPC, the rate at which they change things. They've been innovating a lot the past year or two. Like, it's just changed so much from what it was when I started about five years ago doing Amazon PPC, coming from, like, other search background, you know. I remember, I think, in 2018 or 2019, telling them, hey, you guys need to give us a party on sponsored display. They're like, oh, yeah, you know, thanks for the suggestion. But you know what? That came out, like, about a year ago. Before which they neglected it for four or five years or whatever. So it's fun. Yeah, tell us a bit about your projects. Tell us a bit more. I've been around since 2015 as an FDA seller. 00:02:06 Yeah. Wow. Right. Right. Yeah. 00:02:38 Wow. Wow. 00:02:47 That is huge. It's just it's crazy um it is crazy it's become more of a pay-to-play platform so organic is definitely less than it's taking up less real estate than used to and ads are taking up more so you almost unless you're something super niche down yeah I have a product one of my product lines I don't I don't do any GPC on it wow what kind of volume do you do with that line in terms of annual sales Half a million a year. Nice. On that line. Nice. But yet there's no PPC on it. Some of that they don't actually allow. It's in a category where they really don't allow PPC. It's not necessarily my choice. Right. But still it would do well with that. So you have PPC and the video stuff, everything. 00:03:46 Right. And now with AI, you have to analyze some big data sets. Yeah. And with Amazon giving you the search query reports and the brand analytics reports and all that, you know how to parse that stuff. You can really hone in and really dial this in way better than you ever could before. 100%, 100%. I mean, seeing these search query reports with bringing traffic to your organic listings, you know, what people are seeing, where they're adding to cart, all this stuff is, you know, just. They turn the machine inside out, right? What used to be, imagine, just internal data. They're now provided to the third-party sellers. I'd love to hear what you're doing with that data yourself, with other data. What are you enjoying working on in terms of that kind of keyword and market research? 00:04:42 You're allowed to use it just on your own computer, uh, you know for your own uses. You couldn't import that into a healing channel into a software tool; it's publicly available, that's changed now. Amazon actually opened up an API to it and really, some of the others can actually, um, wow! Not everybody; some of you have to upload your own data, you have to download it yourself and upload it back, and others uh, some tools that have come out, um, that are specializing that, um, I think when I'm suppressing gas at the MDS, the, uh, what's the name over here? Um, I don't know. No, uh, it's called, uh, I don't know. Million dollar something? I'm sorry? Million dollar something? Yeah, the million dollar, uh, sellers group, a couple of the guys in there developed a tool. 00:05:39 It's called JungleAce, that's what it is. JungleAce, where you can actually import your own personal reports into it, and it will do some serious analysis. Interesting. That right there, what we did is back in 20-20, 20-21, we developed our own software. We were downloading it weekly, uploading it and looking through all the trends and doing analysis for both product selection and discovery as well as PPC. That's lovely. That was before the search query report came out. The search query report right now is almost like a roadmap. If you know how to parse and use that, it can do really well for you. Video stuff started doing really well for us as well, especially right when it came out. It still does. PPC is an important component of any Amazon seller's arsenal. 00:06:40 Getting a grip on that is difficult for a lot of people, and keeping it in control is difficult. You pretty much just got to bake in anywhere. It depends on what you're selling, but more than a 5% to 25% increase until you're basically into your cost of goods selling. If you're able to do that and maintain good margins, then you're pretty much set. Yeah. So for the beginners out there watching this, when Kevin's talking about tacos, he means total advertising cost of sales. So that's where you take your ad spend and you don't just divide it by your ad sales, you divide it by your total sales, including organic. And the idea is that your PPC drives organic rankings. So why only look at the PPC sales as a measure of success? 00:07:26 Also look at the organic sales. Together to uh to analyze the success and uh you know I want to I want to look at that a bit more because as you're pointing out, the search results now have way more ads. You know, I remember once upon a time there were about six sponsored product listings in the whole search results page, and you know, somebody listening to that today to me today is like, 'What are you talking about? When the dinosaurs were in the earth, you know? It's not so long after that... But now, you know, if there's not like 10 sponsored product listings, there used to be just one sponsored brand video. Now, there's often two. They have sponsored brand video also competing with a sponsored brand headline ads at the top of search results. 00:08:16 That's a new feature. They're putting, you know, sponsored displays and at the end sometimes the search results as well as all over sponsored brand videos showing up on product detail pages as well. And where I'm going with this is, as you were saying, it's more of a pay-to-play game. And what used to be sort of a commonly accepted strategy is, you know, just break even on the PPC or, you know, very thin margin on the PPC. And you make it up on the organic, you know, so long as you rank. So, you know, it pays off. To what extent is that still true today? Is it changing? How should people adapt? What should sellers 00:08:59 do in response to that, yeah I think you're seeing it, you know four or five years ago it was like, like you said, when you first launched you might be almost all your sales are probably coming from PPC, you're trying to get some traction, trying to get some keyword relevance and association, maybe 100 in the beginning, and still that can be the case today. And but you want to strive for after about a month or so except for maybe 20 to 30 percent of your sales that come from PPC and the other 60% to 70% will come from just organic search. Organic means there's no ads attached to it, it just shows up naturally. Now I think you're seeing for a lot of people, it depends on your category, but that's more of a probably 40% to 60% in some cases are coming from PPC. 00:09:44 In some cases maybe even more. Wow, yeah. That's what you're seeing more. So it has increased the cost. As Amazon's increased, the fulfillment fees, the advertising costs, not only more of a proportion of your sales, but also the cost per click has gone up. Right. The cost to sell on Amazon, I used to say Amazon would take about 35%, 30 to 35%. If you're just doing paperback, when you're in the coffee shop and you're like, oh, I've got a good idea for a product, I can sell this for $20. How much do I need to source it for? And I would say, well, soon Amazon's going to take about 35% of that, so that's $7 out of $20. 00:10:24 So you've got $15 left to do your profit and pay for your product and everything. I don't say that anymore. I think that number is over half now. Wow. And typically, in most cases, competitive categories are going to be taken by the time you add in the tacos that haven't been tossed yet. Increased government fees, their commissions, it's, it's getting up there, yeah, yeah. That's uh, uh, it's, it's an interesting question because you know, you always have, uh, in the investment world this question about, uh, what is your return uh on equity and you know, compared to your investment, what is the outcome? So if the percentage that Amazon takes is increasing, at what point does it turn out to be the case that you could just take the money that you're investing in the business and just put it in an index fund in the stock market and you come out with the same return without worrying about people counterfeiting your listing, and tomorrow seller support decides to ban you, and, 00:11:37 you know, all the rest of it. The thing is, if you can make uh I mean some people that's probably the wise thing to do is gonna play this game but if you're able to play this game it can still be rewarding. It's taking more money now to get into it, yeah so in the old days you might be able to start with a few thousand bucks or five thousand and you could still do that today, but you're not gonna make a chance of you making a true like business that you can live a western salary on right uh Pakistan, you know. You might be able to make a difference in your payment time for the next day 500 a month, but for the average questioner, um that's not going to be the case. 00:12:15 So it takes more money, takes more branding, takes more effort, it's more thought and differentiation. It's not just filling your label on a product you found on Alibaba or finding just an opportunity, it's really more about fans. and Amazon's emphasize that with front registry with giving you additional reports of your brand, registered all different brand stories and brand features and brand pages. So what do people need instead of $5,000 nowadays? Suppose they want to be doing a million dollars in gross sales within two or three years. What's a reasonable investment? I would say the minimum that you should be starting with is in the $20,000 to $50,000 range. Okay. If you want to hit seven figures-a pretty good chance of it in 73 years. 00:12:57 It's not hard to get to a million dollars in sales on Amazon. Amazon's so huge. Right. That's not what the difficulty is. The difficulty is actually making money on selling a million dollars of product a year. Right. And then there's usually tiers on Amazon sales. Getting to a million is not super hard. And gross sales is not super hard. Right. It's a problem. Getting to five or 10 million or 50 million, that's where the game completely changes and we really need an increased system. innovation in the business, you need a lot of other hats and a lot of other people. And getting to that million, a lot of people get to a million sales and they may only have a $50 ,000, $100 ,000 profit. 00:13:37 And the problem is, they can't really take that out because they're having to find new inventory and continue to grow the business. So, it's difficult to get as much money out to live on. But where the Amazon business is different on the internal investment versus the stock market is if you're able to build something, you could likely sell it for a big return. So let's say you build a $1 million dollar business and you should be striving for about a 20% profit margin or higher if you're doing FDA yeah, so that would mean on paper $200, 000 a year in profit. That doesn't mean you're putting $200, 000 in your pocket, but you know that's going to be invested at that $200, 000 point then you might be able to sell that depending on the buyer for anywhere from 400 to $1,000 to 00:14:18 maybe as much as $1 million that's the right strategic buyer right and that's where that's where you can get much better return than what you could if you're doing the same thing so I still think it's a great opportunity it's just it's not nearly as easy as it used to be yeah, yeah. So you mentioned a couple of times uh parsing the uh the search peer report um and also the uh the seasonality in the brand analytics so I want to share with you and with our viewers, you know one tip that I think I haven't seen anybody else talking about literally At all when you're analyzing your sales and seeing if things have gone up or gone down right, so one of the obvious things you want to check for did we increase or decrease the bid. 00:15:06 But if you didn't change the bid and sales have gone up significantly or gone down significantly, where does that come from? And the Brand Analytics report can give you insight to that, the search term report in Brand Analytics, because it tells you how frequently are people searching for this particular keyword. So if you see that you were making an average of, let's say, $1,000 a week, so that was $1,000, $1,200, $900, $1,100, whatever, right around that mark. And then suddenly it goes to $2,000, right? Where did that extra $1,000 a week come from? When you check into the brand analytics and you see that the search term this week started getting searched a lot more. 00:15:52 I said, you know what, this is seasonality, right? So now we're in summer, right? All those summer products, pools and patio furniture, all that is going on. What happens in August? What happens in September with all those things, right? And that affects how much you should be bidding. And it's not just about the volume of searches, but what happens with seasonality, what we've observed is that the conversion rates also go up as the season comes in, right? So like when people won't need to buy patio furniture, they need it today because it's the start of the summer and they want to entertain for the whole summer. In August, you know what, they're not so excited to buy patio furniture because, you know, how much more are they going to use it if they're not in, you know, a southern state like sunny Texas where you are, right? 00:16:42 If you're in Vermont, you don't need patio furniture in September. So that affects the conversion rates, and you can get some good insight into how much you should be raising or decreasing bids with that. Now, with that said, I'd love to hear a bit about what you guys are doing with parsing those search query reports, because I know you just have some of the best insights in this game. Share a sure nugget with the audience, please. Yeah, I mean, with the search query reports, I have someone that actually messes with that, so I'm not super familiar on that one. Super important. I was diving deep into that, and we were looking at, you know, I had certain rules when that first came out. It was like, what was the click share? 00:17:34 So I was looking for things, you know, we could filter data, and we were running reports on a year-long basis. Wow. Single week or month but on a year long basis and creating curves and we could see that if the we were looking at conversion share so not click share but actually conversion share so conversion share if it was less than 35% of those three that they were showing that could be a really good opportunity, that means that 65% of the remaining sales are coming off of people who may not be in the top. That tells me that there's more depth. There's not one person dominating. So that was one of the big things that we were looking at when we looked at fan analytics. 00:18:19 We were looking at the rising stars since we were tracking it weekly. We were downloading the report weekly, uploading it through our system that we developed. We could see that this keyword here showed up at the spot number 987,000. And then it went to 946, 000 and we once it hit you know 700, 000 still trimming that we're like okay this is something we need to look into; this is the keyword that maybe a product opportunity, maybe a keyword that's relevant, I mean just like it happened on on um and you know you you were helping us a little bit when we had Germ Shark and when we're doing the other hand sanitizer right during the pandemic and we went after all the keywords there wasn't a brand analytics I think it came up It wasn’t there, I don’t think, in the beginning, but it came out shortly after. 00:19:05 But we were going after the standard keyword that you'd find on Intense Cerebro or normal tools at the time. There was one that, about six months, eight months in, that didn’t exist until when we first started. It was hand sanitizer party gifts or party papers. And so we saw this keyword was starting to come in. And we’re like, wait a second, what, you know, before the pandemic, no one was given hand sanitizer. Right, that's a pretty gift. But we had, so when we created the listing, that keyword wasn't anywhere in the listing. And so I looked it up, and we had cases of this stuff. So people were buying these in bulk, and we had cases of, like, two-ounce, three-ounce bottles, little small little bottles like that in your pocket. 00:19:49 And we're like, why don't we sell these by the case, you know, to get rid of these things faster than sell them to the community. I forget what a case was I think it was 24 units or something like that sure so when we saw this keyword emerging we thought too many people were ranking on it so it's really easy to rank on if you put in your title and keyword density is one of the things when you have a keyword pack it in the mail and see how many other people are actually have that in their title not just ranking on it but actually have that exact phrase in the title and the few are the better so if you have a keyword like hand sanitizer party favors And you type it in, yeah, you get 60 or 80 or however many results show up on the page. 00:20:27 But look at the titles. If you intend, X-Ray will tell you this, but the title, for instance, let's say only three of those people have an exact phrase in their title. Well, we could rank really easily by just putting that exact phrase in our title. And so that's what we did. We started selling four, five, six cases a day. Wow. Not get rich quick, but you know every little bit adds up and that's 40, 40 to 60 units per case and that's 40 or 60 units per case as you're saying 24, 24 okay yeah um but still that that's uh that was good yeah so we were able to not only rank really quick on it um but we were able to actually take advantage of that chance so that's that's another example of how. 00:21:18 There's lots more. One of the things I want to say is I think searches are about to completely change on Amazon in two ways. One is that Amazon just recently put a post up a few days ago looking for someone for their AI department in Palo Alto. Palo Alto is where the A9 algorithm is. Some people call it A10. Anybody that says it's an A10 runs to the hills. There is no A10. It's the A9. They're just using it for marketing. But it's the A9 algorithm; they do tweak it and change it because that's the name of the algorithm, okay, so they they they're hiring someone for AI and about to really change the way that search is done. 00:21:58 So we're putting stuff in its title, so we're getting keywords in the back end, thinking shirts getting their bullet points-wow, that's all still going to be important but the rank on that, it's going to be the way the rankings going to be on Amazon; yeah, completely get turned upside down. And then on top of that, Amazon now, I believe, nobody can actually 100% confirm this, but based on a report that came out of Amazon Science, which is Amazon's website where they have it's very technical and a lot of the IT geeks post papers and stuff. They posted one last year about using reviews; the language of reviews to help you out. Basically what the customers are saying. In the reviews, they're either doing it now or they're about to. 00:22:49 It's hard to tell, but they're starting to actually look at that. Now with AI, I think they absolutely will. If they're not already, they're going to take the review sentiment and actually use that to determine ranking as well and what customers are saying there. So I think this game for ranking is going to change. Now, how are they going to build PPC into all this? I'm not completely sure. Google's got the same issue and how they're going to build it. It's a different model, but they'll figure it out. So I think a year, two years from now, we're going to be talking in a completely different language on how to do SEO for your Amazon listing to actually show up on different results and show up on PPC or organic. 00:23:34 Wow, that's a very interesting point. Do you know, I don't know if you've seen this yet. Here's another little quick nugget for the viewers: Exact match is not working the way it used to work, meaning if you put in, for example, again I'll just go with the patio furniture example. If your keyword is patio furniture exact match right so nowadays that will also match to outdoor furniture. You heard me, outdoor furniture will match on patio furniture, yeah but it's exact match, it's supposed to include exactly the keywords you wrote in, maybe with the stop word 'a' patio, right? Something like that, or typo, pay-toe furniture, right? But we saw that and we're like, we weren't tight, you know? And so you need to be on top of putting negatives even in exact match campaigns. 00:24:28 For example, if you're on Isolate, if you've got a separate campaign for outdoor furniture and you don't want the patio furniture campaign to get that, you need to negate outdoor, even though you're targeting an exact match. I think that one of the ways of getting that is seeing what keywords overlap in listings and probably also how people talk about it in reviews. I was sharing with the audience that that's one of the tips you can use to improve your copywriting for sponsored brand headlines. What are people saying that they like about your products? Or even forget your products. Look at the top-ranked products on the keywords you want to target. What are the benefits that come up? If you put that into your headlines, you have a much better chance of getting the click and the conversion. 00:25:18 Amazon's also working on, with regards to PPC, using AI to actually generate images using display ads, videos, and generate titles. So the AI, that's coming as well. It's remarkable. Everything's about to get turned on its head. How are you making your videos? How are we making the videos? What are you doing for video creation nowadays? In some cases, we will take just the images and we'll animate those and put those in. Sure. Other cases, we're actually creating a video from scratch where we went on a drone trip and we shot a whole bunch of money and shot an entire thing and we'll slice that up. Other cases, AI can do some cool animation stuff. 00:26:09 Depends on what the messages you're trying to get across or what the brand news you're trying to get across, uh, but that's typically uh the way we've been doing it uh, one of those those three ways right uh, then also getting UCG user-generated content, you know, and being able to use some of that uh, encouraging people to post in the video short down there sure you can show up on other people's products um, now with Inspire which is the new uh TikTok kind of version On Amazon, there's some opportunity there. One area that I think is not taking off as fast as they had hoped is the Amazon Live. There's PPC and stuff around that, but Amazon Live on the video side is still not taking off like it did in China. 00:26:55 It's a huge deal. Over in Asia, people are doing billions of dollars in sales on live video streams. But live video streams within Amazon? Yeah. Oh, no, it's not Amazon in China, but live video commerce, like TikTok and other platforms that are driving to e-commerce sales. But on Amazon, TikTok is a great place right now to actually go viral with an Amazon-related product on TikTok, you can do really, really well. But that's a little bit different than someone standing there pitching a product, you know, QVC or Home Shopping Network style. I know some people are doing that, and there's some people that do okay, but it hasn't really caught on fire that they have. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think part of the problem with Amazon Live is that they're very focused on a few segments, right? 00:27:52 So, like, exercise or cosmetics or things like that, but so much of the market is not so much geared towards live video, right? I'm trying to think of an example. Okay, so like our agency focuses on home decor and furnishings, right? So if you're selling a coffee table, it's a coffee table. Here's the wood, here's the dimensions, you know, the finish is like this, it's this kind of wood, it's mahogany, it's okay, it's whatever. It's a coffee table. You know what I mean? Like, I can lift the coffee table and throw it over my head. Like, what do you do with it, you know? How does this saw, like, cut through this top, you know? Indestructible table. 00:28:51 Wow. 00:28:58 That's cool. At Amazon, I think that beta testing, some of that kind of stuff, where I can drop them in the couch. If I was doing video for furniture, I would be trying to show as many different patio scenes as possible, different scenarios as possible, just hoping that one of those is similar to my customers so they can see themselves in. Something like that would be what I'd be doing. Here's me picking up the table. That's not going to do a whole lot. Creating a scene that the customer could see themselves in. Yeah. You know, there's a patio table. Exactly. And it's got some nice food on top and three or four people sitting around in chairs. Yes. And having a good old time. 00:29:48 So people are like, 'Oh, I would love to do that with my family.' Exactly. And it looks like it holds all the food. That's the type of lifestyle, empathy-type stuff. Yeah, 100%. You know, we did. I think I learned this tool from your workshop, actually, PickFu, which you shared with us, I think, in 2019. And that was one of the lessons that we got from testing out these different pictures was that people wanted to see it in use, right? Not just in kind of sort of abstract settings, which was one of the things that we considered. One of the cool things you can do now, too, with AI, like you're talking about, a coffee table, a patio table, a patio furniture, you can drop it into the scene using AI. 00:30:36 So you can actually take a picture of that coffee table and go to a tool like, there's a couple, several of them, like Capsta . ai, C-A-S-P-A, Capsta . ai, and you can actually drop that picture of that table. And say, take this table, block out everything else that's around it, maybe it's already in some sort of background, and I want that table to be in a scene with a blonde Asian woman that has a bowl of cereal on the table, or something along those lines, and it will create it. Wow. For you. Wow. There's also one that's more specific to Amazon sales. It's called EconTent. Econ, E-commerce, E-C-O-M. T-E-N-T dot A-I. And now we can do the same thing. 00:31:31 We can say, I want this table to be in a farmhouse with a window behind it, with a fireplace in the corner, with a shawl over the chair next to the table, or whatever. It'll create that whole image. So you don't have to go out and shoot all this stuff. If you know, if you can use your brand analytics, your scripture, of course, and find other things that people are looking for, and create, you know, if they're always typing, I'm just making stuff up here, but if they're typing a coffee table, for entertaining, coffee table, farmhouse style, or whatever. You can go patch together a few different keywords and actually have the AI create a scene specifically with all those keywords, so that when a customer looks at it, they're like, that's me, that's exactly what I was looking for. 00:32:16 And so you can get really creative now with a lot of this stuff, and I think it's going to be. Probably get to the point where you can create this stuff on the fly, wow, that's why I think Amazon may probably not initially but when Amazon says they're going to allow you to create images of using AI for advertising, I think they're going to be able to dynamically maybe not the beginning, but it's coming, they're going to be able to dynamically tailor those images to you, so not everybody sees the same image that's remarkable depending on what you type yeah, you see what the customer is saying in the reviews, and they may be able to actually take it. 00:32:53 If the customer is saying in the reviews, this is a very heavy, nice green table, they may actually take that and actually make the table and the image look like that. Interesting. Everything's about to change. Yeah, I've been wondering about that. Given that sponsored brands allow you to customize your creative, whether it's the headline or the video, and they've gone that direction also with sponsored display to customize the creative for whatever audiences you're targeting, I'm curious how much longer they're going to leave sponsored products the way it is, where there's no control over the creative. Whatever your listing is, is the same as the creative. And I can understand, on the one hand, the reasoning, right? 00:33:40 If somebody finds you in products, sponsored products they should be able to find the same listing that they remember organically a day or two later, whatever if they didn't buy right away, but how much higher could the click-through rates be potentially if instead of the generic product title your product title is geared towards what that person just searched right now, right? Because you've got 150 or 200 characters in the title depending on you know what you're selling, your category, your thing might be cut off by the ellipse, but if you could put those keywords at the front and some benefit tied to those keywords, put that right in after the brand name, that could potentially be interesting. Or even changing the uh the main image according to your uh keyword, that could be an interesting thing. 00:34:31 Um Kevin, we need to go what I would love is if you can tell people where They can find out more about uh the BDSS show, 'Billion Dollar Seller Summit', and if they want to follow you or get your emails, follow you on social media, where should they go? Yeah, the Billion Dollar Sales Summit is an event I do once in person a year. And another one's been virtual. We've spoken on a virtual one in the past. It's a very high-level event for advanced sellers. The best way to actually follow me, I have a newsletter that's coming out starting in summer 2023. Great. It's a basic free sign-up page at BillionDollarSellers. com. BillionDollarSellers.com. Yeah, and you can enter your email there, and you'll get a three-times-a-week newsletter about the Amazon and Ecom space. 00:35:23 Amazing. Tips and strategies and tips and hacks and cool software things. That would be the best way to keep in touch. Fantastic. Okay, guys, check it out. Kevin honestly has some of the deepest knowledge in the space, as you heard just now in the show. You won't regret it. And I'm your host, David Guldenberg from 11 Ads for Brands. You can find us at 011adsforbrands. com. You know, we specialize in saying the home decor and furnishings niche and more broadly also in sponsored brands for people outside that niche. So if you like this video, I want to give it a like and subscribe to the channel. And I'll see you guys next time. Kevin, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Kevin. For sure.