Three Important Weekly Tasks for Amazon PPC

Three Important Weekly Tasks for Amazon PPC Speaker 1: What's going on, Vagination? 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 on the show, we have someone that I have tons of admiration for, Dan Head from AMZElite. He works with his clients in a really full funnel manner. He really balances the creative side of getting better click-through rates, better conversion rates, the PPC technician on how to improve things to make them tangibly better. I think he does a really great job at connecting the techniques. We're going to talk about N-gram analysis and ACOS Power Ratio, connecting that to the broader picture of individual product conversion rate and how to improve things. So this was a great chat with Dan. I thank him so much for coming on the show and sharing. He touches on N-gram analysis and ACOS Power Ratio. These are topics that we've talked a lot about. On the show, so we will include a link to the checklist, which includes a lot of these resources. So it's sort of like one place to go and get all these resources. So if you're not doing N-gram analysis, if you're not doing ACOS Power Ratio tracking, we have this here for you as a special treat of consistently good things that will, I mean, I can't think of many other activities that always improve accounts other than N-gram analysis and ACOS Power Ratio considerations. Let's jump into it. Mr. Dan Head, welcome to The PPC Den Podcast. Great to have you here. Speaker 2: Thank you, Michael. Speaker 1: It's great to be here. Speaker 2: It's an honor. Speaker 1: Oh, come on now. It's an honor to have you here. You know what? We met in person a few weeks ago here in Austin, which is where you had, I believe, chicken hearts for the first time. Speaker 2: Chicken hearts and oysters. Speaker 1: What would be your go-to of choice, oysters or chicken hearts? Speaker 2: Probably chicken hearts. Speaker 1: And for the good people out there, how would you describe, in case they've never eaten chicken hearts before? Speaker 2: I don't know how to describe that. I don't think I've had anything like that before. Speaker 1: It was like, you asked me to find like the best steakhouse. So we went to Dai Due here in Austin. And I was like, Appetizer, let's get chicken hearts. I thought they were some of the best chicken hearts I've ever eaten. Speaker 2: And then you're talking to one of the pickiest eaters of all time. Yeah. Yeah. I eat no sauce like other than barbecue sauce and everything's plain. I eat a cheeseburger plain. I eat everything plain. But slowly over time, I've been breaking out of my shell a little bit. So you have a client like the Spice Lab and when you go into the office, they'll have like this chef create like all these different kinds of fish. And we're like testing all the seasonings and then all the staff will get report cards and then we'll grade like how that seasoning works with that meal. Wow. Look at you. They've been slowly getting me out. I've done Cod and MyMy and Red Snapper. Wow. Speaker 1: That's definitely out of your shell for sure. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Awesome. Speaker 1: Awesome dude. We met in core community about two years ago. How would you describe core community? I'm always curious what people think of it. Speaker 2: It's amazing because there's so many people that are willing to share anything. So it's not like anybody has like, Oh, I'm going to hold this back. No, it's like, Oh, I just found this out. Let's go unpack this together. Let's see what the different niches, how they react, you know, because we commonly fall in that, that trap that this thing right here moves the needle. Okay. Well, This moves the needle in grocery and gourmet. Or, you know, you start to go into a shoppable niche, maybe it doesn't move the needle. So we get to get all that testing together. And it's a beautiful thing. And then it's amazing. Yeah, the core was kind of built up from the beginning before even the name got out there for me. So I went to the Austin event for Titan in 2021. And Ryan was talking to me. He's like, I need to get you on the call with the Ad Badger guys. I'm going to get you on the call with the Ad Badger guys. This is going to happen. And then Gonza's whispering to me. He's like, I'm working on something big. I'm working on something big. You're going to be a part of it, Dan. Trust me. You belong there. You're going to be a part of it. And that was all, what, 2021? I want to say. Right after, right after The pandemic started a while ago. Speaker 1: I met Gonza when he came to Austin. We were talking about it a lot. Speaker 2: Gonza is definitely one of the people I respect the most on the planet, you and him. Speaker 1: How would you describe what you do professionally? Speaker 2: Well, I run an agency. I have eight employees. They're like my children, even though I already have four kids. It makes life busy, but I love running the agency. It's a passion. You know, I love marketing. And then I love seeing all forms of marketing, like from print ads to billboards to what Bucky does, turn around 1,062 miles. I mean, that was just genius, you know. Professionally, what I do, I sell products. I build and sell products and turn them into winners. Over the last four or five years, I've created about seven products that do more than a million dollars a year in sales. I like to create things and watch them go. Speaker 1: And how long have you been doing the, how do you balance the time between the agency life and building products or like that whole process? What would you say is Where do you think about the most on a day-to-day? Speaker 2: Well, the balance is all over the place. It's always going to be all over the place, especially when you have a lot of clients. So I don't know how it works for you, but I could be working away on a project and get six phone calls in that hour. And it's like, okay, what am I doing here? It's like, Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce around, bounce around, bounce around. How do I maintain my focus? So I started the toy around with actually turning my phone off for a couple hours so that I'm not so disorientated because I feel like my job makes me ADHD. Speaker 1: There's always a million things to do. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you have somebody tapping on your shoulder. Hey, I need help with this. And then the phone call. It's definitely incredibly challenging. Speaker 1: Would you say for a typical agency that attention, everything needing your attention, trying to prioritize the best things like deep work, would you say this whole sort of like category of stuff is the hardest thing for an agency owner? Speaker 2: Yes, 100%. Yeah, I think so. Because I mean, you're just going to Be hit from all different directions and it's gonna be constant. It's gonna be throughout your entire day. I mean, I don't know if you turn your phone off or you take some time for yourself just to focus on a project so that nobody else distracts you. Do you do something like that? Speaker 1: Absolutely, you have to. What are your thoughts on Slack? Using like a Slack or like a Google Chat or something? Speaker 2: Asana. Yeah, I've used Asana. It helps. It helps. But at the end of the day, for some reason, I still come back down to my planner. My planner kind of keeps my day in check. Speaker 1: Well, I guess what I was saying was the pings on your computer of just like, ping, this person needs something, ping, this person needs something. Over the last few years, I've turned off Slack notifications. So instead of like it being pushed out to me, like I have to go and get the Messages, so I have Slack time where I need to go and read the digest of what's going on. That's been good for Headspace. That's been good for Clarity. Speaker 2: Yeah, I am doing that. I also put my computer in Do Not Disturb so I don't get those chimes from the darn emails. Speaker 1: Constantly, yes. Phone is permanently in silent mode for me as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, mine's always in silent, but it's a question If it's in silent, I'm going to find myself grabbing it. So I realized the trick is turn it off. Speaker 1: Wow. I recently told someone, I did something recently in my personal life, like no phones after 9 p.m. I'm not always 100%. In fact, I'm pretty sure you saw me break it. But no phones past 9 p.m. is great because it just sort of forces you to... I do no phones, no computers after 9 p.m. For me, I went a year without sitting and reading a book. It was only an audiobook and when I'm running, only a podcast, when I'm walking the dog. It was always multitasking, active work to do that. And it's like, oh, sit down and read a book nice and slow. I feel like it's important to have the balance of a really slow activity relative to the flurry of activity that we can have as Digital marketers, for sure. Speaker 2: It's been a while since I sat down and wrote a book. Speaker 1: Dude, it's actually a beautiful thing. Speaking of digital marketing, I always like to ask, what are some activities that you do today that are going to be beneficial to Amazon marketing? I ask you that question, what are some reliable activities that are consistently good? Meaning you can do them almost in All accounts, all seasons, it's always going to be helpful. Do you have any of those very reliable optimizations? Speaker 2: Oh, yes. Yeah. Actually, most of them, you are the father of the N-gram, the N-gram ASIN, the ACOS Power Ratio. I use all three of those every single time. The ASINs we might not use if there's not enough ASINs, not enough product targeting with that particular I don't, but I mean, we're going to do N-gram. We're going to do ACOS Power Ratio. And then we have our CBR sheet or conversion sheet, which just takes data from campaign manager and stacks it over each other. So you have like lifetime, month over month, and then you'll have, you know, the last seven days or the last 10 days. Speaker 1: Okay. I want to dig into this. Number one, N-gram analysis. I would love to lay claim for being the father of N-gram analysis, but like N-gram analysis I found from the Google Ads days, so this was 15 years ago, I was discovering that this was a thing to do with search term reports. And I think that word analysis is a known thing, even outside of the digital marketing world. So I think applying it to a search-based platform is super valuable. And I guess the question I have for you is, how do you define N-gram analysis? Imagine someone I hope that 100% of people who listen to the show do N-gram analysis in some way at least once a week in their accounts. I hope so. Speaker 2: I hope so too. Speaker 1: Especially being a listener of the show, I've probably done like 10 episodes all about different ways to think about N-gram analysis. Even in the last year, I discovered another way to think about it, which I was calling N-gram laddering, where you go up the ladder from one gram to two gram to three gram, then back down to two. Speaker 2: To verify your choice, which is smart because I do something like that too. Speaker 1: So tell me, for the 5% of people that listen to the show who've never done N-gram analysis, and we will link to a lot of the N-gram shows that we've done, we have a big checklist. groups a lot of our concepts together. But for anyone who's never done N-gram work on their search and report, how do you describe it? Speaker 2: The N-gram breaks down what one word correlation means to your listing. Now the way you have it set up, you have it set up by ACOS. I like to add the conversion rate there. It's just my own little trick. So on the end, you'll just add the CVR, just do the formula, you got orders, you know, you got your clicks, and just run that down that side. And then you can really kind of see like how valuable that specific word is. A lot of times, you know, when I first ran the N-gram, and I ran it on client, you had 129 clicks with the word ANDed. And one sale. Speaker 1: In a month? Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I want to say it was a month. It might have been. But I was like, what? How is this possible? Why is this is this word like this? And the product was a journal. So it was journal and a thousand pages, journal and five hundred pages, journal and three hundred pages. Well, this journal had 132 pages. So when you have 132 pages and nobody's searching for a journal and 132 pages, this really was like, whoa, what is this thing? So I started to unpack, like you talk about the laddering, and I'll start going through and seeing where this keyword shows up. Why am I getting all these clicks? Where are they coming from? Go investigate. And it's like, holy cow, I'm going to negative phrase and. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: I never would have thought of that. That would be a keyword that I should negative phrase, but that's 130 something clicks. What did that do? It converged. Speaker 1: First of all, perfect example. And like, yeah, that's like the N-gram laddering. So like I would start with like the one gram, see the word and, and it probably had like a 300% ACOS if we had one sale and like 130 clicks. So it probably, I'd be looking at it and be like, wow, this is like a astronomically bad conversion rate or a really bad ACOS, like whatever. I would see it at the one gram level. And then I'd be like, well, let me see all the two grams. And that's where you discovered like and certain number of pages. And then it's like, okay, like I need to do something about this, the word and, but, and then I would like trigger other stuff. Like, let me go back to one gram and see 500. And then it'd be like, oh, people are searching like 500 pages. Like I don't have 500 pages. And it would like inspire another round of negation. I cannot tell you, even today, late 2025, how many Advertisers, I still meet and I tell them, hey, do you know that over a 30-day timeframe, you probably only have 5% of your search terms that do more than five clicks a month. So like if you have 100 search terms, you only have five. That have more than five clicks a month. If you have a thousand search terms, you only have 50. Like it's a very small amount of search terms that actually cross over a five-click threshold in a 30-day time frame. And they're like, no way. Because like in their mind, they spend a lot of time looking at stuff with more than five clicks, right? They sort by spend, they sort by clicks. So the individual search terms with more than five clicks often And it's very difficult for us to like do something about like one or two click terms. So like I meet people like on various stages of the journey where it's like they either are not aware that 95% of their search terms have fewer than five clicks over a course of a month. And if they do realize it, they sometimes feel powerless about like, what can I do about it? And like doing this sort of like N-gram root word analysis to combine all the terms that have a particular word in it is so helpful. I like to say like, I've shown this to people before and they're like, they sit back and they're like, Wow, it's like I've never seen my search terms before. It's true. It's like I've never seen a search term report before. So in some ways, it's like the better way to view your search term report, where it's like, it's actually like cluing you in on like what the composition of all of your search terms are, which is... Speaker 2: Have you ever gone through a search term report that's 20,000 lines long and sat there and tried to negate it? Speaker 1: Impossible. You can't do it. Speaker 2: Yeah, I did it all the time until I found the N-gram. Speaker 1: Oh, wow. Amazing. Speaker 2: Well, that's cool. One last thing I would like to mention about that. Usually, we would start with the listing first, but one of my staff members recently was breaking down a new product that we were taking over to manage. Usually, we start with the listing, but this employee didn't. This employee went right into the debt. And one of the things that kept coming up was like, This doesn't convert on micro, it doesn't convert on bead, but it's a microbead pillow. So we're looking at the data and we didn't go back and look at the listing right away, which we should have done. But the listing was just a mess. And seeing the N-gram before the listing, it put it in pure context that this listing was not optimized for microbeads. That's why it's not converting. So it's important to understand that the N-gram Is a dipstick on buyer intent based on your listing, even though you have low conversion rates, you know, and a lot of the times we have a tendency to thinking of this as about wasted ad spend, you know, let's get rid of the wasted ad spend. Let's, you know, clean up the conversion rate. But then this simple doing this out of order just made me realize that You know, we're always so leaning on trying to negate, but maybe this is, you know, telling me that I just need to double down on some of these and actually bring the creative up to par to go after that keyword. Because obviously, if you're selling a micro B pillow, you need to be able to convert a micro B pillow. So it was kind of nice to have that accident kind of put that little extra in perspective. It's not about like, oh, negate, negate. Wait, this is, you know, a yellow term. So I'll highlight colors. So like the highest conversion rates always are in green. You know, those middle ones are in yellow. Things that are really pulling the listing down will be in red. So what I've started to really realize is those keywords that I'm putting in yellow, That, you know, I should be working on including those into the creative more and fine honing that buyer pain point. Speaker 1: I love that starting with the product. And I also think that's a great one thing I really like about your experience is this very full funnel. So you get a lot of people that would just jump into the data and like begin to optimize it. I almost call that like You can almost optimize with blindfolded, meaning imagine you didn't know what the product was. You have no clue what the product is or what the market's about. You could go into any account today and make some pretty good decisions with an N-gram report without even knowing anything about the business because you can just see it. It's like, oh, I, you know, this particular gram, 200 clicks, no sales, easy decision to negate. But like what I've always admired about your experience is like it's like full experience. Like, why didn't it? Convert. Like, let's explore this a little bit more. Like, oh, our page isn't optimized for this. So, like, we need to do something about this. That comes up a lot. Like, I watch people do N-gram analysis a lot. Like, I show people N-gram analysis for the first time. Maybe half the time, people's reaction is, hmm, but I like that term. Like, that term applies to my product. I want to keep it. I often tell them, like, two things. Number one, it depends on the stage of your business. Like, I see some people, they have, like, 80% non-converting spend. You know, they spend $10,000 a month and $8,000 is on search terms that don't convert. Depending on the immediate goal of the business, it might make sense to trim it today and then remove the negatives in the future once the listing improves. Because it can take time to improve the listing. It can take time to get the business health at a better spot so you can take better swings. So what would you say to those? Let's actually talk about what you would do in the product in this example. Because I see this all the time. I'd love to give people even better advice. Which is if you are doing N-gram analysis and you see something that you should convert on so it's not It's not irrelevant. It is relevant. It applies to your product, but you look at it and you're like, ooh, I do sell a microbead pillow, but micro and bead isn't working out. How do you actually go and optimize a listing for a particular term? Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to start with customer review insights. That's the first thing I'm going to go. I'm going to go look up that keyword. I'm going to see what people... Speaker 1: Product opportunity explorer? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to see what people are saying. What do they like? What do they don't like? I think that's pretty much the number one thing you want to do right away is what is triggering that response, you know? Something is triggering that response. And if you use those keywords right, and then buyer psychology kicks in. So if they're looking up potassium magnesium supplement, and here's, oh, potassium magnesium supplement on the top, you know, that's going to play into it. But you always want to start with what is the pain point? Why are they buying your product? And then where are your competitors doing? What are they doing well? And what are they doing poorly? So I would probably use something like GoFullPage. And actually, I just did this yesterday. You know, I'm going to do GoFullPage on the positive. I'm going to GoFullPage on the negative. And then I'm going to go grab the top three guys and just pull it all together in the chat. If you use GoFullPage, I always use the image. The PDF seems to make chat a little wonky. So I will use those images and I'll bring it all in there and I'll pull all the information together and then just kind of create a list of What are the most important things to say here? How do I resonate with the person that's looking for this microbead pillow? Now, in the case of the microbead pillow, they had one graphic that was terrible that looked from like Oregon Trail, Commodore days. And it had microbeads in there, but nobody was showing a zoomed up picture of the bee. There was no zoomed up picture on the main image. There's nothing talking about how comfortable these microbeads are or the fact that they're equal friendly, you know, things like that. Speaker 1: Your listing matters. Graphics matter. Yeah, for sure. You don't want to be, I call this like digital marketing myopia, where you're just like zoomed into Oh, my PPC performance is the only thing to fix in my business. And it's like, well, actually, PPC is one part of everything. Speaker 2: You see a lot of people say that too. And I'm like, what? Speaker 1: A lot of people say that. I have a lot of people like, I go as far as, you tell me if you agree with this, I go as far to say total ACOS, so TACOS, is not a PPC goal. Meaning like, TACOS, what is it? What is the fraction? It's ad cost Over total sales, what is total sales? It's paid sales and organic sales. Meaning your PPC could be worse. Like you can go and destroy your account. Your tacos gets better because or for some reason there was an organic lift. Or at the same time, your PPC could be undeniably better and your tacos gets worse because organic sales went down. And it's like you see a lot of People think PPC is the only way to influence tacos. It is a way, but I feel like thinking of the full... I was just talking to someone. They were working with someone and they're like, I'm so mad at my agency because they keep on trying to tell me about tacos. Gains and organic sales, but I just hired them to do my PPC. Why are they talking about this? And I was like, well, let's talk about the connection between PPC, paid sales, organic sales, and like what tacos actually is. I consider tacos, I sometimes I feel like when people say I'm optimizing my PPC for tacos, I almost feel like they're optimizing for revenue per employee. And it's like revenue per employee. That's not like a PPC metric. Well, it's like, Tacos kind of isn't either, but guess what? What is revenue? Revenue is organic sales and paid sales. It's like, okay, that's the same part of the tacos equation. I feel like when you say like, I'm optimizing my PPC for revenue per employee, it's like, that's kind of weird. That's like a weird metric to optimize for, because like employees, how does employees relate to your PPC sales? So like Tacos is obviously closer to your PPC sales, but at the same time, like there's a big factor of that that's actually like organic product market fit, like all of those things as well. Speaker 2: What's your metric? What's the metric metric then? Speaker 1: I think about this a lot because it's like, Can you optimize a keyword for tacos? And it's like, perhaps. I say look at all of them. Like, look at PPC sales, organic sales, ratio of each. Like, what is your percentage of organic sales and paid sales? What is your overall profitability? So you track all of these things and you'll eventually find points where it's like, oh, there are lots of moments where tacos gets worse, but overall profitability goes up because you're doing higher volume, right? So those are things that I think are always worth tracking all the time. Because also, you can look at profitability by month. You can look at organic sales by month and PPC sales by month and tacos by month or week or whatever. But then when you go into your account and you're looking at N-gram analysis, you no longer have profit. You no longer have profit in your And like, you can't put profit next to an N-gram. You can't put tacos next to an N-gram. And I feel like you can have it like nearby and it should inform the way that you do stuff. Like if your profitability is bad and your tacos is bad, As a result of like overspending relative to PPC sales, then like, yeah, you're going to want to optimize it differently. You're going to want to put yourself into a different gear to optimize these campaigns. Yeah, well, it's a mixed bag. Speaker 2: So I mean, like for potassium, magnesium, You know, our ACOS is always really high. You know, it's just generally, it's gonna be high. But our conversion rates are stellar. You know, if we can convert 40 out of 70 clicks all the time, I mean, you're over 50% conversion rate there, you know. So I'm going to pay a lot of money to get that rank to go up. And that's kind of where tacos does matter. But in all reality, I think customer lifetime ROAS is the better number. You know, for anyone with any kind of an SNS model, that's really what you want to be watching. You want to be watching that because that's going to include all your growth in there. Speaker 1: Do you track profitability when you're doing those activities as well? Meaning like, let's go rank higher on this keyword. We have a strong conversion rate. We're going to spend more to rank better. That should improve tacos as well. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. You have to. You have to. If you don't know where you're going, Then what are you doing it for? You got to have a goal and a plan and then a system in place to check it. Speaker 1: I think it's hard for a lot of companies to balance all those metrics and then see how PPC can influence those things and wherever the performance is, is influencing How you optimize, I think that's an interesting point. We have N-gram analysis, key part of an optimization plan. Is there anything else that's working relatively consistently? What else are you doing on a weekly or bi-weekly basis? Speaker 2: Well, the next step would be to hit the ACOS Power Ratio sheet, see which campaigns are bleeding ACOS that is being wasted, essentially. Speaker 1: How would you describe ACOS Power Ratio to someone? Speaker 2: Measures what spend is actually providing for you against what spend isn't. Speaker 1: What spend is generating sales versus what spend is not. Speaker 2: So you have a 50% ACOS, 20% is generating the sales, 30% is wasted, essentially. It would fit the definition of wasted. And I like how it tells you if your campaigns are flying too loose or not. When you're dealing with a lot of broad and a lot of phrase, and I think a lot of marketers are these days because they're trying to get the CPCs down, you're going to have a lot of discovery in there. And to be able to monitor that discovery from the upper level, it's beautiful. So what we'll do is we'll take that and we'll match that against our in-house CBR sheets. Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to hear about your in-house CVR sheets in a second, but just finish your thought on ACOS Power Ratio. So yeah, so you can see it by campaign. Speaker 2: We take everything that's like above a three and we'll mark that line in red and then we'll take that and we'll go match that up to the CVR sheet and highlight those four lines in red. Because all the CBR sheet is, is essentially it's campaign manager view, you export it, you do lifetime, you do months, you do month. And then depending on where the breakdown is, because you get what, 65 days of data, you'll have seven or 10 days on the newest date range. And then what we'll do is for the single keyword campaigns, we'll run that. We have the sheet. It's like all kind of macroed out and we'll grab Helium's rank data. We'll grab our search volume from Helium, the organic rank and the sponsored rank. And we'll put that into the sheet and then it just lines up the data over the top of each other. So you'll be looking at auto close campaign, here's lifetime, month, month, you know, 10 days, you know, obviously on an auto campaign, you're not going to have your rank, but on the one keyword campaigns, It does like a VLOOKUP. The sheet will do a VLOOKUP in the background and then it'll bring in. And you can even run this with historical. So if you've had this in helium for a while, now it gets dicey when you get past like 50,000 lines of helium rank because that rank gets really weird when you're using the historical. But we can get it into the sheet and we can actually see, okay, you know, potassium, magnesium, this exact campaign here, lifetime, we're, you know, we're averaging around five, you know, this month, we were two this month, we were two, but lately, we're one and we can see what's going on, you know, in that momentum. And a lot of times like You'll see little metrics stick out with the CVR sheet that you don't always normally pay as close attention to, like CTR, like, oh, okay, I had a big CTR drop here, you know, so the problem isn't traffic, it's being clicked. And I like having the four lines of data stacked. Because it seems to make my decision-making process go a lot faster. Speaker 1: And just to recap that, what are the four lines of data that you see? Speaker 2: It's just essentially your campaign manager view. So you're going to have your campaign title, your start date. We'll have your CTR, your CPC. The ACOS and their ROAS, all those things go across. And then on the very end, you have the search volume organic rank and sponsor rank. And I still think sponsor rank's important because, you know, if you're running like a top product and you're trying to get to rank one, but you have a sponsor rank of three, how are you going to get to rank one? Now, you can find those things in Search Term Impression Share and things like that, but to have it really stick out, that makes things easier. Speaker 1: I see. And then you also have ACOS Power Ratio on that same list as well. Speaker 2: Yes. Correct. Speaker 1: And then, yeah, the three is typically the switch point of ACOS Power Ratio probably out of whack because it's the ratio of the campaign's ACOS versus the ACOS just of things with a conversion. So if you're Campaign ACOS is 30% and then only the stuff that converted was 10%. That would be a 3x ratio, ACOS Power Ratio. And I think that is really helpful at showing people, number one, it tells you non-converting spend by campaign, which is really great to know. And generally, the more non-converting spend you have, the worse your ACOS Power Ratio is. What I also love telling people too, I've had these thoughts about ACOS recently, which is a lot of people spend a lot of time looking at the ACOS of keywords that have a conversion, right? If a keyword has ACOS, by definition, it has a conversion. I've been observing a lot, like sometimes 100% of people's attention is going towards keywords with And ACOS, whether it be a good ACOS or a bad ACOS. And a lot of times the bad ACOS gets a lot of their attention where it's like, let me trim these high ACOS keywords down. And what I love so much about the ACOS Power Ratio is because you can tell people, ask them what they think a bad ACOS is, 100% ACOS. You would never want keywords at 100% ACOS. Of course you wouldn't. However, what I think people forget or are also thinking of is that you have search terms, a lot of them, Doing no sales. And if you can take $1,000 of search terms with no sales and give it a bad ACOS, like send the money towards something that you consider a bad ACOS, 100% ACOS, you would basically be spending the same amount of money with an extra $1,000 of sales. And anyone would take that. Who wouldn't want that? To get rid of $1,000 that doesn't convert, give it to your bad ACOS keywords, and then generate $1,000 extra at 100% ACOS as opposed to spend $1,000 for no sales at all. For nothing, right? In the spreadsheet, it's really easy to just change the number. Let's take a thousand from stuff that does not convert, give it to something that does convert at a really bad ACOS, 100% ACOS, and people are like, oh, I see. Non-converting spend should have as much attention as your stuff that does get orders. So I absolutely love that. I think bidding is such a big deal. So you spend a lot of time thinking about bidding, bidding, bidding, bidding, placement modifiers, bidding, bidding, bidding, and it's like, well, don't forget non-converting spend. Adjustments. Trim that down as well. And the ACOS Power Ratio is a great way to see how much you spent on search terms with no sales. It's like, oh, that's a hundred. Speaker 2: The marriage between that and the CVR, I think, is kind of perfect. Because the ACOS Power Ratio is really going to help you with any kind of discovery. It's not really going to help you with the exact gambits. Now, that seems to be changing. I'm seeing exact and Google exact again. Speaker 1: It's not wild. Speaker 2: It is wild. Speaker 1: Exact. There's no exact. I remember. Like the degradation of exact match. And it's like, used to be something you can rely on. And now it's like penalizing you a little bit for using exact where it's like, we're going to change it up without telling you we're going to make it more expensive. So it's like, which is why to go full circle, it's really important to like use auto phrase broad and then lock it down with good negative keyword management. Right. I've said it before, but like, We have access to lots of accounts and sometimes I'll just observe what's going on. What are the biggest and highest performing ones doing? And one thing I see in all of them is a lot of negative keyword management. And it's not everything. You can't like only do negatives and like scale your account. But what I generally find is like they balance that out with like really almost like loose targeting, like looser than you would imagine, like lots of autos, phrase, broad. And then they'll just like clamp it down with aggressive negation. Speaker 2: That works pretty well when you can't find a lot of good keywords. You know, you want to really have that wide net to kind of just try to see what does work. Speaker 1: So we've covered N-gram analysis, ACOS Power Ratio considerations, like your CVR sheet where you are sort of balancing a lot of these high-level metrics for single keyword campaigns. And you also told me a lot about how you're using AI image generation for creative optimization. So tell me about this. Are you using it for like A-plus content primarily? Are you using it for like Hero images, secondary images, like how are you? Speaker 2: I'm using this everywhere. So I showed you the beginning of the app. And since then, the app has changed a lot. Now we have like four different versions of this thing flying around. So we have one that does like UGC style video. Now we have another one that's doing video. It's it's getting there. And we're working on the main image one so that I'll be able to do like Your main image, then the infographics, then your sponsor brand stuff, and then just be able to get it all out of one. But right now we have one kind of separated. So we have one that we use for like sponsor brand, and then we have one we use for infographics. I mean, think about it this way. What makes a good marketer? What would make a great marketer? It's got to be somebody that's constantly split testing as much as they possibly can. Speaker 1: Beautiful. Speaker 2: Because, you know, I developed the cycling keywords that brought to core and everybody else. And I got that beautiful back-end thing. But, you know, problems that, I mean, you probably faced it yourself. It's like, I have this graphics team and then I have three major accounts. The supplement guys need their stuff right away. These guys need their stuff right away. And these guys, you know, they're already, you know, blowing up my phone left and right. But meanwhile, we got all these other accounts and we're trying to do holiday image updates or fall image updates. You know, you got to have a process where you can get the creative going in that circle as well. And then when you have both of those circles going like this, that's where the magic is because you're constantly making things better. You know, there's a balance to doing it on the back end as well as doing it on the front end. Speaker 1: Very nice. I like that. I've never heard a phrase like that, which is like, we do a lot of work optimizing bids. We do a lot of work like optimizing keywords. We do a lot of work like Doing that stuff, why not do a lot of work optimizing the front end to the things that people see to eke out better click-through rates and conversion rates? It's basic digital marketing to A-B test, right? It's foundational. And I think that it's tougher on Amazon. They have manage your experiments. They have that, but it's not like... I mean, in Google Ads or meta ads, they ask you to write 20 headlines. And then they have it baked into their system to, they will rotate them. So it's like baked into those platforms and it's not baked into Amazon's platform. And I think that, I would imagine like Amazon, you can see them starting to incorporate more and more of these like testing type tools, but like, As any marketer, you have to do it yourself. I kid you not. I just learned this within the last week. I can't name any names. Believe it or not, in 2025, I think it's like a $5 million business, and they didn't have any digital marketers internal in the business. They were paying their agency $1,600 for four images a month. $400 an image. Speaker 2: Holy smokes. Speaker 1: Holy smokes is right. So this was outside of the e-commerce world. I think that maybe would be appropriate 10 years ago, like, oh, it's like $400 an image, like the images are like the best thing you've ever seen. But today, 2025, that is a thing. What do you think of that? Speaker 2: That is ridiculous. Obviously, the AI generating tools aren't as good as having a real graphic designer really go to work. So our thought was, have it win the split test. Once it wins the split test, then have the graphic artist step in and do it. Speaker 1: But. Speaker 2: $400 for an image is ridiculous. I mean, like, on an easy product, I might charge you $400 to do it all. Like the Info and the A+. On the complicated stuff, it's probably more closer to $1,000 that we would charge for a whole package. You're talking seven images, main image, A+, and all that other stuff. Speaker 1: Is that how much per image, right? Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Woo. Yeah. But anyway, so I feel like I heard this great quote one time, Dan Andrews from the Tropical NBA podcast, the podcast that I really enjoy. This was like 10 years ago he said this, like every company is a software company, even if you're an e-commerce, even if you're an agency, where it was just like, there's so much software to use. That being really good at the software you use is really important for anyone. So even at an e-commerce company, there's like a hundred screens inside Seller Central. To different data points, different things to look at, the best e-commerce companies on Amazon are looking at them and incorporating that into their knowledge base, or they're paying someone to look at them for them. And at an agency, there's so many tools to use. A spreadsheet's a piece of software, like doing N-gram analysis in a spreadsheet. That's a software. So these days, AI image generation for product photography, VO3 for video imagery, Sora, like all of this stuff should be part of any e-commerce brand's stack. And if they're not doing it themselves, then ideally their agency or their team is incorporating These tools I have to imagine in 12 months from now, any creative based like that's driven by click through rate and engagement or conversion rate, like the one step deeper. It's just going to be dominated by people that have incorporated AI testing, AI split testing into their image. Like it's got to be a must do where it's like if you are sending paid media and it's more pronounced than paid media because every click you're paying for. So like every single click you pay for, if you can get a better click through rate, Amazon gives you a slight CPC discount. They don't want to push you up the hill. They'll take your money for sure if you bid more. But at the same time, if you get a better click-through rate than somebody else, all things being equal, you'll generally see you got more clicks for cheaper than your competition. Same thing with conversion rate. I think it's more discussed outside of Amazon, where it's like, oh, you got an A-B test. Your website, because if you can move from a 4% conversion rate to a 5% conversion rate, that's one better percentage point, but it's actually a 25% improvement. You're getting 25% more sales. I think that if you are an e-commerce brand and you're not incorporating this, you're going to be surpassed by people that do. Speaker 2: You're going to get left behind. You are. The world we're starting to live in now, being able to create some really good images on the fly, just And that's not really my type of brain, but I took a great deal of time to create this extensive SOP for setting the scene and setting the dialogue and the video and all these other little factors. You have to control all these little things. A long time ago, I want to say 2017 or so, I was starting my agency, and I had a friend who was running an agency. And he was all PPC only. I'm like, why would you not do your own optimization? Why? Why wouldn't you be trying to control your CPC on the other side? Why would you be pigeonholed to advertising? You know? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Advertising isn't the whole thing. You know, there's a whole thing and advertising is a small part of it, but a very important part of it. But, you know, you've got to be working on making things better everywhere you can. Speaker 1: Well said. I think we'll leave it there. Dan, thank you so much for coming on The PPC Den. I really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoyed our conversation in Austin, too. I enjoy our conversation every week in CORE. I always learn something when I talk to you. Even now, hearing you describe like your CVR sheet, I was just Thinking of that, what are things that you track on a regular basis? I'm trying to build my own organic rank PPC performance, search query, data, table. Super report. Speaker 2: I tried to build one. Super report. Yeah, you have search query, search for repression share, you got the placement, and then you have rank, and then I was trying to get all four of those into one document. Speaker 1: It's tricky. And then once you do, you have so much information. Then what do you do? What do you look for? Speaker 2: Decision fatigue. Speaker 1: Yeah, big time. Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show. By the way, I actually don't know this. What is the name of your agency? I feel like I just know you as Dan Head, the Amazon optimizer. Speaker 2: It's AMZElite. Speaker 1: I knew that. Okay, so I did know that. Speaker 2: Word of mouth has really been what spread my business. So I really haven't done a lot of marketing. Speaker 1: Yeah, I can tell that you really Care about the marketing that you do. It's like hyper apparent. And I'm really impressed that you're able to do that at scale as well, like with employees to be able to be so like everywhere in the marketing funnel for these brands. It's really, really cool. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Speaker 1: I admire it, for sure. Dan, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Speaker 2: Anytime. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, I'll see you here in a couple months. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Have a good one. Take care. And everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Now bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of rocky ones, but I've come through. We are the creepy suit and my friend. You two are the PPC dead. We're talking about Amazon. No time for medicals, cause we'll fix the game.