Using Product Opportunity Explorer to iterate and expand your product line

Using Product Opportunity Explorer to iterate and expand your product line Michael Erickson Facchin: I always ask people when they come on the show, like what has really been on your mind over the last month? And I'm excited to hear you say Product Opportunity Explorer because it's a tool that I use frequently, but I would, I am so excited to hear how you've been using it over the last month or so. Alrighty, Mike, on your LinkedIn, your mission is to never stop growing. And your motto is you are the opportunities you make. Can you expand on that? Mike Frekey: Oh, my God, this is such a good way to start. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, I mean, from my side, I think back in high school, I took like a random psych class. And one of the things we learned about was locus of control. And you can either have an internal locus of control where you take a lot of ownership of the outcomes in your life or an external locus of control, you find the external factors that are having a large impact. And I think obviously for everybody, the truth is that there's both internal and external factors. But I like to live with more of an internal locus of control. Wherever I can find an ownership, what are the things that I can personally do to drive an outcome, to make something happen, I want to make sure that I can say I've done everything I possibly can. And if things still don't work out, c'est la vie, I think more often than not, if you do that, if you take every opportunity that you can, then chances are things are going to work out really, really well for you. I think this is actually a really, really good thing to start with since we're going to be talking a lot about an opportunity explorer. Michael Erickson Facchin: Absolutely. That's why I grabbed it. Yes, we're going to be talking about Product Opportunity Explorer, which I'm very excited about. It's one of my favorite Tools in all of digital marketing, I would say, specifically on Amazon, it's great. This will be the third episode we've done on the topic. We've used, we've covered before using it as a sales driver two years ago. Last year we covered using it specific for PPC campaigns. And today we are going to dig into new aspects of the Product Opportunity Explorer. They constantly make updates to it, which is really cool. And in terms of, you know, internal versus external, Locus of Control. What a great topic for PPC in general, right? I have conversations with a lot of brand owners and it's very interesting to sort of tease out, hey, these are PPC factors that you can control in your PPC account. And these are actually external factors that influence the performance of your PPC. I always think about, you know, why couldn't you have a 1% ACoS? And most people understand that that is not achievable. And it's like, what are those external factors? And then what You know, we can't control those external factors, all of them. Maybe we can influence some of them, but there's sort of, there's things that you can change and things that you can change. So I think it's very apt to have this philosophy in digital marketing where there are so many things outside of your control, you know, that you can't control what that random competitor is doing, but maybe you can control what your product image looks like or how you're iterating or how you are strategizing about ad spend. So very apt topic. So Jumping in here to the meat of this episode, Product Opportunity Explorer. Like I mentioned, it's one of my favorite tools in all of digital marketing. Of course, on Amazon, it's such a huge tool. It is similar to, in case anyone out there has never used it, it is similar to like Amazon having like a Helium 10 or Jungle Scout baked into their platform. And it's interesting because it's real first party data from Amazon. Now, granted, Amazon classifies similar defining words You know, what would be the same thing is sometimes classified differently by Amazon based off where you're looking. So, you know, classic example is unit session percentage versus a conversion rate, right? Like Amazon has their own definitions depending on where you are. You know, there's some really cool things in there like search volume and search trends and a whole bunch of different stuff. But I don't want to spoil the episode here. Mike, I always ask people when they come on the show, like, what has really been on your mind over the last month? And I'm excited to hear you say Product Opportunity Explorer because it's a tool that I use frequently, but I am so excited to hear how you've been using it over the last month or so. So yeah, take it away. Dig it. Dig into it. Let's go. Mike Frekey: Heck yeah. So I think from my side, where I've had a lot of recent conversations, our clients coming to me asking, hey Mike, can we work together in finding out how to expand our catalog? What products are we not selling that we could be selling or should be selling? And what are products that we already have, but we should be upgrading and trying to make better? Obviously, I think part of this whole conversation is very much painted by if you're a seller, what is your lead time from getting a product idea to actually being able to sell it? Obviously, the faster that you can drive to that sort of MVP, get some minimum quantities to sell, That will help you actually take advantage of these trends because things do change on Amazon all the time. But I do find it to be a really helpful area just to take a look at the specific. This is a very helpful tool if you have. An idea or a hypothesis, where do you want to be selling? Again, either a product you already have or maybe a product a competitor has, or just a niche that you know, hey, I'm trying to buy something that looks like this and not finding it anywhere on Amazon. If you can start with any of those sort of starting points, then there's a lot of really good information within Product Opportunity Explorer for us to use. I think we're actually going to get to do something I haven't personally done on this show before. I know we've worked a couple of times together. I'm actually going to get to share my screen. We can take Product Opportunity Explorer together. Michael Erickson Facchin: Oh, yeah. And while you're doing that, I wanted to call it back to that quote from the beginning of the episode. It's like the market, meaning the people who you are trying to sell to, You cannot control their demands necessarily. You cannot get them to like certain things or dislike certain things. They're almost like a fixed thing. We unfortunately don't have brain control yet. We can't get them to want something, but we can learn what they want and then iterate on it. I think some of the best Brands that I work with are aware of this fact. They know that market demands change. They know that there's insight that they can glean from the market. It's almost like doing a focus group, right? These are things that are generally slow and expensive, but the results of that, like things that people like, things that people don't like, how should I expand my product line? How should I iterate on my product line? It's one of the Things that the most successful brands do where it's like, what are the focus groups telling me and how do I bob and weave to sort of help create a product? Exactly what they want. So we are here inside Product Opportunity Explorer. Take it away. Mike Frekey: Again, you can do searches in here for any particular niche or group of keywords. What I wanted to do to start with was take a category that is fairly ambiguous. It's very easy to say, I'm looking at garlic fillers and I'm going to go search garlic filler or garlic slicer and see what other competitors show up and what are the terms for that, but that's very specific to a single product. When we do a search like Mother's Day gift for mom, now we can get insight into how are people buying for a holiday where they don't necessarily know what type of product they want. So I have five different pages within Product Opportunity Explorer. We're not going to super deep dive all of them, but I think we wanted to show what is possible for you to use. So up front, we'll start with just what are the top products when people are trying to buy on Mother's Day gifts for mom? You have access to what sort of categories are people shopping in? What are the actual brands? What are the actual products? What price points? We can see in here the average selling price is more or less in that sort of like $10 to $25 range. So you probably want to make sure that as you're if this is a specific niche or category you're trying to break into maybe for the first time that you're taking note on where are customers already behaving by default. Not saying that you can't change consumer behavior, but it's a lot harder to. And I think you're more likely to run into an issue of, hey, I have this really great $75 product that I'm trying to push as a Mother's Day gift, when in actuality, most people aren't really looking to shop in that capacity. That's what you can learn through some of the product specific info. You can also get a sense on how strong of reviews are people going to be looking at. I have some categories I've looked at before, Michael. If you know the heated sock or heated glove space, at least historically, as long as I've worked with it, over the course of every single winter, your reviews will start out around like a four-ish star. You never see anybody with five-star or four-and-a-half-star visual, but you'll get maybe a four-star visual. And the longer you go through the cold winter season, Everybody's reviews just tank more and more and then you'll have people launch in the next year because there's really no great product that is truly like, hey, this is durable. This is at a good price point because heated clothing is just really hard to pull off. Wow. And so that's where I think it can also be helpful. What is the expectation of average reviews for this specific space I'm looking at? Because it's not just going to be, hey, if you don't have a five star, you're out of luck. I think there are a lot of instances in which specific categories, the meta, so to speak, is a four star visual or a three and a half star visual. So you want to take note of that too. When you go into the search terms of Product Opportunity Explorer, this is one of my favorite sections and I use this a lot for ads as well. I'm sure we've had conversations about how to use this specifically to research how are people searching that I then want to be targeting with my ads or how are people searching where I want to take all of these terms and put them on my listings. This is also just in In part, not always, but in part, a good way to understand what are people searching for where they can actually tell you as clearly as possible, this is the kind of product I want to buy. And in this case, it's obviously going to be a whole lot harder because pretty much everything is going to be mom plus gift. For some different capacity, there are a lot of instances in which people are specifically searching from daughter, from son, and okay, maybe I want to look at products that better convey that specific message where it's not just a gift that my mom would like, but this is a gift that a mother would like that they can directly connect to with their child. Actually, we're going to dive into some reasons where I think Maybe that's not the best way to go. It's really going to depend on what sort of product you have access to creating as well. But here you can also see what are those top three products for those terms. You can see that someone who's searching mom gifts from daughter might be buying a, seems like, yeah, pretty different products than if they're buying the music gift box from their son. So a little bit of insight you can glean just from what sort of products are people going to gravitate towards when they're searching for specific terms. You see personalized in here, but I don't see a lot of personalized. So this is probably an area where I'm not, even though I see the one term out here, I don't really want to lean in on personalized as a factor that I think I need to make. I would say Overall growth is a bit smaller as well on the personalized terms relative to a handful of these other items that are being searched for and total search volume only around 80k over the past year versus just gifts for mom from daughter 450,000 searches. So again, I want to use this to size my opportunities. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, there's so many interesting things on that screen that you were just on. I saw one term. I think it was cool thing for mom, believe it or not. Cool thing for mom. It's like in the middle of the screen here. 175,000 searches in the last year. And the growth of that search term, I've never seen it that high. A 300,000% increase in search volume. So it was like it went from barely being searched for whatever reason, 300,000 times more searched in the last 90 days than the previous 90 days. Cool thing for mom. I've said this maybe 100 times In my career, if not a thousand times in my career, Google put out a stat one time that said, like, a certain percentage of every search every day has never been searched before. So I think it's like 20% every day have just never been searched before. Like all the different iterations, you know, the random things that someone might search only one time on their computer. Google, in fact, used to do this thing where, like, if you were the first person to search something, it would tell you. At the aggregate level here, to see a search term that's pretty big, right, 175,000 times in a year, Just explode like that where probably all of those happened in the last 90 days. 330,000% increase in search volume. So again, Product Opportunity Explorer. So insightful. Mike Frekey: I would also say, at least from what I can tell, some of these are going to be a lot higher price point as well. I know the Renpho eye massagers are pretty penny, at least relative to the $10 to $25 range we were looking for on average too. That is really neat. I have to imagine that probably what happened here, cool gift for mom's birthday about six months ago or so became an auto-fill type of a term. And then because that one took off so much through the auto-fill, the algorithm ended up taking other cool plus mom type terms and turned that into an auto-fill as well. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, this is really interesting. Mike Frekey: So then another area that I think is cool. This one is brand new, or at least new as of the last few months, especially based on when this recording comes out. Purchase drivers, this is where Amazon is going to actually show you over the past year, what are the main features that drove a purchase versus what are the main features that drove someone to not purchase. Some of that might be due to a little bit of over saturation. Some of that might also actually could be just tied to some newness of products where if people are just gravitating towards a lot of I see aromatherapy, Shower, steamer, massager as some of the main categories that are leading to a very large lift in units being purchased. Michael Erickson Facchin: Huge demand. Very interesting. Mike Frekey: Sculpt and Shiatsu are not doing all too well. And one that I saw in here when I was looking earlier was that sentimentality or even Asian daughter gift. So even though daughter gift is a very highly searched term and we saw a handful of the individual terms being searched were daughter gift, we're actually not seeing that the purchases tied to an actual use case of like this has to be perceived as from my daughter versus just a nice gift. So again, that's a way that I want to use as much of this data to help me sort of tell the story what product do I want to be launching as possible. Michael Erickson Facchin: So would you go as far to say like in the actual product page itself, what's that first one, embody? Mike Frekey: Embody, yeah. Michael Erickson Facchin: I don't even know what that means. Mike Frekey: I have no idea. Or sculpt. Michael Erickson Facchin: So basically, how do you interpret that? Like if you're working with a client and you see these information on the right side, negative feature impact. Features of product in a niche that led to a negative impact on units sold. How do you interpret this? Mike Frekey: It's a really good question. And I think you're probably going to be able to say, you will see in this data, whatever you want to see in this data. That's the great slash awful thing about data is it lies a lot, even though it really has no bias itself, but we are biased creatures. I would probably use some of these areas. And again, I'm not, I'm going to skip over embody and sculpt because I'm not entirely sure what features that is tying to versus shiatsu. Okay, shiatsu massage, I get that. We actually see a handful of good massage products, but specifically shiatsu massage seems to not work or not resonate here. Where I would usually be reading this is probably not, oh, I want to avoid some of these features on my products. I might think that way, but that's not my gut instinct. My gut instinct is more so thinking I don't want to invest more in the features on this side at the expense of something else. So if I can Generally speaking, again, as long as you do it right and you do it well, I think more features over less generally works for most people shopping on Amazon. Yeah, you're always going to find someone who's more minimalist and just wants to, I'm buying something to do a thing, let it do the thing. I don't care about the bells and whistles. I have run into more instances where our product does a thing really well, but everybody does that same thing. I mean, you'll look at the, we just talked about Renpho, the Renpho iMassager. I know that space decently well, the vast majority of iMassagers that are at least selling and ranking well. Do both hot and cold massage in the same exact product. So if you tried to launch in that space and all you do is cold compress or all you do is heated massage, but you don't have the option to do both, it's going to be a lot harder for you to succeed when everyone else has multiple features that they can tie to. Michael Erickson Facchin: And it would tell you on the positive impact side, hot and cold on the positive, yeah. Mike Frekey: Correct. Or you might see like the individual lines, right? Like heated and cooling, both individual line items. This is one where I would probably say, let me research more about shower steamer. So I would ever want to end my research saying, okay, I looked at the Top drivers on Mother's Day products. Again, this is more to help get me the ideas on what sort of products might I want to design. And then once I have those ideas, you're going to get a lot more information looking at shower steamers while searching shower steamers than what you're learning about shower steamers while searching Mother's Day. So I consider this a Step one of research. And again, like the sort of research we're talking about, you can do a meaningful amount of learning in about an hour, hour and a half. We're not saying that this is a full-time job and being able to research one product, depending on how many products you want to launch. Okay, maybe you want to have someone where this is their full-time job. But if you're just, again, looking at what are the main areas in my product creation journey, so I can expand my catalog, this gives you a really good starting point that I would recommend you take instead of just foregoing this and just saying, I have a gut idea I'm going to power through and I'm not going to look at any other data associated with these products. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, that's always a tough situation where someone invents something without much market demand. Mike Frekey: Exactly. Michael Erickson Facchin: It's difficult to see. Mike Frekey: Now, these last two that I'll look at, Customer Review Insights and Returns, is a very similar sort of data set in here. So, Customer Review Insights, we're going to look at what are the specific products, specific features that lead to good reviews versus bad reviews, and then Returns, what are the specific features that lead to returns themselves. So again, I'm not over indexing on any one thing across the entirety of Product Opportunity Explorer, but I want to see what all of the data is telling me. So if we look at returns, for example, we can see that size is something that gets mentioned. And again, probably going to matter a whole lot more in certain products than others. But you want to make sure that you're just hitting on with an expectation. How are people actually caring about size? And you can also see over time how much that has played a really large impact. If, for argument's sake, you want to do this in June to plan for next year's Mother's Day, because I would assume again by the time you're actually watching this video or listening to us review this, if you're using this actually as a Mother's Day product research section, It's going to be way too late for you to get anything new in, but wait an extra month and then all of a sudden you'll see the actual, well, what were the top returned features in May? And now you can really get into the root of when we're as top of mind for Mother's Day gifts as possible. What are the things people didn't like? See, heating is also something in here where if you don't have a good heating element, and that seems to be something that I'm going to talk about the massagers again. If you don't have a good heating element, that's something that will be brought up for why someone might be returning a product. But then we can see a pretty similar version of this chart and what are all the top features that will lead to somebody leaving a positive review, that four or five stars. And we can do the same thing for the negative reviews. And Michael, I was, again, playing around with this earlier. There's something really, really cool for this specific niche that I found. So first you can see, hey, this makes a great gift. If someone just says this is a really good gift, then they're going to leave a review at a very high rate. This is saying that the top 25% of products in the niche get an extra one and a quarter star rating when their products are considered a good gift versus when gifts are not mentioned in reviews at all, which also indicates to me Assuming we don't see a very large negative number on the negative side when we look at it, that people really only care about mentioning this was a good gift when they like it, but that's not a factor that ends up being something that they talk about negatively. And so you can see how large of a star rating impact some of these things have, over half a star on the top two, over a quarter star on the next three. But what's cool about this, when we look at the negative topics, There's only really one type of search or type of feature that has any level of meaningful impact on star rating when people are leaving a review. That's durability. And even that is only a one-sixth of a star impact relative to if you just haven't really looked at anything. There are some niches where you really want to figure out what are people leaving negative reviews on and figure out, can I make that a positive? Can I actually solve this issue? This is one where I don't think there's really a ton of negative reviews, period. Again, at least relative to what sort of impact we're seeing from the positives. That also makes sense when we were on page one, looking at products, and pretty much every single product was listed as having a 4.7, 4.8, 4.9 star rating. Okay, that makes sense. But we're not seeing a whole lot of what are people not liking when they leave that negative review. I think if you're in a category where you see a that average review account might be closer to a 4.2, 4.3. I would expect to see a lot more negative topics that are making a large impact. And then I want to make sure that I'm at least am I doing as best as I can on those negatives to not make that something that will tank my product. I like that this is a lot of learning on just what should I avoid that other people have already learned for me that leads to negative reviews. Michael Erickson Facchin: So this is really interesting. And I'm curious, you know, I've never searched it. I never used the Product Opportunity Explorer in this way where you search a general word, right? I think these gift keywords are always so tricky because you don't really know what people are looking for. And this kind of tells you what people are looking for. So I thought that was really interesting. I'm curious to, you know, The product that pops into my head are music boxes, right? So imagine I sell music boxes and I want to iterate. I want to make my product better. I want to potentially think of more products to sell in the music boxes area. How would you use this tool? If we can do like a specific example for music box or music boxes, what is the data Tell us. Mike Frekey: First thing we'll do, we'll search for music box. And again, we'll take that as our phase one. We found music box items in this Mother's Day gift space. That's what planted the seed that we want to go further. Michael Erickson Facchin: This is exactly what happened, yeah. Mike Frekey: Exactly. So now we'll figure out, do we want to look as broad as possible at our largest niche, which is just music box? Maybe. We'll open that up. But then we can also just start to see what are the other top niches or top use cases that people have already for music box. The PPC Den is something that probably is going to be a very different kind of product. There's a lot of Christmas in here. There's a lot of ballerina and Nutcracker. I might want to look at what sort of price point are you trying to sell in? And again, maybe your answer is, well, Mike, you tell me, but I'm seeing our music box machine selling around $85 average price point versus our just standard music box, more of a $30. And I see most of the items in here are more $30 until you get into music box machine and then carousel at $90 price point. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, already this is super interesting because if I were selling music boxes right off the bat, do I have a Christmas one? Do I have one for toddlers? Do I have one for all these different... Do I have one for the Nutcracker? All of these are incredibly popular themes that I can pull on here. Ballerina music box. Mike Frekey: Really cool to me. So especially just knowing the average order values associated with things, I see Our MusicBox machine over the past year is making up two to two and a half times the amount of sales as just standard MusicBox. So there's a lot more revenue to be had within MusicBox machine, again, as long as I feel like I can create a product that that fits. So I would probably gear myself more towards, hey, there's there's more recent growth over here. We have a lower return rate. We have a higher AOV. This is an awesome category that I might want to get more involved in. Michael Erickson Facchin: I think I just realized something that it's actually not music box machine. It's a music boxing machine. So I think this is like something you punch. Yeah, I think I didn't realize that at first either. Mike Frekey: So first, now I'm realizing I had no idea that this was a product category. Michael Erickson Facchin: These are taken off, I guess. Mike Frekey: Yeah, absolutely taking off. So Interesting. Okay, so we're finding out some things already. Music boxing, apparently a thing. Now we'll go over into the standard music box. We can take a look at what are the top products. And it's interesting that already the number three top product just based on click count is a much higher price point than everything else. So $20, $15, $50. 26, 30. Okay, so there's going to be a range in here, but in that sort of $10 to $50 price tier level, I would be very hesitant. I see this one San Francisco music box company around a $90 selling price. But when I'm trying to think, what can I create with my manufacturers, I want to make sure that I can create a product that I can sell for under $50. If it's over $50, unless, again, you're trying to redefine a market, which is just a very challenging thing to do, if that's what you want to do, good on you. But understand when you're doing something, are you trying to redefine a market or are you trying to serve that existing need? And they say this existing need is looking for a $20 to $50 option. That's some of the initials that I'm thinking of. And potentially go into like, I'm very curious about this item because it just looks cool. If we go into this specific product, seeing this is a constellations rotating goddess. Michael Erickson Facchin: Wow. Mike Frekey: The zodiac gift looks very pretty. I bet there's probably going to be at least the 12 different options for when you were born. There's only one person selling this, which makes sense, or at least a specific unit. And now you can see all of the other niches that this product is actively selling in. This is a really cool way for me to figure out, again, if there's a specific product that I want to maybe emulate a bit off of, you get a better understanding of all of the different ways in which that product is selling. I would not have expected this to sell under Sailor Moon, for example, but hey, good on them. Michael Erickson Facchin: Greek mythology gifts. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting You know, I suppose I can also use that again. It only had 28 product clicks in that niche, but it's sort of, you know, imagining that were more, I can use that information to say, oh, like maybe I should add that to my product listing. Mike Frekey: Correct. Michael Erickson Facchin: Or potentially lean into it. Mike Frekey: That one has the highest growth in the last 30 days as well in terms of search. Right. Michael Erickson Facchin: We're looking for the opportunity to iterate and, you know, it's possible that could inspire some Greek mythology, mythological music box type gear. So again, it's like iterating on these ideas. Mike Frekey: We can do that same exact customer review insights review here as well. I'm curious if they have anything negative. Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah. What are people saying about What are some purchase drivers for? Mike Frekey: This is interesting. So that gifting note for the entire category that this sells in, this is usually an area where people are winning or at least leading to very positive reviews. But this has actually been a negative feature for this current item. And I'd love to better understand why. This is something where I might want to go into my own reviews and read the text itself. What is causing people, like I'll literally just search the word gift since I can feel this is tied to gifting purpose. I want to read every negative review on my list that specifically contains the word gift so I can understand why. And specifically, why is this bad for me when this is such an overwhelmingly positive factor for other people selling music boxes? Michael Erickson Facchin: Yeah, that is really interesting. And also I see up there, you know, poor battery life. So again, if I'm thinking about iterating, I'm going to be sure that all of my products have, you know, above market average battery life. Oh yeah, because that is a positive driver. Mike Frekey: Yeah, so battery life we can see was one person referenced this as being good for all of the batteries versus a negative topic based on their own incompetence in putting the batteries correctly, which I probably read this as saying might not actually be a product issue. I think you can take solace in knowing, hey, this is one person acknowledging they're bad at putting in batteries. Yeah, I think this is like a really fun way to go about doing product research that is both informative, but if you're a person like me, and Michael, I think you too, where you can really dive into rabbit holes, there's a lot digging you can do in here. Michael Erickson Facchin: It gives you a lot of information on the market, markets that are to the left and right. And again, it's just a fact that to survive on marketplaces, I think to survive on e-commerce in general, The idea that you need to number one, pay attention to trends is massive. You know, the sooner you can spot them, the better. And this tool does allow you to find some breakouts. So imagine we found that boxing machine, you know, and I'm sort of researching potentially new brands to launch or new niches to get into. It's like, Oh, like that, that, that is a massive breakout and it looks like it's still going up. Right. So it's like, where's the opportunity now? Timing can be a tricky thing, but this could help point you to breakouts and in addition to help you improve and iterate on your own product expansion. I'm very curious too, because my understanding, when has this come up for you in the sense of you're working on someone's PPC account? When do they ask you to do this? Do you suggest it? When does this come up on a day-to-day? Why were you motivated to jump into this in the last month? Mike Frekey: Yeah, so for me, I've had probably, I think, four different clients ask me specifically, Hey, Mike, can you help me figure out what new products we might want to launch? We say, hey, I'm mostly the ads guy. I can really talk to you about what's going on in ads, but let's figure this out together again. I think I'll toot my own horn and say I've benefited from working with a lot of smart people over my career. Back in my three years at Perch as head of marketing, even though I wasn't on a product launch team, I worked very closely with the product launch team. So, okay, what can we take from those experiences to help my clients expand their own catalog? And then we'll have those other instances where maybe we don't have that conversation, and I don't necessarily know what their research process was like, but it turns out, oh, no, we were missing a feature that seems to be more table stakes in this category, and we're not winning on price. It'd be one thing if you're missing a feature, but it's in order to help you win on price. But if you're going to try to be more expensive and not have all of the bells and whistles, that's really tough to make work. So those are some of the conversations we've been having recently. Michael Erickson Facchin: It's funny. I came to this tool recently because a customer had a very longstanding product on Amazon that did very well. You know, it's been on Amazon for like 10 years and over the last 12 months has declined. And we use the Product Opportunity Explorer to number one, determine like, are people searching for this less? Ultimately, we discovered that, hey, there have been competitors showing up that have pushed different price points and they have different features. The market analysis that we were able to do to give them, like, hey, look what this competitor is doing. They have a bigger click share than you. Why do they have a bigger click share than you? Is it something technical? Are we missing keywords that we're bidding on or should have in our listing? Let's look at product imagery from them. What kinds of features are they highlighting on their page to boost conversion rate? And we just came up with a litany of stuff that this was telling us about their market, so that not only could we iterate on additional products, but also iterate on the product page and the keyword strategy, both on page and in the PPC account. So that's how this came up for me in the last few weeks. It's just a fantastic tool. It's baked right inside Amazon. And I think that gives it a unique advantage for a lot of, you know, sellers because it's just sitting right there for you. My one demand, I would love And I don't know if you have any adjustments on how you would make this a little bit better, but I would love it if it had monthly search volume, potentially. Because they give you 360 days of search volume, and then other places they give you 90-day trends. But it's like, ah, just give me the monthly. I want to see the number by month. And that'd be really nice to have. Mike Frekey: I'm very much with you. That's where I tend to just say, I love Product Opportunity Explorer. It's one of my favorites, but that's why Brand Analytics ends up being my actual favorite because they just let you go a whole lot more granular with a lot of data. You have to be actually selling a product in order to view it, and that's the difference between the two. Product Opportunity Explorer is very limiting to it. One other neat thing for why this has come up for me recently It's actually on Vendor Central. They've added their own version of Product Opportunity Explorer. It's almost identical. A lot of the data itself directionally is about the same, but the big difference there is in addition to niches, you can actually just search product subcategories and then see what are the top search terms within that subcat as opposed to it being a pure niche level itself. That can give you a really good way to just learn a little bit more about how Amazon is defining their subcategories together. I'd say it's very neat. If you don't have access to Vendor Central, I don't necessarily think you're missing out on all too much. But also in the same token, if you are a vendor and you don't have access to Seller Central to look at this, the Vendor Central version I'd say is just as good. Michael Erickson Facchin: Awesome. Well, Mike, I think we've given the good people out there in Badger Nation plenty of things to go do into Product Opportunity Explorer. This has been the yearly update, yearly reminder that the Product Opportunity Explorer exists and you should be using it. And there's so much insight that you can grab on your existing products, how to iterate, how to expand, what to lean into, how to better inform your PPC and your Amazon SEO strategy. It's absolutely fantastic. Mike, it's a long, cold winter way up there. Massachusetts. So I hope you stay warm and that you hopefully are warmed by the the hot burning glow of all these fantastic sales that you're helping your clients get on Amazon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to have you back on the show in a couple of months. Thank you so much and everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Unknown Speaker: I've launched campaigns and picked keywords. I've got my bids, some placements too. I've made mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of problems. We are the people sitting like friends And we'll keep up the music You are the PPC Den. We talk about Amazon. No time for Medicoms, cause we fix the gambit of the world.