What Are 7 Overlooked Seller Central Tools? (Classic)

What Are 7 Overlooked Seller Central Tools? (Classic) Unknown Speaker: What's up, Badger Nation? Hold on to your hats because we're about to unleash a ferocious classic episode from the deep dark archives of The PPC Den podcast. This episode is guaranteed to set your Amazon PPC instincts on fire. Get ready to navigate the chaos, madness, and mayhem of Amazon advertising and unleash your inner badger. Speaker 1: What's going on, Vagination? Welcome to the world's first and longest running show all about Amazon PPC to make your Amazon advertising life a little bit easier and a little bit more profitable. I'm really excited today because we have a great show with Mike Danford from Adverio, where we basically do a tour of seven tools inside Seller Central. That if you click on them and you haven't clicked on them before, you will surely get value almost immediately. So really, really actionable stuff here. New tools in Seller Central to help you better think about and manage your ad campaigns. I had a lot of fun. I learned some things. Have a good one. Let's jump into the episode. Unknown Speaker: I've launched campaigns and picked keywords. I've got my bids, set placements too. Now that we say. I've made a few. I've had my share of rock and roll. Hello. The PPC Den, my friends. And we'll keep on... The PPC Time for medicals, cause we fixed the game baby. Speaker 1: Mike, welcome to the show. Welcome to the Badger Den. How are you doing today? Speaker 2: I'm great. Thanks so much for having me today. Speaker 1: You know, fun fact, and I didn't tell you this, I've never told you this, but the Adverio accounts That you guys manage are so big that when you signed up for AdBadger, we embarked on probably a month-long sprint to upgrade our servers just to make everything faster. So, I thank you for pushing us. It was awesome. You guys seem like you're doing amazing things over there at Adverio. So, thank you for coming on board. Speaker 2: No, I definitely appreciate it. I know it was a little rough in the beginning, hitting you with the large accounts, but you definitely stepped up and we appreciate that. Speaker 1: So for anyone who, so this is your first time on The PPC Den podcast. Speaker 2: Correct. Speaker 1: For anyone who doesn't know who you are, why don't you introduce yourself to the crowd? Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, so I'm Mike Danford, CSO for Adverio. I've been in the Amazon space since 2010. Started launching our brand and then realized that my most expensive The cost was paying someone to do the advertising for me. I realized it was just kind of numbers and kind of went from there. And then others started seeing the results and asked if I'd do it for them. And then obviously the rest is history from there. Speaker 1: A CSO, for anyone who doesn't know, What does that stand for and what do you do on a day-to-day basis? Speaker 2: Great question. So, Chief Strategy Officer, there's multiple ways to go with that. Obviously, for the organization, it's strategic partnerships, et cetera, like that, but I also like to get into the weeds on the strategy for sponsored ads, DSP, et cetera, and organizational strategy as well. I have my hands on a lot of different things. I also get into the tech side as well, so I love that, but just trying to make sure everyone's going in the same direction and we're all aligned. Speaker 1: And tell me about the rhino mascot. Obviously, I'm a big fan of companies with animal-based mascots. Tell me how the Adverio Rhino came to be. Speaker 2: That's more for my partner, Alden, to speak on. Obviously, you can see we have a Rhino there. It's my daughter's, Winston. She gave it to me. And then just kind of like, hey, we need something that's strong, burly. And then the AI generation that we have now with the personified Rhino has just been so fun for the team. So we love it. Speaker 1: That's awesome. It's good to have. It's nice because you get a lot of I'm the CEO of The Animals Branding right on board. So it's great. And I'm so excited to have you on the show because we've been talking for a couple of months now, and it's been really great. And I love the way that you think about things and approach things. You have a really cool topic for today, which is really, you know, we're going to sort of do Fast and Furious here. We're going to cover seven parts of Seller Central To be honest, when I look at these seven parts, it's really like if the homework for today for anyone listening is to literally just go into these seven tools, click on them, and you will immediately be inspired to take action. You'll find almost immediate value in a lot of cases. Some of these we've talked before about, but it's definitely a constant reminder. I just I was just talking to a rather successful brand and they didn't have one of these that we're going to touch on. I'm just like, oh, just add that. That'll be really easy for you to find value. Another one of these, we know someone who didn't, again, another successful brand didn't have one of these, turned them on and immediately found value in the first two weeks. So I feel like those things are so It's always so nice when you're able to do that. So thank you for bringing these seven things that people can get value for. And with that, let's jump into the first one. Alrighty, Mike. The first one, Search Query Performance. This is probably every Amazon marketer who I know, probably favorite thing in the last two years. I know that I personally love it because Amazon gives you search volume, total amount of impressions, tells you your brands or your products impressions, all the way down the funnel to purchases, like how many purchases came from this amount of search volume and what your brand's share was. Those are some of my favorite reasons, but there's a big problem with the Search Query Performance Report, which is it's really nice to look at, but it's really hard to take it to the next level. So tell me what you love about the Search Query Performance Report and what problems you experience with it and how you guys and how you recommend people navigate this stuff. Speaker 2: Absolutely. The biggest thing is a lot of these tools that Amazon releases, a lot of information, it's really hard to digest. You kind of have to bolt on some kind of way to manipulate it and spin it up and try to get the insights from it. If you're willing to do that, you can really go to the next level. So with that, our biggest takeaway or gain is looking at the total addressable market through the report. And then there's a way that we work out to understand what the potential revenue bump is if we were to push and pull certain search queries, both from optimizing the listing, putting in images, et cetera. And then what's the quickest levers that we can pull on the advertising side, especially when we were able to marry the advertising data to it. There's just so much there. And then there's a couple other use cases, obviously, there's been three or four podcasts with you that do that, so I won't beat that horse there, but it also helps us, it's one of our main things we do for due diligence, taking on a brand, helps us understand where they're at, because we can get into price and elasticity as well, and kind of like understand, are they already doing well? What's the quick leverage we can do here? We have like one, two, and three phases, how long will it take? And then one of the most common questions we get, it's kind of around forecasting. It's like, hey, how much can I grow? And then obviously the second part of that is how much is it going to cost me to grow and is this sustainable, right? So that's our real goal, is to try to understand those in that order. I know you're the latest podcast, but Destin kind of mentioned forecasting. He's dead since 2020. I'm with her. It's definitely more challenging, but this definitely helps us to understand kind of the quick wins and where we can go. Like she mentioned, it's only one part of the puzzle, so try to keep that in mind. Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of things that I'll also comment on it is I think it's very true that I remember the first time they came out with the Search Query Performance and I'm showing it to an Amazon seller and their mind was blown. They're like, oh my goodness, I had no idea this thing existed. This was over, I mean, I think it's been out for over two years now. And then I think that just a couple of months ago, maybe two, three months ago, I showed it to another Amazon seller and their mind was blown. So I think it's so easy. We have a lot of high level optimizers on this show. We all know it. We all love it. We all are able to download it and manipulate and do all these cool things with it. But I think that it's also very hard to get into. It's like what you exactly said. I love it because you can download it. You can say, well, this is my share of all of these searches. And then you can begin to ask questions like, well, what if I increase my share on these And we're going to be talking a little bit about how we can help families of keywords a little bit. How much am I spending on it? How much am I spending on these keywords right now? Imagine if I were to spend a little bit more and get a few more orders, how would my market share change? But in order to get that, you need to download it and you need to do stuff with it. Spreadsheets where you download a bunch and you put it in there and it gives you a spreadsheet. Good friend, friend of the show, Mansoor from Incrementum Digital, also has something like that where you download it, you put it in a spreadsheet. But what I think is cool, you also have, also yours has the best name. Mansoor has one called the SUPA, SUPA? I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I scratched my head. I've actually never asked him what it stands for, but it's just like a Search Query Performance Analyzer, but I really like the name of your guys' tool, which is QueryIQ, Q-R-Y-I-Q. I was like, what is this query? I see query there, IQ, QueryIQ. So like, tell me with Search Query Performance data, what I want to focus on is like another lens to analyze this. So like, what do you guys do with Search Query Performance? What do you do with this report? Speaker 2: This is a lot of use cases. We have several brands that are larger. So I know when Mena was on here, he was talking about like, why would you ever use the brand report? As you open, you know, we work with large accounts, high SKU accounts, maybe 100,000 SKUs. So we have to go with the brand level. And the big thing is looking at the comprehensive report. It gives us a couple thousand extra terms sometimes depending on the brand and how it is. But it really shows us that that Pareto of across, you know, multiple products at the same time, what to go after. And we obviously figure out which products it is and which ASIN is on the back end based on advertising, et cetera. But what we love to do is look at, we have several brands that have some pretty large tent poles, random tent poles that, you know, it's like they're only like the end of one. And then you have others. We just had St. Patrick's Day for a brand. And what we did, we looked at this SQP from last year during the ramp up four to six weeks prior to the event. And we're like, hey, we could have really pushed this unit. So I'll give you an example. They sold like 40 or 50 units. And we took the top 10 that we knew, we just had better conversion, click-through, everything, et cetera, from Build a Dedicated Campaign. It sold over 500 units over the same timeframe versus the prior year, just by taking that data. So we do the same thing with helping us with our SEO and indexing is say, hey, for the seasonal terms, let's put these in here, whether it be in the backend, rotating alt text, anything of that nature. So it helps us just juice it for that seasonality. That's probably like our biggest takeaway that may be a little less known. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. So, you actually have a freebie for everyone to go and download. There'll be a link in the description there. Again, everyone go collect these, all these different search query performance analyzers. They're so, so, so valuable. So, thanks for bringing it. And with that, let's jump to the second one. Alrighty, this second one, Skew Economics. Talk to us about this. Speaker 2: All right. So this has been available at a individual skew level for quite a while. I'm not exactly sure when it came out, but they more recently released it where it's aggregated, where you can kind of look at a holistic view of your catalog. Again, as we've mentioned, we have large catalogs, so it's really nice to have these all in the same one screen. It's pretty insightful for a lot of sellers to see how many different fees, there's a fee stack from Amazon, from selling it to the referral to fulfilling it to the returns and everything. So it's really interesting to see that. A lot of brands, we develop our own tools called the Profit Pulse System, which is very similar to that. We take all that data and put it together and we create heat maps based on looking at the top five or so categories, ROI, margin, total revenues, ad sales, and organic. What that really helps us do is look at Okay, this ASIN is our top seller, but it's our number 10 spender. Is that what we want? Is that good or bad? Or, hey, this is our number 10 seller, but it's our number one spender. So it really helps us to understand and recalibrate if we're pushing the ad spend to the right place. A lot of brands don't, they focus on margin and tacos and relay costs and a few other things. But when we pull in, you know, net profit for all feeds divided by COGS is kind of how we get into ROI. It really helps them understand, again, we work with large catalogs, let's kill the dead weight based on this. And we can increase our efficiency within a couple of weeks just by showing them this, especially whenever they have some issues or trying to understand or can easily shift things around. And there's a ton of uses for this, but I highly recommend doing it. It's not the easiest to find right now. Do we walk you through how to find it or do it? Yeah, so you'll go into your inventory. Section, you can do by manage all inventory. You have to click on the actual SKU link. Then when you pull it up about two-thirds of the way down, there's a table there that'll show you the SKU economics for that ASIN or that SKU thing that you select. Now right below it, there's a new prompt that says SKU economics, like dashboard or report. Click that and it'll pull everything again for you. Speaker 1: So this is really cool because I know that a lot of people use third-party tools to basically try to extract a lot of this information, which is, You know, returned items, any Amazon fees, and there are several different kinds of Amazon fees. But really at the end of the day, you want to know How much did I spend on something? And then at the end of the day, like what was that profit at the end of all of that, right? Which is actually, it's a very different metric than like total ACOS or at cost of total sales. It's a very different metric. I'm curious when you have, tell me a little bit about the frequency of when you look at that. Like, do you look at that maybe on like a monthly cadence? And if so, like the last time you did this, What were the action items from it, from like a real account? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So it's updated daily in our dashboard so you can pull it at any time. Generally, it's one of the, you know, when our kickoff call, our first coming in, sometimes during our audit, depending on where we're at in the cycle, what they're looking for. And it's really, it's kind of a monthly basis. Hey, let's move some spin around. Let's do some different things here. Let's understand what's going on. And then obviously with these new Amazon fees, there's a whole range you can get into as well with the low inventory, long term storage, etc. So it helps us understand, you know, moving prioritization, etc. And then it's pretty impactful with us on, you know, we have a couple of brands that, I mean, one brand launched this like 200 or 300 SKUs a month. We have another one that does a couple dozen a month. And it really helps us to, hey, take this amount of spend and keep it on your, you know, the ones that are more mature in a product life cycle. And then let's reallocate this spend here. And then, you know, look at the level is really, we love, I know, Green, Alyssa Green, she has a good report too. I think I've seen where she's looking at ad conversion versus total conversion rate. We love that as well. To understand if the push is worth, you know, the squeeze is worth, the juice is worth the squeeze, right? Is the advertising improving the organic or the conversion rate? So there's a lot of ways of looking at that for sure. Speaker 1: Super valuable. Thank you for that. Let's jump into the third one. All right, this one's definitely one of my favorites, the Product Opportunity Explorer. So give people a quick overview of what the Product Opportunity Explorer is first. Speaker 2: There's lots of ways. Most people probably are familiar with Helium 10 third-party tool. It's very similar to that, where you can go in and look at quote-unquote niches based on search terms, ASINs or above. You can pull in your brand, look at other information. It gives you a lot of metrics across the top ASINs or search results for that. It's really, really insightful. I mean, just going in and looking at it can be overwhelming for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you started with, you know, the first wave of Amazon tools were all sort of market niche explorers, generally from the angle of like, go launch a product, here's how to go find a good niche, right? And that's evolved a lot over the years to now where now Amazon has a lot of that information available to you, where they're telling you things like search volume, and if the search volume has gone up or down. Let's talk a little bit about what they define as a niche and what the search terms are of that niche and which ones lead to the most conversions and who's the top converting one. Niche is, which it generally defines as, I think it gives you 20 keywords every time. So like it says, this is a niche of 20 keywords. These are the top sellers for these niches. This is how much each term is, for each search term is how much it's searched. So I love this tool. I'll tell you the way that I use it a lot. I use it for like market growth or market contraction. So if I would, the general feedback loop is like, If a advertising campaign shrinks, maybe revenue goes down, I sort of go over to the Product Opportunity Explorer and then try to identify like, are there more, because it'll tell you. It'll tell you how many people have launched in the last 90 days. So are we dealing with a lot more competitors? The Product Opportunity Explorer can tell you that first party. It'll tell you the average review rating and then you can compare your product versus there. It'll tell you if the overall search volume has gone down. So it's like, okay, maybe we don't need to panic if the overall search volume has gone down. Maybe we're out of season or something like that. I also like to look at it and like, who is the number one clicked product for this niche, for these keywords? And like, let me see what they got. And like, what I can learn, do a little competitive analysis. So I really enjoy this tool. And I think this is just scratching the surface, right? I think that when you put together some of this search volume and competitors, you can really begin to do a lot more with it. So what are some of the ways that you incorporate it in your workflow? Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you definitely nailed several of our use cases for us. I want to iterate, you know, this is definitely a 1P data set. So I love that versus what we used to have. Again, it's not always reliable, but you have to take it for what it is. From Amazon, it's all relatively right. But you mentioned like our biggest uses are getting into the customer review insights and the returns is really insightful because they usually work hand in hand, especially on the negative sentiment side. You get a lot of returns and you can kind of see that come through in the reviews and it can kind of help you change your product or understand what the opportunities are from there. And the list goes on. We have several brands that are launching a lot, kind of trendy, like those tentpoles again. So this really helps to understand a recency bias. Say, hey, my product's been on there for two or three years longer than the top seller. Why is it? Well, they're tapping into that recency bias, that fad, if you will, or whatever's popular. It could be a color, a style, a size, semantics in the product, whatever it may be. So it really helps you to find those trends directly on the platform. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. So if you haven't checked out the Product Opportunity Explorer, click around. I absolutely love it. Hey y'all, it's Mike here. I hope you're enjoying the episode. One tool that we didn't mention in the interview was actually AdBadger. I know it's not a Seller Central tool, but it's a tool that a lot of sellers use to better think about, manage, and optimize their Amazon advertising campaigns. For example, we have our Search Term Ngram Analyzer, which will help you clean up all those search terms that you look at. You're like, this only has one or two clicks. Like, what do I do with this thing? We'll be able to analyze and aggregate information for you, allowing you to easily just click, click, click, pause, or click, click, click, maybe promote. Maybe you wanted to keep it a little bit more. You can do day parting where you can bid up and down. So you can actually see when your products make the most sales and you can go ahead and take action on that. So I want to give it a 20% boost here because this is where the bulk of my orders come from. And on the weekends, in the middle of the night, I barely get any sales. So I'm going to reduce my bids 10%. So you can do really cool stuff like that. Anyway, if you want to check it out, we have a link in the description where you can maybe watch a video, take a tour, or talk to somebody on the team about what it might look like for you to jump into the Badger Den as a software customer. Anyway, have a good one. Let's get back to the show. The market basket analysis. I'm really actually very curious on your perspective on it because I know you work with a lot of clients with very high skew counts. So tell me a little bit about how you guys use the, well, first of all, tell us what the market basket analysis is. And then how you guys actually work it into your workflow. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, it's Amazon telling you what the other two ASINs are purchased with your ASIN that is purchased. And there are ways to look at, you know, your own branded ASINs, like multiple purchases of your brands, and also your competitors as well. So that's the two views that we look at. Speaker 1: So when does this come up? Like, when are you sitting at your computer like, oh, I better go check this out in the market basket report? Speaker 2: Absolutely. So we do it first, we bring an account on, especially a brand that's like, hey, we want to know where our next product is, or we're trying to figure out what to do, etc. So it's pretty wild what you can find in here. You know, obviously on the PDP or the product detail page, you can see we're frequently bought together. But that rotates around and that's, you know, got some bias from Amazon where this will actually show you. It's pretty common that we'll go in and we'll find products. Again, I mentioned we look at what other ASINs in our catalog are they purchasing? We give them large ASIN skew counts. And then competitors. So it's like, hey, what is frequently bought together of our own brand? Can we put those in bundles? Can we put those together? Why are they separate? Can we parent them together? How can we join those and make the cart size larger? Because, you know, merchandising on Amazon, you don't want to have to click around for a lot. And the other part is, you know, a use case we just had for a new brand that came on. This was awesome. They were selling smudge ticks. And we go in and we run the market basket analysis for them, and we show them one of their top sellers, and it was number three. 59% of the time that product was purchased, they were purchasing a Palo Santo type stick. I didn't know what that was. I'm not familiar with that space. And they weren't aware of it either. Guess what they offer now? Palo Santo stick. And it more than doubled their cart size for that product. They were able to actually increase the cart size and the individual price and combined price. It's really awesome. Speaker 1: I just want to confirm if I missed that. Are you saying that they used that as market research and began to develop their own Palo Santo stick? Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: Wow. Right on. So that's really cool. I was going to say, is another use case where you look at what's being purchased in combination with your product and then you go and you actively target that product with different kinds of advertising so that you appear as a sponsored placement on that product page for that other product? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, cross-sell, complements, supplements, all that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Speaker 1: Right. I love it when, I love it anytime things like this happen where it's just like, because I think a lot about campaign structure. How do we advertise? How do we group the things that we advertise? And you have branded traffic and competitor branded traffic and you have your head keywords, which are maybe one or two words long. You have your long tail keywords. What I love about this, it's another category to target, which is go to the Market Basket Analysis Report, click on it, see other things that people are buying when they buy your product and go advertise on that so that when people see that, they see yours, these people are more likely to buy these things together. Easy, right? That's like a layup type event. So, I love that. So, more homework for people. We're giving people so much homework. This is definitely one piece of homework. Go to the Market Basket report. Look at what other people buy from you and either use that as new product ideation or go advertise on it or both. Do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's jump to number five. Alrighty, the Brand Reputation Report. I know this is something everyone is concerned about. What's the reputation of my brand? This is actually one I have not used. So tell me a little bit about the Brand Reputation Report. Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's not actually a report per se. It's just kind of a service that we offer, Brand Reputation. So I can't remember exactly when Amazon released this, but it's always been a struggle of, hey, who left a negative review? How can I help them other than doing it just on the listing itself? So Amazon has a way on the back end under the brand customer review section where if they give a critical review, three stars or less, you have two options. You can do an instant refund or you can contact them if they haven't opted out with buyer-seller messaging. So we have an automated process for that, depending on the product, the cost, et cetera. Depending on the star rating as well as do we do an instant refund and then follow up with them or do we follow, you know, kind of ask out why the illegal review, especially if you can read the review, get some more information and figure out if it's, hey, we need a refund and a replacement or what was in this, et cetera. Was it due to the shipping, which we don't have any control over? You know, that also kind of bleeds into the feedback, the seller feedback as well. Speaker 1: So the workflow here is basically when a review comes in, that is, Not good, right? What do you define as not good? Are you doing this to every single review that is not five? Are you doing it three and lower? Speaker 2: So in Amazon, you can only respond or have that feature if it's a three star or less. You can't connect to the seller if it's a four or five star. And then for each brand, it comes down to cogs, comes down to like review ratio or negative review ratio, where they're at, et cetera. If we're trying to repair a review, we're a little more aggressive. If it's not really impacting anything, we just kind of go from there. But it's usually one, two or three star. We have different SLAs or SOPs for that, depending on what we want to do for the brand. Speaker 1: So how impactful is this? So, you know, I'm looking at an account right now. I see a three star and it, you know, I see it. What would be the action items that you recommend people take when this happens? Speaker 2: Well first, the best thing is timing. So you want to do it as quick as possible. That review's been sitting there for three, four, five months. You can kind of, I can't remember the exact look back. It's either 180 days. It's kind of a lost cause. You can still go in, et cetera. A lot of times sellers don't know how to do a refund or they didn't do a refund or they missed the refund window, but you can authorize it, et cetera. So you can engage with them. It's really up to how much interface or how much you want to be from a customer service side. It's really, each brand has a different philosophy on all of it, for sure. Speaker 1: Do you ever see it, I guess, what is the hit rate? What is the success rate here? So if people were to start incorporating this, what would they maybe expect to happen? What's the realistic expectation here? Speaker 2: So there's multiple instances. One, it's, you know, Getting the review changed or improved, updated. They may still retain the 1, 2, or 3 star, but they'll put an update. You know, hey, product wasn't as expected, but the customer service was awesome. So they'll either just add that or they'll change it and lift. You know, we don't have the exact number because it's different by category. Some brands, we have a 70 to 80% hit rate where we'll have them change it. Largely because, similar to the market basket analysis, where we're like, hey, they purchased this flavor and it didn't quite hit with them. And we know that based on our audiences and code works that people who like this flavor also like this flavor. So we'll send them a refund and a sample pack of the other flavors as well. Or it's a size thing. If we have a lot of apparel brands where it's like, hey, Yeah, we know, you know, it's like, you can just swap them out or out for free, the replacement, etc. It really depends on how aggressive you want to be. Speaker 1: And this is kind of a rhetorical question, because I think I know the answer. But like what you just described, you know, taking time to look at this, taking time to manage and try to triage the situation, sending a sample pack, doing things like that, that comes with a cost, right? And the cost of doing that versus the cost of having a product that has a three-star rating, you know, where the product star rating is low or three and a half stars, like, I think most people would take the cost of triaging the review, dealing with it, trying to do something for them to get it reversed, as opposed to letting a product, you know, have a bad star rating. Would you generally see that as the case? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. You know, you were talking about Monsoor earlier. I think he just posted yesterday or the day before about his supplement brand. And how you launched and I think it's packaging. The dosing was a little off. We had a similar problem. We lost like a food torch a few years ago and we didn't show the image like you have to put the fuel in the torch upside down. We had it inverted. And so just little things like that so you can follow up and say, hey, flip over your torch or hey, here's the size and update the FAQs or put responses in the reviews. Hey, there's nothing wrong. Here's the updated sample size or serving size, sorry. So very impactful for that and catch it really quick. Speaker 1: Right. And it also sounds like you have the bonus of like really good, you know, there are review insights and product opportunity explorer, but like for your own product, it sounds like really good analysis to know, like you should be talking to customers, right? You're like, you should be hearing this out. So that makes total sense. Also, brand reviews. Let's jump into number six. All right, this is one of my favorites from the last year. I've been having quite a good time with these. I know that a lot of clients are brand tailored promotions and brand tailored coupons. So in case anyone out there doesn't know what these are, let's define this. What are they? Speaker 2: So it's obviously different cohorts. It's kind of like an email campaign or a potential coupon email campaign inside Amazon. That's how we kind of word it. You know, you have like people who have abandoned your cart. You have people who are following your brand. You have high-spin customers. You have random customers. And there's a few other cohorts as well. It allows you to give them a special promotion coupon. Now they have two different options for you. And when they're searching your product or you're in their page, you'll see it. And it's very specific to them. It's where you're not giving it out to the masses. You're only giving it to that specific cohort. Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say these are, I would say brand tailored promotions, I would say are so easy and straightforward and effective. I feel like everyone should be using them. Would you agree? Speaker 2: Absolutely. So few do, you know, unfortunately. Speaker 1: You know, there's so many tabs, so many tabs. I literally feel like if there's an Amazon seller who just starts clicking around Seller Central, you'll see something and be like, hmm, I should probably do that. So that's brand tailored promotions, which is really cool. I'm sorry, yeah, brand tailored coupons. How about brand promotions? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's a little bit of kind of a little bit of overlap. So what we're talking about there was the promotions and the coupons. Admittedly, this is a more recent feature that I'm not as polished on. My team sent me over some stuff here. It looks like we have an at-risk, Then we still have some brand cart abandoners. Admittedly, I'm not 100% sure what the difference is. I'm not sure how it looks. So I don't want to dig in too much more on that. Sorry. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I've done this one quite a bit with a brand I'm working with. The things that we found most effective were cart abandoners. So you can create a promotion just for people who abandon the cart. You can also create a promotion for repeat customers. So when you create this, it'll tell you the audience size. So like for this particular brand that I'm helping with, you know, they have 7,000 people who in the last 90 days, and we turned this on about two weeks ago, and we had 31 redemptions on it, which is pretty nice for this account size. So I like that component that you're able to, you know, instead of having a coupon that's the same for everyone, you have one that's specific that you can sort of toggle and tier for different groups of people. And it's also cool because you can then track it. You can actually see who's using these things. So it's like brand followers, my top brand. Another one I found effective was actually running a brand teller promotion for top tier customers. That's the second most redeemed one. People that buy from you a lot, they would love another reason to buy from you for sure. So that's awesome. And then you also have a connection here in the notes about Amazon posts. Speaker 2: Yeah. So obviously one of the cohorts here is brand followers. So when we take over a brand, you know, we really push for their storefront because we want to sponsor brands and getting them in the actual storefront, you know, so for Amazon posts as well. Because once they're in your storefront, there's no competition on your actual storefront. It is yours. You own it. And you can get more of like a web design there instead of being forced to do the square peg that Amazon requires you to put on there with the same flow as everyone else. So what we do is our number one thing, every person we communicate with, we go to their storefront, look at their header in the storefront and say, hey, you need to put a call to action here with an arrow pointing down to the follow plus button in your storefront, because that's how you increase that cohort. Anytime you release a new product or you push out a new Amazon post, they can get notifications for that on the back end if you set that up. And having the increased followers is another organic campaign you don't have to pay for. It's also helping you build that high spinners and that top tier as well. So it kind of really starts overflowing with all of that as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And also you get more real estate on your product listings when you scroll down. I know on desktop, you see another vertical row of your posts. And I know they're even more prominent on mobile. I had a question about The type of social posts that a brand should post on their Amazon store feed. So, how similar or different should it be from like the brand's Instagram feed? Or maybe they're posting things like TikTok style videos. Maybe they're posting just product photos. Maybe they're posting user-generated content. So, like, you know, the typical things that an e-commerce brand can publish How does that vary? Like how different should an Instagram feed be or a TikTok feed be from the feed from an Amazon? Speaker 2: Well, I would say less is more here. Make it easier first. I mean, kind of split test and see what works on the platform for your followers and your engagement. You know, at a minimum, you know, in the beginning, don't be overly concerned with the format. Get that minimum, I think it's 10 or so before you can start having those additional placements on your product detail pages, et cetera. So at least get the 10 out there. And then kind of work on the flow. If you're already posting daily, take that content, repurpose it just like it is, and so it fits into the format for Amazon. And then try other formats in there. Look at your different kind of formats, UGC, et cetera, and see what engages. It's really up to you. You have to split test that. There's no one size fits all. Speaker 1: Some brands that I've noticed, their Amazon posts feed is a lot more commercial than their Instagram feed or maybe their Instagram feed might feature something like a story of a user who uses it, where maybe it takes too much time to dig in and look at, whereas on their Amazon posts feed, they'll just have how the product is used. It's a lot of how the product is used, how the product is used, here's a product. Speaker 2: Yeah. Lifestyle. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Right. I'm curious how that evolves over time. Like what is going to be the most effective thing? Speaker 2: I think it kind of depends on what the brand's persona one, you know, what they're, who they're going after and what they want to depict their brand as and what, you know, What the demographic like, how they interact with it as well. That's another thing, I plan demographics as well on your images, anytime you start putting in people and lifestyle, et cetera. Again, it comes down to, you know, what are you willing to polish? Are you willing to be more professional and commercial brand? Whereas the other platforms, you can't do that just because of the type of followership there. And maybe you can try both, it really depends. But again, we try to keep on, don't, Stray from what you know works on other platforms first. Try that and then you can play around with it. Speaker 1: Right on. Speaker 2: Just check the box. Speaker 1: Alrighty, last but not least, this is another one I haven't personally used, Creator Connections. So, I think every e-commerce brand, you know, if you're developing the product or you're working on the brand, you're normally sitting behind a computer like doing all this stuff, right? Maybe you're going in your garage and building the product And then there's a whole other class. There's a whole other industry of people who are using things, right? It's like the home shopping network has evolved on social media with creators, content creators. So talk to us about what Creator Connections is and how it normally comes up in a conversation. Speaker 2: Absolutely. So I would say it's Amazon's compliant influencer marketing. You're actually working with them inside of the Seller Central platform under the advertising side, obviously. And you're going in and you have access to, you can create campaigns and the whole thing is about incentivizing them to create posts and it creates the external traffic, which Amazon is really rewarding the last year or so, especially for newer products, et cetera. So it's just influencer marketing, but inside of the Amazon ecosystem. Speaker 1: So is it an actual, I've actually never clicked on it, but is it an actual interface where you can find creators for your brand? And then, you know, creators have their creator portal. They log in, they say, Hey, I'm a creator. Here's my stuff that I do. The brand shows up and it's like, Hey, I'm this brand. Let me find someone who's going to be a good creator for me. Is it like a matchmaking site almost? Speaker 2: Very much. It's not as advanced or mature as some of the other 3P platforms, obviously. Amazon wants to control it as they always do. I want to make sure you limit that. But basically, you go out and you create your campaign, put it out there, and you can put incentives and discounts and your commissions, if you will, based on that and how long you put a budget of how much based on the referral traffic that they have. I think they're starting to increase rigging and you can fish more for them and you like to do more of the matchmaking where you're actually going out and get more outreach as opposed to just blasting out your campaign and seeing if anybody picks it up. But it's definitely evolving. It's great to see. Again, it's all about checking that box. It's something Amazon's doing. They're going to give you a reward and you have these links that stay in, like backlinks, if you will, to your listing. And the brands love it as well. Speaker 1: So, I know that I talk to a lot of sellers that are just like, ah, how do I find these people? How do I negotiate deals with them? Like, what does it look like? Do I have to pay them 10 grand for three posts? You know, like, it can get really complicated. So, it's cool to hear that they're building a tool right inside Amazon for people to get started with this and use it. Like, it sounds great. I would almost say, what kind of brands have you seen using this? Speaker 2: Pretty much everything. And the engagement is different. It depends on the product. It depends on seasonality. And, you know, we're trying different percentages of what we've really seen. I think the biggest thing, because we're a third party, UGC and Influencer as well. And it's all about that virality. And basically, you have to be kind of aggressive and more generous in the beginning. And as people see that more people are opting in or promoting that product, you have more people come in and it's usually cheaper. Your commission can drop on the second, third tier that come through. Sometimes, you know, it's got to be 50, 60% to get someone to move just based on the price of the product because they get a percentage of commission from that. If I'm correct, I don't think you can incentivize them outside the commission for the product. Speaker 1: Got it. So, yeah, I love that for so many brands that I know that, you know, I'm thinking of a lot of solopreneurs that, you know, see influencer marketing as something incredibly challenging to maintain and get started with. Like, how do I get started? So, hopefully people can take action there. That's really neat. So, we covered seven things today. We covered Search Query Performance, The Skew Economics, Product Opportunity Explorer, Market Basket Analysis, Brand Reputation, Brand Tailored Promotions, and Creator Connections. Let's say there's a seller listening to the show and they've never done any of these things. What would be the first thing that you would recommend for them to do? Speaker 2: Ooh. It's going to come down to the size of the catalog. I mean, the first thing we do with any brand that we interact with is our query IQ, looking for that search query performance. That's usually the quickest win. That's the painkiller, if you will. Speaker 1: Yeah. I probably agree. Having good search analytics on what is being searched for your product or your brand, understanding where you fit in, gives you everything from like total market size based off search. It gives you your place in it. It gives you your market share. It gives you opportunity for where you can, what levers to push on, gives you a value to optimize your listing for the most relevant, powerful keywords. Like it gives you a lot. And I think a lot of technical marketers would begin there. How about a different question? Let's say someone feels comfortable with the technical side of thing. So like they feel like they've, you know, they've listened to the PPC Den podcast for a while. They know about the Search Query Performance report. And after that, what's the next place they should go to? Speaker 2: You know, I would say the lightest lift is going to be that brand reputation, getting into that customer reviews. Again, do that, engage with them. I can't, I think it's like less than, One or 2% of our sellers are really actively doing that. We'll go in and we'll see a queue of the negative reviews, get rid of those. It's so cost effective for you to do it. It helps. And it's another way to engage with the brand customers. Speaker 1: I love it. Last question. You've got a bookshelf behind you. What's a book on that bookshelf that you would recommend people listen to? Speaker 2: It's not actually on the bookshelf right now. I'm a big fan of Mike Michalowicz. He's one of my favorites. Speaker 1: Profit First? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that one's up there as well. But I think his latest one or second most recent one is Get Different. So you'll see a lot of my blog content that I actually leverage some of his ideation and he is so fun to read and it's so fast. But it's also just like telling you to break the mold, don't be the noise, how to be the purple rhino in the room, if you will, amongst a bunch of other gray rhinos, that kind of thing. So that'd be my go-to right now. Speaker 1: Right on. Well, I'm happy I asked because I didn't know that he came out with another book and it was called Get Different. Speaker 2: Get Different. I think his latest is Fixed Next. It's actually behind me. Those are my current books I'm reading right now. Speaker 1: Right on. Speaker 2: Yeah. Awesome. Speaker 1: Well, this is great. I've only read Profit First. I probably read Profit First two or three times when I was a couple of years ago. So yes, get different. Right on. Thank you, Mike. I'm always looking for new recommendations. Well, Mike, what's the rest of the year look like for you, do you think, in the world of Amazon? What are you most excited about coming down the pipeline? Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great question. You know, for me, my role has changed here at Averio. I am cranking out tons of content. So that's really where my vision is right now. It's my recency bias, if you will. So it's really exciting for me to get my voice out there, working on publishing a book as well. So that's kind of my next big, very audacious goal, if you will. Speaker 1: Right on. Well, I look forward to it. I'm excited by it. If someone wanted to, well, we have links in the description to, we'll include your LinkedIn. We'll include a link to some of the freebies that you mentioned here. But just in case anyone wants to get in touch with you, how should they get in touch with you? Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously LinkedIn, but specific to The PPC Den, it'd just be at vario.io forward slash PPC Den. We'll have some stuff for you. Speaker 1: Right on. Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hope to have you again. Speaker 2: Likewise. See you. Speaker 1: Bye-bye.