Advertising 2020 Tips for Amazon Seller Central #29

speaker 0:   0:00
What can you do to get better at advertising a cost? Keywords bidding, discovery, research, data gathering, all kinds of things I'm gonna talk about today on the my Amazon guy podcasts. My name is Stephen Pope, and I am the founder of my Amazon guy. So as an agency, we are continually trying to improve our own internal processes. We want to get better at advertising better at the core functions that makes selling on Amazon profitable for our clients. And you was an Amazon seller. Listening to this, I'm going to give you a series of questions today to think of and mull over to spark some ideas on what you could be doing Maur on your advertising efforts on your Amazon account to see if we can spark a question that will make some improvements. So Kobe 19 or Corona virus Absolutely still impacting how you should think about advertising right now. Um so Well, briefly touch base on that. So specifically, if you are predominantly an f b A cellar today and you have run out of stock where you can't ship back in, you probably are focused on getting merchant fulfilled listings up or alternative shipping methods in place, and one of the fundamental biggest mistakes that a lot of people might make is they forget toe add Merchant fulfilled listings into their advertising. So that's the question. What's the first question I have on my list is does is every skew on your catalog currently in advertising? Because if it's not, that would be the first starting point to fix your advertising and make some improvements. Now let's say you got 1000 products in your catalog. Clearly, you're not gonna advertise all 1000 but do you have your top 80% of your revenue covered? Um, and if you've made any new skews on the account, the ads do not automatically transfer overs. Advertising is done at this skew level, not the ace and level. And for those that are asking, what's the difference? Ah, and a sin is the catalog detail page, and you could have unlimited skews that link to that a sin, and you might have a skew for a different fulfillment method. Maybe you got one for merchant fulfilled. Maybe have one for F B. A. Generally speaking, you probably don't need more than two skews per ace and But maybe you had to create a duplicate skew to solve the data issue. That's a very common reason. So that is the first question. Is every product currently being advertised appropriately? And that's a fundamental question that you be surprised might be missed on occasion? Um, so that's that's the 1st 1 The second is, Are there any stock out concerns? Because if there is, that could impact how much you're gonna want to be spending on ads right now. So specifically, if if you know you're going to stock out in seven days from now and you can't restock it, you probably should pause your advertising on that. Skew almost entirely. You're going to want to slow down. The sales effort recovers much margin, perhaps raise your prices on it, although if you raise more than 10% Amazon might accuse you of price gouging, which ah, in some regards a little silly, because if you're trying to prevent a stock out, you get penalized for stocking out by Amazon. So if they don't allow you to raise your prices, that's kind of a double edged sword there. Ah, but it is what it is. So try and prevent those stock outs right now, which are a big topic. Do to Cove in 19. And if you can switch over from F B A. T m a thin to avoid a stock out, you absolutely should. Now way did that for dozens of clients. And we found out that a lot of clients margins simply don't work with With merchant fulfilled. Maybe they're item costs two or three exes. Muchas. It costs a ship merchant fulfilled as it did with F B A. And so they were between a rock and a hard place, and we had to kind of flip back to F B A. So margins didn't check out on MFN. But, ah, you may want to pause advertising on select skews to avoid stock outs, keep them in stock as long as possible, raise your prices, so make sure all products are advertised and make sure they're gonna be in stock. Because if they're not in stock, you might want to pause your advertising. All right, next question. I you know, And by the way, we came up with this list of questions as a group on a sink that I do with my agency on a near daily basis. We sync up and just talk about what we're observing because we got access to more than 60 active clients right now and we see trends and we think about him and and so we're trying to. We're trying to take our advertising game to the next level, and there's all kinds of tricks and tips and hacks out there, but sometimes implementing them. It's the difference between understanding theory and understanding the practical application of said theory. All right, so next question are the key products in the account that deal 80% of the sales. Have they been focused with the advertising efforts? So do they have all the key campaigns in place? There's a lot of different campaign structures today, very different than it was, say, a year ago, right? You've got sponsored products, which is your bread and butter. But inside of sponsored products, there's all kinds of new ways to target on new campaigns. You should be building fixed bid campaigns because there's no historical data. Instead of doing bit up and down, you may have a reason to do bit adjustments for top of search versus trying to show up on a detail page. Those are questions you should ask yourself. Do I want to be at the top of search? Pay a premium to do so on my top product for top keywords? Most likely, yes, not for the whole catalog, but on that couple of key products that you have. You want to defend that territory to the death, make it so the competitors can never enter the market space and and and manage it that way. Ah, do you have offensive campaigns in place where you're targeting your competitor? Product? A seance. And and that's a very specific segment, a type of campaign. Are you advertising in search for your competitors? Brand names. Very easy to set up that campaign, probably one of the easiest campaigns to set up and manage. You literally just make a campaign with your top products and target competitors, brand names and some of the lowest. A cost comes in off that Ah, yes, you can do that. That's totally white hat. By the way, no black or gray hat tactics will be in discussed in this podcast. Nor do we use that in any you know we don't use. We only use white hat at my Amazon guy. Just put it that way. Um, so if you hear it on today's podcast, it's totally kosher with Amazon policy to advertise on competitors names you're just you just can't use ah, trademark term in your listing. That's that's where you'll get in trouble. So don't. Don't put your competitors names in your listing unless you can claim it's fair use in some official study or some kind. But for the most part, you'll get a trademark take down at some point the future. It's not worth it. Defense of campaigns This is, Ah, very lesser known strategy. We don't we don't use this on every account. We use it selectively when we think it makes sense. But basically, that's when you advertise on your own products. And you do this because there's a product row of sponsored products within Amazons Detail Page. And instead of seeing competitors products, you see your own there. It does not work in every category. Beauty is probably the one category we use it frequently in, because somebody who buys Maschera is gonna buy your face makeup or your wash or whatever else and, um, although the A plus Constant can have a product read where you link between things. Sometimes it makes more sense. Thio also advertise a product road, So defense of campaigns. Uh, there's now sponsored brands or headline ads these air higher in the funnel. Um, lower. They have a lower propensity to convert people. More curiosity clicks higher in the funnel eso brand awareness. I do those types of campaigns very, very sparingly, but there are some new advertising techniques. One is specifically called a custom mobile image, and we have done extensive roll out on that in the past seven days. It's a brand new feature and allows you to advertise something on a mobile phone and take up half the screen. It's incredibly large for the amount of retail space that you get. And so that's definitely one I would roll out in a heartbeat on your best sellers, because this is the most real estate you could ever advertise on Amazon ever before, and it replaces kind of some bulky, not so attractive headline ads. One of the biggest questions we get on headline ads or sponsor brands is where should you land them? For the most part, we choose to not land them on the on the brand store page, we instead land them on a product search list page on. And that's because, ah, the stores don't convert very well stores. Air built really well for brand awareness. They're not built for landing pages now. There are exceptions to that. If you really segment out your store very well, you could have a sub page that's built like a landing page. But for the most part, we don't think they convert as well and recommend just going to a search landing page. Ahh! Finally, there's category targeting and product targeting eso category targeting you, you advertise against um So let's say you sell a wine glass like I do for Monster my side hustle brand where I test things. Then you could target anybody buying a wine glass and you could put a 15 cent bid in place and you'd be surprised how much traffic you get. Low cost and it does convert with an appropriate costs, So getting category targeting in place is also very beneficial. And finally, the new ah newest ad format type is called product display. Uh, technically, this real estate used to exist on Vendor Central, but it's brand new to cellar Central, and, uh, we find it to be, um, hit or miss, so it's not necessarily gonna guarantee to work, but it's additional real estate you can advertise on, and ah would recommend checking it out. So do you have all of the best products in ads? And you have all of the ad targeting types in place. Next question. Are the ads segmented enough? So sometimes, if you get a large catalog, especially, you need a lot more segmentation? Should you have multiple manual, non brand keyword campaigns? Most likely, yes. Um, you know, especially if you got more than eight products in the catalog or different. You know, the more drastically different your products are and different categories you are, the more segmentation is gonna be required, right? So if your entire catalog can be advertising on the same key words, then you don't need that segmentation. But if But if you're selling a mallet and you're selling the widgets and you're selling a beauty cream, those air clearly very, very different types of key word, you're gonna be hitting, and each one of those products needs its own segment of campaigns and multiple campaigns for different purposes. We often will segment out brand campaigns from from from non brand keywords, because the A cost is always better on Brand because the higher intent for purchase is on brand keywords. And we like to know how we're really doing in the non brand keywords, especially we don't like to hide behind the brand search terms. That's probably one of the biggest things that most agencies don't talk about is the ah. They like to rope in Brandon on brand keywords together instead of just, you know, owning the different A costs. But in my opinion, it's it's better to segment those out. You should know how you're doing on non brand keywords. And so what do I mean by non brand keywords I'm talking about? UH, went when you search for a brand name like monster, that's a brand keyword. But if you search for a funny wine glass, that's a non brand keyword, and those should be segmented from each other because one is gonna perform way better than the other, the brand term will perform better. Um, next question. Are are your campaign's running out of budgets may seem like a simple one, but man, if your campaigns are running out of budget, you need to do one of two things. Raise your your campaign budgets or, ah, lower your bids so your ads create more clicks for that same budget. So you may need to create some dedicated campaigns with your best keywords in them, so that those never, ever run out of had a budget. Ah, we have, ah, lot of different clients desires on how how to do advertising. So we have some clients that their rigid and they want do not spend a penny more than two grand a month on acts or whatever it might be. We have other clients. They're like Sky's limit. Stay under 20% costs. Uh, it's it's a lot easier to manage the latter than the former, because rigid budgets makes is a lot harder to predict results and harder to predict. Ah ah, how to make your bid adjustments but is totally doable and create portfolios. If you don't know what a portfolio is, you probably don't need one. But the more campaigns you have on the account that more likely than a portfolio can help you organize yourself. And if you're running out of budget on on some campaigns, you probably need a segment more or raise budgets. Probably both s. So that's something to check out. Ah, one of the questions that we posed as a group today we decided that most likely is not something we want to act on, but a lot of, Ah, a lot of people that advertise on Amazon. They like to break out their campaigns into broad phrase and exact match campaigns. I think that that's a really good beginner technique, but I don't think it's something that's necessary or scalable or or that's gonna You're not gonna get better performance from that technique. In my opinion, um, in some instances you might see broad outperform exacting phrase, so I don't see a point in and and and segmenting it in that format what I would I would say it's better to segment it in best and make sure your best key words that always perform have dedicated budget, right? And so in some instances, that might mean three broad to phrase and 10 different exact keywords. So, you know, segmenting it out by exact phrase and broad doesn't necessarily correlate. So where should you spend your best money in the best places? So instead, I recommend segmenting by best keywords, which could be any kind of combination of exact phrase and brought. But it is it's great beginners techniques. So if you're listening to this and you know you've spent less than $1000 adds to your name when you first build out your ads, exact phrase and broad campaigns definitely better than not doing it that way. Um, so don't run out of budgets. And, ah, if you need to go ask your team if they if we should increase budget or get the approvals, you need to make that happen at your own company. New listings. Have you got your new skews with dedicated ad budget and dedicated campaign structure? In the 1st 2 weeks of a product launching, there's a honeymoon period, and if you don't get as much maximize sale traction during that time period, you're doing it wrong. You should spend three or four X what you're comfortable doing normally on a new product in the 1st 2 to 4 weeks because every sale you get in ads will lead to three organic sales, especially during that time period. You're gonna gain a lot of new cured rankings. So you know, I'm a marketer. I'm biased. I think you should always be advertising. Um, but I think especially this is important for new listings. New listings should have ah lot of attention when it comes to traffic generation and conversion elements. Make sure those new listings have got some reviews on them. Sign up for the early reviewer program, get fined in place, give away some product and and bum a couple reviews from friends if you have to. Within reason, um and and then make sure you got a plus constant place. If you don't have a plus content today, go out and hire a designer that does that. That is a service my Amazon guy offers. Go to my Amazon guy dot com. Click on our service is we sell a plus content for 500 bucks. It's one of the best service is that we offer for a low cost, um and and we really can't be beat on that service like nobody can beat my Amazon guy in a plus concept. Were that good at it. People forget to put keywords behind the all text of photos. They don't maximize the keyword language. We do all of those things. And we've got good design aesthetics, like we've got good designers and house and technicians, and most people get the design right. They don't get the technicians part correct. The technical elements of a plus designed cannot emphasize that enough. But if you don't have brand registry, you need to get that in place first. Because brand registry allows certain types of advertisements, you can't get access to your sponsor display or sponsor brands without brand registries. So make sure all new listings are in ads and make sure you've got all the converting elements in place so that when you do run those ads, they're gonna convert. Um, do you have all the new ad type set up? You know, I mentioned them on the call already, Uh, brand custom image display product targeting. It seems like Amazon is rolling out new features every other week within the ecosystem, and you need to have your ear to the ground and be checking those sections, or you need to pay somebody to do that on your behalf, right? If if you've never had a consultant look at your ad set up. It is absolutely worth hiring somebody to go in and take a gander or do an audit and give you some recommendations. It will pay for itself within 30 days. Almost guaranteed unless you're a master at it already. But even masters at advertising, they're gonna miss stuff or they're not gonna be seeing, um, the trends that they might If they're only managing one account, right, You're gonna miss the trends on on what happens to the category of what happens to other other other accounts. Um, so make sure you've got, uh, all the new adds up to dates and and and set him up and test them. Most of the most of the new ad techniques are typically gonna flop, right. So every three add techniques to get rolled out. One's gonna do great ones gonna do. Okay. And one's gonna flop. And and sometimes it surprises me that that some work on some clients and some don't on others. Right? So, like offensive product targeting, we generally, you know, only like, 20% of our clients do well on that ad type. But when it does work, it's works really freaking well. So, like, we have a client in lighting and their best campaigns are offensively targeting other lighting fixtures, and I would not have predicted that. So be sure. Test test, test all of these things. Speaking of testing, have you run any A be testing? Ah, and and and true A be testing. You have everything equal and test one different element. If you start a new campaign to test against the old campaign, the old campaign will almost always win. And that's because of the past data on the old campaign. So you're better off a be testing at the ad group level within the same campaign because the data will have more likely to be fairer between the two elements. So what are some things you get A B tests? Well, if you're if you're talking sponsored brands, you can maybe test creative text in the headline Add location where you land them, um, and bids. You could even a B test bits on sponsored products. You could test a B tests, bid functionality types right, so up and down versus down on lee or fix bid you could. You could test which bid function works the best for you. You could also test top of search versus product page. Right? Those were two different real estate locations. Search typically performs best, but not always. So you could do all the same keywords, but test bid modifiers against each other and see what performs best. Um, not a whole lot. You can maybe test on sponsor products. Usually it's related to bid functionality because there is no creative A be testing like you can't test blue versus red, for example. There are no good detail Page a be testing tools outside of the Amazon ecosystem within the A B within the Amazon ecosystem, a plus constant just rolled out with the new eh be testing, um, function for a plus Constant enhance brain content. And that is absolutely something to recommend testing. So a little off topic for ads. But you should be a be testing your A plus content as well and something you get a B tests you could test. Ah, long text versus short text. More images versus less images. You could test the arrangement of the modules. Maybe the product great being higher with comparison of products is better for your products because it leads to hire a O. V. Maybe having a lifestyle image performs better. Or maybe having a different type of lifestyle image performs better. Ah, or a close up. You know, maybe having a close up of a face does better. So those are all kinds of things you can maybe test on a plus contents. And, um, it's very, very product specific. So a lot of trains that we've seen don't necessarily correlate across categories. Um, have you test? So next question ad placement percentage adjusted. Should it be in place, right, slick on the top three or five key words that are most important, Perform well, maybe creating a new campaign for the best Q words with a percentage bid modifier on top of search with, say, 100% bid up might be good play for him, not something I would do on every key word ever. But, um, when you're trying to defend that territory, bidding up on some of those top key words might be important. Ah, next question. Do you have enough display category targeting set up so you could target multiple categories with your products, even, even. Ah, unrelated category types could also be targeted. So if you're selling camping supplies, right, you. So let's say you sell a sleeping bag. Maybe you should be targeting, uh, other prepper categories right now. You know, maybe you should be targeting golden silver coins. Right? Silver stackers. Liketo like to be a prepper. Um, so targeting those categories because you'll get those cursory cells. Hey, man, I'm I'm prepping for the end of world, so I need to make sure I have both a shelter and some some money to carry with me or, ah, monetary exchange of some kind and currency if if the U. S dollar fails, you know, obviously prepping is a giant rabbit hole to go down. But But the point I'm trying to make with that analogy is that there could be some unusual category targeting that you haven't thought of doing that may be worth doing. Um, so do you have enough category targeting in place are the CP sees in a good place? CBC is an acronym for cost per click. You know, is your average cost per click under a dollar? Is it above $3. Well, depends on your category. Things that are high in and and clicks there typically beauty category technology products and consumables such as men supplements. Those are typically the highest A cost categories. Ah, so how do you compare against the industry averages? Have you checked? Have you checked and ask that question? Have you asked two or three of your competitors with their average A cost is or their average CPCS sell X and other tools out there do have some by some charts where they do express like here's the average in each category. That's definitely worth checking out. How is your A costs? Are you advertising to a place where you're not leaving sales on the table? What do I mean by that is, if you're not allowing your a cost to go high enough, which people generally don't like high a cross, it means that you're leaving sales on the table. Generally speaking, you should allow your advertising to go break even, and the reason for that is for every three advertising sales you make, I'm sorry. For every advertising sell you make, you're gonna get three organic. So if you break even on advertising that's going to allow your organic keyword rankings to greatly improve. So it's really important to allow for that and and having ah high a cost may not necessarily be a bad thing if it allows youto convert organically but at bare minimum, I would at least go break even on a cost. Generally speaking, I think 10% of your gross sales should be put back into ads to allow for growth of the account. If you want to maintain your account, do 7% of gross sales. Anything less than that, you're going to see attrition or you're going to shrink the account. Do you have enough offensive ace and targeting in place? Right. So do you have negations in place? Do you have enough negative keywords that have been optimized into the account? Negative keywords is the most missed easiest thing to do because you can go into the search term report and look up. Um, bad performing keywords. Maybe you sell an adult product and the and and keywords like baby or showing up, and you could negate the word baby and save 3% a cost just by negating that very easy technique to do one of the fastest things you could do today to improve your cost performances. Go add negative keywords. And especially ad Adam is a phrase match, not necessarily as an exact because phrase match negatives will allow it orations that for anything that shows up for said, baby key word on that adult products s We talked about portfolios archiving. Okay, so, uh, is your is your campaign structure clean? Have you archived all of your bad campaigns or Polish campaigns? You never plan to resurface. I'd say this is probably a lower priority, which is kind of wise to the bottom of my list here. But sometimes it makes sense to take 1/2 hour and go clean up your structure because you might go back and review and say, Hey, we used to test this, but we probably should retest that. And you might see something that used to do that you should do again. Um, finally, do you have, uh, have you done some really big data mining? So this is Ah, this is a really technical one to dio, but you can go download a bulk update file, um, go into your advertising campaign structure and go to reports and and download the check box Replacement data on each campaign. Hit the spreadsheet for download and go, Dana, My data mine this thing. Usually when you when you find on YouTube those guys with their hacks Are there things to do? Thio improve ads immediately. They're usually data mining techniques that are used to make that happen. Or Mac rose based on downloading those those those templates sheets. I'm not saying there's any specific hack that works well, generally the very isolated techniques. But if you just go simply download a bunch of data, you're gonna find something. I guarantee it. I can't predict what you're going to find. You might find something at the macro level where you're like, Oh, we need to do more of this kind of strategy. Or you might find something that the micro level were like. Man, this one ace and is super underperforming. What can we do about that? So go data mine that tool. I would say that out of 100 people I've talked to that do advertising. Maybe three people of that 100 had ever downloaded that template files, So it's a very rare thing to do. But if you want to get exceptional and add management, that's definitely something you need to d'oh. So finally, a plug for my Amazon guide. We We are exceptional advertising managers. And if you have listened to this full podcast, hopefully we've proven that to you. And if you don't have my Amazon guy on your payroll today Ah, and you want us to help you manage your advertising. Goto my Amazon guy dot com today and, you know, requests a quote from us. We will go in there and find out how we think we can do and improve your advertising, and we'll send you lots of updates on how, um, power making changes we track our bids we track are changes we we make. We make improvements on your account and you're gonna be able to basically look at our high level rollup report and it's gonna show in continual improvement in session counts, clicks, a costs and overall revenue. Everything we do boils down to two things, improve traffic and improve conversion rate. And advertising is very much the art in the science of making the right product show up to the right person at the right. Time for the right price. And we exemplify that at my Amazon guys. So if you haven't decided to hire a consultant today, it's not as expensive as you might think. Um, and we pay for ourselves by day 60 day 90 on average. Go higher. My Amazon guy today my name again was Stephen Pope. I'm the founder of my Amazon guy. Thank you for listening to our advertising podcast.