#221 – PPC Talk – Amazon Updates, PPC Strategies, Prestozon Integration, and more

It seems that Amazon Pay per Click advertising has quickly transitioned from just one more way to make prospective buyers aware of your product, to an integral part of selling on Amazon. Because of that, we’re spending more time to make sure that e-commerce sellers are able to get the best information related to Amazon’s powerful advertising platform.

That’s why, on this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes back Vince Montero for another PPC Talk. Vince was recently promoted to the post of Senior Product Marketing Manager. Still, he’s intimately involved with the day-to-day refinement of Helium 10’s exciting new ADS PPC tool.

Today, Vince will go over the latest PPC strategies and discuss recent updates to Amazon’s advertising platform. He also spends time detailing a sponsored display case study, talks about how to get started with Helium 10’s ADS, and hints at exciting changes to come.

In episode 221 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vince discuss:

• 01:45 – The Acquisition of Prestozon Leads to a New Title for Vince
• 03:20 – TACoS or ROAS?
• 07:10 – Looking Past Hourly Micro-Data
• 09:30 – Advertising is Branding
• 10:40 – How Can Helium 10 Platinum Members Take Advantage of ADS?
• 16:45 – What’s the Best Way to Get Started with ADS?
• 19:20 – New Freedom Ticket PPC Modules are Out
• 21:25 – Coming Up, an Amazon Sponsored Video Guest  
• 23:35 – Sponsored Display Case Study Initiatives   
• 26:10 – ADS Allows Users to Incorporate Existing Campaigns
• 28:30 – Working with Different Campaign Types
• 32:10 – Coming Soon, an Updated Campaign Builder  
• 34:20 – Exciting ADS Changes!  
• 38:30 – TACoS Tuesday is Available on Replay Now

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’ve got Vince back with another episode of PPC Talk. He’s going to give us the latest strategies, the latest updates to Amazon advertising platform, as well as Helium 10 ADS. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

BradleySutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS, free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’ve got another episode of what we call the PPC talk episodes. And for that, we’re inviting back as show Vince. It’s been a minute since you’ve been on the show. How’s it going?

Vince: Yeah, it’s been a couple of months. Going well, doing good over here.

BradleySutton: Excellent. Excellent. Now, in the last, actually a bit more than a couple, I think it’s been like probably about five, six months since you’ve been on here because Ben did the last one and then we had a couple guests on, so yeah, it’s been a while. It’s been a while.

Vince: Well, whenever you launch your sponsored display, test campaigns are first one, that’ll tell you when I was the last time.

BradleySutton: Yeah, that’s right. That’s been awhile. It’s been awhile now. Because it’s been a while, we’ve got some updates that we want to let everybody know about, but just what about you, first of all, you kind of have a new role here. Are we allowed to tell people that yet, Vince?

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely something that I’m excited about. I’m kind of still in the same product realm, as our listeners will know. I basically came on board to Helium 10 to help build our PPC management tool ads. But now with the acquisition of Prestozon, we have a lot more talent. We have more engineers, more resources and things. And right now they’re working really hard on doing that integration of the Prestozon platform and the ads platform, which we acquire process on last fall for those that might not remember. And so it’s allowed me to focus more on the marketing side of things, um, which I’ve always enjoyed. I’ve done quite a few webinars with Amazon advertising. I’ve done just lots of different marketing initiatives. I do PPC, AMA trainings on a bi-weekly basis now. So it’s just allowing me to focus more on the marketing side. So my official role now has just gone from Product Manager to a Senior Product Marketing Manager. But I am still definitely involved with the day-to-day of the ads operations. So you’re not those that are using the tool currently.

BradleySutton: Cool, cool. Cool. All right. Now, before we get into what’s new with ads and things like that, let’s just talk about PPC in general first. It seems like, every three, four or five months, there’s something new or something trending or something that’s buzzing in the industry, or Amazon releases a new metric, or a new report or something like from– you have a lot of interaction with, with agencies and a lot of users out there, Amazon sellers. Have you noticed any, any trends in the last five, six months, like, is there some kind of new report or any kind of new PPC that’s out there?

Vince: No. One thing that Amazon did was introduced and heavily pushed the row as a metric. That’s something that is new since last we spoke, and for listeners that are used to the ACoS, it’s really ACoS was– is an Amazon metric. And so ROAS is kind of standard in the advertising industry. And so they just they’re really pushing that to kind of replace ACoS. And if to understand, it’s just really the flip side of ACoS. It’s just, you’re ACoS is PPC spend divided by a PPC sales, ACoS is PPC or sorry. It’s PPC sales divided by PPC spend. So, it’s kind of confused some users because the ACoS column kind of went away as a default, actually wrote an article about it, God. Yeah, that was a while ago, a blog post about that and the distinction between the two. So, as far as anything else trending really, the sponsored display kind of that’s been growing, since we last spoke and you first launch your campaigns in that arena, they’ve only expanded the capabilities of sponsored display. There’s a lot more product placements, ad placements for that particular ad unit. If you’re using product targeting, they did capabilities where you can actually add like a headline, like a title and an image so much like a sponsored brand ad. You can now do that with sponsored display. If users do that, that opens up really kind of prime positions that were currently only available to DSP. And they’ve also expanded their audiences capability where you can target, not just users, at least in the US for now, not just users that have viewed your profile or show your product pages. But also users that have not viewed your product pages of your competitors have viewed categories similar to your product, or maybe complementary products that are similar to your product that can be used for audiences’ remarketing efforts.

BradleySutton: Okay. Now, going back to that first thing you said, I mean, do you personally– have you used or know any people who use that ROAS, like, how would that be beneficial to somebody, or would you say, you know what, the Vince suggestion is go ahead and hide that column and just stick to the ACoS. And then of course, if you’re using ads, stick to the TACoS.

Vince: Yeah. That’s the only really problematic area is, we talk a lot about TACoS here. So if ACoS goes away, then that’s going to be– we’re going to have to find a new word to talk about total ACoS, which is our TACoS metric. Yeah, what I suggest for users is, if it’s confusing, just kind of hide ROAS, and leave the ACoS on, it’s kind of just retraining your brain, like a high ACoS is bad, but a high ROAS is good. So I kind of feel like Amazon just made the shift again, that ROAS as a standard metric name across the advertising industry. And so it’s more commonly known perhaps, maybe some of their bigger brands or agencies pushed Amazon to make that the primary name for that type of metric. But it’s kind of just retraining the brain kind of like, that high is good versus high being bad. It’s kind of like a half glass empty versus half full, that kind of mentality. At least that’s what I proposed in the blog post that I wrote about it a few months ago when they first introduced that metric.

BradleySutton: Cool, cool. Now one thing I just wanted to bring up, because I still see it coming up here and there, but I see people in Facebook groups sometimes posts like, Oh my goodness. My ACoS is super bad. Like at certain times of day or man, I’m just wasting money or I’m doing great at certain times a day. Now I remember you explained it before. Why is that an erroneous stance to take like remind everybody, why you can’t just like look at your day to day information, and see what’s coming through and refresh your screen and then make decisions based on that.

Vince: Sure. Yeah. Until the time comes where we can actually get maybe sales attribution data broken down by hour. And then also then be able to attribute that the hours might be different depending on what– if you’re running campaigns across different countries that those hours will have to relate. That’s the only really way to know for sure that you’ve got certain timeframes that are performing really poorly for you. So that’s why, especially for newer sellers, which a lot of our listeners are, you want to– at first, when you’re launching, especially you want data. So, it’s smart to keep your campaigns running as much all day, if possible, having budgets in there that will have them on all days, so you can get the data for all day. But then, once you do that for a few weeks, maybe a month, then you can start optimizing it down, but we really don’t have information from Amazon on again, like sales attribution by hour. So I do think it’s kind of– I’m all about saving money potentially on a PPC spend, but it’s kind of, you’re still guessing.

BradleySutton: Yeah. And then even like later I can envision a future where we we’ve got– we know when, when transactions happen, and like, if there’s a way, maybe in the future, there’ll be available to see when the transaction actually happened. But here’s the thing that people need to remember is somebody clicks on an ad at 3:00 PM on a Friday they go back at Saturday at 7:00 AM and purchase it. Now that original click is going to get that attribution. But then, you might be thinking, Oh, they must have hit this ad at Saturday at seven in the morning or six in the morning, but that’s not the case. Right.

Vince: That’s a good point. Sponsored products, which are the standard ads that most sellers have that they have a seven day pixel. So yeah, if somebody does see your ad, really early in the morning that you think is wasted impressions and clicks, they could click on that and buy within seven days. Sponsored brands and sponsored display campaigns or even longer, those were 14 day pixels. So the user could look at it really early hours in the morning and within two weeks, as long as they buy it, make the purchase that 5:00 AM click is actually going to get the sale. I think it’s smart to look at advertising for what it is it’s branding and the more branding you’re doing the better for you overall. And not necessarily trying to make PPC, make revenue during certain times of day.

BradleySutton: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Now, so those are some good general PPC things that’s happening in the industry. And I see in the community right now, but just talking specifically about the Helium 10 Ads platform, I think one of the biggest misconceptions out there, and Hey, that’s probably a little bit on you and my part because we’re the kind of ambassadors of it is that a lot of people were thinking that, Hey, only diamond members can use ads and for the full version of ads, that is true. So that was why in the last webinar, Meganar, as we called it, we really tried to, or you really tried to make a specific push to let everybody know, Hey, even if you guys are our platinum Helium 10 members, you’ve got access to ads that you can actually do some good, make some good decisions on it and it’s going to be beneficial. Can you talk a little bit about, for all of our platinum users out there, how should they be using ads now?

Vince: Yeah. For one, make sure your PPC tokens activated. So if you are doing any kind of PPC, obviously at platinum, if you have your PPC token available, that’s going to be how we get your data. As soon as we have that activated, we will see– upload 60 days-worth of data from Amazon. And that data can be seen in both the dashboard and our analytics areas of ads. And that’s the part, I think that most, again, most platinum listeners out there, they just don’t know that they have that capability. They’ve never bothered clicking on the ads icon at the top to check it out because they thought it was just for diamond. But again, as long as you have that PPC token activated, you’re going to see data on the dashboard, which is great. The dashboard is a high-level account overview of your data set, in total it doesn’t matter if the campaigns that might be included on that dashboard or pause or not. It’s just letting you know kind of what happened during that timeframe. And there’s also some graphs that are, there’s actually two graphs there that a lot of our paid members use to compare current versus previous periods because the graphs that are there that have all types of metrics available to you, sales, ACoS, CTR, CPC, the metrics that are important to you that immediately shows you the previous period. So you can make like, kind of at a glance comparisons. But the biggest thing is the analytics area. The analytics really– it’s again, it’s high level. So it’s a view of the entire account, but the views that you can look at your data are pretty amazing. If you use portfolios, you can see all your data at the portfolio level. Obviously you campaign level, but we’ve also had an ad group level. You can use, you can look at all your data, just what are the keywords from a keyword level. You can look at your entire account from a search term level, just every single search term that’s associated with every single keyword in an ad group, in a campaign you can see just on one page. So no more having to go into Amazon and downloading your search term reports on a regular basis, which if you’re optimizing your campaigns manually, looking at your search term reports is the biggest and most important step in optimizing campaigns.

Vince: Well, if you’re platinum and you’re using ads, you can see all that data right there in the search term level. And the great thing is that we’re not limited to like the 60 or 90 day look back like Amazon has right now, you can only go back a certain amount of days. Once we do have that initial 60 days with the data uploaded, we’ll save that data for two years, really. So, even at platinum, you can use those search term reports and look back depending on how long you’ve been a member. You can look back at last season last year, definitely maybe year to date stats. So, it’s really important for us to let our platinum level users know that they do have that capability available to them in ads, and the search term. One thing that we did, we included in there is the ability to obviously sort, you’ve got all kinds of filters. You can find search terms that are really high ACoS, depending on how many sales you want to look at, or maybe that have spent over 10 clicks or have over 10 clicks or spent over a certain amount of money with no sales. Like you can really drill down it really quickly and easily filter those out. Actually did a pro training video on this exact topic. So which is available at platinum again to you, once you click through you click the learn button at the top, and it’s actually now the first video out there showcasing what a platinum member could do, looking at this data to optimize their campaigns. I show everything from at the keyword level, looking for duplicate keywords. Like maybe you forget how many times you have a keyword in certain campaigns. I know I’ve come across that in myself. You can look for waste there. Again, you can look at your search terms, find wasteful high ACoS keywords, or high spend keywords, no sales. We have a clipboard function, so you can easily copy the sort of term and then, go put it, make it a negative in that campaign. Now you would start to do that manually because you had to go to seller central to add that negative. Our paid members could do it right from that screen. But it’s still very valuable information and displayed in a way that’s easily sortable and filterable that really will take a lot of time out of doing that search term report review, out of the mundane manual process and make it really streamlined.

Vince: And if they have their NWS token activated too, they will see their TACoS metrics and their total sales metrics on both the dashboard and the analytics pages. So even at platinum, they’re going to be able to see kind of the metrics that we push, which is the total ACoS, and they’ll be able to see, okay, here’s how my PPC campaigns, here’s my PPC performance, but what’s my total performance. What’s my total sales? How effective are my current PPC campaigns at branding, right? Because organic sales is especially for brand new sellers, PPC does help with the branding of your product. And that eventually does help with organic sales. So having the ability to see that metric even at platinum level, I think it’s a very, very important for our users to be leveraging.

BradleySutton: Yeah. So, guys, if you’re already a platinum member and I know a lot of our listeners are, and you haven’t started taking advantage of this, go ahead and do that start diving in, of course, if you want to take advantage of automation and suggestions is in a lot of things like that. Yeah. You got to have diamond, but at least, start looking into these analytics because it’s so much easier and it gives you so much more visibility than trying to figure out all of these reports from Amazon and download it and making pivot tables, and doing things like that. Now, if somebody is not even a platinum member yet, what’s the best way to get started for free. Just say, Hey, I’m new to Helium 10. I don’t want to pay any money, but I love to just get a quick glance at how my PPC is doing to know if I can improve.

Vince: Well, we do have our PPC audit tool that’s still available on the main consumer websites, such as at helium10.com. If you click on resources, you’ll see, I don’t know if it’s still says new because it’s not necessarily new anymore, but at PPC audit, is the name of the page. So yeah, our free members can even take advantage of kind of the data and the way I was explaining it, how ads uses it. We basically use ads to run kind of a backend review of your search term report. So you still got to go into seller central and create a report and then upload it to us through the PPC audit tool. But we will definitely give an overview, whether that be 60 or 90 days-worth of data, we’ll kind of let you know exactly where you stand with your keywords we’ll show keyword duplicates. Like I mentioned, ads can do, and we’ll show you, depending on what you enter as your ACoS goal, we’ll let you know how far away you, and what things you can do potentially to get you closer to those goals. So yeah, that is still available at the free level.

BradleySutton: All right, guys, quick break from this episode for my BTS, Bradley’s 30-second, here’s my 30-second tip. We’re talking about PPC in this episode. So we’ve talked before about making a PPC test listings, and we did that in Project X where you maybe just get a few products, a few samples or something from Etsy, you throw it up there. And you’re trying to see if there’s traction for this product, but I also create auto and broad campaign. So I’m not just trying to look at specific keywords that I know I would need to convert for, but when you do the auto and broad campaigns, sometimes you might come up with, or you might see some good interactions on keywords that you didn’t even think were relevant to the product. Like you’ve got some high click through rates or even some possible conversions from your test listing. So this is very valuable because now let’s say you go forward with this product that you did a test listing for. Look back at these campaigns from your test listing and make sure that those keywords that were really good for you. Make sure to optimize your real listing for those keywords.

Bradley Sutton: All right. So, we’re also of course, big on education and training here at Helium 10. So we’ve been kind of low key in the background, building up our repository of modules, our training modules in our freedom ticket program. How many are we up to now? How many training modules do we or videos do we have now in freedom ticket that are PPC related?

Vince: Well, we just actually completed our 10th one, in December, which is why I was kind of under the radar right before the holidays. Yeah, so that was completed in December, and that was our, the PPC campaign optimization module. So every single module before that, featuring Kevin King and myself, and sub-modules was kind of leading to that. So, we do have that completed now as of December, and it is actually now live.

BradleySutton: Cool. What are some of the other subjects some of these videos? Like what are, I mean, I know not all of them are about the same thing, but what aspects of PPC do we go over for people?

Vince: Yeah, we do everything from the basics of Amazon at the very beginning, how to bid on PPC, like what’s the strategies to bid on PPC. We go in depth, both Kevin and I in a product targeting product targeting is a very powerful kind of subtype of each of the campaign types within Amazon advertising. So we want to make sure people are leveraging well first that they understand what product targeting is. Targeting ASINs and ASIN categories versus just keywords and then some of the strategies. And then obviously setting up campaigns, like what’s the best practices for setting up campaigns. We haven’t go through an exercise in how to do that in seller central. I also have a module showing you very similarly how to do that in ads. But it’s great. It’s full of– we even have a guest speaker in there Lazar from Seller’s Alley and he talks about 10 common mistakes to avoid so really valuable content that is available to our– at platinum, again, our paid members. They do have access to that if they want to just get their feet wet in PPC and they want a little bit more education before they do that. Um, yeah, definitely. We should be pushing them to leverage the fact that we do have kind of a complete course in PPC, but I know you’re working on something else to add to that, right?

BradleySutton: Yes, indeed. I filmed with– I’m going to leave a little suspense. I’m not going to say his or her name, but I filmed with one of our favorite guests that we’ve had like on TACoS Tuesdays before, and he or she recorded some sponsored video module for us with me, and it’s going to be really cool because what we did was we kind of designed a sponsored video ad for our Project X items. So I know the team is actually working on that right now. So we filmed the video first, like with instructions and talking about how to do sponsored video. And then now, I mean, I literally just yesterday had a meeting with Jesse over here at Helium 10, who heads up the video team. And so they’re going to actually get the sponsored video, like commercial filmed, and we’re going to make it live on Amazon. So guys, once that’s all finished, we’re going to put that all into a new module. And so there, I guess we’ll have 11 now in a freedom ticket after that.

Vince: Yeah, that’s great. Because video is definitely, for our brand registered sellers that can do sponsored brand ads. Videos is definitely killing it on Amazon and they’re only, it used to be just on mobile that it was visible. Now it’s also on desktop. I know they’re going to be coming up with new unique ad placements for video this year.

Bradley Sutton: Yup, yup, absolutely. Now, I just mentioned Project X, that for those who don’t know what that is, that’s a case study that we did, you can find that on YouTube, you just type in Helium 10 Project X, where we gave you the A to Z, not just PPC, but just the entire journey of finding and launching a product. Now case studies is kind of something that I love to do. And I know you also like to do, because that’s the name of the game. We can’t just like sit here and develop tools and strategies without actually being in the game and testing these things out. So, I believe some of your recent case studies, you mentioned a little bit about this in the webinar before was specifically about sponsored display campaigns.

Vince: Yeah, that’s right. So I’ve been wanting to do case studies for a while. Ads just came out of beta at the end of Q3 last year. So since then, I’ve been able to connect with some of our users and try to do some initiatives with them and see what the results are. So the first one we did, which was actually predicated on a webinar I did with Amazon advertising, what January 15th, was sponsored display like, it’s still kind of a fairly newer ad unit as of last fall. New, as far as the capabilities of their product targeting versions. So we did some tests that were pretty– got some interesting results. There’s actually a blog post on that showing the dispenser display results. I think we posted that at the end of last month, but, uh, what it shows is, I think I mentioned earlier that one of the cool things recently that they did was add the ability to add an image and a logo or a, like a headline into your sponsor display. So we ran some tests comparing, like the standard sponsored display ad unit versus the updated creative version or enhanced creative version as Amazon calls it. And the results were compelling, like to say, definitely update that creative or use that creative if you can. And then we also did a test, just more broad, just with an existing user that has been running sponsored products and sponsored brand campaigns for a while, but had never run sponsored display. So, we tested over six weeks after launching several sponsored display and what we wanted to see was just what the overall lift was in sales in general. Adding sponsored display to the mix, and we definitely saw some increased performance there as well.

BradleySutton: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Let’s talk about some just newer things that maybe people weren’t aware of. And one of these things that I was kind of pushing for before was how was like, man, like when I created my campaign and ads, I loved it because now I have these three campaigns and I have the suggestions, but then I go back and I’m like, Oh, shoot. I put the 25% as my target ACoS, but I’m actually losing money. I really wish I would have put 15% or something. What do you have now for people who want to either do that? Or like, maybe they have a set mode that they’re doing for launch or relaunch, but then they want to go back to something else. What do you have available for them?

Vince: Yeah, so we launched at the end of last year editable rules. So yeah, a lot of our members don’t know that you can actually go in and change those campaign settings when you do launch them in ads. And what’s cool about it is that for the users that have built their campaigns and ads, it’s kind of just updating the original settings, like changing the ACoS, maybe changing the number of clicks it takes for us to make a search term negative. But I think even more interesting than that is now, since we did that, we had the capability for users that are just come to ads and already have campaigns. Pre-existing ones that they’ve been running for a while. We didn’t want them to have to rebuild their campaigns in order to take advantage of our rules and our automation. So that new editable rules forum also allows those users that have existing campaigns to create that three campaign kind of flow on their own with existing campaigns. So, that one is the one that I want to push out there and make sure that the mark, our listeners know the most is that if you have existing campaigns, you don’t need to rebuild them necessarily in ads, if you want to. Sure. But if you’ve got performers that you want to maybe just have ads look at the search terms on your behalf, find those ones that are wasteful or high ACoS, or find search terms for you that are doing well, that you’d like to maybe target directly. You can now do that with existing campaigns and just build them into, like a two campaign structure flow. If you want three campaigns, structure and flow, if you want, if you only want us to look at the search terms for negative, you can just do that. So it’s pretty flexible as well, which is something else that I also wanted to include. And we’ve seen really good results with that users that have taken advantage of that with some existing campaigns that they had, that they put into– they added to our rules. So, hopefully that is actually another case study that I’m working on as well, that we’ll see results on.

BradleySutton: So then, like the two campaign structure actually didn’t even know about that. I thought it always had to be three. So yeah. Could it be, I mean, obviously I’m thinking it could be auto for a broad or broad to a manual. Could you also do auto to manual or it’s just those first two I mentioned?

Vince: You can do an auto to a manual. You can do a manual to a manual. Let’s say you’re not running auto campaigns because you already did that. Right. A long time ago, you ran auto, you got as much data out of, as you possibly could. You created a campaign. But you can just make that the top tier, right. As long as it’s got some broad keywords in it, we’re still looking at search terms and we’re going to look at those search terms. We’re going to recommend cutting the ones that are, that are doing poorly based on the metrics that you enter. And we’re going to promote the ones that are doing well. And that can go into the final campaign, which is like a proven the proven campaign. So yeah, a lot of listeners do that strategy with auto campaigns is like you launch– they’re great at launch, especially. I mean, that’s why they’re at the top of the– our three tier structure, but there comes a point sometimes with auto campaigns where you’ve gotten the most juice out of it, or you feel like it’s potentially just wasting your spend, if you’ve done all of the search term. You’ve reviewed their reports, maybe an ads maybe directly, you’ve added a bunch of search terms to the negative, but it’s still, Amazon is finding new products and new keywords to tie it to that aren’t necessarily connected. A lot of our listeners don’t like auto campaigns for that reason. Right. They just get it for data collection at the beginning, and then they keywords directly to that. So yeah, we want it to be able to accommodate those types of users. And that’s why I made it the flexibility of– you can do manual to manual if you want it. They could also conversely if it’s just an auto campaign and they just wanted the negative keyword rules running to it, like help using ads to help cut down some of that waste, I just described the auto campaigns are famous for. You could just do that. You could have an auto campaign, set up negative keyword rules, hit apply, and that’s it.

BradleySutton: And I mean, can I have, like just a single campaign and then have those still come up in suggestions as far as like bids and things like that?

Vince: Yeah. I know it won’t come up. Well, yeah, for negative keyword rules, obviously it’s just looking at search terms and making them negative. So there’s no keyword promotions, so there’s no new keywords. If it’s an auto campaign, again, there’s no bids because there’s no bits of questions cause there’s no keywords in–

BradleySutton: But for like a broader manual, like would that be something that is on the roadmap, or possible already?

Vince: Yeah, it’s already like, it doesn’t matter. Another thing that a lot of users I think don’t know is that, it doesn’t matter if a campaign has been built in ads or not. It’s always gotten keyword bid suggestions.

BradleySutton: I didn’t realize that. I’m learning stuff here.

Vince: Any campaign, if it’s uploaded, if it’s been built in our tool since ads was launched, you always get keyword bid suggestions. It’s only the negative keywords and the new kind of keyword rules that do require some input. We do need to know, Hey, where do we promote this, the search term as a keyword? Like what campaign do we promote it to? So that’s where you then need to create kind of like flows and structures. And that’s what the new editable rules form allows our users to do for existing campaigns. Or if they just obviously build the campaigns and ads, it automatically builds that flow in there. And that’s when you’ll get the new keyword rule, suggestions, for example, because we have that kind of map of where things are supposed to go.

BradleySutton: Okay, cool. Cool. All right. So we’ve talked a lot about stuff we already have and stuff that maybe people didn’t know about, but part of the exciting thing from when you were on the webinar last month was there’s a lot of upcoming things that you were able to give us a sneak peek. So if somebody missed out on that webinar, what new and exciting things are actually coming to ADS?

Vince: Yeah. So, one of the things I’m most excited about is an updated campaign builder. So, are in its existing form. It’s pretty simple, three campaign structure, but currently product targeting campaigns were not included that subtype and sponsored display since that was a newer one are not currently included in the current form. So a big update will be that you’ll be able to create those. You’ll be able to create your product targeting. You’ll be able to create sponsored display campaign. So essentially you’ll be able to create every single campaign type now within our campaign builder. And then, with the acquisition of Prestozon, they’ve got some additional levers as far as their rules go. So we’re getting kind of an updated rule set for those campaigns that we’re actually putting into templates. So we’re going to have a more guided kind of forms where, if a seller is brand new and they’re just coming to PPC and they’re using our tool, obviously if they’re just launching a product, they’re going to hit the launch template, right. And we’re going to actually then on the back end, we’re going to fine tune the rule set to be specific for someone that’s just launching a product. So, there’s a couple of different templates. I won’t give them all away, but launch is one of them. So I’m excited about the expanded capabilities in general, with being able to create all campaign types of sellers or Amazon. But also we’re creating easier kind of step-by-step guided format of the campaign builder than its current kind of one-page form that it currently is. And I think a lot of our sellers will really appreciate the way that we’re designing it to really help them achieve their goals and build out their campaigns, need the best way possible.

BradleySutton: That’s super, super cool. I mean, like, it was funny. I remember in the webinar, we were asking the different product managers, Hey, can you give us a sneak peek of what’s coming? But you’re the only one who actually–

Vince: I started with that, because I’d like, for me, it was like, that’s the most exciting thing for ads. It’s also things users have been asking for. Right. Sure. But we kind of as we’re integrating the Prestozon a platform and team, that kind of takes precedence. So, with the launch of the integrated platform, which I think I’m allowed to say should be at the end of this quarter. We’re actually going to have a new platform and a new name actually for ads. Yeah. I don’t know if I’m allowed to share that yet, so I won’t, but it’s really cool. I do like the name that we’ve picked for it. And we’re just going to keep expanding upon that. It’s also getting a redesign. So it’s going to look different too, at the end of this quarter, the way users get to things like filters is going to be enhanced. And, yeah, there’s a lot of cool things coming up, UX wise, UI wise for ads, that I won’t get into too much detail because I don’t want to give everything away, but I do, I am really excited about the updated capabilities of our campaign builder, as well as the new rules kind of that are going to come along with that campaign builder that we’re adopting from the Prestozon team.

BradleySutton: Excellent. Excellent. Well, definitely looking forward to that and we’ll probably have you, and maybe Ben back on here too, to kind of like once we can completely announce everything that’s happening with that. We’ll definitely have you guys back here. Now going back in general now to PPC, you’ve done probably more TST, more 30-second tips than anybody on here since you’ve been on the show. So often, what is your TST, or your 30-second PPC tip for everybody out there?

Vince: Definitely make sure you’re including a long term view of your campaign optimizations, not just sort of a short term, depending on the volume of your campaigns, like every seven days should be sufficient as a minimum, but looking at campaign data at 30, 60, 90 days, will also give you insights that you can really only get with more data. There’s a blog post I wrote about that in the last year. I definitely think that including a longer view in the mix is important.

BradleySutton: I love it. Somebody who actually sticks to 30 seconds. If only everybody else would do that.

Vince: I have it in the previous ones. So I made sure that I tired myself this time.

BradleySutton: All right. Now, for those who want like kind of weekly tips, you mentioned a little bit about this before, but there’s like pretty much every week you are putting something out there. That’s not just one tip, but it’s actually very, a lot of them. Can you talk about that?

Vince: Sure. So, after our really fun webinars we did at the end of Q3 last year, we ended up with the TACoS Tuesday kind of party. And I went and kind of carried that forward every Tuesday, since then for 2020. And I do, they were weekly then they are now bi-weekly as of 2021. So every other week, I do TACoS Tuesday with Vince, TACoS Tuesday at 10. So which is great. It’s an ask me anything style training. I typically will give a feature or talk about something you may be new within Amazon advertising for maybe 20 to 30 minutes. And then we just open it up to questions from the viewers that were streaming on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and we get some really great questions and I’d love actually going on now. Because I have some followers that are there on a weekly basis or bi-weekly now one of them even sent me and I showed you, because it was just last Tuesday. They sent me a taco stand. So apparently, that’s what they sell on Amazon. It’s a really nice ceramic six taco holder. And because my show is called TACoS Tuesday, because of the total ACoS message, not just because I like tacos, which I do, but, they sent that it was a really great so on Tuesday, which is out now. So those are available on replay. I will have a link available on the consumer side as well at LinkedIn directly to the playlist coming up. But if you’re in any of our social feeds, you typically will see the posts about it. And they’re all available right by replay. This last Tuesday was a great one. We get Karyn Thomas on and we talked about the importance of product listing optimization and how it affects your PPC, which it absolutely does. So, take a watch of that one, if you guys get a chance. And so I’ll be doing things like that, bi-weekly going forward to having additional guests come on our next one. So not last Tuesday, but in two Tuesdays from now, what we’re doing is inviting it or we’re going to actually market it kind of as a AMA for beginners. So if there’s any listeners out there right now that are kind of in your beginning stages, that AMA is probably the one that you really want to, attend. That’ll be Tuesday the 23rd at 10:00 AM PST. So make sure you’re on our social feeds, and you’re looking at our emails because it will be included in there, but I really want to gear that one towards beginners to see what their questions are, what their struggles are, what their pain points are. And I’ll be going to do an overview PPC basics kind of for beginners in that particular session as the intro. But then I also, every other Tuesday, so it kind of fills the gap in between the AMS. So each other Tuesday between I release a PPC tip. So, and they’re generally about a minute, minute and five, in length. And they’re just kind of little nuggets of information that listeners have appreciated, and are leveraging some of the things that I include in that. The first PPC tip for example, was the fact that you can now add ASINs as negative keywords, which happened last fall. So I’ve been doing them since then, but there’s enough in there now that the replay, sorry, the playlist have quite a bit of, I think there’s like 14 in there now. So, but yeah, those are also not every other week. And so pretty much every Tuesday, our listeners are going to get something from me, whether it be the tip of the week through our social channels, or if they happen to join the AMAs that I do at 10:00 AM Pacific time, kind of driving that TACoS Tuesday theme through, for as long as I can this year.

BradleySutton: Cool. Cool. All right, guys. So make sure to take advantage of some of these ways to get just training. This is free, guys. This is free and it’s not just ads related, of course, people who have ads, Vince will give tips on that, but it’s just people who are, if you’re selling on Amazon guys, you need to be using PPC, needs to be looking at these tips that Vince has giving. So, Vince, thanks so much for coming on here and we really appreciate all your hard work, and we know that people have ideas sometimes of what they would like to see in ads. You mentioned yourself that a lot of these things that you talked about today actually originated from users requesting it. So guys, don’t forget the best way to get your voice heard as far as what you would like, not just with ads, but with anything in the Helium 10 tool suite when you’re logged in on the very top right. Click on. There’s like a little, let’s see. I think it’s like a question mark. Yeah. It’s a question mark at the very top right of your Helium 10 dashboard and then hit share your ideas. And then if it’s PPC related, I can pretty much guarantee that Vince is going to read it. So make sure to get your suggestions in. All right, Vince we’ll be having like you and probably Ben as well in the month or two, or whenever we have that huge announcements for our new ads platform, and we’ll be looking forward to.

Vince: At least two months, I would say like at the end of Q1, we should be integrated. So it’d be great to come back on with Ben after that. And then, kind of really share with everyone who listens to our podcasts, the latest and greatest, and the new name of our PPC platform.

BradleySutton: Yes. Is it called Vinsanity? All right. Well, Vince, we’ll talk to you at that time and then we’ll have that big reveal.

Vince: Sounds good. Thanks, Bradley.