Helium 10 Buzz 1/4/24: TikTok Shop Wants to 10X | New Amazon Sponsored Brand Features

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

TikTok eyes US$17.5 billion shopping business on Amazon’s turf
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3247219/tiktok-eyes-us175-billion-shopping-business-amazons-turf

Sponsored Brands introduces theme targeting to enhance goal-based campaigns
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-introduces-theme-targeting/

Alexa is now available as a new supply source for Standard display and AAP-mobile app
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/alexa-available-as-new-supply-source-for-standard-display-and-aap-mobile-app/

Sponsored Brands video introduces video-only creatives on the advertising console and Amazon Ads API
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-video-only-creatives/

And for those looking to network and learn, Bradley extends an invitation to join upcoming events in Dubai, Pakistan, and Germany.

Finally, our conversation leads us to Helium 10 new feature alerts emphasizing the importance of competitor monitoring, emphasizing the convenience and impact of setting up a comprehensive Insights Dashboard. Bradley guides you through automating competitor tracking to save precious time and demonstrates how to assess a niche market – with coffin shelves as our case study – using analytical tools to scrutinize competitor listings and keyword strategies. Additionally, he stresses the advantages of the Listing Analyzer tool, which transforms the arduous task of comparing listing images into a seamless, one-click operation. Stay tuned for next week’s episode, where we’ll continue to share invaluable insights for sellers looking to thrive in the fast-paced world of e-commerce.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:57 – TikTok Shop 10X?
• 03:00 – Amazon Sponsored Brand Update
• 04:57 – Alexa Ads
• 06:18 – Brand Tailored Promotions
• 07:23 – New Video Ads
• 09:05 – Catch Bradley On The Following Events
• 12:18 – New Feature Alerts
• 17:00 – Pro Training: Using Listing Analyzer

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

TikTok wants to 10x the revenue of products this year, but they’re also increasing fees. Amazon’s sponsor brand now has new targeting and new video options. DSP advertisers can promote on Alexa. Now. I’ll be doing events in Dubai and Pakistan next week. This and much more on today’s episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that’s going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We tell you about the new tools and features that Helium 10 has released this week and we also give you a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. All right, let’s go ahead and hop right into the news.

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re going to be talking about something from TikTok as the first news story, and this article is from this website called scmp.com and it says here TikTok eyes US 17.5 billion US dollar shopping business on Amazon’s turf. All right. So you might wonder well, how’s that 10x? Because last year they only did about 20 million in gross sales, but actually Southeast Asia was most of that, all right. In America they didn’t hit those kind of numbers yet. All right, so this basically is kind of like 10xing what they did this year. Part of what they’re going to be doing they’re push in the US and North America is that they’re actually going to launch the e-commerce TikTok shop in coming months in Latin America. It says so that’s something new, that that is coming up. Now keep in mind that, according to TikTok, they’re saying that the article information about these sales figures for US is incorrect. So like we got to take some of this with a grain of salt. However, something that is confirmed, because TikTok did give out information on this, was that just yesterday, TikTok announced that it’s going to increase fees imposed on merchants to 6% of each sale beginning in April and to 8% in July in most product categories. All right, so you know. Still, this is, you know, compared to Amazon is 15%, but a lot of sellers were getting like 0%. You know how TikTok was subsidizing it. You know some were getting a lot. You know even less than a lot, less than 6%, but now it’s going up to 6 and 8%. So this is a kind of interesting move. You know TikTok. Regardless of what the sales figures are, I think it’s kind of obvious that they have big ambitions for the US market and, seemingly now, Latin American market. I don’t think it’s too late to get started on TikTok shop. Yes, maybe it kind of sucks that if you get started soon you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the crazy low commissions now. But even at this you know, kind of increase in commissions, it’s still like half of the commission of what Amazon is charging.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of Amazon, let’s go to the next article and this was an announcement by Amazon itself entitled sponsored brands. Introduces theme targeting to enhance goal based campaigns. All right, so basically you’re going to be able to target themes and a model based approach designed to simplify campaign creation and boost campaign performance per Amazon. So so the two new targeting groups that you’re going to be able to do is number one, the keywords related to your brand, okay, and then keywords related to your landing pages, which is a set of relevant keywords that drive traffic to a brand store page or product detail pages. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see kind of like how this looks, or maybe you already have access to this in your seller central. But now you’re going to have this new targeting groups section here when you’re setting up your sponsored brand ads, where you can select keywords related to your brand or keywords related to your landing pages. The bids at least in this example here are pretty, are pretty high. Now why does Amazon want this to work? They say that theme targeting enables advertisers to create sponsored brand campaigns with simplified controls. Advertisers can start the campaign with at least one targeting group and one single bid for that targeting group. This is going to be available in throughout America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, for me, I’m not sure if I’m going to use this. I use Helium 10 Adtomic and so I have a lot of you know for my sponsored brand ads. I like targeting just the you know keywords as opposed to themes, because I can really niche down and get what I’m looking for. But this could be, you know, potential nice discovery on keywords that, who knows, maybe are completely new to the niche, so they wouldn’t appear in tools like Adtomic or Helium 10 or or in other parts of Amazon advertising. So it could be something that you could at least try.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of trying something if you are a DSP user. Amazon DSP Alexa is now available as a new supply source for standard display and AAP mobile app. All right, so that means that advertisers who sell on Amazon can now see Alexa as an additional inventory supply that’s checked by default for all line item types. Amazon mobile display, standard display and AAP mobile app. Amazon DSP self service advertisers using responsive e-commerce creative templates will have the opportunity to reach incremental customers seamlessly. All right, and they show a picture here of some Amazon Echo shows where it shows kind of like the ad placement that’s going to be on Alexa. So you know Amazon you know has talked about how they’re going to be using AI to power Alexa more.

Bradley Sutton:

I think Alexa kind of fell off as far as usage goes because there was no real innovations to it. Like I pretty much just used to listen to music myself Do you guys have that yourself? You can listen to the series sellers podcast on it, but it’s not very great as far as interaction. So I don’t think many people are using it to shop either. But who knows now that if it starts getting better the whole shopping experience and now there’s going to be ad placements this could be an important ad platform that you could advertise for keeping with the Amazon news, this was on your dashboard. They announced that brand Taylor promotions are available in seven new international stores this week. All right, so brand Taylor promotion something we’ve had access to in America for, you know, since last year, and a lot of you already, you know, including myself already had access in some of your other marketplaces, but now it’s kind of like across the board for UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Mexico and Canada. You are going to be able to brand Taylor promotions, which allow you to offer discounts of 10 to 50% off of products, where you can engage different kinds of customers, such as your repeat customers, high spend customers, et cetera, and I’m not going to go too deep into it because, like I said, this is not new to most of you. You’ve had this for Amazon USA, but it was kind of game changing when it came out as far as on Amazon, because it allowed you to retarget customers in ways that you know Amazon normally wouldn’t have allowed you to do so. Now, the news is, though, that you can now do this for these other marketplaces if you’re selling in those marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:

Last news story of the day is again coming from Amazon advertising and it’s entitled sponsored brand video. Introduces video only creatives on the advertising console and Amazon ads API. So now you can launch video only creatives that drive customers to your Amazon store, right? So this new creative is under the menu. I’m goals and then grow your brand impression share, and so this this is, you know, like those you can now have, like the headline ads, sponsored brand ads, instead of it just being, you know, the option of of having you like two or three of your products, custom creative. The creative can be a video now. Alright.

Bradley Sutton:

So take a look at this. You know those of you watching on YouTube, you can see how you’re going to set it up. When you create the campaign Under goals, you’re going to select grow brand impression share, and then you can select automatic bidding and then video under the ad format, alright. And then you can select your store. As far as the landing page for it, it looks like you can also select product detail page too, according to this image, even though they didn’t mention it, and then how it looks is like in mobile. It looks pretty cool, you know, like it almost takes up like half of the screen in mobile, where your video will autoplay at the top of the search results and the same thing on desktop. It’s going to come up right there at the top. It’ll have your, your custom like header and your brand logo and then a video that automatically plays at top of search. And this is available throughout all of the Amazon marketplaces US, north America, Europe, middle East, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, next up, in just a few days, I’m going to be doing some events. So when I had it announced this is going to be on the 12th of this month, which is next Friday, I will be in Dubai on a long layover on my way to Pakistan. So I’m going to go ahead and do an event with Crystal from Amazon Seller Society. She was just on the podcast a few days ago. We’re doing an event Friday, January 12th, in the morning. Kind of like a laid back event, nothing too formal, like a huge conference or anything, just kind of like a meetup. So to get more information about this event, go to h10.me forward slash Dubai meetup h10.me forward slash Dubai meetup it’s going to be at the move and pick hotel apartments downtown Dubai. All right, there’s going to be a meeting room that Crystal is going to go ahead and reserve for that. So again, see you next Friday in Dubai on the 12th.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, another event I’ll be doing that I hadn’t announced yet is going to be a little bit later in January, on the 25th, and that’s going to be in Frankfurt, Germany, and it’s a helium 10 elite event that elite members can go to. But we’re having a whole day of activities over there in Frankfurt. It’s going to be right in the Frankfurt airport, all right, like if you fly into Frankfurt, you don’t have to rent a car, get an Uber or nothing. You just walk into where it’s going to be. It’s going to be 75 euros for attendance for the full day. Normally our elite events cost $600, but we’re doing a special, since this is our first one that we’re doing in Europe Helium 10 elite members or a VASC plus members you guys can go for free. So if you haven’t got an invitation, you’re a Helium 10 Elite member, reach out in the helium 10 elite Facebook group and you can get a link to go for free. But if right now it’s going to be open, it’s not close to elite members. For the first time here in Europe, you can actually attend for only 75 euros.

Bradley Sutton:

We have tons of great speakers like Matt from Clear Ads coming from the UK. Kara’s coming from the UK, talk about branding. She’s been on the podcast before. We’ve got local speakers from Germany. We got somebody flying in who used to run Legos, amazon, you know operations, so we’ve got tons of great speakers. I’ll be speaking there. So, again, that’ll be on January 25th and if you’d like to get more information and go ahead and sign up Tickets are limited go to h10.me/avaskgermany, no spaces, h10.me/avaskgermany. There’s a couple more events. I announced it last week, but again the next weekend I’m gonna be in Pakistan, in Lahore h10.me/reality if you want to go to that event. And then the biggest event I’ll be doing in January will be in Berlin, germany, with the AMZ Hackers, h10.me/germany for that one and that’s gonna be January. The 27th is going to be that conference. So a lot of chances to come hang out. Hope you guys can go to one of those. All right, let’s go ahead and hop into our new feature alerts for the week. You know, you think that, hey, it’s New Year’s, helium 10 is not releasing anything. No, we are releasing something. It’s actually something that you guys have been asking for, and it’s a way that you can kind of automate your Cerebro on a like Completely laser focused level. All right, you can kind of automate your Cerebro with inside Stashboard, but check this out. This is going to be kind of like the new way that you can do it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the very first thing that’s important that you have to do if you want to use this feature is on your inside Stashboard. You have to make sure that you have your competitors set up, so you just go to any of your products on your insights dashboard, you go ahead and expand it out and then you hit the competitors button and make sure that you’ve got your four or five top Competitors here. Once you have that set up, what I want you guys to do is go to your Insights tab from the left hand side menu, hit insights and this this shows you all of your insights. That Aka alerts that you’ve been getting on your product and your competitors products, but then go into settings and preferences. Now what you can do is you can now create custom Insights at the ASIN level instead of before you have to do it kind of like one size fits all for all your products.

Bradley Sutton:

But maybe you know you might have some products that you’re like hey, I want to know if my competitors are Ranking on page one and I’m on page two, but for another product You’re like, I just want to know if a competitor starts ranking in the top 10 and I’m not even ranked at all, like, like, there’s probably a million scenarios you can think of. Before you couldn’t really customize that, but that’s what you would do in Cerebro. Right, you know you would run, you know you would have your Team or you yourself would go and run Cerebro Comparing your product to your competitors. Product what? Maybe once a week, every other week, and you had probably different settings. But now, whatever your flavor is of what you like to do in Cerebro, you can completely automate that. So what you’re going to do in the insights page is hit, create new insight and then scroll down to the keyword tab and then you’re going to want to select Keyword suggestions based on my competitors. All right, once you select that, scroll to the bottom and now you can choose a specific product or group of products. So like, for example, let’s say that for my coffin shelf, I can add my coffin shelf here and I want to see if there’s any keywords that has at least 400 searches.

Bradley Sutton:

Where my product is Is, let’s just say, not ranked. What does that mean? I’m going to put ranked minimum, zero, maximum zero. So there’s a keyword that I’m not even ranked for, maybe I’m not even indexed for, but then I can put the number of selected competitors. Ranking for this keyword is a minimum of. Let’s just say I can say one, all right. So if I say one, that means any one of those five competitors that I showed you guys earlier. If any one of those is ranking in between, let’s just say rank one and 30. You know the top half of page one.

Bradley Sutton:

I want a notification. What does that mean? What did I just set up? Now I almost never have to run Cerebro again for my product versus my competitors, because whatever I was looking for when I was running Cerebro, it is now automated. Now, if this criteria comes up, where I’m not ranked for a keyword but my competitors starting to get sales from it, which is, you know, that’s what I’m, you know taking away from the fact that they’re ranked high on a new keyword, now I’m going to get a notification on my Helium 10 dashboard that my competitor is getting sales from this keyword that I am not even ranked for. So guys, go in there.

Bradley Sutton:

I think this is right now available if you have diamond account. Later might be available for platinum users, but if you have a diamond account you have got to use this, and this is almost reasoning enough to upgrade to diamond by itself is how much time is that going to save you? You know, let’s say you’ve got 40 products and your team is running cerebral once a week for all of those, right, just try and find new keywords. Or once every two weeks, times that by 26 or times that by 52. Even if you’re old, if it’s only taking you, like you know, maybe three, five minutes or so each product to run cerebral, we’re talking scores, hundreds potentially of hours saved throughout a year just by automating your cerebral using insights dashboard. So that’s the new feature alert for this week.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s hop into the training tip of the week, and this is going to be about comparing competitors, perhaps in a new niche that you’re looking at selling. Let’s just pretend right now that you are going to start selling coffin shelves, for whatever reason. Right, you got inspired by project extra, like, I want to sell coffin shelves. So you search on Amazon the coffin shelf niche and you run x-ray. Well, I’m going to choose the top five, six, seven competitors and maybe I just want to get an idea of the lay of the land. How strong are these listings? What kind of image strategy are they doing? How’s their keyword strategy going?

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so if I select the four or five or six or seven or even 10 competitors, instead of running it cerebral, I’m going to hit the run listing analyzer button and once I do that, it’s going to bring me to listing analyzer and it’s going to tell me for all of these products, you know what’s the seller region, what’s the listing quality score. I can see that all of them have at least a six or seven listing quality score. Only one has a nine right. So that’s kind of you know, promising. I could see what’s the price range of these top products, what’s going on with their reviews, and then I can also see how strong are their listings. Like what’s the average listing quality score?

Bradley Sutton:

Among all of these listings, how many don’t have five bullet points? How many don’t have enough images? How many people don’t even have a plus content or a decent description? This is going to tell me in seconds the information there and it’s also going to tell me there of the top keywords in this niche. You know, like coffin shelf, coffin bookshelf here, how are they ranking? So I can see that, wow, for the main keyword, everybody’s ranking pretty high. But look at this keyword, this other keyword, what is that? Here, coffin decor, there’s only two listings that are in the top 10 and the rest are kind of off of the top list here. All right, so instantly, this is just like with a click of a button, I can see all this cool information.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the coolest part of this is, let’s say, I decide that I want to actually, you know, make this product and I want to get my listing together. What is the best way to look at what is working on an image standpoint with your competitors and what are some ideas you might want to reach? Well, right here on that same page, there is a button called media comparison. So you hit the media comparison button and instantly you have all of the images for any of these listings completely laid out here in a grid in one screen, and I can print this. I could give it to my designer, but I can just instantly get you know kind of like themes of what’s going on, like, for example, I look at this and I’m like, wow, look at this, everybody’s like either second, third or fourth image. They’ve got an infographic showing the size every single one. So guess what? That means that if I want to sell in this niche, I better have one of these images too, because it’s obviously important to customers.

Bradley Sutton:

Here I can see multiple customers. They have these kind of like fake pumpkins in the coffin show, so that might be a good image to have. If I have a fake pumpkin in mind, every single one here is hanging it on a wall and showing it on a tabletop. So now I’m like, hey, I need to make sure my designer is going to have an image that looks like it. Maybe somebody is doing something that others aren’t that maybe I can decide like, hey, is this a good idea? Like this guy is putting the coffin shelf upside down to show that it can go upside down.

Bradley Sutton:

The list goes on and on of what I could kind of like take away by looking at the images you know, like if you were trying to do this manually, you’d have to go to each of these listings, copy and paste each image into like a Google slide show or something like that, and then hopefully you can print it off to something that you could actually, you know, kind of like visualize. But in using listing analyzer you could do all of that with just the click of one button, guys. So make sure you’re hitting that button media comparison after you put a whole bunch of competitors inside of listing analyzer. All right, that’s it for our training tip of the week and I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the Weekly Buzz. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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