#584 – Amazon Search Query Performance & Product Opportunity Explorer Breakdown

Join us in this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast with the inspiring journey with Mansour Norouzi, a former civil engineer who has successfully transitioned to becoming an e-commerce advertising expert in Canada. In this episode, Mansour shares his story of moving from managing residential construction projects to launching his own Amazon brand in late 2018. Listen in as he discusses his discovery of Amazon advertising, starting by managing campaigns for others and eventually partnering with Incrementum Digital. Mansour’s experience in launching a supplement brand and more in Canada offers valuable insights into leveraging Amazon data points and successfully transitioning careers.

We also explore the utility and limitations of Amazon’s Search Query Performance report. This often misunderstood data can be a goldmine for sellers when used correctly. Discover how Search Query Performance and the Product Opportunity Explorer can aid in ad testing, monitoring keyword trends, and understanding click-through and conversion rates compared to competitors. Learn about the challenges of scaling data analysis across multiple ASINs and the potential benefits of API integration. For a holistic brand view, focusing on top-performing products and key keywords is recommended, and the need for more streamlined solutions from Amazon is highlighted.

The episode also covers optimizing advertising strategies on different platforms, including the nuanced differences between Walmart and Amazon. Mansour discusses the effectiveness of auto campaigns on Walmart and the importance of advanced placement controls for desktop and mobile optimization. Additionally, integrating Amazon data with Amazon seller tools like Helium 10 and conducting market share analysis using Market360 are emphasized for better insights. Finally, we dive into evolving strategies for cost-effective customer acquisition, sharing practical tips and real-world examples that have helped brands improve performance metrics over the past several months. Tune in for an episode packed with actionable strategies and inspiring success stories!

In episode 584 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mansour discuss:

• 00:00 – Leveraging Amazon Data Points for Success
• 04:57 – Transition From Engineering to Entrepreneurship
• 07:40 – Optimizing Performance With Amazon Search Data
• 11:43 – Challenges of Scaling Search Query Performance
• 18:26 – Analyzing Market Trends for Sales Success
• 19:56 – Understanding Brand Metrics for Amazon Success
• 26:49 – Amazon’s Free Visibility Advantage
• 28:04 – Optimizing Advertising Strategies for E-Commerce
• 29:23 – Differentiating Amazon Data vs Helium 10
• 32:30 – Forecasting Strategy for Amazon Sellers
• 35:09 – Driving Cost-Effective Acquisition Strategy

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got one of the world’s top experts on how to leverage Amazon data points such as search query performance, product opportunity explorer, brand metrics and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. You want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. Do you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. H10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon SSP10. 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 e-commerce world, and today we’ve got somebody on for the second time. Now the first time he was just on one of our live Tacos Tuesday, so this is kind of like the first regular episode he’s coming on. Mansour, how’s it going, man?

Mansour:

Going great. Thank you so much for having me and I’m really excited to be here and have this discussion.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. Now, normally when somebody’s on for like the second or third time, you know we don’t go into their backstory and stuff, because we already did it in the first episode. But for you well, I was checking over the notes here we didn’t do that, since you’re on a live show, the last time about PPC. So, I want to just dive into your backstory first of all and get to know you, like, if you’ve told me any of these things, I’ve already forgot it, so I’m just learning about it too, at the same time as everybody else. So, where are you in? Is it Toronto right now?

Mansour:

yes, I am in Toronto right now and actually I moved to Canada in 2015 from Iran.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that where you were born and raised

Mansour:

Yes. 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So then moved to Canada. And what did you go to university back in Iran or in Canada?

Mansour:

Yeah, I went back to Iran. I got my master’s in civil engineering. So, like some of these sellers and I come from engineering background even in Canada up till 2020, I was a construction manager. So, I was doing, I was in construction, I was kind of managing, like per year, four or five residential homes going back and forth between different projects, which was fun. But at some point I’m like, okay, can I do? I want to do this for next 10 years. I don’t know. It hits me that no, I don’t want to do it and I honestly, the main reason actually was the location and dependency. I’m like I do like this only because I’m really dependent to the location especially in construction. That the main thing is. That doesn’t even moving from one city to another city. The network is really important. So when you move, you have lost everything. You have to start from scratch. So, yeah, I started searching and I came across selling on Amazon. I started my first brand.

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about here?

Mansour:

It is end of 2018, early 2019.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, okay.

Mansour:

Yeah. So, I started my brand. It was a very small brand, and it was a scratch of math which I go back. I’m not gonna do this again to play for that brand. But it was a good start for me to get into that and I started going to some of these meetups for as advertisers. That was the first one was in Canada. It came across this guy. He asked me who is doing your Amazon advertising? I said I’m doing my own. He was like, do you want to do it for me? I said sure, why not? So, I started like you can’t believe, I just charged him 200 for me for just an experiment. Let’s see what happens. So, he was happy, and he was a good seller. It was seven figure seller. He introduced me to his friend, which was a big seller, because he was happy. So, long story short, my story started from there. So, I have my own brand. I quit in 2020. I have my own brand. I’ll do Amazon advertising PPC and in a meetup I think it was conversation for a conversation 2020. It was in Austin. I get to know Leron, so Leron reached out to me. Later on I joined Incrementum Digital. Moving forward, I’m now partner and director of advertising at Incrementum Digital and early this year I also launched a supplement brand in Canada which is going good. I’m pretty happy with that, so my focus is now to scale that brand in Canada.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, All right. So you know, like you said, you’re not the only engineer that has made the path to Amazon. I always find it interesting to see what completely different careers that people do come up with. And so at what point did you stop the engineering? And then Amazon, be it consulting or be it working for Incrementum or just your own brand, you didn’t have to work a full-time job anymore.

Mansour:

That’s a great question At a time that I quit my job, which is early 2020, actually in months before covid hits, so surprisingly that covid hits, like after a month, but the income that I had from my brand and on the side, what I was doing, it wasn’t anywhere near my engineering job. But I was like, okay, that’s it, I have to get out. And I think that was the best decision, because at that point I’m like, oh shoot, what the hell did I do? And now I have no way back. I had a way back, but I was like I’m going to make this work. So that was the point for me, that’s it like just go figure it out. And joining Incrementum, what came after, like six, seven months after quitting my engineering job?

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, people out there don’t just get so excited about the new Amazon journey. You know, before you have a solid footing, just I’m going to quit my day job and go all in unless you know you have some savings. You know, lined up and make the decision Right. We have somebody else who’s probably going to come on the show soon Robert Gomez from Cafe, a brand that he started. He was working as a Microsoft engineer for even like five years, you know, even though he was already a seven figure seller. So there’s no like one exact time that it’s hey time to quit your day job. It’s different for everybody, but we’re happy that you are on this side now and not doing engineering. So one thing I think that you know you’re probably known for more than most on LinkedIn and other places is how you leverage Amazon data. And it’s funny because a lot of people come sometimes to me and say like, oh man, aren’t you scared from Helium 10? Like Amazon’s coming out with so much data? I’m like, no, if Amazon had no data, you know, like Walmart, for example, doesn’t have that much data. You know that they provide, and so our Walmart tools are not as robust as Amazon. It’s harder to provide opportunities. Like the more data that Amazon gives publicly, the more that Helium 10 can give, the more validation. Sometimes we’ve got some great algorithms, but nobody has a way to like, hey, how can I trust this data? But now Amazon can oh well, look how the search volume is in such a similar order as Brand Analytics or something like that. Now I can trust Helium 10. So, I love it that that Amazon comes out with more and more from a, from a Helium 10 standpoint, but obviously, as an Amazon seller myself, I love it too. So, let’s just talk about we’re going to talk about as many things as we can today. You know, like product opportunity, explore search query performance. You know brand metrics. But let’s just start with search query performance. It’s been out almost a couple years now. It’s hard to believe, but this one hasn’t changed too much. You know a lot of the. You know since day one, like a lot of the other things, like product opportunities, where they keep adding more and more and more things. So, I think now that we’ve had the same search performance, I think probably you have, you know, have gotten all the juice out that we can squeeze. So what’s some of your daily or weekly habits, or like what you are leveraging that report for and how sellers can get some actionable information from it. 

Mansour:

Right and that’s a great start. So, I’m going to go into the goods and bags of search query performance. I think in the downside is that I still, after a long time that it’s released, I see posts are or use cases that the sellers or agencies don’t get run, because I feel like they don’t really understand what’s going on and what is really the way this data is being provided so they interpret the data could be misleading, which, as you know, it is 24 hours. It is just from searching from search result pages, getting impression for the same product, clicking the same product and purchasing the same product. So one misunderstanding is that when you they go, when the customer clicks, go to it, goes to your page. If they purchase another variation, that purchase is not recorded in search for your personal finance. So these are stuff I see. Like many people ask about this discrepancy. Yeah, of course there should be. Maybe like 20, 30% of your sales are in search query personal image because of all these differences that you see. So that’s the main thing. Now, the way we look at it. Is that one, this trend of the search? Of course you can see it how it is happening. Well, there is one thing that you have to understand here is that this and I would say me probably heating in terms better than search query performance, and the reason is that every time customer is refreshing the page for the same keyboard for the same search, Amazon is chanting that as a search volume. So, you gotta understand that this is not the real search volume. It’s not normalized. I don’t know why Amazon changed this. They came up with the normalized version and then they updated. They say no, it’s not normalized anymore. So that was a point that I’m like why are you doing this? But now let’s go to use cases. One is what we do for search query performance is that it’s the best place to do your ad testing. So, we go very isolated for specific keywords that you want to test. Let’s say you change your images; you change your authoring or any change. A type of change you do that could change your converse generate or CTR. Right away you can see that reflect itself in that keyword. Right when you are isolated, you can see what happens for this keyword. Or in some cases they want to be more. If your organic writing is not good. What we do is that we take one keyword, we push for top of search with our product with that new change and now we can see what’s going on with the product that we have. The other one is that that directional of your click-through rate and conversion compared to the competition directionally, it’s not 100 accurate directionally. What is going on and how very outstanding compared to your competitors. Then in many cases, is that you could find a keyword stack, for instance. They are highly related and either your click-through rate is low, your conversion rate is low from this list you can come up with those keywords and start working on them, testing them and seeing, at the same time seeing the results. The downside from search query performance, unfortunately, is that you can’t scale it because you can’t like if you have 100 aces, you can one by one go download this. It is a very time consuming, so we are hoping one day Amazon will come up with it. Bring us to this API.

Bradley Sutton:

They’re a year old. It was supposed to be last year but then it’s now this year. But I’m not even I’m not even 100 percent sure it’s going to come available on the API this year. But yeah, like it’s really hard to consume a lot of that information for sure. Now are you at the ASIN level. You have a little bit extra information because you can click on those keywords to see the top 10 click, which it’s also strange that that’s different than Brand Analytics, but it’s probably the normalized, denormalized thing too as well. But are you going that deep and looking at who are the top 10 clicked and what percentage of the clicks they have, or are you pretty much just staying on the ASIN page, or are you staying on the brand page? Where are you focusing your efforts?

Mansour:

For us at Incrementum digital, what we do, as I mentioned, we can’t do this for all the products in brand level. It is easy, we do it and the reason we do that in brand level more often is that because it gives you a holistic view of what is going on for your brand, for specific keywords. So, for brand, we are working more with brand, with the brand section. For ASINs, we focus on our best products and the most important keywords to understand what’s going on. Maybe it is like five ASINs plus five keywords. That’s the reality, right, like how much time do you have to go out to all these details? So, in ASIN level, we are very limited to our top sellers and few of keywords, to going really into the deep and seeing what’s going on, who is getting these clicks indeed for these keywords, and how we can manage this situation.

Bradley Sutton:

Some things is just kind of like FYI, you know, like, hey, this is good information to have what’s going on the search volume history or of a product. You know how many clicks. You know what’s the overall conversion rate. You know, I love looking at that. You know the overall conversion rate of a keyword. What are, what would you say is the most actionable things from search query performance? That kind of closes out like, hey, this is actually something that is not just it’s good to know, but hey, I’m actually going to take action on this taking action.

Mansour:

I would say even when I look at my own brand one is that for the main keywords, what I actually I do this on a weekly basis. I have a list of the main keywords which is for my, for one of my ACMs, are like 10 keywords and actually I go into the detail of, week over week, what is happening to my click share for those keywords, because they are very important for me and I want to be on the top and top five for these terms. I want to be aware of what is going on with my competitors and what’s my need. So if I see I haven’t tracked off my click share for the keywords, if I see it is going down, right away I’ll figure out what’s going on and maybe push with my advertising, for that for me, would be our main keywords and what’s going happening for my click share rate, conversion rate and click share just for my clicks or so rate, conversion rate and click share just on my top keywords. Honestly, I won’t go, I think, bother myself. One would offer all the keywords, just like top five to ten keywords, what they are, and I’ll keep it very close overview and monitor them to see exactly what’s going on? Because you see that search volume going up or down. But I want my click share and my conversion share that I have I’m generating. Either they are consistent or going up. So, if I see this trend is down, right away I start doing maybe I run coupon code or I push with my advertising to make sure I’m getting them back into track.

Bradley Sutton:

Fast forwarding day one. It’s available in the API, Helium 10. You obviously know what we can do and can’t do. What would be the most value that we, as Helium 10, can give you to make your life easier or other people out there. Like, what’s the first thing that we should implement, you think, with search query performance in Helium 10?

Mansour:

I would say the easiest and the lowest standing fruit is just putting these keywords and showing the trends for them week over week, month over month. As you know, search for your performance. You have to go back and forth. As simple as that. It could be very helpful because right then you can easily figure out what is happening for these trends. Right At the end of the day, it’s about identifying the trends and what’s happening and taking action. That identifying part right now is time consuming because they’re the Amazon’s providing data which Helium 10, with having API, easily can provide that. 

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s switch to something that seems to be changing every month, or even every week sometimes product opportunity explorer. I mean like they’re adding always new metrics, new views, new tabs and in in there, what are you know? Like we could probably do two episodes all about this, but what are some of your top things that? Hey, Amazon sellers, you’ve got access to this, even if you don’t even have brand registry on, like Search Trade Performance. This is something that should be in your SOPs for what you’re looking at as an Amazon seller in Opportunity Explorer.

Mansour:

Oh man, I love opportunity expropriation, explore. I think people underestimate it. The first thing is I would recommend to all sellers and brands is just, if you are looking for product opportunity, one of the best ways are to look at the product opportunity explorer, and the reason is that you could either search for any niche that you want or, when I started, when I wanted to go to supplement what I did, I drilled down to the category, because you can filter to any category. I drilled down to the subcategory that I want. I guess now Amazon gives you all these niches related to that subcategory. I downloaded it and it started going that you can search with search volume. You can search for changes, unit sales or number of the competition in that market. So much it could give away that I would say this is the number one. If you are doing product research, you can find opportunities. We are going to go to other stuff as well, but talking about product. The second is that in any niche that you are best place to start your research in terms of what customers like, what they dislike and what futures they are looking for. If you go to any niche, it’s going to give you all those information which they. I think Amazon updated like so five weeks ago that customer review insights returns trends not trends-wise, but these two are great for product researchers. Number three by far one of my best use cases is the trend. We have these calls with the clients that they ask about trend. They ask about the like my sales are down or up. What we do is that we go exactly find the top category that they are in, the product niche that they are in. You go to the trend tab and Amazon provides you would leak over a weak trend of the search volume right again. Probably the search volume is not normalized here, but it doesn’t matter because you are looking direction. Yes, it can show you are. Is it? The trend is up or down? And it could give you a great idea of what’s going on with the market. And are you aligned with that? If trend went down, your sales going up. Well done, you are doing a great job. If trends going up, you are going down, then something is happening, you are staying behind and sometimes you could even like you have the week over week data. You could do this calculation and see what is the growth for this, how much it grow from last week to prior week how much your brand grows so you could see directionally in terms of the growth as well, to understand where you are standing with that. I’ll give you one more that recently I used, and I posted a template about this. We are going to talk about brand metrics, which has the conversion rate for products. But if you are launching a new product and you don’t have conversion rate because brand metrics doesn’t give you any data since you are not in top category, there is a way from product opportunity explorer to come up with average conversion rate of the market, that niche, which is going to be an estimation but the display instead of not knowing, having zero idea what the conversion rate is, you could get some data and from the KPIs that you get from the product dashboard and from search sharing dashboard. Combining these two, it’s going to give you the average conversion rate for that market. I use this a lot and it’s the best place for me to start and say, ok, I’m launching this product, it’s going to help you with the budgeting, because you have the cost per click estimation, but you need conversion rate to come up with the budgeting, because you have the cost per click estimation, but you need conversion rate to come up with the budgeting Plus understanding, because we know how conversion rate can impact your brand ranking. Understanding where you have to stand initially and it is for just first or two weeks as soon as you get data, brand metrics is going to give you a more accurate data. So it’s just for initial days to have an idea.

Bradley Sutton:

So what are you doing in order to get that calculation? How are you actually doing that estimation?

Mansour:

It is very easy in the product age Amazon gives you. Actually, I’m looking at here to remember Amazon gives you the niche click count for every product. Okay, so you have a niche click count. You sum up all the click counts; it’s going to give you the total clicks of the market over past year across all the products. And just a side note, when I’m saying across all products for every niche, you are seeing the products that giving 80% of the clicks of the market. So, we don’t see that the other 20, but that’s good enough. So we have the total number of clicks now in the search. 

Bradley Sutton:

Actually, now it’s 90. They changed that. Now it’s just recently changed.

Mansour:

 Yeah, even better now, in the search terms tab, for every single search term, Amazon tells you what is the click share of that search term. So, you multiply click share of every search term by the total count of clicks that you calculated from product page. It’s going to give you the number of clicks. Also, Amazon have the search conversion. For every term. You have the search conversion rate. You have the total searches for each search. It’s going to give you the purchase. You have the purchase. You have the clicks. Divide this, you get the conversion rate per search share. And also what I do in my template. I have this aggregated so you can see for this category what is the average coverage rate.

Bradley Sutton:

You reference brand metrics. So you know you don’t have that until you start selling. But then you know now you’re selling in a brand. How can that report help sellers?

Mansour:

Brand metrics. Everyone is just talking about the conversion error rate in brand metrics, but the data there is so valuable that you could check everything. So, Amazon gives you awareness, consideration and purchase trend and the data for any subcategory. So, what is awareness? It’s just simply telling you that the number of shoppers who search your brand but they didn’t purchase, how this could help you. Let’s say you’re running DSP or awareness campaigns. If you come here for the subcategory, you can see the trend of your branded searches in one dashboard for that subcategory. So easily you can see how you were searched in BSP or any awareness campaign. Or maybe it’s not on Amazon. Maybe you are running on social media TikTok. You could see here how that is impactful your Amazon branded searches. Are the customers coming here or looking at this or not? Where it becomes interesting is that when you click for any subcategory, there is this purchase index, sales index. This sales index for every subcategory shows you that there are you in the percentile in terms of the sales. For instance, there is this brand right now. I’m looking at it. It shows that in the purchased uh top part of funnel, this brand in this category stands in 90, 20%, 92% sorry, meaning it is performing better than 92% of the brands in this category. Now, what this means is that what we are doing with this. We are tracking this for every subcategory, months over months. Amazon doesn’t show us this, but we are tracking our own dashboard. We put this in a graph which, months over months, we want this number either to stay stable or go up. If it goes down, it means you are losing market share. This is amazing and I don’t see anyone talking about this, but this is a very great index that shows you where you are roughly and it’s a good estimation of where you are standing in terms of market share, which is directly coming from Amazon. Also, it shows the stoppers about that percentile, which is a great index to look at. It shows your shoppers how they are changing week over week. It shows the category median shoppers how they are change plus the category top, how they have changed. So sometimes, when I want to compare our brand with the competition, this is the absolute number of the shoppers week over week. What I do or months over months, I divide the number of category median to previous months, mine to previous months, to see the growth and I compare my brand to the category top. Like if the shopper is increased 10%, how much my shoppers increase me. In an ideal work we want to be 10 percent or more, but you could get to that number and see where you are standing with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome and just for you know we’ll maybe show some screenshots later, but for people just listening to this, they’re in their car right now. They want to go home and go find where to find these things. How can they navigate to this section that you just were talking about?

Mansour:

So, you go to Seller Central, click on Advertising Campaigns, go to the Advert on advertising campaigns advertising console. On the list there is this tab called insights and planning. Under insights and planning, there you have the brand metrics. 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so I’ll show this for our YouTube. So they’re here in the advertising console, they go to the left hand side and then the next thing they need to click on insights and planning.

Mansour:

Insights and planning and then brand metrics.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, I hope you guys. You know we just spent, you know, 20, 25 minutes talking about things, 100% of which I don’t know. Maybe three, four years ago nobody had access to. You know some people say, oh, Amazon is getting more difficult, Amazon is getting more competition, it’s less profits, and so some of that is absolutely true. Of course, it’s not as quote unquote easy as it was back in the day, but there are some aspects of Amazon that you just have so much more visibility into what’s going on thanks to Amazon that it kind of makes up at least for some of the added competition and some of the barrier to entry. So definitely take advantage of these things. Not one thing that he just mentioned you have to pay for or is like you know, like back in the day, six, seven years ago, you used to have to pay even tens of thousands of dollars to Amazon for these special reports, if you’re an only, if you’re a vendor, and what we have today for free is more powerful than those that brands used to pay tens of thousands of dollars for. Let’s just quickly switch gears for just a couple of minutes. I see you do put out some content on LinkedIn about Walmart and Walmart advertising. What’s just a couple of things that you can mention just about in Walmart in general, or some specific strategies that you’re seeing that works or that people maybe should be taking advantage of. That’s new on Walmart that sellers aren’t taking advantage of now.

Mansour:

I would say, yeah, I realize we have done everything, or like everything that I’ve done in Walmart. We have realized that it’s pretty much similar to Amazon in terms of the strategies you add. One difference I personally noticed like for Amazon, we say focus on starting with keyword targeting to do the indexing and everything. But actually Walmart, I have noticed that auto campaign is working better when you are starting. So just to start with auto campaign, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t target keywords, or you shouldn’t segment, you should do that. But to start with auto campaign, it seems like Walmart is doing a great job there. And also I really something that I don’t see uh, maybe the managers using it as these placements for the campaigns. Walmart has more control over placements desktop, mobile, you could add multiplier for them and different placements. Even they have more control than Amazon. They give us more control than Amazon over them. That I would say it’s a low-handing for that I don’t see many people are using it. But as you can create and give control at places and focus on different placements. It’s going to give you more control to understand where you are getting the best efficiency in Walmart advertising. One thing I wanted to go back you mentioned about these new data is coming out, as I’m giving you data and people asking you about Helium 10. I haven’t always said that these are two different things. Amazon gives the data, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Helium 10, because Helium 10 has a different purpose. These data have a different purpose and the way I actually think is that these two working together to give you better insights and Amazon is the worst in bringing the data, like they give you data from every single dashboard. You can’t make connections, you can’t know what it is, but tools like Helium 10, at the end of the day, the idea is that they bring this in one platform and give they give you the insight. So, yeah, I don’t like when people are comparing or sometimes like post on like, oh, we don’t need Helium 10 anymore. I’m like, no, you need Helium 10. That’s a different tool that you need to have and it is different from what you are talking or what Amazon is providing you. So it’s not going to stop you from using Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

All right Now, before we get into our last questions and last strategy of the day. How can people find you out there on the interwebs I’m sure everybody wants to follow you on LinkedIn and how can they find you? Incrementum, et cetera.

Mansour:

This place for me personally is on LinkedIn man sort of already you search, you can find me. For Incrementum digital LinkedIn Plus we are very active on YouTube and social media like Instagram and TikTok. In our YouTube we post videos, contents. You could follow us there as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Since we were talking about Helium 10, something I ask every guest here I already asked what you would do for Search Group Performance, but two questions about Helium 10. Number one, what is your favorite tool that Helium 10 has now, or favorite function of a tool? And then number two, outside of what you said about Search Group Performance, if I said about social performance, if I said Mansour, you’ve got, you are our chief product officer for the day. What would you make our team develop that we don’t have currently?

Mansour:

Market 360 is very good for the market share. That’s a great tool because I see, like brands, they haven’t started going out of this mindset of revenue how much our revenue grows, because that is meaningless at the end of the day. You need to understand your market share and grow your market share, because you can’t look at the revenue. So market360, I would say, is the best tool which could help brands to understand holistically what’s going on and where they are standing. Put away a revenue. Revenue doesn’t show you how your brand is doing. And if I want to add one thing which I feel like brands are missing is forecasting and what I mean by forecasting. Unfortunately, I see many smaller to medium-sized brands like bigger brands. They do forecasting. They move forward blindsided, they don’t have any idea. They are saying, okay, here’s my top, with goal of, let’s say, 15%, 20%, let’s go see what happens, which is the biggest mistake you could do. And actually we have started doing this and we want to do this for most of the brands we are working recently.Do a forecast for next 6months to 12 months. Of course it’s an estimate. It’s not going to be accurate. Do a forecast and say, based on your historical data that we see and trend here is what’s going to happen next 6 months to next 12 months. Based on that, you plan what’s going to be your monthly revenue, what should be your monthly expense. So, months over months, you are tracking this, you have this number and if your goal, let’s say, you’re getting to in 10 months, you are getting 12 months, you are tracking this, you have this number. And if your goal, let’s say you’re getting to 10 months, you are getting 12 months. You are getting to 10 million, but your goal is 12 million. Okay, now we know that it has to have that extra spend to make sure we are getting in track for achieving that. And you’re tracking without being blindsided or just going with the flow. So forecasting, I would add, in ASIN levels, very easy, plus the sales for brands to plan for the future.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that. You know we kind of have that already, just for inventory, though, like we haven’t. I mean people in our inventory management you can select, okay, based on 30-day velocity, but we also have a dynamic algorithm that’s looking at the seasonality of your product and know that prime day is coming up, but what we don’t have is just overall, just outside of inventory, like a forecast. I think that’s a great idea. All right, so your last 60 second strategy, 60 second tip of the day, something kind of actionable that Amazon sellers can and should be doing.

Mansour:

So, yeah, my tip would be that I see this happening time and time for some of the brands that it applies if your product is exploratory. For instance, if you are selling bed mattresses, right, these are the products. Or fashionable products, these are the exploratory products. Customers browse many products, click around until they find the things that they like and they purchase. Either it’s design, either it’s color or the size. So the mistakes that I see times and times these brands doing they push the advertising too much for top of search, which you don’t need. You’re wasting money by increasing your cost per click to be on top of page, by increasing your cost per click to be on top of page. While being on top of page or being in the middle part of the page doesn’t matter, because still, customers will click on your product because they are looking. And if you go to brand analytics you can see for these type of keywords anywhere you see the click share for the keywords are low. Those keywords are exploratory. It means you don’t need to uh bit high, just bring your bit down. Make sure you are visible on the page on top half of the beach. Don’t aim for top of the search. I wanted to give this as a tip because I see many brands and many examples I have seen over the last five, six months they have been doing, they have changed their strategy and they have seen results. We haven’t lost many sales, but our cost per acquisition comes lower.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Thanks a lot, mentor, for coming on and sharing all your knowledge, really appreciate what you’ve been able to share with us and we look forward to having you back on the show next year to see what you’ve been up to.

Mansour:

Thank you so much for having me. It was great Thanks.

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