#656 – How to Rank Faster with Amazon PPC

Audio Version Above. Video Version Below.

Join us for an insightful episode featuring Marcel Marculescu, the CEO of IntelliRank. From his early days in Romania crafting browser-based games to becoming a cornerstone in the Amazon selling community, Marcel’s journey is a testament to his entrepreneurial spirit. We unpack his expertise in Amazon ranking and advertising, examining the evolution of strategies for product launches and the importance of a harmonious blend of organic methods and PPC advertising.

Our conversation ventures into the world of Amazon keywords, where Marcel sheds light on the power of targeting long-tail keywords. We explore how user-generated content, like reviews and Amazon Posts, can amplify product visibility — especially crucial during the initial stages of a product’s life. Marcel also emphasizes the significance of testing product listings through Amazon experiments, providing a fresh perspective on customer insights versus personal biases. The essence of community comes to life as we discuss Amazing Days in Bulgaria, fostering a vibrant network for Amazon sellers in the region.

In the realm of advertising, we have Vincenzo Toscano, CEO of Ecomcy live in the Amazon Ads booth in Prosper Show to share advanced techniques for harnessing Amazon’s Sponsored Display ads and audience targeting. We discuss isolating campaigns to refine bidding strategies, and an innovative approach using Helium 10’s Black Box tool to focus on complementary products. The episode wraps up with the undeniable value of seller networking and community events like Amazon Accelerate, highlighting how these connections fuel both personal and professional growth in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

In episode 656 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Marcel, and Vincenzo discuss:

• 00:30 – Amazon Advertising Strategies for Ranking
• 04:08 – Romanians Dominating Ranking Companies
• 08:18 – Amazon PPC for New Products
• 11:55 – Optimizing Amazon Keywords and Strategies
• 12:40 – Leveraging Amazon Post for Visibility
• 18:51 – Europe Event Travel Opportunity
• 22:28 – Amazon Advertising Strategies Beyond Basics
• 27:16 – Maximizing Amazon Advertising With Basket Analysis
• 32:32 – Global Amazon Advertising Strategy Insights
• 34:05 – Helium 10 Ads Strategy and Growth
• 36:42 – Global Marketplace Advertising Strategies 
• 41:04 – Amazon Seller Networking Value

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got two expert guests on our Tacos Tuesday advertising show. We’re going to talk a lot about how to rank when you’re launching with PPC. We’re going to talk about some advanced forms of advertising such as sponsor display and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a two-for-one episode, half recorded here remotely, half recorded at the Prosper Show recently, and we’re going to be talking mainly about Amazon advertising and some other strategies, with one familiar face to the show and then one new face. And let’s go ahead and bring the new face to the show. Go ahead and introduce yourselves to our listeners out there.

Marcel:

Hey there, Bradley, thank you for having me. Me so my name is Marcel Marculescu. I’m the CEO and co-founder of IntelliRANK and also the organizer of Amazing Days. This is a show, an actual event that’s happening in the Balkan area. So a lot of events in the US. We participate a lot of them in the US, but in Europe, in the Balkan area, this is the most important one. So yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, so he doesn’t just organize amazing days like, like literally. I mean he’s talking about a show there, but I’m sure he organizes really amazing days for his family and friends as well. But let’s talk about some strategy. But before we get in there, since this is your first time on the show, let’s get some background. You said you’re from Romania originally.

Marcel:

Yes, that’s correct.

Bradley Sutton:

What city?

Marcel:

From Timisoara, so born and raised in another city and it was Drobeta-Turnu Severin. That’s a long name. And came to faculty, the university here in Timisoara, and been here.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you study there?

Marcel:

So I’ve been computer science, I’m an IT Engineer and also have a mechanics faculty, also have a Master’s degree in Informatics. So yeah, I pretty much kept myself busy.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, is that what you started working in after you finished school?

Marcel:

Yes, absolutely. So I’ve been with the internet ever since it was on dial-up. I was working with servers, Linux, so that’s a passion that was here with me and also a very good incentive to get on board with the internet with websites and stuff like that. So, yeah, I can tell a lot of tales and stories what happened back in the days, but yeah, I don’t know if this is the case right now.

Bradley Sutton:

And then how did you get introduced to like the e-commerce part of internet?

Marcel:

Well, the e-commerce part came with myself programming. So I went into the programming space and designed my very own uh browser-based role play game. So it was back in the days in 2008, 2009, when I started this game, and that’s when it come, when you come to go aboard with the actual things that were happening online. So I had to market it. I had to do all the programming, so it was a one-man show and it was very, very overwhelming but also rewarding. After that I went into the actual e-commerce of Amazon back in 2016. That’s when Hudi was also creating the course in Romania. I’m sure you know Alex Hudisan. We had a very strong community in Romania of Amazon sellers but slowly it dissolved because no more courses. Hudi is not organizing the course anymore and not a lot of people are tapping into that. Hence the need of getting the people together and building up a big community here in Romania and why not, in the Balkan area.

Bradley Sutton:

Now for your agency and services. The name IntelliRANK, as you said, is one of your specialties ranking then?

Marcel:

That’s absolutely correct. Yes, so both organic and PPC.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, well, let me ask you what is it about Romanians and ranking companies? Because I think a lot of the top you know, like in history and when you know there’s been different times where different strategies are able to be used and not, but you know, you think of a lot of the, the main companies of ranking, that the one, the very first one, I used was not Romanian. It was called ZonBoost, which doesn’t you know, that was how I got my start when I was a service provider, but then, after that, it was the Romanians taking over the game, whether it was RankBell Izabella, originally from Romania, AZ Rank Alina, from Romania, and now another Romanian ranking company. Why are Romanians so good at launch and rank?

Marcel:

That’s a very good question. I guess, I don’t know. We like this bit, and this is the most important part of any you know business. If you ask me, it’s about visibility being up there in the top of the shelves so people actually see you and actually purchase from you. So I guess we’re more focused on the solutions rather than the journey. I don’t know, I’m guessing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now I mean, you know, as we mentioned throughout the years, regardless of the company or whatever you know, the Amazon rules and regulations have changed. Some things that were able to be done and were legal, you know, all of a sudden one day became not legal. What is your go-to method for ranking and especially for launch, nowadays? Is it a mixture of utilizing Amazon advertising, now that we can’t do things like maybe, two-step URLs and search, find, buy and things that were very common just a few years ago? Is it PPC your main source, or how are you ranking these days so?

Marcel:

There are two methods that we use. The main one is PPC, that is very well known for everyone, and also we have another one that’s called product testing.

Bradley Sutton:

When you’re trying to rank and launch, when you’re just opening a product, you know like sometimes advertising and PPC costs can get out of control, but you know that’s a very legal way of getting sales. How do you keep your advertising budget under control? When you’re a newer product, you don’t have too many reviews and so you know PPC spend can kind of get out of control. So how do you control your budgets and your spend for a new product?

Marcel:

So it’s a matter of strategy. We always like to plan ahead and also present it to our clients and then execute. So whenever we look at the signals we’re sending to Amazon, I truly believe that we should present to Amazon no day without sales. We need to bring in sales every day, from day one, and this is what we’re doing through the product testing campaign. Mainly, we’re bringing in slowly sales. It doesn’t have to be like 100 sales per day, it has to be something like one, two, three sales per day, and then also with PPC, keeping it under control, that’s more on the. We usually start.

Marcel:

For myself, this is my personal strategy. I start with an automated campaign and also with a manual campaign on the long tail keywords. We do a very good research and this is a coincidence, but our favorite tool for keyword research is Helium 10 and we are using it on an everyday basis. And, yeah, getting everything done with Helium 10 and we are using it on an everyday basis and then just implementing into the PPC is straightforward for us and has been working for years. So, yeah, we’re bored with it and thank you for this great tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now you mentioned auto campaign and some exact campaigns. What other match types or campaign types are you using or do you suggest to use like are you doing video campaigns right away or that’s only until later? Are you doing sponsored brand campaigns, sponsored display or strictly ASIN targeting and keyword targeting for newer products?

Marcel:

For new products. We start okay, the auto campaign is the main one and then we target keywords, but videos come later. We work through the entire funnel with Amazon. So first is awareness top of the funnel. Then we work through consideration, conversion and loyalty. So we tap into the whole funnel and we organize the campaign slowly to target each of the steps in the funnel.

Marcel:

Now the idea behind it is that the strategy is not being implemented all of it at once, so we’re not targeting all of them at once. We start along a lot with awareness without awareness. That’s the main goal just to present the product out there. Also, we don’t want to be very aggressive and put a lot of money into PPC at the beginning because we frankly don’t have a lot of reviews right. So you need some social proof, you need some good reviews out there to showcase your product as a good product and then so as soon as you get into and tap into more reviews through Vine, of course, you can expand and you can definitely reach out on the entire steps of the funnel and expand through targeted campaigns. So the whole idea and also the most powerful thought to have here be aggressive, be defensive and also target everything that you can through PPC and work your way out, because, at the end of the day, Amazon is putting this on the table for us, and why not take advantage of all the specs there?

Bradley Sutton:

You mentioned starting lower with the budget. What kind of budgets for your initial campaigns do you suggest? And then what does it go up to once you have more reviews? I know it’s different depending on the seller’s budget and things like that, but on average you’re starting off with your first auto and manual campaigns for launch. What, if, as long as the customer’s budget or the seller’s budget allows, what kind of budget are you allocating in, like the first month? You know your daily budget for PPC.

Marcel:

So again, it’s a matter like you very well mentioned, Bradley, it’s a matter of seller choice. So we work closely to the sellers. There’s not one like the other. I’d say the most important part. I would refer back to the funnel. It’s important for the sellers to understand that whenever we’re starting, we need to invest in mainly the first layer of the funnel, which is the awareness. So we’ll be investing most of the budget into awareness, consideration allocation also we tap into that. That’s mostly about the actual clicks, about the display page views. So we’re tapping into these two bits for the beginning and optimizing for them.

Marcel:

Now, in terms of budget allocation, that again is done based on client yeah, let’s say budget and at the end of the day, we want to measure the KPIs. We have KPIs in place for each of the steps of the funnel and based on those KPIs we can take informed decisions. We do not do any guesswork here. We’re mainly looking at the KPIs. So the first step of the funnel, awareness, implies actually getting the actual impressions, the actual views that you get on the product. Then, as we tap into consideration or looking at APIs, like the actual display page view or the actual clicks that we get. That’s very important. The CTR is very important here, and then we tap into the actual conversion, which is referring to the actual sales, the actual orders and the new to brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you know you mentioned using Helium 10 to find the best keywords that you would put in the listing, and then that’s what you’re targeting. How do you strategize which keywords you’re trying to rank for first? Obviously, you can’t just rank for everything from day one. What’s some of your strategy? Because obviously you, obviously Helium 10, can find a lot of keywords that are relevant to your product and relevant to competitors. How are you focusing on what are the top five, top 10 keywords that you’re trying to rank for in those initial stages.

Marcel:

At the beginning, we usually get to the long tail keywords. We are targeting keywords with at least 5,000 monthly views and we are getting the long tail keywords out of that list. We want to build a foundation. I look at it as building a house. You want to have a strong foundation, so, first of all, we target and we get the low hanging fruits. This also is in parallel working with reviews, which will come through Vine or other methods, whatever people are tapping into.

Marcel:

And, yeah, as the beginning comes at the beginning, you want to tap into this. You need user-generated content. You need to. You know, maybe not. Why not leverage Amazon Post? Even though, yeah, Amazon Inspire has been retired from the business? Still, amazon Post is out there. I don’t know for how long, but as long as it’s there and it’s free, why not tap into that as well? Get more visibility for free. And while we go with the long tail keywords, we want to get as much real estate on those through PPC and, why not? Through organic ranking. Later on, we will scale up and we will target more powerful keywords, more competitive keywords, because, yeah, we want to get more visibility, but that will happen once we get at least, let’s say, for example, 10 reviews or 20 reviews, that will showcase the product in a good area and we have some social proof in terms of some good pictures, videos of the product, unboxing, anything that can help demonstrate the quality of the product at the end of the day.

Bradley Sutton:

What is a couple unique strategies you think you have? It could be about advertising, could be about ranking, could be about listing, optimization, AI, anything at all. Something that is a little bit more unique that you guys leverage with your own accounts and your clients’ accounts.

Marcel:

I’d say it’s a mix of everything that you mentioned. At the end of the day, it’s not one strategy that will do the difference. It’s a matter of getting them all and leveraging everything. One very important strategy I want to mention and people are not using it so much is experimenting.

Marcel:

Back in the days, I got attached to my products, to my main image. This is what happens sometimes to business owners out there. We get attached to those. So it was later that I discovered that at the end of the day, it’s not important how you see it as an owner, and of course, you will love your product. It’s your product, of course.

Marcel:

But try to get the information from the clients, and how we like to do that is through Amazon experiments. It’s very important. Also, we build the listings having in mind how the client will perceive the listing. It’s not about bragging about the features and everything, but rather put it in the perspective that you know.

Marcel:

Whenever someone is browsing Amazon is like looking out there on the products and saying what’s in it for me, it’s not about you know your brand. Okay, you have a great brand, you’ve built it very nicely, you’ve hard work a lot, but people don’t care, frankly, about that too much. They care about how your product is helping them. So as soon as we understand that as sellers, as soon as we make the listings reflect what’s the benefit, what’s the value that people get out of the product, that’s when we actually get the business rolling and the sales will kick in. And this has been, let’s say, a journey for us to actually implement it and try to educate around the people how to best present the products in order not to be too braggy about the brand, but rather what’s in it for the customer.

Bradley Sutton:

Back to the Amazing Days. It’s been a few years in Bulgaria. Why Bulgaria if you’re living in Romania??

Marcel:

That’s a great question. So the event started back in 2020, I believe that was the first event there. It was a quite small event like 30 people at the beginning, very, very cozy and it started in Bulgaria because it was started by Nikolai Ilchev. He is the actual main organizer of the Balkan E-commerce Summit.

Marcel:

Now, this is back in the days when we started actually leveraging the Balkan area. We started in Bulgaria, Sofia then we shifted to Romania. The next event was in Romania, then we went to Barcelona and then last year we came back to Sofia and this year we’ll be back in Sofia again. Why?

Marcel:

Because we found a very nice community in Bulgaria and also Romania is neighbor country, so it’s easy for us to to just, you know, commute from Romania to Bulgaria, and we found a very powerful community there in Bulgaria. So, instead of, you know, getting them all traveling to Romania, to Bucharest, to Barcelona and all the parts of the world, we created the core there.

Marcel:

Now, this is one reason. The other reason is that the Amazing Days is a satellite event for, and has Amazon topics, and we’ll have Amazon celebrities this year that are, you know, we have a powerhouse lineup for speakers. Also, the next days will be about e-commerce in general, e-commerce in the Balkan area, with the Balkan E-commerce Summit. So we linked it together to get the most out of people whenever they’re traveling, to get the most out of their travels and participate in two events at once.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Now, obviously, I’ll be speaking in English, but the rest of the event, for the Amazing Days event at least, will all the speakers also have their presentations in English.

Marcel:

Absolutely, and all the speakers actually are very powerful speakers, like you know, from around the world. We have Vincenzo. Everyone knows Vincenzo from Ecomcy, so he’s coming this year as well on stage. We have Samantha Tillett from Aleph Group. We also have Or Shamosh, which is very powerful into the industry in terms of compliance and problems that might. This is a very powerful presentation about how to stay compliant with your listings and everything on Amazon. And we have Max Sinclair. He will be talking about AI. So everything will be in English and every presentation will be there and, yeah, the main language will be English definitely.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, all right. So, guys, if you want more information, an easy way, easy link to go, go to h10.me/bulgaria. I made like a forwarding link that will go to the website and then we can see you. The date is going to be on the 28th of April, so still time to plan. And you know, the thing I love about Europe is, regardless where you are in Europe, you’re like a 40 euro Ryanair flight away from another country anywhere else. You know, I was just in the Prosper Show in Vegas and just to go to the airport, to any casino or hotel, is about 40 euros or 40 dollars. It’s in the Uber. It’s so crazy. But for the same price you can go from Spain to Bulgaria. You can go from, you know, UK to Bulgaria. You can go from almost anywhere. So, if you’re in Europe and you want to go to an event with some great speakers, make including myself. Thank you for forward slash Bulgaria. So all right. Well, I look forward to seeing you there. It’ll be my first time, I think, in Bulgaria. I’ve been to Romania a few times but I look forward to it. One of my favorite sumo wrestlers originally is from Bulgaria. He was very famous in Japan for many years and I know Bulgaria is also famous for yogurt and some good things. I have to.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll be leaving a little bit early, so my presentation will be in the morning, probably because all of a sudden, last second, just like a couple of days ago, my work was like hey, you have to be in San Diego, California, Tuesday morning 8:30. And I was like I’m speaking in Bulgaria on Monday. How in the world am I going to get back? But then I was able to find a flight that goes like I will give my speech and then two o’clock in the afternoon I get my flight and I’ll be back here in California somehow by Tuesday morning. But I hope to see you guys. I’ll be there for the VIP dinner the night before. So if you guys have a chance to sign up for that VIP dinner, make sure to sign up on I think that’s a Sunday night and then the main event on Monday. So, Marcel, thank you very much for coming on here and I’ll be seeing you in a couple of weeks.

Marcel:

Looking forward to it, Bradley, thank you for having me. One more thing I guess we can mention to everyone. We have a small present for everyone, like a discount. If you input Helium 10 when you purchase the ticket with Amazing Days, you’ll get a 10% discount. So thank you, Bradley, and looking forward to seeing you soon.

Bradley Sutton:

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Vincenzo:

Third, it’s my third Prosper Show. It’s been an amazing experience. I think it’s one of the few shows out there that you really get to connect with like-minded people. People fly all across the globe to meet at the same place. It’s been an amazing experience as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk Amazon Ads, since we’re in the Amazon Ad booth. I fear we can talk about like advanced strategies going to beginners. But let me just start off with something that I think I haven’t dabbled too much in and I’ve always used sponsored display ads, but I just do the very basic where I’m just, like you know, for ace and targeting sponsored display is much more than just ace and targeting ads those ones that you see like under the Buy Box and things what are some other ways that me and the audience out there should be using sponsored display ads.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So I would say sponsored display is something that I feel a lot of people unfortunately is being utilizing. Is such a powerful type of advertising that you have within Amazon. I think something I personally love about a sponsored display is the opportunity to use audiences. It’s effectively trying to reverse, engineer what is their lifestyle or the context behind affairs in terms of what they’re actually shopping in the platform itself. Right, and you can be very clever. You can go clear in the sense that you can understand. For example, let’s say you’re selling products in the pet space.

 Vincenzo:

Are you looking for people that, when it comes to lifestyle, has everything to do with pets? Right. So now, with Sponsored Display, you can find those audiences, and there’s a lot of audience that Amazon effectively gives you the option to target. And then you can refine that, also with specific windows in terms of what is the engagement they’ve been having with your product pages, with your competitors, and that’s something that allows you to go an extra step forward beyond the traditional sponsor products that you have only with keywords, because now, usually with keywords, you’re always at the button on the funnel is when people are already at that stage that they want to make a purchase. But with sponsored display, you can be very clever and interact with the customer on top of the funnel, create that awareness effect and try to make them into a loyal customer of yours. So it’s very powerful, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now on ASIN targeting sponsored display, you know like if there’s something that’s not performing well, I can just do negative target or pause that target. You know, sponsored product. We’re all used to being able to control cost because, like, if there’s something that’s getting out of hand, I can control the bid. I can just pause that target and do a negative match. When you’re doing like audience targeting, which is not like a certain keyword, how do you control it so that the spend just doesn’t go crazy?

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So usually what we try to do with audiences, we try to test them in isolation. That’s very important. I see that mistake done a lot when it comes to doing sponsored display. Usually people end up putting a lot of audience in the same campaign. Then effectively is going to be very difficult for you to understand what is the actual contribution of each audience to the performance that you’re getting out of that strategy. So start by doing isolation, so one campaign per audience when it comes to sponsor display and then based on the performance, usually that’s how I’m going to adjust effectively the bid I’m putting against that audience, right, and then you can refine that at the budget level. And then if you see that usually I give myself seven to 14 days because you need to let the system to effectively give you data. But if you see the consistency is not there in terms of exposure, I should just end up turning that campaign off and then start doing more A-B testing with our audiences until I find the right one when it comes to the KPS and looking to sponsor this flat.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s switch gears and maybe talk a little bit more about some more basic strategies and something I’ve talked about at different talks I’ve had here at Prosper. I just ask for a raise of hand and pretty much everybody says they’re not doing this. I’ll give one and then maybe you could give something that you think that is something that, hey, even newer sellers, they’re forgetting when it comes to advertising one. I don’t want to call this a hack, because it’s just a regular strategy, but when we talk about product targeting, ASIN, targeting ads, I think the tendency is everybody’s only focused on doing like products and that’s fine. If I’m selling a coffin shelf, I’m going to target the other coffin shelves that maybe are higher priced or worse reviews. Nothing wrong with that. You absolutely should be doing that. But another strategy I think people should do is in Helium 10, there’s a tool called Black Box but then it’s called product targeting and with that tab you can put in an ASIN and you’re going to see the history of like the last 60, 90 days of the products that have come in, frequently bought together, and sometimes what you see is like you know, people are not buying two different coffin shelves at the same time. You know sometimes they do, but usually it’s like complimentary products are like here’s a coffin shelf and then it’s like a skull shaped candle holder or bat shaped stickers right, and then what happens is if you look on those bat shaped stickers, you look on the skull and the holder and you look at who’s targeting them in sponsor display. You look at the product targeting curve, it’s just all the same product, which, again, it’s fine.

Bradley Sutton:

You should target your competitors. But you actually have data from Amazon that says, hey, people are buying this coffin shelf with this skull shaped thing. This is not like some gas or some Helium 10 algorithm. This is directly from Amazon saying people are buying it. So now you should be targeting that. And now you would be the only coffin shelf showing up on a product that already there’s a history of people buying it. So that’s a one strategy thing that almost nobody is using that. You guys are up. A lot of you are healing ten members. Any level of the Helium 10 has a product targeting tab. Fine, complementary products. What about you like? Do you see some like kind of what you would maybe consider a basic strategy, but you think a lot of people are sleeping on?

Vincenzo:

Yes, I think actually, the basket analysis inside for you get from brand analytics is super powerful and I think a lot of people is not utilizing that. And the reason why I say so powerful is when you’re doing advertising on Amazon, specifically in targeting, I agree a lot of people just go at the basic level, just targeting products that are exactly the same, but sometimes they don’t go into the extra layer and understand what is the other product. My client is buying this product with right and a lot of time what actually allows you to do is effectively find a cheaper CPC, cost per click, which can be huge when it comes to maximizing the return on investment on ads. So, yes, try to diversify what kind of products you target. Sometimes it could be accessories, could be compliments or products that are part of the design lifestyle when it comes to the full journey of that specific product.

 Vincenzo:

And another tip I would like to give to a sponsored product as in targeting campaigns, something that works very well for us is try to identify what are those listings that were just launched in the platform. Right, we try to use Helium 10 to identify those and effectively what we do is by finding the listings that were just launched in the last 60 days. We know for a fact when somebody launches a product on Amazon, they’re gonna run a lot of advertising to those listings. But sometimes we’re gonna have a very competitive offer. We might have better pricing, more reviews and, effectively, if we find those assets and try to take advantage of the fact that you might have a better offer, that can be a better way for you to get a better return on investment. Try instead of trying to compete with the bigger selling on that category. That might have already a lot of reviews and a big organic exposure. So it’s okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing I wanted to talk about today was, you know, I think everybody’s favorite Amazon data point search query performance. One of my favorite ways of using it is looking at hey, where have I gotten purchases? But my conversion rate is better than the market conversion rate, you know. And the way you look at that is hey, actually in Helium 10, it’s super easy, it just shows you. We have a tool for that. But if you’re looking in Seller Central, you just need to take the number of page clicks from the overall, the total page clicks, and we’ll get total purchases. Divide that, that’s the market conversion rate for that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you look at my product. You know my purchases versus my clicks and now you have yours. And so if, let’s say, mine is a 10% conversion rate and the market is 7%, I mean I’m doing better. So now I look at my impressions and if it’s less than the search volume, it means I could be leaving money on the table because I’m not showing up always when somebody searches. So that’s what I want to double down on advertising and maybe increase my bids, knowing that it’s also going to help my organic rank, and conversely, the opposite if my conversion is way less and I’m struggling with profitability on a target, instead of just like insisting oh, I have to show up on top of search, maybe I can dial back the spend, knowing that I’m not. It’s got like a losing battle. Is there anything else in search group performance that can affect the way that you tackle advertising that you look at?

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So I think something I also love about the search career performance report is effectively allows you to understand how you compare against the competition. Right, and sometimes, if you don’t take that into consideration when you structure your sponsor our campaigns, you might end up effectively having a structure that is not going to allow you to maximize your return on investment because it’s not tailored to counterattack what the competition is doing against you. So, on the search query performance report, something that I love to see is the whole funnel exposure. So I have the impression, you have the click, you have the add to cart and then you have the conversion.

Vincenzo:

And usually something I do quite often is I try to understand how my conversion changes throughout the whole funnel right. So, for example, if I see that I have a very good conversion when it comes to impression, then I have the add half a drop at the click rate and then I have another drop, add to cart and a significant drop at the purchase. That means it’s something happening towards the end of the purchase that is not making the sales to go through and usually when I do an audit, it comes down to I’m being heavily attacked by sponsored product campaigns from my competition. They are within my product details pages. They are targeting with sponsored display ads, so I need to protect effectively that exposure and that usually can allow you to fix that loophole where you’re losing sales.

Vincenzo:

Another example, to conclude, this same approach in the search query performance report is the inverse also happens. You may have not a lot of impressions. Then the click increases in terms of conversion and they are too fast and you have a very good closure of purchases. That means you don’t have enough traffic coming through. That means you need to invest more into advertising and that’s usually a good way to understand where you are and how you can tailor your strategy there to effectively the KPS you want to achieve.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now, for those of us who have been doing Amazon advertising for five plus years, we remember the old days sponsored brand ads, sponsored display. There’s not much room for like, custom creative, like. Maybe you could have your logo or something there, or just like another image that is in your image stack. But now, across sponsored brand headline ads and sponsor display, you can do a lot of custom creatives and even still, some people thought, oh, I can’t really do it because it’s too expensive, like to invest. But now, with even AI and things like, I think it’s a lot more accessible to do custom creative. So what direction do you suggest people go in, whether it’s sponsored brand, like should they be doing like lifestyle images? Should it be just, you know, product shots? Should it be like something that just catches the eye, like? What do you usually guide your brands to do when it comes to custom creative?

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So something I love about Amazon as well in this side of a type of ads, is the amount of investment they have done to effectively try to give as much access as possible to people to leverage sponsored brands. Now integrations such as the one way is happening with Canva. Now it’s very easy to come with very nice, you know banners and lifestyle images that can completely change the perception of your brand. So I think a big mistake going back to your question is that usually when people do sponsor brands, the reason why they might not get the best outcome out of it is because they use very generic content when it comes to their campaigns. They don’t tailor the content to the keyword they’re targeting.

Vincenzo:

Very quick example let’s say we’re targeting a yoga mat right, and the long tail keyword is yoga mat for park right. It’s a yoga mat is meant to be used on the outdoors, but then on the banner image is somebody using on a gym right. It’s not connecting and conveying the motion. What the for park right. It’s not connecting and conveying the motion, what the cue actually should reflect. It should be actually somebody on a nice park at the beach, something that reflects the actual usage of that cue. So I think doing that, tailoring your content towards the specific cue, is something that, for us, has given us the best conversion, not only from the banner perspective and lifestyle images, but also video. Video, oh my God. If you tailor that to a specific keyword and you convey the emotion that the keyword would reflect, video ads is being super profitable bro.

Bradley Sutton:

In Helium 10 ads, which your agency uses. Obviously, the key is making all the rules space and I think if we’re just brand new sellers or maybe this is not like one of your hero products there’s nothing wrong with just making rules based on, like, ACOS. Like, for example, I’ve got a lot of rules where I say, hey, if my ACOS is between 70 and 80, calculate it so that brings it down to 60. And then, if it’s 60 to 70, bring it down to 50. And then if it’s five to 10, hey, bring it up to 15. And different rules like that. But as somebody progresses with ads, you know like you should not be just basing things off of ACOS. So, like, for example, using Helium 10 ads, we have the opportunity to base rules based on impressions, row as clicks. How are you leveraging those rules? Like? What are some things that you can make rules about that you would suggest to people that’s not just solely based on ACOS.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So if you purely focus on ACOS when it comes to doing any strategy within sponsor ads, sometimes you might end up falling into the trap of effectively stagnating the growth of your business, because, of course, profitability is very important, but we have to understand that sometimes advertising also to be seen from the perspective of creating the showing the awareness that you need to consolidate your presence and captivate the market share control, which in the beginning might not be profitable, but over time the goal is that we consolidate organically. Our name is out there, people start creating a familiarity and that’s where potentially, with the time and as a product, the ACOS is going to go to a point that you’re going to be profitable. So, going back to the rules, usually a good rule that we try to implement when it comes to doing advertising is conversion. For us, the click-to-rate is super important.

Vincenzo:

Going back to what you just mentioned with brand analytics, like if, for example, you’re running advertising on Amazon right and you’re having a very poor conversion and click-to-rate, usually what we see is that that significantly affects your exposure on the platform, because it’s very simple, why would Amazon benefit a product that is effective not converting traffic? That significantly affects your exposure on the platform? Because it’s very simple. Why would Amazon benefit a product that is effective, not converting traffic against a competitor that is maximizing? You know, every single customer that has an impression and click is being converted into asset.

Vincenzo:

So, going back to the rules, we try to maximize also conversion and this also, the end of the day, has to be tailored to the specific objective of the campaign. Some campaigns might be purely for defensive strategy, so right now, focusing it has to do with how much impressions and clicks I’m getting. What you know is about profitability, so it’s an ACOS-driven rule. So try to tailor the rules based on the objective and try to not make it generic because at the end of the day, if you end up doing some of these rules generic, that’s why we say that the profitability is real.

Bradley Sutton:

I think in the old days a lot of people were content and it was fine to just sell in one marketplace as far as Amazon in North America or hey, I’m selling in Amazon Germany, I don’t need to worry about others. But I think sellers nowadays understand the importance to diversify. And, of course, for listing copy, of course you’ve got to localize your content. But as far as the advertising side, a lot of similar principles are the same matter. If you’re advertising Amazon Germany, Amazon Australia, Amazon Japan, like ACOS ROAS impressions like the way you manage and keyword harvesting these are like universal things. You have a lot of clients that are around the world in different marketplaces. Are there any like marketplace specific advertising strategy? Like hey, you know what, this doesn’t work in Amazon Japan, or this only works in Amazon Germany, or it’s pretty much 100% of advertising the same in all marketplaces.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so Ecomcy would significantly focus on localizing strategies when it comes to advertising. I would say that, when it comes to the way advertising works across all the markets where Amazon is present, it’s definitely very similar in terms of how I would structure the campaigns. However, something that’s significantly different is how I would target these keywords and how I would create my content. Very quick example is, for example, the way I do sponsored brands in America, such as the US, is completely different than how I would do it in Amazon Japan. The perception of branding is completely different in terms of culture, how they actually convey a message throughout advertising. So you need to make sure and we do that at Ecomcy to use local people to reverse engineer what they have to see on a license image, what they have to see on a banner or how they actually create that emotional connection to a campaign, such as sponsored brands who work.

Vincenzo:

But going back to traditional sponsored products, usually the key is to focus on finding what are the right keywords you have to go for and, just as a quick tip, let’s say you do international expansion, and I see this mistake a lot. Let’s say you’re jumping from the US to the UK. People sometimes assume that keywords that might work in a market such as the United States are going to work in other countries where the language is the same, or they just translate the keyword, and that’s a huge mistake. Make sure you use tools such as Helium 10 to understand what is the actual keyword that is performing at the country level because, trust me, most of the time it’s going to be different than the country where you’re having the success and you want to do the expansion.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s close with our 30 to 60 second tips each. So my 30 to 60 second tip would be hey, if you’re selling a product that has any kind of seasonality which most products do have some seasonality, if it’s not just a Christmas gift but the keywords that people search around Christmas time might be different. Do a historical search in the Helium 10 Cerebro for your competitors you don’t have historical information if you’re a new seller or it’s a new product and you weren’t selling last year Christmas. So take the ASIN of a competitor, stick it in the Cerebro. Do a time machine it’s called the historical trends.

Bradley Sutton:

Look back at November and December of last year. Look back at November and December of the year before. What were the different keywords that they were advertising top of search for? And probably those are good keywords to actually not. Don’t wait till November. Start in October ranking and bidding on those keywords so you can get some placement, so that when you are having your first Christmas season you’re already like at the top of search for these keywords you know are important to your niche. You have a 30 to 60 second tip for everybody out there.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So for me I think that works very well is leveraging a placement optimization. This is something that’s also very underutilized when it comes to sponsored ads. So make sure you understand what is the kind of placement that works the best for you most of your campaigns. If you go at the campaign level within the placement tab, you’re going to be able to see what is the kind of placement that gives you the best conversion. I usually would say for a lot of the main keywords you go for top search is usually where you can have the best outcome in terms of return on investment. So make sure you leverage that. And something that we do significantly is identifying the top five to 10 keyword, doing single keyword campaigns, maximizing exposure when it comes to top search, and we consolidate our presence and also make sure that organic exposure stays healthy over time. So that’s my 30 second tip. 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. I love it all right. What’s the next few months for you for conference? You do Amazon Accelerate, Amazon Unbox.

Vincenzo:

Yes, a busy schedule. Accelerate, unbox. We have a couple of events in Europe, but we got Billion Dollar Summit Kevin’s late next week, Sophia with Amazing, a set of sessions in. So, yeah, it’s going to be a pretty tight schedule, but that’s something I love, you know. When it comes to the Amazon community meeting with our Amazon sellers, it’s definitely something that I value significantly, because that’s usually where you’re going to learn what are the latest strategies, why things are working, why things are not working, and you can stay on top of the game. So, very excited.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. So, guys, if you’re not here wish you were here make sure to go to Amazon Accelerate, unbox the other conferences around. You know it’s cliche, but your network is your net worth, kind of, and also you learn things at the sessions. But for me, like the networking and being able to, you know, hang out with guys like Vincenzo. This makes these conferences good. So we’ll see you at the next conference or see you at Amazon Accelerate.

Vincenzo:

Thank you, see you. Thank you, brother, go out.

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