#633 – 20 Top Amazon PPC Questions Answered

How can you elevate your Amazon advertising game and maximize your e-commerce success? Join us as we welcome Anne Harrell, Head of Product Evangelism & Enablement from Pacvue, to answer over 20 of the most pressing PPC questions from our listeners. Bradley and Anne’s deep expertise offers a fresh perspective on how Helium 10 and Pacvue can complement each other, helping brands at various stages of their Amazon-selling journey. She dives into the latest innovations Amazon has lined up for 2024, like AMC and expanded sponsored ads, which aim to give sellers unprecedented insights into customer behavior.

Throughout the episode, Anne shares actionable strategies for mastering Amazon ad campaigns. Bradley and Anne also break down the complexities of setting up effective campaigns, sharing how tech tools like Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker can fine-tune your bids beyond basic estimates. We also touch on the power of automation with tools inside Pacvue, which can alleviate the burdens of manual campaign management and enhance overall efficiency. Anne emphasizes the role of external traffic and audience maximization within Amazon’s ecosystem, offering a balanced approach to boost organic sales alongside advertising efforts.

Finally, we explore the nuances of Amazon PPC strategy, from mitigating rising ACoS to the strategic use of AI in campaign management. Anne shares her fascinating journey from the advertising world to her pivotal role at Pacvue, along with resources like TACoS Tuesday for those keen on deepening their PPC knowledge. Whether you’re working to optimize your PPC campaigns or looking to learn effective strategies, this episode is packed with insights to fuel your Amazon success story.

In episode 633 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Anne discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Advertising Solutions
• 02:57 – Helium 10 and Pacvue
• 06:32 – Amazon Ads, CES Announcement
• 08:30 – PPC Campaign Optimization Strategies
• 09:25 – Optimizing Keyword Bids for Product Launch
• 12:42 – Optimizing Amazon Campaigns for Keywords
• 16:05 – Optimizing Campaign Management Frequency
• 22:56 – Effective Ad vs. Organic Sales Ratio
• 23:34 – Driving Sales Through Advertising and Optimization
• 28:34 – Finding Trending Keywords for Sponsored Products
• 32:22 – Product Display Ads Optimization & Competitor Avoidance

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today on our Tacos Tuesday advertising show, we answer over 20 of your top PPC questions with the help of our first time guest, Anne, who brings a wealth of knowledge to our show. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. My name is Bradley Sutton and this is the show. That is our Tacos Tuesday show, where it’s actually a recorded live. We’re doing this live those of you here watching this on Tuesday and we’re going to be getting to all of your questions that you’re going to have about advertising, about PPC, whatever you might want to ask about on that topic. And so we’re uh, as always, we have different guests that we invite on, expert guests and this will be her first time on the show. We’re going to go ahead and invite up and from Pacvue and you notice my swag I’ve got. I’ve got like this unique hat that I think we got at that one offsite. I’ve got the old school Pacvue.

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, you’re all set over there.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it, Love it. So this is your first time on the show, so let’s just get some background on you first. Like I know a little bit, but even I don’t know too much, and probably what I do know I forgot already. So where are you at right now? First of all, in the in the world.

Anne Harrell:

I’m actually based in Austin, Texas. We have a very small but mighty team here in Texas, so we’re fully dispersed all over the country and I’m here in the South.

Bradley Sutton:

I would never be able to live within 20 miles of Terry Black’s because I would be even larger than I am already if that was the case. So yeah, Austin’s a dangerous place for me, with all the amazing barbecue and good stuff out there. How long have you been at Pacvue?

Anne Harrell:

I’m coming up on five years now, so for quite a while my time at Pacvue has been varied in terms of what teams I’ve been on. I actually started on our strategic consulting team, where my main focus was actually growing and developing the omni-channel strategy for a lot of our enterprise customers, and then the last two or so years I transitioned over to the product team where I lead product evangelism on the enterprise side, which basically means I wear a lot of hats, I work with our cross-functional teams, I work with our top-tier customers and I take that all back to the technical teams to make sure we’re developing the right roadmap for our customers to use.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, kind of like my counterpart on the enterprise side there, counterpart on the on the enterprise uh side. Uh, there now a lot of people obviously almost everybody listening to this show um, knows about Helium 10 and what we have to offer and who can use helium 10, and most people, I would say, know that hey, Helium 10 and Pacvue, you’re actually the same company. But some people have the questions uh out there, like how do I know if, if I’m looking for advertising solution, uh, or just a commerce solution in general, should I be going for Helium 10? Should I be going to see what Pacvue has to offer? That’s a very loaded question, but if we were to simplify it, what would you say to people asking about that?

Anne Harrell:

Well, I think, first and foremost, it’s important to note that, while Helium 10 and Pacvue are sister companies, we share a lot of the same tech underlying processes. For instance, your research tools were actually integrated into Pacvue and some of Pacvue advertising tools were integrated into Helium 10. So, while there are some differences in terms of how the products are designed, at the core it’s the same company. I think the small nuances in how the product is designed really will determine where a brand or company or individual should play. For instance, on the enterprise side, it’s started with advertising at its core and then expanded to more retail and organic operations, whereas, obviously, with Helium, tenant started as that research component really focused on the individual product and then some of those bigger advertising integrations were launched.

Anne Harrell:

So it’s a matter of where you are at your journey on Amazon or on Walmart. If you are playing in multiple retail media networks, I would say that Pacvue is probably the place to go. We do have a bit more expansive in terms of retailer inventory available. Right now we have over 90 different retailers available within the Pacvue product suite. But if you’re really focused on some key marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, Helium 10 is still a great option. So I think it’s a matter of asking yourself the right questions in terms of what are your goals and we do have folks who use both, so it’s not an either, or you don’t have to pick and choose. If you’d like to try both, I think it’s definitely an option.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, 2024 was probably the year of innovation on Amazon’s side as far as all the new releases and things from AMC to expanded sponsored TV, to different metrics that never had been shown before, and just so many things and too many to remember here. But if you were to pick two of the most noteworthy additions to Amazon advertising that you think will affect sellers of all levels, or that they should be using where it’s like hey guys, you might not even understand the power of what you just have like I never thought Amazon would ever make this available. Like what would you say? Like top one or top two things that you got excited about last year?

Anne Harrell:

That’s a tough question because to your point there were quite a few releases of AMC to sponsored ads only accounts is a really huge unlock for folks who are maybe earlier in their advertising journey and haven’t jumped into display, which can be kind of overwhelming. I think the value of AMC gets kind of lost in its complexity but at its core it just really allows you to understand your customer’s full journey on Amazon. So as opposed to just seeing the last engagement that led to a purchase, you can see every ad touch and organic placement that led to someone purchasing one of your products. Once you start being able to look at data with that level of granularity, it essentially allows you to completely optimize your customer journey and that will have an impact beyond just ads. It will also impact your product journey, the organic placements, how you set up your PDPs, et cetera. So I think there are a number of use cases for sponsored ads.

Anne Harrell:

Only AMC and Amazon, as kind of a sub header to that, has released a number of actionable ways you can use AMC even if you don’t have DSP audiences. One big one that was released at the end of the year was the ability to do bid modification based on AMC audience segments. So if you’re maybe again earlier in your advertising journey and you don’t have huge budgets, this is a way that you can actually make your audience targeting more relevant for search. So, as opposed to just targeting everyone who’s searching for a specific keyword, you can say I’m targeting everyone who searched for a specific keyword but also falls within this specific audience segment. So, for instance, they visited one of your PDPs in the past. So within this specific audience segment. So, for instance, they visited one of your PDPs in the past. So it allows you to just make the group that you’re spending money on more relevant, which means that they’re more likely to purchase down the road.

Anne Harrell:

Another big announcement this is technically still in beta, but I think it’s really exciting, especially for folks who again, maybe are earlier in their journey on Amazon ads is Performance Plus. So essentially what this is it’s like AI recommendations driven by Amazon, and they recommend how you should optimize your account. So while with Pacvue and Helium 10, we have tools that basically do this optimization for you with automated rules and AI, they don’t always give very specific recommendations. Those types of functions are just running in the backend. So this type of activation can actually help you understand, like, what choices you should be making, what automation you should be using and how you should set it up, and so, again, I think it’s just another way that Amazon has released functionality that makes Amazon ads just less complex overall.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and then a big sign that I think everybody understands how advanced Amazon’s ad technology is  the announcement at CES last week that, hey, even if you’re a, you know you’ve got your own website. You’re now going to be able to even use Amazon’s technology to run your own advertising on your own website, and so this just shows the direction Amazon is going into. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool, Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash Listing Analyzer.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s start with the questions. The first one actually looks like it’s for me Would you explain the difference between the Helium 10 suggested bid on the Amazon and the Amazon suggested bid? The former is always much lower. So, first of all, if you’re asking, how does Helium 10 come up with that? Well, we’ve got a lot of data points that we look at to see hey, what wins a placement on page one and we basically just have a proprietary formula that will show you that. Now, personally I just this is just my personal thing, and then you know and can maybe chime in here too I don’t look at any suggested bids almost all you know to maybe get a rough idea. But I am not going off of Amazon suggested. But I’m not even going off of Helium 10 suggested bid, and the reason is because of Helium 10, because we have things like the Keyword Tracker. I don’t have to guess or run some long tests like, hey, what’s going to get me top of search. I literally can start targeting a keyword, pick a bid and then I can turn that keyword on boost in Keyword Tracker and within three, four hours I’ll be able to see hey, what placement did that get me?

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, I’m at position 11 in sponsored, towards the bottom of page one, top of page two. Hmm, maybe I should raise my bid a few cents and let’s just see what happens. Wait a few more hours. So because of that, I personally just don’t like going off of, you know, like Amazon suggested. I find it’s very, very off many times. What about you Like when you’re getting somebody started like maybe with a new product. They launch a new product and you want to know what to set your initial targets at. Are you just going with the suggested bids or how do you determine that?

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, so I always recommend to take a look at any suggestion provided either by the retailer or by the tech stack that you’re using. But to your point, I think Amazon’s focus is always going to be on making sure that you have a pretty large gap in between you and the person underneath you in terms of that bid, so the suggested bid is probably going to be a bit higher than you actually need to spend. Helium 10 is also a bit more focused on organic, so, while Amazon doesn’t directly share the algorithm, they use to calculate their suggested bid and we don’t, obviously, on our end either we do factor in a number of organic positions into why you should bid a specific way. So a lot of the product information that’s in Helium 10 actually allows us to have what I would say is potentially a more robust algorithm and consideration in terms of what you should be bidding. I’ll end, though, to your point. I think it’s just a starting point, so the suggested bid kicks it off right. You can use that to launch your keywords, but then there’s a number of automation tools and research tools that we have that help you optimize from that point on. So, even if you don’t start at exactly the right position. Over time you will start to boost based on some of the automation we have available.

Bradley Sutton:

Another good question by Josh Is there a rule of thumb? How many different ad groups per ASIN is standard or best practice? I came to Helium 10 from a couple different PPC agencies and I literally have 400 campaigns. It’s insanely overwhelming. What should I do? Should I archive the hundreds of campaigns that have no activity?

Anne Harrell:

Yes, 400 campaigns. I mean it depends on how many products you have. Right, if you have 400 products, that’s normal I guess, but 400 campaigns is quite a bit. Typically, how we recommend setting up ad campaigns is based on tactic, category and if you have an individual product, strategy, product as well. So, while you will have quite a few campaigns, you really only need about four per product or four per category. There’s kind of four major targeting tactics that we recommend separating out in campaigns because those keywords perform differently, so you’ll want to have different bids, budgets etc for each of them. But it’s auto campaigns, which is just kind of the blanket free for all. Branded campaigns, which means someone searches for the brand that’s associated with the product Category, which just means people are searching for specific things. You sell shampoo and someone searches for shampoo and then competitor. So if you’ve done competitor research, you know what other ASINs are playing within your category that are high volume. You can actually target those. And if you have four for each product or category, you’re pretty well set. So don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t make it overly complicated. A lot of PPC agencies will, because they have those experts on hand, but those people are also there to manage day to day. And if you’re managing your own account yourself, I recommend consolidating and just sticking to four per product.

Bradley Sutton:

Of those four and of those types. Are you having different match types in the same campaign and, if so, are they in the same ad group or do you separate like phrase with exact in different ad groups?

Anne Harrell:

So it really depends on the account. Back in the day, when I was setting up these accounts, we would sometimes have different match types in different campaigns. But it’s not always necessary because you can still optimize bids on the keyword level. So you can just make sure that your bid for phrase is lower than your bid for exact because you know that the exact match is going to have a smaller pool and so you don’t have to worry about costs running away with you. So again, if you’re trying to keep it simple and you’re managing it yourself, I’d probably just group them all together. But you definitely can have those split out as a separate either ad group or campaign.

Anne Harrell:

Typically, I try to separate things out on the campaign level as opposed to the ad group level, primarily because you can adjust budgets on the campaign level which you can’t do on the ad group level. So if you want to have a separate budget for phrase match versus exact match versus broad match, then you do need to have additional campaigns for each of those. But one really great thing about the Helium 10 tool, as well as the Pacvue tool, is you can kind of copy paste settings. So if you set up those four kind of initial groups and then you want to split it out by, you know, exact versus broad. You can literally copy over those four campaigns and just change the keywords to broad. So it’s easier to set up and then, you know, easier to manage, as opposed to having to go through and do a campaign by campaign or ad group by ad group.

Bradley Sutton:

Question from Neetin. Here it says I’m a perfume seller. The sales have dropped drastically as December has gone by. What should my bidding stance be? At this moment, the same campaigns are operating at an additional 50% ACoS, I’m assuming, compared to December November.

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, that’s a great question and you’re in a highly seasonal category, so I think it’s pretty relevant for you. We often see brands who do have highly seasonal products chocolate, perfume, gift-focused products or decor will have bids that are 10x or that are 10 times what they have in January and December. So I think it’s definitely fair to say that you should reduce your bids and kind of focus on efficiencies at this moment, because I’m sure you saw a ton of volume in December and you probably want to hold on to some of your budget for additional seasonal periods that come throughout the year. For example, Valentine’s Day seems like another great opportunity for your specific products to see an increase organically in volume, and then you can also increase that with your advertising strategy. So, for folks who are selling products in these highly seasonal categories, what we recommend doing is what we call a micro-season calendar, where you map out what seasonal peaks are going to impact your product sales and then you make sure that your budgets and your bids are highest in those moments, and then in the moments where you’re maybe not going to see as much activity, you decrease your bids and you decrease your budgets to make sure that you still have some reserves for those bigger times of the year.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll start off with an answer to this, just to say what I do, and then let’s get Anne’s input. How often should we optimize our ads? Once a week or every few days? If you’re trying to change things every two hours, that would probably be a wrong answer, but other than that it’s kind of like whatever floats your boat. If you’re trying to do it every six months, that’s also a wrong answer. Me, uh, with Helium 10, Adtomic uh, which I’m assuming you can do in Pacvue and many other tools out there. But what I do is I set my own custom rules and then I have it checked like once a week and I’m looking personally back like at a 60-day window. That’s just how I. Sometimes I’ll look at different windows, but I’m like, hey, look at a 60-day window once a week and here’s what I want you to be looking for me telling Adtomic, hey, be looking for this kind of thing and give me suggestions based on this, and then once a week I’ll go in there and I have personally maybe about not too much compared to others, but like 150, 200 campaigns I manage across three different accounts of mine and I can usually knock out you know, optimizing, quote, unquote, these campaigns in maybe five or 10 minutes, due to all of the things I programmed into Adtomic, which does most of the heavy lifting, and it’s just a matter of me deciding do I want to implement the suggestions or not. Do you have a rule of thumb, Anne, for you as far as like hey, what’s a good cadence for you know, looking into campaigns?

Anne Harrell:

You know this sounds like a cop out answer. I feel like I’ve used it a lot but it really depends on what your goals are, what category you’re in, what your budgets are. I would say that if you have good tech Adtomic, AI ads, Pacvue most of the optimization should be done in the background without you having to manually interfere. You can set up, for instance, rules in the Pacvue product which says when this specific performance thing happens, for instance, my spend gets too high or my traffic gets too low, change my bid. For me, you don’t have to go in and do it, it’s going to do it in the background. So in those cases I would say check in once or twice a week, make sure that things are moving in the right direction. You can make some manual tweaks to budgets or bids if you see an opportunity to do so, but most of the legwork is done in the background. If you’re fully managing manually no tech, no automation, no AI I’d probably say you want to check in at least once a day, which sounds overwhelming.

Anne Harrell:

But if you don’t, you have potential errors that could occur. For instance, your campaigns could run out of budget and it could be a key campaign for a key product and you’re not showing any ads. That gives your competitors an opportunity to take some share away from you, which means that you might not get as many sales that week or your bids or keywords could be optimized incorrectly. You could be missing the opportunity to target a really high value keyword that just started kind of growing in popularity because you don’t have keyword harvesting tactics active. So the biggest recommendation is to make sure you choose a tech stack that can do a lot of this for you and then check in once or twice a week. If you don’t have that tech support, make sure you’re checking in once a day. It doesn’t have to be the weekends, maybe five times a week. Then just check in in the mornings, make sure that your bids, your budgets, everything looks okay and make some manual tweaks as you go.

Bradley Sutton:

Brandon says hey, and when you, when you do, set up your clients for campaigns, how are you getting outside traffic into Amazon? Are you running like a blog on Shopify that runs Google ads into Amazon, or what kind of outside traffic do you focus on?

Anne Harrell:

Well, the real answer is anytime we’re trying to connect outside of the Amazon ecosystem, most of the enterprise customers use display. So that’s Amazon DSP, not sponsored display, which obviously has some similarities. So that’s Amazon DSP, not sponsored display, which obviously has some similarities. The main reason for that is because a lot of the outside traffic, or the inventory for placements outside of Amazon, is going to be more visual, and also it’s not keyword focused. Maybe with the exception of Google, which is search based. A lot of it is going to be more so about the person that’s moving around the Internet and not specifically a keyword that they just searched for. So I’d say, though it’s sometimes overwhelming for folks, because programmatic advertising is a whole new ballgame, just like can be a really great way to grow your audience on Amazon with folks who are, you know, relevant in other places. It also allows for tracking across various websites, whether that’s you know, your, your Meta account, your Google account, your D2C website, whichever.

Anne Harrell:

That being said, I would say that on Amazon, traffic is pretty vast. There are a number of folks within categories or cross categories, so before I would say you move to trying to pull converters from off Amazon, I would make sure you’re totally tapped out on the Amazon market. One strategy that we use if we feel like a specific category feels stagnant, like we’re not seeing a lot of growth, is we’ll start pulling adjacent category targets. Which means, you know, tying back to the example I gave earlier, I sell shampoo. I’m going to start looking for people who are looking for conditioner, soap, other bath and beauty products. That allows you to grow your audience on Amazon with the tools that are available within sponsored ads and search, without having to get overly complex about pulling them from Google or whichever.

Bradley Sutton:

Is Pacvue auto enroll you on other retail platforms that you have to enroll individually and then activate that feature on Pacvue.

Anne Harrell:

So it doesn’t auto enroll you. Most of the other retail platforms require authorization by the brand or seller. So we let you pick and choose which retailers you pull into Pacvue and we authorize by retailer. But we do have connectivity between all of the retailers within our ecosystem. So while you do have to do kind of a first step, which is authorizing by retailer, then we actually pull in cross retailer reporting, cross retailer functionality, so that you can see the full picture and not just that individual retailer or marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you forecast ACoS for a new product launch?

Anne Harrell:

That’s difficult. A lot of it is either going to be based on other products within your portfolio in that same category or some guesswork. Right, we have research tools that allow you to see the volume, that can show you things like bids, and so you can back into, based on the volume, based on the bids and based on estimated click through rate which can either come from other products or other research tools what your spend will be. And then, if you have also estimated conversion rate, that’s when you can start factoring in what my sales would be and calculate ACoS. There’s a lot of guesswork in the kind of initial stages of setting up an account, but that guesswork is much more accurate and supported with tools like Pacvue and Helium 10 because of the research tools that we have at our disposal and just the amount of data that we’ve saved for so many products. You’re able to go through, look at comparable ASINs, look at comparable SKUs and make calculated guesses.

Bradley Sutton:

This is a philosophical question we always get, and so I always like asking it when somebody does this. But the you know like, hey, I’m already ranking high organically. My profitability is already tough. Like, am I wasting money by also doubling down and still advertising for that same keyword, even though I’m already ranked high organically? What is your take on that?

Anne Harrell:

I think you’re losing money if you’re not spending money on advertising, even if you’re ranked high organically. The reason for that is the ad placements fall above the organic placements and most people for lack of a better term are kind of lazy. When you’re searching, you click on that first product. Not everyone notices that it’s sponsored, and so if that’s your competitor who’s not in the top 50 or who is in the top 50, they’re getting more clicks than you. They’re getting more conversion opportunities. So if you have the available budget for hero products or new products alike, I would absolutely recommend advertising, especially in sponsored product.

Anne Harrell:

Now there are some additional placement, for instance like sponsored brand, that can add a lot of value to your strategy but don’t necessarily always need to feature products that are already doing well organically. Those types of adjacent or additional ad types, I would say, can be used more so as a growth strategy, and if you already have a really solid product, you don’t necessarily always have to use those. So there are certain types of advertising on Amazon that you don’t need if you’re doing well organically. But, like the core sponsored product, I think you’re missing out if you don’t have your products featured there.

Bradley Sutton:

I agree, and you know we talk about things like share a voice. You know, like if that’s something that’s important to you, like me, I just want all the real estate I can get, reasonable, you know, in a reasonable manner, because it just gives me more at bats and for every placement I have that’s one less chance that they have to look at a competitor, but obviously within reason. You know. Like, don’t be spending so much that you’re not profitable anymore. Kim asks what do you feel is a good ratio of ad to organic sales? I’ve heard 25%, she said, is good. I’ve heard 30% is good. Do you have a rule of thumb? You shoot for me. Personally, I just want to be profitable. I’m not looking to say, oh, I need to get at a certain, I need 60% coming from organic or something. What about you do organic or something? What about you? Do you actually have a target for organic versus PPC sales?

Anne Harrell:

I’m doing the cop out answer again. But it’s it depends, right, it depends on your goals, the product, how long it’s been in the market. You know we got a question earlier about a completely new product. Um, and those first couple of months it’s not unheard of for 90% of your sales to be driven by ads, because you’re building the growth, the volume, the knowledge around that’s individual ASIN. I would say that profitability is what you should be looking at, what your ultimate goals are. And another thing is making sure that when you’re spending on ads, that you’re not just impacting advertising. Advertising is a means to an end. It shouldn’t be the only way that you’re driving sales. So, over time, even if you start with your, you know all of your sales being driven 80% by ads. You want to make sure that that ratio becomes more favorable and that you’re seeing both advertising sales and then eventually, organic sales go up. Because if you’re not seeing that, you’re paying one for one for every sale and that’s not a scalable or sustainable strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s a question for me. Maynard says to help improve conversions and PPC results, we’re focused on optimizing our existing Amazon product listings. What’s the best tool to optimize these listings? So there’s two aspects of it. One is the SEO and how set up. You are for SEO, so definitely go into listing builder, hit the learn listing builder or listing builder train or some button like that it’s called, and you’ll see a lot of videos there about how to use that, where you can bring in competitors and really understand what is the best keywords for the market and how you’re optimized. But the second aspect is your visual, you know, and so something’s like hey, best thing for click-through rate. Hey, how is your title optimized for search? How is your main image? And inside of Helium 10, we’ve got this split testing tool which is kind of like an audience split testing tool. It’s called Helium 10 Audience. It uses a service called PickFu. I highly recommend that because I’ve used that so many times. I’m like, oh, I’ve got the best main image here. I have a couple other main images that I don’t think are that great.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me just test my target market. When I say target market, I can go like hey, if my target market is 30 to 39-year-old females, prime members. I can actually target that market and ask them a question and say, hey, which picture do you like the best and why? And a lot of times, like half the time actually, what I thought was the best is like not accurate, and now I switch gears based on that. Of course you could do that in live on Amazon as well with their split testing. I get answers within 30 minutes sometimes there and I’m not split testing a live listing, especially if I’m not even ready to launch yet. I don’t have to wait. I can actually do the split testing. So anybody who has not looked into it, you definitely look up Helium 10 audience to take a look at that. Riyad asked. Another common question here that some have is hey, if I’m advertising the same keyword and exact phrase and broad match, am I competing with yourself? I assume only one of the campaigns will get the impression. I know the answer to this, but, Anne, go ahead and let people know about this.

Anne Harrell:

So you’re not competing with yourself, because when it’s an individual product, while you may be bidding on multiple keywords that overlap, that product can only show once. So you’re not competing with yourself, you’re just opening up more opportunities for your product to show. And typically, when you’re looking at, for instance, broad versus exact, what you’re actually showing up for what auctions you’re winning are going to be vastly different, because you can bid more on exact. So the exact is normally going to be the reason that you show up for that specific keyword. And then, as you go to phrase or broad, you may be bid a little less and they’re going to be the reason you show up in that kind of phrase match, broad, match auctions. So you’re not competing with yourself as long as it’s just one product. Now if you have two comparable products in the same category and you’re bidding on the exact same keywords, you might be competing with yourself a bit, but one thing to note is that prevents your competition from competing with you. So it means that you can show up in more placements for those high value terms, and so a little bit of self-competition, or self as we like to call it. But in general, one product, it’s fine to bid on both the exact phrase and broad match versions of a keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Anton says hey, some keywords don’t appear in Cerebro in no search volume. But I do a sponsored product campaigns. I have impressions, clicks and sales for it. Why does it happen? So this is a good question because there’s some misconceptions about impressions and Anne can further clarify this as well. But when you see impressions it doesn’t even match like what you see in Amazon as far as their own like metrics, as far as search volume and things like that. Because like, let’s say, somebody searches a keyword maybe only one time a month, and so obviously if it’s only one it’s not going to show up in Helium 10 as search volume. But somebody clicked on that ad or that ad is actually going to follow that customer around. It’ll start showing up on product pages. It might show up on other search terms that you weren’t even targeting every single time. You know that one first search might trigger something that could have 15, 20 impressions later on, because now that ad is following that customer around Amazon. So you can’t like take the impressions from advertising and compare it to like any even Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

You know search volume metrics because when we say search volumes it’s that exact keyword. The other thing is that you know plural versions of that also count. You know for that. So, like, if I, or if I search for coffin shelf, coffin shelf has its own search form. That means the people who search that exact term. But when you’re talking about impressions, you’ll look at your search term. You might have targeted it exactly coffin shelf, but you could be showing up for coffin shelves, coffins shelf, coffins shelves and like all these other things are counting impressions, even on a search, and then plus those two or all these variations are also leading to other impressions because that ad is following around. Is there something I said wrong or some other clarification you have on that?

Anne Harrell:

And yeah, for certain ad types it absolutely. There’s retargeting capabilities, so you search for something, you engage with an ad and it will follow you around. I think for core, like sponsored product impressions, the key piece is how exact is the search term? So, for example, if you looked for the words, the phrase like shampoo for women, which is a very high-volume keyword, so that’s not a good example. Which is a very high-volume keyword, so that’s not a good example. But someone who searches for shampoo products for women, a number of different variations can actually match to that specific search term, so it’s not always one for one. This is what I searched for and this is the impression that I’m giving. So probably a lot of the impressions that you’re getting are coming from terms that overlap with that specific search term, but that search term in and of itself has very limited or no search volume as an individual phrase. So a lot of it is the logic behind the phrase exact match, the broad match, etc.

Bradley Sutton:

I can take this one from Kim what’s the best way to find newer keywords that are gaining recent search volume but may not be showing up yet in ads? So if you mean, like might not be showing up in your auto campaigns, or I mean, obviously whatever’s going to show up in ads is what you target in your targeting campaigns, but like, if you’re just asking generally, hey, how do I find trending keywords in your niche, then yeah, definitely be looking at Helium 10. And then I would be looking at some of the top competitors too. There’s a feature in Insights Dashboard and Keyword tracker inside of Helium 10 where you know we’re going to pick up on search volume right away. There’s no such thing as oh uh, this brand new keyword has 8000 searches in the last two weeks and helium 10 doesn’t know about it. It’s going to come up within one week, you know, even if something pops up. But we have this keyword harvesting. I bet you Anne doesn’t even know about this.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m not sure if she knows about this feature in Helium 10 where in our keyword tracker you can say, hey, here’s my competitor, you know, I know they’re top class and they’re going to pick up on these trends. But you can actually say, hey, if there’s a keyword that all of a sudden gets more than X search volume whatever you determine 300 or 400 or 1,000, and my competitor is showing up either in ads or in, you know, organically in the top 15, meaning that they might be getting sales from it, give me a heads up. So, instead of you having to go search like every day or do some search, or run Cerebro every week and see where your competitors are, just set it and forget it where you can set an insight or an alert inside of Keyword Tracker and you’ll find out right away if there are new keywords that are happening in your niche. But then just in general, advertising is a great way. Amazon’s algorithm is usually pretty good, you know, with like broad campaigns and auto campaigns on picking up on trends that similar products to you are getting traction on. And if you’ve got an auto campaign with a decent budget, I would venture to say a lot of the times, Amazon might, might start showing you on their own. Let’s see. Henry says do you have any recommendations for managing advertising for a large catalog of small ticket items that are less than $15 each, often with not that many direct competitors?

Anne Harrell:

Not that many direct competitors is an interesting factor in there, because I would say, if you have a large catalog of smaller products, I would group them based on similarities so that you don’t have to have campaigns for each of them and that you can kind of disperse the budget based on the highest performing product, as opposed to spending a lot of money for a product that has an ASP that’s lower than $15. So I would still recommend that in your case, not having many direct competitors, that might actually be the factor that you want to group your products by. So, as opposed to looking at like attributes, instead look at are they more competitive and group them based on competitiveness. So, for instance, if you have one third of your catalog that maybe has some competitors, you group those together. One third that has a lot of competitors, you group those together, and then one third that are maybe less competitive, group those together and spin more in the area where you have more competition, so that you’re gaining that share with ads versus spending in the area where you’re organically doing well. You don’t have a lot of competition, so you maybe don’t need as much budget and with those products.

Bradley Sutton:

Joseph says how do you determine which products would be best for display ads for traffic off of Amazon? We’ve got 300 products and don’t know where to start.

Anne Harrell:

That’s a great question. I would say what are your hero products, what are your hero ASINs and what do you expect to make the most money with? That’s step one. Typically, we recommend, if you’re running both search and display, to start with your hero products and then any new launch products, because one thing about display campaigns and off Amazon traffic is there’s a lot of it. So if you have a new product and you’re trying to get the word out about it, trying to get more engagement on that PDP, having off Amazon ads can really help with that. So really, two camps hero products they’re going to drive a lot of sales. I want to make sure they’re getting in front of people. And then you know those new products that maybe need a little help in the interim. Everything in the middle that’s, you know, obviously still important but not as much of a priority for your goals for the year or the month or whatever. Those don’t necessarily need display campaigns. You can just focus on ads on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Pierre says how to avoid competitors from wasting our ads and increasing our ACoS. We were stable 30 to 35% ACoS for years and now we see campaigns going up to like 80% and sales are slumping.

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, that can be difficult If you have a vertical category or product that all of a sudden you see a spike in competition, it definitely will increase your ad spend and decrease your efficiency. I think the best way to combat that, if you don’t have the budget to stay in the areas that you’re currently playing in, is to find new keywords that are still relevant, that maybe your competition isn’t showing up on. One big way to do that is through long tail keyword targeting, but it’s a matter of kind of testing and learning where they’re currently showing up and where they’re not, and those really highly relevant category campaigns, for example, category keyword targeting. That’s where most people start when they launch a new product. So more than likely that’s the area. Those are the types of areas where they’re driving up your costs. Another strategy that you could implement would be targeting their PDPs. So we’ve talked a lot about keyword targeting. You are able to actually target products it’s called product attribute targeting so you can find their ASINs and start targeting them. It’s kind of the opposite strategy. Do you? You know, fight or flight, right? The flight is going to find new keywords, new categories to play in. The fight is to start targeting their PDPs and essentially driving their costs up so they have less cost in those category areas to spend.

Bradley Sutton:

Hamza says I’m currently number one rank for one of my keywords. Now, whether I run PPC ads or not, he says my sales remain largely unchanged, only a slight variation. Given this, I’m questioning whether it’s worth continuing to run ads. This is similar to the other question, but a little bit more specifics here. My breakeven ACoS is 33%. The ACoS for the specific campaign is approximately 48%, making it less cost effective. What’s your take on this situation? Should I continue advertising for this keyword?

Anne Harrell:

Probably not. If you have one keyword where you’re doing extremely well organically, take the money you’re spending on that keyword and find broader categories, broader keywords, longer tail keywords to start targeting. Because what you will see is that you’re now using that budget to get new customers as opposed to using that budget to show up where you’re already doing a good job. So there’s certain keywords that, like we say hero products, we say there’s hero keywords. If you don’t have a lot of competition, you don’t necessarily have to defend that keyword with ads. If you do have a highly competitive category, pulling away from that keyword with ads could cause an organic decline over time. So if you do decide to shift that budget to longer tail keywords or adjacent keywords that allow you to get that new customer acquisition, just make sure you keep an eye on your organic performance. Then you flip it back on if you’re starting to see that decline over time.

Bradley Sutton:

Another question here If you have got brand category competitor auto campaign, should you not be running Atomic AI advertising for each ASIN, or do you so? Me personally, I don’t run AI advertising and my regular set of campaigns at the same time. Our AI I’m not sure how much you know about it, Anne, but I think ours is kind of built off of the Pacvue AI. Do you have clients who are running Pacvue AI while also running simultaneously regular campaigns? And then why or why not?

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, so we have multiple uses of AI and I know a little bit about AI advertising because it does the setup for you. In many cases it might actually create multiple campaigns that align with the brand category competitor auto campaign segmentation, because it’s designed by folks who have been in the industry for a while and that’s a pretty standard best practice for a lot of people on the enterprise side. Additionally, often people on the enterprise side of the house will set up their campaigns and then activate AI, so they’re segmenting their products, their keywords, their tactics out how they want to see it and then they have AI do all the optimization day parting, bid management, budget management, keyword harvesting, et cetera. So there are multiple ways that AI can be used and I think in many cases when AI advertising is set up, it will likely have some segmentation by tactic, because it’s designed to suit industry standards and make sure that you’re set up for success.

Bradley Sutton:

Joseph asked how you learned about Amazon PPC and what’s the best place to learn lesser-known advanced strategies. Well, lesser-known advanced strategies. You’re on there right now. Tacos Tuesday is a great place. You know our blogs, you know podcasts, etc. But, but, Andy, did you just like start working for a company and just dive headfirst in, or what was your background?

Anne Harrell:

Yeah, so prior to working at Pacvue, I worked at an advertising agency here in Austin, Texas, back when we were all still in office and I was. I’ve been in the industry for well over a decade, so throughout that time I actually started on traditional search I think that’s where a lot of people start and that’s like Google, Bing, etc. I started doing some social and then this new thing called retail media ads started popping up, primarily because of Amazon, and so a lot of the tactics and strategies that we were using for channels like Google apply to Amazon PPC. There were just some nuances that we had to learn as we go. But after my time at that agency, I went to Pacvue and I was able to work with a lot of really great enterprise brands who have a lot of budget, a lot of specific goals, and so in those ways you really do get a lot of that kind of more nuanced experience, and that’s when you start picking up on what works for specific categories, what specific keyword strategies, how you should conquest your competitors, and so a lot of it has been learning as I go, I will say, both from Pacvue and from Helium 10, we have a company built of some of the largest and best experts in the space, and so I think, as you can tell by what we’re doing today, we really hope to educate. So there’s a lot of content both from Pacvue and Helium 10 that can help teach the more nuanced strategies, and we try to create events, create forums for you to ask these questions live as well, so it’s not just you reading a blog post or watching a video, but you can get your specific questions answered as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. If anybody’s interested in more information on how to use Helium 10 Adtomic, just go to h10.me. forward slash Adtomic this year. Now, even if you have the diamond plan, you’ve got Adtomic. Adtomic used to be an add-on where you had to pay. You had to have a diamond plan and you had to pay extra. So now if you guys have a Helium 10 diamond account, you’ve already got access to it. I highly recommend using it. We just launched a cool share of voice tool within Adtomic last week to some members. It’s going out to a wider number of members this month, so make sure to check that out. If people want to get more information about what you guys do at Pacvue best place to go, Anne.

Anne Harrell:

So pacvue.com is a great place to go, [email protected]. Also, if you’d like talk to your team at Helium 10. We do have some individual types of test accounts that you could poke around in. We have a knowledge base that you could view and we have a ton of training materials that we can send out. So we have a blog on pacvue.com. That’s probably where I’d start.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. All right, Anne, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge. You had me worried there at first. I was like am I going to have to answer these questions? And I know my initials are BS, but man, this is going to be tough for me. I was like we need the expert in here. Definitely brought a lot of knowledge and we appreciate that. Look forward to having you back on this show in the future and thanks to all of you guys for asking such great questions. We will see you guys later. Bye-bye now.

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