#609 – AI Optimized Amazon PPC Campaigns

What if you could transform your Amazon advertising game with just a few strategic tweaks? Join us as we sit down with Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, our guest expert, to uncover the secrets behind mastering Amazon PPC. From understanding the fundamentals of conversion rates and bid management to leveraging advanced AI strategies, Destaney sheds light on how sellers, both newbies and veterans, can optimize their ad spend. We explore the intricacies of using tools like Helium 10’s Adtomic to benchmark product performance in competitive categories like home decor, ensuring your campaigns hit the mark and convert clicks into sales.

We take a closer look at what it means to truly optimize your Amazon advertising campaigns. Discover how identifying underperforming ads and adjusting bids can significantly impact your ACoS and ROAS. We discuss the importance of relevancy and the power of long-tail keywords in capturing less competitive niches. With Destaney’s insights, you’ll learn how monitoring account activity through tools like Adtomic can prevent unnecessary expenses and how adjusting strategies based on competitive factors like pricing and reviews can troubleshoot conversion barriers.

Ready to elevate your strategy with AI-driven advertising? Destaney highlights the potential of new AI features of Helium 10 Adtomic in streamlining keyword performance and improving budget efficiency. We explore how transitioning budgets from traditional to AI-optimized campaigns can enhance both new and existing Amazon PPC campaigns. Whether you are launching a new product or defending your brand against competitors, our discussion emphasizes the importance of bid management and using data-driven insights to align your Amazon advertising endeavors with your business goals. Don’t miss this opportunity to take control of your Amazon advertising success.

In episode 609 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Advertising Strategies and Tips
• 04:31 – Granular Insights in Home Decor Advertising
• 08:53 – Comparing Adtomic and Amazon Ad Console
• 09:40 – Amazon Advertising Conversion Strategies
• 16:08 – Long Tail Keywords and Competition
• 17:00 – Amazon Advertising Beginner Strategy Guide
• 25:19 – Strategies for Amazon Advertising with AI
• 26:58 – Optimizing Your Amazon PPC Campaigns 
• 33:55 – Optimizing Advertising Strategies With Adtomic
• 37:41 – Maximizing Sales Strategies Without Adtomic
• 42:57 – Adtomic Campaign Optimization Session

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got Destaney back with top advertising strategies, from how to set up initial campaigns all the way to advanced strategies such as Amazon AMC and what’s coming in the future. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and 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. And today is another edition of our Tacos Tuesday, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon advertising related. Our guest this week is Destaney, and we’re going to be talking about a wide variety of topics, including some cool new features that you can use with Adtomic, which is now in our Helium 10 Diamond plan that anybody who has Diamond has full access to. So we’re going to show you how you can leverage different rule structures and things that maybe used to take you five, six hours now only take you just a few minutes with Adtomic. But if you don’t have Adtomic, no worries. We’re going to also talk about how you can leverage some of these strategies even if you don’t have software. So let’s go ahead and hop into the episode. All right, let’s go ahead and hop into some scenarios, because, as you saw, Destaney, we’ve got tons of people on here who were talking about different struggles that they have, and there are some things that are universal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nine-figure seller, if you’re a brand new seller. We’re worried about, maybe, ACoS, we’re worried about our budgets, and things like that. The one thing also about advertising though is that there are some things that are very unique. People have different strategies depending on if they’re new to Amazon, if they’re experienced. Some people want AI to control everything. Some people want to have super control over every little granular aspect of advertising. So we’re going to try and hit some of these different cohorts I guess you could say. And let me go ahead and pull up my screen now, and I am going to pull up Adtomic and we’re going to go over some different strategies based on different personas. So what? What about some of the newer, the people who are newer with Amazon? What do you see, Destaney, out there as far as what they struggle with?

Destaney:

Yeah, I think there’s two big things that are 100% the most important, whether you’re a brand new seller or a larger seller, but typically larger sellers have this part a little bit figured out. It’s understanding your conversion rate. I think that’s the first thing to dive into because you have to think if someone clicked on your ad, the ad did its job. So why did a customer click but not purchase? There’s typically something wrong with the listing, whether it’s price, whether it’s reviews. Maybe you’re not optimizing your product detail page to the best of its ability. That’s the first thing and most important thing to understand. The question I usually get after that is well, how do I understand my conversion rate, which you and I are going to show everyone how to dive into using Adtomic in a little bit? The second biggest thing that’s incredibly important to understand is bid management. So all of the questions in the comments that are saying my ACoS, my ROAS is bad. Your bid management is the number one lever that controls your ACoS or your ROAS, and we’re going to dive into that. Second, but starting off here, Brad, I would love if you could go down to the reporting section so we could take a look at Brand Metrics. So reporting on the left-hand side, and then Brand Metrics. Brand metrics is one of the absolute best tools. This is able to be navigated to within ad consoles so for anyone who doesn’t have Adtomic, you can find it there. It’s a little bit more difficult and a little bit harder to access, but within Brand Metrics here. This is where you can really understand your performance and how you’re performing relative to the category. Your conversion rate is incredibly important to understand because, again, if people are clicking on your listing but not buying, your PPC is not going to be effective at all. So we like to understand because again if people are clicking on your listing but not buying, your PPC is not going to be effective at all. So we like to understand Brand Metrics to figure out hey, is our conversion rate good compared to the rest of the category? So, as you can see here, when we’re looking at all of home decor products which is really broad, would recommend niching down even further. For others, you can see our conversion rates only a 2%, but the category is a 7%. That’s really important to understand. Now, again, we’re looking at all of home decor, and home decor and apparel are some of the most difficult categories because when people are within home decor. Not only are they buying by price, they’re buying by aesthetic, so it’s a little bit harder. But as you can see, if you highlight that customer conversion rate area here, you should take a look at this before you ever even consider diving into Amazon advertising, and I’ll pause there to let you ask any questions.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, this is a part of advertising, even in Adtomic. I haven’t really dug too much into. So who is this? Since I’m at this level, this is taking the benchmark across this entire category of home decor products. I take it, then, right.

Destaney:

Yep, a hundred percent. You can probably yep Go keep diving into yeah Floating shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

Floating shelves. I wonder if there’s any data on this one. Let’s take a look here.

Destaney:

Sometimes the category is a little bit too niche to dive into this, but for anyone selling something, I would say, a little bit larger of a category, you can dive in really, really granular, like, if I’m selling supplements, you can go down to probiotics in this level. And again, for everyone in the comments, you can find this under Amazon as well, under insights and planning and then brand metrics. It just shows you this in a different aesthetic, not as easy to understand, but you can still access it. What’s really cool is this is not just advertising data. So even if you’re terrible at Amazon advertising, it’s not actually going to influence your conversion rate. This is pulling in your organic and retail data as well. So this is a perfect view to understand. And again, if you’re converting less than average, maybe you shouldn’t be running ads. You should probably be taking a look at your listing and improving your listing first.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, like if I were just to double down and like hey, I just happened to come upon some extra money so I want to increase my budgets, well it’s like putting a lipstick on a pig, right, it’s not, it’s not really going to help me out much. Until I can, I can fix the core problem. Okay, so that’s something new that even I’m learning about. But let’s take it even a step back. Like, let’s say, somebody wants to just audit, kind of like their performance. I guess until now, you know, like hey I’ve been doing PPC for a month. I’ve been doing it for a year, I’ve been doing it for three years. I want to find some low hanging fruit where immediately I know I need to stop the bleed. How would somebody do that? Let’s take it out of Adtomic. What would the process be if I didn’t have Adtomic? And I’m just needing to download my reports, walk the audience through what they would need to do.

Destaney:

Amazon Advertising now has the targeting tab. So within advertising console, you go into the targeting tab. That’s probably the place that I would 100% start with. Everyone who’s been in the space. Two to three years ago we used to download search term reports, combine all the search term reports and go through that whole process. You don’t really need to do that now because Amazon gives it to you within the targeting tab. So I almost always recommend starting there, filtering top down by spend and making sure you’re then optimizing from a CPC ACoS perspective. But I’ll pause to see if you have any questions with that.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s definitely easier than before, because before I probably would have only had to be or, you know, download the search term reports, which I still can do, and then make some, like you know, pivot tables and things like that.

Destaney:

It’s a lot of work.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, but it’s. And still, if I want to really really get down and dirty, I do have to do that, Like, hey, I need to see where I’m at, where I’m at with exactly this range of clicks and this number of this amount of spend, et cetera. But let’s go ahead and show you guys how to do that. For those of you who just joined Adtomic which, as you guys know, is now available in the Diamond Plan and you’re like hey, I have access to this tool I had to pay for before and now I get access to it as part of the Diamond Plan how can I use it to at least just audit my account? So what you can do is you can actually go here on the Analytics page and then go to the target tab. All right, and then what’s the number of clicks, would you say, is like, yeah, you know what? There’s probably a good chance you’re not. If you got zero sales, you’re probably not going to get a sale on the very next one. Do you have a magic number that you use?

Destaney:

Yeah, so it really kind of depends on your price point. I’ll say that the industry standard is typically around 10 clicks, right, if you have 10 clicks and zero orders, then your conversion rate is probably not that fantastic. If you’re really focusing only on profitability, then 10 clicks is kind of that number. But you also have to consider if you have a product that costs $100, you’re going to get a lot more clicks and no orders, just naturally your higher price products convert worse, so you can kind of change your click threshold for that. But for a standard $20 to $30 product you’re usually looking at a 10 to 15 click threshold.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so what should I put like 15 here?

Destaney:

Yep.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s go 15 clicks.

Destaney:

I was going to mention. There’s a lot of conversation in the comments about Adtomic versus Ad Console and where these things are. Everything we’ve talked through so far is in both. It can be applied to both. There’s a targeting tab in Ad Console. You can go take a look at. It allows you to do very similar fashion. You’re going to apply the same methodology. Brand Metrics is also directly in Advertising Console. You can log in right now, following the steps I mentioned ahead, and go through that. The Adtomic view is just that next level. It’s allowing you to really kind of understand the full stages of the funnel and be a little bit more granular with your targeting. So you’re not missing out on either or depending on where you’re managing it. It’s just what level of granularity you want to have applied.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, okay, perfect, so let’s talk about this. So, whether we’re in Ad Console or whether we are in Adtomic here. You need to do a query hey, zero orders and 15 clicks and a lot of this stuff I’ve already taken action on because I am somewhat monitoring this account. It’s a real account, guys. It’s not dummy data here but you can see that actually, overall you know there was times where I didn’t catch it there was $644 of spend, $644 to spend on products or on targets that I had at least 15 clicks on where I got zero. So a lot of these, as you guys can see, I paused and so that’s the first strategy that you know is an easy one for you guys to get more money is whether you have Helium 10 Adtomic or whether you’re just in Seller Central in your ad console. However, you have access to go in and look at what you might be spending too much money on. Because, let’s say, I didn’t take action. You can see I’ve already taken action on a lot of these guys because I set up rules and things of that nature so that I get notified if this happens. So here, $644. This is imagine you guys out there, what could you be spending $644 on? You’re probably a lot of things inside and outside of Amazon. But here’s the thing if you don’t take action and pause some of these things, Amazon is not of the persona to be like. You know what Amazon seller? We do not want your money, please, please, stop giving us money. No, if we’re going to give them money for clicks and things, they’ll be like we’ll gladly accept it. How generous of you, all right. So we have to, as Amazon sellers, we have to take action if we want to stop the bleed. And so this is an easy way to stop the bleed and you can see I’ve already done that is pause some of these targets that are maybe a little bit irrelevant, and you know you’re not gonna get sales on now. Here’s the thing Destaney, correct me if I’m wrong, but I personally do not just blindly go in and pause everything that hits this metric. If my main keyword I am not getting sales for, I gotta figure out why. I mean because I cannot survive if I am NOT gonna get sales for a certain keyword. So talk a little bit about some strategy there, how we can decide.

Destaney:

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing you need to consider is again relevancy and put yourself in the customer’s shoes. If someone typed in gothic home decor, they were probably interested in my product. It fits perfectly right. So that’s a scenario where I’d say maybe I test lowering my bid. I can’t afford to spend $1 on those clicks because I’m not converting well enough, but I can go ahead and lower my bid to then optimize for that target ACoS or ROAS. So as kind of a really quick example, you can do the math. If you have again a $20 product, you can figure out your maximum spend threshold for profitability based off whatever your goals are. If you want to target a 50% ACoS, that means you can spend $10, right, $20 product, $10 in spend. If I’m bidding a dollar, that means I can only justify 10 clicks. That’s it. 10 clicks times a dollar bid equals $10 in spend. I have to be driving a sale. But if I say, hey, let’s lower my bid to 50 cents, that now means my click threshold can be 20 clicks. I may get less clicks and less impressions because I’m not showing up as high up on the page. But that’s the math between your CPC and bid and your ACoS correlation. They are directly correlated.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. Now what if there is a case though where I have a keyword that I know I’m not going to succeed if I cannot convert for it? What are some of the things, when you have conversion problems, that you look at to try and figure out what is going on? Like, do you use services? Obviously, we have Helium 10 Audience or PickFu, where you try and poll some customers and figure out why people are buying the other products and not yours. Or what things are you looking at on your page itself? Is it just a simple thing of hey, do I have A plus content? How’s my images? But how can you fix a conversion problem? You don’t do that with software. You don’t do that with Seller Central. You don’t do that with Helium 10 per se, but how would you tackle that?

Destaney:

Yeah, the first thing I do is I type in that keyword that’s converting poorly. I’ll type it in directly into Amazon and I will look at how my product compares on the shelf to every other product. If my price is so much higher than everyone else, then I’m going to need to really sell my product better because it’s more expensive. So I look at price. I then look at reviews. Are my reviews a lot lower than everyone else for that keyword, not just the general market for that specific keyword? Then the next thing I’m going to take a look at is my main image. How does it look compared to the others? And then I’m going to open up the product detail page and see if I have a competitive advantage that my competitors do not. That’s the biggest thing that I typically go through. I think the secondary issue, especially when it comes to Amazon advertising, is maybe that word is just too competitive, right, all of your competitors maybe have 10 times as many reviews, a better price. What I then I’m going to look at doing is how can I bid on longer tail keywords? Maybe I look at auto campaigns or broad match. So maybe I can’t win for blue pin. Blue pin is too competitive. I’m competing against pilot. They’re too good. But maybe I can win a blue pin for college students in Because it’s a little bit more niche down. It’s specifically targeting college students, not the whole market. That’s kind of. The secondary process is to start looking at the long tail keywords where maybe I’m going to have a higher conversion rate because the keyword’s more precise in a smaller audience.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so like I mean, it’s not a big market, but obviously I sell a lot of coffin shelves. But let’s just pretend that coffin shelf was just this big ocean of so many different types of products and this and that my conversion wasn’t great, especially when I have a newer product with lower reviews. But then maybe, instead maybe I’ve got one of the few pink coffin shelves that has a built-in LED light or something. Let’s just say that actually had some search wine where it’s like pink coffin shelf with LED light. It’s going to help my ranking and things for that core keyword of coffin shelf. But instead of going after that hero keyword from the get-go, you’d probably want to go after the longer tail ones to build it up, or my conversion rate would actually be better.

Destaney:

Okay, that’s a perfect example. And then I personally take that and I’ll run it in exact match and phrase match. I want to keep it in exact match so I can control exactly where I’m showing up, for Sometimes if you take it and you push it in broad and phrase, you’re going to then still show up for black coffin shelf because it’s broad. Or maybe you’re going to show up for shelves and you don’t want to compete directly against the shelving market. When you have a coffin shelf right, they don’t overlap a ton. So I continue to expand on that keyword research. I’m going to go to Phrase Match and say, hey, maybe now I’m going to show up for pink coffin shelves for Barbies. Get a little bit more granular, a little bit more long tail, knowing that my impressions are going to decrease. Not that many people are searching that, but the people that are searching that, the 10 people a month they’re my exact audience. So it’s small impressions, low clicks, but typically high conversion rates. I’m targeting exactly what they’re looking for.

Bradley Sutton:

Now we’ll get to questions at the end, but I just want to throw one up here for now, since the guy has the same name as me. But Brad says in your pen example, would the long tail keyword be broad phrase or exact? And then he follows up if you put it in phrase or exact, are you competing against yourself.

Destaney:

Nope, not at all. So we’ve tested this across the board. We’ve also taken the exact same keyword in multiple campaigns. You don’t compete against yourself whatsoever. It’s impossible. Now, if you have the same products, you have to be a little bit careful around cannibalization, especially from an organic perspective. But from an advertising perspective, you do not compete against yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

All right now. Earlier you talked about conversion. You know good conversion, bad conversion, but what about, since we’re on this Analytics page and again, if you’re an advertising console, you might be on your target page what should I be looking at? Like, let me just clear the settings here. Should I be looking for bad conversion? Should I be looking for good conversion targets that have good that maybe I can improve on? What would you do here as far as to look, for that’s something I don’t necessarily do myself.

Destaney:

Yeah, the first thing I personally do is I filter top down by highest spend with zero filters, like that’s my, that’s my absolute favorite viewpoint.

Bradley Sutton:

I got that. That’s my default, so I already have that right here, perfect.

Destaney:

I typically look at, you know, last 30 days. That kind of is the ideal timeframe in my opinion. Unless I’m needing to make quicker decisions, then I’ll look at a smaller timeframe. So I’ll do last 30.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it.

Destaney:

Now, the three things that, in my opinion, are most important to look at is your CPC, your ACoS and then your conversion rate. Now, the reason being is they all really influence your total ACoS and ROAS. So your CPCs and bid is important because they’re not always the same, which I think a lot of people had questions about that earlier. If you’re on up and down bidding, or if you had placement modifiers applied, Amazon can actually increase your bid and make your CPC higher. This can be a problem because most people do their ACoS math based on their bid and then forget that they have a placement modifier. So they’ll go in and they’re like why is my CPC so much higher? Amazon’s spending more money than I told it to, and I’m like well, you have dynamic bidding and placement modifier. So that’s kind of the first thing I try to identify if there’s any discrepancies in that. The second thing is that conversion rate. So let’s see, do you have conversion rate up here right now, or can you scroll over to see that this is fantastic? We can almost immediately see that we’re spending a ton on a terrible converting term. 1% is bad in general, but also bad compared to all of our other numbers, so that’s almost a really easy way of. I shouldn’t be bidding on that term at all, because when customers click on it 245 clicks, there’s only been 3 orders, right, that’s super easy to red flag. It’s not even a good keyword, so I’m like okay, bad ACoS, bad conversion rate. That’s your first signal. You should almost always pause it okay. On the flip side, a lot of people have a good conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

I got something on 11, on an as 11%. I didn’t even realize that. That’s crazy.

Destaney:

So that’s a great example. You have 11% conversion rate. You have a few 13% there as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yeah, and so like looking at this, that’s great, but then what action would I take if somebody out there is looking at their own account and they see they’ve got some good conversion rates? Is it always a matter of hey, maybe I should increase the bid to see if I can get some more action on it? Or what’s the action to take?

Destaney:

The next question I usually ask myself is, Is that a keyword I would like to improve my organic rank on? And someone asked us earlier what is the correlation between Amazon advertising and organic rank. Well, anyone who’s listened to Bradley’s Honeymoon podcast or followed my content knows that your Amazon advertising does influence your organic rank, right? Your organic rank is driven by two things High traffic, to prove to the algorithm that customers love your product when they type in a keyword, and conversion rate, which proves that customers love that keyword. Right. So you need traffic, so that way they have enough data and you need conversion rate. So what I typically look at is okay, it’s a great conversion rate, fantastic. Is that a keyword that I want to improve my organic rank on? And if the answer is yes, I will increase my bid and I’m willing to spend more and have a worse ACoS and ROAS, as because I know if I continue spending on that target that’s converting better than the category or better than average my organic rank will start improving, as that organic rank improves your total sales increase because you’re having better visibility on the page. So that’s kind of a worthwhile trade-off in my opinion. On the flip side, if I see it’s an ASIN or if I see it’s a term that’s really not relevant. I’m going to keep my bid where it’s at and just let it run profitably because it’s within my target costs.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s take a quick step back here. You know, some people are right along with us. I see them commenting and they’re like completely understanding everything. There are some of you who might be a little overwhelmed with some of the granularity, with some of these data points, that conversion rate. Anybody out there who’s just like, oh my God, I’m some of the stuff it sounds like you guys are speaking a different language. Let us know in the chat, it’s okay. But for somebody who’s newer and let’s say they don’t use software, yep, what campaigns should somebody start with? And then, even because let me just take even another step back, you know, I feel like a mistake that some people make is, from day one they hire an agency. Now, you’re an agency, obviously you need to make money, but and I like agencies I feel that people should be using agencies when they’re trying to scale or you know they’re so big now that they can’t do it in house and they can hire an agency. And the reason I like to wait is because now at least you know if an agency or a consultant or whoever you’re using knows what they’re doing. Like if you, from day one, try and outsource your PPC without understanding it. To me that’s like not a good move, because now how are you going to judge, to know if somebody is doing great or if they’re doing terribly? But that being said, if I don’t hire somebody right off the bat and I’m trying to learn myself what are the best campaigns, to start with for newer sellers? Um, and then some simple kind of maintenance things that I can be doing without having to be a PPC expert maintenance things that I can be doing without having to be a PPC expert.

Destaney:

Yeah, I’m going to create a don’t list real fast. Don’t get caught up in worrying that your keywords are going to compete. Don’t get caught up in the perfect broad phrase exact match structure Doesn’t exist. Don’t get caught up in the perfect budget. I know that’s kind of one of those myths in the space. Instead, focus on the basics, which is one campaign and one ad group. I almost there’s never a time where I recommend running multiple ad groups. Ever. Always run one campaign, one ad group, five to 10, one to five to 10 keywords very small set of keywords and focus on your top keywords that you know customers would search to look for your product. Don’t overthink that. If we’re being completely honest, you should be able to look at your product and say, “‘that’s a hair clip “. I know customers are gonna look for a hair clip or ‘That’s a blue pin’ or “That’s a highlighter”. Focus on those top keywords. The second thing to really start considering is that bid management aspect we talk about. You don’t need to have the perfect bid management solution If you hear someone say of the perfect absolute AI, you don’t need that just yet. AI optimization is fantastic when you have a lot of data and things like that, but it’s not needed from the get go. The second thing would be, when it comes to that bid management, know that bid management and bid optimization is just like real estate. Truly, if you bid really high, your ad showing up at the very top of the page, truly, on Amazon. That’s how it works. It’s that simple. You have a $50 bid, you’re showing up on page one if the keyword is relevant. But, as many of you will see, you can’t afford that placement. It’s too expensive. So if I set a 10 cent bid, I’m now going to be showing up on page two or page three of Amazon, which means no one’s going to see me, so it’s going to be really low impressions. Your job is to find that balance. Where can you bid that is in the middle ground of those two, that gives you impressions and sales but is affordable? That is truly the balance there and that’s kind of the biggest thing I would say to like make sure you’re considering with bid management and I’ll let you ask questions. I think we can go a level further with it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that’s good. And then there are, I see, people in the chat are like man, hey, you know, like I struggle sometimes, you know, as somebody new. And then Bihari says what would you suggest for somebody new to Adtomic and wants to start PPC? So I’ll show that in a little bit, but that’s good. So, like guys, don’t you know? The point of this is, don’t be completely overwhelmed with or so overwhelmed that you’re like I just can’t, I’m not going to try and start any campaigns, I’m just going to forget about PPC. It’s very difficult to have success on Amazon without doing advertising. Now, for those that have Adtomic some, we’ve come up with a way to make it even simpler for you and that’s called advertising AI. So those of you like Bilal who asked that question, if you have Adtomic and you’re kind of newer to Amazon and you’re just like, hey, I don’t want to have to do all of these filtering and managing my campaigns, but I want to have a decent structure. That’s going to get me in the right direction. What I suggest doing, guys, is go to AI advertising, and this is so simple. All right, you can just hit product goal. All I have to do is click one thing product goal. You select your product and then set ACoS goal. Everybody, there’s no magic number here. Some people have higher profit margins than others. Number here, you know some people have a higher profit margins than others. You know, a lot of people set a goal at 20%. You know some people want it really tight, 10%. Some people are like, hey, you know I have a supplement, I’m okay with losing money because I know I’m going to get money back from subscribe and save. So you know what? My goal is 50% ACOS, 60% ACOS. You know there’s no magic number here. And then just set how much do you want to spend on advertising daily across all the campaigns that we’re going to create? And just set that. And then you kind of, are good to go. Now, if you happen to have a couple of main keywords that you know you have to rank for and you know is a priority, go ahead and throw those into the keywords section here. But that’s not even necessary. You, you can start completely from scratch if you want to, and our AI software is going to find the campaigns for you. Now, this is for somebody who’s just starting, but, theoretically, if I’ve been advertising for a while and I have my own campaigns, I’m just not happy with it, the performance. I could use this AI advertising. But then what do you suggest I should do? Like, perhaps, maybe if I’m, if I already am advertising I’m not brand new but I want the AI to just to see what it can do. Should I maybe do what I had shown in the beginning, do that audit to maybe like take away some of the bad spend targets and pause those, and then that’s the budget that I can use, where now I’m not even having to pay more? Or what do you suggest for experienced sellers who want to use the AI as well?

Destaney:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I would consider from an AI standpoint. We’re looking at all of your historical keyword performance, so trying to create campaigns with new keywords for certain ASINs and make sure that alignment’s really clean and organized, but you definitely want to make sure you’re cleaning up all the old stuff, right? I think one of the first questions that always comes up is what is the balance between my spend and total sales? And when you’re transitioning to a new software, that’s a concern of like. Are you guys just going to spend a ton more and then ruin my performance that I already had? No, the goal is to clean up everything that’s not performing well. You should be doing that anyways. You should be going into the targeting tab and pausing, lowering bids at everything that’s not performing it well, and then the AI is going to optimize towards that target ACoS, which is why it’s so important to understand that target and the lifecycle of your product. A brand new launch product probably needs to have a higher target ACoS. A product that has hundreds of reviews and they’re five stars can have a lower target ACoS and you can make that adjustment based off what you’re trying to achieve..

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely, absolutely now. It’s a couple quick questions. Somebody says where is AI advertising? I can’t find it on my dashboard. So over here on the left hand side of Adtomic once you’re in Adtomic, it’s right here, this little symbol, here, AI advertising, right there. Kimberly says what about AI bids? So that’s a little bit different. We’ll talk about that. Like you could have, you can keep control of your own campaigns and still have the AI do your bid suggestions. The AI advertising is like an A to Z service where the campaign creation, the bidding, the keyword harvesting, the negative matching all of that is done by AI, the AI bids you can actually apply to your campaigns where it’s just like, let’s say, you have an ACoS goal. It’s going to give you suggestions on how to change that. In order to do that, what about if I, again, I’m an existing seller and I have existing campaigns? I start AI, maybe over time with the move be to start lowering the budget of my old campaigns and then increase the AI budget over time once I’m comfortable with the results.

Destaney:

Yep, that’s exactly what I would do Now. If you think your campaigns are set up absolutely perfectly in the past and if they were, you probably wouldn’t be moving to a new solution then you can let them run side by side. Again your bids don’t compete. It’s not a concern. I know someone was having a conversation earlier around vendor versus seller central, but that’s not really a problem that most people have to deal with, so you don’t need to worry about your bids competing with old campaigns and new campaigns. The goal would be to take that budget and start increasing it on your new campaigns because they’re gonna be structured appropriately. They’re going to be utilizing AI to optimize your maximum sales with your maximum profitability goals. So that’s where you want to spend more. You want to slowly decrease your budget of your old campaigns because, more than likely, they’re set up in a scattered fashion where you don’t have a lot of control over where your budget’s being distributed.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s talk in general about bidding rules. A lot of people were talking about that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using software like Adtomic or you’re doing advertising on your own. Everybody needs to have some rules going, whether you’re manually doing it or programming it or whatever, to hit your ACoS goals. Amazon does not magically give you your target ACoS. You’ve got to be doing things like decreasing and increasing or any increasing bid. You’ve got a negative match, poor performing search terms, and so what are some general rules that you see work? For example, let’s just say somebody has got some ACoS goals, so they’re old school, and it’s like, hey, I’m only trying to optimize by ACoS. And somebody’s just using search term reports from know, from Amazon. Um, like, what should they be looking for? Like, should they just, should they bracket it up? Like, hey, if it’s above X percent of ACoS, might as well just target might as well stop it. If it’s between 80 and 100, you know, I should probably decrease it by X percent. If it’s between five and ten percent, I should probably increase. Like, what are general? I know there’s no one size fits all, but what are some general strategies that people could be doing when they’re looking at their own search term reports.

Destaney:

Well, let’s start really high level. There’s typically three to four different goals you should keep in mind when it comes to bid management. You should be optimizing for efficiency, which is based on just your target ACoS, ROAS. Another goal is you should be optimizing for product launch or organic rank, and your goal is to get to the top of the page and to rank well. The third goal is optimizing for branded spend, which is very different. And then a fourth goal is more for video and creative. So I’m not going to talk about that now. But if we start with that first goal of optimizing for profitability, you should only be focusing on lowering or increasing your bid based off your target ACoS or ROAS, which we’ve built out right. That’s the only thing you’re looking at is I have a 30% target ACoS. I want to hit that target ACoS, which means you lower the bid if you’re not performing well. You increase your bid if you are performing well. It’s just really simple math. The second objective that launching slash ranking well is important because, as mentioned in the chat, the demand is set by the market. So if you bid 10 cents but everyone else is bidding a dollar, you’re not getting impressions. So there are some keywords that we are willing to take a loss on because we know that they are very important. We’re converting really well on, but we have to bid with the markets bidding in order to drive sales, which will improve our organic rank right. So we typically look at launch strategy in this regard. That’s where we’re going to say hey, my ACoS is not within target, but my conversion rates high and I’m trying to improve my rank, so I’m going to spend more to send a positive signal to Amazon that my rank can potentially improve over time. The third one is branded strategy again. So a few people have asked about brand cannibalization. So I typically recommend bidding on your branded search because if you don’t, someone else will. But we use a budget cap to make sure we’re not spending all of our money on branded and we’re not cannibalizing our sales. If I’m ranked number one, then maybe I pull back on my branded spend, right? I would say those are kind of the core philosophies we look at when it comes to bid management. Just because it’s came up multiple times in the chat related to that, is the bidding strategy behind it. Right, increase your bid or lower your bids or follow Amazon suggested bids. Amazon suggested bids are just an average of what everyone else is bidding. So I know people will be like Amazon’s suggesting I bid $4. Do I bid that? I’m like. Well, they’re suggesting that because someone else is probably bidding $20 at the top of search and someone else is bidding $1 at the bottom search. So that’s the average. So Amazon’s giving you the suggestion that you need to bid in order to maximize impressions and clicks, but that’s not taking into consideration your target ACoS, your target ROAS. So I use suggested bids to understand how competitive a market’s going to be and how much everyone else is probably bidding. But I keep in mind that I want to hit my target ACoS and ROAS, so oftentimes I will decrease or increase based off my goals.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So we’ve talked about one end of the spectrum where you’ve got the Helium 10 Adtomic AI advertising just controlling everything for you. Now I’m going to talk a little bit about the middle, but then the opposite end of the spectrum, the complete control freaks out there. Like myself, who maybe have like, have you guys have been doing on your own some specific, you know V lookups and pivot tables and things in your own search term reports to be able to optimize your bidding. Well, whatever rule that you are doing, you guys can also just assign those rules to Adtomic and so like here’s just a sample one that I had created that was strictly ACoS, where I’m like hey, you know what, if the ACoS is greater than 200, it’s probably doubtful that I’m going to get it down to a level that is meaningful. So I just wanted to go ahead and pause that targeting. If it’s between 100 and 200, I might want to play around with a little bit, just to see can I convert at a lower ACoS. So then I put in a formula here where I’m like you know what, go ahead and take the whatever cost per click I’m getting up and then multiply that by my target ACoS let’s just say I’m trying to get to 60% and divided by what my actual ACoS is, and then what that does now allows me to lower my bid to a rate that I think is doable. And I have different, different clips of that. I go really, really deep here. I have like probably 13 criteria’s here that I programmed into Adtomic where I’m like, but again, it doesn’t matter if I have Adtomic and you guys don’t. This is exactly what you need to have. You need to make sure you have the rules set up, even if it’s in your own spreadsheet, of how you are going to lower the bid. So here I, as you guys can see, if it’s, if my ACoS is bigger than 40 and less than 50, I’m trying to get down to 35%, all right. Then, once I get down there now it’s between 30 and 40. Now my next thing is I’m trying to get under 30%, but then it flips. All right, like if I’m trying to get 20% ACoS and I’m happy with it, if I have 6% ACoS, there could be a possibility that I might be leaving money on the table because I am only getting maybe some impressions when other people are out of their budget or something at the end of the day. But I want to show throughout the day, or maybe even increase my position. Maybe I’m showing up at the bottom of the page. Well, here I have it, where I’m like you know what, if my ACoS is between 5 and 10%, I’m going to go ahead and try and get it over 10. So it’s going to slowly increase my bid over time. And then the last one I have like is on a target. If I have greater than 25, you know, Destaney was talking about 15, everybody has different numbers 25 clicks and zero orders. I just want to go ahead and pause that target. And so this is available whether you have Adtomic or not, you have to be able to know what rules are you running your advertising by writing on a piece of paper. Put it in Excel formula, if you’ve got Adtomic, just program it into here, and now I never have to be trying to make these calculations. Adtomic is going to tell me once these things hit these certain thresholds and I’ll go ahead and be able to take action. Now, in the middle there are things. Maybe this is way overwhelming to you. Well, if it’s overwhelming to you, I don’t know what you guys are doing your spreadsheets, because this is easier than doing on spreadsheets, but maybe you want to use a template. You don’t want AI to completely do it. Now, some of these templates you have made, right. Destaney, are any of these yours or you assisted in the creation of them?

Destaney:

Yep, I think the three first ones were the ones that we built based off the most common occurrences I see in the market. So profitability is always the first one. Hey, I want to optimize my bids just for profitability. Sales surge is what we discussed earlier. You’re okay with having an ACoS that is a little bit higher. Your goal is maximizing top of search impression share. You want to show up at the page. You want to drive sales. Your focus is potentially organic rank or just again, increasing visibility. That’s where we’re saying, hey, your ACoS isn’t the best indicator here. It’s a lot more conversion rate, it’s a lot more what’s going to drive sales for us. The launching is very similar, except for that’s all about data collection and impressions up front, so that way we can gather, gather all of that and optimize later on and harvest those keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, so let’s say somebody doesn’t have this. How is this working in the back? Like doesn’t have Adtomic and they’re like I want to try and I’m not going to be able to get it exactly perfect like Adtomic is doing it because you’re the one who designed this. But what are some strategies they can do? If they’re just in general? Hey, I don’t have my own software, but I’m in this. I want to do a maximized sales push on my own advertising. What are some of the things that are powering this that people can maybe apply on their own accounts?

Destaney:

Yeah, profitability is all about knowing your CPC and bid. So set a fixed bid and make sure you’re optimizing your bid management, maximizing sales. We’re looking at conversion rate and we’re looking at impression share. So take a look at those again. Use your targeting tab in advertising console. If needed, you can pull up your impression share, you can pull up your conversion rate and do that top down filter by spin that Bradley and I walked through earlier. For launching that’s where we’re going to cast a much wider net. We know our conversion rate is going to be lower than average because we don’t have reviews yet, so we’re okay with a lower conversion rate. We’re really looking for what’s driving the most orders. What can we do on the auto side.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time and now I’m managing 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic. For more information. That’s h10.me forward slash a-d-t-o-m-i-c. But now just real quick. You know, last week was unbox. I didn’t get to go to it and I think AMC was one of the stars of unbox. What is AMC? Uh, destiny first, and what were some of the announcements at Amazon unbox? And like, how is that going to affect myself and the rest of the people here where maybe before we didn’t even have access to AMC?

Destaney:

Yeah well, AMC is going to be a whole rabbit hole that we’re probably going to get into later, but, put simply, AMC is what is going to allow us to include more behavioral targeting and PPC. I think that’s one of the simplest ways to use it. There’s a lot more content that I can help with. AMC is Amazon Marketing Cloud, and what it is a space to hold all of your data, all of your customer data, all of your advertising data, all of your ad type data, everything. Historically, it was only available to those who use DSP, but now they’re unlocking it for anyone with an advertising console. Now, to really get power from it, you probably need to be running sponsored brands and sponsored display. That’ll unlock a lot of the Analytic Insights, but what it does is allow you to do some level of behavioral targeting. So someone asked like a pixel in the comments, relatively similar. You’re used to retargeting within meta ads and retargeting based off audience and behavioral insights. We’re going to be able to do that with sponsored brand ads and sponsored product ads. We’re going to be able to say hey, I want to bid higher for individuals who fit X, Y, Z whether it means that they purchased my product twice in the past and I want to bid higher on them and bid lower on everyone else. Or if we’re going to get into some behavioral audience targeting, which will be incredibly exciting. That’s where AMC is going to be beneficial. So not only can we target someone who’s looking for a certain keyword, we’re going to be able to narrow down that targeting and say, hey, I don’t want to just target the blue pen audience, I want to target the blue pen audience who’s already viewed my listing five times or viewed my competitors listing or XYZ, similar to DSP.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the timeline when this is going to be available for the masses. Some of this stuff is already available or it’s going to be over the next few months.

Destaney:

Over the next few months. So it kind of really depends from an Amazon advertising perspective, like are you using a software? Are you using ad console? Are you using the API? All of that’s going to be a dependency here. I know that we’re working on a lot with the Adtomic side of going ahead and getting the analytics available to people, so things like ad type overlap, which is a really cool report that says your sponsor brands, when combined with sponsor products, improve the overall conversion rate, and then on the audience side it’s gonna take a little bit of time to get that rolled out because it’s one of Amazon’s newest additions.

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, be on the lookout, guys. That’s something I know very little about that I definitely want to dive into. So, guys, thank you so much for uh joining us. Thank you, Destaney, for sharing your knowledge, with everybody and we hope you guys put into practice these strategies that you learned today. Whether you’re doing advertising on your own, you hopefully you learned a lot of what you need to be looking for when you’re downloading your search term reports. Don’t forget though, if you have Diamond plan, make to use Adtomic. I used to spend 20 hours a week on my campaigns before I had Adtomic. Now I’m spending 30 minutes because I’m able to put all these rules in there. So, if you don’t have the Diamond Plan now, use the code SSP10. There’s a 10% off coupon code for you just from our podcast SSP10, and then sign up for the Diamond Plan, get in on Adtomic and then join one of our sessions. If you’re kind of like overwhelmed with how to set up Adtomic, hit this QR code right here. Join the session, learn from our experts. We’ve got Travis, we’ve got Ashley and others who are going to be helping you guys out to really understand how to set up your campaigns in Adtomic. So I highly recommend it. And a sneak peek I’m going to be working on something you guys know. The Project X Destaney is going to be using Adtomic to kind of like optimize some of our coffin shelf and egg tray campaigns that we got going. So we’ll have some content on that in the next few months as well. All right, guys. Thank you so much and we’ll see you later. Bye-bye now.

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