#637 – How To Track Amazon Share Of Voice

Join us for an enlightening TACoS Tuesday discussion on Amazon Advertising Strategies for Success with our expert guest, Destaney Wishon, CEO at BTR Media. Together, we explore advanced techniques to elevate your advertising game on Amazon. We unpack essential tools like the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and Demand-Side Platform (DSP), as well as campaign segmentation strategies. We also highlight the significance of understanding the time gap between clicks and purchases, shedding light on common misconceptions about dayparting Amazon ads. With insights from Amazon Marketing Stream data, we provide actionable strategies to optimize your advertising efforts, ensuring you can effectively apply these techniques to your business.

As we move forward, we focus on maximizing Amazon ad type expansion, emphasizing the competitive edge gained by utilizing unique ad formats such as sponsored brand and display ads. Destaney shares insights into the effectiveness and costs associated with sponsored brand videos, particularly on mobile platforms. We also address audience experiences with video ad performance, clarify targeting options, and explore the potential overlap in ad real estate. Our conversation also covers optimizing these ad types for conversions, offering strategies to combine various ad formats for enhanced conversion rates and discussing creative content’s role in driving success.

Finally, we highlight the importance of understanding Share of Voice on Amazon, a crucial metric for both large and small brands. We discuss how tools like Helium 10’s Share of Voice tool can provide valuable insights into brand positioning relative to competitors, helping inform strategic investment decisions. We explore organic versus paid presence and the impact of owning more “real estate” on Amazon’s search pages. Our session wraps up with an overview of best practices for utilizing brand metrics and share of voice tools, offering guidance on campaign management, bid strategies, and maximizing profitability. Don’t miss this opportunity to refine your Amazon PPC strategies with insights from our engaging conversation with Destaney.

In episode 637 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Advertising Strategies for Success
• 02:22 – Timing Discrepancy Between Clicks and Purchases – Dayparting
• 05:54 – Optimizing Bid and Budget Strategies
• 09:16 – Maximizing Amazon Ad Type Expansion
• 12:20 – Comparing Amazon Sponsored Brand Ad Performance
• 13:30 – Amazon Sponsored Products Conversion Analysis
• 18:35 – Optimizing Amazon Ad Types for Conversions
• 26:56 – Optimizing Bid Management Strategy for Campaigns
• 29:52 – Understanding Share of Voice on Amazon
• 31:57 – Optimizing Amazon Advertising Through Keywords
• 35:33 – Importance of Amazon Rank Strategy
• 36:24 – Amazon PPC Best Practices Overview
• 40:17 – Fixed Bids vs Other Bid Types

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

On TACoS Tuesday. This month, we’ve got Destaney back on the show. It’s going to talk about different advertising strategies, different campaign types, how to measure, share of voice and more. 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 is a special edition of our TACoS Tuesday. That means that we are going to be talking about a lot of cool things, anything and anything advertising related for Amazon and, just like we do every other month, we have our special expert guest, Destaney, on the show. Let’s talk about what we are going to be going over today. So what do you have here in front of us, Destaney?

Destaney:

Amazing. So we were kind of discussing internally with the team what are the key areas that really take someone’s Amazon advertising from basic which I would say is your bid management, your keyword research. It’s what everyone’s doing to advanced. Now, advanced is a fun topic because we could be talking about AMC and DSP, or we could be talking about things like Amazon marketing stream, ad type, expansion, campaign segmentation. It’s honestly one of the biggest struggles I have is putting together an advanced advertising webinar, because everyone’s definition of advanced is all the way across the board. So what we put together today is kind of the basics that everyone needs to take their Amazon advertising to the next level. We provided a lot of the tools that we have directly within Adtomic that someone can apply these immediately, but we’re also going to leave quite a bit of time for Q&A, so I’m going to talk about these things, but I think the biggest difficulty is how do they apply to your business? And if I cover any of the advanced topics that you see out there whether it’s B2B placements or AMC audiences or reporting save those, drop them in the chat. We will get to them later. But we wanted this to be an incredibly, incredibly actionable presentation. So here we are alright. So one of the first things that we wanted to cover is day parting schedule, mainly because this comes up in almost every single one of my Q&As how do you day part, whether it’s optimizing your bids and budgets on an hourly basis, or maybe you don’t have sales on the weekend? I get asked this all the time. A lot of you probably heard my soapbox around how I feel about day parting, so we’re going to discuss some of those aspects.

Destaney:

First and foremost, it’s really important to understand that the time between a click and a purchase not always the same. A lot of people will hop into ad console. They’ll see their spins really high in their morning and they’ll be like my sales don’t come through in the morning. The problem with this strategy is that that’s not quite how it works. Most shoppers don’t always click and purchase immediately. So if you’re trying to use day partying with an ad console, it’s probably not going to be an accurate reflection of what your customers are doing. So a lot of customers add to cart and they’ll do cart building. So, as you can see, in order to get same day delivery, you need $25 in your cart. So that’s just one of those small examples that someone could have clicked on your ad at 8am, but maybe they waited to add more things to cart till later. So time of click and time of purchase are not the same. This has been a barrier for pretty much everyone and the problem was no one actually had access to those insights until Amazon rolled out the API for Amazon marketing stream. So if you’re within Adtomic, you can actually see the day parting scheduler. So it’s under the rules section and you’ll be able to click into that and you’re going to be able to see for your brand when do the sales come through and when are those sales associated with the appropriate click.

Destaney:

So that’s one of the big things that we like to take a look at. Here’s some of the data that we pulled just for our accounts. What’s really important to understand again is sometimes you have misconceptions about your brand. Almost everyone always says okay, I get a ton of clicks at night, but no one buys. My first question is how often are you shopping and not purchasing on Amazon? Not very frequently. What’s probably happening is they’re clicking and shopping, but maybe not purchasing until the next morning.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me ask you a question on that, Destaney. Real quick, going back to I mean, you don’t have to go to the last slide, but you talked about the day part and I think one question I get from a lot, and sometimes I’m confused about this myself, is when you’re talking about the click might happen at some time and the purchase somewhere else. Now, this marketing stream data that Amazon provides and that Helium 10 shows, is it showing when something happened via when they actually purchased, or when that original click so let’s say right now is 11 AM. I click something, I purchase it, I actually check out of my cart. Uh, two days from now, at 5 PM. Uh, when I look at that marketing stream data, is it showing what happened today at 11 AM or it’s showing that something happened at the 5 PM later?

Destaney:

It is showing you the sale associated with the click. So the first point of the first touch point which is why this is so important, because you can’t see that within ad console. Sometimes you log in on a Wednesday and your ad console sales look really high. What people don’t consider is there’s a high chance that those clicks came in on Tuesday. So if your spend is high on Tuesday and your sales are high on Wednesday, the first thing that most people want to do is they go in on Tuesday and they try to pause all their campaigns. And then what happens? Their sales are down on Wednesday cause what they did not realize is that that point of click is very different. Most people do not add to cart and purchase immediately. That is why Amazon has a 14-day attribution window. Also, you start considering things like payday. Right, people are adding to cart but maybe not checking out on the day of purchase. So when you’re using a tool like Adtomic that’s pulling this Amazon marketing stream data, it’s really important to understand these insights and figure out how to optimize backwards from them. You cannot do this directly in Ad Console because of what I’ve mentioned. It’s an inaccurate reflection of purchase patterns. I would say so under schedules, you can start seeing some of these insights. You can log in and you can see hey, when’s my spins the highest? When are my sales the highest? This is really important because there is a lever of optimization that we can apply with budget and bid rules across the board. My argument is always if they click, they’re interested, right, we everyone’s probably heard me say that. So I never recommend coming in aggressively and like pausing or optimizing overly because of that.

Destaney:

But what we do see is there are certain times a day and certain times a week where someone is more likely to convert. We have a brand, for example, that has the majority of their sales on B2B. What we found was on the weekends their conversion rate was a lot lower because people weren’t purchasing their business products on the weekend. So we went and we ran a really small test where we lowered all of our budgets on the weekend and we were able to almost immediately increase our TACoS or improve our TACoS because we were cutting back on spend. So the biggest things that we recommend to use this again don’t blanket cut everything. That’s not the best route. Instead, take a look at the scheduler and say, hey, is there a time of day where CPCs are the highest that maybe I can’t afford. Is there a time of day when my conversion rate’s the lowest, and can I optimize my bid and budget distribution based on that? The optimization windows are also incredibly important. Are there certain days that you do best? Again, if you go in and just lower everything lower your bids on every single day yes, your TACoS is probably going to improve, but just because you’re decreasing your spend, the risk in that is that you’re then going to also decrease your sales. So that’s the first thing that we covered. I’ll kind of pause there, Bradley. Any questions on that?

Bradley Sutton:

No, that makes sense. I just put I’m just curious, guys I don’t know if you saw the chat I’m just curious about you guys. What do you guys do as Amazon buyers? You know, as far as when you add something to the cart or click something like I always thought everybody was like me because I’m not what Destaney said, like if I’m adding something to the cart, I check out like I don’t want to play with the seller’s minds that I’m interested in, like I found when I started looking at data that Amazon provided that I’m the weird one. Actually, most people are putting stuff in their cart and not checking out, and sometimes even days later. So it’s a very important thing to understand about buyer behavior, especially in the context of advertising guys, I hope everybody’s paying attention.

Destaney:

100%. We’ve also seen that it takes multiple touch points. We’ll dive into this a little bit later, but some of the AMC data. We see that if someone views a sponsored brand ad and then views a sponsored product ad later on, they’re more likely to convert. So it’s kind of interesting because if you think about like billboard ads or tv ads, does everyone remember, like the my pillow guy commercial, like the frequency of that is forever stuck in my brain because there’s something to be said about frequency. So even if they’re not buying, they’re seeing and that I think is really important to remember. Like I know all my ACoS focus people hate to hear this but at the end of the day it’s also marketing psychology and making sure you’re showing up consistently in their brain and not just optimizing solely for profitability.

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 over 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 forward slash Adtomic for more information. That’s h10.me forward slash A D T O M I C.

Destaney:

Now the other thing I want to dive into is ad type expansion. This is obviously one of my passion areas. It’s something that I still am educating people on how to overcome the hurdle. But expanding to all of the ad types available to you is a huge competitive advantage. Your ad types do not compete. Why is it so important? Well, amazon is giving a lot of opportunity to these unique ad types. This is a great example. The ad at the top of the page absolutely captures all of the attention. The sponsored brand ad. This is something anyone in here can run almost immediately. They’re a little bit more difficult to set up but at the end of the day, the majority of it is still keyword targeting and bid management. So making sure you’re expanding into all of your appropriate ad types is incredibly important, and I’m going to pause here.

Destaney:

Let people kind of have comments in the chat. I always get questions of like is sponsored brands video still work? Do the CPCs work? So I’m going to let people ask those questions now so I can build them into the rest of the presentation. But at the end of the day, one of the easiest, lowest hanging fruit that I always see in auditing accounts is not expanding into their sponsored brand sponsored display in their video campaigns. One again inventory. As you can see on mobile, this video takes up over 50% of the scroll page. As you can see to the left, you have four different sponsored brand placements showing up on your competitors’ product detail pages. The one that’s an umbrella in the middle is actually a DSP placement, but the rest are also sponsored brands. They must be a part of strategy. Not to mention when you add a creative element to your ads, your conversion rate is much higher because you’re doing a better job of educating.

Bradley Sutton:

Two questions. Can you go back two slides? What type of sponsored brand is that there at the very top?

Destaney:

So it’s a sponsored brand ad with a custom image added driving to the store page.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s why there’s no products that show up there, because it’s a store. Like oh, that’s no wonder I don’t. I don’t do anything to my store. I need to start.

Destaney:

Yeah it’s not going to populate all the time. I typically only see it on Safari. I typically don’t see it on Chrome. It’s one of the placements that Amazon’s playing around with, but it does incredibly, incredibly well and your sponsor brand ad should perform pretty close to your sponsor product ads in terms of ROAS and ACoS.

Bradley Sutton:

And on the next slide, the ones that are showing up on product pages. Is that just a regular sponsored brand ad? And then the like. I can’t choose to show up. You know I can’t target ASINs with sponsored brand ads, right, it’s just Amazon decides to show me.

Destaney:

You can target ASINs and categories but, similar to sponsored product targeting, sometimes it shows up like for keywords as well. So there’s quite a bit of overlap in this real estate, but you are able to do both.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it. We got a couple of questions here in the chat. Let’s go ahead and pull up. First of all, a couple of comments. Jackson says sponsor brand is part of every launch strategy. Perry says my video ads perform much better. But then we’ve got Kim who says the opposite. My video ads tend to be very expensive, so it can go both ways. And then Joshua has a question here what percentage of sales come from sponsored brand ads? I’m still trying to dial in my sponsored display ads.

Destaney:

Well, I’m going to cover the first two questions first, then my next slide I’ll cover the percentage. So one sponsored brand ads and sponsored brand video ads. I’ve never seen them perform bad in terms of product line, because Jackson mentioned product line and I’m actually very interested to see what products you’ve seen them not perform well. I’ve seen them perform well if you have bad creative or bad images, but at the end of the day, again, it’s your bid optimization that matters. Now, video can be a little bit more expensive because, when it comes to inventory or available placements on the page, sponsor brands video is some of the least amount of inventory. There’s typically one video at the top of the page, occasionally one video in the middle of the page and occasionally two videos on the product detail page. Because everyone is bidding on these limited placements, CPCs can be a lot higher and the more expensive it is, the lower your ROAS is, the higher your ACoS is. That being said, you don’t have to bid that high. You can always lower your bids and you can make sure to expand into other long tail keywords that are a little bit cheaper. That’s the thing that I think people sometimes forget. With sponsored brands, it’s still bidding keyword management. So if it’s not performing well, you’re probably bidding too high or you’re covering keywords that aren’t aligned with your landing page or wherever you’re driving the traffic to.

Destaney:

Getting into some of the specifics that we see in the chat, if they don’t perform as well as sponsored products, they may not perform as XYZ. I pulled some of our agency data so this is a little over, I think, $60 million in spend. So it’s a wide array of categories and products. You can see sponsored products converts the highest. We see this almost across the board because sponsored products are incredibly native. They look like an organic ad so customers click and purchase pretty consistently. But we can also see our sponsored brands. Video ads really not that much lower. It converts pretty well. Our sponsored brand ads are 11%, but that’s also because we run them for a lot of brands that run it like a billboard ad, so they go really, really broad and maybe target category targets that aren’t as profitability focus as we would on the sponsor product side.

Destaney:

But you can kind of see how in line all of our performances sponsored display 4.67 row as sponsored product almost a 4. ROAS. Auto campaigns almost 4, sponsored brand higher ROAS at 4.39, sponsored brands video 3. So all of them are within $1 of each other, which is pretty incredible, and that’s again. That’s because that’s how we’re choosing to optimize. If we’re converting lower, then we bid a little bit lower, so that way we can still achieve the same outcome through our bid management, our keyword research and in terms of percentage breakout, sponsor products are almost always going to drive 70 to 80% of your sales because they have the most inventory on the page and they’re most native to customers who they convert better. Sponsor brands anywhere from 15 to 20% when maxed out within that video. 5% to 10% depending on competition, as mentioned. Sponsored display 0% to 5% if being ran well, and that’s considering DSP as a whole separate segment. Wow, there’s some great questions in here. We’re maximizing sponsor brands and sponsored display. Do you want me to run through some of these?

Bradley Sutton:

There was one from Darina about the click-through rate depending on the placement. That’s something I know that Helium 10 doesn’t show yet. Like, hey, you know, like, obviously with Helium 10, you can see in keyword tracker the placement of your sponsored product ads. Like hey, what position are you? But you know, sometimes a sponsored brand video ad shows in the middle of the page, sometimes it shows at the very top. Yeah, like, even Amazon doesn’t really tell you where it’s showing, right?

Destaney:

Yeah. So in general, we don’t recommend really using click through rate. It’s a huge factor with sponsor brand ads because your click through rate is going to be so dependent on your keywords. So, for example, if I am selling soccer equipment and 30% of my equipment is pink soccer equipment, it’s a pink soccer ball, it’s pink shin guards. If I bid on the term soccer, my click through rate is going to be lower than if I bid on the term girls soccer. Right, one of them is a lot more aligned, so your click is going to be a lot stronger. So it’s not necessarily an indicator of a bad ad, it’s more so. Just how aligned are you with the keywords you’re targeting?

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, just a comment here from Kim. Followed up. She says I’ve got more seasonal products and they do better.

Destaney:

Absolutely. That’s also a good pro tip is when you have a custom image on your sponsor brand ads, it’s a really big opportunity to layer in seasonal creatives. So Amazon now has their AI generators that are directly incorporated into AdTomic as well as Ad Console. One of the things that we do is, if we have seasonal items that do well in summer, we’re going to put products in the beach or have sunshine in the background. If we have seasonal products for Christmas, I’m gonna add snow or a little bit of a seasonal element. That has drastically improved our click through rates almost across the board.

Bradley Sutton:

Josh follows up here. We kind of touched on this earlier, the different things that you could send, but are you doing product videos? Are you sending people to a store, spotlight or product collection?

Destaney:

Almost all, but we depend on the customer journey. If we go back to my soccer example, if someone types in the term soccer equipment we don’t know if they want shin guards or soccer balls or goalie gloves I’m going to drive them to my store so that way they can see my full collection. If they type in shin guards for men, I’m driving them to a product collection landing page so that way they can immediately check out. It’s as low friction as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and Kim says yeah. Compared to your competitors, do you need to be in their price range to convert with sponsored brand, sponsored product ads? Yeah, sure, If there’s two sponsored ads and they’re right next to a product that’s way cheaper. That could have an effect. But what about? Is it the same in sponsored brand or, since it’s on its own island.

Destaney:

I would say it’s less important because your sponsored product ads are directly comparing you to everyone right next to you. Right, it’s the review, it’s the price. As mentioned, your sponsored brand ads give you an opportunity to stand out. So sometimes, yes, they can still be a little bit more expensive, but oftentimes in the categories that you mentioned where they’re highly saturated with people who are racing to the bottom, your creative ad types help you outperform so much better, because when you have a video, you’re educating customer and you need to buy my product because of X, y, z. When they’re watching the video or they’re seeing the lifestyle image, it’s helping sell that your product is more expensive for a reason. So when you do great creative video and sponsor brand headline ads are some of the absolute top performing ads that we see. So a few other things. Um, Joshua, is that two different campaigns? It is. I will touch on that a little bit later. Is the sponsored product metric including FBA and FBM products in general? Yes, I’m not sure if you’re referencing anything specific. The majority of the ones that we showcased on the last screen for us is both FBA and FBM. We do run them slightly different because of the shipping timeframes. Your conversion rate is usually going to be lower.

Destaney:

But getting kind of to the point of this slide, I have here another really important things of ad types and we can now see this data with AMC, which is going to be a big focus for us in general within AdTomic the next year. AMC allows us to see ad type overlap and ad type overlap is incredibly important because, as you can see here, when we’re only running a sponsored product ad, compared to all of the clicks that we see, our conversion rates less than one percent. When a customer is exposed to a sponsored product ad and a sponsored brand ad, you can see our conversion rate jumps to 0.39. When we add in a sponsored product, sponsored brand and sponsored display ad, our conversion rate jumps to a 3.27. Now there’s a few different biases that could be considered here and that if someone clicks on three different ads, of course they’re going to be more likely to purchase. But the real important thing to consider here is sometimes your sponsor brand video ad may not get clicked, or it does and it may not drive the sell, but what will happen is they’re going to come back and click another sponsor product ad later and then also check out. So, going back to our comments on frequency. Having more ad types and exposing your customers to more of your ads almost always drives a higher conversion rate, and that’s always fun when Amazon advertising is a big revenue driver for Amazon. But at the end of the day, AMC Insights now allows us to actually see this and we see it almost across the board that multiple ad types drives a much stronger conversion rate.

Destaney:

A few high-level things before I start answering the rest of these questions. Use your sponsor product search term report to maximize placements on sponsored brands. So we almost always pull our search term report. We look for everything performing well and we put them in our sponsored brand campaigns. We do segment out our sponsored brand campaigns pretty granular, in a granular fashion. Again, I’m going to segment my men’s soccer versus kid’s soccer versus women’s soccer so that way I can have a landing page and creative aligned with those terms. Not always easy to scale, but it outperforms anything else. Invest in great creative. Both sponsor brands and sponsor display allow for video and lifestyle images, so this is 100% beneficial. And then group your campaigns into small segments for maximum control, as mentioned earlier. Now diving into some of these questions.. Do you add variations of the same product to one campaign or is it better to run different campaigns? If the variations are similar searches, absolutely. If it’s a white t-shirt and I have extra-large, large and small, put them in the same campaign. If it’s protein and I have chocolate protein versus vanilla protein, I’m going to break them out and break out the keywords so I can align my creative and adjust my budget based off performance.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s from Keith. If my variations are different colors, great minds think alike. Very similar question what happens if I’m running ads for them already and I switch the main seller only he says?

Destaney:

I would go ahead and make the switch slowly, honestly, because when you run them all in one campaign, you can’t control your budget distribution. Amazon just runs your budget to whatever they think it should. So when you break them out, that can be a little bit of a barrier to overcome. Again, colors isn’t a huge difference unless the search volume is strong. Sheets, for example. Sheets, are 100% driven by color, so we find breaking them out can help us optimize quite a bit better.

Bradley Sutton:

Bruce says, in more competitive categories with relatively low average row as any adjustments to your recommendations.

Destaney:

So is your row as low because of your conversion rate, which is an indicator of competitiveness, or because of your CPC? That’s the first thing I’m going to identify. If it’s low because of my conversion rate, I need to expand my keyword research, create better images and figure out my competitive advantage. If my ROAS is low because my CPCs are high, I need to adjust my bid management, adjust my placements and also figure out if you can improve your conversion rate so you can afford those high CPCs.

Bradley Sutton:

Keith says I’ve got a product that suddenly significantly dropped in impressions week over week. I tried increasing bids and placements but it’s not revving the impressions.

Destaney:

Three things I would do. I would start and make sure you don’t have any keywords that could cause like an ineligibility issue. I would just check your ineligibility. Usually it’d be zero impressions, so it’s easy to identify. I would potentially copy that campaign and create a new one. Start with much higher bids. The third thing is, if you increase bids 20% to 30%, that’s probably not going to help. If it were me take this with a grain of salt, because it’s not my money. I would go into that specific campaign, set a few $49 bids, refresh your page on Amazon, see if your ad shows up. If it does, the reason you’re dropping impressions is because of your bid management and then readjust your bids back to your level of profitability. The last thing is to see if it’s a category search issue and you can just use any of the tools to see hey, maybe the category is down.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And then a couple of things you know like make sure this goes to everybody in this room down. Uh, have your Helium 10 alerts activated for all your ASINs. Because the number one common thing where, um, you might lose relevancy is if Amazon all of a sudden changes your category. You know you change from, like, the clothing category to, um, you know, the shelving category, for whatever reason. Well, what’s going to happen is Amazon’s not going to be showing your ads on clothing related keywords as much, because now it’s like oh no, this is a piece of furniture or something you know so. So make sure your alerts are on and then check your alerts if your category change. And then the other thing is hopefully you’re running your, your product, in Cerebro sometimes, and then that’s how you can also tell if, on the advertising side, your relevancy has changed. So look at your old history of when you ran Cerebro on your product and then look at a column that you probably never even noticed. It’s called Amazon Recommended Rank. Sort it in ascending order and whatever you see as the top 30 keywords. That gives you a good picture of what Amazon thinks your product is from the advertising sense, and that should stay fairly steady. It’s not going to be the same exact keywords but like if I’m selling a coffin shelf, you know the keywords might be coffin shelf and large coffin shelf and coffin decor and things like that. But then if something wonky starts happening, you’re advertising it’s usually because of a relevancy issue, even if it’s not the category. And then you run Cerebro fresh on your listing and then again put in descending order the Amazon recommended rank. And if you have like wild keywords there, then for sure there’s a big time relevance issue because now Amazon it means got confused on what your product is. So at least you have some visibility.

Destaney:

Campaign segmentation. I’ll get to some of these questions afterwards as well. So campaign segmentation is incredibly important now that we’re seeing the space get as competitive as it is, and I’m going to use a quick slide on bid management. So, as we all know, the majority of top of search is pay to play. You want to win the number one sponsored product ad for any one keyword. Go, put your bid at $49 right now and it’ll show up within five to 10 minutes of refreshing your page. The problem with that is the top of search is where you’re going to drive the majority of your sales. You can’t always afford it. So on this slide here, you can see if everything is constant in terms of your conversion rate $20 product and 20 clicks. A 50 cent bid is going to give you a 12% ACoS. A $3 bid is going to give you a 75% ACoS. The problem with that is, if you lower your bid to 50 cents, your ad’s showing up on page two or page three and you’re barely getting sales. If you increase your bid to $3, you’re not profitable, but you’re going to be driving a ton of sales. Your goal is to find the balance of those. So one of the things that we recommend doing is to segment your campaigns by strategy. You’re going to have some campaigns that are focused solely on sales. Maybe you’re going to show up at the top of the page or the middle of the page and you’re going to have a different ACoS, ROAS target and you can use the different bid templates that we created for that. There’s also times where some of your keywords you’re going to want to lower ACoS to balance out that high ACoS, so you’re going to lower the bids and maybe put them in another campaign and then you can adjust your budget based on these goals. Now, we don’t do it for every single keyword. We’re not going to have 700 profitability keywords and 700 sales keywords. But, as I think everyone here probably knows, you have five to ten keywords that if you were ranking number one on them, it would change your business. How do you rank number one on a keyword? You convert really well and you drive more volume than the majority of the others. So we create campaigns strategically focused on sales and organic rank for this reason, and this allows us to shift pretty quickly in between both of those. So, as some of the people in the chat have mentioned, some of your video campaigns do much better. We’re going to create a different bid management strategy for those campaigns rather than all of our other campaigns. And then, within Campaign Manager this is a little bit what that looks like. Let’s say, I’m managing dog food. I’m going to have a campaign for our ranking terms, dog food, with a $5 bid, hypothetically, and then I’m going to turn it on and off as I can afford because it is a cash flow business. I’m going to have my efficiency keywords which are focused solely on my ACoS and ROAS objectives. And then I threw branded in here, because it’s always incredibly important to segment out all of your branded campaigns. You do not want to commingle your branded search and your non-branded search, but that’s going to be segmented out into a whole separate campaign as well. Now I’m going to pause there to see if we have any questions.

Destaney:

Before we dive into share voice. Do sponsored brands and sponsored display conversions help organic ranking, like SP ads? So share voice is probably one of the most exciting rollouts for me personally to be included into Helium 10. Share of voice is a fun one because it’s used to understand how you are performing relative to the rest of the category. There’s a reason why it’s so important. Everyone, I’m sure, has walked a retail store. This looks like Walmart’s by the low price in the background. Big fan, as a fellow Bitten Ville person. When you’re walking into a retail store, there’s only so much shelf space, right. So within a category, within cereal, within protein drinks here everyone’s fighting for shelf space. So it’s really important to understand market share and it’s really important to understand share of voice. A lot of brands use this for their overall internal objective and metric tracking. When it comes to e-commerce, I think we’ve a little bit let it slipped because we tend to think that Amazon is an unlimited shelf, right. But the problem is there’s 4,000 results for popcorn here. No one’s going to see all 4,000. The majority of customers are going to look at page one, right? As we all know, the problem with this is, as we can also see, top of search is primarily ads. So even if you’re ranked two through five, which the majority of us here would consider being really high, you’re still not going to get visibility. If you’re not investing in ads. You’re gonna get some visibility, of course, but not maximum, because, as we can see here, the only person that’s showing up for popcorn is Orville and 95% of the placements here.

Destaney:

So what share of voice is considering is how much of the voice which is your ads and your organic, are you making up? What is your total share of the category, including ads? This is important because if you are not investing or if your ranking slips, someone else’s increases right. So if you start losing share and you stop investing and your organic rank starts decreasing, you could potentially slip to the bottom of the page or page two. And what happens when you slip the bottom of page or page two? You don’t get any visibility. Most customers don’t click on page two, page three. So if you’re a big brand, you understand why share voice matters, why you need to make up. If you’re a small brand, it can be hard to understand. But this is why, because if you don’t realize how much you’re investing compared to the category and you start slipping on the page, you’re going to start losing total sales really fast and the total sales start decreasing. Typically, so does your margins. So what Helium 10 has done is find a way to put all of this data in one really easy to view format. So it’s pretty cool because we’re breaking out share of voice on both brand and the keyword level. On the brand level.

Destaney:

As you can see here, everything is broken out within your subcategory so you’re able to go in, pull, share of voice, add the keywords that you want to track and it’s going to show us. Here’s how Manny’s Mysterious Audities is doing compared to the rest of the category. This is really important for one understanding, where you have an opportunity to make investments. But also, if you hop in here and you think you’re doing pretty well and you see, you know your number one competitor is spending ten times more than you, you can make an assumption of what their total sales are going to start doing and they’re probably going to start moving up an organic rank. And if they’re moving up an organic rank, someone is moving down. It is not an unlimited shelf. Now, this is broken out in a few different ways, which makes it pretty actionable. One, as you can see all of the brands that are within our category. We can see the products. We can see the share of shelf, which is pretty easy to understand out of the shelf. Here’s how much they’re making up. We can then compare their average price, look at their top ASINs. But we’re also going to be able to break this out into things like organic versus paid. This is really beneficial for understanding. Maybe your competitors are spending a lot more than you. Maybe they’re doing much better organically. Maybe they have 30 more products within the category than you. All of that we’re going to be able to view from this page. Taking it a step further, we’re also breaking this out into sponsored products, sponsored brands. This is going to allow us to figure out where we have an investment opportunity. Maybe we see that our number one competitor has a really low sponsored brand share of voice. That means we can go in and immediately action on that and increase our investment, because it’s going to be less competitive without them paying to play in that space.

Destaney:

Now the next thing is breaking it down on the keyword level. This is where it becomes really beneficial with your Amazon advertising strategy, because I think we all know there is correlation between your ad spend and your total sales. So when I look at the keyword opportunity, I’m trying to compare to market and screenshot showing a little blurry here, but I want to compare to market to figure out if there’s any low-hanging fruit. Is there any terms that my competitors aren’t investing in that I have an opportunity to? For everyone who mentioned, that video was more expensive for them. This is a good opportunity to figure out. Maybe there’s terms that they’re not bidding on that we can make up for. I also want to gauge the market opportunity. A lot of people come to me and be like, you know, my sales are flat year over year and we’ll go and look at the category and be like, well, it’s flat for everyone, so there’s less customers walking down that aisle, so it’s not necessarily you. We’re just going to have to differentiate our category. And the last thing is the investment space. So on that keyword level again, is there any area that I can make an investment that I know is going to correlate with my total sales? That’s really breaking it down to conversion rate. Where am I converting better than the rest of the category? Where can I identify that my competitors are not spending and then make up that opportunity directly within my ad campaigns?

Bradley Sutton:

So again, it’s want to make sure everybody understands, like you know, the share of shelf and how it’s different than, like you know, somebody might say well, I can see keyword tracker and I can see where I’m ranking. Well, you know, like you might have multiple products on page one and then share of shelf. You know, like we’re looking at overall what’s going on page one, because you could have one placement, you could be page one, position one on one product. But let’s say your competitor has four different kinds of products for different kinds of coffin shelves or whatever on that, that product page and they’ve got a sponsored brand ad and they’ve got a sponsored brand video ad and they’ve got sponsored product ads. Well, they’re kind of like real estate of how much they own on page one, or the shelf as we call it, is going to be a lot more impactful than just your one position there. So it’s like a different way to look at keyword ranking. It’s kind of like how much real estate do you have? You know, like you’re this real estate mogul trying to trying to buy up this beachfront property. Well, do you want just one house on the back street or do you want, you know, like as many of the properties that are right there on the ocean front as possible. Well, obviously it’s. It’s going to be a ladder.

Bradley Sutton:

So Helium 10 has never had a tool, um, that shows that, uh, until now. And so this, this has been a top, a top ass. So, hopefully, you guys, um, anybody who on this call, who has Adtomic uh, I would like to hope that you can you’ve already seen it and started playing with it. If not, just go into atomic and you’ll see it. Well, it’s under the um, it’s under the reporting, right Under the reporting, like a tab hit reporting and hit SOV and add, add a um, add your shelf. The one that you showed was just a couple of keywords I chose. Is there a number that you would suggest of what somebody should be doing for their markets and the share of shelf? Should it be like their top five keywords? Should it be only one? Should it be two? What do you think?

Destaney:

I like kind of splitting it up into your keywords that are again going to drive the most sales. So that’s I would say like 10 to 15 keywords. But I think, because you guys are providing the opportunity to overlay the advertising breakdown on the campaign ad type level, that’s where you can get really creative and strategic. Now you don’t want to go throw 300 keywords in there, like yeah, it’s, it’s going to be cool, but are you able to be able to action on all of that? Like probably not. So I would probably say anywhere from 5 to 50 is a good number for both learning and education, but also immediate actionability. Now, one thing I want to call out is you mentioned like you may be number one with one product, but if someone’s taking up a lot more visibility, the argument I always get is like well, I can’t afford that. It’s not always profitable. So I think it’s up to each brand owner to figure out what their objectives are in terms of sales and in terms of profitability. The problem with Amazon is again, it’s not an unlimited shelf. If someone is taking up all of that advertising space and moving up the ranks, someone has to be moving down. In order for your competitor to go from eight to four, someone has to move down the page. That’s why it is so important to not get complacent with your rank strategy, with your advertising spend. I know a lot of people in the groups ask like, hey, if I’m ranked number one, should I pause my ads? The answer is always it depends. And the reason is if you pause your ads, that doesn’t mean ads aren’t going to show up anymore. I mean, someone else is that going to show up and they’re going to continue to sit there and invest and grow.

Destaney:

Now two other questions I can answer just really quickly while we’re here. Sam, go into reporting and you’ll see share voice, but you’ll also see brand metrics. Brand metrics will tell you what your category median conversion rate is and top of category conversion is, so you can understand on the category level. You’re not going to be able to necessarily see it on the keyword level unless you dive into a brand analytics search query performance report which is still not available in the API, so none of us are able to use it from a tech perspective. But you can start pulling some of your competitor conversion rates there. But category conversion rate is anatomic right now. And then to Zach’s question are there instructions for how to get this set up with share of voice best practices. Actually, I just ran one, probably two hours ago. It is probably the easiest process that I’ve seen rolled out within Atomic. So just hop in there, select the brand, add the keywords that you want to take a look at Again anywhere from. I would start with five, what are your top five most important keywords, and run the report. It’s really that easy. You’re then going to see brand share of voice and the screenshots I showed, and then keyword share of voice. So, yes, more resources are going to become available, but also it’s so easy to hop in there and run and start reviewing, as is.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so this is a good one. So, Spencer, you were talking about the, you know the Adtomic scheduling and day partying, and so first step is obviously looking at what is the data. So, step one, Destaney. What are you looking for? Are you looking for days of the week that are good, slash, bad? Are you looking for times of the day? All of the above, what are you looking for?

Destaney:

I don’t look at spin sales or ROAS, because all of those are secondary metrics that are an effect of your primary metrics. What I do look at is conversion rate and CPC. Those are metrics that tell me exactly what I need to do. So if I open up day partying and I see on Sunday my conversion rate is 5%, but on Monday it’s 30%, I know that customers are a lot less likely to purchase on Sunday, so I should potentially decrease my bids or decrease my budgets. Same thing can be applied on an hourly basis. The second thing I look at is CPCs. So CPCs are a reflection of market demand. Almost across the board. We see CPCs are a lot higher, first thing in the morning because everyone’s budgets reset, and then by the end of the day CPCs are a lot higher first thing in the morning because everyone’s budgets reset, and then by the end of the day CPCs are low because everyone’s ran out of budget at the end of the day and it’s just the stragglers who have low bids that are winning those placements right. So I’m going to look at when are the CPCs the highest and the lowest. If the CPCs are too high for me to compete, maybe I’m going to decrease my budget at that time and say I would rather spend at the end of the day where no one else is spending because they’re out of budget right? So those are the two most important things to look at. Again, ACoS and ROAS I don’t really care about because that’s in my control. You can control ACoS and ROAS immediately with bid management. That one’s easy. And then impressions and spend I don’t necessarily look at as well, because it’s again, it’s a reflection of my budget and the demand in the category.

Bradley Sutton:

When advertising for only one product and you create several campaigns for that product. Uh, Joanna says, do you recommend using campaign level budgets or using a total daily budget for all your sponsored product campaigns?

Destaney:

Great question. I almost always recommend using campaign level budgets. That’s going to give you the most control and flexibility you can. Can put a daily budget cap on there if you’re really profitability focused and you just don’t want to spend more. But if you have a good bid management automation and good handle on your budget, there are some keywords that you may want to bid high on because they’re driving your sales, but you don’t want a high budget because you can’t afford it. So you can use your budget to shift back and forth on what’s profitable and what has an opportunity to scale versus what’s not. If you just kind of allow Amazon to distribute your budget as is sometimes, they’re going to optimize for sales over profitability. So I like having control of my campaign budgets in order to better optimize for each outcome.

Bradley Sutton:

Keith says what’s the difference between fixed bids and other bid types and which is preferred.

Destaney:

Great question. We prefer fixed bids if we’re using automation software. So again, when you’re using down only or up and down bids, you’re telling Amazon that they’re allowed to update bids based on variables out of your control, right? If you tell Amazon, yes, you can increase my bid in XYZ circumstance, that’s great, but they don’t do it all the time, so it’s really inconsistent. Down only is also okay, but sometimes it’s like too far down and you stop getting impressions and sales. So if I’m using a software, I use fixed, so that way the software can do its job and achieve my ACoS and ROAS based on the equation. Yeah, that’s actually I only use fixed ever. I don’t typically use.

Bradley Sutton:

So just to clear that up fixed does not mean hey, I’m bidding $3, but if the second highest person is bidding $2, Amazon is still charging me three. It’s still going to be the $2.01 or whatever. Right?

Destaney:

Yep, the auction model stays the same. It’s just fixed bid is going to be equal to what you’re setting as your bid. Bidding up says okay, I set a $3 bid, but I’m allowing Amazon to increase that bid slightly, and I don’t love that.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, this was great, a lot of great questions today. Don’t forget, every month we do something similar to this. Take a look at the email and the weekly seller update that Helium 10 emails out, so you know when the next one is Destaney’s on here, every other week or every other month, and then on the other months we have other experts come in, either from Pacvue or other places that answer all of your advertising questions. So the takeaways today, guys, I would say, hey, make sure that you’re not just focused on sponsored product. There’s all kinds of different ad types that maybe some of you aren’t leveraging. Also, make sure you’re getting a lot of data about what is happening on page one, and you can do that with the new Helium 10 share of voice tool that is inside of Adtomic. That’ll help you understand what kind of real estate your brand, not just your single product, is taking up on your top keyword. So thank you again, Destaney, for coming on, and thank everybody out there for joining us today. We will see you guys next month. Bye bye now.

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