#156 – The Latest Amazon PPC Advertising Strategies, Including Video and Sponsored Display Ads

When it comes to selling on Amazon, there’s nothing that’s quite as hot as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Everyone wants to know the answer. E-commerce is constantly changing and sellers are always on the lookout for advertising strategies to help them to adapt and level-up their Amazon game.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Destaney Wishon. After growing up in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart, it was almost pre-ordained that she’d end up in the business world.

As often happens, she backed her way into e-commerce with a bartending job that put Destaney and her smarts in front of influential Walmart-connected people.

Now, she’s one of the leading experts in a field that is changing how sellers advertise on Amazon. Recently, Destaney helped a client make a million dollars in one month with sponsored display ads alone.

PPC secrets anyone?

In episode 156 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 01:25 – Destaney – “Test Every Ad Style and Type”
• 03:00 – In Bentonville, Everyone Has a Connection to Walmart
• 04:50 – Bartending Her Way Through College and Into Entrepreneurship
• 08:15 – She’s Spent Time Everywhere in the Sales Funnel  
• 10:00 – Structuring Your Amazon PPC Campaign
• 13:30 – Your Bid is the Best “Lever” You Can Pull
• 15:15 – Collecting Data with 15 Cent Clicks  
• 18:00 – Incremental Targeting Tactics
• 20:30 – You Can’t Replicate What Makes a Keyword Successful
• 24:00 – Targeting Your own ASIN – What’s Happening?
• 26:35 – Sponsored Video
• 32:00 – Launching with PPC Alone
• 34:30 – Make Sure that Your Backend is Optimized
• 36:00 – TikTok is on the Rise 
• 38:20 – Sponsored Display Ads
• 39:25 – How to Reach Out to Destaney       

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today’s guest has some great tactics and strategy on how to use new video and search tactics in PPC. And for one of her clients, she actually made him a million dollars in one month with sponsored display ads. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. I’ve got Destaney on with us and I’m not even sure if she’s a serious seller. Actually, I know what you do Destaney, but have you ever sold on Amazon yourself?

Destaney Wishon: I have not. Amazon advertising is seriously the only thing I know.

Bradley Sutton: Ah, cool. Cool. Alright, so I want to start off right off the bat with your best strategy. Let’s just say now, I’m not going to give you guidelines here. So at the end of the show, I always ask people, if you listen to the show for a 30-second tip, but right off the bat, just to get people excited and to show people that, Hey, this is somebody who knows what they’re doing. What’s a great strategy? It doesn’t have to be 30 seconds or less, but what’s a great PPC strategy that you can share with us so that people can get excited about the rest of this episode?

Destaney Wishon: Honestly, I feel like there’s so many one of things out there, that one of the best things you can do is test every single ad type. I know people are always worried about jumping on sponsored display, or video and search, but get them up and running immediately. You can always lower your budget and lower your bids. That way they’re not hemorrhaging money and collect as much data as possible. And then begin to optimize. Staying ahead of the game is really what’s going to allow people to win. Now that’s getting so much more competitive or complex through the Amazon advertising platform.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. Love it. Love it. Now let’s get just in to your personal history because here’s somebody who is not a seven figure seller, which is absolutely fine. I personally, I, myself was never a seven figure seller, but the cool thing I love about having so many different guests and such a variety on their show is we all start from different backgrounds and different upbringings and different education. And we all somehow end up in the similar Amazon ecosystem, which is where we’re all at. And I just think it’s really cool to see where people come from. So first of all, where were you born and raised?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, I was born and raised in Bentonville, Arkansas. So the home of Walmart.

Bradley Sutton: That’s right. Yeah. I never would have ever gone to Bentonville, Arkansas, if not one of my old jobs, I had to visit Walmart headquarters for some presentation, so, okay. So growing up there, eight, nine, 10 year old girl, were you wanting to work at Walmart headquarters or what did you think you would be when you “grew up”?

Destaney Wishon: Pretty much anyone and everyone in this town has some type of tie to Walmart. My dad came from a corporate background, my mom always worked in stores growing up, things like that. So I always knew that either the vendor community, or Walmart in itself would have something to do with what I did, and honestly, it’s how I got into my role with Amazon is there was a lot of agencies jumping on this new Amazon opportunity and trying to take advantage of every single vendor being in our back door. So in some ways, yes. Did I ever think I’d be doing what I am now? Probably not.

Bradley Sutton: So, that’s what typical person grows up, they’re thinking about in that community, but then when you actually graduated high school, did you attend college right away?

Destaney Wishon: I did. I went to the University of Arkansas here. I–

Bradley Sutton: Razorback?

Destaney Wishon: I am, yes.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I always try and test myself to know the college mascots. Thanks to sports and stuff, but okay. Razorbacks. All right. So as a Razorback, what was your Razorback major there?

Destaney Wishon: General business.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Still at that time, were you thinking of getting into the Walmart world or did you have already by that time, some other goal?

Destaney Wishon: I’m going to be honest; I had no idea really. I kind of hate that mentality about college of trying to come up with something extremely specific. Cause I feel it never fully applies. I love general knowledge. I love sociology, psychology, the marketing aspects. I think a lot of that can roll over to pretty much anything you do, but I did not know exactly what I was going to do. I actually kind of dove into it through a bartending, is how I got interested in this community.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. So you graduated with a business degree. Did you ever use that degree actually in the business world, or did you go into the bartending right after, or what happened there?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, I bartended in my way through college. So I was working at a local country club. It’s kind of one of the number one country clubs in Arkansas. And a lot of the family of the Walton’s was still there at the time. A lot of those teams were actually visiting the country club and I had the opportunity to be mentored by a lot of the members there and learn how to speak kind of their language and speak well. And through that, I really kind of sparked my interest in entrepreneurship and basically, kind of growing as a person on those aspects. So that’s kind of what sparked my interest to, actually.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So now, you never actually became an Amazon seller, but then how did you get into the Amazon kind of space? How did you make that jump? Sometimes people come from a background where, “Hey, I’m going to learn how to do Amazon my own.” And like, “Whoa, I’m just crushing it in this aspect. I need to go ahead and start my own agency, or work for another agency because I’m so good at this.” But it’s not always often where we’re an outsider. I almost consider myself an outsider, but even myself, I still was kind of in the Amazon ecosystem. I didn’t sell on Amazon myself, but I worked for a company who was selling on Amazon. So I kind of knew more or less what was going on, but I just taught myself everything. But how did that work for you?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, there was a full consulting agency, again, in the backyard of the vendor community. And at the time they’re hiring their first digital marketing intern. I applied and I took that internship and I always laugh cause it was kind of back in the OG days of Amazon advertising. So I was self-taught through a lot of Ben Cummings videos and a lot of small accounts. So I think I ended up having four to five accounts immediately within that first month, they were all spending 500 to a thousand dollars a month. But between that Ben Cummings, always say like Mike Zagare and all of them were definitely a part of that. And I basically just dove in and learned as much as possible and was able to do a lot of hands on testing. And then within my time at that agency, they scaled incredibly quick just due to the connections and the relationships at this area. So by the time I was at the end of that company, I was managing a lot of some of the largest consumer brands that we know of on the Amazon platform.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. And I think that’s important to note cause now, you’re probably one of the– I would say top 10 most sought-after speakers or influencers as far as PPC go and in the Amazon ecosystem. And it’s not like you were a six, seven, eight figure seller. It just goes to show that, Hey, you don’t have to be an Amazon seller or a private label seller to just be able to become an expert in something because the education that the knowledge is out there. Now at the same time, you cannot go and teach somebody or run somebody’s business. If you’re not actively getting in there and knowing what’s going on, but working for an agency despite you not having your own products, you can see probably even more than just a person who has their own business and can only see what’s going on with their business, but you have a plethora, probably, of visibility into what’s going on and what’s working on Amazon and what’s not right.

Destaney Wishon: A hundred percent. I think that synopsis was perfect. For the people who have kind of listened to me, they always know I’m not extremely definitive about certain strategies. And I feel like that’s because I’ve ran kind of the whole funnel. I’ve worked with the super small private label brands. I’ve worked with the brands that started in brick and mortar, and then transitioned to Amazon. And then I’ve worked with some of the really big brands that just care about top of the funnel and brand awareness. And being able to see that full scope, if I’ve learned anything, is there is not one definitive strategy that will work for your brand, your category and your ASIN a hundred percent of the time. And I think that’s kind of the silo that happens, when people are kind of their own brand owners. They absolutely understand the cash flow, the inventory, all of the other assets that affect your PPC. But sometimes what gets tricked in their head is, “Hey, this worked incredibly well for my brand. I’m going to apply it to every single other brand and sell this as a product.” When that’s not always ideally– I always kind of preach. You can never replicate the results of what happened in one instance in another instance on Amazon. There’s so many different variables that affect the outcome.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. Now, let’s get into the strategy cause we kind of have your history of how you came into the game, and now, for those who don’t know, what you do is mainly helping people with their Amazon advertising. So I want to kind of take a two pronged approach at this and do both ends of the spectrum. Let’s talk about some beginner strategy and then maybe later on, let’s talk about some advanced next level strategy. So basically, let’s say we’ve got a brand new seller, all right. And they just launched their first product from day one. What do you recommend as far as how they should attack and structure their PPC campaigns?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. So one of the biggest tips I can give is, have a really clean naming structure from the beginning and understand how to kind of work backwards when it comes to budgeting and bids. Start with the really, really simple basics and then work your way up in scale as you collect data. So if I’m a brand new seller, I have one ASIN, let’s start a campaign and let’s separate out by just exact match. And let’s start really small with the amount of keywords we’re targeting. So as an example, I say, if you’re only wanting to spend $10 a day, you shouldn’t upload a list of a hundred keywords. Cause you’re not going to be able to collect data across any keyword. It’s going to be spread across a certain amount of keywords. So kind of work backwards on how much you have to spend, look at what your suggested bids are to see kind of how competitive your category is.

Destaney Wishon: If it’s suggesting you need to spend $3 on a click, you’re probably not going to be very profitable from the beginning. So maybe you should focus on some of the long tail keywords that you can do. Dive into a lot of your keyword research for that. Another thing to throw out there is sponsored products is typically where we see are going to drive the bulk of your advertising sales. So start with sponsored products. I typically recommend starting with a manual campaign on a launch. So that way you can precisely know what you’re targeting and then start with exact match. So again, you can see exactly what keywords you’re targeting and then start with really low bids and work your way up as you collect data. Now, if you set aside a certain set of money, just this fits specifically for PPC launch, you can be a little bit more aggressive with your bidding strategy, knowing that you’re attempting to rake, but in general, work backwards with the amount of budget you have to figure out how many keywords you can afford to bid on and to collect data against.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now, let’s say somebody follows that exact guideline that they got their stuff set up, but what are some of your benchmarks as far as when you decide to do things, for example, I imagine at launch, you probably know your ACoS is not going to be very good because your conversion rate might not be that great due to having no reviews or very few reviews. So, do you kind of bank on having your cost kind of high in the beginning and then you have a different set of rules on how you look at your PPC after you have X number of reviews, or how do you kind of put that in stages?

Destaney Wishon: A hundred percent. The ACoS is definitely going to fluctuate and hopefully improve as you get more reviews and you’re able to optimized. So don’t go into it expecting to be ridiculously profitable from the beginning, understand at its foundation, Amazon advertising isn’t going to make your product great, but it is going to drive traffic to your products. So, utilize it as a true marketing expense. Now, in terms of some of the benchmarks we look for, one of the biggest one is truly know just number of clicks we’ve received and orders. A lot of people try to dive into impressions and things like that. And those are all fantastic when you get to that high level of data analysis, but at its core, we need to be concerned of whether or not people are seeing and clicking on our ad, and whether or not they are converting. Now again, with a small budget and a brand new launch, people often get stressed out when they get eight clicks in no order, and they’ll kind of stress out and pause that keyword.

Destaney Wishon: We always recommend not making adjustments until we get at least eight clicks and then just lowering your bid. Your bid is the number one lever you can pull to optimize any campaign that you are running. Before you negate a keyword, before you pause it, before you move it to match types, lower your bid. We have some keywords we run that, maybe get 70 to 80 clicks and only one order, and they’re still profitable because they have the appropriate bid based off our conversion rate and our price point. So biggest thing I would look at is making sure you have a bid optimization in place and that you understand it. And then, like I said, once you get to those six to seven, seven to eight clicks, lower your bid a little bit more or analyze your conversion.

Bradley Sutton: So then if you have seven or eight clicks, but no sales, or what is the click amount that you look forward that’s like, “you know what, this is probably a money pit keyword.” Like you just said, it’s not just based on the number of clicks because you could technically go 70 clicks and then finally get your first sale. And then your ACoS is still pretty low. So is it a mixture of both? To me, it’s almost like, “wait a minute, if I got 70 clicks, something’s wrong.” I go, like, something somehow they’re interested in my product, but they’re either it’s not what they thought it was, maybe this keyword that they– it just doesn’t resonate with them when they actually see my listing, or it’s the price, or something. But, what’s your thought process there?

Destaney Wishon: If I was a new seller in this type of scenario, I would probably wait until that seven to eight clicks lower my bid. And then once I get to 20 clicks in no order, I would lower it close to 15 to 20 cents. So that way we’re just lightly collecting data in the background, not serving a ton of impressions, not hemorrhaging money, but still able to collect that tape data and see if it’s potentially driving an order. There’s no harm in putting a 10 to 15 cent bid because one, it’s probably does a similar job to pausing, and that it’s so cheap that you’re not really that competitive. So you’re not going to get service in that impressions and clicks. But if you do get clicks from it, it’s going to be so cheap that it’s going to be profitable. That’s really how we drive scale for bigger brands as well. So again, biggest thing, look at that bid management. And if you need to, maybe the keyword isn’t extremely relevant, maybe you’re bidding on short socks, but you sell tall socks. You can still drive conversions based off that, but just lower your bid based off that kind of understanding of relevancy.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. That’s good to know. Now, one question I have about the strategy kind of along the lines that you’re talking about. We have exact campaigns and we’ve got it’ll auto campaigns. Now, if somebody does the Project X that Tim Jordan came up with, as far as like doing a PPC test listing, you might have some initial data on what your launch cost per click might be. And a lot of times, of course, it’s completely different than what Amazon suggests. However, you can kind of set those and you have a good idea, but what’s a good rule of thumb for how somebody should set the bid for their initial automatic campaign. Do I just do it at 25 cents? Do I do a dollar? Do I do that $2? How do you judge what to do there because Amazon can show you for anything?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. I think that’s a great call out. I think where really makes a difference is when you look at the four different types of auto campaigns we now have. So we have close match, loose match substitutes and compliments. And with those, you can kind of read the guidelines of where they’re showing. For close match, we can recommend running a slightly higher bid cause we know it’s going to be extremely relevant and much closer. So it’s probably a higher chance of converting. I usually recommend going close to what the suggested bid is. I don’t like making decisions if I don’t have the data for it. So if I can kind of see what my CPCs are now, I would just roll it over to my auto campaign and then separate that out across the match types for running a substitutes or a compliments, maybe we want a little bit lower a bit, cause we know it’s not going to be quite as clean of targeting as close match, things like that.

Bradley Sutton: Can you talk about that a little bit? Cause I think that’s for me, I’m somewhat of a PPC newbie because I only started working on it when we came out with our ads tool eight months ago. But that to me was eye-opening that what you just mentioned about the close matching and compliments and substitutes, and I’ve really been able to hone in my auto campaigns based on this, but for those who are brand new and maybe don’t know what those are, can you explain what each of those things are and what it refers to?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, a hundred percent. So it’s really similar to how broad phrase and exact works. It’s just a more incremental type of targeting. So when you go to launch an auto campaign now, it’s being separated out to those four different targeting types, close and loose match are now being populated within the search results, I believe. And then you have compliments and substitutes are being populated on the product detail page, which all that means is one of them is going to give you data for search terms, close and loose match, and then compliments and substitutes is going to give you data for ASINs because it’s showing up on the product detail page under sponsored products related to this item. Now, as a quick tip, what you can do is you can launch four campaigns with one auto targeting type on per campaign. So one auto campaign for clothes, one for loose, one for substitutes, and one for compliments.

Destaney Wishon: What this is going to allow you to do is scale as your campaign scale. So for example, your close match is probably going to convert the best. So if you have it in its own campaign and you increase the budget, you know your close match is going to get a higher percentage of your budget. Versus, if you have all four targeting types turned on within one campaign, when you increase the budget, you can’t exactly control directly where that budget goes, Amazon’s going to distribute it to where it thinks it should be distributed to. So we have started running four different auto campaigns in order to do a better job of micro analyzing the data and the results and being able to scale it a little bit more efficiently.

Bradley Sutton: That is interesting. That’s something I never heard about. So it’s like you open up four different auto campaigns and then you just– you only have on the one type of targeting and it gives you better control because in my experience, it usually like only one or two, for whatever reason, targeting types are ever get traction. The other one, no matter how high the bid is it just for whatever reason, Amazon chooses not to show you. So, that’s an interesting tactic there. Now I asked this to a lot of people who do PPC cause it’s– everybody has their own opinion on it, but let’s say you’re converting for something in a broad campaign or an auto campaign. So obviously you want to move it or you want to add it to your manual campaign, but some people say, “you know what, I’m going to negative match it in the broad or in the auto so I can focus on it in my manual.” Or some people say, “Hey, you know, sometimes Amazon just refuses to show you in the manual campaign. They only like to show you an auto, so you should still keep it open in the other campaign.” What’s your personal opinion on that?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. I, a hundred percent agree with the philosophy of keeping it in both, for a few reasons, one, you can never replicate what made a certain keyword successful. So when people try to move it and then they don’t understand why it works, you got to realize that a keyword could be successful in the auto campaign because it’s showing up in a different placement that’s going to be showing up in broad phrase or exact in your manual campaign. So if it’s not broke, we don’t need to fix it. We know it’s doing well there so we can continue to run it there, knowing that it’s not going to compete. Another reason is for sponsored products, which is where auto campaigns are ran. We have 10 to 15 different placements we can populate on page one. So we know we’re not going to be competing for the same ad inventory, that is more likely to happen with sponsored brands.

Destaney Wishon: So we always recommend running in all match types and we do not negate from auto to a manual because there’s a high possibility that maybe you’re doing extremely well in your auto campaign because you’re showing up on the product detail page, or maybe you’re showing up on page two in the auto campaign. And then when you relaunch it in a manual campaign, maybe you can be more aggressive and show up on top of search. So it’s high possibility. It’s two completely different placements you’re collecting data on, which is why it doesn’t perform as well. Or maybe it performs better.

Bradley Sutton: I like it. That’s awesome. Now here’s one question I have for you, and this is my opinion on it, but it seems to be backed by facts. And I’ve talked to people at Amazon before, but one thing people never understood was like, they’ll say, “Oh no, Helium 10 search volume is wrong because it says it’s 300, but Hey, on this keyword alone, I got 900 impressions in a month.” So obviously how could the monthly search warrant be 300? And, for my talks to Amazon, that’s not the way impressions are counted. It’s not like somebody searched for it. And then there was an ad that showed up. That’s the impression, but you click on– you search for coffin shelf and your sponsored ad for coffin shelf shows up there’s impression one.

Bradley Sutton: Now you click on one of the coffin shelves on that page. And now the product targeting shows up at the bottom. That’s another impression that came from that initial search. They click back on their browser, back to the search. There’s another one that comes to, “Hey, there’s another impression, there goes another, and so on and so forth.” So, what would be considered one search volume, an actual search, there could be five, six, seven, eight, nine impressions by the end of the day. Do you agree with that assessment, or what have you heard?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, that’s what I would assume as well. Actually, I haven’t dove in too deeply on that topic, but I know that broadened phrase match also kind of trip up a lot of people with the same philosophy that– for example, that coffin shelf, if you’re running it in broad and phrase match, you’re also showing up for 98 different search terms, which is really going to influence them on what impressions you have as well.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now, one last beginner, I guess, question, and this is something that I don’t even remember doing, but I think Vince did it when he was in the Project X account, but with his exact product targeting campaign, he targeted the actual agent. And I’m not saying an ASIN that is also on the account– that the campaign was for the coffin shelf, this ASIN and he targeted our own ASIN, and it was getting tons of sales. Now, when somebody goes onto the coffin shelf listing, it’s not our own product is showing up in the product targeting at the bottom or sponsored products related to. So I’m just wondering, what is Amazon showing you for when you’re targeting your own ASIN and getting conversions for it? Where do those conversions come from?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, we run the same strategy, but we typically see it show up under the buy box. So, under the buy box or under sponsored products related to this item, depending on what type of product targeting it is.

Bradley Sutton: So you’ve actually seen unsponsored products related to the item, the actual item, the same exact item of the page that you’re on. It’ll show up down there too?

Destaney Wishon: We’ve seen it if it’s in variations, but I’m not a hundred percent sure if it’s the exact same ASIN. I’ve never actually seen that.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. See. So good, I’m not the only one who’s perplexed about this, but as– when I was looking at the metrics, I’m like, what in the world? I’ll say, where are these impressions coming from? Because I have never seen it show up down there. So my opinion was, and this will be good, now you can go and test this too. And our listeners too, but my opinion was maybe if somebody clicks on somewhere outside of that product, after visiting a product page that now Amazon is following them around Amazon with my ad and maybe that’s what it’s coming from. But just was one of the most mind boggling things in the last couple of months to me. So I’m going to have to ask Vince about that too. And you come back with me with some information on that too. Cause that could be golden. Nobody– not many people teach like, “Hey, target your own ASIN in product targeting.” It’s not something you hear from, but hey, that could be a good strategy.

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. A hundred percent. I would have really have to dive into the data because we upload the full list of every single other product we have to make sure we’re targeting. So I know that we are running it, but our product targeting has 10 other ASINs we’re also targeting. So I’m not sure how easily that data.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Okay, cool. Let’s switch gears to now some more advanced things that people have been selling on Amazon. Maybe they’ve got some brand registry going on and they know what compliments and substitutes are. They want some more meat and potatoes here. Let’s talk about video in search. How does that work and how have you seen people use that successfully?

Destaney Wishon: Video and search is absolutely incredible. It has been beta rolled out since October. So we’ve had the opportunity to drive quite a bit from it. I think we have driven around $400,000 in additional sales across accounts. What’s really unique about it is although it’s under sponsored brands, it’s much less of a branded play in that it’s only driving to a single ASIN landing page as of right now. So what I always recommend is when you’re creating your video creatives, try to make it product specific. Because that’s really what it’s driving to. And, sometimes consumers don’t know to click on store pages to see your other line. So, that’s going to one strategies make it singular product specific. As of right now, two, we’ve seen him–

Bradley Sutton: Before going into that though, can you just like me personally? I honestly don’t– I’m not even sure. I think I know what it is, but I’m not completely sure. So when we’re talking about video in search, or I think it’s also called sponsored video if I’m not mistaken, what does that even mean? Where our customers seen this?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. So it’s truly a video that’s showing up within search. So if you’ve scrolled on a desktop, it’s typically showing up under editorial recommendations or in the middle of the page, it shows on the left hand side, a video that autoplays, the volume does not autoplay. And then on the right hand side, it’s kind of a quick screenshot of the listing. It’s the number one main image of the product. And if you’re on mobile, it typically shows up bottom of search. I believe it’s now also been moved up to middle of search on mobile and yeah, they do absolutely incredible. It’s very similar to what a commercial format is. I believe the timeframe is under 45 seconds, but that could be incorrect.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So does it work like sponsored brands and sponsored products when you’re targeting search terms and targeting actual ASINs? Or how does targeting work on that?

Destaney Wishon: It does. It is very similar to sponsor products and sponsored brands, keyword targeting, and that you can upload a list of keywords and target by broad phrase and exact.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. All right. Now let’s go back into your main two points of strategy you were talking about now that I think we’re all on the same page. We understand what this is, but so then how were you saying is best way to leverage this?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, so the videos autoplay, it’s, again, it drives to a single landing page. So unlike a sponsored brand headline ad where it drives to a landing page with three to four different ASINs, or maybe drives to a store page, it populates similar to a sponsored product ad in that if they click on the video. It’s going to drive them just to that ASINs. So we’ve seen you a product specific videos do a little bit better. The volume does not autoplay. So we’ve seen that that’s not necessarily a necessity to make a high converting. And then again, added score, it’s still just keyword targeting and bid management. So for one video, one ASIN will run five to six different campaigns. One of the campaigns focusing on all of the major keywords we want to target, understanding that we’re going to have to bid higher and have a higher ACoS. We’ll run another campaign, maybe bidding on all of our competitor keywords, same philosophy. And then we’re going to dive into a lot of the keyword research that we pull from all the different tools, long tail keywords, things like that, and make sure we’re targeting them as well.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So what are some success stories? Obviously you don’t have to give people’s account names or what their products was, but give me some OMG stats about some crazy campaign that was ran that will get people excited about using this.

Destaney Wishon: In general, every single campaign that’s pretty much been ran with video and search is doing incredible. Like I said, we’ve driven over $300,000 in additional sales and every single one of those has CPCs lower than a dollar, which means that’s still low competition, really high ACoS. We’re running in a sub 30% ACoS, and we are being ridiculously competitive. We have a brand that sells facial products, we’re bidding on keywords, like beauty, things like that, that are expensive, top of the funnel. We’re competing against some of the big name players out there. We have a baby product and we’re able to bid on like latex baby or diaper genie, things like that. And we’re still able to convert, just because it’s not as competitive yet, a lot of the big name players aren’t necessarily rolling out video across all of their products. So we have a lot of opportunity to get in there, get early and start collecting data and indexing.

Bradley Sutton: Wow, that’s pretty cool. Now I’m not even sure if the Project X account has that available to it, but if it does, maybe you could help us make the first one and we can make a video about the coffin shelf. But that brings me to my next question is, do you always suggest going to outside cup, professional companies to make video for this? Or can you do it by yourself? Or do you use animation, or what do you use?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah, this has come up quite a bit across the groups seven to eight months ago in October, I think when this was first rolled out. We were doing anything and everything to get a video. We were using external videography that people had from Facebook or Instagram and making sure it was running. We were having people record in house videos that weren’t fantastic quality and they were still performing extremely well because it was low competition. Now, of course, as the competition increases, we’re going to need better quality videos. But again, it’s one product. It’s product specific for now. So take your top one ASIN and your top two ASINs, and maybe find a videographer. Or if you can’t, I know there’s certain software and tools out there that are integrating video processes and videography into their tools. So you could do that.

Destaney Wishon: Or from what I’ve read in some of the groups, you can always open up like a Google slides or something like that, and create a walkthrough and you can actually do a type of screen recording and download it in the correct audio file and get it up and running. So as of right now, you can still do that and see pretty strong results as it gets more competitive. You’re probably going to need to create a video, but in general, impressions are increasing and it’s getting more and more exposure. I’m going to run off the assumption that we’re going to have the ability to drive a store pages, possibly drive off-platform, so now is the time to get it going. So that way you’re ready for when it is more scalable.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. All right. Now a question that can be for beginners or advanced people. So let’s say somebody is making their first product. Somebody is making their 50th product. Do you have a tried and true method in general? Obviously every case is different, but of how someone can launch just with PPC? Some people try and teach, oh no, you have to do giveaways back in the day to it to launch it. And, yeah. You could do giveaways or promotional things or search find buy, or ManyChat, or all these launch strategies. But I think probably the most popular or the most used strategy is just PPC. So if somebody– you have a client that comes to you and says, Hey, I’m launching, let’s just stick with it, a coffin shelf, and I’m not going to do social media marketing on this. I’m not going to do ManyChat. I’m not going to do a discounted promotion. I just want to be able to get to page one for my keywords using PPC. What is your general strategy on how you can accomplish that?

Destaney Wishon: This is a hot topic, Bradley. We could be getting into a lot of discussions here. I didn’t score. We recommend bidding on the keywords that you need to be converting on. So as everyone knows, in order to affect your organic ranking, you just need to convert on the correct keywords. So where that goes in terms of strategy, we have seen so many different results depending on the category. I don’t even like giving any definitive solutions for this because it’s so dependent on what else you’re doing and how much you have to spend. So if you’re a smaller brand trying to launch, I don’t recommend bidding on coffin shelf. If it’s going to be highly competitive, you’re not going to be able to afford it because what’s going to happen is you’re going to maybe drive 10 to 20 clicks and it’s going to be too expensive to be a hundred dollars down the drain, and you’re going to pause it.

Destaney Wishon: You’re not actually going to give the algorithm a chance to see how well you’re converting for it. Because you don’t have the data. So if you’re a smaller brand, we typically recommend finding those 10 to 15 keywords that we really think we have a high chance of profitably converting off and going in all in on those keywords to get us to the top of the search, top of the page, things like that. We do recommend increasing bids by top of search, because we’re just– that’s where we know we’re going to collect the most data upfront. Now, for a bigger brand and we can afford those really expensive keywords to absolutely dominate. We’re going to do the same thing, exact match 10 to 15 keywords, and just go all in on them. Now, always recommend your backend is in a fantastic place because if your listings not even indexing, you’re going to make the job of PPC 90 times more complex because Amazon’s thing going to have no data.

Destaney Wishon: If you’re not indexing on the backend and your listings not perfectly optimized, it’s going to be very hard for you to get the data on the PPC side of things. But in general, the core philosophy of it, you want to drive as many consumers as possible to your top keywords and you want them to convert in order to win. And I think that’s the easiest strategy in terms of longevity. Because we all know how crazy the landscape’s changed in terms of ranking launches. Used to be, you could give away a ton of product at a super high discount. You can get to top search. And then nowadays it’s kind of the, let’s get it added to cart. And then there’s ManyChat. There’s so many other things. Well that’s constantly going to change at its core at the foundation. You just need people to convert in your top keywords. PPC is the easiest one to one solution for that.

Bradley Sutton: Alright, cool. That’s good to know. Now another question I had is has Vince never gotten you to test out our ads platform? Or do you have any experience at all?

Destaney Wishon: I have not. I have done some research and dove into a lot of the ad solutions out there, but I’ve never tested it out.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. I got to get with Vince and see why he’s holding back. We got to get you started on that so that you could help coach people on that too. And then last question say, we’ve been talking about on Amazon sponsored ads, but what are some off Amazon advertising you think that people should do regardless of what level they’re at?

Destaney Wishon: Something I have seen recently perform really well in this, maybe even be kind of highly skewed organically is TikTok. I’ve personally been skewing and seeing actual products I sell on TikTok– going viral and I’ve sent a message out to my brands and be like, Hey, did you happen to, or are you running a TikTok ad? Did you work with this influencer? And they had no idea. I think the viral ability of TikTok makes for a great organic advertising platform, especially if you kind of reach out to the right influencers, there’s a high potential for reaching a really fantastic audience. Email lists are really big. That’s another one that has a much longer half-life than some of the other Facebook and Instagram targeting options out there. Because if you have a strong list of relevant consumers who are really familiar with your brand, that brand loyalty will go a long way and that will make your launches and everything else 90 times easier. So those are the two that I’ve– one’s really shiny and interesting TikTok, and one is more longevity and just fantastic, which would be your email list.

Bradley Sutton: That’s great. Now I’ll never forget, somebody in your network had sent you a screenshot and I think it was this classic to talk about outside advertising that don’t overlook anything because you had showed me the screenshot that somebody said to you of Tim Jordan and Bradley on Tinder. But it wasn’t, we don’t have Tinder accounts. What it was is I guess Helium 10 was running an ad on Tinder, but you never know. Hey, obviously whatever algorithm somebody in the Amazon space. So they knew how to target them. So don’t discount any outside advertising, whether it’s TikTok or Tinder or whatever website, you can find potential customers for your product. Now let’s go ahead and get into your 30-second tip. We call this the TST. You’ve been giving us nonstop strategies throughout this whole episode. Probably if I counted, you might have given us the most unique strategies that we’ve had in a few episodes here. I love the way your rapid fire is able to handle this. But what is one last thing that you haven’t mentioned that you can say 30 seconds or less for. It doesn’t matter, it can be targeted towards advanced, could be beginners, whatever you want.

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. Sponsored display ads. So they’re pretty much the new shiny object syndrome, but they’ve actually been rolled out in accounts from AMS since 2017. So we have a ton of data on these and they do incredible. Make sure you are running them whether you’re a small seller or a big seller, you can extremely incremental on the other products that you are targeting. But they’re one of the most profitable ad types we ran. And for one brand alone, we saw over a million dollars in sales driven in December. So we can dive into all of that strategy another time, but make sure you’re running sponsored display, product targeting ads. They are amazing.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. All right. Well, that’s neat. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of our PPC talk. We will try and we do different things sometimes where it’s the same theme show and actually nowadays PPC is one of the hottest topics out there because I think it’s one of the things that people most struggle on. And so that’s why we’ve kind of tried to dedicate ourselves to every six or eight weeks or so to have a PPC expert talk about it. So thank you for being that expert this weekend. If people want to reach out to you because they have more questions, or want to see about possibly you helping them with their PPC, how can they find you on the internet?

Destaney Wishon: Yeah. So definitely go to betterams.com. If you want to find more out about our company and our team. And if you ever just want to reach out and follow me, I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook. And I try to pretty consistently post really valuable content. We have some engaging discussions and that’s probably the easiest way to just follow along.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Thanks a lot, Destany. And we’ll definitely have you back on the show in the future.

Destaney Wishon: Amazing. Thank you so much, Bradley.