#650 – Launching New Products with Amazon Ads

Join us in our monthly TACoS Tuesday episode, as we explore the essentials of launching Amazon products, featuring expert insights from Destaney Wishon. We start by discussing how to make your product retail-ready, emphasizing the importance of indexing your listing for the right keywords to drive sales. From match types and targeting to effective keyword research methods often overlooked by sellers, we cover fundamental Amazon advertising strategies for 2025. With Destaney’s extensive expertise in Amazon PPC and Bradley Sutton’s experience launching over 600 products, they provide valuable guidance for both new and seasoned Amazon sellers.

Listen in as they navigate the ever-changing landscape of Amazon advertising. They recount the evolution of strategies from two-step URLs and giveaways to modern methods that are currently non-compliant with Amazon’s TOS. By sharing Bradley’s recent success story of achieving top keyword rankings within three weeks, they provide practical insights into adapting to market dynamics while leveraging core strategies for sustained success. They also focused on optimizing keywords for seasonal products, using mason jars as an example to illustrate the need for specificity in targeting audiences and identifying seasonal trends and opportunity keywords.

Finally, let’s tackle the art of optimizing Amazon PPC strategies, focusing on understanding customer feedback and incorporating emotional touchpoints into product listings. They discuss bid management strategies, the importance of balancing profitability and scalability, and how successful bidding can enhance organic ranking. Additionally, they cover the significance of tailoring marketing strategies to fit specific product niches and maintaining brand loyalty amidst the shift from organic to paid search on Amazon. Throughout the episode, we aim to equip you with actionable insights and strategies to boost your product’s visibility and success on Amazon.

In episode 650 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 00:02 – Amazon Advertising Launch Strategies Workshop
• 01:22 – Navigating Amazon’s Ever-Changing Advertising Landscape
• 10:08 – Optimizing Keywords for Seasonal Products
• 13:12 – Keyword Research Using Helium 10
• 18:41 – Optimizing Amazon Advertising Strategy
• 24:49 – Importance of Keyword Research in Advertising
• 26:52 – Effective Bid Management for Targeting Types
• 28:50 – Finding Balance in Amazon Bid Management
• 35:37 – Bid Management for Sales and ACoS
• 38:23 – Mastering Amazon Bidding Strategy
• 45:41 – Discussion on Algorithmic Love and Relaunch

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we talk the basics of getting your listing prepared and the strategies to launch that listing in Amazon advertising with the help of expert Destaney. 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 our monthly Tacos Tuesday, where we go deep into anything and everything Amazon advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, usually we have tons and tons of Q&A, but on this one we actually prepared a special kind of presentation here at the Helium 10 office and it was first of all, before you even get to advertise your product, you’ve got to get it what we call retail ready. The first half of this is going to be about how do you get your listing retail ready, how do you make sure you are indexed for the right keywords that could potentially bring you sales that you’d want to advertise for, and then what are some of the basics of Amazon advertising in 2025, whether we’re talking about match types and targeting and things of that. So we’re going to go a little bit deep into this and even if your experience, it might be a good refresher, especially some of the keyword research I would say 90% of sellers are not using all of these keyword strategy methods that I’m talking about. So let’s go ahead and hop into it and then, yeah, at the end we’ll also get some of your top questions that we had when we recorded this live. Here we go.

Bradley Sutton:

I want to take a quick time machine, a blast of the past, when I was launching like a hundred products a year. That was around before I started working at Helium 10, and they’re right. When I started and in those days, the way to launch products was using outside services that would do like two-step URLs and what we would call giveaways and search, find, buy, and these were actually not against Amazon terms of service in those days. And then we had the Maldives Honeymoon. So another thing that has happened in the last six years. These things are out of date and also I’ve gained about 60 pounds, as you can see from that picture there.

Bradley Sutton:

But how do we launch products now if we can’t use those services? For those of you who are not old-timers, basically what those were was like hey, I have, like these five keywords I want to rank for, so what you would do is you would use this service and then they would get, like you know 30, 50, a hundred people to like, search for this keyword, and then you know, add it to the cart, buy it, and then you would rebate them, and then that’s the way you would get to like page one, which is what we want to do when we do launch. You remember those days right?

Destaney:

I absolutely remember those days.

Bradley Sutton:

So all of a sudden, overnight, that became something that you couldn’t do anymore. And that’s the thing we have to understand about Amazon. All right, things change, so don’t like get so like have your strategy so contingent on one specific thing that your business comes to a screeching halt and you don’t know what to do. Before then, what could you do for reviews? That was totally allowed on Amazon. Do you remember?

Destaney:

Aggressive follow-ups?

Bradley Sutton:

Not only that, like that’s kind of crazy. What she said is actually 100% true. You used to be able to like send five emails to people and like do custom messages and stuff. But even before then I’m aging myself now in the Amazon world you could legally give away product in exchange for a review. And when I say legally, it’s not just, oh, it wasn’t against Term of Service, it was like a part of Terms of Service. There would even be a little badge that said this product was exchanged for a review or something like that. So it was like encouraged by Amazon, and then one night that became not valid. Now here’s the thing, what we’re talking about today, guys. I can pretty much, I don’t like doing guarantees, but I almost guarantee this is never gonna become against Amazon Terms of Service using advertising right.

Destaney:

Absolutely. In general, the fundamentals we are covering are pretty similar to what we were doing in the old days. We just adjust that strategy, and that’s why it’s so important to understand the foundation. What we’re talking about is driving velocity and customer loyalty and making sure you have a high conversion rate. That’s not going to change. That’s fundamental to a success in any business. So if you can take those principles and figure out how to adjust them to the new market, you’re going to be successful. And you’re going to continue to be successful because you’re going to be able to reiterate and make your process better as time goes on.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely, absolutely. All right. So let’s go ahead and hop in. I’m going to take the first kind of like half of this webinar and talk about how to get retail ready, because when we’re talking about launch, it’s not just okay, hey, what do I do to get to page one? I mean, that’s the eventual goal, right, of launching a new product, but there are so many things that are lead up to that day, even before you even have the product ready, and we call this like getting your product retail ready. And so there’s a couple of podcast episodes. Right, I go in more into detail. I’m going to give you kind of a brief overview, but if you guys want to check later on, check out episode 466.

Bradley Sutton:

I like naming things after exotic places that I travel to, so I call the keyword research strategy the Bali blast, because I actually came up with it while I was at a conference in Bali. And then the actual launch strategy. We call it the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. But take note of those two episodes. You can find them if you go to h10.me/466 or h10.me/600. And it goes a little bit more into depth about what I’m gonna talk about. But some of the things I’m talking about today are even newer than these, because the last episode I did was maybe September.

Bradley Sutton:

Like I said, I’m talking about a launch that I just did a couple of months ago. So when we talk about getting retail ready, there’s three aspects. There’s keyword research, customer research and listing optimization. A lot of things like inside of those things as well. So let’s just first get into the keyword research. But I said before that this was about a launch I just did. Here’s the kind of like TLDR. This is the end result of the strategies that I’m going to present today. You can see here that I launched this sample product. It’s some socks. It says beer socks. You might be wondering what the heck is a beer sock? Well, they’re these socks that have like a message on the bottom of the feet where it says like hey-

Destaney:

Bring me beer?

Bradley Sutton:

Bring me beer. Exactly. There’s like ones that are like coffee and wine. Side note, the founder of Helium 10, who actually was in a previous slide. That was one of his first products in like 2015 when he first started selling on Amazon before there was a Helium 10, but within three weeks, you can see, we launched this product and within three weeks, all of our keywords that I was trying to get ranked for and get visibility I was in the top 5-10 positions for on Amazon. All right, so these are the strategies that got me to here. It’s not just a one step thing. So let’s go ahead and hop into keyword research and just know that, hey, the honeymoon period is alive and well. There’s people ask me like, oh, I heard there’s no such thing as a honeymoon. I was like those people who say that whatever they’re considering honeymoon period is not really what the industry considers a honeymoon period. It’s very accurate to say there’s no, some like secret algorithm in Amazon, right, that says, hey, 60 days, you’re gonna get crazy visibility and then it’s gonna stop. No, there’s nothing like that on Amazon. When we say the honeymoon period just means that, hey, when you have a brand new listing, Amazon doesn’t have that much data about what this product is, what’s gonna resonate with customers, and so what happens is the pool of data is small, so anything that happens to the listing it has a lot more impact with ranking and advertising and things like that, and that’s what we call the honeymoon period. You have a six month old listing. Amazon is analyzing millions of data points about how customers have interacted with it, purchases you know like. Well, so one little thing, one sale here, one sale there. It’s not going to move the needle too much because Amazon kind of knows what’s going on. But you have this kind of window of opportunity when a product is brand new, where you know signals that are sent to Amazon from customers and from your listing. It has a bigger impact. So let’s go ahead and hop into this.

Bradley Sutton:

Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image or Amazon changed their shipping dimension, so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

First step. Guys, how do you find the right keywords? You don’t even have to say you don’t have Helium 10. You don’t have anything. Guess what guys? You’ve got free access to an amazing tool inside of Amazon Seller Central if you’ve got a professional selling account. It’s called the Opportunity Explorer. So take some products that are existing sellers for some of whatever you’re trying to get into a niche and then put them into Opportunity Explorer. See if they’re part of niches. Niches are niches of keywords and then you’re going to get a list of like 10-15 keywords or more, depending on how many niches it’s part of. And that’s a great starting point about relevant keywords that you’ve got to make sure that are in your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step for those of you who have Helium 10, I assume that most of you do niche keywords. You get the top ones you can get with one click, all right. So you would just put in like an ASIN, a seed ASIN, and then the five to top 10 products that are closest to your product, all right. And then you just hit one button. It’s called the top keywords button in Cerebro. Hit one button and boom goes the dynamite. You are gonna get a list of the top keywords in that niche. All right, sometimes it’s three keywords, sometimes it’s 10, sometimes it’s 30, it could be 50 if it’s a big niche. But basically what this list of keywords are the keywords that most of the top sellers of this product are getting their sales from just with one click. All right, so add that to your list.

Bradley Sutton:

Next thing is what I call opportunity keywords. It’s the same thing on that same Cerebro search that you’re doing and, like I said, I didn’t want this to be like a how to use Helium 10 or product opportunities, for we have very detailed videos on how to use Opportunity Explorer, how to use Cerebro. This is just showing you what you need to look for and then you could like find those more you know selective tutorials and get like actual step by step. I’m giving you just a broad overview, but anyways, the next step in Cerebro, after you get the top keywords, is get opportunity keywords, and these are keywords where maybe only one or two of the top products are ranking for it, where you’re not going to be competing with the whole top five or the whole top 10. Usually these are kind of like lower hanging fruits where it might be easier to rank for if you are just getting started on Amazon. So again it’s a one click button in Cerebro says opportunity keywords, and then you’re going to get a whole bunch of keywords that didn’t come up in that top keywords, one that you were selecting.

Bradley Sutton:

Next thing is historical keywords. This is important because products sell differently throughout the year. Like you’ve got a mason jar here, probably, that sells kind of like the same. Can you think of a seasonal product where it’s definitely going to have peaks and valleys?

Destaney:

Let’s use the mason jar as an example. So if I’m selling a mason jar, I could sell mason jars, and that’s incredibly broad and I’m gonna be trying to target everyone. In reality, mason jars have multiple uses. You have the canning community. You can build your listing specifically targeting the canning community and what you’re gonna talk about is you know the sealability, how well it seals, or XYZ. On the flip side, we also have mason jars that are definitely used for weddings. We’ve seen a rise in that style of wedding day cart decor. It’s the barn weddings.

Destaney:

If I’m still selling the same mason jar, maybe I want to create a listing that showcases my mason jar on the table for multiple different weddings. That’s the type of audience I’m going to attract. On the flip side, there’s people like me who are going to use it for water and use it within their kitchen. That should be a very different listing as well. So that’s why it’s so important to understand the breakout we’re giving you here. The first one was the keywords that are relatively going to rank well, right, it’s the mason jar is going to be your highest volume term that you’re definitely going to need to target. On the flip side, we’re going to be looking at opportunity keywords, which is mason jar and wedding mason jar for canning. That should be a whole different audience you’re targeting because you’re going to want to make sure your listing is built for the audience you’re wanting to attract. That’s where you’re going to get the increase in conversion rate. If you try to target everyone, you’re going to convert no one.

Destaney:

But if you get really specific on things like historical keywords, where we can clearly see there was a wedding trend for mason jars and now we’re into the canning community because of the egg prices, you know we don’t have a little bit of a tangent there, but you can see why it matters to break things out, because your listing needs to be built towards the audience we’re targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely, and she actually just gave me an idea of what she was talking about. Like weddings, are you know, I would assume usually, especially in colder areas, you’re not going to have too many barn weddings, maybe in the middle of December, right? So let’s say you were making a mason jar that only had one use, it was only going to be for weddings. So if you were doing your keyword research in December, you’re not gonna find too many keywords that there’s ranking for, like the wedding related keywords. So that’s where this historical comes in is take the time machine in Cerebro and look at whenever a wedding season is April, May, June, July and then what were the keywords that people were converting for then. This is super important because when you’re looking at Opportunity Explorer using the regular Cerebro, it is absolutely great, but it’s showing you what’s happening right now or in the last month. But a lot of products out there, you know, a more extreme example might be beach ball. It’s definitely not going to be sold in December. Christmas tree ornament is definitely not going to be sold in July. So if it’s July and I’m trying to prepare myself for Christmas season, which you shouldn’t do in December, you should be doing that in July, you know you’re not going to be able to find the right keywords in July unless you’re doing this like kind of time machine. So this is historical keywords is the next step that you need to do to find out what keywords were driving sales for a particular product in its peak season. Only do that with Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

Next step Brand Analytics. This is again something that comes directly from Amazon. It’s called Brand Analytics, top search terms. You can get it directly in Amazon. We’ve got some tools in Helium 10 that tie directly to Amazon to bring that in. So those competitors that you were analyzing in Cerebro, put those in Black Box and then filter out for the last 20 weeks.

Bradley Sutton:

Just look at a big chunk of time. What were products that brought it sales? And this is not Helium 10’s estimation or some algorithm we use to say oh, we think that there is sales. No, this is information coming direct from Amazon that these keywords drove guaranteed sales to these products. So that’s another way to find products. This is to me this is like the beginning of the cool data that Amazon released, because it’s probably the older one, like four or five years ago. And now we’ve got like search career performance and stuff like that. Next step look at your competitors ad strategy, their advertising strategy. Where are they bidding top of search? Like, if you’re a pretty good seller and you are consistently showing up in the top four sponsored positions on a keyword, consistently over time, what does that probably mean? Like, why are they spending money to be top of search?

Destaney:

Because it’s a really important keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I mean so you might be a brand new product and you would learn that over time, like, maybe you’d have some auto campaigns and over time, oh this keywords working good limit, let me go ahead and put it in a manual campaign. Oh man, it’s still converting. Well, let me make sure my bid is high. So I always show at top of search. You would figure that out on your own anyways. But guess what? If you have competitors who’ve been in this market for months or a year, you’re basically taking advantage of their research and now on day one, you’re gonna be focusing on keywords that they already have proven work for them. So the way to do this is again, right there in Cerebro just use a filter and say, hey, where have my competitors been consistently showing in the top five or the top page of sponsored results? And again, if they’re decent sellers, you can just kind of unless they’re just throwing money at Amazon for no reason, which not many decent sellers do you know you can kind of deduce that they must be getting sales from these keywords, otherwise why are they trying to bid? You know top of search. But again, you can get that information right here in Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that again comes from Amazon is we call it the Amazon recommended keywords. This is an API that we, Helium 10, exclusively has with Amazon. I think anybody can get it, but for some reason, only Helium 10 is taking advantage of this where it’s like how relevant something is to Amazon and especially the Amazon advertising platform. This is an internal score that Amazon gives for every keyword compared to every product. So what happens is, let’s say that there’s a keyword coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, Amazon has like a list of 200 keywords and each one has a score that says, hey, this is the most relevant keyword for. It doesn’t mean it’s the best keyword, but it’s just the internal mechanisms of how Amazon’s algorithm works or how it views keywords. And so again, come in from day one, Amazon’s not going to know too much about your product, but plugging your competitors products and we’ll tell you what Amazon thinks is the most relevant keywords to that product. You can only do this with Helium 10, but this is like a lifesaver for me, because when we’re talking about advertising a brand new product, I’m sure you’ve seen it before where day one like you can barely get any impression sometimes and it’s usually a relevancy issue. But if you have like the top phrases that Amazon thinks is relevant for another product. But then you’ve got like those keywords in your listing like in phrase form. What that does is now Amazon’s like oh you know, we don’t know what this new kid on the block is I just aged myself.

Bradley Sutton:

This backstreet boy is no. This new kid on the block is, but oh, we notice it’s got a lot of similar keywords with this one product. We know what this product is. It’s been there a year and now for from day one, you’re gonna start like showing up in more in auto campaigns and things like that for keywords that some of your competitors are getting impressions on. So this is a super important step as well to kind of like round out your keyword research. And then the last step, or the last step I’m going to talk about for keyword research here, is getting the top keywords from frequently bought together. It’s a similar thing Like here I entered. This was you can’t tell from this ASIN, but this was a coffin letter board. All right, it’s like a letter board that you put letters on shaped like a coffin and I was doing some research on it, existing competitors and I noticed non-letter boards were showing up infrequently. Box here like these are some bat shaped stickers, I guess I’m.

Destaney:

I am concerned with 30th birthdays which I just celebrated, being aligned with coffin shelves. It used to be. It feels up on the hill. It’s now 30 over the hill.

Bradley Sutton:

But then again you’ve seen pictures like those memes of, like the Golden Girls. Yes, how they were like 43 or something, and 43 nowadays does not look anything like 43 back then. So you’re good.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, these are not other letter boards. And again, so if you kind of relate your products from day one to the products that are showing up frequently bought together, it’s again gonna widen the net of where your ads, your advertisements. If you’re running auto campaigns and are gonna show up and this is again information from Amazon, the frequently bought together is from Amazon is telling you hey, your competitor, they had a letter board and there was a lot of people who, the same time they bought this letter board, they bought these bat-shaped stickers. Now I have an advantage over other, you know coffin letter boards who are just launching, who don’t realize that they’re relevant to these other kind of non-relevant you know products. But again, it’s going to help you in advertising. So, real quick. The last step here is Amazon is not just about keywords. You’ve got to understand the customer. This is not new. Anybody who’s been teaching how to sell on Amazon is for any time, a period of time will tell you yes, you have to be relevant to the algorithm. That’s what the keywords are for. You got to show up in search but at the end of the day, are you selling to the algorithm? Who are you selling to?

Destaney:

The customer.

Bradley Sutton:

The customer. Hopefully you guys say that in the chat here too.

Destaney:

Waiting. It goes back to our mason jar example. The Mason jar data is going to tell you what are your top keywords, but it’s your job to understand what customer you’re selling to and how to adjust your creative, your content, your main image to that specific niche audience. That’s going to give you a competitive advantage over everyone else.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. Again, yes, be relevant to the algorithm, but be relevant to a human being. You are selling to a real person and you’ve got to connect with them if you want a better chance. So how, what can you do? That’s outside of the scope of keywords, for that one is look at the reviews. You know, like this was. This is another product I had done a test sounds like this toy storage hammock and I was looking at the reviews of another product and I was just looking at what were the common two and three word phrases that this is from Helium 10 insights, and I could see, hey, people were we’re saying how cute it was. That’s not a cute. Very cute is not a keyword that people search for, thinking that they’re gonna get a toy storage. It’s like very cute, let me type that in. That’s not a keyword, it’s not a search term, it’s not something you advertise for. But that tells me, hey, in my images and in my product I got to convey the thing that, hey, my product is cute and people who see it will think it’s cute. All right, daughter’s room was one of the top keywords, so now I’m like okay for my images. I got to make sure to have to show that it’s in. You know, maybe a, a girly style of room and you know girly toys or something. And hey, do you have a daughter who has a lot of stuffed animals? Look how you can use it. You know these are not keywords, but it’s use cases. It’s the persona you’re thinking of, all right, so this is important to put in your listing, to be retail ready, the kind of like emotional touch points about how somebody might use your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Another free tool that’s available inside of Amazon. Going back to the Opportunity Explorer, they’ve got AI-assisted summaries of reviews. So look at your competitors. If they’re in Opportunity Explorer, look at the customer review insights there and see what kind of things that they are showing up for. Next thing is look at their image strategy. All right, again, people have been selling for a year or two or three years. They change their images based on the feedback they get from customers, based on what they see like resonates. Well, take advantage of their one, two, three years of research and customer testing. Look if you see common things like hey, man, everybody in there, like their fifth or sixth image has. Like what do you call it? When it’s the measurements, is there a word for that kind of? It’s like an info, kind of like an infographic, but dimensions like a dimensional infographic where it shows the, you know, hey, this is 10 inches wide and 20 inches, you know, tall, and stuff like that. Like, hey, everybody, all my competitors have that one, that same image around their third or fourth image. Usually it’s not by coincidence, because that’s what they found works best. So now you know what you should probably around their third or fourth image. Usually it’s not by coincidence, because that’s what they found works best. So now you know what you should probably have your third or fourth image, something similar to that. So just make sure that you take a look at your customer or your competitor’s images and you can do that pretty quickly just by looking at their images and putting them on a PowerPoint or in Helium 10. Listing Analyzers is where this screenshot comes in last part. This is again last part because this is this is not used by too many people but Rufus AI sometimes look at the questions that people are asking. Now, almost nobody on the buyer side is using Rufus, so this should not be one of the first things you know if people are telling you on LinkedIn or other places hey, rufus is the most important thing you need to be worried about, forget that. You know it’s not, but if you’ve done all the other things, this can help like here’s a listing I changed because of Rufus. All right, there was a question that was coming up on competitors listing that says how sturdy and durable is it? And on my listing it didn’t know the answer. All right, so what I did was I changed one of the bullet points to answer that question and within 10 minutes of the listing being updated now Rufus said oh, according to the product description, it is sturdy and durable. So yes, for the very small handful of customers that are using Rufus, you want to be optimized for that as well. So then the last step just put everything together in your listing optimization, and you do that by making sure all those search terms and keywords are in your listing so it can be indexed, making sure those emotional touch points and those connection points with the customer are in there. That you did from your customer research. Put it all together to make a good listing and then you guys can screenshot this.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m not going to go into detail here, but the last steps that I, that I did for these, these launches I’ve been doing, you know, do some uh tests with the pricing, you know, try and establish that list price so you can get like a strike through price. If you have a coupon code, make sure you use Amazon. Mine you can get two reviews for free, 10. I don’t know how much it costs, it was like 50 or 100 for 10 and then I think it’s like you want 30 reviews. It costs like a couple hundred dollars.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s verified reviews, from actual customers and 100% Amazon TOS terms of service compliant because it’s from Amazon. Always do Amazon Vine, make sure that your index for your main keywords and then I like to choose five, ten keywords that I’m going to launch for I use Helium 10 ads to like make my campaigns because it’s so much easier to manage, and then I’m just going really hard for those initial keywords I think I can start ranking for right away and, as you saw, within three weeks I was on page one for all of those keywords because I did all of these steps. So that’s more of the retail ready. But let’s dive a little bit more into advertising and Destaney’s going to be talking a little bit more about that.

Destaney:

So it’s really important to understand the keyword research that needs to be done here, because all of that should be directly integrated with your Amazon advertising strategy which is what we really wanted to talk about here. So you have the keywords, you understand the volume potential with those keywords, you understand your competitive advantage on the mason jar example. How do we integrate that directly into ads? Well, first and foremost, I think it’s important to understand Amazon targeting. So within Amazon advertising console, we have three different options. We have sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display. This is you log into ad console. You’re going to see this if we look at the next slide.

Destaney:

What we’re gonna dive into is where those ad types show up on the page. So the very top of the page you can see right, is a sponsored brand ad. Everything highlighted in green directly below that it’s for sponsored product ads. Now, pausing here real fast. Amazon advertising is such an important part of your strategy because those ads can show up at the top of the page. How long did it take you to get ranked decently well for?

Bradley Sutton:

Organically, it was like three, four weeks.

Destaney:

Three to four weeks. And that’s normal. I mean, that’s pretty fast actually is what I would say but if you launch a product on Amazon from scratch, it would be incredibly naive to think you can get on page one that quick. But, as a customer, does anyone go to page two? I don’t. No one goes to page two. So in order to get yourself in maximum visibility early on, you need to bid on the terms that are most relevant for your product.

Destaney:

Now, of those three targeting types sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored display we almost always recommend starting with sponsored products, why? Well, as you can see, they look just like an organic listing. They show up at the top of the page and throughout the page. Sponsored products in general are typically going to drive around 70% to 80% of your advertising sales. Sponsored brands get amazing visibility at the top of the page. They’re a little bit more difficult to run due to creative setup. They’re going to drive an additional 5% to 20% of ad sales.

Destaney:

Turning slides here we’re going to see. On the PDP, we also have sponsored display. Sponsored display is highlighted in red, has a lot less inventory. There’s a lot less real estate to bid on. So sponsored display is only zero to five percent of your total ad sales. But as you can see here, that blue carousel is another sponsored product carousel. There’s 33 sponsored product items. Their sponsored products take up the lion’s share of real estate on the page. So that’s why I always say they influence your organic positioning a little bit more than anything else, because they’re gonna drive the most sales for you.

Destaney:

So now we know about targeting, we can move to the next slide. You’ve kind of segmented and said, hey, let’s start with sponsored product ads. I have the keywords that I want. Now do I go automatic targeting? Do I go manual targeting? Do I go product targeting? Do I go category targeting?

Destaney:

In general, starting with an auto campaign is probably the easiest campaign you can run. Most people jump straight into automatic targeting just because maybe they’re unsure of their keywords. Maybe they didn’t listen to a single thing. Bradley said they’re incredibly distracted by me sitting next to him. Skip all of that. They go straight into an auto campaign to help them with keyword research. I think that’s one of the most beneficial aspects of an auto campaign. So if you’re launching a product from scratch, we always recommend starting an auto campaign, keeping your bids a little bit low, because that’s going to allow the algorithm to start showing what products they think are related to your ASIN.

Destaney:

Now, in the beginning, if you have no data, no reviews, the auto campaign may not perform that well because, again, Amazon isn’t quite sure what keywords to show up for your listings. They may go really broad. If this is the case and you did pay a ton of attention to the beginning of Bradley’s webinar you know exactly what keywords you want to target. I always recommend starting with a sponsored product manual campaign. This means you are hand selecting the keywords that you are gonna be showing up for. You know what’s best. You know you wanna bid on mason jar. You’re gonna put that into a campaign.

Destaney:

Now, within manual targeting, we do have keyword and product targeting. Those are both beneficial. Product targeting kind of allows you to target specific ASINs. So if you did the reverse ASIN research and you understand what you need to target from a competitive advantage standpoint, we can create a campaign targeting all of our competitor ASINs. It’s truly as easy as uploading a list of ASINs that are your direct competitors and making sure your ad shows up on their product detail page.

Destaney:

If you wanna go a little bit broader, we have category targeting as well. Category targeting kind of cast a really wide net and allows you to bid on every term within a category. Typically not best for someone that’s starting in the very beginning. It tends to go a little bit too broad and kind of cast a wide net, so you can get a lot of clicks but not a lot of sales. So, going back to the automatic targeting campaign in a little bit more depth, when you create this campaign it’s gonna allow you to target close match, loose match, substitutes and compliments.

Destaney:

Pretty much what that’s saying is Amazon’s going to open up and cast a wide net. They’re going to target terms that are close to your product. They’re going to analyze your mason jar and say, okay, maybe we need to show up for water glass or canning glass or canning jar. Right, we’re going to target loose match, which is maybe going to go even broader. Maybe we’re going to target something like gardening or homestead or weddings. Again, substitutes and compliments are you know, what are products that can be directly substituted for my mason jar that I could show up to. That’s going to convert a customer. Compliments is targeting products that can be used complementary to my mason jar? Maybe it’s. What is? What do you set your? What is this called?

Bradley Sutton:

Coaster?

Destaney:

Yeah, coaster. Maybe it’s going to show up for a coaster, because we know customers are going to kind of broadly switch between the two out of the four of these. I think it’s pretty easy to see what targeting types are going to be a little bit more closely related in the early stages of a launch. We always recommend targeting closely related terms. I typically keep on close match and maybe turn off loose match and substitutes and complements in the beginning because again, I don’t want to cast too wide of a net. We’re not 100% sure what terms we’re going to show up for in the early stages. So we try to keep it really precise so that way we can kind of guide Amazon on what keywords are most important, because we did all of the keyword research from the beginning.

Destaney:

Now, next slide, I am in control. You can see we have keyword match types. So again I chose a sponsored product ad. I decided on manual targeting this time around. What match type do you use?

Destaney:

So match type can get a little bit tricky because, as you can see in the below example, cat toy was the term that I wanted to target. It was incredibly important to me. It’s my most relevant keyword. If I bid on exact match I’m only showing up for cat toy. So exact match, you’re only bidding on cat toy. Again, this is a really precise approach to running your Amazon ads because you did the keyword research ahead of time. You only want to show up for this term. Now the problem with that is it can be really competitive because everyone else is bidding on cat toy. So maybe we want to go to phrase match and expand that search a little bit. So we’re still bidding on cat toys, but now in phrase match we may show up for best cat toys for indoor cats. It’s the phrase that includes that original search. That’s going to broaden our approach a little bit while still allowing us to be pretty concise with our targeting right. Phrase match typically drives more sales because, again, we’re showing up for more searches at this point. But maybe it doesn’t convert as well because maybe I have an outdoor cat, so I’m bidding on indoor cat in the phrase match, but I have an outdoor cat toy, so maybe my conversion’s a little bit lower. It’s a little bit too broad, which does bring us to broad match.

Destaney:

Broad match is exactly that. It takes a key point, a key roots cat toys, toys and it expands it. So the good thing with broad match we run broad match strategies in general is expand your reach a ton. I have a rottweiler who’s absolutely obsessed with walking around and chewing on all the cat toys. He does not prefer his dog toys. He wants the little tiny feathers and the little tiny mice. He carries them and takes them away from the cat. So yes, maybe if I bid on cat toys I will convert for dog toys. That is why broad match is so important.

Destaney:

But in the early stages, when you don’t know that, you don’t know the keyword research, broad match can be a little bit too aggressive. So maybe you want to focus on exact match and phrase match in the early stages. So I wanted to use a really quick example. You mentioned suggested keywords and how it’s built directly into Helium 10. This is what it looks like directly within Ad Console as well.

Destaney:

It is incredibly important to do your keyword research because, as we mentioned in the mason jar example, some terms are going to be direct and drive the majority of your volume. Air Fryer, as you can see, with a space, is the most competitive. It has the highest suggested bids here. That’s because keyword research is a little bit of common sense in the beginning. If I’m selling ChapStick, I’m bidding on ChapStick. If I’m selling mason jar, I’m bidding on mason jar. But if you are thinking to bid on that, so is everyone else. So, yes, you want to bid on it because your customers are typing it in, but you also want to do the long tail keyword research that we talked about. We want to look at the historical trends and see if maybe names have changed for our products. We want to look at the long tail terms because those can often be a lot less competitive. Air fryer, toaster oven, combo, glass air fryer, deep fryer, air fryer with no space those are all a little bit cheaper because not everyone else is thinking to bid on them as aggressively. So when you’re bidding on your main terms, that’s going to drive your sales typically, but it’s also going to be the most expensive because it’s an auction. Everyone’s wanting to bid on that placement. If we do the long tail keyword research, we can get a lot cheaper suggested bids and a lot cheaper bids in general, because not everyone’s thinking to bid on those terms.

Destaney:

Now a little soapbox here. I always get the question of, like Amazon suggested bids are terrible. They don’t work, like I don’t know why that’s an assumption in this space how suggested bidding works is it takes all of those full placements that we discussed earlier top of search, which is a billboard ad, bottom of search product detail page and it averages them out. It is very likely for air fryer played in that space. The top of search bid is 10 to 12 dollars. Whoa, it’s insane. But the sponsored product out on page five may only cost 13 cents because no one’s going there. So your suggested bids are kind of an average on the market pricing. It’s how much everyone is bidding across all of those different placements. So that’s why there’s a wide variation in suggested bids. I like to use it as a guide rail to say, hey, air fryer again looks to be our most expensive, makes sense. It’s our top keyword. Deep fryer, which is a whole different product, is going to be a lot cheaper. It looks like there’s a little bit of a market for deep fryers nowadays as well, but air fryers are a little bit trendy, so it’s a good opportunity to dive into.

Destaney:

Now to kind of close up on the targeting types, I wanted to talk a little bit about bid management with the targeting types. So with an auto campaign, as mentioned, Amazon’s doing a lot of heavy lifting with the keywords. It’s casting a wide net. It’s pulling in all those keywords that we discussed earlier. The problem with that is you’re setting the bid at the campaign level we’re gonna talk a little bit more about bid management after this but you don’t have control over all of those separate keywords.

Destaney:

So we looked at the example of dog toys showing up in a broad match campaign. You can see here, if I bid on an auto campaign a dollar 37, all of those search terms could potentially cost us a dollar 37. There’s not a lot of control. In a manual campaign where you are doing your own keyword research, you’re able to set the bid at the keyword level. This is incredibly, incredibly important because now I can take all of those auto campaign search terms that are doing well for me and set the own bid. So for dog toy I’m going to bid a lot lower because again, I’m selling a cat toy. I don’t want to bid high on that. I don’t want to pay for the best traffic because it’s not going to convert. But for cat toy maybe I want to bid a little bit higher because it is relevant. Cat toy for kittens that’s exactly what my product is. It is designed for kittens I want to bid the most because that’s where I’m going to get the maximum visibility, at the top of the page. So that’s kind of an entry into how your bid management needs to change based on your targeting types, which leads us to understanding Amazon bids. So let’s talk about Amazon bid management.

Destaney:

I think this is one of the more difficult topics when it comes to Amazon advertising. There’s a hundred different directions we can go here. But to set the context, Amazon advertising is real estate at the end of the day, and when you’re opening a retail business, the first thing they tell you is location, location, location. If you open up a retail store selling wine in the middle of nowhere, how are people going to see it? They’re not. If you open up a wine store in the middle of the Vegas Strip, everyone’s going to see it and you’re going to have a lot of foot traffic. It’s the same thing with Amazon advertising. We are just bidding on real estate. The real estate at the top of the page that I have highlighted here is the most competitive real estate in the space because everyone sees it.

Destaney:

If you type in any search term and scroll down, the first thing you’re going to see is the sponsored ads at the top of the page. If you want to win that placement, you bid on a relevant keyword and you bid really really high, like really high. That’s how you win that. Now the trade-off for that expensive placement is a ton of traffic, a ton of clicks and potentially a ton of sales if it’s relevant. But not everyone can afford that. So some people want to bid a little bit lower and maybe when you bid lower your ad shows up on the product detail page and maybe it shows up on page two. You get less traffic on a specific product detail page because not everyone’s clicking on that product detail page from their search. So your bid’s cheaper. It’s a little bit, I would say, more efficient. You typically have a better ACOS, a higher ROAS, but the trade-off is you get less sales because you’re not showing up in a high traffic placement. That’s really important to understand. So how do you balance the two with bid management? Well, here’s kind of a quick example I’m going to use Now. Let’s assume my variables are constant across the board. You can see that with a 20% conversion rate means 20% of the people that view my listing buy my product. I have a $20 product and I’m getting 20 clicks.

Destaney:

Your bid has a direct correlation with your ACOS. The higher your bid, potentially the higher your ACOS. The lower your bid, lower your ACOS. That’s really how bid management works. Now why doesn’t that work directly? Well, because when I am bidding lower, I am not getting as much traffic right.

Destaney:

I think the first thing that I always get asked on sales calls or discovery calls with brands is I want to increase my sales and decrease my ACOS. That’s everyone’s dream, but it doesn’t always work like that, because this is how bid management works you bid high, you show up on page one. You bid low, you can afford it, your ACOS is fantastic, but you get up on page one. You bid low, you can afford it. Your ACOS is fantastic, but you get a lot less sales. So every brand’s goal should be balancing that profitability and scalability, but for your own brand goals.

Destaney:

Now this is where it gets interesting, because Amazon is a flywheel. So if you bid higher and you drive more sales, more people are going to buy your product and you’re going to get more reviews, and when you get more reviews, your conversion rate’s better. When your conversion rate’s better, your organic rank increases. So a lot of people like to view Amazon advertising in a silo and say, hey, I only want to target a certain ACOS. At the end of the day, you need to view the bigger picture of if you’re driving more sales with ads, can you improve your organic rank? And when your organic rank improves, your total sales are going to improve.

Destaney:

So the goal of Amazon advertising should be finding this balance bidding low to focus on profitability, bidding high to focus on sales and scalability. When you’re launching a product, this is incredibly, incredibly important to realize because, kind of as Bradley says, Amazon doesn’t exactly know where to put you on the page in the early stages. So we like to take those keywords that are priority and bid high on them so we can drive a ton of traffic up front and get a lot of orders and that’s going to help ignite that organic rank. If I’m bidding on dog toy and 50 people buy a dog toy in the very beginning, Amazon’s going to say I have a lot of data that shows when people type in dog toy, they buy this product. That means Amazon’s making money. So how does that product increase on the page? It’s through data. And where does that data come from? It can be your Amazon advertising. I’ll pause there. Any thoughts?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, this is important because let’s just dive a little bit deeper into what you were talking about and what we see here in this slide is how does maybe this is what they’re asking like how do you know then where to find that balance? So, like, obviously, in the beginning, yes, like I aim like you guys saw that I got to page one that wasn’t in a profitable way. Like I actually aim to lose money because I, my conversion rate’s not going to be great. I’ll probably get clicks, but like here, like maybe my bid is three dollars, as you guys see in the slide and my ACOS is 75, but I’m fine all day long.

Bradley Sutton:

Am I making money at 75 ACOS? No, but I’m getting those sales when, when I’m a new product, my conversion rate might not be great because people will see one, two, three reviews or something you know. So I and my price is lower, so that is gonna make my ACOS worse, but I’m totally fine with 75 ACOS when I launch a product, I’m fine with 100 ACOS but then over time that’s not sustainable, like you’re not gonna have a sustainable business. So then you kind of like want to move to this, this lower one, but then still it’s not like your sales are gonna tank because, theoretically speaking, by that time hopefully your organic rank is up and you’re getting free sales where you’re not paying that. So now you’ve got a mixture, so this is a really great slide. I hope you guys understand what you’re looking at here.

Destaney:

And I think to Bradley’s first question of like how do you find that balance? And that’s what’s difficult about these webinars is everyone wants the textbook answer. It takes $500. The magic button, yes, like they want. It takes $500, target three keywords, only an exact match and again on a full moon. It doesn’t work that way. We have some brands that will, you know, launch with a five thousand dollar budget and they can rank a lot quicker. We have some brands that only have five hundred dollars a month and that’s gonna take a little bit longer because it’s gonna take time to gather that velocity. If you have five thousand dollar budget, you can drive 500 orders in a few days. If you have a 100 budget, it’s going to take you additional time to gather that velocity. So the real answer is finding the perfect balance for you and your cash flow, but also being realistic at the expectations here.

Destaney:

The problem with bid management is the market sets the cost. Again, we’re going back to real estate. So, yes, you may think that top of search should only cost $2, but if your competitor is willing to pay $25 for that placement and someone else is paying 26, the market is setting the demand and a lot of people forget that. Like I said, everyone wants a lower ACOS. So they’re like lower bid, lower your bid. I’m like, yeah, but everyone else is paying this. So it’s hard to find that balance. That’s for sure. If we take it one step further we just talk about bidding strategy within Amazon advertising console. You’re also going to see different levels of bidding strategy. You’re going to see fixed bids. You’re going to see dynamic bids down only dynamic, dynamic bids up and down. So, in general, I personally like to run with a fixed bid because I want to know exactly what my bid is. That’s going to get me that ACOS that I am trying to achieve.

Destaney:

As we discussed in the slide prior, certain softwares are going to do, you know, dynamic bidding up and down. Some are going to do down only. It’s really dependent on, I would say, your threshold for aggression, similar to stock market risk. If you want to be more aggressive and drive more sales, you’re probably going to do dynamic bids up and down with a placement modifier. If you want to be a little bit more conservative, you’re going to do dynamic bids down only. If you have control issues, like I do. You’re going to do fixed bids down only if you are, you know, have control issues, like I do. You’re going to do fixed bids so you can calculate the perfect outcome every single time.

Destaney:

The next thing is you’re also going to have placement modifiers that you can stack on top of your bid management. And again going back to Bradley’s point in the very beginning, this is a high level. We have a lot of segmented content on going a little bit deeper and once we’re getting into placement modifiers, we’re getting in the weeds here. But I know this is something that people frequently see within ad console and it always comes up in our questions. Now placement modifiers is taking things even a step further.

Destaney:

So, as Bradley and I have talked about top of search, it’s an incredible place to be. It’s some of the highest converting placements on the page. Think about it as a customer. If you’re typing in mason jar and I’m clicking on the first thing I see, I’m probably highly likely to buy. If I scroll to page two or page three, I’m less likely to buy. I may be a little bit more price conscious, a little bit more conservative and I’m shopping around. Top of search is an incredible place to be from a conversion rate perspective. So if you open up your placements with an ad console under your bidding strategy, you’re going to see we can also make bid adjustments for top of search, rest of search and or product pages. This is an interesting kind of use case. You can see that my top of search a cost is 3%.

Bradley Sutton:

Good grief and $50,000 of sales. This is a real screenshot. Yes, this is, this is. I want this Amazon account.

Destaney:

It’s a high-priced product but you can see product pages are 45% for this product. This makes sense. I am more expensive than anything else in the market. So when I’m advertising on someone else’s product detail page it’s hard to convert because they’re like why would I pay three times? I’m looking at a cheaper product, why would I buy a more expensive product? So what we do here is we increase our top of search modifier because, again, the customer that clicks on the first ad on the page typically a little bit less price conscious, so they’re ready to buy. So thought it was important to kind of dive into placement modifiers.

Destaney:

Now the last thing in this kind of section I’m gonna talk about is the bidding strategy. The bidding math can be really difficult because you need to update it really frequently. You should be updating your bids multiple times a week, if not multiple times a day in a competitive category. But if you don’t know the math on how to balance your profitability and your sales, then it’s a day in a competitive category. But if you don’t know the math on how to balance your profitability and your sales, then it is a project to manage on your own.

Destaney:

I don’t even manage bids manually anymore. We typically utilize a software because the software is gonna allow us to choose the outcome we want and then work within that outcome. So, within Helium 10 Ads, something that we utilize is the bidding templates, which says hey, I’m going to maximize profitability, select, I’m gonna maximize sales, select, I’m gonna maximize launching, which is all about sales and impressions. That’s gonna allow us to then apply that bid optimization formula to every single keyword in every single campaign that we are working with, so you don’t have to do all of the heavy lifting on your own.

Bradley Sutton:

You’re the one who made a couple of these formulas all of these, these ones, all of them are well.

Destaney:

They worked closely. I thought we were going to put your name on there, like this is the destiny special one or something. That was too scary, okay, but I think the important thing to understand is it can be done on your own, yeah, but you can see how difficult it can be to scale because, again, the market is setting the demand. So you have to be constantly evaluating your strategy based on the competitors and what their bidding is, and you can see the balance here. Right, we started with creating keywords for the algorithm. Finding keywords for the algorithm is what keywords are most people searching, how much volume are they driving and how well are they converting?

Destaney:

The second piece of this is okay, let’s take that list of keyword research we did and align it to our specific audience that we are targeting whether that’s in your main image, it’s how you’re doing your content, your stores, things like that. Now we’re taking that needs to be funneled directly into your ads. Again, advertising strategy is so dependent on things like budget, which is where this is a hard webinar. A lot of people are going to be in the comments and be like, okay, okay, I was looking for the exact playbook. You can’t always give an exact playbook.

Bradley Sutton:

You have to understand how to be flexible, based on what the market’s doing and I think that’s something that, as a seller, you’re gonna have to lean into definitely yep, so while this is not the exact playbook, this is a great overview that gives you a starting point. So you know what direction to go. And and a lot of this applies to I don’t care what level of seller you are. You’re a brand new seller launching your first product here. You’ve got a hundred products under your belt. You need to launch your 101st. You’re gonna use a lot of the same strategies, but you just got to tailor, make it to what works for you. She showed you a pitch, a screenshot of vitamin C top page. I almost guarantee that those placements are like ten, fifteen dollars cost per click, per click.

Destaney:

The headline ad gets up to $40.

Bradley Sutton:

$40 cost per click for vitamin C. For a $20 vitamin C I’m selling coffin shelves. A lot less competitors there. I’m paying $0.30, $0.40. All right, so again it’s not one size fits all or the same thing, but the basic principles behind these strategies are the same for everybody and so that’s why you know all of you guys can benefit. Now, we’re gonna take some questions now. So a lot of the tools that we were showing today is either free inside of Amazon, product opportunity, explorer, brand analytics. We showed you a little bit of, or most of you said you were healing members. You have access to almost all these. If there’s a couple of you who don’t have a Helium 10 account, highly recommend trying out the Diamond plan. Every single thing we showed. If you had the Diamond plan you absolutely would have access to. You can just go to Helium10.com. Use a discount code SSP. By the way, it’s a plug for the Serious Sellers podcast, that’s what it sounds like. You can hear Destaney usually once a month on there, and myself. So SSP 10 will get you 10% off.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re a new customer who wants to try Helium 10 ads, it comes with a dime plan. You used to have to pay separately. Now it just comes, you know, no extra charge to use the software and then you’ll be able to use the rules that she made and she humbly did not name after herself. She didn’t want to take credit there, but make sure to get the dime plan. If you’re on platinum upgrade, give it a try on your next product launch. Have you seen a flip from organic search to paid search since 2023? We used to be 70 30 organic to paid in 23 to now 30 70.

Destaney:

Absolutely. I mean, if you opened up Amazon and typed in a search bar lately Bradley and I did this yesterday and I mean I think 45 of the page, if not more, is sponsored ads. And this is always a fun debate Everyone’s like, okay, well, I’m gonna pull back ads because I’m ranked number one. Even if you’re ranked number one, the first four things in the number one placement is ads. And this is a fun. You know the market setting, the demand thing. Everyone’s like, okay, maybe I won’t bid. If you don’t bid, someone else will. So in the beginning, I would say four to five years ago, it was around 70, 30. Then we saw a shift to 60, 40. Nowadays, for brands that are not ranked in the top four, it’s probably 50, 50, if not higher, leaning towards ads. If you have high repeat purchase rates and you’re ranked really well, you can kind of keep that 70, 30 split. But you better have some brand loyalty and a lot of DSP retargeting to help assist with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody was asking about relaunch. So you know, a lot of this stuff we were talking about today is launching now. When you relaunch, you’re not going to get that algorithmic love, that a new one. You know, like the honeymoon effect, because like we talked about the beginning, Amazon’s already got a million data points. So it’s not like you’re going to fool Amazon like, oh it a million data points. So it’s not like you’re gonna fool Amazon like, oh, it’s been doing terribly all this time. We’re gonna go ahead and give it the benefit of the doubt and shoot it up the the rankings. No, you’ve got six months of perhaps poor performance, right?

Bradley Sutton:

That being said, a lot of the principles still would apply. You know like you could do a big discount. You know like 50 off or something on your product and try and get more conversions. That’s going to definitely boost your conversion rate, your click-through rate from search and if you go aggressive in your Amazon advertising, yeah, you might gradually start moving back up.

Bradley Sutton:

Or if you just keep things going the way it is, you know they also ask hey, should I do giveaways without requiring reviews? No, if you’re talking about giveaways in the, in the old sense, that’s against amazon in terms of service. So do not do that. Where in Amazon do I find the keyword suggestions, the one that Destaney was showing like? If you add a new campaign and it’s a keyword campaign, there’ll be a tab that says suggested keywords. What you don’t see there is like a score. So Helium 10 brings all of the keywords that Amazon has in its database and sorts it by the score. But at least using the Amazon advertising one, you should see at least five, 10 keywords, if not more, and there’s no score there. But usually all of those are pretty well, pretty highly relevant.

Destaney:

Small life hack. If you add your ASIN and you go to your suggested keywords and they’re not relevant, that typically means you have a problem with your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes.

Destaney:

Because Amazon is suggesting keywords that aren’t aligned, so we typically see this with a new product launch. I’ll go in and look at my suggested keywords. If they’re bad, Amazon does not know what to align your product with, so maybe don’t run an auto campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

So important and that’s why if you have Helium 10, I always say you have your listing up, make it live, run it through and check the Amazon recommended rank, sort it from one to 20. And if you see some nonsense like I had problems where I was selling some socks, it wasn’t the beer socks, it was coffee socks and I started my campaigns. I was like why am I not getting impressions on these main keywords, which is like gifts for coffee lovers and stuff like that?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, it’s because when I look at the Amazon recommended keywords, what Amazon thought I was relevant for was just like black sock, pink sock like these generic keywords Because, if you think about it, coffee is a keyword that kind of belongs in the grocery category, right, and I’m selling socks, which is in the clothing category. So it kind of makes sense that Amazon was confused, even though I had the word coffee everywhere in my listing. So I saw, hey, I had to send some relevancy signals to Amazon before I would start showing up in that Amazon recommended. Thanks guys, very much for joining us.

Destaney:

Thank you.

Bradley Sutton:

And we’ll see you next time. Bye, bye now.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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• 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.
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