#393 – PPC Strategies And Amazon Marketing Stream Explained

In this PPC-centric episode, we welcome Cameron Berlin-Day, Account Manager at Pacvue, to discuss PPC strategies and Amazon advertising. We cover and explain some new features inside the platform, like the Amazon Marketing Stream and Amazon Marketing Cloud, and how you can utilize these features inside Pacvue. Also, we answer some of your common questions like, what is the difference between Amazon vendor central and the seller central ad platform? Is it essential to have an omnichannel advertising approach? What are the best budgeting tips for your ad campaigns? And What ad placements should the 7-9 figure sellers focus on? This will be a jam-packed PPC episode, so make sure to stay until the end!

In episode 393 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Cameron discuss:

• 01:35 – Cameron’s Backstory And How He Got Started In This Industry
• 03:30 – Working For Amazon Advertising
• 04:55 – Talking About Pacvue And Does It Connect To Vendor Central Accounts?
• 06:45 – The Difference Between Amazon Vendor Central And Seller Central Advertising
• 11:00 – What Is The Amazon Marketing Stream?
• 16:15 – Results From Client That Have Used This Service
• 18:45 – How To Use This Feature Inside Pacvue
• 21:30 – Let’s Talk About Amazon Marketing Cloud
• 26:15 – Having An Omnichannel Advertising Approach
• 28:15 – Budgeting Tips For Your Advertising Campaigns
• 33:15 – What Ad Placements Should Bigger Sellers Focus On?
• 37:15 – Cameron’s Thirty-Second Tip
• 38:30 – How To Reach Out To Cameron And Pacvue

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got somebody who has actually worked for Amazon advertising and now works at Pacvue and has helped sellers generate millions of dollars of revenue on advertising. And he’s gonna give us some high-level strategies for high-level e-commerce sellers out there. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research? Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information. Go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet Works in most Amazon marketplaces, including the USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India, and much more. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the serious seller’s 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. We’ve got somebody that I know almost nothing about. I don’t know if he’s a serious seller or if he’s a seller at all, or he just works in the industry or whatever, but welcome to the show for the first time. Cameron, how’s it going?

Cameron:

It’s going great. Thanks for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

Where are you located?

Cameron:

I’m actually located just a bit north of Seattle, maybe about 20 minutes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Is that where you were from?

Cameron:

That’s where Born and raised. Yeah. Grew up for a few years actually in downtown Seattle, and then moved out into the suburbs. But other than going to college at Washington State University, then coming back, it’s in this area the whole time. Go Cougars.

Bradley Sutton:

There we go. What did you study? What was your major?

Cameron:

So it was not communications, it was not marketing or business. It was political science,

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yeah. That can just get so many great jobs in the initial. But what was your goal with that? Like what kind of job were you looking for to get with that degree?

Cameron:

Yeah. So before I kind of got into the corporate world, I actually served in the Army National Guard. And the whole point, my thought process around it was to get a better understanding of the world. It was political science with a focus on international relations and the goal was to create more of a career there. But things change. Started to build a career in the corporate world. Met my now-wife who probably would’ve had a little bit of an issue with me being a career military person. And so plans changed, but that was the original goal.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. But what was your first, like, you know, big-time or regular full-time income after university?

Cameron:

Yeah. I actually started out in the like, like a lot of recent grads in the recruiting world. And so I was an account manager for a company called Collabora. One of the bigger companies like Apex or Tech Systems doing recruiting and a lot of techs recruiting and had one account. That account was Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re gonna have one account, that’s a good account to have.

Cameron:

Yeah. In the Seattle area, there are a few, you know, Microsoft as well. Amazon they do quite a bit of hiring as people know. So did a couple of years there and then kind of took a natural path to Amazon itself, where I worked at Amazon Ads for a while.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, you worked for Amazon?

Cameron:

Yep. Went from Collabora and then to Amazon ads, and that’s where I started this whole e-commerce–

Bradley Sutton:

So you were helping them with the recruiting, and then you basically recruited yourself over there too.

Cameron:

It makes it a lot easier to get through interviews if you’ve been prepping people for interviews for a couple of years.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s one way to get in the door at Amazon. Very, very nice. And so what did you do with Amazon Ads?

Cameron:

So I was an account executive there. I went through their account executive training program that they have, and that’s still ongoing, really great training program. It helps a lot of people go from not much e-commerce or eCommerce marketing experience. It gives them a really good foundation to build on their experience and, and help brands sell on Amazon. A lot of brands that do sell on Amazon, big, medium, and small, probably had some sort of interaction with Amazon account executives helping them to kind of formulate a strategy and build their business. And that’s where I got exposed to just a ton of different brands, different categories, different goals. Really great way to help me understand what brands see on a daily basis and what they go through with building their business on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Nowadays, you’re still in the Amazon advertising space, you work for Pacvue. How long have you worked at Pacvue?

Cameron:

I have worked at Pacvue for just over six months now. So still pretty recent to the Pacvue ecosystem, but it’s been a great six months for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, here’s something that I’m curious about, you know, this is kind of dumb that I don’t know the answer offhand since, Pacvue, our sister company, but Pacvue is also connecting to vendor central accounts, and you’re managing vendor people who have vendor accounts as opposed to seller central accounts as well.

Cameron:

So, Pacvue has a great ability to sync up with the retail side of the business and coordinate that and interact with the marketing side of the business through a tool like Pacvue Commerce as well. So I think in the past we’ve had a really robust tool for managing to advertise. And not just on Amazon, of course, but on other platforms as well, managing that, that advertising, making it effective efficient driving, really good volume in terms of sales orders, what have you. And recently we’ve been able to build a really great retail tool that both helps you manage that business and also really importantly helps coordinate that business with the marketing so they work in sync and allow you to manage and be more efficient overall.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, I don’t know too much about Vendor Central accounts. I’ve never had one. I’ve never like dug in. I’ve never even logged into one. But as far as advertising, let’s just say somebody’s not using Helium 10 and not using Pacvue, they just have access to their vendor central account. Like, do they fully control their advertising too? I know with like some things in Vendor Central you don’t have as much control over, but on the advertising side, how different is the Vendor Central advertising experience compared to the Seller Central advertising experience? If we’re not talking about tools,

Cameron:

It’s gonna be extremely similar. There may be some small differences in terms of maybe attribution windows for different ad types or some different functionalities. Sometimes they may have an update for the vendor side before they have an update for the seller side and vice versa. But in terms of that user experience that brand going in and, and running their advertising, the experience is going to be hard to tell a difference for, especially if you’re doing pretty straightforward things like just running sponsored product sponsored brands, sponsored display, sponsor a brand video, just running those and getting those to efficiently drive traffic to your products, it’s not gonna make a difference that much, whether you’re on, on seller vendor based on what your goals are.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, I’m not sure if you have an opinion on this or if you have enough know knowledge about this particular use case, but, but if you have the experience, like do you have an opinion on if somebody is approached, you know, by Amazon to join the vendor program? What would be the factors to decide if it’s worth it or not? You know, some people say, “Oh with Vendor Central, like maybe I lose a little bit of control over some things. And then maybe I’m not able to kind of project too much and Amazon doesn’t take care of the listings or something.” Maybe I’ve heard of it, but you deal with both kinds of customers and you probably hear complaints and, and the virtues of each program. But if somebody out there listening to the podcast now they are a regular Seller Central seller right now, or maybe they’re, they’re just about to get on Amazon and they’re approached by Amazon to join the vendor program. First of all, does that even still happen? And then secondly, under what circumstances should they say yes or no?

Cameron:

Yeah, I’ll preface this by saying for sure have more experience on the marketing side. Between Amazon way to Pacvue, I’ve worked with both sellers and vendors and both have had their separate and unique challenges and oftentimes similar challenges as well. I would say from my experience working with them not being as hands-on in terms of setting up those businesses myself it, it seems like there is a bit more independence on the seller side. You do have a little bit more control from the vendor side the barrier of entry is a bit higher. And I would say you do have a little bit less control that being said as a business grows, not to say that you can’t have of course, a hugely successful business on the seller side of Amazon, but I think there are benefits as your business grows to go the vendor track as you’re shipping higher volume of the product as maybe putting a lot more emphasis on the weeks cover that you have and a small percentage change can mean a much higher dollar amount less than I think it, it makes sense.

Cameron:

But that being said, I’ve seen clients that have worked with struggle on both be successful on both I think it really comes down to, you know, what, what you’re comfortable as a business owner with and what’s really working for you. I’m a big believer in keeping things as simple as possible. So there isn’t a need for a change. I don’t think that’s necessarily new.

Bradley Sutton:

Now one thing that’s interesting over the years back in the day, you know, people who had vendor accounts actually did have more of an advantage over Seller Central in some aspects of advertising and others, like so many tools available to Amazon and so much analytics that wasn’t available to sellers or to seller central people was available to vendors. But Amazon has certainly bridged that gap lately where they launched stuff that was exclusive to vendors. Now it’s available to sellers, or they just launched something across the board. And one of these things recently in the last few months that Amazon launched was– What is it called? The marketing stream? Or is that?

Cameron:

Amazon Marketing Stream

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon Marketing Stream. So that was launched and that’s something that people have always wondered about day party and back in the day, I would just tell people, “No, it’s dumb.” If you’re trying to day part, you’re dumb. I wouldn’t say that to a customer, but in my mind, I was telling them they were idiots because, at the time, there was no analytics that could really justify taking a certain action. Like, you have no idea what time of day, you know, you were being profitable for you. So for you somebody to try and make the decision, I’m gonna turn off my ads during this time, or I’m gonna up my budget on this time, it completely shots in the dark, but now this marketing stream kind of changed that. Right?

Cameron:

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say a similar thing, especially when I was at Amazon, cuz the difference now in, in some of the data that’s available when, when I started at Amazon all the way to the present there’s a lot of things that have been added, and I definitely get that question a lot from all sorts of businesses. You know, how do we break this up between the day, Like, is there a way to automatically turn off our campaigns? Can we turn them back on? And at that time you would just have to go in and manually do that. And for a mom-and-pop shop that has 10 campaigns, sure, by all means for a business that has 150 campaigns running, it’s gonna be a little bit more difficult and arguably not worth it.

Cameron:

And so I’d say things like for these Amazon search as they’re running, you’re only paying when someone clicks and if someone clicks, they’re showing interest. So by all means you just wanna keep it running all the time. Yeah. And as time has progressed, there’s been some tools that have helped with that. I think a lot of brands have probably used their audience insights tool, which will break it up by the day. And that’s really helpful in a way. But it is organic data. It’s not marketing-focused data, organic sales, or things like that. And it can show you, you know, day by day throughout the week and, and the month what kind of traction you’re getting. But it’s a very high level. You can’t get granular at all. And so what we’ve seen with Amazon Marketing Stream is once we have that data, we see that there is a huge difference sometimes.

Cameron:

Sometimes it’s not as big, sometimes it’s pretty mild, but other times it’s a really big difference between even just hours of the day. And, and based on not just sales, but based on efficiency as well. I’d said that example of, of, you know, if someone’s clicking, they’re going to the page and, and that’s great, you want that. But now we can see that maybe from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM you might have people clicking, but that click is not worth the cost that you’re paying. They’re not converting. And really what you want to have is the bits high enough to capture the clicks that are from say 4:00 PM to seven 7:00 PM for example, because those people are converting. And that’s among many, that’s a big, big deal for small, medium, big businesses. And that’s why Amazon Marketing Streams, I think is gonna help a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you noticed, you know, since you guys have had access to the data actually longer than Helium 10, like we just now integrating this for our Adtomic tool? Again guys, whenever I say something, it’s not a one size fits all or something. It depends as you said, on categories and things like that. But are there any generalities that, that you have, you know, now that you’ve had access to this data that you could say like, you know, for the most part, you know, Friday’s a terrible day for PPC or weekends, like have incredible low ACoS or middle of the night is, is absolutely amazing? Are there any general statements you can make?

Cameron:

I think one that pops out my head right away and something we may not think about sometimes is we have to remember that a lot of people are on a biweekly pay schedule, and so they get paid, you know, usually, sometimes it overlaps, but usually twice a month usually on a Friday, maybe you get a little bit earlier from your bank on a Thursday. But that’s a very clear indicator of when you’re gonna have maybe more traffic and certainly more sales. And that’s an example of something Amazon marketing streams can see because you may approach your business on a weekly basis and you may weekly or daily, and you may know that says people get done working, maybe in the evening, you’re seeing better efficiency, better sales, things like that.

Cameron:

And you may react to that accordingly by raising bids or increasing your budgets. But I think what this data showed in this example is that you do also get a pretty big jump on payday as well. And that can sometimes be bigger by category. A category that has higher priced items, maybe furniture, you know, maybe that thousand dollars couch isn’t gonna be like a payday purchase, but in a grocery category or CPG with lower prices that someone’s been saving up a little bit for that a hundred dollars item, that can be a big change from earlier in the week to later in the week on that payday week as

Bradley Sutton:

Well. Okay. I mean, obviously, we don’t give out, you know, private customer information on here, people who don’t want their info being shared. But are there any examples where you can just tell us an experience in the last couple of months that you’ve had were a customer started utilizing this information and because of this they were able to lower their total ACoS or RoAS or any of these things? Like any cool stories stick out in your mind?

Cameron:

I can say that utilizing this information, like a lot of things in Amazon marketing or marketing in general we try to make incremental changes over time. And so it’s not like we took Amazon marketing streaming implemented, and then all of a sudden we just increase a business’s weekly sales by 150%. But I’ll say for sure that, that using Amazon Marketing Stream as a guide for a client that I’m familiar with we were, we were able to focus their efforts and by efforts I mean their budgets and their higher bids both on a daily basis where we were seeing more traction both in the morning and in the evening, not as much in the middle of the day. And then also because they are a type of product that has a lot of subscribe and save customers they usually need to be refilled every three to four weeks.

Cameron:

So we’re able to kind of focus on when those subscribe and save customers are coming back. And then also utilize that data to see how can we expand on that and bring in more customer customers as well. Because if you have to subscribe and save customers coming back to your brand to refill, you’re also gonna know that you’re gonna have other customers needing to refill from competitors, whether they’re subscribing, saving to competitor products, or just need to refill that product that they need for on a monthly basis as well. So that’s, that’s one example of ways that we’ve used it. Allowed us to increase that efficiency for certain products. Not necessarily, you know, making a, a huge sales increase but allowing us to continue to build sales while doing so with a lower cost per click and just an overall more efficient strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So in general, as I said, Pacvue has had this for months whereas Helium 10 just started this, but what is available on the visibility side in Pacvue? Like if I am running Pacvue, I have it connected to my seller central vendor account, what can I now see with this marketing stream connection? And then what are the actionable things that I can like program in like do I then like program in when I want a budget to be increased? Or do you have the ability to actually say, “Hey, turn off my campaign at a certain time of day or day of the week.” Like, what are the things I can view and actually do inside of Pacvue with this?

Cameron:

Yeah, so this is kind of the part that I’m most excited about just because having been in this, you know, e-commerce world for a while having this tool available, it is just a night and day difference. And within Pacvue there are kind of two ways that you can use it right now. At this time it’s focused just on sponsored product campaigns, and you can go into a specific campaign and you can get a snapshot of the Amazon marketing stream data right in the Pacvue tool. You don’t need to switch back out, go to the Amazon API. You don’t need to know any complicated I guess or fill out any complicated structure know, like any sort of sequel, like a lot of people needed for AMV, things like that.

Cameron:

You go right into the tool, you see a snapshot of the Amazon marketing stream data, and then what you can do is press a toggle and be able to apply that marketing stream data directly to that campaign. So you can see a percentage for every hour of every day in that week where you should be increasing or decreasing bids. You can base that on either CPC, RoAS, ACoS, obviously the inverse of RoAS, et cetera, and then you can press one button and implement it for that campaign. So not only is it you know, a really effective tool on its own Amazon marketing stream, but the way that we integrate into Pacvue is that we make it as simple as possible to take that campaign data to apply the marketing stream data, and then implement those changes right away. So you can use it in that way and implement one button there, or you can use it in a more advisory capacity. And if say you have a campaign that does a lot of volumes and spends in sales. You can take a look that Amazon marketing stream data and then use it as a guide for other campaigns that maybe are newer or have a brand new product in it that you need to get ramped up, but also do so efficiently.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s AMS, Amazon marketing Stream, in LinkedIn sometimes there are other little acronyms in there. And one I literally have zero knowledge about is AMC, which to me, I swear that’s like the movie theater chain that I usually watch my movies in AMC, but in Amazon, what does AMC stand for, and gimme you know, some education about it because I know 0% about it.

Cameron:

Yeah, Yeah. And you’re right, it’s not the theater. It’s not a stock that you wanted to buy mid-year last year either for those interested in that kind of thing. No, it stands for Amazon Marketing Cloud. It’s a, it’s a really great evaluative tool to understand how your full-funnel marketing is working. And so we just talked a little bit about Amazon Marketing Stream and that’s a really effective way to make your search ads specifically right now, also your sponsored product ads more effective based on whatever metric you want to be looking at. And that’s a really bottom-of-the-funnel type strategy, that awaits you, after a shopper gets all the way to that almost point of conversion, to make that conversion more efficient and make it happen.

Cameron:

Amazon Marketing Cloud is kind of a way to zoom out and look at the marketing that you’re doing across the entire funnel. So it can differ between the size of the business, but for larger businesses especially, you’re gonna have a dedicated search strategy. You’re gonna have a dedicated Amazon DSP demand side platform strategy, which is on and off Amazon. And you’re gonna have a dedicated, as well, most of the time streaming TV strategy. So you’re going to be showing or building that awareness for the brand at a high level to people that are not necessarily currently shopping for the brand, might just be interested in the type of product that you sell, and then you’re going to try to get them onto Amazon and then eventually to purchase your product, become a loyal customer.

Cameron:

One thing that has always been a challenge in the past and to be honest, still a challenge, but AMC helps a lot with, is understanding how effectively you are bringing those people from the point of not knowing about your brand to the point where they’re purchasing the product from your brand. And that’s one of the main things that AMC helps do, is visualize that for you, understand where you’re not being effective, where you’re being effective, allowing you to consolidate budget, where it’s having more of an impact and then being able to show you the effects of those changes over time. And this is just not something that was easy to figure out in the past. AMC is relatively new, so a lot of brands might not be as familiar with it. And it’s still fairly difficult to use in some cases.

Cameron:

I know if you’re trying to work with it directly from Amazon you have to have some SQL skills, therefore I would not be able to use it that way cuz I am not a SQL person. I don’t know about any other players in the space. So I know at Pacvue we’ve actually created a really effective UI that can visualize the entire full funnel process and give you the data from AMC in a really digestible way. So it’s a great way to just kind of get a 30,000-foot view of your business and see what places are you missing. Cause you can have what you consider a Bulletproof strategy at any time. And even, even those strategies are gonna have places that you can improve no matter what. This whole space is changing too fast. There are too many variables. You have different competitors VY for, you know, your share of that search result page or your share of the category as a whole. And so understanding that full funnel process and where you sit in it and how effective it’s being is just an amazing tool for brands, sellers, or vendors. Doesn’t matter for that whole thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Switching gears a little bit, you know, we’ve been talking exclusively about Amazon, but Pacvue obviously helps tons of sellers with advertising on Walmart and other platforms. What are some wins that you see from people who are taking more of an omnichannel advertising approach as opposed to like, “you know, what a hundred percent of my advertising budget’s just going into Amazon.:

Cameron:

Yeah, I think I can speak to this generally cuz as of right now at Pacvue my experience is Amazon, I’ve been focusing mostly on Amazon itself. But I can say, you know, a lot of the same tools on Pacvue that we use for Amazon are being used for Walmart and Instacart, things like that. Walmart specifically doesn’t have the same type of Amazon marketing stream. Data is set up in the same way, but you still do get hourly data. So you are able to look at the hourly sales, hourly efficiencies, things like that, and apply those learnings in the same way. So what you have across the board is brands able t use this information and then apply that information to that campaign or campaigns on a small or large scale. And I think the moral of the story here is that with Amazon with Walmart, which have made crazy advances in their whole ad ecosystem within the last one to two years, they’re all kind of competing to offer more data to the sellers on their websites. And this is allowing the seller to really benefit from that competition and be able to have this data to make more informed decisions as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how does somebody go about budgeting though? Let’s say I am selling on Amazon, I am selling on Walmart, you know, maybe I’m, I’m selling on, you know what else do you guys do? Like Kroger, you know, Instacart, whatever. Should the budget always be tied to like, my revenue? All right? Like, hey, 80% of my gross revenue is coming from Amazon. I’m gonna put 80% of my marketing budget there. And then it’s like a one to, or like, not a one to one basis, but a relative basis where I put my 5% of my budget or 5% of my sales is coming from Walmart, so 5% of my advertising or are there other use cases where it’s like, I need to put more money into this platform because I think I can grow faster. Like how do I decide where I’m throwing my marketing dollars?

Cameron:

Yeah, I think, and that’s a really great question. As brands expand to all these different platforms, a lot of brands in the past would’ve just been centered solely on Amazon, and that would’ve been a very easy question to answer. I think they should never feel locked into having a budget set in a certain place. I think brands always need to be flexible in terms of where they’re putting that budget and also evaluate what amount of their sales are marketing attributed, what amount of your sales are organic a brand that is trying to break into Walmart for the first time. You’re gonna need a budget there to be able to drive traction, drive relevance for your products. And at the same time, if that same brand has been on Amazon for, say, eight years and has cemented its place in a certain category, its organic sales percentage may be a lot higher than it was say six years ago when it really had to invest a lot more in their advertising.

Cameron:

So I think it depends on how they built up their brand is for each platform. And if they’re trying to grow on certain other platforms, then they need to decide maybe I do need to allocate more budget to that as well. I think kind of the infancy of a brand on certain platforms is something to think about. And how fast and how much they want to grow. I think the capabilities of the ad types themselves is also something to consider and how much, you know, they are weighing, driving sales, bringing in new customers, or simply raising awareness. Say we’re comparing Walmart and Amazon, You have two totally completely different beasts, really. Which is no fault of Walmart. They’re just getting their ad business going.

Cameron:

In the last couple of years, Amazon has had a lot more time, but Walmart’s gonna be a lot lower funnel than Amazon is a lot more on the site or on the app, on your mobile site really looking for the products and then purchasing Amazon has a better ability to accomplish upper-funnel goals when it comes to the demand side, DSP platform that they have and also streaming tv. If you’ve been on Amazon, whether it was this latest Prime Day, the last couple of days, or time probably within this year you’ve probably seen them promoting the heck out of Thursday night football.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s crazy. Like you go to Amazon.com on a Thursday and the entire splash screen is all whatever teams are playing. Yeah, yeah,

Cameron:

Yeah. You’re gonna see it, that’s for sure. And because they’ve poured a lot of time and money into a building that Thursday night football, and with that, their whole streaming service, and you’re able to reach people on that streaming service with your brand based on the same type of audience insights, audience information that you would use to reach them, say, on the internet as well. And so that’s just an example of a way that if we’re talking about brand awareness upper funnel, you’re gonna wanna allocate more budget to tools like that. If that’s not as much of a worry, maybe you’re a smaller business, and you don’t have the budget for those big brand awareness pushes then you won’t have to worry about that. And maybe it can be more even. Another very long answer that comes down to it depends, unfortunately. But I’d say that it’s reliant on the goals, and either way, at the end of the day, a brand needs to be flexible and they need to understand that, Walmart, Instacart, and places like that have been growing really fast, and it’s kind of like when Amazon was starting out with their ads. You don’t want to ignore it. You wanna make sure you stay competitive as much as your budget allows.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, a crystal ball or maybe not a crystal ball. A lot of this stuff has happened. Amazon is opening up more channels of where you can advertise, you know, DSP and other things and advertising on like streaming tv and things like that. As a bigger Amazon seller or even a small one, trying to plan ahead on where I’m going to be advertising, like how do I make that decision, like what I need to do? Like, obviously everybody almost needs to do regular sponsored products, you know, sponsored brand ads, sponsored display in many situations. But once you start getting up to these other levels like, “Hey, I’m a $10 million seller I should be getting DSP.” But now the question is, there are so many channels that Amazon is now allowing me to advertise for. What are some of the main ones you think are gonna give you sellers the best bang for the buck?

Cameron:

I think about it this way, at the very least, consider your search ads, your sponsored product, sponsored brand sponsored display, and sponsored brand video, that is your net. At the end of the day, when there was nothing else going on with Amazon ads, that’s what you could focus on. And that was the entire ecosystem. It’s grown, it’s evolved. It’s a little more complicated now. Now you need to, you need to fill the net and you do that by starting off, and of course, it’s not a blanket recommendation for everyone, but you do that really by starting off with some straightforward DSP marketing and what that DSP for those that aren’t familiar, what that DSP allows you is to go off of Amazon based on audience information and bring those potential shoppers that haven’t purchased your brand or, or maybe were browsing the category and bring them back to your brand.

Cameron:

Because I’m kind of going back to the Amazon days with the spiel that I think I said a thousand times at least. But no one buys the first time. It takes multiple visits to a detail page. It takes multiple visits to a product before a person purchases it. And during those visits, your product is competing against every other competitor’s product in that category while that person is at that research stage of their journey. And so the more you show your product to them after they go off Amazon, the more likely they are to come back onto Amazon and purchase from your brand. And you do that really effectively through Amazon DSP. And to be clear, Amazon DSP and things like streaming tv, they use a lot of similar information to accomplish their goal.

Cameron:

It is audience-based targeting. So you can either retarget people that have looked at your brand, looked at competitors, or say, for example, I have this, this huge water bottle next to me, this Stanley water bottle if I am in the market for a water bottle, that DSP will allow you to proactively and reach out to those people, and you can also do that at a streaming TV level, but with much less likely that person will purchase. Because people sitting on a couch watching and streaming TV are less likely to purchase than when they’re on their computer.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, who knows? You never thought that on Thursday night football, you would see an ad for, you know, collagen peptides or your Amazon product on it. So the possibilities are endless guys, for Amazon sellers out there, yeah, you probably have to be a larger seller to be able to qualify to pay for that. But I mean, regardless if you’re a small or large seller unless you’re a huge, huge, you know, Proctor and Gamble brand, you weren’t thinking about being on football games, you know, advertising, but Amazon’s kind of changing the game here, right then. Well, you’ve been giving us, some great insights and, and strategies throughout this episode, but something we always do at the end of each episode asks for our TST, 30-second tip. So is there a quick-hitting, highly actionable, 30-second to a-minute tip or strategy? Could be about Walmart advertising, Amazon advertising, how to use Marketing Stream, how to use Pacvue how to get on page one, or about anything you possibly want.

Cameron:

Yeah, I’d say the one most important thing that I’d recommend to people is that it’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day of marketing on Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart and going through the motions. There are a million other things to worry about. I’d say every once in a while as often as possible, really try to audit your entire ad strategy question. It is not to say that it’s wrong to question it, evaluate, you know, how it’s performing, and more importantly, evaluate what tools are you using to make it better. Amazon Marketing Stream is one of those tools I would highly recommend utilizing as soon as possible if you’re not already taking a look at it. But there’s always a part of your campaigns, a part of your strategy that you can improve. And this is one of those tools along with AMC as well, but I’d say Amazon Marketing Stream uses it, it’s great data. For any other reports, if you use the Amazon API any other brand insights which are also available in the Amazon API, use that data. It may not change a lot for your business. It may change a ton for it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Well, thank you for coming on here. But if people wanna reach out to you to, you know, get more information or perhaps. If they’re pretty serious about their advertising, they’re not a brand-new seller. I know you guys, you know deal with main people like doing like high six figures, seven figures eight figures, et cetera. How can they find you out there on the interwebs? How can they book a call with Pacvue, et cetera?

Cameron:

Yeah, so they can go to our website they can request a demo. I’m of course on LinkedIn. If you wanna talk to me, I feel like I’m pretty personable. So by all means feel free to reach out and I can get you to the right person to help you start that process, and start that journey to improving your business. Everything that we’ve talked about today, Marketing Stream, AMC you know, is technically available through your API in one form or another. The great thing about Pacvues is it’s all consolidated into one place, and it’s all made to be, you know, extremely functional for a person that doesn’t have hours and hours every day to focus on these kinds of things and also, you know, needs to run a business as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and will maybe reach out to you in a year or so and see what’s new with Amazon advertising.

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