#307 – PPC Talk: The Latest Walmart And Amazon Advertising Strategies

In this episode of PPC Talk, Bradley is joined by PPC expert Destaney Wishon to discuss everything from the difference between Amazon and Walmart advertising, her favorite new features inside Amazon advertising, plus a lot of strategies involving product targeting ads, PPC launches as a ranking strategy, and so much more!

In episode 307 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destany discuss:

• 03:30 – Amazon And Walmart: Advertising What Is The Difference?
• 05:15 – How To Get Approved In Walmart Advertising
• 10:30 – TACoS: Amazon vs. Walmart
• 12:00 – Destaney’s Favorite New Features In Amazon Advertising
• 15:00 – Updates On Amazon’s Sponsored Video And Sponsored Display
• 20:45 – Product Targeting Strategies From Bradley and Destaney
• 24:00 – Using PPC Launches As A Ranking Strategy
• 28:30 – Using Google Advertising Traffic For Your Listings
• 30:00 – General Rules For Amazon Advertising
• 32:00 – More PPC Strategies and Tips From Destaney
• 34:40 – How To Get In Touch With Destaney  

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got a jam packed strategy session on this episode of PPC talk. Destaney back to talk all about things such as Amazon advertising, Walmart, advertising, and much, much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon, Walmart, or e-commerce world. And today is another episode of what we do every few weeks or so-called PPC talk. We’re gonna kind of take a focus on the advertising end of e-commerce and we’ve got one of our favorite experts on this subject. Destaney. How’s it going?

Destaney:

It is going super excited to be here Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Before we get into it, how is your sister’s basketball season going so far?

Destaney:

It’s going

Bradley Sutton:

Does anybody ask you that on podcasts? You’re on a podcast every week? Am I the first one to ask about it?

Destaney:

You are bonus points. First one to ask it season is going really well. It’s, you know, not great on my schedule. I leave immediately after this podcast to go to a game, but it’s a lot of fun.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Is she starting?

Destaney:

She is, she was a freshman varsity player. I mean, she’s taller than me. So if anyone knows me or see me at conferences, I’m pretty tall. So she is a incredible four and five spot.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, I just went to a very depressing game last night. My son’s team, their division five, and they played a division three team. S, they were gonna probably lose anyways, but, they actually kept it close know was kind of my son had a triple-double last night, but the wrong kind of triple-double, one of them being 10 turnover. So but anyways, we’re not here to talk about high school basketball. We are here to talk about advertising and you know, it’s been like a year and a half or so since you’ve been on the show and, and you’ve, you know, before talked about, you know, things ranging from product targeting, you’ve talked about DSP, sponsor display. I wanted to start something now talking about something we haven’t in the past, but it’s like, you know, something that involves where you live. So let’s talk more Walmart advertising, you know, I’m just gonna go out in a limb and say maybe your agency, or just you in general have probably had an exponential lift in people asking about Walmart advertising over the last year would you say?

Destaney:

A hundred Percent? Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

So give us the rundown. I know nothing about Walmart. I barely started, you know, Project X and a couple other things on Walmart, and I have not gotten into guys. I think Carrie over here is starting to get into it, but maybe just give us a general overview, like the differences between Amazon and Walmart advertising and what you can do, what you can’t do.

Destaney:

Yeah, of course. So I kind of like to start with a conceptual overview of the two platforms. Walmart has the retail base, right? They’ve been the largest retailer for a very long period of time. I think they’re in a race with Amazon now. I don’t remember if Amazon officially took over last quarter, but Walmart has the retail base. They have the relationship with all the vendors that are in their stores and they have the capital investments. Now, as you start looking at their kind of eCommerce side of things, they don’t need to reinvent the will. Amazon’s already started and built a very strong foundation for Walmart to mimic, and that’s kind of what we’re seeing. So if you log into the Walmart platform and look at their advertising platform, it’s very, very similar to what you saw on Amazon five years ago. It’s primarily focused on search auto campaigns do really, really well.

Destaney:

I think that’s where we see typically the top performers. They have a few aspects that I actually like better. I think their UI has the opportunity to be very strong from a aesthetics and just how they’ve decided to portray their data looks really good. But from a management perspective, it’s so minimal viable. It’s not a lot of opportunity to get really strategic. You know, they have displays potentially gonna be rolling out. They have some of these like headline ad aspects that are more pay to play, which is how Amazon was back in the days you had to run under AMS. So I think it’s really easy to see the trajectory of Walmart, but for right now, it’s really fun sandbox to play in with low barriers and low cost.

Bradley Sutton:

Is it, how do you get approved? Like, like isn’t it, I mean, on Amazon, you can get approved in like two minutes and if it’s your first-ever campaign, they even give you like $50 credit and boom, you’re good to go, but are, are they more selective on Walmart or literally any buddy, as long as you’re selling on Walmart, anybody has access to the ad platform there.

Destaney:

So from what we’ve seen, you have to go through an approval process. Another thing to note is Amazon’s amazing at outsourcing everything. That’s why sellers have so much work to do. Walmart is not as fantastic at it. They’ve kind of stuck with their traditional model of like you have to work with a buyer to get your products in stores. That’s how they kind of built their online presence as well is there’s a lot of these kinds of loopholes and a lot of hurdles that you have to jump in order to get certain approvals. So from what we’ve seen, there’s this outreach that you oftentimes will have to figure out through a buyer in order to get your advertise access, but it’s also not necessarily my area of expertise on the back end. We typically take accounts that are already set up. So if that’s wrong, I apologize.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. No worries. And is it, do you have like Auto Campaigns, and Exact Campaigns, Broad Campaigns, is that similar?

Destaney:

It’s very similar. So Auto Campaigns are what we have seen do the best. Their algorithm seems to be pretty decent in that aspect. You can set up Manual Campaigns as well with different tar types of targeting. You could be a little bit more selective over where your ad show up as well. So think placement modifiers on Amazon. Walmart rolled that out much quicker and a lot easier than what Amazon did. So all of that functionality is there. It just isn’t as fantastic. I would assume they’re making a lot of algorithm changes because Walmart doesn’t quite know what’s best. Amazon is a ton of data. So when they make a change, you can pretty much assume, Hey, if I’m running this place with modifying I know exactly where my ads showing up. Walmart’s not quite that precise. There’s a lot of changes happening frequently. So Auto Campaigns are kind of the basis and like the easiest to run.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now when you’re getting one of your clients set up for Walmart advertising, let’s say they’ve been doing it on Amazon. Do you just start from scratch on Walmart and just completely, you know, literally for, from scratching, let’s start with some auto campaigns and see what works or do you take some of the data from Amazon PPC and what worked there and like at least have a starting point and like, Hey, let me target these keywords because we got proof that it works on Amazon or do you just ignore what happened on Amazon?

Destaney:

No, you’re spot on. There’s a lot of data that can be utilized from the Amazon side of the platform. It’s a bit very similar search model. It’s not like going from Amazon to Google where the intent’s different. If someone’s searching on Walmart, they’re still searching to buy. So we definitely like to use a lot of the keywords and there’s even some opportunity for like some of the products and seeing like what we convert best on what we have a competitive advantage on. Sometimes you’ll go to Walmart and see that your number one competitor on Amazon maybe has three reviews or like three-star reviews on Walmart. So we like to compare that data and see where we have room to really build a foundation. Cuz Walmart’s so early on. It’s like the old days you can start now. And yes, it may not be fantastic. You may not see the return or the scale of Amazon, but you may, at five years

Bradley Sutton:

Cost per click. Is it similar, less, more?

Destaney:

Less from what we’ve seen now, the auction model is quite a bit different, which is something to note on Amazon. It’s like a traditional auction, right? You bit up bit up, bit up bit up. And then the next highest bidder is what you’re gonna pay in terms of CPC. So if I bid a dollar and someone bids, a dollar and 1 cent dollar and one cent’s gonna win now Walmart’s a different auction model. If I bid a dollar and someone else bids $5, they’re paying $5 for that click, not a dollar and 1 cent. So that’s something to note. If you go into Walmart and bid incredibly high, you’re gonna probably spend a lot of money cuz it’s not a traditional auction model. I expect that to a change. I don’t love managing it cause you almost have to start load incrementally, increase bids over time, but it is what it is.

Bradley Sutton:

All Right, now I heard this before. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but if you are showing up in the search results in a sponsored search results on Walmart, your organic position disappears. Is that still the case where like you can only show up for one. Have you heard of that before?

Destaney:

I have not. We haven’t played around too much with organic in the advertising relationship, but I would not be surprised. Though organic placements on Walmart are very similar to Amazon where it stands out and it’s a premium position.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, I’m gonna have to, I’m not sure if you have a Helium 10 Elite account, if not, we gotta hook you up with one. But we haven’t beta right now for our Helium 10 Elite users a Keyword Tracker, you know, for Walmart. And so I’m gonna start doing testing. I, since I’m not running, they can’t really test on my Keyword Tracker, but I heard that like once you start showing up for a keyword and sponsored, now, if you’re a page one position five or something organically, you’re not anymore, like it just shows your sponsor results. So you can only show up one time, you know, like on Amazon you could like take the whole top of the page. And then the first line of organic, you know, could be you too. But I heard that that’s not the case on Walmart. So I’m gonna have to, I’m gonna have to dig into that. And now for your clients how does it differ, like your TACoS Target, your Total ACoS Target for Amazon as opposed to Walmart? Is it higher on Walmart? Because it’s you know, the system is not as robust and you gotta spend more in order to get more or do you always, do you have similar targets between Amazon and Walmart?

Destaney:

I would say it’s less competition on Walmart right now. So we typically see like a lower, lower TACoS. Now that being said, I, again, the algorithm on Walmart’s a lot different and it’s changing pretty quickly. They’re still trying to figure out what makes sense. They’re having major changes to reviews, to what your content looks like. You know, most of the time you have to go through a certain approval process to get like what we would consider EVC, A+ you can’t just upload it and get it scraped to by bot. You usually have to work with a corporate agency. So all of those factors are changing the organic ranking side pretty drastically, which of course is gonna influence your TACoS. So in general, I would say lower, but that’s because Amazon is becoming so much more pay to plates. Search is incredibly saturated by all of those ads and organic placements that as mentioned, you can influence

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s switch back to Amazon now. You know, I think most of our listeners are still, you know, mainly on Amazon now on the advertising platform, since you’ve been on the show like a year and a half ago, they have added so many different new features and new reports and just new visibility on certain metrics. I, if you had to name like your top three favorite or something new things in the last year that you think sellers definitely should be, you know, taken advantage of what are some of these new features that have come out in 2021 and maybe even from 2020?

Destaney:

Yeah. Great question. In general, I think Amazon’s moving into a direction of promoting or pushing more brands building. So a lot of the reporting and the assets they’re getting on the advertising side are focused around that. One of my favorite rollouts is custom imagery, which is a lifestyle image that can now be added to sponsored brand and sponsored display ads. The most frequent opportunity to see this is if you’re searching mobile and you see the lifestyle image that shows up the very top of search, that’s a sponsored brand ad that has a custom image uploaded. So that’s fantastic. We’ve seen crazy increases and clickthrough rates upwards of 500% when being run appropriately. And it takes up a very large portion of the page. So that’s probably one of my favorite rollouts.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Any others, you know like either maybe on the metric side, like Uhhuh, what was that like? Top of search of –

Destaney:

Impression Share.

Bradley Sutton:

Something top of search. Yeah. Yeah. Impression Shares. Yes. Do you use that one? And is that one of your favorites or if it’s not that, what other metrics you think people should be looking at that’s new?

Destaney:

This could spiral to a whole different conversation, but I absolutely love Impression Share Reporting because it allows us to see how much opportunity we have to grow if we just spent the right amount of money. So as we all know, there’s been recent changes to what is allowed and what’s not allowed and what’s Whitehat, what’s Grayhat. So what we’re seeing is a shift where everyone knows PPCs Whitehat. Amazon wants us to spend more money, right? So as we look at our strategic Amazon advertising management, we’re having the discussion of how do we set aside this budget and focus on certain keywords in order to grow market share and improve rank. So we’re able to set up very precise campaigns and then see what our impression share is. So we set these up from a ranking purpose, and then I’ll go to my brand and be like, Hey, we’re only winning 40% of impression share let’s increase our bids cause we’re converting so well.

Destaney:

So that’s one of my favorites. And then my next favorite that’s related to that is a new tab in Advertising Console called Brand Metrics. It’s in the top left-hand corner. It’s not directly correlated with the advertising aspect, but if you click on that tab, Amazon’s now giving you category comparisons for all of your brand performance. So you could go in and say, Hey, shelves, average conversion rate is 30%. I’m converting at a 33%, which means you better be spending more money on ads cuz you’re converting so well compared to your competitors. And we’ve never had that holistic view cause it’s actually organic and advertising data. It’s not just ad data. The are finally giving us category comparisons on the organic level.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s just talk about actually just different types of advertising. Now a year and a half ago, a year on it was around the time that sponsored video became you know, available to brand registered sellers. And, and that was kinda like the hot thing. You know, we talked about how you know, your cost per click was like really low. What’s happening in the last year and a half as far sponsored video like has, you know, the CPCs caught up with the rest of it. Is it still as, as profitable as it was once was if not, are, is there any kind of new advertising? That’s like, oh man, not enough people are using this. So it’s, it’s a good time to take advantage of it.

Destaney:

Yes. To rising CPCs with sponsored brands video a lot something that a lot of people need to consider is that there’s only one placement on page one for a video ad. There’s one placement on page two at the bottom of the page. So you have every single person who’s been on this keyword fighting for that placement. So sometimes it can become very pay to play. If you have a Long-tail Keyword, no one’s spinning on, you’re still in a good spot. Video ads in general may not be that competitive, but for some of those really top-notch keywords that are a lot of traffic, you’ll see CPCs increasing performance is still really strong. I would say they’re still one of the highest converting placements from a creative perspective. So we’re going all in. And I expect Amazon to push more advertising inventory here. They’ve already beta tested video ads showing on the product detail page. A lot of those different ad inventory placements are gonna diversify spin. So what’s not as competitive. We’re not all gonna be fighting of one placement. We’re gonna be able to showcase in other areas. So yes, to video, keep pushing it. Even if it is getting more expensive, it’s a big investment on Amazon’s end. Newest ad type that’s probably a hot topic is sponsored display. They’ve rolled out a lot of remarketing aspects, which now allow us to actually officially remarket similar to what people are used to on Facebook.

Bradley Sutton:

Like how would somebody use it? What’s an example for us if somebody has never heard of that be for how does it?

Destaney:

Yeah. So let’s say I’m selling protein people, repurchase protein frequently when they’re done using their first, you know, round of protein. So what this ad type allows you to do is take a product that you know people repeat purchase and then pick a look back window. So for example, I could say, I wanna target everyone purchased this product 40 days ago. And I’m saying 40 days, because that’s probably the average length of protein powder. It’s usually, you know, on a month average, you use all your protein powder you’re done with it. Now you’re gonna serve that person another ad to remind them, Hey, they need to buy my product again instead switching to another product. So that’s a really big opportunity. And then you also have the ability to retarget anyone who viewed your listing but didn’t purchase. So maybe you have a high price point product where it takes someone a few days to think about it. They laid on your listing. They don’t buy, let’s serve them an ad, you know, seven days later, and then they’re ready to purchase. So those are two really cool assets that we love playing with.

Bradley Sutton:

So when you target get like previous purchases, it’s your own products? I can’t target, like if somebody bought another product, Hey, let me serve them with an ad. Right?

Destaney:

You can play around, you can’t get as selective on DSP where you’re like, Hey, I only wanna target this product and remarket their whole audience, but you do have the opportunity to expand into like audience based target we’re or you could remarket people who viewed other protein powders per se.

Bradley Sutton:

I was playing around with atomic and I noticed how there’s something for Product Targeting Sponsored Brand. So I know how to target keywords, you know, that’s what is the artist formally known as headline? You know, search ads the ones that come from the top, but when it’s targeting the ASIN, where in the world is that showing?

Destaney:

So hypothetically, let’s say, I am targeting your number one competitor for coffin shelf, right? It’s going to show up in the regular headline search ad, like a similar keyword targeting, but it’s going to show up when you’re targeting for the product and they’re organically ranked for that keyword, which is kind of confusing. So if you select like seven products that you wanna target with your headline search ad, it’s gonna take all of the keywords they’re organically ranked number one to four, show your headlines search ad for it.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, okay. So it’s not that somebody landed by any means on this one product page. And then now we start following them, following that, that buyer’s journey with a headline ad. But it’s literally like you’re gonna show up where that product is showing up for on page one or organic position one

Destaney:

Organic position one is what I believe it is. It may be expanded to the top four now, but last time we test it was one

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I mean, I’m learning stuff left and right here, I love it.

Destaney:

Another area I think it’ll open up to is there also beta testing sponsored brand ads on the product detail page. So sometimes you’ll scroll down and above the A+ content. You’ll see these three placements and all you’ll see is copy and like an image. It won’t actually have a product showing, but if you click on it, it’ll take you to that brand store page. That’s a sponsored brand ad. That’s also influenced by product targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So like I haven’t used this yet, but guys, I already thought of a way you can like, know where your product could show up, you know, what keywords, like if you enter an ASIN into Cerebro and find the organic ranks, you know, like she said, one through four, one through six or even just one and whatever, you know, keywords those come up that’s probably where your sponsor brand product targeting ad could show up for. So there’s one way to find out there. Now, speaking of product targeting. So, you know, I’ll tell you my flow and then you can tell me if this, you know, how I can tweak this to make it better or how you do things. But, you know, obviously, if there’s a product that I know is I’m better then like you know, I’ve got a coffin shelf, I’m $29, I’ve got a five star product, you know, absolutely. I want to target it a very similar coffin shelf. That’s smaller costs, more money, maybe less star rating because I, you know, I imagine that if somebody’s on that page to see my ad, they’ll probably like my product better. The other way though, that, you know, I would just, you know, find product targets is you know, just obviously for my Auto Campaigns, you know, if Amazon shows me and if I convert a couple of times, but how I do it right now is other than just naturally knowing what I wanna target. If my auto campaign does find me a product or two, that I get a couple purchases on, I kind of automatically put that into a product targeting campaign by itself. And then I also put it into my sponsor display campaign as well. Is that good to just like blindly do it through three things now, you know, like still in my auto it’s in my sponsor display it’s in my product targeting or should I pick and choose? Are, are there different cases where I shouldn’t just take it from the auto and put it in these other campaigns?

Destaney:

No, I think that’s a fantastic strategy. It’s very similar to what we do. We run them across all three ad types. So we’ll scrape our search term, report everything that’s B zero, we’ll pull that list and we’ll run it, sponsor products, sponsor runs, and sponsor display, product targeting. They don’t compete all three ad types influence, very different placements, as you know. So I get that question pretty often. And another thing that you can do as well is broad category targeting, which is gonna be a little bit broader, but I view it similar to an auto campaign. Like I’m targeting a category and then I’m gonna go in and see where all I converted within that category, and I’m gonna pull those ASIN. So I kind of use that as like a data collection. And then we use obviously Helium 10 and Brain Analytics do this something very similar.

Destaney:

So what we’ll do is let’s say I’m bidding on like crazy expensive keyword, so vital proteins collagen we’ll talk about that. That’s gonna be, you know, collagen averages, I think around a $20 or $30 CPC from what we’ve seen. I don’t, I don’t wanna compete. That’s crazy. Yeah. Like I don’t wanna compete tough of search. So what we’ll do is we’ll pull all of the ASINs that are ranked well for collagen and then run product targeting in all three ad types against those ASINs. So that way I’m not a $20 CPC instead of piggybacking off all of the traffic that those products are getting for being ranked well for it. So I’m showing up on their product detail page. It’s gonna be a lot less traffic than collagen would be topless search, but I’m not paying the crazy cost per clicks.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. That’s good to know. Now, you know, as we know, a couple months ago you know, things came or month ago or so things were coming up where, Hey, you know, rebates and search, find, buy, and things like that, you know, are now frowned upon by Amazon. And so, me just personally, you know, naturally the same day that it came out, I started doing some PPC tests and found, you know, some like some different ways where you can kind of do what we used to do with search, find, buy, but no rebate and things like that, but are a lot of your clients asking you about stuff like, Hey, you know, I used to use search, find, buy. I used to use rebates, but is there a way to launch PPC? Do you have more people asking you that kind of stuff recently?

Destaney:

A hundred percent, I think it’s gonna be a pretty big change in general market KPIs, as well as we go into next year. I am forecasting higher TACoS as we start getting into next year because it’s gonna be a lot harder to influence organic rank from a manipulation standpoint. So you’re gonna have to spend more money to show up at top of search. Your organic may not increase this heavily. So we are definitely running ranking campaigns from an ad perspective. And I mean, it’s pretty simple at the end of the day, any type of all you wanna do is drive conversions for your top keywords. That’s what a search, find, buy is. That’s what working with influencers, sending ’em to a specific URL, like it’s all the same concept and philosophy. So take that, apply it to your ads, set up campaigns for ranking focus on exact match. And then something we like to do is put a top of search placement modifier. So that way we’re getting as much traffic as possible because we’re winning the number one sponsor product placement. And then what we’re gonna do is see how well we convert. If I converting at 10%, I probably shouldn’t be trying to rank for that keyword cause that’s not great conversion rate. So we’ll kind of analyze those metrics. And then we just view it as, rather than a profitable advertising strategy. No, it’s a ranking strategy instead of setting aside your $3,000 and 700 units, I don’t even know. I’ve never run, you’re gonna set aside that money for a Amazon advertising PPC ranking strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what’s the difference of either in cost or how you set it up for like top of search or you just do a really high fixed bid that you think will get like, is it pretty much the same thing? But, but just with the top of search, you’re not having to guess what, what your fixed bid should be, or should you use one over the other?

Destaney:

The reason I do top of search is so that way if someone’s starts outbidding me, the top of search is gonna override them. Outbidding me. It basically guarantees you top of search. If I bid $10 because I’m running a Reiki campaign and someone bids 11, I’m no longer gonna be top of search, but if I do something absolutely drastic, like a crazy top of search modifier, I’m gonna continue to outbid them. So that’s what I do for ranking strategy because I want be in those top four sponsor product placements, that’s where I’m driving the most amount of traffic. Now, again, if I see it’s really expensive, I’ll do a fixed bid and not focus on top of search because I, from a profitability standpoint cannot justify the ad cost.

Bradley Sutton:

Sure. Okay. Another scenario here, you know I’m sure you get this question a million times. I get it a million times and I don’t think there’s any one, you know, set answer. I could see both sides of this, but somebody always says Hey, I’m, I’m paying for PPC for a keyword. I achieve, you know, top three organic position. Should I stop advertising for that keyword? Should I roll back my bid? My personal thing is, and this is just what I do. I think again, guys, I’m not saying this is the only way, but I personally keep going hard because I love real estate at the top of page one. If I have the first sponsored and I have the first organic, that’s great for me, because now that’s less chance for the buyer to go somewhere else. But what do you guys do? Or what do you guys teach?

Destaney:

Very, very similar. I mean, subconsciously it does something to see one product 90 different times. I don’t know if you’ve ever searched Pepsi, Pepsi dominates a lot of their top of search marketing and they dominate Coke as well. The first thing you usually see, or it used to be is a headline search out in multiple sponsor product placements. And if someone texting Coke, they wanna buy Coke. But the subconscious awareness of seeing an ad in an organic placement, it’s crazy. That being said, if we’re working with like really large brands with limited budgets, you know, I only have this amount of budget per month to spend, I will have the conversation of, okay, well we’re organically ranked, well here let’s move that budget elsewhere. That’s the only time I recommend it. But at the end of the day, if you’re not winning that placement, someone else is, and you’re probably losing market share, which may hurt your ranking overall. So I agree with you.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Google, you know, I would say this is one of those things in the last a year and a half more people are talking about it. And now I’m not talking about like the special Google links that we’re going around, where people, you know, where you kind of like tricked Amazon that, Hey, this is coming from Google or things. But I’m just talking about like legitimate Google advertising, bringing traffic to your listings. Do you have clients who ask you guys do, I don’t even know if you guys do that or not.

Destaney:

We don’t manage it, but it’s definitely been a very hot topic as we’re seeing a increase in CPCs. So what I’ve been recommending to people is kind of understand what your cost per acquisition is. So again, if you’re having to pay ridiculously high advertising cost on Amazon, because you’re in a very competitive market test Google and see how much you’re gonna have to pay to drive that traffic. If it’s a lot cheaper and you’re driving conversions, then a hundred percent look into an omnichannel strategy. I’m always gonna be a big fan of Amazon ads because I think it’s gonna play a big role in the algorithm because how does Amazon make a crap ton of money through Amazon ads? So it’s just fundamentally mathematically, it’s gonna be a really big role, but it is becoming more pay to play. So I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to test other strategies. And with Amazon attribution, they’re pushing people to test these things because they’re now giving us the metrics to have a fair comparison of what my Google ads are doing versus my Amazon ads.

Bradley Sutton:

Isn’t there something too, like, I forgot what it’s called, where if you send the traffic from off Amazon, you get like 10% or something like that so-

Destaney:

Yeah. Brand Referral Bonus, maybe.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. That one, one, yeah. Okay. a couple more questions here before we get into your, like your 30-second tips here. What’s your general rule of thumb for rules? Like for example, for Auto Campaign, you know, do you wanna see two purchases from an ASIN or a product before you’re like, Hey, I need, I should probably move this to a Manual Target. And then conversely, what does it take for you to negative? You know, like, Hey, if I get 20 clicks with no sales or if I get yep. You know, up to the full retail price of this product with no sales I should probably negative match. What are your general rules there?

Destaney:

So I’m gonna lay out a scenario of why I don’t love having general rules for either of those. If you have a hundred dollars product, you can justify a much higher threshold, right? You can spend $30 before ever drive a sale and still have a 30% ACoS, which is strong for most standards. If you have a $10 product, you can only drive three clicks at a dollar, right? So I don’t like putting a blanket scenario like that because there’s so much variance. So I always recommend knowing what your threshold is on a product level marginally and then making rules based off that. Now I personally do not do a lot of negating because my fundamental rule of all rules is if you have good bid management, you don’t need to negate. Because again, I bid on whole foods, as an example, I had a keto product and I was bidding on the term whole foods, which is very, very broad.

Destaney:

I had a hundred clicks in one order. That is a terrible conversion rate. That is a 1% conversion rate, but my ACoS was profitable because I had a 10 cent bid. So I had a good ACoS. So that’s how you drive incremental long term sales. Now, if you don’t have a high enough budget it to cast a wide net, it can be eat up really quickly by a lot of these like death by million cuts. But when we’re looking at scaling Amazon ads, I always push for bid management over negating keywords because good bid management can make a terrible keyword profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

Sometimes we try and just say, Hey, I’m gonna do one, you know, one size fits all, but that’s not the case always, especially with advertise. Right? My last question, before we get into your tips you know, as we start building out our campaigns, regardless of how we’re building them you know, for Product Targeting or for ASIN targeting, or for Keyword Targeting, whether we’re talking broad or exact what’s your cap at when it’s like, right. I’m not gonna add any more targets to this campaign. You know, some, you know, like Mina, I know he does like something crazy sometimes where he has like a thousand campaigns with like one target each other people have one campaign with a high budget, but they’ve got a hundred different targets. Where do you start saying, all right, I’m just gonna close this one down, let this one go, but I’m gonna start funneling my new ones from auto into a, you know, now a brand new one because I don’t want to put too many in one campaign.

Destaney:

Yeah. That’s a great question. So we typically sit around 20 to 30 targets in a campaign. The reason being is mathematically. If you have a thousand targets in a campaign in a $20 budget, that math’s not gonna work out, you cannot collect data across all those keywords. So Amazon’s gonna give all of your budget to the highest depression, two to three. And that’s what a lot of people. So I don’t think it’s anything like some people would be like, oh, Amazon, you know, like says, no, like they’re gonna harm your campaign if you have to meet targets and it’s not Amazon saying no, no, no, don’t do that. I think it’s just a algorithmic math perspective of you don’t have a high enough budget. So, I mean, we have some campaigns with 300 keywords, but we have a $3,000 a day budget, and they’re gonna get enough data. So most people don’t have those budgets. So if I’m starting really small, I like to keep smaller groups of targeting. We’ll sometimes even do single keywords, single ASIN targeting in campaigns when necessary. So that way we can easily distribute our budget to the amount of keywords we’re trying to target. If I have a $10 day budget, you probably should only have one to two keywords in a campaign or else you’re not gonna collect a lot of data very quickly.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Good to know. All right. You know, you’ve been giving, literally, this is probably one of the more jampacked strategy sessions we’ve had recently, but if you had to give one more TST, our 30-second tip PPC related, what would be your 30-second tip for our listeners out there right now?

Destaney:

I Would recommend investing in your creatives and expanding your listing creatives and assets to apply to lot of the new Amazon advertising ad types. So custom image, sponsor brands, sponsor display video are gonna be scaled. The problem with those things is they do take time. You need to have them made through graphic designers. So invest in your creatives, cuz it’s gonna be more important to the future.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, awesome. Before you go I know you’re gonna be on your way to your game, so not to put pressure on her, but let your sister know that now 80,000 listeners of this podcast are all rooting for her game tonight. No pressure, but a 20 and 10 points and rebounds would be. And then how can, if people wanna find out more about, you know, what you guys do and reach out to you for help with their PPC, how can they find you on the interwebs?

Destaney:

Yeah. So one of the best places is probably on LinkedIn. I post a to content, my whole team posts very valuable free content for everyone, BetterAMS, YouTube channel, or if you’re interested in us betterams.com.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. Destaney. Thank you so much. And we’ll definitely, I don’t want a year and a half to pass again before you come on the podcast, but sometime in 2022, let’s talk about the guaranteed 17 new things that Amazon’s gonna add to advertising from now until then.

Destaney:

Amazing. Can’t wait, thank you, Bradley.

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