Helium 10 Buzz 12/14/22: Amazon FBA Issues | Amazon Inspire Release | Sponsored Display Updates

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon Marketing Stream (beta) has now expanded to include Sponsored Display in North America, allowing partners and advertisers to receive performance metrics and information on campaign changes in near real time.
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-display-available-amazon-marketing-stream/

Sponsored Display contextual targeting and audiences is now available to advertisers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-display-available-in-egypt-saudi-arabia-turkey/

Amazon is bringing a TikTok-like shopping experience to its app. The company today announced the launch of Inspire, a new short-form video and photo feed that allows consumers to explore products and ideas and shop from content created by influencers, brands and other customers.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/08/amazon-launches-inspire-a-tiktok-like-shopping-feed-that-supports-both-photos-and-videos/

Bradley also shares and walks us through an FBA Inventory issue that happened to him recently that lowered his sales. 

We continue this episode with an invitation to join us for December’s Bigger Better Launch webinar this Thursday, Dec 15th. We also shared a clip from this month’s TACoS Tuesday with Gefen Laredo and concluded this episode with the Pro Training tip from Bradley on how to do your Amazon keyword research to crush it this 2023.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:

• 01:30 – Sponsored Display Updates
• 03:15 – Amazon Inspire
• 06:30 – FBA Inventory Issue
• 09:30 – Register For December’s Bigger.Better.Launch! Webinar
• 10:15 – TACoS Tuesday Interview
• 15:50 – Pro Training Tip: Keyword Research – Getting Ready For 2023

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

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 Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news and goings on in the world of e-commerce, on Amazon and Walmart. We have interviews with people you need to hear from in the industry, and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing this week. We’ve just got a couple of news articles today that we’re gonna be talking about, one of which is kind of like a new TikTok thing that Amazon has come out. And another thing is affecting a lot of you sellers out there who are trying to make sure your products get in the hands of your customers by Christmas.

Bradley Sutton:

We also have an interview where we go over some of your top PPC questions and then a great training tip of the week that is going to be about keyword research. How within just about 60 seconds, you can see stuff like what keywords that you’re not even ranking for, that your competitors are getting sales from. And also how to see if you’re even indexed for those keywords or not. Let’s go ahead and hop right into the news. First of all the first couple of articles actually comes from sponsor display and it’s from Amazon made two announcements, and one of these is entitled Sponsored Display Now Available in Amazon Marketing Stream in North America. So for those who don’t know, Amazon Marketing Stream is something we’ve been talking about a lot lately, but what this article says is now you can see your sponsor display.

Bradley Sutton:

So in the past, you couldn’t think about doing what people call day partying or trying to like turn off and on or adjust bids at certain times of the day because Amazon never really gave you insights into, Hey, how is my performance at this time of day? You couldn’t, you couldn’t tell that you, you have no idea to know, if at 2:00 PM or 2:00 AM your, your ads were doing better. But Amazon opened up the Amazon marketing stream to a lot of partners, such as Helium 10, such as Pacvue. And so with your regular Sponsored Product Campaigns, you now have these insights, which is why in Atomic, for example, we have what’s called schedules where I could say, Hey, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM turn off my ads because my ACoS goes to the roof for whatever reason, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, now you’re gonna be able to start doing that in sponsor display. So we’ll be, you know, incorporating that eventually into Helium 10. It’s gonna be right there in Pacvue. So for those of you Pacvue customers, you’ll be able to go right into there to be able to have that visibility. Another thing still on the topic of Sponsored Display, another article that was brought up was, sponsor display is now available for advertisers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. All right? So here in the United States, in Europe, we’ve had access to Sponsored Display Ads for years, right? If you’re selling in those other marketplaces like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, well starting now, you will now be able to actually do sponsor display campaigns in that marketplace. The next article was something that was kind of hyped up a lot last week.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon put out a press release that they have this new feature called, it’s kinda like TikTok, like shopping. It’s called Amazon Inspire. And what it is, is those who use the Amazon buyer app, and maybe some of you guys have used this already, you can select, hey, what kind of topics you’re interested in. And then you get this kind of like feed that’s like TikTok or Instagram stories where, you know, there’s influencers who have created these videos that allow you to just like scroll through it in an entertaining way and then potentially by the product. So this is, you know, rolled out here in early December, and it’s going to be broadly available to US customers in a few months. All right? So now the interesting thing is that this is kind of like what TikTok was doing.

Bradley Sutton:

You can just go directly to Amazon, but this is like a native in the Amazon app. Now, I am not an e-commerce you know kind of person like e-commerce, what’s the word? Like a prognosticator something where I have special insights into what’s gonna hit and what’s not. But just thinking from a, a consumer standpoint, I personally have difficulty understanding a path to success for this like, big widespread success. Like, I could totally understand, even though I don’t like TikTok or I don’t use TikTok myself as a consumer, I can understand why sometimes you can, your products can go viral on TikTok. It’s cuz people go to TikTok and Instagram to be entertained and they just wanna see stories that catch their eye. And then what happens is, is that sometimes there are products that come out in these stories and then you’re like, oh, okay, I came here to be entertained, but this is actually a cool product.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s a blanket shape, like a burrito or whatever like that, right? And then, sure, I’ll go ahead and click on this and go to Amazon. But the reason why TikTok is so popular is cuz it’s such a strong algorithm to entertain people. And then, you know, maybe one out of every 50, you know, TikTok things that you see, it has to do with their product and, and it has succeeded. Now, this one, I’m struggling to understand or kind of like having confidence that it’s going to take over the world, for example, because I personally don’t go to the Amazon app in order to get entertained, right? Like, I go to the Amazon app cause I already know I need something and I’ll go there. So to get people to go into the Amazon app to get their entertainment when they already have probably TikTok and these others, you know, I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m sure some people will, will go ahead and do it. People who just are on their phones all day, they’ll be like, sure, I’ll go to another TikTok-type app, but let’s see what you guys think. Am I being too pessimistic? Am I off base here? Do you think this thing is gonna just, you know, become the holy grail for Amazon service? Could be, you never know. But my personal opinion is that it’s going to be okay, but it’s not gonna be like one of those hashtag game-changers per se. Like, I almost think that the live shopping experience might be better. The kind of things where Amazon Live, for example, is because, you know, you’re going there with the intention to learn about certain products and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

But to actually try to tie the entertainment aspect into this, let, let’s see how it goes. Maybe I’m being too pre judgemental. The last news article of today is actually another just personal kind of anecdote. Let me just show you guys something here on the Helium 10 Profits for Project X. So I noticed earlier this week, hey, we were doing great, right? You know, like our sales were, were crushing. And last week you’d see was high, this, this light blue number. And then as you can see, day by day, the numbers started plummeting. I was thinking like, what in the world? Like, this is the middle of Q4, like the heaviest shopping season for coffin shelves, even more, you know, than Halloween. Why are our sales plummeting? And then what I did was I looked in the search results for our coffin shelf and take a look.

Bradley Sutton:

What you see here in the search results, and maybe some of you guys, I’ve, I’ve heard other people have had this experience. Like, here’s our book Coffin Bookshelf, it says, arrives before Christmas. Look at everybody’s arrival before Christmas, but look at our main coffin shelf here. It does not say to arrive before Christmas. I’m like, what? That’s troublesome. So I went to the actual listing and it says it arrives after Christmas on December 28th. I’m like, it’s December 13, December 12, and December 11 when I was first seeing this, like, why in the world is this product arriving December 28th? Who’s gonna wanna buy a product and wait until December 28th? And then I went to Seller Central and I looked into my inventory and look what it did, it put all of my inventory and it put it into like this transfer status. Reserve status.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, I had inventory there, sure, I shipped a little bit extra, but all 134 units, it just stuck into transfer status. You don’t see that on these other products. But here’s another product that you see it in our egg rack. It put over a hundred units, a hundred percent in transfer status. So it makes sense about why we are losing the sales, because people who are looking at this are like, wait a minute, I’m not gonna wait until after Christmas. And I posted about this in the Elite group, and I remember Ankit in there who’s been on the podcast before, he had 30,000 units all put into reserve status. And when that happens it looks like your product does not arrive. So I don’t know what is going on.

Bradley Sutton:

I check different addresses and some of them say it could arrive before Christmas, like if I was, you know, ordering this in New York. But what I made sure to do is I made sure to have my FBM listing active, and in some locations, my FBM, my Fulfilled By Merchant listing is now active and has the Buy Box, and the shipping time is says before Christmas because, you know, we use UPS and that’s how our shipping is set up. So Amazon knows that it’ll get there before Christmas. So that’s just another reason to always try and use FBM when you can. So that is it for the news today. Now one thing I wanted to give you guys a heads up is we have our Bigger, Better Launch tomorrow, depending on when you’re watching. This is gonna be Thursday.

Bradley Sutton:

So I want you guys to assign up for, we have tons of strategy that we’re going to be going over that is going to be for to give you the best leg up on 2023. So if you guys wanna sign up for this bigger, better launch workshop, go to h10.me/launch, h10.me/launch, and then you’ll be able to join that live. And I’m gonna give you guys nothing but strategies and Carrie and Shali as well. Alright, let’s now get before we get into the pro training tip of the week that killer keyword research strategy I want to give you I’ve got an interview here that I did with somebody who is live taking some of your top questions on PPC. So here are a couple of questions that we went over that hopefully can help you guys with your advertising strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

The question was from Shlomo here if you have two similar products, but different application forms, what would be the ad strategy to ensure that you’re not bidding against yourself? So I’m not a hundred percent sure what he means there, but let me just try to use my imagination here, but maybe he’s saying that you’ve got a coffin shelf and a coffin makeup shelf or something. But I mean, I might want to bid on the coffin shelf for both keywords. Like both are kind of relevant to me. So in that sense, I am bidding against myself, but I, I want to so under that situation, maybe he means that, like, how do I make sure I’m not just pushing the ceiling, you know up. So what would be your comment on that?

Gefen:

Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I think my application form, he means like, it’s the same, it’ll be a similar product with slightly different applications. Is that what that means? So like kind of the example you used. I think it depends on number one if they’re complimentary products, so if they’re purchased together oftentimes, or if they’re serving a similar purpose where people need both of them, then targeting the same keywords or product targeting themselves can be really helpful as far as a branded upsell strategy. And then honestly, one of the things we always revert back to is looking at the data. You know, if one of those, if, you know, I would say try it out. They’re so similar. Try out some of those more general, higher level, broader keywords that might encompass both of those mm-hmm.

Gefen:

And if one of them is significantly outperforming the other, then go with that one. You know, listen to the data because Amazon or Walmart, wherever you’re running ads on, they’re gonna reward that product more than the other one. So it will naturally increase in ranking if it’s performing better. So my opinion and what we do at vendors is we just test, right? If products are similar enough, we’re gonna advertise on that keyword. If the data comes back and says that they perform about the same, well then we’re gonna go even, you know, one level low or one level more granular and say, Hey, what are CPCs? What are conversion rates? Right? Are there ways for us that we can maybe manipulate the CPC so we can get a higher RoAS on one of these products?

Gefen:

And then the final question, of course, is to your business objectives. If there’s one you want to push more than another, then you wanna push that more across your branded targeting as well, as well as those keywords. And then if there’s one that’s more profitable than the other, you’re gonna wanna look to push that as well. And you’re gonna make the backend calculation about potentially if there are lower sales on one of ’em, but higher profitability, what is the right path for you guys? But yeah, it’s really just, Hey, which product is converting better if you test out the same keyword?

Bradley Sutton:

And as far as the other thing, like let’s say he was, was thinking about, Hey, what, if I’m raising the ceiling here you know, like, like one thing that let’s say you absolutely want to have, be at the top of the, you know, top of search from a Helium 10 standpoint like let’s say I’m using Keyword Tracker. I could have the keyword on boost. And for those who don’t know what boost means is that little rocket ship in front of a keyword and then it’s checking like 24 times a day in different browsing scenarios. And then what I could do is kind of, you know, start experimenting with lowering both bids. Like maybe I have an equal bid for both and then make sure I’m still at the, you know, showing up in the search results. I don’t have to check and refresh the page every time I just use Keyword Tracker. And then, you know, once I start seeing that somebody else takes my top position, well now I kind of know where that artificial ceiling might be. So guys make sure that you don’t, you don’t just blindly change your bids raising or lowering, but, but know how it’s affecting your placement there in the search results.

Gefen:

Honestly, you’ll find that I think that Bradley and I are gonna be saying that a lot in this conversation, which is to look at the data, right? When we can make assumptions, especially as business owners, a lot of businesses make assumptions about knowing the products and knowing the competitors or the keywords that are relevant. And you know, you might be right in certain scenarios, but at the end of the day, we are beholden to these marketplace’s algorithms, and however those algorithms are indexing or looking at our products, and then the customers inside those marketplaces are buying them is really what’s going to be able to accelerate sales. And so, as Bradley mentioned, if we’re gonna see a lower CPC, or excuse me, a higher CPC and a lower conversion rate, then that data are making it very obvious. Let’s, let’s lower the bids. If it’s high CPC, high conversion rate, a little more challenging, high conversion rate, low CPC, then we know to raise, to lean into that even if it’s against the same keyword for two, for two similar products.

Bradley Sutton:

So, guys, that was actually a clip from yesterday’s Tacos Tuesday. We do that every month, once a month, we’re going forward we’re gonna be inviting a guest expert on PPC in, and we’re going to have a tacos Tuesday strategy session all on PPC where we go over your questions. There were about probably like 12 other questions in that whole session. And guess what? You’re not gonna have to wait too long to listen to those. You’ll be able to hear that this Saturday on this Saturday’s Serious Sellers Podcast episode. So this very next one is gonna be our first ever on the podcast Tacos Tuesday, where we go over all of your top PPC questions. Make sure to tune in on Saturday for that episode. So now let’s talk keyword research. Getting ready for 2023. This is we’re gonna be talking about different strategies also on tomorrow’s BBL especially with keyword research, but things that’ll set you on the right track that you can start doing, you know, now one of them is, Hey, how can I find keywords in an instant that maybe not only am I not ranking highly for, maybe I’m not even ranking at all on the top seven pages yet.

Bradley Sutton:

My competitors are in like the top 10. Let me show you how you can quickly do that step by step here. All right? So step one is just to go to your main keyword on Amazon. I mean, there are different ways to do this, but, but this is the way I like to do it. Go to your main keyword and then it’s very important. Run Xray and make the first product you click. This is important. Make the first part product, you click the checkbox, your product that makes you the seed product or you the one that we’re gonna compare everybody else to. So what I did was I chose our Manny’s Mysterious Oddities coffin shelf. I clicked it first, and then I clicked some of the other top coffin shelves in this niche that I think are my direct competitors. And then I hit the button, run Cerebro right from X-ay, one click and that’s all I need.

Bradley Sutton:

And it pulled up all of the keywords that these products are ranking for those over 6,000 of them here in Cerebro. Now, the way to instantly see where you are not ranking at all is like a little-known, I don’t know if I wanna say secret, but a little-known strategy. When I go to the Position Rank Filter inside Cerebro, I put a min zero and a max zero. And that means, hey, I am not ranked, my seed product is not ranked. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the first advanced rank filter, and I’m gonna say minimum just one. That means that, hey, at least one of these competitor products is about to match the criteria I’m about to put, what is those criteria? Well, that’s the second advanced rank filter column. And I’m gonna say minimum rank one through, let’s just say 15.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is really simple, what I’m saying to Helium 10. And then, and obviously, I’m explaining this, so it took me two minutes to explain it, but this literally takes 10 seconds, is I’m saying, Hey, Helium 10 out of these three products and all the keywords that they rank for, show me the keywords where I am not ranked at all the last time Helium 10 checked, but at least one of my competitors is ranked in the top 15 on page one. That’s pretty deep. You’re like, you can’t do this with any other tool out there. And I’m gonna go ahead and apply these filters. Let’s see how many, if any come up here. I mean, ideally zero would come up here, right? If you guys are absolutely crushing it, but I know I’m not crushing it that well here. So, okay, I see a whole bunch, you know, I, I’m, I’m gonna filter this out to like keywords that have like at least 300 search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me just whittle this down a little bit more. And here we got five keywords. Look at this. Here’s a great keyword that I don’t know why I’m not ranking for it, but it says creepy decor. This keyword has got a thousand search volumes. I am not ranked at all, but if I were to look at my competitor’s rank average, look at this. The other guy is ranked number 12. Witchy room decor, room decor goth, gothic decor. So these are keywords that I’m not ranked for. Now, the next quick step is the question is, am I not ranked just because maybe my listing is not optimized for these keywords, or am I not ranked because I am not even indexed, I’m not even searchable for this. There is a quick way to find out. So what I’m going to do here is I’m gonna hit this export button, and then I’m going to copy this to the clipboard.

Bradley Sutton:

And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to open up the tool Frankenstein, and I want to extract all of the individual keywords to see if there’s one keyword that I’m just not indexed for. So I paste all of those keywords and there are only five of them here. But when you are doing it, you might have a hundred or more, right? And then I wanna see what are just the individual keywords, one word or phrase per line. And I see here the individual keywords are creepy, decor, witchy, room, and goth sticker. Like I’m pretty sure I’m indexed for room and decor and things like that. But let’s just make sure, let’s, let’s not rely on my own intuition. So now I copy these individual keywords, and now I’m going to go into Index Checker. Index Checker is what Helium 10 has to make sure that I am indexed.

Bradley Sutton:

So I paste those nine keywords right here. And the only thing I really need to do, is I don’t need to put this seller id, I’m just gonna get the ASIN of my product. All right? So let me just grab the ASIN of my product and I’m gonna put it into Index Checker here. And now again, the difference of what Helium 10 is doing is it is checking if I am searchable, indexed and ranking mean different things. I already know I’m not ranking. I saw that in Cerebro. But the question is, am I indexed? And then look here, every single keyword I am indexed for except for this one called sticker. So now instantly, now I know, hey, the reason why I am not ranking for it is just that I’m maybe not optimized, or I’m not pushing it in PPC at all because I am indexable or I am searchable for all of these keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So then the next step is for the keyword. If I want to rank for a sticker, I gotta put the sticker into my listing or figure out why I’m not indexed. But for the others, I now know I’m indexed. So now it’s just a matter of, hey, if I really wanna rank for these keywords, well what am I gonna do on the PPC side or maybe listing optimization side to get relevant in front of Amazon for it? So, guys, this is just a quick and easy thing that you guys can do that I want you guys to do before 2023 is again, check for the keywords where you are not even in the search results, the first seven pages of the search results, but at least one of your competitors is like in the top 10 or 15. And then check what insights you can get from there. Alright, guys. I hope this episode was helpful to you. I wish you guys the best of success in the last few weeks here of Q4 trying to get those Q4 sales. And I’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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