We are joined by Helium 10’s Product Manager, Vince Montero. Vince is the Product Manager for Helium 10’s PPC tool, ADS. During his 14 year career in digital marketing, he built his expertise around the latest ad-tech in both America and the UK spanning everything from Affiliate Marketing to Mobile Marketing at an app development firm. As a consultant since 2016, he’s focused on helping Amazon sellers advertise effectively on Amazon and brings that experience to Helium 10 with the goal of designing the ultimate PPC tool. On this episode, we discuss strategies going into the holidays, how to find the right keywords to test for PPC, and Vince’s number one recommendation for any seller during this busy season.
Date: December 11 2020
Episode: 74
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Vince Montero, Product Manager for Helium 10’s PPC Tool, ADS.
Subtitle: Strategies for the Holidays and PPC Tips
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-74-ppcholiday-tips-w-helium-10s-vince-montero/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Vince Montero, Product Manager for Helium 10’s PPC tool, ADS.
Vince has worn many hats throughout his career in digital marketing but he found his strength in working with teams and amazing clients. Vince shared strategies for the Holidays and some PPC Tips for eCommerce Sellers.
If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!
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Norman 0:01
Hey everybody, it’s Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the rise of the micro brands.
Norman 0:19
Oh, alright, so for today’s show I’m going to be talking about or I’m going to be talking with Vince Montero over and Helium 10. He’s a project manager over there and it’s a hot topic, PCP or PCP.
Norman 0:36
It’s PVC. My head’s all over the map right now. It’s too close to the holiday season in sales. So I’m just going a little bit crazy right now. So you know what? If I blow it, I blow it during this call. But anyways, yeah, maybe you can laugh at me. Put in the comment section, I’m out of space right now. But anyways, Vince is going to be joining me today and we’re going to be talking about a hot topic and that’s your holiday PPC tips, a few strategies and Vince is number one recommendation for any holiday season. So anyways, Kelsey, join me.
Kelsey 1:14
Hello, don’t worry. We’ll get through it together.
Norman 1:17
Well, we. Yeah. I can count on you, buddy.
Kelsey 1:20
Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I’m here for.
Norman 1:23
I know.
Kelsey 1:24
Okay, it looks like we have Marcia joining us from Arizona. We actually are here in Canada, and we just got a bunch of snow.
Norman 1:35
So I was just telling Kelsey, just before the call. I’m in this little room and I’m freezing and he has too.
Kelsey 1:43
Yes, that is correct. Yes. So if you’re new to the show, please go ahead and like and share this video. It does a whole lot of good for us. Gets eyes on the show. But also, we want to know how you guys are doing. It’s December, we’re going into the holiday season. How are your sales doing? What’s going on with you? What’s new and exciting? Put that in the comment section. Or just let us know where you’re watching from because our group is growing every day. So it’s great to see you. We have Rad joining us as well.
Norman 2:13
Hey Rad. Guzman as well, he was the big winner last podcast.
Kelsey 2:23
All right. Let’s see who else we got. We got Mark joining us.
Norman 2:27
How do you know this? All I see is Facebook user.
Kelsey 2:30
Yeah, I got magic powers. No, I have my phone next to me that shows.
Norman 2:36
Oh, okay.
Kelsey 2:37
All right. This is Marina. Say hi to Wendy. She’s listening with me on speaker in her house. Hi, Wendy. How’s it going? Okay, and Marcia. Don’t forget the invite to come visit. We can host a show from Sunshine. Ooh, very nice.
Norman 2:54
That would be so nice.
Kelsey 2:56
All right. But yes, getting back to it. So if you’re interested in joining our group, you can go search Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. If you missed an episode, if you catch this right at the end, you can always find all the episodes on YouTube. They’re full episodes. We also put out a new short episode every time.
Norman 3:20
Hey. You’re taking my line.
Kelsey 3:22
Social media?
Norman 3:25
Huh? It’s social media. But like, I have one little line here and you steal it from me. Now, I’m gonna have to make something up. Thank you.
Kelsey 3:33
You’re welcome. We got Nathan, and Milos. Hi. Welcome to the show. Hope you guys enjoy it. But let’s just jump into it.
Norman 3:45
Hold it. Now, I gotta say my line.
Kelsey 3:47
Okay. So the floor is yours.
Norman 3:49
All right. Thank you, sir. So look, if you’re listening to this on a replay, just skip by everything and you can just skip this part where Kelsey is being annoying. Very good and also, if you’re on my Facebook profile page, you can always skip over to Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy on my fan page where you’ll get all the episodes, full episodes, some really great content and a bunch of video clips. So if anybody has any questions, just put them over into the right hand column and we will answer them. Now sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. Enjoy the show. See you later Kels and welcome Vince.
Vince 4:34
Hey, Norm.
Norman 4:35
Vince, how are you?
Vince 4:37
I’m very good. Thank you.
Norman 4:39
Oh my gosh.
Vince 4:40
I’m not as cold as you. I need some Helium 10 swag. Yeah, yeah. I’ve got you’ve got a new logo, we’ve got classic. So I’ll send you some and it’s super comfy too.
Norman 4:57
I woke up this morning to snow. So beautiful Toronto.
Vince 5:00
Yeah, I didn’t realize you were in Canada. That’s awesome. Yeah. I’ve always wanted to visit.
Norman 5:06
That’s why I have the beard. I’m close to the North Pole.
Vince 5:08
Keeps you warm.
Norman 5:10
You know what? This is gonna be a great topic. It’s perfect timing for the holiday season. We’re in the holiday season, but not only this season, but other seasons and maybe Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, other holidays as well. So this will be perfect for people to look back and re listen to this. So Vince, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit of what you do over at Helium 10?
Vince 5:39
Sure. I’m the product manager at Helium 10 for ads, which is our PPC management tool that I’ve been working on for just over a year and my background is as a consultant that actually I was a consultant for two and a half years before joining Helium 10. But specifically doing Amazon. Prior to that, I was still a consultant, but I was just doing digital marketing in general, which is my background. I’ve got 15 years just doing digital advertising everything from banner display ads to mobile ads, we’re brand new. So I was consulting and picked up a client that had been doing Amazon advertising and couldn’t really figure it out and he brought it to me and said, Hey, Vince, can you figure this out? Because I can’t do it. Luckily, I had worked on so many ad, eCom ad, ad tech platforms before that, I picked it up pretty quickly and within two years, it became my bread and butter. Like, I just had Amazon clients within a short period of time. Then Helium 10 reached out to me and said, Hey, we’re looking to build out a tool specific to PPC. They had not done that yet and they wanted to get started the process. But they didn’t have anyone that was really familiar with PPC at that time and yeah, so I came on board, and I’ve been directing gutting that ship ever since.
Norman 7:04
Oh, nice. Before we get into any questions, I just wanted to say hi to a bunch of people, I see a few new people, I see a bunch of people from the community.
Vince 7:17
So somebody in your community is also in my community because they said, Great to see, have two tacos Tuesdays in one week. So yeah. So every Tuesday at 10, I do tacos Tuesday. It’s my Ask me anything. It’s my PPC live session. So yeah, but one of your viewers is getting me twice this week.
Norman 7:40
Oh, very good. What’s that Kels?
Kelsey 7:43
I believe that’s Mark Conch, He’s in our Facebook group.
Vince 7:49
I just joined your Facebook group, too. So we’ll be able to help, be able to chat with you.
Norman 7:53
That’s awesome. That’s one of the things about this podcast is a lot of our guests join the group and it just helps out so much when you’ve got these top experts that are in the group, and you’re able to ask questions and get real answers. I’ve gone into so many groups, and I see these people answering these questions, and they’re just wrong information and you feel bad, like, you don’t want to go in and say, hey, look, you’re giving people wrong, or you steer them in the wrong direction. But, it’s the quality of the group and we do have really incredible people. So other than that, I just wanted to say hi to Milos, and Bee, and Darwin. Simon. Hey, Simon and a few other people.
Kelsey 8:38
This is from Grove. Grove is a new Facebook. I don’t believe he’s commented before. So right. Welcome, Grove. First comment and Marina.
Norman 8:49
I hope I’m saying your name correctly, Erica.
Kelsey 8:54
Yes. Oh, before we get started, there were a couple of new users or new people, new sellers, and they don’t know what Helium 10 is. So if we can just quickly jump into that?
Vince 9:06
Sure. So Helium 10 is best known or we are best known for a keyword research tool. So actually, it’s a good point. So the reason I came on board for Helium 10 is because I had been using their tools already. I was using our keyword research tool, actually have two. One’s called Magnet, the other one’s called Cerebro. Cerebro uses more ASINs or products that you can enter to look for, to do some research. There’s Blackbox, there’s Frankenstein, there’s Scribbles. It’s basically a suite of tools that help you with everything from keyword research, product research, competitor research, it helps you finalize your listings, how to create your titles and bullets and so on. So there’s a whole suite of tools that actually started out with Scribbles is the name of the tool that Helium 10 started at, which was just to help you product listing, but it’s expanded and now we’ve got 20 plus tools. We’ve got a new inventory management tool, we’ve got market competitor, research tools, keyword manager tools, and of course, my PPC tool. So if any of your users go to helium10.com, they’ll see a whole suite of tools. But my specialty, again, is the PPC focus. But I was lucky enough again, to have the experience with those tools that I knew immediately what I wanted to do when I came in and how to leverage those tools with PPC, which is what I’ll speak with.
Norman 10:34
Oh, I think it’s important that we talk about keyword research as part of this topic. Helium 10 is definitely something that I use. I don’t have any relationship with Helium 10 and as anybody who listened to this podcast before, I don’t take affiliates. So on the podcast, this is strictly content. I love working with Helium 10. I’m sure that we have a bonus or a link that we can provide any new users that want to check it out.
Norman 11:09
I forget what it is and Kels, maybe after the podcast, we can talk to Vince about that. But I know that we have some bonus, I don’t know if it’s 50% off the first month or something. Again, no, I will not accept affiliate commission. So anything that you hear is we give you the best discount possible and it’s up to you to make your own choice. But Helium is one of the things that I use, you can check it out, it’s also got some really great content in it as well. If you get to the different levels, you’ll see and it also in the when you go into the app, you’re going to be able to see an area where you can learn. So they put together some really good training in there for each module. But let’s get into today’s subject, shall we? Yeah, and that is holiday selling.
Vince 12:00
So yeah, which stands for pay per click.
Norman 12:02
Pay per click. Yep. So these are those ads for anybody that’s new, you’re selling on Amazon and you want to get some extra traffic, you can turn on sponsored ads or sponsored brands. Why don’t we talk about it? So let’s talk a little bit about that and then yeah.
Vince 12:20
So when you’re on Amazon, and you do a search, typically what you’re going to see as an ad right at the top, it’s typically three different products, that’s called a sponsored brand. Someone’s paid, whatever that brand is that it’s in there, they’ve paid to be in that in that spot, it’s prime position right under the search bar and then you’ve got your search results, right and typically, your top four search results are again, going to be a sponsored ad, they’re going to be paid advertising. So if you’re a new seller, it’s one of the easiest ways or best ways to actually get your product viewed and seen is by getting those placements and so that’s the holy grail is getting those top four placements, but there’s other placements on the page, as well. There’s other types of ad units that Amazon has and it’s called PPC or pay per click, because you as a seller only pay if somebody clicks on the ad. So if you’re bidding on particular keywords, and your ad shows up, that’s just an impression, you’re not going to get charged if somebody just sees your ad on the page, you only get charged if the person clicks on it. That’s why it’s called pay per click.
Norman 13:29
Right. Okay, so there are a lot of different sellers, there’s beginners, intermediate and advanced sellers on here. Why don’t we just because I know a lot of people are looking at the holiday season and pro got holiday questions. Let’s talk about your strategies going into the holidays.
Vince 13:46
Sure, yeah, one of the things that we suggest and I actually had a webinar with Amazon advertising itself a few weeks ago, actually probably about a month ago at this point and so what we did was we just went through some different tips and topics. One of the things that I do recommend, now, this only works if you’re brand registered. But if you are brand registered, you get what’s called brand analytics and that’s kind of an advanced research tool, a keyword search tool and what’s really cool about brand analytics is that you can look at last year and see what users were actually, or what shoppers were typing. So you could go to last year, maybe put your product type in there and just see if there’s any kind of Christmas related keywords in there and that is something that we suggest trying at least testing out. If you see your product with a kind of maybe a gift or Christmas, let’s say it’s a candle. Maybe you can see Christmas candles. If there’s ways that you can make your product a little bit more relevant to people what they’re searching for right now, then that’s one of the things that we suggest that you do. Now, a lot of new sellers of course don’t have access to brand analytics again. It’s only if you’re brand registered that you do get access to that. But even if you don’t have brand analytics, you can still test things out and right now is a really good time to do it. It’s only the 9th, you’ve got a lot of people that are still searching for ideas and Christmas gifts and things like that. So, if your product is relevant, if you think your product might be good as a gift, for example, this is a good thing that to test out and all you gotta do is just figure out, Okay, again, if you’re selling candles, maybe you just change the title of your product listing to a winter candles or seasonal candle or holiday candle. Again, sticking with that candle product. But if you can update your listing, then again, you might get picked up for those types of keywords and if, again, users are browsing, a lot of shoppers right now are using Amazon for discovery.
Vince 15:56
Which couple years ago, they weren’t like, Google was your discovery engine. Amazon is where you went when you knew what you wanted. People are now just skipping Google and just going straight to Amazon now. So when they’re searching for ideas, christmas gift ideas, if you can take some of those words and put them into your listing your title, maybe your bullets, we definitely see that that’s one way to take advantage of this increased holiday traffic that we’re seeing right now.
Norman 16:22
You’re getting most of that information out of brand analytics, or are you just going after keywords?
Vince 16:30
Yeah, so looking at brand analytics again, and looking at your product for last year, you can see what types of searches that shoppers are doing, which is pretty cool. It’s not limited to just your product either. It’s like if you do it right now, actually, for brand analytics for last year, December of 2019, you would see most shoppers were searching for things like air pods and electronics. It was like tronic keywords and then you see some like Christmas gift ideas and things like that is what you see for last year. Who knows what’s going to be for this year, given that it’s a completely different shopping environment. But, looking at that kind of information last year, it gives you an idea of what people are searching for and again, all you do is type in whatever your product is, you type that in and then you can see what type of words that include your product in it were being used last year. But again, even if you don’t have access to brand analytics, it’s still worth figuring out or deciding, hey, yeah, my product might be a good gift, right? So think about some keywords that shoppers might be looking for, that might include your gift in it, and then include those in your listings. If you’re running sponsored brands and sponsored display, which again, is only available for Brand Registry users, you can even update your title of your ad copy as well to include some of those keywords. So those are just some ideas that we do have. Now for PPC specific camp, so not just talking about your listings and maybe your ad copy, what we also suggest you do, or maybe test and again, right now’s a good time to do that, because it’s the 9th. Figure out, some Christmas related type keywords and set up a seasonal campaign, you can set one up that starts tomorrow and ends after Christmas and we suggest that because you don’t want to just throw seasonal type keywords, if you’re running PPC, you don’t want to just throw those keywords into your existing campaigns, your evergreen campaigns, right? Your ongoing campaigns, because it might skew the results. So if you want to test the same kind of concept with PPC, by actually bidding on those types of keywords, then, which is a great thing to do, we suggest that you actually just put those in their own campaigns and then again, make sure that you use the end date. Amazon does have the capability to include end dates in your campaign. So if you do that, if you run a seasonal campaign, put an end date, then you don’t have to worry about it, you don’t have to worry about shutting it off after Christmas. You can focus on being with your friends and family safely, of course, and let your PPC campaigns turn off. But conceptually, this also works for any sellers and actually any tips that we’re talking about today are really good for if you’ve got products that are fitness related or health related, we’re going to see just like we do every January, right? We’re going to see that big bump in people with their new year’s resolutions. Right? So same concept. You might have keywords that you think about that might be related to New Year’s resolutions, like people trying to rededicate themselves to their fitness, which is something I’m definitely going to do as well in January. But if you do that, you can set end dates and say, end of January, that type of campaign, this type of keyword, probably won’t work anymore but it might work at the beginning of January. So end dates for campaigns are definitely something that we recommend if you’re doing this type of strategy, which is targeting specific holiday or seasonal related keywords with PPC.
Norman 20:13
So one of the things I always like to do is, and this is more for the new seller, well, maybe some sellers don’t know this. But Amazon gift cards usually run the cycle up until the mid January. Anyways, we still see a pretty good flow of sales coming after Christmas, most new sellers would think, Oh, it’s done. You don’t see that. It continues on until usually mid January. Yeah, so keep that in mind and the other thing with your PPC, so you’re talking about optimizing your titles and your listing. Another thing that we do is we optimize the images in our enhanced brand content, or A plus pages, or even in your slide deck to show the product in a stocking or some sort of under the tree or something like that. People think of it as a gift and if you’re targeting that keyword.
Vince 21:08
Same idea.
Norman 21:09
Same idea and also, if you’re doing sponsored brands, well, you can make it more of, especially that first image, you can make it a holiday image and you’re completely within TOS.
Vince 21:22
Yeah, and the title because sponsored brands, of course you control the headline, right? So you can put in, I don’t know, a gift or a holiday gift for mom. Best gift for dad, well stay away from best, but you can tweak your ad copy and then that will then go along with these images that you’ve added that have some holiday kind of focus in them and again, it’s really great because Amazon’s shoppers are definitely in the Amazon ecosystem, getting ideas. So leverage that, you have the ability to just use those keywords, update your copy, update your images, like you said, that’s another great idea.
Norman 22:04
I just got to give a shout out to my old artillery buddy, Mr. Apperlry. Line baba baba line, my friend. So let’s see any questions that have come up?
Kelsey 22:16
Yeah, we got a couple of questions. So first off, we have a question about Europe. Hey Vince, when are you going to let us have the PPC tool for Europe? This is from Simon.
Vince 22:30
It’s available for Europe.
Norman 22:32
There you go Simon.
Vince 22:35
So there’s Helium 10 tools that might not work for certain European countries, but the ads tool, pretty much it as long as you have access to that European account through the login that you use for Helium 10. We can still see that data and we pull that data from Amazon. So you shouldn’t have a problem with that. But if you do, that’s definitely something that you want to bring up with our support team and help take care of that. But it is available.
Norman 23:10
You started to say stay away from a word, you said best. Are there words to stay away from PPC?
Vince 23:20
Yeah. Amazon doesn’t like it when you try to say and obviously you can’t say sale, right? But yeah, number one, best, things like that. 100% yeah, whatever. Anything that sells that sounds too salesy, Amazon will, sometimes they get through, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the moderators see that and go, Oh, no, that’s too close to being sales pitchy and so they’ll reject the ad copy, and then you just have to tweak it again to make it go through. So yeah, I mean, just in general, that’s something I suggest that you don’t get pained or deemed I should say, by Amazon.
Norman 24;01
Yeah and I just have another comment about keywords in general. For me, and I don’t know it’s the same terminology, but for us, I call them buying keywords versus browsing keywords and I use the example of a dog treat, let’s take a bully stick. So you can go in and search Helium 10, and you get your like in Cerebro. So if you’re new, you can check it out. You can type in different ASINs or your products into a search area, you can search the competition, and it’ll bring up their keywords. So what this allows you to do is check out search volume on keywords, and the competition. So let’s say that you’re going down and you’re selling dog treats, okay, bully sticks, all of a sudden you see dog treats, or pet treats. Well, that’s so general and if you’re going to go in and put this on PPC and create a campaign, you will blow a ton of money on it. First of all, it’ll be expensive and then second of all, it’ll be useless and then you see, Oh, okay, let’s get a little bit more specific dog treat instead of pet treat. Same thing, still very broad tons of search volume, very broad, dog chew, same thing. Those are all browsing keywords. Now you go down to a more of a buying keyword bully stick this pet owner, sorry, if I just whacked the mic, but this pet owner knows that they want a specific product, a bully stick, but it has still 200,000 search volume per month, and you’re gonna still even though it’s a buying keyword, you’re going to get killed. So now what I call primary long tails, I’ll go down and I’ll try to see what has higher search volume, but is a little bit longer primary keyword and that might be organic bully stick, natural bully stick, odorless bully stick, grass fed bully stick.
Vince 26:01
Bully stick for a big dog.
Norman 26:02
Yeah and then we take that this is where I love working with this tool, you can do it with other keyword research tools, too, you take those two keywords and usually there’s an advanced search, you put the two keywords there, and you search that whole list and you’re going to come up with a list of six inch organic bully sticks, 12 inch organic, natural grass fed organic bully sticks, organic bully sticks made in the USA, and you take those keywords, and those are your gold. Yeah, you create a silo for each one of those and now you can start targeting those keywords and it’s not the keywords that everybody are kind of targeting. So anyways, that’s one way of targeting keywords and that’s not the only way. But that’s one way that we try to, when we’re training people it’s, understand buying, understand what’s buying and browsing.
Vince 26:59
That’s so great. So I call those keywords that are high, very broad, but high search volume, I call those loss leaders. So basically, they are your product, but very high search volume, you’re very broad. So if you have a budget, you should try to include some of those types of keywords into your PPC because obviously it has really high search volume, it might not convert very well but you’re branding yourself. Every single time, potentially someone puts in that very broad keyword of bully stick, which has a lot of searches. If you pop up, impression wise at least if you’re visible in your in every time someone searches that eventually your product might stick in the shoppers mind and they might come back and put in your brand, specifically. So yeah, one of the things that I do train as well is to figure out what your loss leaders are, what are the keywords that you can afford to just be? What are your branding keywords like you might not make any sales on them. But they’re definitely going to help you for your visibility or exposure and all of that it’s good for your branding of your product, which eventually then helps with teacher sales and organic sales.
Norman 28:12
Right. Great. Okay, it looks like there’s a bunch of questions, right Kels? There’s a bunch of questions.
Vince 28:19
I have more tips.
Norman 28:22
Oh yes, okay. Let’s take a couple of questions and then we’ll get back to the more tips.
Kelsey 28:30
All right. So let’s do, Vince. What do you think about the option that we can display our ad on their videos like Amazon Prime videos?
Vince 28:39
I think you should do it. What do you think when you see a video? You click on it, it’s more engaging, and depending on how you do it, it definitely makes you stand out from the competition. So if you’re brand registered, and you have access to sponsored brand ads, which is the only ad unit that you can actually use for video, definitely make a video. I’ve seen videos that have good click through rates that are even, they’re not the best videos. They’re just they happen to have a video and your competitors don’t. So yeah, if you have the time to make videos right now, now’s the time definitely to get them out there.
Kelsey 29:16
Okay, I’ll just do two more for now. Darwin, I use PPC to rank to the top of page one, usually 30% A cost.
Vince 29:24
That’s awesome.
Kelsey 24:35
In your experience, how long after hitting top five can I turn down my spend and by how much do I drop my spend?
Vince 29:31
If you’re top of page one, and you’re 30% A cost, Darwin, I would stay there. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing good. I would ask what’s your TACoS? What’s your total A cost? I would say which is basically take your PPC spend and what’s your total sales? If that number which obviously will be lower than your 30% A cost, keep doing keep doing what you’re doing and the reason I say that is because what you always want to do is be in the consideration cycle of the shopper. Right, there’s always new shoppers coming on. Some are browsing somewhere, just getting ideas. So if you’re top of the page, and you’re staying at a general low A cost, and even lower TACoS, you want to stay there and that’s gonna continue to help with your PPC sales, and it will continue to help your organic sales.
Kelsey 30:19
Okay, great and our last question for now from Rad. Hello Vince, Helium 10 is the best and your Taco Tuesday. Is it possible that you can use some graphs to show the differences in PPC?
Vince 30:31
The graph? Sure, yeah. I’ve actually sort of done a little demos now in my PPC Taco Tuesdays. I think last week, I actually went into brand analytics and showed people how to do what I just suggested for brand analytics. So yeah, I’m happy to do that. I think it’s a good idea. Just in general, there’s three different ad types. For PPC, there’s sponsor products, which is what you get if you’re a new seller, you just focus on sponsored products. If you’re brand registered, then it sponsored brands and sponsored display and yeah, I’d be happy to explain what the differences are at that next one.
Kelsey 31:09
Okay great. Yeah, that’s it for now. We’ll get back to more questions afterwards. But yeah.
Norman 31:15
All right, more tips from Vince.
Vince 21:17
Awesome. So another thing that we like to tell, especially for newer sellers, is that if you have campaigns that are already running, which is great, we want you to manage expectations by kind of preparing yourself for this holiday traffic. You should already be seeing the increase, since Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but then it tapers down a little bit and it picks back up like this week. So what we suggest is that you make sure that you’re managing your budget so that your campaigns don’t shut off during potentially prime time. So one of the ways that you can do that, obviously, if you’ve been selling your product, if you sold the same product last year, look at what happened last year. If you have that data on hand, you might be able to project what to expect this month. So depending on when you started with Helium 10, we also have that data in ads, we actually save up to two years worth of data in PPC. But, take a look at what happened last year and Amazon says to expect at least twice, two times the number of clicks because of the increased traffic that we have right now. Increased shoppers, new people to eCommerce because of the pandemic. Amazon’s projecting that they’re going to see double the amount of clicks, same thing, same period as last year, to this year. So if you have that data last year, take a look at it and make sure you look at your budgets and say, can I afford twice the amount of clicks this month versus last month, and then make sure that you adjust your budgets. Even if you don’t have data from last year, just look at your data from the past couple of months, maybe October, maybe early November, take a look at what your clicks were, what your spend was, and again, anticipate maybe two times the clicks from those months, because we’re going to see, and we’re already seeing a lot more shoppers in Amazon. So you want to adjust your budgets to compensate for that and again, you want to do that because the worst thing you can do is have a campaign that’s been running and running successfully. But all of a sudden, you’ve got this increase in traffic and your campaign shuts off because your budget was too low. We see it happen all the time and what happens when your campaign shuts off is that your competitors get that slot, for whatever keywords you’re bidding upon, they’re going to get that slot. So compensating for the increasing amount of clicks in your budget is definitely an important thing that we suggest that users do and along that same kind of vein, you want to adjust your A cost targets. So if your goal is to remain profitable with your PPC during this holiday season, that means you really need to know what your breakeven A cost is. Your breakeven A cost is whatever that point is where you’ll start to lose money from advertising after your product sales. So taking into account maybe your cost of goods, maybe your FBA fees. But whatever you’re at that breakeven A cost is, I would suggest making that your actual goal for this month of this increased traffic, because it really shouldn’t be about making money off of your PPC this month, it should be about how much exposure can I get from all these new shoppers that are coming online that they might not buy immediately but they might buy next week. Depending on your product, they might buy next month. So that’s my suggestion. If you really want to take advantage of this increased traffic is to be a little bit more aggressive in your approach. Obviously the higher your A cost target is, the more you’re able to stay on, the more search terms you’re able to look at and the more clicks you’re able to afford. So if you aim too low during this holiday month, then you might over optimize, you might turn off keywords that may be spent a little bit too much right before a potential sale, or search terms, you might make the negative too early if your A cost target is too low this month. So, again, it’s all about managing expectations. So take a look at the data, make sure that your budget is is healthy enough to account for those increased impressions and clicks and traffic and then make sure your expectations with your A costs are going to be in line with what this month is going to shave out and if you do get afraid of A cost being too high, again, I’ll circle back to our TACoS, which is what we talked about every Tuesday, Tacos Tuesday, look at your TACos, as long as your TACoS is at 20% or below, then you’re actually doing pretty good. 10% as a goal for TACoS. But take into account those your total sales line, when you’re looking at your PPC costs, don’t just look at your PPC sales, take into account that total sales line, and that will make it a little bit more bearable to have an aggressive A cost this month and at the end of the day, when you’re selling on Amazon, the goal isn’t just PPC, your goal is total sales. What are your total sales is your organic plus your PPC. So we like that’s why we talked about it as much as we do is because we know that that is the goal, right? The Holy Grail of selling on Amazon is actually organic traffic or organic sales. But we also do know that PPC helps with organic sales. The more visibility and exposure you have, just like a billboard on the side of the road, the more times you see it, you may not need whatever that product is, first few times that you see it, but down the line, you might need that product and you’re gonna remember that brand name because you’ve seen it so many times. That’s what advertising is for. It’s the same on Amazon. So that’s why we promote taking into account your total sales.
Norman 36:53
So Erica has got a question. So can you explain what A cost is?
Vince 36:57
Advertising cost of sales, it’s similar to ROIs, but it’s basically how much you spend on an PPC before you get a sale. Right? So if your product is $50, and you spent $50 on PPC to get that sale, that’s 100% A costs because 100% of the spend went is what you actually made in profit. So it’s just a calculation between the amount of spend that you have divided by Sorry, it’s your spend divided by your sales effectively and TACoS is taking it a step further. It’s looking at PPC spend, but it’s dividing it by your total sales. So not just your PPC sales, taking your PPC spend divided by total sales, and that’s your TACoS, your total A costs.
Norman 37:49
Kelsey, can we just put some examples in the talking points of A cost? Well, I will put the formula in there just for anybody who’s not quite sure of the two.
Vince 38:00
Actually I have slides, I think I mentioned them to you guys and I do have one of my slides that has a deeper explanation of A cost.
Norman 38:09
There we go. Kels, you don’t have to worry about anything.
Vince 38:13
I’ll tweak these, I’ll create a deck specifically for this conversation and we can put it in the Facebook group and let your viewers take a look at the information.
Norman 38:26
That’s great. Before we get into anything else, I wanted to talk about the A cost for a second. I hear there’s so many people that talk about Oh, the lowest A cost, I had somebody say oh, we’re at 9% A cost. I’m sitting there in my head thinking, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table, and it’s funny because I’ll talk to some of our clients and I’ll say they’re even running at 20%, or maybe even a little higher, a little lower and the way that we’ll run it, and this comes back to your explanation of TACoS is that we will run campaigns or go into different keyword silos and it takes a bit of time to get the results. So you’ll see all maybe you’re running at 20 or 25%. Now all of a sudden you’re at 40 or 50%. But it’s over a time period, just getting the results of this new silos, so you go really wide on your keywords but your TACoS is going down. So if you’re seeing your TACoS go down even though you’re having a panic attack, saying oh I’m at 49 or 59 I’ve seen 70%. Your TACoS is going down and then as you start to zone in on that silo, have another silo and see how you can work it but don’t be afraid of going above 20%. If you know the reason why you’re doing it, you can break the rule. But for beginners, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t suggest that.
Vince 40:09
Sure, yeah, for beginners is definitely important because you’re watching your budget, obviously. But for beginners, you should already have a high A cost target, right? When you’re a beginner and you’re just launching PPC, I tell users your cost could be 100%. Your A cost goal should be 100% for the first month. Why? Because when you’re launching your campaigns, it’s all about data collection, you want to cast a wide net and you want to get all the search terms, you want to be able to see everything, what’s converting what’s not. You do your keyword research and stuff up front, of course, using Magnet, using Cerebro. But you still have to have a wide net for that first few weeks to a month. So shoot for 100% A cost, you’re not losing money, but you’re not making money on your PPC either. But what you’re doing is you’re getting the data that you need to figure out, Okay, this keyword works at this bit. This search term really works for me, I should try to target that keyword directly on our ads tool does everything I just set up for you automatically. But that is the most important part when you’re launching when you’re brand new is getting the data. So at the beginning, especially you really can’t be afraid of your A costs and then when you have the data, that’s when you whittle it down, that’s when you can trim keywords or search terms, and it will lower that A costs and then at that point, you can start taking into account your TACoS as well.
Norman 41:29
Okay, before we go any further, I think we should talk about the giveaway today.
Vince 41:34
Oh, sure.
Norman 41:35
We’ve got an incredible giveaway that Vince is going to give away his time. So it’s a one on one consult, which I don’t know about you, but you can’t get a one on one consult with Vince. So if you want it, just type in, Kelsey?
Kelsey 41:53
So first of all, I want to make sure because we are getting double winners a lot. So this is strictly for people that haven’t won before.
Norman 42:04
Okay, there we go.
Kelsey 42:06
Yeah, just to make it fair.
Norman 42:07
Guzman?
Norman 42:10
You want to do just a quick hashtag. I want Vince. There we go.
Kelsey 42:16
Okay, so this is Yeah, I want Vince. I think I think Simon has won before, I’m not sure.
Norman 42:24
No Simon just knew I was gonna say that.
Norman 42:27
Tony, make sure you put in the hashtag.
Norman 42:31
I want Vince, that’s what it has to say.
Vince 42:33
Do you guys just look at all of them and then just like?
Norman 42:35
Put it into the wheel of Kelsey.
Vince 42:39
Okay. All right.
Norman 42:41
All right. All right. So we’ll let that go on, guys. It’s a really great giveaway. What, how much time do you have Vince? I want to get through the tips.
Vince 42:48
Yeah, no, I’ve got a few more. So yeah, I’ve got a good 15-20 minutes easily.
Norman 42:52
Okay, so let’s go next and you’re seeing there’s a couple of people that liked this giveaway. So all right.
Vince 43:03
So another tip that I like to share, it’s actually a tip and something that is worth noting that dynamic bids. So dynamic bidding is something that Amazon has some presets for your PPC and historically, it was set to dynamic bids down only, meaning whatever bid that you put on a keyword, Amazon’s gonna bid it down to the point at which it’s going to make a sale without actually going to the bit itself. So generally your that’s where your CPCs are always a little bit lower than what you’re bidding on for a keyword. Well, two things. Number one, that’s no longer the default, the default when you make brand new campaigns as of about maybe a month or two months ago, the default now is up and down. So that’s one thing to note, if you’re an experienced seller, you know what I’m talking about and if you like that your dynamic bid down was set to down only, make sure when you’re making new campaigns go in there and put it back to down only if that’s what you like, dynamic bit up and down means that Amazon will bid down or take your keyword bid and bid down on it for sale if it’s likely to happen. But it will also increase that bid up to 100% if it’s likely to increase conversion, so it’ll double potentially whatever bid that you’re using. So dynamic up and down is both directions and again, that’s now preset to a new campaign. So if you don’t like that, I would suggest if you’re making new campaigns, just check it and then switch it back over to dynamic a down which is what I prefer actually what I recommend, but dynamic bit up and down is something that I do recommend for if you’ve got established campaigns and by established I mean you’re making at least 50 sales a week on this particular product. That is a campaign and that is more established and it might actually benefit from doing dynamic up and down. So if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve done the job, everything we described earlier, which is launching your campaign, getting that chunk of data for that first month, having a high A cost, you can get the data, whittling it down, and then you’re seeing a good amount of sales for your product on a weekly basis. That’s when you might want to try a dynamic bit up and down. Because at that point, you’ve got the formula down, you’ve got the right keywords right bid and so at that point, testing to see if up and down might actually get you increased sales. Amazon said that they’re seeing users that do have again, established campaigns, they’re seeing a 52% lift in sales, if they switch over to dynamic bid up and down. So that is that’s a tip that I do want to share. Two tips. Number one, if it’s a new campaign, go check and flip it back down today and make bid down only and then for established campaigns, if you’re making good sales already, maybe try up and down and see if it actually helps increase your sales and we’re seeing that as well, for campaigns that again, are established, especially during this holiday season, it’s a great idea, because you’ve got a lot of new people coming in, you got a lot more shoppers. If you have a branded keyword campaign, so meaning, which is actually another tip, a campaign that just has your brand keywords in it. So whatever your product is called, maybe try your up and down dynamic bidding for that campaign, because other competitors might be trying to steal your buyers by using your brand as their keywords. So that’s another area that you might want to try your dynamic bid up and down setting on Amazon.
Norman 46:49
Perfect, nice. I love using the brand keywords. One of my clients, I was kind of surprised. So it’s brand name, and then the kitchen utensil and all of a sudden there’s 1500 searches on it.
Norman 47:05
They’re searching for the brand and it’s dirt cheap.
Vince 47:10
Exactly. So that’s what I was saying. That’s what sellers, especially new sellers need to understand is that PPC, it’s just advertising, right? So the more advertising you do, it’s like a commercial. The more times you see it, even though we can typically skip commercials now. But sometimes you see it, you get that brand recognition and then the shopper might come in exactly how you said and just put it in the brand name and whatever generic kitchen utensil it is. So that’s why it’s important A.) to always be in the consideration cycle by using PPC. But B.) it’s also important to have a campaign, I believe it’s important to have a campaign with your branded keywords in it to capture those particular searches. So you can kind of see, just in that type of campaign, you can really see how well my branding efforts are doing right now. Like how branded Emma and what you should see, eventually, if for a new seller, you should have actually started seeing your branded keyword campaign, you should start to see it go up in sales and conversions, while your PPC sales for your standard keywords might even go down a little bit. But you see that shift because you’re doing the right, you’re doing it correctly, you’re using the PPC to brand yourself from the mind of the shopper and then they’re going in and they’re putting that keyword with your brand in it in their search query and they’re finding you and a lot of organic sales come from that too. So not just PPC. But a lot of organic sales will come that way.
Norman 48:44
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize they’re afraid to spend money on PPC. But you could get a 2:1 or 3:1 organic sale ratio from your sponsored ads, and here I mean, here’s the general poll. Here’s a bunch of people that go onto Amazon that are listening today. Do you go and click on the sponsored ad? Or do you go and click on the organic? I bet you this is a good poll. Like let us know what you do. I don’t click on the sponsored ads. I click on the organic listing. But it’s probably psychological.. You see it, you surround and oh, yeah, I trust it as long as the listing’s good.
Vince 49:29
Exactly and to that point, when I see a product in both positions, like their sponsor tab, but then actually see them in the first row of organic then I’m like, Okay, yeah, that’s probably a product that I can believe in because not only are they doing the job of being number one with their PPC but obviously they’re doing a good enough job that they’re organically ranked high enough for whatever keyword I just put in. So I do the same thing, but only because I do this for a living but most shoppers that are out there, this is actually a good poll. So I would actually love to see the results of this poll. If you really do this poll, I would think that most shoppers don’t even know that the first top positions are sponsored, that they are paid. I would bet.
Norman 50:18
Hernia, I hope I said your name right. An organic sale is just one that it’s a natural sale, you’ll see sponsored sales or advertised sales, and it’ll say sponsored on it, or just below it and then you’ll see, for the most part, the second row is just what we call organic, it comes up naturally as a search ranking. So you’ll see the sponsored ones going up across the right, across the bottom, squeezing a few in the middle now.
Vince 50:52
I like to tell new sellers, think of Google. Amazon’s a search engine. That’s all it is. When you’re typing in search, Google’s search engine, that’s all you’re doing. You’re typing in keywords, right? So when you’re on Google and you type a search term, you generally know the ads because we’ve been doing Google and not that we can see okay, that particular thing over here, that’s an ad like somebody paid three plays. But if you go low enough, and your search results on Google, you eventually start to see some titles or articles or whatever it is that don’t have that little ad, that little ad token on it and that’s organic.
Norman 51:31
Perfect. I’m glad we were able to answer that for you. Okay, and one other thing for people that are probably intermediate sellers, there’s probably some advanced sellers that don’t realize this too, but dealing with my clients, a lot of them have not been involved with eCommerce before and they’re actually afraid to spend money. So I just recently had this happen. I had one that had a 5:1 ROAS, Okay, not bad. That’s basically, for every one sale, you’ll get five sales, pretty much. I would be telling the person to be spending all day long if it was $1,000 a day, do a 1000. If it was $5,000 a day for a 5:1 return and if you knew like with that type of return, you should have, I’m just saying normal profit margins, you would be making a killing and so that’s like, just so I don’t cause any confusion. ROAS is just another way of talking about ad spend. So if we go A cost, if you had a low A cost of let’s say, 20%, I do have a client that spends about what is it $200,000 a month in ad spend? He’d spent $400,000 a month. He gets sales. Yeah. So many people are afraid to spend $100 a day or $50 a day or they think that because you’re putting out $500 a day that they’ll even get sales. Right? Just because you put $500 or $1,000 a day doesn’t mean you’re gonna get, that’s not gonna be unless you spend it foolishly, that you’re not going to be taken up on $500 a day.
Vince 53:40
Yeah. The way I counter that is thinking, just letting especially new sellers know PPC is your marketing budget. It’s a line item in your Amazon business. It’s the cost of doing business on Amazon. If you can look at it that way, then you realize, well, the more money I throw into that line item potentially, I’m going to get a higher return. Right?
Norman 54:06
Right. Okay, do you have another tip, I know that we’re going to be doing your number one recommendation at the end.
Vince 54:14
Well, actually, I was gonna get my number one recommendation. But let’s see, I could actually give another tip here.
Norman 54:20
Or we can dive into questions.
Vince 54:22
Why don’t I give my number one tip and then we can dive in?
Norman 54:26
Alright, so drumroll, Kelsey, and the number one tip. This is Vince’s number one tip for the busy selling season.
Vince 54:32
Yes, actually applies to any selling any season, or anytime as you mentioned, but especially right now, again, we have a lot of new shoppers that are on Amazon, that are on all eCommerce platforms, because the pandemic has introduced them to the world of eCommerce. So to take advantage of these new shoppers on Amazon, I highly, highly, highly, highly suggest and you can do this if you’re a new seller or experienced seller, brand registered, not brand registered, please use coupons.
Vince 55:06
Use Amazon coupons, even if you’re just giving a 5% discount on your particular product. If you use Amazon coupons, it’s going to drive more traffic to your listing because they draw the attention of the shopper to your product. That little green badge that you see when you’re on Amazon, if the product next to it doesn’t have it, which, typically it won’t, because a lot of people still don’t take advantage of coupons, you’re going to focus on that particular product tile versus the other ones. Those green little badges, they appear on the coupons page as well, a lot of people don’t know this, there’s actually a coupon section in Amazon. So a lot of sellers know that that’s there and they just go to the coupon section in Amazon and look for products that are there. If you have a coupon on your product, you’re going to be there. If you don’t, then you’re not. But it’s also going to appear in search results and then on product listings as well. So even if you’re a brand new seller, you can put a little bit of budget aside for coupons, they do cost 60 cents per click. But the exposure that you’re going to get, the additional visibility and attention you’re going to draw from those coupons is really invaluable. So that is definitely one thing, you could do at any time of the year. But I think right now, because of the increased traffic, I think that the sellers that take advantage of coupons are really going to see an increase in their CTR. Amazon actually says that they see a 40% increase in click through rate versus products, ads, or trials that don’t have the coupon and Amazon just recently included coupons, those badges in sponsored display. So if you’re running sponsored display product targeting ads, and if you have a coupon, you are actually visible just there. It’s not just in sponsored products that you see that coupon but it’s also now in sponsored display. I’m sure Amazon’s gonna be releasing coupon little badges and different placements. So if you can get ahead of the game, then I would definitely recommend doing that.
Vince 57:12
Now, what I would also recommend is just kind of as a pro tip with coupons is that you schedule the coupon for a single product or a set of products during the most busiest time that you think
your products are going to be. If your products are fitness related products, like we were talking about for New Year’s resolutions, I definitely think increasing your budget, you can also set budgets for coupons. So it’s 60 cents a click, but you can say Amazon, I only want to spend 100 bucks on coupons so you can set that it’s not just going to run through that. But definitely do that and make sure that’s on your top selling products. If you have that data, make sure those little badges are there. Because it’s gonna you’re gonna see a tremendous increase in CTR with those.
Norman 57:59
So I can handle Near’s question here. I was just gonna mention this. So that’s the big question. Do you put percentage or do you put dollars? So one of the things that I found out is if you have a lower priced product, like let’s say you have a bar soap at $10, it’s better to put a discount on a low dollar product like 5%, or 10%, whatever it is. If you put it as $1, it’s going to be insignificant like 5% of $10. So I only use the percentage and you might be different. I only use the percentage on small low dollar items and I use the dollar figure when I’m giving away a bigger dollar like a $2 or $3, $5 off of a higher ticket item.
Vince 58:56
Exactly what I do, exactly the same. So if your products are worth a bigger, if it’s cost $20, $50 or more, then shoppers can easily calculate, okay, I’m getting a good deal on this, right. But if you’ve got a lower price point, then there’s not really a point adding $1 off because it doesn’t look like much. But if you just put percentage, a lot of people aren’t going to do the math. They really aren’t. If they see a percentage, they’re just not going to do the math, they just know that yours is going to be slightly different. If they click on that coupon, they know that your products gonna be slightly less expensive than that product next to it that might be even the same exact price and that’s the selling point is that is that they see that and it’s a percentage off and they think they’re getting a deal and they’re getting a deal. It’s a small deal but it’s still a deal.
Norman 59:46
That’s it. It’s all psychological.
Vince 59:49
It really is. It really is.
Norman 59:50
All right, Kelsey, now.
Kelsey 59:52
Okay, so before we get to the questions, I think we should say that we’ve got a lot of questions so we can’t get to all of them. But Vince does have an Ask me anything.
Vince 1:00:02
I do every Tuesday at 10. I will have a link for that because I’m gonna get my own stream yard similar to what we have right here. So I’ll post that in the Facebook group when I have that. We do post those in our social media channels, if you follow Helium 10, you’ll see that. So next Tuesday at 10, the 15th and then I’m off until the new year so this next Tuesday will be the last for the year.
Kelsey 1:00:32
Okay, great. So anyone who we don’t get to, we’re sorry. If there’s only so much time.
Norman 1:00:38
But we will try to answer whatever we can in the group.
Kelsey 1:00:41
Yep. Okay. So I’m not sure how you’re doing for time, Vince?
Vince 1:00:47
I’m good. My next meeting’s in an hour.
Kelsey 1:00:51
Okay, let’s see. All right, from Tony, I’ve not been able to edit the creative on some of my friends. Have you experienced this problem at all?
Vince 1:01:00
Yeah, since Amazon’s weird. Like, they’ll release new features, such as editing your creative on your sponsor brand ads. But for some product types, they won’t do it and so what Amazon does is it releases those features in phases and a part of those phases is by category type or product type. So what I would do Tony is open a ticket, open a case and just say, Hey, here’s my brand, I can edit my creative on these ones. Why can’t I do it on the other ones. If you’re lucky, someone on Amazon’s might take it up for you and say, Hey, this guy can already do it for these products. Let’s open it up for his other ones. They might do that for you. But the reasoning is simply because Amazon rolls out new features in stages.
Kesley 1:01:49
Okay, great. Let’s see from Marina, when I searched my brand name, my competitors’ ads were coming up first, see my brand name? In the keywords or does Amazon like them more than me?
Vince 1:02:03
Amazon likes whoever’s bidding upon the keywords, and who’s going to be bidding the highest on that keyword and potentially convert. So this is a primary example of why both Norm and I talked about branded keyword campaigns. Have a campaign that has all your brand new keywords in it, all the different variations of it, different match types of it, your broad, your phrase, your exact and make sure you stay on top of the bids for those campaigns. It’s pretty, Amazon’s very responsive. So whatever search term or keyword that you put in, you can literally go into Seller Central and increase the bid and then go back within a minute and do that search again and if your competitor still comes up, you know that you haven’t gone high enough yet and you can literally just keep increasing the bid a little bit by little bit until you see yourself. I shouldn’t say minute, it might take five minutes or 10 minutes. But it is responsive. So you can eventually figure out how much that competitor is bidding on your keyword by increasing yours. Now, it might be that they’re bidding really, really high and that does happen. We have competitors out there that are really high on your branded keywords, simply because they know that people are searching for your product and they want to take those sales. But that is definitely a scenario that I would say is worth throwing more budget at.
Kelsey 1:03:34
Okay, great. Let’s see. This is a big one, so how do you create your PPC if you have three to four root keywords with a lot of high relevant keywords? Do you put them in one campaign and every root keyword has its own ad group or do you create campaigns for each keyword?
Vince 1:03:54
Yeah, so that would be something that would be answered in a one on one. Or in our q&a session on Tuesday. That’s very, very broad. But really quickly, I would say that it’s good that you at least have your three or four root keywords. Helium 10, we recommend a three campaign structure for new products, an auto campaign, a broad keyword research campaign, and an exact match campaign. So it sounds like you’ve done your homework and you at least have your root keywords, you’d definitely be able to take advantage of our tool to launch these particular campaigns. But as far as how do you create them, there’s actually five different campaign types that I actually recommend for launching your campaigns. But that again, would take a while to get into.
Kelsey 1:04:44
Okay, great. Let’s see, Yaro. I don’t know if this is too broad too. But how do you optimize campaigns weekly? What are your steps to go through once a week?
Vince 1:04:53
Sure. That’s a really good question because it actually talks about the cadence in which you should optimize. For new sellers, I do find that once a week is generally a good way of doing that. So what I do and how I used to do it when I was a consultant, and also how ads do it as well.
Vince 1:05:12
I would always look at the data from the week prior, right? So sponsored product ads, for you guys that don’t know, they have a seven day pixel, right? So that means a seller can click on your ad on day one, but they can come back seven days later, and then actually buy your product and that sale is going to get attributed to day one, it’s going to get attributed seven days prior, right? So when looking at your optimizations, and especially if you have a lot of volume, a lot of search volume, a lot of clicks, you definitely want to keep that minimum, that seven day pixel in mind when you’re looking at your data. So if you’re doing it on a weekly basis, what I’m saying is look at the week prior, so I would do my optimizations days. But I would look at my clients data through the Saturday before, right? I wouldn’t look at my current week, I would look at the week before Sunday through Saturday, which was seven days, seven days had passed in between and how you optimize is simply looking for wasteful search terms, looking at your reports and find those search terms that are just spending and not converting for you. In the negative, looking for keywords that are spending maybe had that have high A costs that are just wasting your or taking too much of your budget. But I would only focus on, I’m not a big fan of pausing keywords, especially if they’re making sales, unless they’re exact. If you’ve got exact match keywords that are not making sales or exact match keywords that are making very, very high A costs sales that you can’t absorb in looking at blended A costs. Those are the only key words I recommend that you pause. If you’ve got phrase, broad match keywords, you should really be looking at the search terms because the search terms are actually what’s spending on that keyword. So if you can trim, if it’s a high A cost broad keyword, for example, if you can look into your reports and trim the search terms that are spending, that are either wasteful or the search terms that are the higher A cost ones, make those negative and leave the search terms on that are converting well, or even better, take those search terms out and make them manual keywords in your campaigns, either phrase or exact because they’re obviously converting for you. So it might be something that you want to target directly and again, all these optimizations are something that our ads tool does for you because I designed it to do that. But you can also do these things manually in our tool as well as of course, as in Seller Central.
Kelsey 1:07:50
Cool. Okay. Let’s see from Herb, I seem to get better sales in the evening. So I cringe when I see lots of PPC spent during the day with no sales. I’m told some buyers might be clicking on a listing in the day, but going back to purchase at night. Should I be concerned if I run out of PPC budgets in the day, but see sales at night? My concern is I have had days of no sales and had Amazon collect my PPC money all day.
Vince 1:08:15
So I’ll start with the reverse. Amazon is yes, they are collecting your PPC money all day. But you’re also getting branded all day. Right? So people are seeing your brand all day. That’s good. That’s what you want, right? So especially if you’re seeing your sales mostly come in the evenings, you definitely want to make sure you don’t run out of budget because Amazon starts at midnight, and it runs through 11:59 the next day. So if you run out of budget at 6am and most of your sales come at night, then now you’re out of all that sales. So you really want to again, take into consideration doing some projections, looking at your clicks from last year or looking at clicks from a couple months ago, seeing Hey, can I afford twice the many clicks and adjust your budget so that you don’t get shut off during the early part of the day or maybe even right before the evening. You don’t want that either. So you definitely want to make sure that your campaigns do stay on all day and as far as the click fraud on Amazon is definitely, in my opinion getting better at identifying that and Amazon does look at clicks and it does actually change. It takes out fraudulent clicks within the first 72 hours typically so keep that window in mind too. I would never look at data within the first 72 hours. Especially because sales attribution takes 24 hours, click fraud takes 72 hours to identify. If click fraud is found, obviously that’s going to get removed, that adjusts your spend. So there’s not really anything that you can do about it unfortunately but Amazon is getting better I think at finding it and responding.
Kelsey 1:10:03
Okay, and we get just a couple more.
Vince 1:10:07
Okay.
Kelsey 1:10:09
Alright. From Janet, do you always need to run PPCeven if you’re already on page one? When is the usual time you need to run it?
Vince 1:10:18
I think you always need to run PPC. Again, especially if you’re already on page one. So if you’re on page one for the particular keywords that you’re targeting, then you’re doing a good job. That’s the holy grail of PPC is to be on page one. So you definitely want to keep doing that. When’s the usual time you need to run it when you’re just launching? Of course, as we suggested, because nobody knows your brand, Amazon doesn’t know your brand yet, either. So you should use PPC to get your product out there and get and gain visibility and when is the usual time that you need to run it? That probably plays into the previous person’s question saying that, I get more sales in the evening, right?
Vince 1:10:59
There’s no day parting and Amazon. So you can’t just turn your campaign or set your campaigns to be on or off during certain times of the day. I know there’s a lot of users that would love it if we did have that capability. I highly doubt that Amazon will ever do that. So the short answer is always, you should definitely run it at launch and you should pretty much always have your PPC on because again, you’re always trying to be seen to be visible. Your PPC is your advertising. So there’s constantly, there’s new shoppers coming on every single day, every single minute, there’s new shoppers, new shoppers, you want your brand to be visible, especially on page one. For those new shoppers, those new shoppers might not buy your product right away. But they might buy it the next day, they might buy it a week later, they might buy it two weeks later. Sponsored brand ads and sponsored display ads have a 14 day pixel. Because Amazon knows that for those types of ad units, shoppers take up to 14 days to make up their mind. Right? So my shorter answer is that you always want to keep your PPC running, especially if you’re on page one.
Norman 1:12:10
We talked about just being psychological if you’re there and they can see it, one, two, then it’s Oh, yeah, that must be a great brand.
Vince 1:12:20
Right. Exactly. If you’re top ranked PPC and you’re top rank organically, I think that’s a great position to be at. Now, some sellers that are trying to be more budget conscious, they might drop out of PPC for that top position if they’re high organically, which is fine, because you’re still top of the page. But you really have to then keep track of that. Because what if you drop organically, then you’re not in that top position anymore and you’re also not doing your PPC for that keyword.
Kelsey 1:12:49
Okay, and last one we’ll do is I think we’ve gotten above and beyond this episode. What are your thoughts about the fact that Amazon has started to give more influence to external traffic, and in 2021, it’s going to be more of an organic ranking juice to the listing now.
Vince 1:13:07
It’s not that they’re giving more influence to external traffic, it’s something that they’re making it easier for sellers to track it. People have been running external traffic, from Facebook or their other streams to their product listings for a long time. But they’ve never actually been able to see the end result of that. So Amazon’s just, mostly, I think, because of people complaining about it, Amazon’s now making it through their API attribution API, they’re now making it visible for tool providers like us or to sellers, you can log in to their API tool, or their attribution tool and see what marketing channels are working for you. Amazon wants, it behooves them to do this too. Because if they can show you which types of ads or which channels are performing better for you on Amazon, that’s better for them, because you’re going to throw more money into that channel, and then potentially make more sales on the back end on Amazon. So, I definitely think that running external traffic is definitely going to be a continued trend and now that the attribution API or attribution console is available. I think now is the time to start testing that because you can actually really see the results of your external traffic to your Amazon sales.
Norman 1:14:30
So I’ve got a comment on PPC. This is just, again, a psychological thing. I don’t know if you’ve done this, but it’s important that you get the frequently bought together section. So what I’ll try to do is, let’s say I’ll just use knives, for example. But you’ve got a quality, 8-inch knife, you’ve got a polishing stone, and you’ve got I don’t know a sheath. I’m just making something up. So you’ve got the three products bought together, that usually is about 30% extra sales. So a lot of times competitors will try to do that, well, if you can get somebody to buy these products maybe once or twice and you get them into the frequently bought together, you can increase your sales dramatically. Well, here’s the psychological part. A lot of times when you’re doing PPC, you’re thinking about a product. When you’re doing a video, show the polishing stone, show the product going into the sheath, and target the one product at a time. But if you can do sponsored brands, you can show them all together. So now you’re seeing all the products together, you’re seeing them in frequently bought together, you’re seeing them in the video. Now it’s just psychological, it’s just another way to kind of put everything together.
Vince 1:15:51
Images too, because you can add custom images to your sponsored brand ads and your sponsored display. So if you get if you get some images, and you sell, again, the same scenario, products that are similar to each other, try to get multiple of those products in the same image and then again, it’s all about visibility, it’s about awareness, it’s about brand recognition for your particular product and if you do, which is it, that’s a great position to be in. If you sell a knife, but you also sell products that are helpful and nice. It actually also then increases your brand ranking to the mind of the user. They’re gonna think, Hey, this brand is a specialist in this product, because look, they sell these ancillary products that also help or included or for this particular product. So yeah, I definitely think that getting that frequently bought together is amazing, if you can get it and you can also use it for your competitors. If you look at your competitors listings, you can actually look at the frequently bought together and those are other areas you can actually target as well. Those are listings that you can actually say, Hey, I’m going to pull out those ASINs and I’m going to target those ASINs from my product targeting campaigns.
Norman 1:17:11
Dirty little trick is to go and buy the competitions with your product and now you’re on their site. People are buying your product with their products who frequently bought together, you’re getting a ton of extra exposure. So that’s something you can do. That’s a whole other topic.
Vince 1:17:30
I thought about that one.
Norman 1:17:31
Yeah. Anyway, let’s give one more quick if you want the one hour consult with Vince, just type in I want Vince and we’ll enter you will wait about 30 seconds. I know we’ve got a ton of people that have already used the hashtag. But anyways, yeah, Vince, this is great. tons of information for the holiday season. We got to get your back. I would love to have you back on to go through different types of reporting and explain what we were talking about a little bit earlier and show people what are the metrics that you use and just different important things to look for when you are putting together a report or looking at a report.
Vince 1:18:18
Absolutely. I’d be happy to come on and we can maybe even go over the different ad types. Quickly, just show sellers what were the different versions that we’re talking about, what you can get when you’re brand registered. Yeah, happy to do that Norm.
Norman 1:18:32
Okay. Very good. So, Kelsey, you just let me know when you’re loaded up here. It’d be a big deal of Kelsey today.
Kelsey 1:18:40
Yeah. So I believe I got everyone and Simon, I did enter you. Sorry. I thought you did enter you or you won before but yes, that was my bad. Okay, so let’s start this. I’m just gonna share my screen.
Kelsey 1:18:53
Bear with me. Alright, so these are all people that have not won before. So here we go. So 321.
Norman 1:19:07
It would be a great giveaway.
Norman 1:19:11
Ooh, Simon. You just missed. Kathleen.
Kelsey 1:19:15
Okay, Kathleen, I believe she was from LinkedIn.
Norman 1:19:18
All right. Well, that’s our first LinkedIn winner, I believe.
Kelsey 1:19:21
There we go. Yeah. Congratulations, Kathleen.
Norman 1:19:23
All right. So well. How does Kathleen get a hold of you to get the information? Is it Kelsey, you’re gonna?
Kelsey 1:19:30
Yes. So Kathleen, you can message me or Norm on his LinkedIn or email me at k@lunchwithnorm.com and I’ll get you in touch. Do you have a link that I can share Vince? Or do you want to just see?
Vince 1:19:47
Yeah, just copy me. Again, I will have a stream yard link of my own soon. Actually, probably by the end this week. I don’t have it yet. I’m currently using Bradley’s when I do my Q&A. So I will have that soon. But yeah. You can connect us and then we can schedule that.
Norman 1:20:09
Okay. Fantastic. So I think that’s it for today’s program. It went long, but it was well worth it. Vince, thanks a lot for coming on and spending what? An hour and a half with us.
Vince 1:20:20
You’re very welcome. It was great to speak with you and answer some of the questions from your viewers.
Norman 1;20:28
Fantastic. So thanks again and we will have you back on I hope shortly.
Vince 1:20:34
Sounds good. Thanks.
Norman 1:20:36
All right. See you later. Bye. All right, everybody. So that’s the end of the podcast today. If you want to see the whole podcast, go to Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy and you can see not only this other content, and tons of shorter clips as well. If you want to see our faces, maybe Kelsey’s face, go to YouTube and check out Norman Farrar and there’s a ton of videos there. Kelsey is putting up new content every day. Also, we have a newsletter. It doesn’t suck. It’s a good newsletter with tons of content. What we’re trying to do is build content and make online sellers better not just Amazon, online sellers. So check it out. You can go to Lunch with Norm calm or normanfarrar.com, and just subscribe. There’s no advertising, you’ll just see content. So this Friday, I am really excited.
Norman 1:21:37
We are going to well, Kelsey, you come on and you tell this, this is really cool.
Kelsey 1:21:46
So for those of you in our Facebook group, you’ll probably have seen the name Brenda Mendez pop up. She’s been answering a ton of questions about packaging, design, building a brand. So she is coming on this Friday to talk about how she built a business or work with a business. I believe it’s like an oral hygiene product, her company and they’ve built from $0 to nine figures.
Norman 1;22:15
Nine figures. You know what? I love this brand. It’s actually a brand that I like. It is one of the brands that I would talk about because it’s so fantastic what they’ve done with this. So check it out before you come on to the podcast or watch it, check out what the brand is all about. Check out their YouTube channel. Incredible and it’s done with just branding and what you can do with it. So anyways, I’m really excited to have her on and to talk to her. So please join us next, it’s this Friday coming up. How weeks are flying by.
Kelsey 1:22:55
If I can just add, she posted a video of her Instagram of some of the packaging that she’s done for her products. So I posted that again on the Facebook group so you can see exactly what she did and what’s possible in your packaging and what you should be aiming for possibly, if it’s in your budget, but yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode. So super excited about that. Yeah, like the video today if you haven’t yet and yeah, that’s it for me.
Norman 1:23:24
We haven’t smashed anything or rang the bell.
Kelsey 1:23:30
Smash that like button, ring the bell.
Norman 1:23:32
Yeah, very good. Okay. So please tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for being part of the community. Thanks for all this engagement is fantastic. We’re really excited to see how fast the community is growing and have a great day. We’ll see you soon.
