#349 – PPC Strategies From Liran Hirschkorn

44 minute read

Published: June 4, 2022

In this episode, Bradley welcomes Liran Hirschkorn back to the show to talk about everything from PPC strategy to Amazon business reports and data points. He also mentions all the positive changes inside Walmart and their ad platform, the basics of D2C (direct to consumer), and why Amazon’s buy with Prime can be a total game-changer. Liran also shares his insights on how you can take advantage of the newest features inside Amazon, what sponsored brand really is, the key metrics that you should focus on, and what common PPC mistakes all Amazon sellers make. So make sure to listen until the end!

In episode 349 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Liran discuss:

02:20 – Positive Changes Inside Walmart And Their Ad Platform
04:00 – Success On Other E-commerce Platforms
05:00 – The Basics Of D2C And Amazon’s Buy With Prime
11:40 – Liran’s Favorite New Features Inside Amazon Seller Central
16:00 – Business Reports And Other Important Data
19:20 – Why You Should Use Market Tracker By Helium 10
22:00 – Liran’s Favorite Helium 10 Tools
24:50 – What Are The Key Metrics That You Should Focus On?
26:15 – Common PPC Mistakes That Almost All Sellers Make
30:30 – What If My Top Keyword Changes?
34:50 – Amazon Sees Sponsored Brand As Top Of Funnel Strategy
37:15 – Building Up Your Followers Is An Under-Utilized Strategy
39:00 – Influencer Marketing And Recording Data Points
41:08 – How To Get In Touch With Liran
42:08 – Catch Liran On The Sell And Scale Summit – Get $100 Off Code: S3BS100

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re gonna talk to one of the OGs in the industry. Who’s gonna give us tons of strategy on PPC, Amazon data points, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Black Box by Helium 10 house is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world, outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces from USA to Australia, to Germany and more use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might wanna get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don’t forget you can save 10% off for life on helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. We’ve got a serious seller back on the show, not his first time on the show he’s been here before. So it might be a familiar face, Liran how’s it going?

Liran:

It’s going great. Thanks for having me back on I don’t know what episode number this is, but I was episode three of the Serious Sellers Podcast. So it’s great to be back on.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. One of the first completely outside guests, you know, the first episode, if I’m not mistaken, it was Manny Coats himself and I believe the second episode was Kevin King. You know, who even at that time was part of freedom ticket, not a helium 10 employee, but, but still part of the family. And so Liran was the very first person that we chose to go outside of the family. And so it’s great to have you back here and we’re in the 300s now, so still a three. There’s a three in there, but anyways we wanted to see, you know, catch up to, to see what you’ve been up to, you know, even in those days, you are a big time Amazon seller, you’re an educator in the space, you know, you, you were known for your PPC strategy. And so we talked about a, a wide variety of things, but the first, the very first thing I wanna talk about, which I know we didn’t talk about the last time is, as I said, in my introduction, you know, we’re trying to make this show not just about Amazon sellers, but about Walmart sellers as well. What about you for any of your Amazon brands? Did you ever in the last, you know, couple years also cross sell on Amazon or on Walmart? I’m sorry.

Liran:

I personally did not cross sell on Walmart, but we do work with people who sell on Walmart as well. And it’s kind of interesting because yesterday, just yesterday Walmart’s earnings came out and I think they had some nice growth in their advertising revenue and online commerce. I think they reached $2 billion in ad revenue which was a nice growth for them. So obviously, Walmart is growing and so is Walmart advertising, and Walmart’s made some good changes recently to their platform specifically in terms of the advertising. Just to touch on it. It used to be that you had to rank organically in the first, you know, a hundred positions in order to show up with ads that’s now no longer the case. And also, I think starting in June, they’re going to be switching their auction system to be the same as Amazon’s auction system. So right now on Walmart, if your competition bids 50 cents and you bid a dollar, you pay a dollar, which is terrible. Yep. Like on Amazon, you’d pay 51 cents. So Walmart is switching to that platform. So some good positive changes coming out of Walmart as it comes to their advertising and their platform

Bradley Sutton:

With your agency. You know, obviously, you deal with just like you did when, when you were you know, doing courses and things like that. Well, you deal with so many different people. Anybody else having success on other platforms other than Amazon and Walmart, like, you know, sometimes it blows me away when, you know, somebody say, oh yeah, I’m doing like seven figures on Wayfair. I’m like Wayfair, what in the world? You know, like, like what about in your experience?

Liran:

I mean, I’ve seen some sellers do well on Etsy, so I would say that’s an interesting platform. I think they’re also allowing now non handmade, I think it just has to be sort of like classified. So, you know, I think Etsy will be, you know, another growing platform. And I would say really outside of that, it’s really Shopify and I’m actually really excited about DTC because of the buy with prime that Amazon just recently came out with.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about that because you know, that came out a week ago or a couple weeks ago. And then some people, first of all, didn’t really understand, well, first of all, let’s explain what DTC is. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of new people on here. And then what exactly the implications of Buy with Prime is.

Liran:

Yep. So DTC is direct to consumer. And generally that means a brand that is bypassing all other parties to sell directly to the end customer. And even Amazon is not necessarily considered so much DTC because you’re going through Amazon’s channel whether it’s third party seller or vendor, but when you’re selling on your own website to the end customer, you are getting all the customer data, et cetera. That is sort of the, the purest form of direct to consumer (DTC). Now, Amazon came out with something called Buy with Prime. And what that means is that right now you can do multi-channel fulfillment with Amazon. That means you can have somebody who sells on Shopify or any, or any platform for that matter, really. But let’s talk about Shopify and Shopify with some integration connection to Amazon, and you can ship to your customer on Shopify with your inventory that’s sitting in Amazon warehouse and you’ll just pay a fulfillment fee essentially.

Liran:

And Amazon will ship it to the customer, which is great because you don’t have to, you can warehouse, and you can keep your inventory together for your Amazon sales and your Shopify sales. You don’t have to use a different warehouse. Amazon now is taking it a step further. And they’re saying, we are gonna allow you to put a code on your site. That’s gonna have a little button that says Buy with Prime. If the end buyer on your website is a prime customer, they can click on that button. They check out it’s a Amazon checkout. They check out with all their Amazon information and details, which is awesome, which is there which by the way, you could do before with Amazon pay, which is also a service but again, it wasn’t tied to fulfillment necessarily, but now you can check on Amazon, but now it gets fulfilled with, you know, one to two days shipping with prime and multi-channel fulfillment was always kind of slow.

Liran:

You know, I would say three to seven days in terms of like, until Amazon shipped the product and it got to you and Buy with Prime allows that customer to get to order on your Shopify store and have the same experience as prime delivery, getting something really, really fast. Yep. What I think that means is that conversion rates on Shopify and other DTSC websites, Big Commerce has already said they’ve a hundred percent are going to allow it because the platform still needs to allow it. We could talk a little bit about Shopify, whether they will or not, but what’s essentially gonna happen is your conversion rates on your DSC store are gonna, I think, skyrocket because you have that Prime feel, and the trust kind of people have in terms of buying from Amazon and knowing that it’s easy and they get it fast, and you’re gonna be able to get one to two day fulfillment from your Shopify store.

Liran:

So I’m very bullish about that and the opportunity and what Amazon, you know, this is initiative by Andy Jess used the new CEO of Amazon and he was head of AWS, and AWS was a underlying cloud right. Of storage. That really basically is underneath kind of a lot of the internet, right. And maintains a lot of the internet across many, many companies and websites. And what Amazon is trying to do right now really is somebody kind of there’s a great article on statutory.com that says Amazon as a service, they’re taking the, instead of just being amazon.com, Amazon is going to power, all of eCommerce, right? Or a lot of eCommerce will be powered by Amazon because now Amazon will do the merchant processing, the right, the payment and also Amazon will do the fulfillment, whether or not somebody shops on Amazon or not.

Liran:

Right. And Amazon embeds itself into eCommerce a lot more, which is really smart. It also means Amazon sees kind of the threat of Shopify and DTC and they want a piece of the action. And who knows if let’s say this, this pans out, and this works, if Amazon will say, now we’re gonna offer all sellers a tool to build their own DTC site. And maybe they take some of that away from Shopify. It’s interesting whether or not Shopify will adopt it because their president on an earning or their CEO on an earnings call said yeah, we’re very interested in adopting it. And then he walked, I think, maybe got from black from the board or something. And he walked, I heard about that. The comments a little bit, because what the threat is here is that Shopify just bought the Deliverr.

Liran:

And Shopify also makes a lot of their money off merchant processing. They charge, you know, 2.9% plus 30 cents or whatever it is, right. A merchant processing. And they bought Deliverr. They wanna do the fulfillment and drive that business. And now Amazon’s taking that away with the buy with prime, if people check out there, so it’s a double edge sword. If they don’t adopt it, will Amazon launch something or will people move on to Big Commerce or other platforms where they can use the Buy with Prime button, will they lose, will they lose their customer if they don’t adopt it? And if they do adopt it again, they lose some business. But again, I think there’s a massive opportunity for DTC to grow based on this Buy with Prime. So I think they will end up adopting it. And I think it could be a game changer for a lot of sellers. And maybe if you haven’t thought about going DTC, if you’re at seven figures, I think it’s something you should, you should be doing.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Liran:

If you’re, if you’re smaller, you know, really depends. How many products do you have? How, how successful are those products validated and get success on Amazon first? I think, but you know, I, I really like where this is going with Buy with Prime. I think it’s genius. And it’s just a brilliant move on Amazon’s part.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. It’s, you know, the diversification of platforms and DTC and Walmart. I mean, we’re having a conversation here that we wouldn’t have even had, you know, two years ago, let alone three or four years ago. And it’s just showing how much the space has evolved. And it just goes, you goes to the point that, you know, guys, you know, you’re selling on Amazon. Great. You know, but you can’t be resting on your laurels here because you know, the industry is evolving and you need to evolve with it, or you’re gonna be left behind. All right. So, so these are some like cool new things that are in the pipeline here that we definitely wanna keep an eye on. Let’s talk, just talk about some bread and butter stuff here. So you know, in, in the last couple of years, Amazon itself has come out with a lot of cool data points, a lot of cool filters in advertising that before was only available or reports that was only available to vendors and things like that on the strict Amazon side.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ll talk about Helium 10 next. What are some of the top, you know, two or three new things, be it Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance, or Top of Search function, like all these plethoras of new stuff that Amazon has launched in the last year. It seems what are some of your favorites?

Liran:

Yeah. So many things I’ll share with one of my favorite reports in PPC that I don’t think a lot of people are looking at and that’s the Impression Share Report. It’s also new, I would say probably in the last year or so. It’s really important, Impression Share Report, you can look at it on sponsored products, and sponsored brands, and you can really see what is your impressions on a particular keyword compared to your competitors? And you can see those results with that particular keyword. So you can see what your ACoS is, what your conversion rate is on that keyword, and where you are in impressions. And so you might be looking at a keyword that you’re number three, it’s an important keyword. And you have a 30% ACoS with a 10% conversion.

Liran:

Like maybe you wanna push harder on that particular keyword. Now, if you’re number one, there’s no reason to push harder. You’re already getting more impressions than any other brand. Maybe you can get even higher percentage of shares, it’s a very helpful report to see if you are, you know, pushing on the right keywords, some keywords that you need to kind of pull back on more, but really great report. And I don’t think a lot of sellers are utilizing it enough. Now, one of the things along with this, what we do is if you get a little fancy and you learn pivot tables a little bit on Excel, which you could do with Google, with YouTube, what we do is we also pull a report of all the keywords that we’re targeting between sponsored products and sponsored brands.

Liran:

And we create one sheet that shows us all the keywords under the impression share, report their performance, and then whether or not we are targeting that specific search term in sponsor product exact phrase in broad in headline ads and in video ads. And we look at this report and we try to understand, so, and sometimes we’ll see when we audit an account, sometimes we’ll see a keyword. You’re like, number four, you’re getting really good results and you’re not targeting it all. Well, what’s going on, it’s coming from the auto campaign, but you maybe never moved it over and you’re not managing it manually and able to dial up the bids and get more impressions and do better. And you’re already doing well. So I love that report. I think everybody should be pulling that report.

Liran:

If you can do a pivot table along with, you know, are you targeting those keywords or not, or even look at it separately and find a way to copy and paste it from another Excel sheet and if you’re targeting that keyword, I think that’s a great report to make sure you’re targeting those keywords that are relevant, that you have pretty good results with that you have room to push further. That that’s one of my favorite and I think most important newer type of reports that’s available, it’s available with sponsored products sponsored brands as well. Also interesting to see on that report, we have seen some interesting things that you should look out for. So we’ve seen things with sponsored brands where you’re getting a lot of impressions, but your clickthrough rate is really low. And then we try to identify why, why am I getting so many impressions here?

Liran:

Am I clickthrough rate is low. So you have to go in and see what’s happening is sometimes your sponsor brand will populate on a page, but you’re not a top of the searcher on the bottom. And it’s considered an impression I believe because it populates on the page. Even though the person may not have seen it, but your bid is not high enough. So you might be looking at this and saying, I’m number three here. I have a lot of impressions, but I’m not getting any CTR here on what’s going on. And you might identify keyword that you really need to push the bids up on in order to actually be visible because you’re not at top of search for sponsored brands, which is where most of the clicks ar coming from for sponsored brands, as opposed to like on the bottom of the search page.

Liran:

So that’s really important as well. Let’s talk about more reports. First of all, there’s been some updates in the business reports. So business reports now shows you mobile views. So you have to actually go into your business reports and go to columns and show the mobile sessions. And then you’ll be able to see that first of all, the percentage of traffic on a product from mobile to desktop, it’s very important that key, especially if you have a high percentage of mobile, which I believe what I’m seeing is almost kinda like 60% mobile, 40% desktop nowadays, but depends on products. If it’s a very expensive product, people might be researching it more on a laptop, you know, versus their phone, but very important that like your first 60 or so character is like if you have like one ounce or certain things that are important for a person to see that are in there.

Liran:

But now you can see your true conversion rates where before they were really inflated, because what you saw was your total orders divided by only your you know, desktop traffic and not the app traffic. And so now it’s really important to go back and evaluate what your real conversion rates are. People had a false sense. I think of what conversion rates are Search Term Query in Brand Analytics, a really good report. It’s a new thing in brand analytics. If you click you’ll, you should have something at the top bar, you can click on that and you can actually see real search volume on a week to week basis. So I love that report because it really helps you see search volume and it also helps you see conversion rates within a 24 hour period of the person just coming from a search.

Liran:

So not coming from product pages, not coming from other sources outside traffic, et cetera, coming just from search. What are your conversion rates? What are the add to carts where you might lose people along the way? I think that’s really important one. And again, you see actual search volume there. And the Product Opportunity Explorer I would add is great. You can see some data there. You can’t see anywhere else. Like how many competitors are in a particular niche. How many are using sponsored products? How many new competitors have come in and you can really start to identify, maybe changes within your niche that are happening. So all those things are new, and these are great reports to get more insights. And with these reports, you can really start to see what your market share is on a particular product within the niche and understand where you are in terms of market share.

Liran:

And you can track this over time and see, am I losing market share? Am I gaining market share? Because some of these, there’s some brand metrics there, like on the Search Query Report for brand share, for example, what percentage of, you know, on this particular like keyword does your brand kind of get a share of the sales. And that’s really important to see if you’re gaining or losing, because, you know, in some sense, if your sales are down, it could be a trend of the market, like fitness products today, sales are down from last year on home fitness products because the search volume is down, but have you lost market share is more important metric, right? Because, okay, maybe the pie’s gotten smaller, let’s say in this particular niche, but if I had 10% share before I now have 12%, I’m gonna look at that as a positive. But if I lost market share, it’s a negative, really the search volume, the demand is not something that I can control. So you have a lot better insight into what’s happening when you start piecing some of these reports together.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, you know, what we’re talking about there is why we made that tool Market Tracker in Helium 10 is because I mean, how many times, if we had a dollar for every time, somebody in a Facebook group says, Hey, my sales are down this quarter. Anybody else? My sales are down today? Anybody, you know, like, well guys, if you were actually tracking, you know, it doesn’t have to be a Helium 10, if you’re using whatever. And tracking your market, you know, you’d be, you’d be seen, well, the pie got smaller, the pie got bigger. Oh, your piece of the pie got smaller. Yes. You, are down compared to your competitors, but everybody kind of like does not seem to want to programmatically track their market. They just wanna ask in Facebook groups, anybody else’s sales down. Speaking of newer Helium 10 tools, you know, you were one of the early adopters of, of helium 10. You’re probably using Hhelium 10 before, before I even was.

Liran:

And Bradley, I’m proud to say I have four Helium 10 accounts.

Bradley Sutton:

Four Helium 10 accounts. There you go. One’s not enough. You guys gotta have four. Oh my goodness. You know, you use some tools that even most people don’t, you know, back in the day, like ASIN Grabber and things like that. But you know, in the last couple of years we’ve launched about 7 billion new tools, just like Amazon, are you still just using the bread and butter? You know, like Cerebro, Keyword, Tracker, ASIN Grabber you know, stuff like that. Or have you adopted any of the newer tools?

Liran:

We’ve used Market Tracker. So really like that tool I would say is one of the newer tool I just saw there was an upgrade to profits as well. And so that’s, that’s a tool that I think is really

Bradley Sutton:

Useful. We now have Business Reports in there. So the impressions and the page sessions and stuff like that.

Liran:

Yeah. Cuz I saw recently Amazon created an API for that before there was no API.

Bradley Sutton:

They always said they would never do it. You know, we’ve been asking them that for years. Cause that’s one of the biggest asks of our Helium 10 customers. Like man, I always have to go into stink in business reports, and Seller Central do this. And I want to like correlate it to my Keyword Tracker. I wanna correlate it to, to this or that and right. And we’re like, sorry, you know, like, unless we break Amazon’s rules and like try and like get a sub-account and then like pull it out or something like we can’t, you know, it’s right. Can’t really do that. But finally they, they opened it up.

Liran:

I think there’s been some kind of strategic change with Amazon over the last couple years. Where they just said, we’re gonna share more data because we never thought Amazon would share search, fine. Like, well then you can reverse engineer how much traffic Amazon gets on a monthly basis and they don’t wanna release that information. And, and then they’ve kind of opened the floodgate. So they, they must have made some kind of strategic decision. We’re just gonna open it up which I think isawesome for sellers. We’re heavy, heavy users of Cerebro, and Keyword Tracking, that’s the reason why we need multiple accounts cuz we’re, we’re running up against limits, you know, on one account. We, and we also kind of manage accounts by teams. And so yeah, for the agency.

Liran:

So we, we like to segment it out by account. But I mean one of the best tools out there, you know, I think for, for, for Amazon sellers is Cerebro and the ability to really understand keyword research and understand relevancy of keywords and as well as tracking keywords. I love that. Now you can see the history of when you add in a keyword to track, you can also go back and see the history. I know that’s a newer thing. I didn’t know, you’ve added business reports, which is, which is awesome. And so yeah, we’re, we’re very heavy users. Obviously, the extension is super powerful. Both from just kind of getting, even if it’s just some view, but listing, you know, when you see that listing score, it’s definitely helpful to see the listing score.

Liran:

And we also like the additional kinda filtering and selection. And now the ability to go straight to Cerebro from the extension, which is yeah. Also something sort of, I would say newer that you’ve added that’s you know, that that’s really, really useful, but in my mind, you know, Helium 10 is like an essential tool. Like I don’t see how you can run a– if you’re private label, right. If you’re just jumping on as a reseller, maybe not, but even, even, even in that case, I think you need it, but it’s kind of like an essential tool it to really understand bottom line is, you know, you’re, you’re playing kind of like a keyword game when it comes to Amazon and you know, you wanna be, you wanna have those keywords in your listing. And the, the only way to do that is to understand where sales are, are coming from. And you could do that with Cerebro and reverse engineer your competitor. So this is like, you know, some people today would say, take this for granted, but, you know, back in our day, you know, as we, we become older, we didn’t have those things when we first started you know, on Amazon, like there were cute.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s that one guy who had that one, that one shady guy who had some tool, and then it came out that he was like stealing people’s accounts when they had a big coupon or so something like that. I remember.

Liran:

Yeah. When he was tracking when people had coupons and like a glitch in their coupons on quantity or something, and he was buying their stock using his tool, he was tracking it, buying their stock and reselling it. And I never heard.

Bradley Sutton:

But other than that, like if you didn’t have that tool, then you pretty much had, and that didn’t even tell you ranks or anything, just kind of told you where things were, but we’ve come a long ways. We’ve come along we’ve come to a long ways.

Liran:

It’s, it’s amazing how much data is now available to you know, today it’s almost like you have too many points of data and you need to decide what should I focus on, you know, in terms of your, in terms of your business, which I, you know, I think there’s some actually somebody asked me yesterday, like, what are some of the key metrics I should be focused on in my business? And to me, it’s like, you wanna track your top line sales, you wanna track your TACoS, ACoS, organic sales, paid sales and, and margin, right? Like, you know, at a high level, those are, those are some of the things you should be tracking. And then some, some other things on a product level, like the keywords, but in TACoS, but yeah Helium 10, you know, has really become, you know an essential tool. And, you know, Amazon has been adding a lot of data points as well. I’m sure now Helium 10, you know, brand analytics again, the beginning, there was no API. Right. They said they, weren’t kind of, you were not allowed to use Brand Analytics data. Now you can pull Brand Analytics data. There’s so much more data that’s available to you as a seller.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, absolutely. So let’s talk about some, some just, you know, go, go into some strategy now, you know, we used to just do sometimes the 30-second tip and just one, but you know, let’s take the last 10 minutes and, and just do some quick hitters from you. Like some stuff that, you know, but actually before I get into that I forgot to ask one thing. I always ask this to anybody who has their own agencies when I have them on their show is as an agency, you guys, it’s not like you guys are onboarding brand new Amazon sellers who haven’t even launched their first product. Most of them, if not all are existing Amazon sellers. And so you guys have unique visibility into like, you guys are doing what, like, so, I’d love to ask you, like, what’s common amongst your customers, where, where you onboard them. And it’s a mistake that you think a lot of your customers were making that you guys obviously correct. But probably a lot of Amazon sellers out there are doing the same thing.

Liran:

Everybody. So we, and we almost now are auditing almost every single account before we take it on in some way, for multiple reasons, I’ll just share one, we don’t really wanna take an account that we don’t think we can help. Number one. Number two, sometimes it’s a way for us to show the end customer, the end person. Who’s not a customer yet. Some of our work before they decide whether they wanna work with us at all and it’s added value. So we do a full audit of their advertising account takes us five to six days. We provide that audit back to them and that they could choose to work with us or not. Right. So it’s added value. And there’s one thing I see in almost every single one of those audits is campaign structure is not the way really that it should be.

Liran:

So what do I mean by that? Meaning, you know, campaigns with 300, 400, 500 keywords, okay, shouldn’t have that many keywords in a campaign. You’re not gonna maximize your impressions campaigns with mixed match types in the campaign. Again, with different CTRs you can’t manage the right goals and budgets at that at the campaign level when you have a mix of really good and really bad in one campaign. And the biggest thing we see is like, you know, the keywords, there are certain keywords that should just be segmented, like your highest search volume keyword. If I’m selling a felt letter board, right. Letter board should probably have that keyword has so much search volume. That keyword should be in its own campaign with its own budget. It’s a very important keyword for me. I also might be willing to allow that keyword to have a different ACoS goal than others.

Liran:

And if you’re using software, let’s say you’re using Adtomic or using software for PPC, you’re entering in an ACoS goal. And the software’s managing that ACoS goal. The more keywords you have in there, the less likely it’s managing each individual keyword to that goal, because what the software tools do is if I have a 30% ACoS goal in a campaign, and I have 20 keywords in, there are a hundred keywords they’ll manage towards the average. But that, so it’s possible that that most important keyword because there’s other keywords that are poor in that same campaign is not allowed to spend because it’s bringing down the bids on everything to bring the ACoS down. So we really see. And when you have that keyword that has a ton of search volume mixed in with long tail keywords, that keyword will suck up most of the budget and long tails, which have less search volume, but sometimes much higher buying intent because they’re very specific, right.

Liran:

Felt letter board 8×8, right? Example like sizes or whatever, right. That are less searches. Well, you wanna get traffic for that because you might have a better conversion rate even on that than just felt letter board, but mixing in that high search volume keyword, along with that lower long tail keyword together in my opinion is not the way to structure campaigns properly. And we see a lot of that segmentation problems. And in my opinion, one of the keys to successful PPC campaigns is the right segmentation process. So don’t mix your match types. You don’t have to have not every keyword needs its own campaign, but start out by doing your research and, and take all your keywords that are relevant and sort them by search volume and a relevancy, and take the top keyword and put in it own campaign, and then maybe take the next three or four most important keyword that have high search volume and put them in its own campaign. And then maybe the next 10 in their own campaign. And then from there go in groups of like 20 to 30, because the long tail keywords don’t have as much traffic. And if you start out that way in you’re structuring that’s gonna be really helpful. Some other tips are, I believe–

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I have a question on that. Yes. Let’s say, you know, you didn’t know is gonna be one of your top keywords, you know, like cuz you probably know if you’re using Cerebro, you probably know what what’s your, your top keyword. But then sometimes the market changes where the main keyword, you know, in 2018 is not the main keyword in 2019. Right. So let’s say in 2019, or whenever a year later now you realize, Hey, this other keyword is now the main keyword. I have it just in one of my, you know, exact manual campaigns with 20 other keywords. Now, since it has so much history in that campaign. Do you take it out? Do you isolate it, but then keep it active in the old one, just in case that new one doesn’t get traction because you know, at least in the old days, I remember that sometimes you would try and put a keyword into a new campaign and just wouldn’t get any traction at all. Or what’s your strategy there?

Liran:

So you could do one or two things. If the other keywords there are not so important, you could do the opposite. You can keep that keyword and move the other ones out, for example. Okay. So that that’s one option. Otherwise what I would say is I would move it into a campaign I’d pause it. And if it doesn’t get traction, I’d unpause it. Typically we do see that it does get traction and it may take a little bit of time cuz there is that factor of campaign history. So you’re right. But we typically after a couple weeks, you know, it start seeing it and raise the bids and you know, you could do some things to give it a push if you need to, but ultimately yes, I would isolate, I would isolate that campaign again, if I have, you know, a lot of many, many other keywords there, I, and some of them are important, et cetera.

Liran:

I probably move that one. But you can always turn it back on in that campaign, if something doesn’t happen, but I would move the keyword ultimately. the other thing that we do is we don’t start still, you know when we interview people to work at our agency and we ask ’em, how do you start off campaigns? They’ll say, well, I start with auto. I’ll let Amazon find the keywords. And then I move them over. And that’s a very, very old strategy. And some people still do things that way. We always start with manual research, all the keywords that we put in the manual campaign, we negate off the bat in the auto campaign because we wanna control them on a manual basis. And when we harvest keywords from auto and move them over, we negate those keywords in the auto campaign again because we want the control on the, on the manual campaign.

Liran:

So that’s another thing we see. And again, it’s part of the reason why we sometimes, and again, with certain software tools, etcetera, you can even, you can even automate that what our, our default is two conversions. Once we see two conversions, we move it over because one can be a fluke our default is two conversions to, to move something over. But that’s another reason why we see search terms on the impression report that you’re not targeting it. All right. And you have a lack of control when those things are in auto. So one of the things we see sometimes is like somebody’s highest spending campaign is auto. Well, you know, you’re controlling four targeting types that within each of ’em have hundreds of keywords or ASINs and you have very little control.

Liran:

So in my opinion, as PPC has gone more complex, as competition has gone more competitive, the more granular you need to be in your campaigns. Another thing we see sellers not doing is harvesting across campaign types. Okay. So people harvest from auto and a broad phrase in a phrase match of a search term back into exact. We actually added back as exact phrase in broad. When we see a search term that converts, we added across all three. How about harvesting across campaign types, something converts over in my sponsor brand video campaign search term. Maybe I don’t have that in my sponsored product campaign for the same product. I wanna move it over something, converts something harvest in my sponsored product. I wanna move it over to my sponsored brands. So you wanna really harvest across same product within sponsored products, but then you also want to harvest, we know within sponsored brands, sponsored display, product targeting, for example, it’s to sponsored product.

Liran:

And then one more thing. Is this again, many people may know this is broad match in sponsored brand is not the same as broad match in sponsored product. And I’ll tell you why Amazon sees sponsored brand, even though we don’t see it that way Amazon sees sponsored brand is more of a top of funnel strategy. So just to explain, what does that mean top of funnel? If you have a funnel, right. A physical funnel and at the top is wide, right? And at the bottom is gets small. So at the top and the top, you can, you can put a lot of things in at the top, right? So you’re casting a wide net at the top, but it may not be as targeted. And then towards the bottom of the funnel, something is a lot more targeted and much more likely to convert.

Liran:

Amazon sees sponsor brand is more of a brand awareness play. Okay. Similar to DSP in a lot of ways which we talk about, but Amazon see sponsored brand ass a brand awareness, this may not drive as much sales, but you’re getting a lot of people to see your brand’s brand awareness, which, because they view it that way, they take a lot more leeway in the keywords, meaning the keywords you’re putting in your broad, if you’re putting three or four words, those three or four words do not have to be in the search term for Amazon to show it on sponsored brands, but they do in sponsored product. So one of the things we do is we add a little plus sign, which makes it a broad match modifier for sponsored brands on the keywords.

Liran:

And that broad match modifier makes it equal to what a broad match would be in sponsored products. Every single one of those keywords has to be in the search down in that order, like a phrase, but they have to be in there. And that’s a big thing we see in terms of a lot of wasted spend in sponsored brand campaigns. So all these things hopefully are actionable that, you know, you can go back into your campaigns and look at and see, and again, you know we typically work with sellers that are kind of spending closer to 10,000 a month in ads, seven, 8,000 closer to 10,000 a month in ads. And if you’re in that category, we can do an audit for you, whether you decide to work with us or not, we can help you identify these things.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it, love it. Now how about maybe just one last 30-second one, like just a quick hitting strategy or tip that you think people should take advantage of. Doesn’t have, I mean, if it’s PPC great, but it can be about anything.

Liran:

I’ll share two things. Number one, top of the search, top of search strategies, top of the search, you know, will have a higher cost per click, but because the conversion is so good on average, our clients see better ACoS in top of search than not using top of search so that, but I’ll share something else where I think Amazon is going. Building up your brand followers, I think is an underutilized strategy right now, Amazon recently added customer engagement where you can send messages out. If you have a thousand, they were coming. If you have at least a thousand followers, you can send a message out to those followers. But the follow button is now on Amazon posts. It’s now in your store. I saw something where, you know, Prime Day on mobile, if you’re following a brand, you’re gonna see their products there on your mobile if you’re following them.

Liran:

So I’ll share a few things here. So I think that is something you should be on a regular basis. Treat post like your social media on social media people post once a day, or even more maybe, or three times a week, you should do post regularly. Post is still free. Okay. It probably won’t be free forever. Once it gets mass adoption. And once the, you know, you’re gonna get more tools out of it, followers, and it’s showing them deals, et cetera. This is where Amazon is going. And I think people don’t have this strategy and you easily with a graphic designer on a low cost basis. You can have them crank out, take your images, use Photoshop, crank out, you know I wouldn’t be too worried about what the caption is and stuff. You just gotta get it out there, get people to see it, click it, follow the brand.

Liran:

I think you’ll get a lot out of it. Drive traffic to your storefront, right? Because that’s also where you can get, you know, brand followers. And lastly, we’re doing a lot of influencer marketing and I think for just my tip on influence of marketing is it’s hard to track. What do I mean by that? We’re using Amazon attribution, but Amazon attribution is clunky. So we’ll run TikTok ads, for example, or Facebook ads into Amazon. We’ll see a thousand clicks on Facebook and 700 clicks on attribution. So we, we see on average, like only 70% of the traffic shows up in attribution, the sales take time to come in. And then when we work with influencers, especially on TikTok, people don’t click the link because the link is only in the bio maybe for a week and then it’s gone.

Liran:

And it’s not in the thing. So people come and search a brand. So if you’re doing influencer marketing, we figured out early, you have to track multiple multiple data points. Okay. So now we’re tracking. Okay. Has BSR changed? Are people using the coupon attribution and branded searches? So we chart out because you can look at brand analytics if you’re showing up on branded searches or not, or search query performance, right. You can now get these data points from Amazon. And we put on a chart. So we’ve seen where we don’t see attribution. We don’t see any sales there. We’ve seen some sales increase and then we see branded search that your brand name was not even on the brand analytics, you know, search terms. It wasn’t in like the 2 million or whatever it is. And now we start to see hits of it coming up.

Liran:

And so we know that the influencers driving, but if we only looked at attribution, we would say this isn’t working. And so that’s like another overall tip. And, and I think there will be more and more opportunities with influencer marketing coming up and maybe in a year from now, you’ll be doing that to your website. Cause you have Buy with Prime, right. So you know, lots of, lots of opportunity. One, one last thing I spoke to a seller yesterday that built their DTC brand clothing, $2 million just off brand ambassadors and influencers, 80% of their business. And they’re only paying influencers with commission only with commission. They negotiate it 20% commission to influencers, 10% their brand ambassadors and they have a four X RoAS just on their business with the influence and marketing. So I think that’s another, you know, trend. I think that’s gonna continue to grow.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. Love. All right. Well, Liran thank you so much for joining us. Now, people want to reach out to you guys to get some help with their Amazon or just to ask some questions. How can they find you guys on the interwebs?

Liran:

Yeah, sure. So incrementumdigital.com is the website we also launched. If you go under Incrementum Digital on LinkedIn, make sure it’s not the Australian company there’s so I think you search incrementumdigital.com. We launched a LinkedIn newsletter. We’re doing weekly with just like tips, added value. Some of the posts we’re putting out there. It’s also fun. It’s got some, some gifts and some, some fun stuff, updates. And so we’re putting out a lot of content especially a lot on LinkedIn and it’s easy for us when somebody on our team shares something, we share it on the LinkedIn profile. But yeah, social channels, you could obviously follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. And I typically do enter every single DM. So if you reach out maybe I could try and help.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s awesome. And if you guys not sure which company it is, you can also just check they’re one of the Helium 10 and this seller, what do we call? We just changed the name Seller Solutions Hub. So, guys go to hub.helium10.com and Incrementum Digitals right there. If you’re already with them, make sure to another thing we just add is where we can leave reviews you know, to the agencies and service provider use. So make sure if you guys are using them and you know hit them up with a review right there. So other people can take advantage of that, but Liran, thank you so much for joining us. It was a strategy field episode, which you always like here and we appreciate it. And we’ll be seeing you probably at the Sell and Scale summit, hopefully, you’ll be at.

Liran:

At say, I hope to I hope obviously to see you, but anybody listening, if you’re there at, I heard the inside term is S3 from the Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. S3 Sell and Scale Summit. So you guys wanna join us out there at the Sell and Scale Summit, make sure to go to h10.me/s3, and you could save a hundred dollars off of the entry fee by using the coupon code S3BS100.

Liran:

Yes. so hopefully I’ll see you there. And yeah, I’m looking forward to that Nelly performance. So

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, all of us who are all of us who are–

Liran:

Old

Bradley Sutton:

Who are old. Yeah. I was trying to think of another word here, but you know, that’s pretty much it. Why all of us who are old school will definitely be digging that. So thank you so much. And we’ll see you there in September.

Liran:

Thank you.

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