#571 – Amazon PPC Deep Dive with Destaney

Can cutting-edge metrics and AI revolutionize your Amazon advertising strategy? Tune in to our latest episode of the SSP by Helium 10, featuring the brilliant Destaney Wishon of Btr Media as our guest. This week’s Tacos Tuesday show is brimming with expert advice on leveraging Amazon’s new data rollouts, like brand metrics and category insights, now seamlessly integrated into Helium 10’s Adtomic tool. Discover how these new metrics can help you understand both organic and sponsored performance, offering a pathway to improved conversion rates by analyzing category averages. Plus, we dive into innovative advertising elements, including AI and sponsored TV, to future-proof your Amazon PPC strategies.

Launching a new product on Amazon and unsure about the best PPC tactics? Destaney breaks down the nuances between phrase, broad, and exact match campaigns, emphasizing the necessity of bid evaluation and search term analysis to boost exact match performance. Learn about keyword isolation and its potential to enhance relevancy and campaign success. With actionable tips on using our Keyword Tracker to analyze Amazon’s recommended rank, you’ll find out how to significantly improve your organic ranking during the crucial launch phase.

As Prime Day approaches, how can you keep your ad campaigns sharp and your sales soaring? We explore effective strategies to drive extra traffic while overcoming eligibility issues, such as running sponsor brands to subpages and utilizing alternative platforms like TikTok and Google. Our discussion includes crucial advice on building landing pages for optimal conversions and making savvy budget adjustments for Prime Day. Balancing defensive campaigns with organic sales is key, and Destaney shares her wisdom on maintaining a competitive edge without cannibalizing your organic presence. Join us for this insightful episode packed with practical tips to elevate your Amazon advertising game!

In episode 571 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Advertising Strategy Session & AMA With Expert Guest
• 03:11 – Brand Metrics in Advertising Strategy
• 05:31 – Value of Amazon’s Search Query Performance
• 08:48 – Understanding Repeat Purchases for Supplements
• 13:44 – Keyword Isolation Debate and Strategy
• 17:13 – Amazon Relevancy and Ranking Insights
• 20:45 – Optimizing Pricing Strategy for Prime Day
• 22:43 – Optimizing Amazon Advertising Budget Allocation
• 23:59 – Alternative Traffic Sources and Prime Day
• 30:22 – Amazon Advertising Strategies and Tips
• 31:31 – Planning for Prime Day Success

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got expert guest Destaney back on TACoS Tuesday and she’s going to be answering a lot of advertising questions on a variety of topics such as keyword isolation, sponsor display strategy, Prime Day, PPC tips and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ad’s reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show, that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon advertising related. And as always, we have special guests on with us each month and every other month we have the specialist of guest here. So, without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce her Destaney welcome, welcome back. How’s it going?

Destaney Wishon:

It is going incredible. Super excited to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Can you believe we are in the middle of June of 2024 already? It’s like I don’t know what’s going on here.

Destaney Wishon:

We’re already being thrown straight into Prime Day planning, like it never stops.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it’s never ends and, like I think the last few years that I’ve been in the Amazon world, it has been the fastest years of my life, like it’s just going by. There’s always so many things to do. So, just right off the bat, let’s, let’s just kick it off with anything new in the Amazon advertising world. Over the last couple months since you’ve been on here, you know like new reports from Amazon or your team has been trying out some new strategies or trying out some new ad types or different things, anything you can update us on.

Destaney Wishon:

I think the two biggest things Amazon’s given us a lot more data lately. Helium 10 and Adtomic have already been pulling in some of that data from like a category perspective, so insights and planning brand metrics, which is being tied directly into Adtomic now, is one of the best rollouts in my opinion, and they’ve recently updated it to add even more data around like subscribe and save and lifetime value and repeat purchases, which is always a conversation for sellers, as well as allowing us to see category comparisons how many clicks are within our category, how many detailed page views are within our category and how are we comparing to average. I think that was a huge rollout. And then the second big rollout is just all the creative elements we’ve gotten recently, either from an AI perspective or like sponsored TV. I think those are really big and even if you’re not ready for them yet, it’s showing the direction Amazon’s going, which is the important part.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, now I was on some kind of training yesterday or day before and somebody actually asked about that the brand metrics that is showing in advertising, and so that brand metrics page that’s showing all you know the data there is across organic and sponsored, or it’s only showing you what’s happening in sponsor. Okay, good, yeah, I was like there’s a 50-50 chance. Somebody asked me which one and I’m like I’m going to, because I saw there was some like fine print and it just made it seem like it was across the board. So how are you, which parts of that are you using and how is that affecting your ad strategy?

Destaney Wishon:

I think the biggest thing is again, it’s showing you retail and advertising, organic and advertising combined so we don’t really have a lot of resources for that anywhere else. Those are two different API’s from a technical perspective. So, amazon doesn’t usually give us that data. But you know there’s a lot of questions already in the comments asking about conversion rate and performance and efficiency. And Amazon advertising is amazing for driving clicks. That is its job. Think about it as a customer. If you click on a sponsored ad, you’re ready to purchase and if you don’t purchase, it’s because the price was wrong or the listing was poor, the reviews were poor. If the ad drove the click, it was successful. The reason brand metrics is important is because brand metrics gives us conversion rate compared to the category. So, you can pull up brand metrics right now and like, let’s say, I’m selling dog toys, I can see that my conversion rate is a 23%, but the category median is a 30%. If I’m converting less than the category, my PPC is not going to be near as efficient, because people are going to click, but they’re going to buy a category product and not mine. So that’s probably the biggest thing that I’m using it for.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. Now you know. Speaking of conversion rates, you know obviously there’s search create performance that can help you with your conversion rates at the even keyword level. But then there’s also the counterpoint that sometimes people do is that, hey, you know, the data there is so limited compared to overall. You know, like anybody can just see the number of sales and compare it, because there’s only a certain kind of, you know a certain set of situations where it’s going to register in search query performance. You know, like if somebody clicks something today and then 25 hours later, they actually buy it, it doesn’t count. They click on something, they click something else, they hit back on their browser and they purchase. It doesn’t count. You know, like I don’t know about your experience. My experience sometimes is between twenty-five to forty percent of overall purchases, but my opinion I just want to get yours is that it’s still valuable because it’s still apples to apples it’s not giving you the whole picture but valuable because it’s still apples to apples. It’s not giving you the whole picture, but you can at least benchmark what’s happening with you at the keyword level compared to the exact same situation for other competitors. Is that how you feel, or are you kind of ignoring that data.

Destaney Wishon:

A hundred percent. From a volume perspective, like a sales volume or an impression, I don’t use it because, like you said, it’s a smaller data set, but from a conversion rate perspective it’s probably still showing you. You know 30% to 40% of your overall data set, but from a conversion rate perspective it’s probably still showing you. You know 30% to 40% of your overall data set. Here’s how it converts. So that actually scales out pretty well in my opinion, and that is super, super valuable to understand. Because, again, if someone else is converting better than you, they’re going to get the same amount of clicks but drive more orders. That’s what conversion rate is at the end of the day. So. when you’re able to dive into SQP, you can actually see those comparisons on the search term level.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, absolutely. All right. Now, going back to Atomic, you had talked a little bit about Adtomic and some of the newer features, but something that’s been out for a while now is the custom bid rules. Have you, for any of your clients that you’re using Atomic for, have you started at all with the custom bid rules? or are you still using, like,  just the Adtomic algorithm and making decisions based on that?

Destaney Wishon:

Anyone who, I think, has followed me knows that I’m a pretty big fan of breaking out by strategy.  So, that’s where we recommend implementing custom bid rules is because there are certain keywords that maybe you are willing to take a loss on at the end of the day from a keyword level. Again, be clear. I don’t want to say you know, go run your overall amazon advertising at a 400 ACoS but there’s certain strategies that are going to need different rules and that’s why it’s so important not to have a set it and forget it automation running. In my opinion, now if your only goal is a 20% ACoS, you don’t care about anything else. Your only goal is profitability for your business, for your solopreneur endeavors. That’s fine, but if you’re really building a brand that’s going to scale, it’s so competitive in the category and CPCs are kind of increasing that you’re going to need to have some keywords that maybe you target at a 50% ACoS because they’re your top sales driving keywords, and then maybe you’re creating a campaign targeting competitor ASINs that you want to run at a different ACoS. That’s where it gets really important to start building out those segments and strategies. We also do it on the lifecycle level. So, if you have an established product with hundreds of reviews, you can run at a lower ACoS because your conversion rates higher. If you have a new product launch, you don’t want to set a low ACoS or else you’re going to drive zero sales and your honeymoon period is going to flop because you have no data.

Bradley Sutton:

So, there’s a lot of people, maybe even watching, who are for the. If they’re just getting into supplements, they’re. They probably have some crazy sticker shock of what kind of cost per clicks they have, but you know how, how do you count? You know how, how do you calculate LTV? You know, with the data that Amazon you know gives and tools available and where is your like, like, how do you, you know help brands like that really focus to make sure long term they’re profitable?

Destaney Wishon:

Historically, this has been a really vague area in Amazon. They haven’t given us a lot of insights. I know that we have a lot of plans on the Helium 10 side here, but the first thing that you need to consider is just that repeat purchase rate. In supplements we consistently see $20 to $40 cost per clicks for a $20 to $40 product. And the part that people need to remember is, if you get a customer to buy your supplements and you believe in your product, your supplement should be good enough that they buy it the next month and the month after and the month after. So, that’s why lifetime value is so important to understand, because if they end up buying your $20 supplement four times, that’s $80. So, even though you paid $20 cost per click, the product you sold was actually $80, because ideally, they come back and repeat purchase from you. So, it’s super important. I think. When it comes to actually coming up and finding those insights, the majority of people rely on typically their DTC information because that’s where you have it most easily accessible. Amazon gives you subscribe and save data within brand metrics, insights and planning. Amazon gives you subscribe and subscribe and save data within brand metrics, insights and planning, like I mentioned, and also through DSP, you can have a pretty clear indicator of what you subscribe and save or your repeat purchase rate is, and that’s what helps you justify those high cost per clicks and that’s why you see them as well. People know that someone comes back five to six times. They’re going to be willing to pay for that first purchase because they have a great product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we got the first question from Joan. Joan says it’s a pretty common question. I would say what’s the best strategy to control ad spend? For a $21 item in a competitive niche, cost per click is often over $2. Some of those supplement sellers wish they had cost per clicks at $2. But we’re selling product but we’re only helping Jeff buy more rockets. We aren’t profitable unless I can improve ad spend efficiency. So, right off the bat, if at $2 on a $20 product they’re not profitable, probably their conversion rate is not very high. I’m assuming on some of these keywords.

Destaney Wishon:

A hundred percent. The first thing is to realize whether or not you have a conversion rate problem or an Amazon advertising problem. So, going back to our initial kind of call out, I recommend going into Adtomic, going into your account overview. A few people later on have asked this question on where you find the data I mentioned Adtomic, account overview, brand performance and then, once you’re within brand performance, you can niche down and figure out how you’re performing compared to the category. If you’re converting better than the category, then it is an ad efficiency issue. It means you need to improve the keywords you’re targeting. Instead of going after dog toy, which may be too broad for your dog toy, go after soft dog toy for small dogs, where you’re going to be sacrificing lower volume but a higher conversion rate because the keywords are a lot more related to the product you’re selling. So, you can justify that $2 cost per click. The other answer is to just lower your bids. If you can’t afford $2 because you’re not converting, well, lower your bids. What’s going to happen when you lower your bid is your ad’s going to show up in less premium real estate at the bottom of the page, or page two and page three, but it’s going to be cheaper and more profitable for you. So that’s the trade-off you’re going to have to make until you improve your conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

Jay Smith says hello from the UK I recently launched should I be doing this in a British accent? I recently launched a new product and I’m finding my phrase and broad match campaigns are performing much capital, much better than exact match. Are there any scenarios where you would suggest pausing exact match campaigns and only running phrase and broad during the first few weeks of launch? I don’t think I’ve seen this question before.

Destaney Wishon:

Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend pausing them. I think the first thing you need to realize is do you have different bids across all three of them? More than likely your exact match bids are higher, so it’s maybe just a little bit more expensive for you. The other thing to consider is, again, if I’m targeting dog toys, an exact match that’s really broad from a term itself right, so it can be a little bit competitive targeting just dog toys. But if I run dog toys and broad, I’m showing up for dog toys for small dogs, dog toys for this, this and this. So, sometimes your broad and phrase match are going to be a little bit more profitable because they’re targeting longer tail terms that are more aligned with your product. So, open up your campaign, open up your ad group, look at the search terms that those broad and phrase matches are performing on and if they’re long tail, take out those long tails and put them into exact match and you can control the performance just as well. Easy answer is lower your bid on exact match to find the conversion ACoS point. But the longer answer and the better long-term solutions to figure out why the search terms and your broad and phrase match are performing that much better and then move them to an exact so you can control a bit precisely within your exact match campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. On the flip side, here’s one that we get all the time and this is, you know, the eternal debate. this is an eternal debate here. Uh, it’s from hey, hey there. When you use a search term from an auto ad for an exact or product ad, should you move it to negative in the auto to avoid redundancy? Is there any cost per bid difference that could affect impression and conversion between those ads? So, this is also called keyword isolation and Destaney, what’s your philosophy on that?

Destaney Wishon:

I am very familiar with why people isolate keywords. We personally don’t isolate keywords because we find that when you move them from an auto campaign to a manual campaign, you’re starting from scratch from a relevancy perspective. So, within your auto campaign you got to think, your bids are typically lower. They’re typically slowly focused on profitability, so you’re casting a really wide net. So, the ASIN or the search term you’re converting on within the auto campaign could be on page seven and page eight. It could be within the frequently bought together section that’s a new sponsored section or anywhere else on the page and it’s running well for a reason because Amazon has, you know, the shopper history and they’re targeting those placements because they have a lot of data. When you pull it out, if you negate it, there’s pretty much a hundred percent chance it’s not going to perform the exact same when you put it into a manual campaign. Most people kind of almost restart that relevancy journey that they were on and find that their manual campaign does not perform as well, especially in the first six to eight weeks because you have to refine that sweet spot. We continue to run them separately and just control the bids.

Destaney Wishon:

There’s a few scenarios where I could recommend isolation. If it’s your core keyword, eating up all of your impressions and sales in your auto campaign, sure move it over to a manual. But then also the second part of your question is there a cost per bid difference? Yes, typically there is per bid difference. Yes, typically there is. We find autos are typically winning inventory for lower CPCs and impression conversions. Also, a yes, your manual campaigns typically higher impression because you’re typically running a bid specifically for that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. All right, a question I think I can handle. I’ll do this one that’s from Jay Smith. During the first week of launch, my sales have been really high, especially on top keywords, but my organic rank is not moving much on many of the top keywords. Any tips for improving organic rank during launch, or does it just take time and consistent sales? My BSR is top 10 in my subcategories when my sales are good. So, a couple of things. First of all, make sure that you have boost on in keyword tracker so that we’re checking 24 hours a day and rotating browsing scenarios just to see you know, who knows, maybe your rank is improving in some locations, just not, uh, others or some browsing scenario. So, make sure you have that boost on. That’s that rocket ship. The other thing is look at the CPR number inside of keyword tracker. Once you have you know you already said you have the keywords in Keyword Tracker there’s a customized CPR number. It’s actually different than the one that’s in Cerebro and Magnet because it’s specific to your listing, takes into consideration the age of it, your Title Density and things like that, and then see what that number is. If that number is, let’s just say, 50, that means that, hey, over a week, week and a half, you would need around 50 people to search, find and buy your product, whether it’s organic, whether it’s in PPC. Probably it’s going to be PPC. If you’re not organically ranked very high, it’s 100% from PPC and so you can clearly see how many conversions you’re getting on that keyword and that’s the best chance, that number of getting you to stick to page one. So, if you’re not at that number yet, well, there’s another reason.

Bradley Sutton:

The other thing to look at is you could have a relevancy issue to Amazon. So run your product in Cerebro and then sort it by Amazon recommended rank. All right, this to me is the most slept on mini feature in all of Helium 10. It’s a direct link to the Amazon API. This is not a Helium 10 estimation or an algorithm or anything like that. It’s directly to the actual Amazon advertising API. But it gives you a look into what Amazon thinks your product is. So just sort that in ascending order, meaning it’s, you’re going to see the Amazon recommended rank one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and just take a look at the general uh, those, those general keywords. It tells you what Amazon thinks your product is. And so, if it does, if some of the keywords you’re trying to increase your rank on are very specific and none of them even appear, like in the top 20, 30, 40, 50 words, well, yeah, it might take you. It might take more effort, to get to page one. Or you need to re-optimize your listing to kind of like show Amazon what your product is. But I’ve had issues like that where my listing was fine but Amazon was confused about it and so, even though I was getting sales, it wasn’t increasing my organic rank. So, there’s three things that you can try there. Kim says is there any magic mojo way to control profitability? When bids quickly rise due to an upcoming event like Prime Day, I often find that the increase in sales rarely offsets the lost profit. So, if I could find an automated way to control bidding, it’d be helpful. There’s some good questions today.

Destaney Wishon:

There is. Your bids don’t change unless you’re changing them is the first thing that I’ll say. So, unless you’re using a software with rules that you’re changing them is the first thing that I’ll say so. Unless you’re using a software with rules that you’re not controlling or you have aggressive placement modifiers on, your bids will stay the same, regardless of what-?

Bradley Sutton:

She’s probably talking about cost per click. I bet you she mistyped that probably.

Destaney Wishon:

CPCs. So, if we’re talking about CPCs, it’s also related. You’re not going to see a major change. You can keep your bids low during Prime Day if you want. Just know that you’re probably not going to get as much traffic because the rest of the market is increasing their bids. So as everyone else is bidding higher and higher and higher, it’s like bidding on real estate. You’re going to be showing up lower, lower on the page, so you’re just going to get less sales and some people are okay with that on Prime Day. I will say personally, across the board, as an agency, we find that the increase in conversion rate almost always offsets the increase in bids when we’re really strategic. That being said, the majority of our brands do have some type of promotion or deal or discount, so their conversion rates inflated because customers think that they’re getting a deal. So, short answer is don’t rely on placement modifiers and keep your bid management software set to a target ACoS and you’re probably not going to see that big of a change in bids on the day of.

Bradley Sutton:

Shubham says what’s our launch strategy for 50 product? Prime day is also coming up, we wanted to reduce the price to where our customer buys, but how many keywords shall we run in? Launch PPC? But let’s just take the other part of that, you know, those people who might have some products that are going to be ready in the next, uh, month, month and a half. Should they just go ahead and launch? Should they wait until actual prime day and take advantage of that? Should they wait until after prime day? What’s your general strategy as far as timing goes?

Destaney Wishon:

The first brand that I managed on my own as a consultant was a prime day launch and it was incredibly successful, but this was seven years ago. The thing to consider is how much you’re going to lean into Bradley’s point. If you don’t reduce the price, you are going to drown in Prime Day and not do incredibly well, and you may not anyways, because you don’t have a lot of reviews. That being said, if you plan on doing a pretty heavy discount on Prime Day, it is a fantastic way to get inflated traffic from people who are ready to buy, and customers on Prime Day are a lot less sensitive to reviews, in my opinion, and a lot more sensitive to price. So, I always hate this question because I feel like it’s so dependent on budget and financing and all these other variables. But if you want to heavily reduce your price and stand out, then Prime Day is the way to go. There’s no other industry that drives this amount of traffic on any specific day. I don’t think, so definitely take advantage of that.

Bradley Sutton:

He had a follow-up question. He or she had a follow-up question. At what point should we start using Adtomic? We’re new launching our very first product, so is there, like you know? Is this something that somebody should be using from day one, should they reach a certain advertising spend figure? What’s your personal opinion?

Destaney Wishon:

Personal opinion is it’s really dependent on, I think, what your skill set is internally and where your time’s going. PPC is a major efficiency time suck. I think it’s probably one of the most hands-on, consistent, redundant tasks and that’s where everybody needs a bid management solution, no matter if that’s you going in every day and managing bids by hand or relying on a tool like Adtomic. I’ll leave that up to you. But if you’re running any Amazon advertising campaigns and you’re not managing your bids, that is the biggest mistake you can make. So, I think the convenience of Adtomic, incorporating directly into category insights and like Market Tracker 360, is the biggest value add in my opinion. But if you’re in your first few weeks and you have time to go in and optimize bids manually, then that’s perfectly fine.

Bradley Sutton:

David says what metric do you look at to determine where a budget needs to be increased or decreased across your campaign types? Sponsor brand, sponsor product and sponsor display?

Destaney Wishon:

Love this question. As a whole, we typically see sponsor products drive around 70 to 80% of sales because they make up the most real estate on the page. Sponsor brand. Sponsor brand’s video is 10 to 15%. Sponsor display is the least amount of budget, only because most people aren’t fully utilizing it appropriately. At the end of the day, sponsored brands and sponsored products, RoAS and ACoS should be almost the same if you’re running them appropriately. I’ve pulled this across hundreds of millions of spend and it’s still just targeting keywords and setting bids. So, for those two ad types, you should increase or decrease based off RoAS, for the most part, or ACoS, but your ACoS and RoAS should be the same. That being said, if you are managing a brand that has a good DTC presence or a meta presence and you have amazing video assets and amazing lifestyle images, sometimes we’ll shift more budget to sponsor brand and sponsor display because we want to educate our customer with those videos before we convert them with sponsored products.

Bradley Sutton:

Chris says if you’ve got an eligibility issue, what are other ways to drive traffic aside?

Destaney Wishon:

A great question. If one thing we’ll see is some brands will only have certain products running into eligibility issues, but all their other products will be okay. If that’s the case, we recommend still running sponsor brands to the store. You can create a subpage with some of your products that are ineligible and some of them are eligible and continue to run sponsor brand traffic as a really quick workaround. Beyond that, I think it really depends on product type. Like TikTok can be fantastic if you’re great at the videography and the UGC needed to make TikTok successful. Google can be good, but typically you need to build a landing page between your Google and your Amazon ads so that way you have your conversion increase still, Bradley, do you have any other recommendations here?

Bradley Sutton:

No, you kind of hit it, you know. And then, plus two, you know there’s other platforms that you know might be able to drive some traffic. And then you know, the more your branded search increases, the more organic, you know, eyeballs you guys are going to get without, you know, sponsored, but you know that goes for anybody. You know whether you are eligible or not. That’s kind of like the goal is to is to get a lot of organic eyeballs on your products without having to spend, without having to spend. Brendan. A lot of people think about Prime Day coming up, how do you approach prime day, lead in, lead out? When it comes to budgeting also, what’s a fair estimate for cost per click lift? So, like, is there a rule of thumb where, hey, usually you need to increase your, your budgets this amount, you know to make sure you have enough, or usually you need to you know boost your cost per click X percentage.

Destaney Wishon:

I’m going to start with the lead in, lead out. That one’s super easy to kind of answer. Typically, the seven days leading into prime day are historically the worst performance in all of Amazon advertising. End of story. That being said, the part that people forget is that customers are shopping. They’re just not buying. That’s why your clicks are up but your sales are down is because customers are starting to build their carts for Prime Day. They know that Prime Day is now a national holiday, so in the back of their mind, they may go onto a platform and say, hey, shoot, I need my toilet paper that I always buy. Oh wait, I’m not going to buy it until prime day, so I’m going to hold off.

Destaney Wishon:

So, some people like to lower their bids and budgets on the week leading up. I prefer to continue to run at the same strategy if I’m running a dealer discount, because those customers are going to add to cart and click and then when they see my discount the next week, they’re going to check out. So, I am still building my funnel and attracting my shoppers the weekend, even though they’re not buying until seven days later. That is one really important key to mention. Again, if you’re not running deals or discounts, maybe it’s worth it lowering your bids and budgets on lead in lead out. The last two years has been some of the strongest conversion rates we have seen across the board even stronger than prime day in a few instances. And that’s because prime day is no longer prime day, it’s prime week and it’s being challenged by Walmart and every off platform. So, customers are still continuing to shop on the days after.

Destaney Wishon:

So, lead out, we continue to keep bids and budgets high and we’ll also run a lot of retargeting if we’re running any type of DSP or sponsored display, because sponsored display and DSP allows us to capture all of the traffic and all the clicks from Prime Day and then continue to retarget that audience after Prime Day. So that’s super important and super valuable. And then estimate for CPC lifts. There’s really not one because it’s like every agency or software that releases CPC insights is skewed by the type of brands they’re managing. Right, pack view always cracks me up. When pack view does like their insights, it’s going to be skewed by a lot of enterprise brands. So, their CPC lifts could be 50% because they’re running crazy discounts and have crazy marketing budgets. But maybe a smaller software won’t increase their bids because they don’t believe in Prime Day right, so we personally do 20% to 30% increase in bids if we’re running deals or discounts and just go from there.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Last question of the day before we get maybe into just your closing comments or your closing tip. This is from somebody new who hasn’t asked a question today. Zee says does sponsored products and sponsor display defensive campaigns eat up organic sales? Does it affect my TACoS in the long run?

Destaney Wishon:

The answer is yes. There’s some level of defensive campaigns. That would have happened anyways, but that’s really hard to prove because the way Amazon is set up as a platform what happens if you do not advertise there? Someone else will. So, you need to decide on the balance of do you have a strong enough competitive advantage that a customer’s going to stay on your page and not go to your competitor’s page, and is it that big of a deal if you do cannibalize some of your organic presence? I would rather cannibalize some of my organic presence than lose a customer to a competitor. So, it’s just deciding. Now, that being said, Celis, who is on the Helium 10 podcast, at one point he runs Lego, or used to run Lego. He was one of my great friends in the space and he tried to convince me that, like, branded defenses never need it. And I was like Celis, Lego doesn’t have competitors, like, of course you don’t need to bid on Lego. Who the heck’s gonna try to compete? So, it’s definitely a little bit dependent on depending on your category. I like the. I’m enjoying the conversation here on if it’s niche or niche.

Bradley Sutton:

Andre says it’s niche in the UK, all right, niche in the USA, he says so as well. Okay, yeah, we have started a big debate here this is the one takeaway that people have from today. But in order to make that the not the one takeaway people have, can you give us like a 30 or 60 second uh strategy to close this out, something you think that could uh help sellers, maybe leading up to Prime Day? Or it could be just a general advertising strategy or a metric that you think people are sleeping on, or an ad type anything at all that you can think of that quick hitting and people can take away from today?

Destaney Wishon:

I’ll give two really big ones. Start viewing your Amazon advertising by strategy. Have some keywords solely focused on profitability, where your goal is to lower your bids and have an amazing ACoS and RoAS. Have some campaigns that are all about sales and driving volume and organic rank. Have some that are for brand defense. And when you segment out these campaigns, that gives you budget control. So, to Zee’s question earlier of like hey, maybe I do realize my brand defense campaigns are eating up my budget. Lower your budget and shift your budget over to your organic rank campaigns. When you segment, it gives you maximum control. The second thing I’m going to shout out is the last webinar we did on ad type expansion. This is a hundred percent. The second biggest issue I see within accounts is not expanding to sponsor brands because they don’t think it’s right for them. At the end of the day, sponsor brands will perform almost identical to your sponsor products with good bid management and good campaign setup. But it’s more real estate on the page that’s unique real estate. So, you’re going to show up at the very top of the page. You’re going to show up on product detail pages in placements that sponsor products does not win.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right. Well, Destaney, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. You’re not going to be back here on TACoS Tuesday, at least before Prime Day. Maybe we can. We can talk offline about doing something Prime Day related, since there are so many Prime Day questions. It’s obvious that it’s top of mind and, unlike inventory and other things you know, PPC is something that you can kind of like up to the day before prime day, kind of like, you know, lock in your, your strategy, uh. So that is something maybe we can think about doing next month right before prime day. But, Destaney, thank you so much for joining us and thank you all for such great questions. It seems like every show, the questions get better and better. So, thank you guys for tuning in and we’ll see you next month for TACoS Tuesday.

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