#405 -Amazon & Walmart Advertising AMA – TACoS Tuesday

39 minute read

Published: December 17, 2022

This is the first time that we are broadcasting our TACoS Tuesday program in the podcast. In this program, we take questions live from our audience about anything PPC or advertising related. Our special guest of the month is Gefen Laredo, Director of media buying at Vendo. We talk about all PPC strategies, terms, and trends that you need to know so make sure that you stay until the end of this episode.

In episode 405 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Gefen discuss:

02:10 – Gefen Laredo’s Backstory & How He Got Started In E-commerce
06:00 – Main Differences When Advertising On Walmart & Amazon
11:45 – What Is Influencing Where You’re Showing Up On Sponsored Results Widgets
17:00 – Gefen’s Opinion On Negative Exact Matching Keywords
18:25 – TACoS Tuesday AMA’s
20:30 – Will Adtomic Touch Walmart Advertising Soon?
20:45 – Top Announcements From The Amazon UnBoxed & Other Recent Events
24:00 – What Does Cannibalism Mean In PPC?
25:30 – The Best PPC Strategy With A Limited Budget
27:15 – How Many Clicks Without A Purchase Before You Negative Match?
30:00 – Impact Of Lowering Bids By A Few Cents
31:30 – Offering Incentives On The Sponsored Brand Ads
33:00 – How To Get In Touch With Vendo
33:45 – For Keyword Research: Broad Or Phrase?
36:40 – Speaking Of Placement Stats
38:00 – Gefen’s 60-Second Tip

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a PPC-centric episode that we call TACoSTuesday, where we go over all of our listener’s top questions on any and everything, Amazon and Walmart advertising related. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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 ads 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 Seller’s 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 e-commerce world. And this is the first time that we are broadcasting our TACoS Tuesday show. That is a PPC-centric episode for everybody. This is something that we do where we take questions live from you, the audience, and questions that I’ve gotten offline as well about anything and all things advertising-related. This could be PPC on Amazon, advertising on Walmart, et cetera. So let’s go ahead and get into this episode. And we’ve got our special guest of the month is Gefen, the Director of Media Buying from Vendo. Let’s go ahead and welcome him to the program. Gefen, how’s it going?

Gefen:

Good. Good. Bradley, how are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

I am doing just delightful. Thank you. Now, the first question, tell me the origin of your name, because you are the first ever Gefen that I have ever met in my entire 44 years of existence.

Gefen:

I’m first of all impressed that you said it correctly.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what I did was I looked up your YouTube channel just to make sure, but sometimes, you can’t always completely go by that because you could have just been nice and like allow people to call you that like when you’re on another podcast, and just not say anything. So like, it was still 50-50 for me, but I’m glad I got it right.

Gefen:

I wouldn’t have gotten easy on you. I would’ve given you some tough love there, but no. So the name is Hebrew. Fun fact. It means wine. So drinking wine is I guess part of who I am. So I do like red wine and yeah, it is a prayer in Hebrew. I dunno, if you’ve ever been to something, called a Shabbat dinner on a Friday night, but when they bless the wine, you’ll probably hear my name being said once or twice.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. And then Laredo, that’s like a Mexican family name.

Gefen:

Spanish. So my family actually is way back when I’m talking 600, 700, 800 years. They’re out of Laredo, Spain,

Bradley Sutton:

Laredo, Spain. Okay. I was thinking of Laredo Texas. And then I thought there was a Laredo in Texas too.

Gefen:

Nuevo Laredo which is Mexico, and then there’s Laredo, Spain. And so my family way back when they were, I don’t know, probably like a thousand years ago, they were from that city in Spain. And luckily we were able to keep the last name throughout all these years.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. So guys you came here for the PPC, you’re getting historical and geographical lessons here. Well, we do everything on TACoS Tuesday. But anyways how did you get into the e-commerce world?

Gefen:

So, I started in college. I was helping out and starting, I was helping my mom out starting some different Amazon stores selling a whole variety of products back when Amazon was, I mean, it was only what, five, six years ago, but it feels like it was a lifetime ago in our world where Amazon was a completely different platform where PPC was pretty nascent. And we started out kind of with all facets of Amazon and through a stroke of luck across different networks. I ended up finding the amazing company of Vendo where I started. I was employee number seven or eight at the time. And, we were just a small little agency helping our larger kind of sister companies B Direct and T Direct help in the help the .com side of our retail business.

Gefen:

And as in the past five, six years, e-commerce has exploded, as has our company. We’ve grown to almost a hundred employees. And since then we’ve really built out our media buying capabilities from me managing a couple of brands and helping out some clients to a full fledged media buying department that fully encompasses everything, basically, all marketplaces and platforms, Amazon, Walmart, paid search and social different marketplaces like Instacart, Cratio et cetera. our bread and butter is Amazon and Walmart. We, I mean, me personally, and we as a company, we, we dive in day after day on Amazon advertising strategy, Amazon advertising tactics and as you all know, especially everyone who’s streaming in right now every day is day one on Amazon. So yesterday we had different strategies than we do today. So really excited to dive into some of those.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. I wanted to ask you you mentioned about Walmart and I’m wearing our sister company here, Pacvue shirt who handles Amazon advertising with their, with their platform. And we also with PAC View handle a lot of Walmart. So that was what I wanted to talk to you about. Cause if I’m not mistaken, you guys use pack view for your Walmart advertising, so Yes, correct. Just in general, what are some main differences between advertising on Walmart and advertising on Amazon?

Gefen:

Wow. Well a lot. If you had asked me six months ago, some of the differences would’ve been even bigger. So the main difference between advertising on Walmart and advertising on Amazon, I’ll talk about a couple of things. So number one is capability. Amazon advertising is much more built to be blunt. Amazon advertising is much more built out than Walmart advertising, but, and that’s a button all caps, Walmart is rapidly expanding its capability. So one of the biggest changes that happened this past year in Walmart is moving from the first price to the second price auction.

Bradley Sutton:

So can you just explain that to the people who don’t understand that?

Gefen:

A hundred percent. So before, so for those familiar with Amazon advertising, it’s pretty much ingrained, and we pretty much take it for granted that if, let’s say Brad and I were both bidding on a certain keyword and you bid $2, I bid $1. In theory, you win that bid for $1 and 1 cent, right? You were 1 cent higher than my $1 bid on Walmart up until about, I think July, I wanna say June-July. Previously it was, if you bid $2 and I bid $1, you would get, you would win the bid, but you would pay the full $2. Yeah. That’s called a first-price auction. And so we’ve seen since then, we’ve seen our CPCs on Walmart come down over 50% year over year just as a result of that change, obviously, as a result of optimizing within those changes. But yeah, that was a huge adjustment, a huge shift for Walmart. And I think everyone who advertised on the Walmart platform agrees that it was very positive. A couple of other main differences between advertising on Amazon and Walmart is again, the capability. So things like negative keyword targeting. Yeah, you can’t do it on Walmart. They said it’s coming down the pipeline. We hope it’s coming down the pipeline.

Bradley Sutton:

Just boggles my mind. I heard about that too, and I’m just like, how in the world I’m so used to Amazon, right? Like, how in the world can you effectively manage PPC on a platform where you can’t negatively match the poor-performing keywords? So, so what do you do? Wait, first of all, are there auto campaigns on Walmart or is everything like broad and exact?

Gefen:

There are auto campaigns and you can effectively manage them. The management is not, it’s just de facto not as effective as Amazon because on Amazon you can accomplish, you can kill two birds with one stone, right? You can look to data gather, grow your keyword base, and expand your business by data gathering and conquesting keywords. So things like auto campaigns, things like broad match targets, right? And during that process, you can optimize with negative keywords. So what you can do is you can put in a broad keyword, or you can put in a phrase keyword, and you can negative target the exact keywords you’re already working with. You can also negatively target any of the keywords that have not been performing. And you can force the Amazon algorithm to show your product against new keywords.

Gefen:

And that’s how you expand really early base level. That’s how you expand your keyword base on Amazon. On Walmart, you just, there’s, there’s really two ways you can do it. Number one, you can do extensive keyword research, right? So Helium ten’s a great tool for doing extensive keyword research, finding as many relevant keywords as you possibly can, and leaning into exact terminology, way more than auto broad or phrase. And then testing those out more manually. And then having that process of keyword discovery be more manual. The other option is you do lean on the Walmart algorithm a little bit more. And you do rely on auto. We rely on auto, on Walmart a little bit more heavily than we do on Amazon. We also find that performance isn’t necessarily terrible from a robust perspective on Walmart. We find that the RoAS on auto campaigns is better on Walmart than on Amazon. So in that regard, if you’re willing to maybe stomach a little bit of a lower RoAS, and by the way, our RoAS on Walmart is higher than on Amazon then, then there’s that route two, and you can still discover keywords, take those out, move them into exact, and then shift budgets. So that really is a fundamental difference. To your point, a fundamental difference between Walmart and Amazon is negative keyword targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. But even without that, your, for example, if there was no negative keyword targeting on Amazon, I mean, things would be armed. It

Gefen:

It would spiral.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon just like sometimes is like, Hey, well, we’ll just go ahead and show you for this keyword. I don’t care that you got 75,000 clicks without a sale, we’re gonna keep showing it to you. But on Walmart, like their algorithm kind of makes that not happen where you’re not Oh,

Gefen:

No, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. I would just say that the blended RoAS is just a little bit better. Okay. That’s also a function of CPCs too. Like, I mean, CPCs and auto campaigns and Amazon are low, but CPCs an auto campaigns on, on Walmart are, can be really, really low. And so that really just allows you to, because the platform is newer, because there’s fewer advertisers, I think if we had this conversation in a year from now, I’ll have a little bit of a different tone. I would imagine that CPCs are gonna increase now that there’s more and more advertisers coming onto Walmart. But I think that right now it’s a good time, but again, to your point, it’s just flat-out not as efficient as Amazon because of negative.

Bradley Sutton:

Now we got a couple of other questions here, but I wanna get to one of mine that I had thought about. But nowadays there are just so many different sponsored ad placements on Amazon. in the old days, in the old days as in last year, you type in a keyword, okay, you might have the sponsored brand and then, and then you have like three or four ones with a little sponsored icon right there. But nowadays there’s like these I I call ’em like widgets and things like there’s four-star and above, and then there’s highly rated. Now it says there, Hey, these are sponsor results. But I’m just wondering, have you ever done testing to know like, which kind of campaigns are driving this? Is it basically just, hey, if I’m running sponsor product campaigns, then like, like my keyword targeting, I have equal opportunity to come in these as I do with those just, or regular sponsored ad placements, or are these specifically like ace and targeting campaigns? And then they’re following me around Amazon, like what is driving where I’m showing up in all of these different widgets?

Gefen:

Yeah, it’s a great question. So for those who dunno what Bradley’s referencing is if you type in any search term on Amazon, most likely you’re gonna start with a sponsored brand campaign. Usually, a headline, which now I’m sure we’ll get into, there’s video placement there, which is interesting. And then right below that is usually three to four sponsored product slots. Then you have four organic rankings. And then these quote-unquote widgets that Bradley is talking about is essentially three rows of sponsored results. And it’s everything from highly rated, like I typed in a supplement brand here. And it seems like there is a climate pledge friendly.

Bradley Sutton:

I saw that collagen peptide, it’s one of my favorite searches right there.

Gefen:

Yeah, exactly. So the climate pledge-friendly widgets, and then there’s a video. So you’re really looking at, of your top five or six rows, four of ’em are sponsored. And to your question, Bradley, at current rates, there’s, or at current capabilities, there’s, it is, it is impossible to target those right, to target those explicitly. What I have found is that the highly rated ones for products that are highly rated, which I haven’t gotten clarification, if it’s over four or four and a half stars but I have found that when we put in the aggressive top of search bid adjustments we start showing up a lot more on the highly rated on top of page, and we usually show up both times too. We show up on the regular sponsor product slots, and then we show up on the highly rated ones as long as those products.

Gefen:

I’ve seen it for four, but I’ve mostly seen it for four and a half stars. And so usually that’s how we do it, is we just go aggressive on top of search and it, and it gets there. The video is obvious and then, to be honest, the climate pledge-friendly one I think is interesting. I’m not a hundred percent sure how they’re exactly gauging when and where and which products to put up there, but I know I’ve seen some of our brands pop up there on occasion, haven’t been able to figure out exactly how to target it. However, to your last point, as they, they move into video now on, so I dunno if anyone’s noticed, but where the headline search ad used to be there is now sometimes it’s popping up a video ad which is similar to the sponsor brand video ad that’s showing up on lower on the page.

Bradley Sutton:

Similar to, or it is formally known as? Okay. So if, if I was doing a regular sponsored brand video campaign, you’re saying that now that has the chance to actually show up at the top?

Gefen:

It does, and you can actually put in a bid adjustment for the top of search now.

Bradley Sutton:

So you see it at the bottom too. Because I also see it at the bottom sometimes too, which I never saw

Gefen:

That happens at the bottom. Yeah, it happens on page two. But I know that when we were at Unboxed which is the Amazon advertising conference out in New York last or two months ago they had announced that that was coming out and they had started running it about a week before that. And then a couple weeks ago they put in top of search bid adjustments for video campaigns. And now that doesn’t, you can’t explicitly bid on that placement, but what you can do is you can say, you can tell Amazon to add a multiplier to get to that placement, so it’s the next best thing

Bradley Sutton:

Or I could just bid high just like I do with Walmart.

Gefen:

Or you could bid really high. Yes, and my expectation is those CPCs are gonna increase because I think with sponsored brand search ads, we’ve consistently seen lower conversion rates than sponsored product campaigns. However, with video ads, we’ve seen higher conversion rates and even more than the higher conversion rates, significantly higher engagement, so significantly higher CTR on video campaigns versus certainly versus sponsored brand head headline campaigns and then versus response product campaigns. So I think Amazon’s gonna push that more heavily. And if you had to ask me my prediction, I would say that CPCs on that placement is gonna increase pretty drastically over the next six to eight months.

Bradley Sutton:

Trusting. Okay. All right. Good, good to know. We got another question also coming from YouTube Zavier says, what’s the consensus of putting negative exact match keywords from your exact campaign into your broad and phrase campaign to stop cannulation? I’m seeing mixed opinions and before we answer that, what is your opinion, first of all, on negative exact matching in exact campaigns? Me personally like I have the option to do that in our software in Adtomic, but my personal preference is I like pausing those campaigns instead of like negative matching. Because if I’m just looking at my campaign manager, whether I’m in Adtomic or whether I’m in the campaign manager in seller central I don’t necessarily visibly see the negative match. So it might look like I’ve got all these keywords that I’m still targeting and all I’m, I can be like, oh, this is full now. So like, do you, for exact target campaigns, do you negative match because Amazon is almost making these like broad campaigns it seems nowadays, or do you just pause the target?

Gefen:

If all the keywords in the campaign are exact? Yeah. then I won’t add any exact negative terms. I would

Bradley Sutton:

Just pause, just, okay. Okay. So now that we got that out the way, so regardless of if that’s your strategy or not, let’s say there’s something that going to Zavier’s question here, there’s something that I either want to pause or if my strategy is doing exact negative as he said, do I take that and put it to my auto and broad and phrase campaigns, or do I wait until the data on those campaigns show me that it’s not performing there as well?

Gefen:

So best practice that we have at Vendo is we do add those keywords into broad and phrase campaigns to stop cannibalization. And the reason why is, well, first of all, let me clarify a little more. Sure. If it’s against the same ASIN, right? If we’re looking at different ASINs, then I think that the debate really opens up because I’ve heard directly from Amazon that Amazon views campaigns as potentially competing against one another. And you can actually, according to my contact at Amazon, you can drive up your own CPC if your campaigns are competing for aga or are targeting the same keywords. Especially if it’s for the same ASIN. Now, if it’s for different ASINs, it’s very interesting because you can argue that you want to get more page real estate. And if you wanna get more page real estate, then you can go very aggressive on top of search and show up twice, which we’ve definitely done before.

Gefen:

But as the best practice, I would say, Zavier, that most likely you should be adding those exact terms into negative in those broad phrase campaigns. Now, on the flip side what a little nugget of strategy that we like to sometimes do is we like to do catchall campaigns that are either auto or broad with really low bids. So like, for instance, a good example would be you can maybe have magnesium as a keyword, right? And you can bring in a really aggressive five or $6 or 200% top-of-search bid adjustment campaign on that term. And then maybe you have a second one that captures a lot more keywords and broad and phrases with like 50 cents or $1 or whatever it is that will capture all of these page two, page three placements or whatever they are. And if that’s a built-out strategy, then you don’t need to add into negative. But if you’re looking at bidding $3 in one campaign and bidding $3 in the other campaign for both of the same terms, my recommendation would be to add one of them into the negative.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Thank you for that question there. We got more, we got one for me talking about Adtomic. Jake says, Will Adtomic touch Walmart advertising at some point? well, what was that movie field of dream? If you, if you build it, we’ll come, well, it’s the opposite. It’s like, hey if you ask for it, we will build it kind of thing. So have we considered that? Is it on a roadmap? For sure, butwhere it’s prioritized is the more customers who ask for, Hey, we want helium 10 to have Walmart advertising support, then the faster we can get that done. Jake, so you, you referenced Unboxed and then you and then also of course, recently there was Amazon Accelerate and I would say advertising at both of these was a big as far as releases upcoming releases, advertising, what’s the star of the show. If you can remember, what are your top two or three announcements on the advertising side of something that has already come or is coming that you are most excited about?

Gefen:

Yeah, so the first of them, well, it wasn’t technically an announcement, but I think it was a focus AMC. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, yes, is going to be from the way Amazon was pitching what they call their ad product or their ad flywheel is AMC is going to be the glue that really ties in all of these different previously, even though they were in the same marketplace previously disparate kind of advertising products into one. So for those who don’t know, Amazon Marketing Cloud is basically a sequel-based command function in the backend of Amazon that allows you to essentially just, I know it’s gonna sound broad, but pull any data you want from, from your sponsored campaigns. You can pull data by hour, you can pull data by minute, you can pull past the conversion, you can pull so much that a lot of brands are getting a little bit over, or a lot of agencies, at least our brands are getting a little bit overloaded with the amount you can pull.

Gefen:

So the challenge coming into these next six to 12 months is figuring out what’s the valuable data and then what’s a lot of the white noise in the background. So I think that AMC was a big one, and I think that the integration of AMC with Amazon Marketing Stream, with sponsored ads with DSP, et cetera was huge. And then the second thing to like nerd out, one of the things that they allowed was they now have launched their bulk sheets 2.0, which is a really small detail for those. I know that if you’re using a software like Pacvue, then it’s a little bit easier to make bulk changes. But bulk uploads, I know that have been a focus for Amazon and we’ve talked to some of the Amazon reps as, as far as making media buying more efficient, and they’ve also enhanced their DSP bulk uploads too.

Gefen:

So you can now in DSP, which is pretty cool, you can make changes to multiple advertisers with one bulk upload sheet. And so from a more granular perspective, not as high level, I think that was really effective. And then the third one we already talked about is gonna be that video placement. I think that that video placement, and by the way, just in general, Amazon’s focus on video, they’re gonna start integrating vertical aspect ratio videos. They’ve only done horizontally up until now. We’ve seen on mobile some placements, especially during ma like football games, or during Black Friday, Cyber Monday we saw, I think I saw a Cheeto, like it was an engageable scrollable vertical video ad, I think for Cheetos or Doritos or someone that was just off of the Amazon homepage. So vertical videos, video focus in general, top of search video, all of that stuff, Amazon is bringing in very aggressively. I think that we’re gonna see a requisite increase in CPC with that, but I think it’s brands should really start looking at building out video content as best they can.

Bradley Sutton:

One of the things I think I’ve seen in the wild and it was announced was isn’t it like in sponsored display ads, the, like the ones that come on the actual ASIN page? Like there’s videos now the one, the one that comes right under the buy box. Small, but I mean, that used to be just to be a real static image that you could have. And, but yeah, there’s videos now coming up for there, right?

Gefen:

I’ve seen, I haven’t seen on any of the product pages I’ve been on as a consumer and network, but I have seen people post that. And then there are other features too, like on desktop now, if you hover over, not forever everyone, but if you hover over product listing, then a video starts playing. Which if, obviously if that ASIN has a video. So again, the focus on video was a big call out, I think from Unboxed.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Excellent. You were talking earlier, and somebody was asking about can Cannibalism, I and he says, what does Cannibalism mean? I think he’s not asking about the actual definition of cannibalism, but when we’re talking about PPC, what does this mean?

Gefen:

So Cannibalization is basically when, and there are multiple different definitions within e-commerce. But it basically means when you’re losing efficiency because of, because you’re targeting the same things, whether they’re keywords, whether they’re products, et cetera. You are almost essentially competing with yourself and fraying your data into multiple different places or driving up your CPCs, driving down your efficiencies with the same keyword targeting. That’s what cannibalization means. And oftentimes it can lead to what’s called wasted spending. So spending that could have driven more revenue than it did because you’re not putting all those eggs in, in the right basket.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. Alright. Hope that answers your question back to you probably said his name, right, Zavier like your last name is Laredo, and here I am thinking, and I’m Filipino American, and I’m the one thinking like Javier, so it must be Zavier. I swear I have a Latin mind here, but anyways, I love it. It’s probably Zavier, so I’m gonna say Zavier. He says, if you have a limited budget for PPC, would starting with your best 25 keywords in exact and broad campaigns to begin with, be a good strategy? My personal opinion is I’m not sure that’s a little bit too much. I think especially for one campaign maybe. And then especially if I, if I have like some super long, long tail keywords, I personally wouldn’t put it in broad, but let’s let the expert speakers.

Gefen:

Took the words outta my mouth. So, so I think that there are two aspects to limited budget. There’s limited budget, and then there’s also, which KPIs are you looking at, right? So if you’re looking at RoAS and conversions and the most control you can have over these keywords, then I wouldn’t even do the broad to Bradley’s point. I would just do, I personally like the 20 to 25 keyword range. I think it gives the Amazon algorithm enough to work with where they can choose which keywords you want to go into. Also, it’s not like a hundred or 150 and it’s not like one. Yeah. It’s like a pretty good range. And if you’re limited budget, then I would never go with broad just because Amazon’s gonna outspend. That’s what we were talking about at the beginning. Even if you keep putting in negative keyword targets, it’s gonna keep spitting out new keywords.

Gefen:

My recommendation is you should probably do something like maybe 15 or even 10 of your top exact keywords and have that. Maybe let’s make up a scenario, 10 of your exact keywords with 70% of your budgets that you think are gonna work if you’ve never tested them out. And then I would go into a phrase campaign with maybe three to five keywords. So you’re still discovering very relevant keywords that are that is only spending about 20% of your budget. You really do want to continue investing in keyword discovery. Yeah. And you always want it to be a minority of your spending.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. How many clicks without purchase before you negative match? Let me preface that by saying, hey, whatever he says, whatever I say, whatever you hear, there’s probably no one size fits all, but everybody has their own preference. I’m just wondering what yours is?

Gefen:

Absolutely. Well, first of all, I will always say it depends on the price of the product. So we have brands that sell two or $300 products and they can afford to go 80 clicks without a purchase. Wow. and still, I can’t imagine Ros, right? So we look at those brands. So we look at those brands usually on a monthly basis, and we’ll see keywords with 80 or hundred clicks, but they’ll still have a $2 RoAS. And you’re like, how is that possible? Well, because their product is worth $500, most brands are selling within the 20 to $40 range. And usually what we like to see off the bat is we like to say as a blanket rule, certainly anything above 15 clicks, I think that we can all agree probably isn’t gonna convert at that point. Yeah. Right. Now, take in mind on the flip side, if this is a very relevant keyword, right?

Gefen:

If you’re a magnesium supplement and you’re not converting on magnesium, then it’s not the keyword, it’s something in your brand, whether it’s the price, whether it’s the images, whether it’s the title or the reviews, there is something in that process that your most relevant keyword is not converting. And I would take it back to the drawing board and the data’s telling you something on that one where there’s something wrong. But for most of these longer-tailed or more niche or lateral keywords, 15 is a definite no. 10 is, I think the kind of middle ground where you’re like, okay, if we really want to be, be efficient than anything outta 10, we can just get rid of. What I will say is that anything around five, in my opinion, deserves to be tested a little bit more. And that could be anything from maybe taking 10 of those keywords, siphoning them off, putting them into their own campaign and putting a a $20 a day budget to see if any of those actually convert at 10 clicks. Because you can convert no times in five, convert once in 10. And if your product is decently priced and you have a pretty good CPC, then that’s a scalable campaign. So I would say between five to 10, as Bradley mentioned, you’re never gonna find one consistent answer. But I would say that anything above 10, we usually like to discard anything around five, we like to test a little more.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. We’ve got another question, and I’ve actually gotten this a lot of times myself. So this is good that Darsha is bringing it up. When you lower the bids by a few cents, does it have any impact if the bid is higher than cost per click? So for example, I think some of the scenarios that people have given me when they ask this is like, Hey my bid is 75 cents my cost per click is only 55 cents. Does anything happen if I lower the bid to 70 cents?

Gefen:

Yes, it does. And the reason why is that Amazon is charging different costs per click for different placements. So what matters the most is the weight, right? Where is most of your spending being allocated? So a good place to go is when you open up your campaign when you open up an individual campaign on the left, it says placements. Go open those placements and see if most of your clicks are coming from top of search. And then look at the difference in CPC between the top of the search click and either the product page or the rest of search click. And usually what you’ll find is that the top of search is more expensive. And usually, if it is a competitive keyword, that CPC will be much closer to your bid than the rest of them.

Gefen:

So let’s make up a scenario. You’ve got a 75-cent bid as Bradley mentioned, and your top of search is at 73 cents, right? And you’re getting 80% of your clicks from the top of search, if you lower from 75 to 70, 80% of your clicks are gonna be affected by that. And what you’ll find is that your overall CPC will decrease. On the flip side, if you have a 75-cent bid and all of your placement is on the rest of search at 55 cents, most likely if you’d lower from 75 to 55, you’re not gonna see much of a difference.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Thank you for that. Another question here one of the announcements that was given I think was about like offering incentives on the sponsored brand headline ads where it’s like, Hey, spend 25 bucks, get five bucks credit, or something like that. Has that started yet? And whether or not it started, is this something that you guys plan on doing? Or do you think this is not really gonna move the needle might be a waste to focus on it?

Gefen:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So we saw it, and correct me if I’m wrong, I saw it, they had announced it on display.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, display, okay.

Gefen:

Announced on sponsored brands.

Bradley Sutton:

I wasn’t sure it was either sponsored brand or sponsored display. I had 50-50.

Gefen:

This is Amazon looking to push sponsor display aggressively as an advertising product. I mean, we haven’t used it yet. We haven’t seen it yet. I know it’s in beta, but I know it’s coming out and I’m curious to see if it’s gonna work. I’m curious to see how the messaging is gonna look. I don’t know how easily they’re gonna convey to a customer that they just get five bucks to Amazon. In general, I think it’s a brilliant idea. And I kind of like, I think it’s gonna have a positive impact on conversion rates and I think it’s gonna incentivize people to spend more against the sponsored display, but at the same time, I’m curious to see how they’re gonna roll out the messaging around that. So TBD.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. We might have time for one more question if you guys wanna get one in. But in the meantime, before we, we close here, if you guys wanna get more information on what Vendo can do for you by the way, that’s just a great name of a company. Vendo for those who don’t know means like I sell in Spanish. So kudos to whoever named the company there. But guys, go to hub.helium10.com, hub.helium10.com, type in Vendo, and then you’ll be able to contact them directly from there. I got a couple, one, or two more questions here. We got one from Mike. If you could only use only broad or phrase for keyword research which would you choose? And by keyword research, I assume he’s meaning, hey, try and discover, discover new manual targets

Gefen:

Phrase hands down the phrase and what me personally it’s more relevant. Again magnesium, we’re just gonna stick to that example. If you use the magnesium phrase, right? Then every term that you have to bring in, and you can even use a longer-tailed term, right? 500-milligram of magnesium, let’s say. Right? Your product is 500 milligrams, then all of a sudden you might Amazon is gonna narrow their search to 500-milligram magnesium organic, 500-milligram magnesium supplement, organic, right? Weird, different things that still contain the phrase and it’s relevant. Now, if you have a lot more budget and you’re willing to test out as broad of a net as possible, then go with broad and you can harvest a lot more and you can test a lot more at once. But most brands don’t have that budget.

Gefen:

So what you do is you bring in the phrase, you see what converts, you export to exact, you rinse and repeat, right? And then eventually once you’ve been advertising on phrase for a long time, you have a new set of exact terms that you can actually put back into phrase and see what it can generate again. And that keeps it leaner, right? I think the reason I like the phrase is that a lot of our brands are, especially moving into this, whether you wanna call it recession, whatever you wanna call it, brands are focused on profitability a little bit more right now. And so being a little bit leaner through phrase has worked very well for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I’m just curious, back in the day, as in earlier this year, exact campaigns with exact manual targets, it’s like it would show me for that exact keyword or maybe a plural form of that keyword but then there was a time where on some of these campaigns, I don’t know if this was a glitch or this is just the new normal, and that’s, I guess is my question, if this is the new normal or not in exact campaigns, sometimes they were almost performing as phrase. I’m like, what in the world? This is not an exact match like, have you ever seen that on any of your campaigns? Or was this just a temporary thing or what?

Gefen:

I think it was just temporary. I haven’t seen that too much. Yes. The plural I’ve seen, the plural I’ve seen, absolutely. And I think we’re all okay with that. I think that we would definitely want magnesium supplement magnesium supplements. However, I do see different using Helium 10’s product. I do see different search volumes for plurals versus regular. I’d see different search volumes. I see different performances against those two terms, which I always think is interesting. But yeah, no, I haven’t seen too much as it pertains to phrase, I think, was that around your question earlier, around negative targeting too. We haven’t seen it. If it’s there, it’s not, it’s not moving the needle.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright.

Gefen:

In the wrong way.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, there actually is another question. So let’s go ahead and knock this one out since we got it here from Tom. Speaking of placement stats, if I run a sponsored product ad with product targeting, how can there be placement data for top of search? Shouldn’t it just be on product pages?

Gefen:

That’s a great question. So no, so the way Amazon indexes, they’re very smart. mean, we all know that Amazon’s algorithm is very smart, right? I have, you can type in certain branded keywords or even potentially certain keywords and you can have your product target show up or your product ad shows up on that product target for that ASIN. At the same time one thing I need to clarify with Amazon is if for that campaign, they also mean top of search on product pages. Because you’ll notice that when you, when you scroll on a product detail page, you’ll see multiple product-targeting carousels, right? You’ll see one at the top of the page, which is just below basically the buy box, right? You scroll down a little bit and it’s there, and then there’s the A+ Content, and then there’s potentially either another carousel or there’s the reviews, and then there’s another one. So it’s also very possible that they can do that. It’s a good, good question. But what I do know is that people also type in individual products as well. So you can type in like Apple MacBook Laptop, and Amazon has indexed that term as that asin And from my understanding, from what I’ve talked to Amazon about, it’s possible for your product to show up there and count it as a top of the search.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Alright, now it’s time for our SST, our 60-second tip. What is your 62nd advertising strategy for the masses out there?

Gefen:

That’s a great question. So in 60 seconds look at your wasted spend. I couldn’t be more this, you, you brought up this question about spend that doesn’t generate clicks or does or doesn’t generate conversions or revenue. And there’s been a lot of questions today around the phrase and broad, if you’re running phrase and broad or auto campaigns, Amazon is targeting keywords in the thousands for you, right? And 90% of those keywords have usually less than five clicks, right? We’ve seen brands that are spending in the millions that have 80% net granted, their ads could even be still profitable and have 80 to 90% of their keywords not generate any revenue. And that goes to my point earlier, find the keywords that you’re wasting money on, get rid of the ones with a lot of clicks, find the ones that have two or three clicks, and then have a rotating rinse-and-repeat test cycle of testing those ones out and generating new profitable verticals for your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. Love it. All right. Well Gefen, thank you so much for joining us. Hope everybody else got a lot of value. I definitely got a lot of value in this. Every month we’re gonna keep TACoS Tuesday going with different experts. And so next month Carrie will be on here with another expert and I save the date, guys, I believe the date is gonna be, if this is correct January 10th, if that’s the second Tuesday of January. So again, go to hub.helium10.com, hit Vendo. If you wanna hit up Geffen and his team for some help with your advertising. Don’t forget Pacvue advertising. Of course if whether you’re doing Walmart or Amazon if you’re a larger seller and if you’re a newer seller $500,000 range, or million dollar range, then probably Adtomic by Helium 10 is the solution for you. If you want manage your own advertising. So again, Gefen, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you everybody for tuning in. We’ll see you guys later.

Gefen:

Thank you for having me, Bradley.

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