#144 – Here’s a Mini Case Study That Shows the Keyword Research, Listing Optimization, and Launch of a Live Amazon Product

Long before Helium 10’s Bradley Sutton assumed his position of Director of Training and Customer Success; he was busy optimizing Amazon products for grateful eCommerce sellers.

Now, he’s back in the saddle. This episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a case-study that Bradley created that gives us an over-the-shoulder view of what leading-edge product optimization looks like. Now however, Bradley has the benefit of Helium 10’s full suite of tools to help him re-establish a stalled Amazon product.

Using Helium 10’s tools, sometimes in ways that they weren’t originally designed for, this case-study will show you crucial techniques that you can use to reduce your expenses AND help get your products headed in the direction of Amazon’s page one.  

Look for a two-part blog post from Bradley in the coming week that will offer a deep dive into these cutting-edge tactics.

In episode 144 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:20 – Bradley’s Getting Back to His Amazon Product Optimization Roots
• 03:50 – Don’t Leave Money on the Table
• 06:00 – “5 Extra Units a Day Would Be Fine” – OK, Let’s Go
• 07:45 – Putting Helium 10’s Cerebro Advanced Rank Filter to Work
• 09:00 – Making Emotional Connections
• 11:30 – What are They Hiding?
• 15:30 – Using the “Tomer” Method
• 17:30 – How Helium 10’s ADS Can Help
• 19:00 – Taking Full Advantage of the Honeymoon Period
• 21:00 – Clever Search-Find-Buy Tactics Help Put the Product on the First Page
• 23:30 – Getting “Ranking Juice” from Competing Sponsored Products
• 25:50 – Surprise! Showing Up for CBD from Day One
• 27:20 – “And the Product Really Works!”
• 29:10 – Putting Negative Match to Use   
• 31:30 – Market Tracker’s Side Gig as a Product Targeting Tool
• 34:55 – Bradley’s 30 Second Tip

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley: Today, we’re going to dive into a recent case study that I did where I took a product from scratch to an optimized listing and then to a launch that got it on page one, top 10 for 20 keywords by only giving away 25 promotional units. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley: 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 eCommerce world. First of all, shout out again to our podcast guest from a few weeks ago, Slushii, the DJ who gave us that intro song that we’ve had for the last few weeks. Today, we’re getting into the nitty gritty, back to my roots. As you guys know, I used to be a consultant for Amazon sellers before I started working here at Helium 10, and my specialty was listing optimization launching, and getting things to page one. And I kind of missed that a little bit. Working at Helium 10, I don’t have much opportunity to do that. I kind of got really excited about Project X because I got the ability to get back to my roots as it were. And so, I’ve been trying to do some more case studies here or there to be able to give you guys the best information either through here in the podcast or in the blog or in the Facebook groups. And a lot of these I’ve been posting to the Helium 10 Elite group. Today’s story, actually, the Helium 10 Elite group knew about it a few weeks ago. I posted it in there to share with them, but I wanted to just let everybody else know about it, because I just find a lot of this stuff really interesting that I discovered.

Bradley: Now, to give you guys a backstory: one of my friends that I used to work with way, way back in the day and now works on his own helps other companies as a consultant. And one of his clients had this company, this hemp cream company. Now, they don’t pay too much attention to Amazon. They sell products off of Amazon in retail stores and things like that. But they started selling things on Amazon, and he asked me for some help. Every now and then, I’m like, “Hey, I can’t really do consulting anymore. But what I could do is I can take a look at the listings and see what I can do and maybe use different things as case studies.” And about a year ago, if you guys recall, for one of these hemp creams, I had shown in some of my—I don’t remember if it was in a—blog post or in a Facebook group or as one of my TED Talks at a conference. But I basically had shown how—by analyzing the market on their hemp cream—I could see why their sales had gone from like 70 a day down to six or seven a day. It was due to the market being changed. I don’t know if you guys remember that, but it was a case where, with the hemp creams, everybody all of a sudden started putting this ridiculous untrue figures of hemp on their products, like saying it was 3000 milligrams or 10,000 or 50,000 milligrams of hemp, which is obviously a bunch of nonsense. But because of that, people were brainwashed and thinking that it was true and that anything else that was only 300, like their product wasn’t good enough. I was able to change just a little tiny bit on their listing, and it increased sales about 20%. It wasn’t a big deal. Well, my point of showing that before in that case study was that making some slight changes even just to the images or to the title can make a big difference on your bottom line.

Bradley: Now, that was not a big difference. It went from like six to eight sales a day or something like that. I forgot exactly what it was. But imagine if you had something that you could take from 60 to 80 sales a day. How much money are you leaving on the table by not making that switch over a year? I mean, we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars. That was a great case study that I did. And then a few months ago, they came to me again and were like, “Hey we’re going to launch this product, and we’d like to just go ahead and throw it on Amazon. Is there anything you want to do with it? Can you help us out with a listing?” And I’m like, “Yeah, let me take a look.” And it was a hemp roll-on cream. I don’t know if you can picture this; too bad that this podcast doesn’t have video. But basically, instead of actually putting a cream, sticking your hand in a jar, putting cream on your arm, basically there’s like this roller ball on the end of this thing. And you roll the whole bottle over your arm with this all as it were, and then the pain cream comes on you.  “Okay, that looks interesting,” “Let me, if you guys allow me, talk about this later publicly.” Everybody’s so secretive about their products, but since they’re not real Amazon sellers, they are like, “Yeah, we don’t care. It gives us more publicity. “ I said, “As long as you guys let me talk about it publicly, let me go ahead and design the listing for you. Let me take care of your images. Let me do the keyword research. Let me start your PPC. Let me do the listing optimization. Let me do the launch. Let me do everything as long as I can go ahead and tell everybody about what I did and if you guys are cool with me doing some experiments on the side that might not necessarily be completely about your sales but will help me get some data. They’re like, “Yeah. No problem.” I told them right off the bat after I started analyzing this niche, I’m like, “Guys, I honestly wouldn’t have launch this if it was just for Amazon. And the reason for this is the hemp roll-on market didn’t seem like there was much demand.” I mean, a lot of the keywords that were out there don’t have that much search volume. The top sellers weren’t making that much. 

Bradley: I said, “There’s a ceiling.” I don’t want you guys getting your hopes up on this, but hey, I can guarantee that I’m probably going to make it at least one of the top sellers in this small niche hopefully, hopefully within the first month.” I said, “Hey, I guarantee like top five, top 10.” But that’s not saying much. We’re talking selling five units a day or something. They’re like, “Hey, no problem. We sell off Amazon. You do what you can do. Five units a day is great for us.” I said, “All right. Let me do the research.” I went in, and I did our regular keyword research that we teach for using Cerebro. I ran a reverse ASIN using Cerebro on there. What I viewed as a top competitor in that specific niche is a roll-on pain cream that had hemp in it.

Bradley: All right, so I probably looked at about seven or eight listings, and it was really hard because a lot of these just were not selling that much. The keywords were all over the place, but I right away discovered that there’s just a few main keywords that were related to hemp. A lot of the keywords, there was like tons and tons of these keywords that had like between 250 and 600 estimated search volume and some higher, had the word CBD in it, and I thought, “Wait a minute.” I was like, “CBD can’t be a word that’s allowed on Amazon.” I looked it up. Sure enough, that’s a forbidden keyword and nobody really had it in their listing. “Hmm, that is going to make a cool study. In itself, how am I going to get indexed for CBD without putting it in my listing?”

Bradley: If you put a CBD keyword in your listing, you’ll get suspended. That’s challenge number one. Let me see what I could do to do that? Then, I made another Cerebro search, also on the generic roll-on pain creams—the ones that didn’t have hemp. I found some that had lidocaine or just other kinds of ingredients, and I’m like, “Maybe down the road, they can start targeting some of those keywords.” I wanted to get some of the top keywords from there. I also use the newer feature that we have in Cerebro, the Advanced Rank Filter, and I found that very beneficial because with the Advanced Rank Filter that we have—by the way guys, if you have no idea what that is, if you’re in Cerebro, make sure to click the Learn button. I made a specific video exactly about this method. It’s the one called Advanced Rank Filter. Basically, it allows me to see, not necessarily where all the top-selling products are performing well for a keyword, but maybe only one or two or three out of the top eight are doing well and everybody else is not doing well at all. I was able to find a lot of keywords under that kind of search, which to me was like, “Hey, these are some keywords that I can target from the get-go and the competition might be a little bit less. It might be a little bit easier to get on page one if a lot of the top competitors are not ranking very high for it,” so I put those keywords aside. I put my phrases, my top 10 to 15 phrases that I definitely want it to get in phrase form in Scribbles right away.

Bradley: And then all the rest of those keyword phrases that I searched, I just dumped those into Frankenstein, which is our keyword processor tool and Helium 10 just so I can extract the singular words because I knew I couldn’t get all those phrases in. And after that, I put them all on the Scribbles, just like we teach in the videos. It’s amazing guys. It actually works, this stuff. I’m not just doing these videos for the fun of it. I mean this stuff actually works.  I put them into Scribbles, and I wrote the listing right there. Now, while I was writing the listing, I had remembered that I forgot an important piece. I wanted to make some emotional connections, and a lot of that happens with the pictures that you use. And I’ll talk about that in a bit, but I wanted to put some things in my bullet points and the title that I felt made an emotional connection.

Bradley: What I did was I ran Helium 10 Review Downloader, and I started analyzing a lot of the competition, not just the hemp roll-ons but the regular roll-ons and I found some key points that were coming up in the reviews of the competition. When you hit Review Downloader and then hit Analysis, a lot of the top keywords came up.  Some of the things I found out was a lot of people were using it for their back and their knee. It can go on any part of the body.  I was like, “Hey, I’m going to write this down. That’s important.” It looks like the majority of people who use this, use it for the back and the knee. I also saw some people complaining about the smell. You all know about that—was it—Bengay? Like somebody walks in, and they got Bengay on there; you can smell them coming from a mile away.

Bradley: It’s an embarrassing kind of smell.  Some people were complaining about that in some competitors, and in other competitors, they were happy that it didn’t have any odor.  I’m like, “Okay, there’s another thing that I just learned from reading the reviews of the competition. This product here is odorless. It doesn’t smell like no Bengay.”  I thought, “I definitely want to bring that out in my bullet points.” Another thing is people were liking how it was non-greasy. Now, again, non-greasy is not a word that ever came up in that extensive keyword research that I did. I mean, nobody types in non-greasy and expects to get pain cream, but that was how people were describing it after the fact in the reviews, and there’s a good point. It’s non-greasy, like maybe people have had bad experiences where they put on this pain cream, and it gets all over their clothes or just feels nasty or something.

Bradley: I thought, “There’s another point that I am going to put in my listing even though it wasn’t necessarily a keyword that I had found.” And then another thing that I had found was there were some people who were like, “Hey, I don’t even know what’s in this product. I don’t see the ingredients anywhere.” That has nothing to do with the keyword right there. Right? But I saw multiple people complaining about that. Now, on the InMotion product, that’s the name of the company, they have ingredient deck on there. I was like, “I’m going to make a bullet point that says”—it brings a little bit of humor into it, but kind of hits a pain point, no pun intended for a pain cream. Actually, I did kind of intend that part, and I’m sorry.

Bradley: But anyways, I did like a bullet point that says, “WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?” in caps. And I’m like, “If you look at a lot of the hemp roll-on pain relief products out there, you’re going to notice very few show their ingredient deck. Why is that? Look at our images and you’ll see our ingredient deck because we have nothing to hide.”  I’m like, “This can’t hurt. There’s not many keywords in this, but I have space to be a little bit creative with my copy.”  I went ahead and did that. Then, after that, I went ahead and just made the rest of the listing. I tried to keep some of my top keyword phrases twice; I had it maybe once in the title, then I would throw it in the search terms, maybe once in the bullet points, and I would have it once in subject matter just to really make sure that Amazon knew I was relevant for those, and tons of CBD keywords, but I couldn’t put those CBD keywords in there.

Bradley: But the longtail version of the CBD key word, I would make sure those phrases were in there just minus the CBD word. And what I especially did as part of my theory was that I wanted it to have a chance to start from day one showing up in auto and broad campaigns for those CBD listing. I made sure that for the people who were performing the best for those CBD keywords, I wanted it to include multiple phrases from those listings into my listing. They didn’t have CBD in their listing, but my theory was I want Amazon to relate my listing to these other ones, and maybe if they’re like, “Hey, this listing is very similar to this product that performs well for CBD keywords.” My theory was, hey, maybe they’re going to show me for CBD right off the bat.

Bradley: And so, that was my hope. All right, so I made my listing. Everything’s good. I ran Index Checker as soon as the listing was live, and sure enough, I was not indexed for CBD. I mean, that was what I expected. I don’t have that word in my listing. I was indexed for pretty much everything else that I had put in my listing because of what I had found out about the people who were using it for their back and their knee.  I’m like, “Okay, what am I going to do for this? I don’t have time to go look for stock photography.” I had my daughter just take a picture of me putting the roll-on cream on my back.  She took a picture. I bet you guys can see that picture on Amazon.

Bradley: I guess you can consider me a back model now. And then also a picture of me putting it on my knee with my Zumba pants/pajamas on. You could see it rolled-up there right now on Amazon, and there’s a picture of me putting it on my knee, and we used those. And then I sent those to actual Helium 10 graphics department. I was like, “Hey guys, can you go ahead and pretty this picture up.” I didn’t take it on professional studio or anything and they did it in 30 minutes. They were able to make it look nice, and for the rest of the pictures, a lot of them I was just kind of lazy.  What I did was I just took their images that they had in their regular hemp cream product that they’ve had for a couple of years, and I just had our team Photoshop the new bottle in there because actually all the ingredients and things were the same.

Bradley: But a couple of the pictures, I wanted to kind of make sure that it was similar to what’s working out there. I did something that, as a test too, this is all a case study. I noticed that all the top sellers, a lot of them had a marijuana-looking-type leaf on their main image. That is against Terms of Service. But I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to give it a try. This is such a small niche. I want to know how long does it take for Amazon to slap me on the wrist for this.” I told the graphics department to put a little leaf on the back of the main image, and it’s been a month now, and Amazon hasn’t said anything, But, once Amazon says something, I’ll let you guys know.

Bradley: I always tell everybody: “Don’t take chances with their listings even if your competitors are doing it.” This one was not so bad. Well, the stuff that I would not even test doing is putting infographics or something like that on your main image. That’s like a super no-no. I threw in a little picture, because I’m using the “Tomer” method. You guys know Tomer who has been on the podcast a couple of times. He likes analyzing the competitors, not just about their listings, but about their imagery and what kind of images they use. Because if you take a look at the top competitors and see what’s working for them, hey, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; if it’s working for them. It could work for you. I kind of followed that methodology with the image deck, and you guys can see it there on Amazon now with this InMotion hemp roll-on. Nothing that fancy with those images. Anyways, the listing went live. I immediately opted into the Amazon Early Reviewer Program. I wanted to make sure to get those reviews right away. I turned on Helium 10 Follow-Up. I wanted to send emails out to customers in a little flow in order to get reviews hopefully after people purchase. And I went directly into my ADS Tool, which is from Helium 10 as well, the PPC tool. If you’re hearing this early April or probably—April, what am I saying? I’m living in the past. It’s May already. If you’re hearing this now in May, unless you’re an Elite member, you might not be able to have access to the ADS tool. But if you’re listening to this later on, if you have another plan, maybe ADS you’re able to use.

Bradley: But anyways, what I did was I used the methodology that Vince, our product manager for ADS has talked about here on the podcast before and launched three PPC campaigns from day one. One of them is an auto campaign, right? I did an auto campaign. I set the bid at like a $2 I think and did a $20 a day. And then I did what we call a research campaign, which is a broad campaign. And for that one, I just had like some of my main short-tail keywords that I want to examine, like roll-on pain and hemp cream and things like that.  I was hoping to get some like long-tail keyword activity on. And then, a proven campaign, which is an exact manual campaign, I also started at the same time, and I started with the top 10 keywords that I knew the competition was converting for.

Bradley: I knew that I needed to get some activity from those as well. Now, the way the ADS works, the tool, is that it finds words in auto campaign, and then, it’ll suggest that I move it to some of the other campaigns if it starts converting. It all kind of works off together. I don’t have to be downloading the reports from Amazon advertising or PPC in order to see my search terms. Everything is done within the tool. I separately added a product-targeting campaign right off the bat. I wanted to do a product-targeting campaign because I knew who those top competitors were based on my keyword research. I want to start showing up on their pages even from day one; even though I didn’t have any reviews yet and no sales history. I had four campaigns actually total running from day one.

Bradley: Now, again, I waited to do the launch, but let me explain that. What they did was they sent about 800 units of inventory, six to 800 units; I forgot how many. They want to launch in the middle of March, like, “Hey, we sent this off. Can you go in and launch?” I’m like, “No, I want to wait until this inventory is checked in a little bit more. And they’re like, “What. No. Just go in and launch. We want to see what happens.” I’m like, “No. When we do the launch, I want to make sure that we have the widest distribution of the inventory across the country.” I could see that even though it was checked in, it was not fully available. Let’s say it was 600; for a week, it was only showing 100 available, and the rest were in transit, still going between the warehouses, and I explained to them that from day one, as soon as I make the listing live, I had the listing close; actually I had it suppressed.

Bradley: I thought, “From day one, I think the honeymoon period is very important. I want that honeymoon period to start, and I want to go with a bang.” Like the Search Find Buy is something that I was going to redo a lot. I want to make sure that Amazon is showing it across the board no matter what zip code they’re in in the United States. I want it to hopefully show up, especially for the PPC ads and everything. Geolocation for years has always been an important aspect at times for listings, and I did want to make sure that there was not going to be any geolocation issues for this one. Since they sent so much inventory, I was like, “Hey, let’s just wait until more gets checked in, and then we’ll go ahead and unsuppressed the listing.” And that’s why I did it until like more than a half got checked in. Once there were 400 units that got checked in, I’m like, “All right, I’m going to turn it on.” I did, and then, I went and did the following. Now this is where it starts getting crazy. All right.

Bradley: The very first thing that I did was I did a pain relief roll-on keyword. All right. Pain relief roll-on keyword. That’s actually a keyword that’s pretty generic. I’m like, “I’m going for that what would be like a home run keyword for this product,” and a homerun keyword for this product is only 3000 search volume. That might seem small to you guys, but again, like I told you, this is a very, very small market, so I’m like, “I’m going to go right off the bat,” and I’m only going to do six units Search, Find, Buy. I used AZrank.com. In the past, for other products, I had used Rankbell.com; that one’s another great website.

Bradley: The owner of that company, Isabella, has been on the podcast. This one, I use Alina’s company. Alina has been on the podcast as well: AZrank.com. I only did six units. That means six people searched for this pain relief roll-on keyword, and you might be wondering how in the world did you do that from day one, and it was because I had a sponsored ad running. All right, so they were able to do it from the sponsored ads. They could see it in Search, Find, Buy. They could organically search for it, and then, they could see it in the sponsored ads, and they were clicking on it. What happened after a week and a half only? It was already on the top of page one for that keyword. Right? Another one I did is: hemp oil roll-on for pain relief.

Bradley: That’s a mouthful, right? Hemp oil roll-on for pain relief. The reason why I did that word was there’s a lot of juicy words that I had found in there. There’s hemp oil, there’s hemp oil roll-on, there’s roll on for pain relief, and then there’s of course the whole keyword.  Those are all phrases that I had pinpointed, and they were all kind of in that keyword. Now, that keyword itself only had about 400 search volume. I did Search, Find, Buy again: four units. That’s it. Four units, and where did it bring me? Page one, position one. Guys, the honeymoon period is real. That was crazy. Four units. Page one, position one. Another keyword I did all had about 350 searches estimate at the time. I wanted to try something different, so I actually made a Helium 10 Portal. I used Portals, our newer tool, to make a landing page for that.

Bradley: And then, on that landing page, if somebody clicked on it, it actually took a two-step URL. A lot of you will say, “Oh, two-step URLs don’t work anymore.” I used a two-step URL and it was a brand two-step URL that I made right there in the Portals tool, and it actually got me to page one only gave three units.  Gave only three units away on that. I think I used AZrank again. AZrank obviously does Search, Find, Buy, but I’m this is all for a case study.  I’m not trying to get the most bang for my buck. I’m just trying to experiment to see what’s working and not working. I was like, “Hey, have your community instead of just searching, finding it and buying it, have them use this landing page to get there.

Bradley: And that got me to page one, position five and 10; it was fluctuating from five to 10. I’m like, “I really want to get to the top of page one on this keyword.” Can I do something different?  I tried something I haven’t tried before. What I did was that I told that same group after that first launch of three units using the two-step URL from the Helium 10 Portal, I told them search for the keyword organically. All right, search for the keyword organically, and then find this other product. This other product I had been targeting on product targeting ad. I knew that on that product, you could see, under sponsored products, our listing right there on their actual product page under the sponsored ads.  I said, “Find this product; don’t click on the InMotion product; click on this other product and then scroll down. And then, in the sponsored ads, when you see us, click on us and buy it.” All right? That’s what I had them do. Three more units, only three units. I had them do that because I was curious: what if somebody searches a keyword, clicks on something else, but then clicks on your product and buys it eventually. Will you get some ranking juice as it were on that original keyword? Sure enough, did only three units there, and in a few days that got to page one, position one.  Yeah, it wasn’t as powerful as the Search, Find, Buy, but you know what, the similar search volume keyword got me to page one position one with only four units. This one took six units between the two-step URL and between this other method, but it does show that there is movement there.

Bradley: Actually, almost every single thing that I did got me to the top half of page one. The only one that I tried that didn’t work, and again, guys, none of this stuff I did in big qualities. All right, we’re talking four units here, five units here. We’re comparing apples to apples.  Don’t take this as some long six-month case study where I tried this over 75 million products or something. All right. I’m just telling you what I did. Last year, a lot of people were talking about the social share buttons that are on a page. Basically, if you look on an Amazon listing page under the Buy Box, it’ll say, Share, right? And so, you click like either the Twitter or the Facebook button or the Pinterest or something, and then take that URL, which just shares the listing. But then, what you do is you add keywords to the end of it. You can add this little code at the end, so that when you hit, it’ll actually show the keyword in the search. And now, again, I’m not trying to say, “Hey, this is what you guys should do.” Actually, this URL isn’t even available in Helium 10, but since so many people keep asking me about this URL, and why we don’t have it in GEMs, I was like, “Sure, I’ll give it a try.” But that one, it didn’t do that great. It only got me to page two about position 50, so about the bottom of page one, top of page two; that’s where it brought me.  That one worked the worst; the social share one, but the Search, Find, Buy, it was working great. Now, here’s the cool thing from day one in my auto and broad campaigns, I was already showing up for CBD-related keywords, tons of CBD-related keywords.

Bradley: My theory was correct that I was able to make Amazon think that I was kind of related to these other products that we’re doing great for CBD.  Sure enough, because I had an auto campaign going, they showed me for CBD-related keywords, and so then, what I did immediately was again going to AZrank. I told AZrank, “Here, I just want you to buy three units, all right. Three different CBD-related keywords; find it in Search, Find, Buy, but click on the sponsor ad because we’re not showing up organically. We’re not even indexed for that keyword. Find our sponsored ad, click it, buy it, and let’s see what happens.” What happened? Three units were bought, boom. We were showing up now organically for all of those CBD-related keywords that I had targeted as being important.

Bradley: And when I ran Index Checker now, and this is only four days after the listing launched, and after all these launches, we were actually now indexed now for CBD, thanks to converting for those keywords. And so, what happens now that I’m organically indexed for it, I can actually run an exact manual campaign in PPC for it. And that’s exactly what I did. By the way, guys, this isn’t a completely fake product. I mean, I wouldn’t put something on Amazon that didn’t work.  Just a personal note, you guys remember that Megathon we did a couple of weeks ago, 16 hours. I was streaming live, and I was super, super sore after that, and I actually tried this product. It actually works.  Guys, if you see it out there, if you’re trying to look at the pictures I did or whatever, go ahead and buy one.

Bradley: Give this company a little shout out, because they help kind of donate their product to the world by allowing me to talk about it. Look it up: InMotion, hemp roll-on cream, and if you want to use a great keyword, please don’t click on their sponsored ads and mess up my PPC case study. All right guys? But go ahead and buy it, and if you have any pain on your body, I’m sure it might help you too. Well, let me talk a little bit more about the PPC. Some interesting points is the campaign that actually did the most is the product-targeting campaign. In about a month, the first month—well, it’s only been around for a month—it had a $650 spent and sales of $1,800 on the product-targeting campaign.  that was very, very interesting to me.

Bradley: And actually, on the auto campaign where I had another $500 of sales, most of the keywords that that was converting for were actually not keywords but also those were ASINs that Amazon was showing it for. And I moved those to the product-targeting campaign, but overall spent $1,200 in the first month on PPC with over $3,000 worth of sales.  For a brand-new launch, that’s actually not too bad, 40% ACoS. Usually, you lose tons of money when you first launched. It’s very important guys—even if you don’t have Helium 10 ADS like I was doing—to be checking to see if any weird things start showing up that you might want a negative match right away, like all of a sudden and after like two weeks, there is all these strange keywords that was getting these clicks, and it was like spending like $10,  and it was all about like bondage, sex. I’m like literally looking at my Ads tool right now: bondage, sex, and sexual bondage. I’m like, “What in the actual heck is happening right now?” I immediately negative match all that. I was like, “What is Amazon doing?” And so I was like, “Hey, I definitely want to share these with people,” because you never know Amazon, when they have auto campaigns, they can just go crazy with this stuff that doesn’t make sense, and you’re going to lose a lot of money. But then, now, now that I think about it, I’m like, “Wait a minute, it was getting clicks. A bunch of people must have thought it was somewhat relevant.” I don’t even know if I want to know what’s happening or why people who are into that kind of thing need pain cream.

Bradley: But then, I started thinking and I was like, “Wait a minute, maybe this does make sense.” Maybe I shouldn’t have negative match it, but that just weirds me out, so I just kept it as a negative match. But anyways, the point is you got to monitor your keywords on what you’re getting charged for, because Amazon might be showing you for some crazy stuff that is just going to cost you a lot of money until you negative match it. All right, what else? Let’s talk about the actual sales. All right, so in the first week after the launch, I only did one week of launch and that was it. The very first week, it sold—let me check my notes here. This was like in the first part of April. It sold 60 units. I was like, “Whoa, that’s pretty good.”

Bradley: Because the top guys are only doing like a hundred units, maybe a week.  The first week it sold 60 units completely organically, and with PPC. There is no launch or anything there. The second week, it went down a little bit, 55 units and week three, it’s sold 74 units for $2,300 gross. And this is a product that, guys, I honestly did not spend that much time on it. Maybe a day, I did all these things where I researched it and got the listing together; maybe another day to get the images together and things like that. Obviously, Helium 10 is my day job. It did not take me that long to do this. I probably could have done better, but since this is mainly for just case study purposes, I’m like, “Hey, let me, let me just do what I can.” A niche that is not that great grossed $2,300 in a week. I started using some other Helium 10 tools. I activated Market Tracker. Now, here’s where it gets a little bit interesting. I activated Market Tracker for this and those other products I had targeted as my main competitors, and as you know, Market Tracker is checking to see other movers and shakers that might be similar, and the interesting thing is, it suggested to me, it found and said, “Hey, you should start tracking these other hemp creams that I never even found before.” I hadn’t even seen it. I didn’t even identify those as main players. And an interesting thing is out of the top seven or so that I never found and that Market Tracker was suggesting to me, when I cross examine that with my PPC reports for what I was converting for in my auto campaigns, Amazon had shown me actually for four or five out of the seven I believe of those ASINs as converting and PPC, like Amazon chose to show me for it and I converted and then after that of course I moved it to an exact manual campaign.

Bradley: But that was kind of crazy to me. Man, if I would have turned on Market Tracker earlier and taking these suggestions and actually put them into my PPC campaign earlier, maybe I could have gotten sales earlier from those ASINs.  There’s something that I’ve never even taught really that Market Tracker could be used for is when it’s products that it’s suggesting that you can kind of track. These might be products that you could consider for some of your product-targeting campaigns, even if it’s not the exact same product. Not all of them that I converted for were hemp roll-on creams. There were other similar related products that I was converting for that actually it suggested, so that was another thing that I learned. All right, guys, that was a lot. I literally am not looking at a script; I’m just looking at my Keyword Tracker and my Helium 10 ADS, trying to remember this stuff, so I’m sure I might be forgetting something.

Bradley: I’m going to write a blog about this as well, so make sure to check the Helium10.com/blog in a few days, and I’ll have some of these screenshots there so you can see it. But before I get to my 30-second tip, I’m going to go ahead and do a 30-second tip too, even though we don’t have a guest. I want to go ahead and play the search volume game with you guys. Now, you guys have been playing the search volume game with all of our guests lately. I’m going to give you guys three hemp-related keywords. All right, and then, I’m going to give you three search volumes and then you on your own, don’t look at Helium 10, you tell me which key word goes to which search volume. All right. The three keywords are from shortest to longest: hemp oil, hemp cream, and hemp gummies. Alright. Hemp oil, hemp cream, hemp gummies. The three search volumes from most to least, this is the estimated amount of times that it’s searched for per month. One of these is 80,000. One of these is about 20,000. And one of them is about 15,000. All right? Which one goes to which guys? Well, say it out loud. I can’t hear you, but just say it out loud, so you can like be proud of yourself if you get it right. Again, hemp oil, hemp cream, hemp gummies. All right, the number one keyword out of these three, the one with 80,000 is—drum roll please—hemp oil. All right, the number two. What did you guys say is in number two? The number two is hemp gummies is search for about 20,000 times a month. And the number three is hemp cream, which is 15,000 search volume. Alright, there we go. That’s the search volume game for this episode.

Bradley: Now, let’s get into my TST, which is the TST 30-second tip. And this 30-second tip is just going to be about what I just told you guys about indexing.  If you guys have a listing that you know that there’s some words that you could be converting for, but that they’re forbidden by Amazon or for whatever reason you can’t put into your listing,  you’re going to get in trouble if you put them into your listing, a great way to get index for them right off the bat is try and make your listing have similar keywords and keyword phrases as other existing products that you know are converting well for these phrases that have that forbidden keyword in it. Or maybe it’s another brand name that’s in there that you think that you can convert for.

Bradley: And then if you that sometimes what Amazon will do from day one as long as you have your auto campaign and your broad campaign on, is they will start showing you and giving you impressions for that keyword that you’re not even indexed for. If you convert for that product, Amazon is relatively fast going to index you for it. And then, now, even though you don’t have that word in your listing, your index, you can start running exact PPC campaign. There’s my 30-second tip for today.  Anyways, guys, I have some other cool stuff that I’m working on. I’m going to try and do a little bit more of these episodes to show you some of these case studies. I hope you guys learned something from it. If you have any questions, if you’re an Elite member, you can hit me up in the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group or you can hit me up in the Helium 10 Users Facebook group.

Bradley: I don’t check that as often, but I check it. Make sure to tag me in there, and I will answer any questions. And like I said, I’ll have some of these screenshots in a blog in the next week. I hope you guys learned something today, and you can use this in your own business, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Quick note, guys, don’t forget that regardless where you’re listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the subscribe button so you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.