#143 – PPC Talk – Step Up Your Amazon PPC Game

With each new podcast, we’re inching closer to a total of 150 episodes, and starting to see some significant trends. One of them is the fact that our “Tech Talks with Bojan,” Helium 10’s former Chief Technology Officer (now our Chief Operating Officer), have always ranked at the very top of the most popular episodes.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton welcomes Helium 10 Product Manager, Vince Montero and introduces a “competing” tech talk.

Vince is responsible for ADS, our new PPC management tool that’s now in the beta development phase and being used enthusiastically by Helium 10 Elite members.

If you’re looking to level-up your eCommerce game on Amazon, this is a great place to start.

In episode 143 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vince discuss:

• 01:40 – Introducing PPC Talk
• 03:30 – Coronavirus PPC Tactics 101
• 05:30 – Dynamic “Down” Only
• 08:30 – Don’t Lose Your Page Position
• 10:15 – Make Sure that You’re Part of the Algorithm
• 12:15 – Using FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) to Get the Buy Box
• 14:00 – Taking Advantage of Brand Registry  
• 16:00 – Using Product Targeting  
• 18:20 – A “New Wave” of eCommerce
• 20:45 – How is ADS Helping Helium 10’s Elite Members?
• 22:40 – Adding ASIN Functionality
• 25:49 – Here’s How NOT to Have to Wait For Helium 10’s ADS
• 28:00 – Back End PPC Audits
• 32:00 – Bradley’s Search Volume Game 
• 35:20 – Vince’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 is a PPC Talk episode where Vince Montero is going to answer all of the most urgent questions you’ve been having lately about PPC during coronavirus and beyond. 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 completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley: First of all, let us know what you guys think of our new opening theme song. As you guys knew from our previous episode, DJ Slushii has made a couple of songs for us, so let us know which one you like better. Hit us up at support@helium10.com/attentionpodcast. Let us know what you think of our opening theme songs. Actually, Vince, you have no idea what I’m talking right now because you didn’t hear the theme song as we opened up. Vince is just sitting here like, “Oh, what is this guy talking about. I thought that I was here to talk about PPC. We’re talking about music.” But anyways, Vince, this is actually the first episode in a new series. If you recall, remember what I used to do with Bojan? Do you remember what that was called?

Vince: Yeah. I remember.

Bradley: The Tech Talk with Bojan. I want to do a new segment because I think one of the most important parts and the most crazy to deal with part of the whole Amazon journey is PPC. I’m like, “We need to have a regular segment of this show that just talks about PPC strategy, because this is something that changes all the time.” You’re going to be in the very first episode, and I’m going to have some of your friends and network come on future episodes. But this is the very first episode of PPC Talk with Vince. Maybe we should add your name to it. We can put your name on it. Anyway, so far, for those who don’t know, Vince, who haven’t seen you in our other episodes, why should we listen to you about PPC? What’s your background?

Vince: Sure. Yeah, so I came on board last September to Helium 10 to help create and launch the PPC tool, which we’re going to talk about a bit today, ADS by Helium 10. Before that, I was doing Amazon consulting pretty much full time. For two years prior, I worked with all different types of sellers, large and small, and actually had an agency as well. And so, in that time, I saw everything from the beginning of Headline Search ads to the beginning of Product Targeting ads and all the changes that came with those out of the advent of different ad units for the Sponsored Brand ads, like the video and the mobile. And so, I’ve seen a lot; I’ve been working on a lot and channeling all that into Ads.

Bradley: Cool. All right. I think we’ve established your credentials here. Let’s hop right into the last couple of months. I mean, the whole reason why I’m doing this podcast from home is we know the coronavirus has affected a lot of people in the way they live, but in a specific viewpoint here, it’s also affected the way that people are managing their PPCs. The first thing I wanted to talk about was just, in general, like, during coronavirus, I’ve heard so many different opinions. People are saying on Facebook groups, “Oh no, you should stop your PPC or you should lessen your spend or you should increase your spend or you should go crazy on it.” I mean, can you just give us a rundown of just, in general, what are some good rules of thumb on if people should be adjusting how they spend PPC during coronavirus?

Vince: Well like regularly: it all depends on how it affects your ACoS and how much you’re spending out there. If it’s something that’s becoming unmanageable, obviously lowering the bids by a certain percentage across the board might help versus actually just targeting keywords that maybe used to perform before, but maybe they aren’t now because of the current situation. You might not want to kill those. You might just want to maybe lower those. You could also, for the higher keywords, a lot of campaigns are blended ACoS. You have your keywords that have higher ACoS, and you have your keywords that have lower ACoS, right? You have a blended ACoS. If some of those higher-cost keywords are just killing you, then those would be the ones that would just suggest pausing, but if they used to work before, and they just aren’t right now, maybe I would just lower those ones. Auto campaigns: What we’ve seen is that auto campaigns are performing kind of badly at the moment, mostly because it’s remnant traffic. I would definitely keep an eye on those. The other things that people can do if they are taking advantage of placement bidding is maybe just consider lowering that. If you look at your campaigns and your top of search percentage is way too high and your product page percentage is lower. Maybe you consider just lowering the top of search percentage and that will obviously decrease the bids across the board. Because you’re telling Amazon, “I want less than that. I don’t want to bid higher up to be seen on top of search for right now.” Make sure it when looking at dynamic bidding, make sure if you’re not already, make sure you’re definitely set to dynamic bid down only because that will take into account automatically any changes in conversion rate.

Bradley: Real quick. What does that mean? Because I mean I think, I didn’t know before you told me, I just, I’m sure there’s other people as dumb as me who don’t know necessarily what dynamic down only means.

Vince: Sure. Dynamic bidding is, it used to be called bid plus in for people that might remember that, basically letting Amazon know “Hey, here’s how much I’m bidding on a keyword in a campaign.” If I set it to dynamic bidding down only, that means I only want Amazon to adjust it down. If they see something that’s maybe not as likely to convert, I’m going to adjust the bid down to be seen. That’s where you typically see you’re bidding a dollar on a keyword, but your CPCs are ending up, ending up being a lot lower because Amazon is dynamically bidding those that dollar down to fit with that particular impression in time. Dynamic bidding down and up is the newest or newer bidding structure, which is dynamic is saying, “Hey, do the down, but also do the up.”

Vince: It’s saying, “Hey, my keyword is I’m bidding a dollar, but I’m also allowing you Amazon to bid it up.” It could actually go up a hundred percent. You actually could be paying $2 for a click, for example. That type of bidding is typically reserved for campaigns that are doing really well that have had a lot of history that are doing well or your brand keyword campaigns that typically you’re going to do well because that’s your brand. Right now if people are taking advantage of dynamic up or down, if they’re doing that up and down, I suggest to go just down only right now. There’s also a fixed bid options. Basically you’re telling Amazon if that’s on and my keyword bid is a dollar, that’s what I want to pay–the dollar. Fixed bids, in general, aren’t recommended at all. I don’t know why people would use those when you have the capability to tell Amazon, “Hey, you know what, lower my bid right now,” If you still think that it might convert.

Bradley: Okay. Now, one thing I think that there’s some controversy about, and I’m just going to give you my take and then you can critique my take or not. But I think one of the reasons why some people were suggesting that,” Oh, turn off your PPC” or “do this” especially during the heat of things, and we still see it now is there’s this two-, three-, four-week delay sometimes on shipping. What some people were saying was, “Oh, hey, maybe the buyer didn’t realize that there’s going to be four weeks shipping.” They see a PPC ad, they click on it, they purchase the product, you get charged for the click of course and then a week later, like, “Where’s my product?” And they’re like, “Oh man, it’s still, it says it’s going to still take another three weeks to deliver.”

Bradley: And then they ask for a refund. Right now, I believe you don’t get your PPC money back on that.

Vince: No.

Bradley: But you can clarify that in a second. But here’s my take, me personally, I still would want to run my PPC because the organic page position of my product might be depending on that. If you stop your PPC on a keyword that now your impressions and your clicks and your sales go down on it regardless of if you’re getting refunds later, you’re going to lose your page position to your competitors who are still business as usual.

Vince: That’s right.

Bradley: Did I get that right of an answer or what’s your suggestion?

Vince: Actually that is one thing that we’re seeing that has actually changed kind of the landscape of Amazon right now for advertising. A lot of brands were worried about that particular example that you gave exactly. A lot of brands were also worried about just running out of stock, right? Because they weren’t allowed to restock their items. They were worried about how it would look to people coming to their page and then it not being available at all. For both reasons, a lot of people turned off their PPC, which in my opinion and based on the data we’re seeing, it was a mistake. Because what happens when a lot of people turn off their advertising, well, the people that are still doing their advertising that they take their position, right? Yeah, things are stabilizing right now but the people that kept their advertising on, they basically took the position for those people that didn’t. There’s new players that have taken that spot. It’s definitely worked in their advantage. The other reason that you don’t want to pause campaigns in general is because Amazon loves history. Amazon’s all about legacy data and the longer a campaign is running, the more likely it’s going to show up and the more likely it’s going to be in the algorithm. If you pause it, you’re basically saying, “I don’t want to be a part of the algorithm right now.” You’re losing, you’re cutting off that legacy data—that history. That is one of the things I was going to say in response to how people should respond. Pausing campaigns is definitely something that I would not do. If you’re doing really well and if your product runs out of stock because you can’t get new product in, I also I wouldn’t pause for that.

Vince: For that particular reason, you shouldn’t worry about running out of stock because PPC stops if you run out of stock. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Vince: You’re not wasting money in that example. If I run out of stock, and I want to spend PPC. No, your sponsored product PPC campaigns will automatically turn off, and it’ll turn back on when it goes back in stock. As long as you’re not out of stock for typically more than two weeks, you shouldn’t lose too much ground in the Amazon algorithm. I wouldn’t let either one of those worries be the dictator of pausing a campaign or not.

Bradley: All right, let me give you another Bradley hot take, and then you can critique it again. Another thing, for those who didn’t see it, I recently wrote a couple of blogs on the Helium 10 blog. You can see that at helium10.com/blog and just search for FBM. That means fulfilled by merchant. I made a couple of blogs on fulfilled by merchant because that’s a hot topic right now. There’s a lot of people who have switched to fulfill by merchant because of these FBA restrictions. Actually, I read one report that under normal circumstances, only 10% of orders are fulfilled by merchant, 90% by FBA for the third-party seller’s. But now it’s jumped up to 30%. And the reason is because of this one-month delay, and actually the manufacturer or in some situations, some browsing scenarios, the fulfilled by merchant SKU, if somebody has it dually listed, will get the Buy Box. Because it’s faster shipping. Here’s what I have done, or I have tested on my accounts that I’m like, for example, the Project X account. If I do have a dually listed, I’ll put in my campaign the other SKU too, so that whatever has the Buy Box, Amazon is still showing me for the sponsored ad. Is that  suggested or is that a no?

Vince: That’s exactly what you should do.

Bradley: Woo hoo! I am two for two.

Vince: Yeah. You’re two for two. You should definitely do that. Obviously, shipping times are going to affect a conversion. But for people that did move over to FBM, make sure those fees are in your campaigns. Actually, one thing that I was seeing is that people were forgetting to do that. Their PPC campaigns were running with just their FBA SKUs, and so they did not take advantage of what you just said, which is basically that the FBM one is going to be the one that appears in the Buy Box. Yeah, two for two. Kudos.

Bradley: All right, cool. All right. Now, earlier in the episode, you were talking about some different adjustments that that sellers can be making in response to what’s going on with the coronavirus. But let’s say somebody either on their own already had done those suggestions that you gave or as of right now, they hear your suggestions and they implement it, but maybe there’s still some FDA restrictions, either limited inventory or they can’t even send no product in. What other things should sellers be doing other than those adjustments that you talked about?

Vince: Yeah, if it’s just a waiting game at this time, Amazon’s accepting more and more products. That’s going to change in the near future. If it’s just a waiting game, if you’ve made those adjustments, you should take advantage. You should really be taking the time to kind of clean house, refresh your images, update your EBC, create video, which is continuing to be huge with an Amazon. If you’re brand registered, there’s ton of updates you could be implementing. If you’re not brand registered, that’s one thing that I would be focusing on right now if you have the time. Because again, lots of things happening on Amazon advertising that you can’t do unless you’re brand registered. There’s also new ad units coming out that take advantage of the video, like I said. And not only are they showing it on mobile phones, but they’re also now appearing on desktop. Those are the kinds of things that I would be focusing on doing to get ready, so that once the issue is back to normal and you’re able to have your regular stock and the campaigns are up and running, that you really kind of have a fresh look to it. The other thing that I would suggest people to do if your product was non-essential, work on maybe different types that will maybe look at the categories that work deemed essential by Amazon and didn’t have any kind of delays in their FBA issues. I would look at those and say, “You know what? Can I maybe add to my product line?” That’s some of the suggestions that I would give for people that have done their due diligence with their campaigns. They’ve really optimized them just by lowering some of the things I suggested. But yeah, do these other things as well. You can have a fresh start.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Now what if somebody is not affected by the limitations? So many people are saying, “Oh, I can only replenish 50 items.” Somebody is just under normal circumstances, should they be doing something maybe extra, especially if they notice their competitors might have limited stock. Maybe they’re running inventory levels on the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool, and they noticed that a lot of their competitors have low stocks. Maybe they’re being hit with that FBA limitation or their competitors all have fulfilled by merchant listings. Maybe they’re not even allowed to send it FBA, but somebody still has FBA. Should they ramp up their activity maybe?

Vince: Absolutely. Yeah. Targeting is really good for that. If a certain ASIN goes from a week to a month in a wait time, and you can see that, user product targeting. Find those ASINs, build campaigns that are specific to those landing pages. People that are on those competing products will look down and see yours and then click on it and see, “Hey, yours is available right now. It’s available in two days or a week” versus the other product that they landed on which is available in a month. Definitely something that you should be taking advantage of right now. Using product targeting defensively for your own products is something that you should be doing right now too, especially if you’ve got products of different sizes. People are looking to bulk buy right now.

Vince: If you’ve got a product that has different sizes, make sure your variations are in your product targeting campaigns as well so that you show up and appear on your own product pages. Conquesting can also be done right now, but sponsored brands, again, this is something only that you can get with brand registry, but for the same reasons, you’re now able to target sponsored brands using product targeting. Although it’s still in beta sponsored brands right now, I’ve seen better performance, because it increased impression shares on product listings out of the things that have been happening. Yeah, definitely I would take advantage if you take the time to find the data and see those other products that are competing to yours that have those on our wait times, you should do those conquesting tactics for sure.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Now, another thing I’ve been seeing in the Facebook groups lately, for those who don’t know Helium 10 users and the Amazon FBA High Rollers Facebook groups have combined about a hundred thousand users on there. A lot of those users are newer. I see a lot of newer sellers, like, “Hey during this crisis, I’m brand new. My product, I can only send it in 50 at a time or I can’t even send in inventory. I have to do my launch fulfilled by merchant. Like should I still be running PPC as a new seller or with a brand-new product?” And my answer would be under all circumstances you should run PPC. What’s Vince’s take?

Vince: Well, yeah like I said, right now, the landscape is kind of changing. We’re experiencing kind of a new wave of e-commerce, right? What’s happening because of what happened is that it, we have all these new shoppers that have come in that are now used to, or for the first time, if they weren’t used to shopping online before, now they are. Millions of people aren’t going to be permanently changed by the way that they shop with this experience. It’s going to severely affect Q4 2020. The holiday season shopping, I’m sure we’re going to see it how much higher than it was last year. Definitely, still take the time to start right now because things are stabilizing. The only good reason is that people should be jumping in right now is because so many advertisers job dropped out. The CPCs went down.

Vince: By the end of March, we saw a reduction in average CPC here from point 88 to a point 78. That’s a 10 cent drop. That’s significant over time. Yeah, if you’re a new player, actually right now is a great time to jump in and take advantage of what’s happening right now. With CPCs being so low, what new people can do is do testing, right? If they’re not sure certain images or certain copy. They can actually take the time right now to test certain things because CPC prices are a little bit lower than what they normally are right now. Absolutely. And again, the other reason is history, right? The sooner you start a campaign, the sooner you’re flagged by Amazon. This is a new product. This is a new campaign.

Vince: You don’t want to wait. If you have the opportunity, you at least want to get your basic campaigns out there which we suggest being like your auto campaign, your research-type campaign with broad match keywords, and an exact campaign with some keywords that you know have worked maybe in a different type of campaign or maybe just your brand name, right. That should convert for you because that’s the exact name of your brand. Yeah, I definitely would suggest that to new sellers. Definitely it is still time to come on board and now is a great time.

Bradley: Cool. Let’s go switch gears a little bit now. We’ve been talking in general about PPC, but obviously, here at Helium 10, you’re the product manager for our ADS tools. I’ve been using this for four months now and I’m just loving all the new features that we’re coming out with. It’s still in beta but still, there’s just so much that you’ve added since maybe the last time we have talked. For some of these things that you have mentioned about the strategy today, how are our Elite members, because right now at the time of this podcast, the only way to get into ADS and the beta program is if you are a Helium 10 Elite member. How is ADS helping our Elite members with maybe some of these strategies that you’ve mentioned today?

Vince: Yeah. In looking at your search terms, for example, I’m looking at those overall in the past month, maybe two months, to see what changes have occurred. There might be some that you want to add to negative. I would definitely take the time to see if those used to perform before and maybe they aren’t right now. Before doing this, you might want to have a little bit more due diligence on that. But if you do find search terms that you just tanked over the past two months, you definitely just want to cut them off. What we did is in our Analytics a page, we added an instant negative feature, so you can look at it all the search terms from all of your campaigns, and you can sort them by ACoS, by spend, and then immediately from that page actually you can add them to the campaign that it came from. That’s a really quick and easy way to clean house that we added. I also mentioned lowering bids maybe by percentage instead of maybe one by one or killing off keywords that performed before but aren’t maybe aren’t in the past month. We added a bulk editor into Ad Manager, so you can now go in and you can do the normal things like changing your keyword bids. But we also added a Percentage Page, so you can go in there and look at a campaign, all your keywords, and the bids that are in there and say, “I want to decrease this ad account, all of these keywords, by 10%, by 15%.”

Vince: And then when things look up again, when things start to shift, you can go back in and just reverse that. I’m going to switch it back up to 15%. It’s a real quick and easy way to edit those keywords that are in those campaigns. We’ve also done a lot of work on just in general in dealing with ASINs. And this was something that I was hoping that you would see because you are in Ads a lot. We’ve added a lot of functionality around ASINs in the Product Level page, in Analytics and the Ad Manager, and Suggestions—basically anywhere you see ASINs as a search term. Auto campaigns pull in a lot of search or a lot of ASINs because they do a lot of product targeting.

Vince: Amazon has this annoying little habit of making the ASINs in lowercase, right, which aren’t really usable and to make them all uppercase and then you can put them in Amazon, you can see what their product is. Or you can maybe put it in uppercase and improve it in a campaign. What we’ve done for all the search terms is make them auto: they’re all capped, so you can copy and save them. You can look at them in Amazon, but we also linked to them. You’re able to immediately link to that ASIN if you find it in a search term or maybe if you just forgot that you’re targeting it in a product targeting campaign and you want to maybe optimize it, but you’re like, “okay, I know this ASIN here, it needs to be optimized, but I can’t for the life of me remember what product is.” You can just click on it now, and it will open the product page. That’s just another streamlined way that we’ve made it easier.

Bradley: I love it. I love that. And I noticed, I remember you had teased out to me. You’re like, “Hey, Bradley, look out for this update tomorrow.” And I was like, “Okay, well what is it going to be?”

Vince: I thought you’d see it in the suggestions. Because when we give suggestions, which are basically a search term based, we look at campaigns, search terms, and we give suggestions for new keywords. Search terms that are doing well, right? When we say, “Hey maybe move them into a campaign.” We also do them for negative keywords, same search terms that maybe aren’t doing too well, maybe make them negative. But sometimes, ASINs come up as they did well. Add it to this campaign. Well, you can’t add an ASIN to a manual campaign. You can add it to a product-targeting campaign. The ability in our suggestions to look at these ASINs that have come up right as good, as converting, the ability now to just look at them and click on them just to see what they are. You can immediately see what the relevancy is and say, “Oh, I do want to add that. I do want to add that ASIN to a product-targeting campaign.” Use your clipboard. You can copy-paste it, and you can pour it over to that product-targeting campaign now. That’s the part that I thought you would see that you would flip out over, but you’re so good at doing your Suggestions regularly. You probably didn’t even see that.

Bradley: Yeah, I mean, it’s just amazing. Like, honestly, if anybody would watch my AMAs I did like over a year ago or any of the training videos I did, one of the first things I always mentioned is “Guys , I launched over 400 products, but I never did anything with PPC.” That was always somebody else’s job. I don’t know anything about PPC. And in the last six months, I’ve learned so much, thanks to the ADS tool. It’s just amazing. PPC is now one of my passions, like this is so fun, I can’t wait to see the different trends and stuff. I can’t wait for everybody else to be able to get into that tool. But again, guys, if you can’t wait for our beta to be done, and you just want to start right away, just make sure to go to elite.Helium10.com, and then you could upgrade your Helium 10 membership and you’ll have instant access to ADS.

Bradley: Anything that’s imminent like within the next couple of weeks that some of our Elite members can look out for as far as some upcoming features?

Vince: The next couple weeks? Probably. I don’t want to…

Bradley: You don’t want to spoil it.

Vince: Yeah. There are definitely some things that I can say that are upcoming for sure. A lot of people are asking for the ability to edit their rules, right? What that means is the ability to, if you go and you create a campaign, maybe the strategy changes. When you launch a campaign, you should be a little bit more aggressive with your ACoS, right? Because you really want to just get a lot of traffic, and so you can look to the search terms and find things that work. Maybe after a few months, you want to change that strategy. You want to lower the ACoS, you want to lower the ACoS, with the suggestions that we’re providing you.

Vince: We’re opening up the capabilities to do that. Being able to edit rules is something that we’re working on right now. And that includes updating the spend threshold like telling us, “Hey I want this keyword to be paused or made negative if it spends X amount with no sales or clicks.” X amount and no sales. That’ll be upcoming, which will be a wonderful for our users to be able to go in there and edit. And then also a change log to track all the things that are being changed. One thing when you’re optimizing campaigns, you try to look at the last time you changed something and then what that was and then what it is now.

Vince: We’re building out a, I don’t want to say it’s a report, but the initial would just be “like here’s all your keywords; here’s the date that you changed them. You change it from this to this.” And so there’ll be a change log. And that’ll eventually become something that will actually show you the differences between the change that you made here and then what the result was. That’s something to look forward to as well. One thing that I do think is important to mention for everybody that’s listening actually right now is that we’re taking some of the functionality of ADS, and we’re creating this backend PPC audit that feature or function which I think you had a part in. Thinking about that, Bradley. I’m excited about launching that in the next step. I think it will be available in a week for people to just come and they can upload their search term report for the past 60 days for a certain campaign, and we’ll use our backend tool to do an audit of it. We’ll let them know how their campaigns are doing, how their keywords are doing, how their search terms are doing. And that’s something that we’re going to be offering just kind of as a free service right now.

Bradley: Even to non-Helium 10 members will be able to use that?

Vince: Yeah, I believe so. I believe it’s going to be linked to our website so that people that are curious about how they’re currently doing with their PPC, they can leverage the power of ADS to kind of give them a at a glance rundown of how they’re doing at that moment in time, which is really helpful. And I don’t know of any other company that’s currently doing that for free.

Bradley: Wow. That’s pretty cool. What we say here is “how cool is that?”

Vince: How cool is that.

Bradley: There we go. All right now. There you go. Pretty cool. Vince thinks is pretty cool, then it must be pretty cool. Alright, speaking of pretty cool, I wanted to call you out a little bit here, but there’s a lot of people especially people who work from home or people who are hip in their office, and they have that gaming chair. It looks like a race car seat. You know what I’m talking about?

Vince: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. And now there’s other people that they’ve just got the traditional regular office chair. But can you let everybody know what Vince sits on for eight hours a day in the office?

Vince: And at home.

Bradley: At home too.

Vince: Yeah, no, I have an exercise ball in the office and at home. I actually was sitting on it before we were talking, but when I move, it squeaks, I actually am sitting on a regular chair at the moment. But, yeah, normally I sit on just a standard very large exercise ball. And not the ones that have like a, I don’t want to say, a mount, but they have like a thing at the base that holds them in place. No, mine’s just straight up exercise ball that I sit on. I was on a Zoom call the other day and Bonnie, our head of design, I didn’t know she could see me. I was just talking, and I forget the camera can also see our screen share. And she was like,  “You’re giving me a headache,” because I was bouncing.

Bradley: And every time you’re not at your desk, and I’m in the office like I just can’t help it. I just have to go sit on your chair and just bounce around. It’s so fun. But that’s pretty cool. Now, with that in mind, we’re going to go ahead and play our search volume game. All right. I don’t remember if we had this the last time you were on the show. But basically what I do is I give three keywords to the guest that are related. Did we play this before?

Vince: No.

Bradley: All right, cool. This is your first time . Now, no pressure because 95% of the time nobody gets it. Right. Which is the whole point of why I play this game.

Vince: Wow. Okay.

Bradley: All right. Obviously you worked for Helium 10, don’t be using Helium 10 or using Magnet in the background. I can hear if the keyboard clicks, but here are the three keywords and I’m going to give you three search volumes and you’re going to try and match the keyword with the search volume. Alright. The three keywords are yoga ball chair, gaming chair with footrest, and office chairs with wheels. Again, office chairs with wheels, yoga ball chair, gaming chair with footrest. I got some pretty longtail keywords here. Now, the one that is searched for the most is searched for about 26,000 times.

Vince: Alright.

Bradley: The second most is about 18,000 times. And the one that is searched the least among these three is 11 thousand times.

Vince: Alright.

Bradley: Which keyword goes to which?

Vince: Only because the current situation, a lot of people are being forced to work from home over the past couple of months. I would say the highest has to be the office chairs with wheels, because that’s probably what people are used to at their regular office. Gaming would be my second guess, because a lot of people are gaming a lot more at home and maybe they’re not used to sitting in front of the screen so much as they were, but now they need gaming chairs specific to that. And then exercise. Exercise should it be closer to the top, but people are obviously doing that a lot more home too. I would think that the yoga, a ball chair, would potentially be the third.

Bradley: All right, well this is pretty hard to do, but you’ve got them all wrong. I don’t think anybody has gotten them all wrong. Actually, usually people get two out of three wrong, they usually get one. Right. But this is great. I love it because you are obviously an expert in this, because this is what you do. But the number one keyword actually is the gaming chair with footrest like that long tail keyword. I actually tried to throw you off there because that was such a longtail keyword. I’m like probably this is not searched for much, but actually gaming chair is something like a couple hundred thousand but even if this isn’t so popular right now that it still is number one, even though it’s a longtail keyword gaming chair with footrest. Yoga ball chair, which is yours kind of, that’s 18,000 and then the office chair with wheels is 11,000 only.

Vince: Wow.

Bradley: This goes right in with PPC and with keyword research, I always tell everybody, “you never rely on what you think is the most search or how you would search because it’s not necessarily how other people would search or how other people would find you in an ad.” This is why you rely on the data like ADS for Helium 10, or like Magnet, or like Cerebro.

Vince: Yeah.

Bradley: You’re going with the consensus.

Vince: That’s why it’s important too to be looking at your search terms regularly, whether or not you’re using our tour or another tool. Make sure you’re looking at your campaign search terms because you’re going to find things in there that you never would have thought people would be looking for that is inked to do your campaign that you can then use. Yeah, that is actually very surprising to me.

Bradley: Exactly. Yup.

Vince: But I guess we know what people are doing mostly at home right now is gaming.

Bradley: Oh yeah. Tons. That’s why like Nintendo Switch right now is selling for two, three times what it normally does because everybody, that’s all they have to do.

Vince: Maybe they’re working from gaming chair. In their laptop in, they’re just in their gaming chair at work. And who knows?

Bradley: Maybe the next thing we’ll have is a yoga ball chair, but that has arm rest or something that could be something you can work on. Yeah, I guess so.

Vince: I would not be shocked if that comes out.

Bradley: There we go. We just gave her a product idea.

Vince: Exactly.

Bradley: Somebody let us know and give you some commission on that. If you make money.

Vince: You think you are healthy, but you won’t fall down.

Bradley: Yup. There you go. All right, now let’s get back to the this is the Serious Sellers Podcast. Wait, we’ve got to get more serious. Again, let’s do our 30-second tip. You’ve been giving us tips throughout this episode, but what’s something in 30 seconds or less that’s I would say PPC related that would be a valuable tip for our listeners.

Vince: I mentioned it before, but definitely doing video, if you haven’t yet. There’s a lot of sellers that aren’t doing video. If you are to get video out there, you’re going to stand out in the crowd. You can do this with sponsored brands. But video placements, we’re seeing incredible click through rates for the clients that do have them. And like I said before, they’re not only just on your mobile phone, now they’re on your desktop. You want to make sure you’re taking the time to get brand registered. if you aren’t, then get video going there are guidelines to follow it to get approved. Make sure you look at what those are. But definitely that’s my biggest tip because it’s going to be super important as we get into the shopping season and beyond.

Bradley: Cool. All right. Well, Vince, thank you so much for kicking off our new series of PPC Talk and I know you’ve got some cool guests that you’ve suggested to be in the future episodes of this who are titans in the game as far as PPC. We’ll look forward to them being on the show. And then of course we’ll have you back in a couple of months to see where ADS is at and to see how much of a six pack you have because of your special stability chair. But, we’ll just leave people to imagine that we have no proof of that because this is not a video show.

Vince: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, thanks a lot Vince for coming on. We’ll talk to you later.

Vince: All right thanks Bradley.

Bradley: 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.