Serious Sellers Podcast: Learn How To Sell On Amazon FBA & Walmart

Helium 10 Buzz 12/8/23 - Amazon Fee Increases: How Does This Affect Sellers?

Ever wondered how Amazon's impending FBA fee changes could impact your selling journey? Let’s tackle this complex web and break down what these changes might mean for you.

#515 - Generative AI & Crazy Data Strategies for Amazon Sellers

Join us on a journey as our special guest, Ritu Java, takes us from her beginnings in India to her experiences in Japan, ultimately transforming her into a data-driven entrepreneur. With a unique perspective on the blend of culture and commerce, Ritu shares insights on how she leveraged her expertise in data and analytics to excel in Amazon PPC strategies. You'll also hear her intriguing tales of running an Etsy store from Japan and overcoming the complexities of helping Amazon sellers worldwide.

The conversation doesn't stop there. Discover how AI has become a game-changer in running Amazon PPC campaigns as we discuss our personal experiences combining AI with other data sources to optimize campaigns. Listen as we unveil the advantages of using chat GPT for keyword research and translation over traditional methods like Google Translate. This episode offers a unique perspective on integrating AI into workflows and SOPs, driving efficient and effective results. We also underscore the value of incorporating AI into Amazon PPC strategies for successful product launches and campaign management.

 

To cap off this enlightening conversation, we tackle the future of Amazon selling and the role AI plays in it. From generating keywords for Amazon searches to creating images for sponsored brand ads, we unravel how chat GPT and mid-journey can elevate your selling game. Don't miss out on our tips for creating effective lifestyle photos and the significance of close-up product images. We also shed light on the evolution of Search Query Performance on Amazon and share our strategies for effectively managing and analyzing data.

In episode 515 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ritu discuss:

• 00:00 - AI Power for E-commerce Sellers
• 07:54 - Utilizing AI for Amazon Sellers' Success 
• 09:05 - AI in PPC Strategy With Chat GPT
• 20:52 - Search Term Modifiers and Word Order 
• 23:04 - Enhancing Amazon Ads With AI
• 31:24 - Generating Posts Using Canva and Amazon 
• 32:19 - Utilizing Search Group Performance Data
• 33:47 - Optimizing Data Strategy for Efficient Analysis 
• 41:23 - Convert Snapshot Data to Time Series

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a first time guest who I think is probably top five in the world these days as far as actionable Amazon strategies, and she's going to give us an absolutely value-packed episode full of tips on generative AI, PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews? By following up with them in a way that's compliant with Amazon terms of service?

Bradley Sutton:

You can use Helium 10 Follow-Up in order to automatically send out Amazon's request, a review emails, to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don't want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me forward slash follow-up. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a special guest today Ritu. So, first of all, we're going to get into your backstory about how we can even talk in Japanese, because that's something that's crazy. Were you born in Japan or were you born?

Ritu:

I was born in India, but I lived in Japan for 17 years.

Bradley Sutton:

So from what age?

Ritu:

You want to know how old I am.

Bradley Sutton:

No, no, no. From what age were you living in Japan?

Ritu:

Mid-20s. Yeah, so mid-20s.

Bradley Sutton:

Also was, so you didn't go to school in Japan.

Ritu:

No, I didn't. I went there as an adult. I was working at a company and I take company 17 years.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, that means you had to have gone there when you were a child. Then because you can't be over 25 years old. So I don't know what's going on here.

Ritu:

That is very cute.

Bradley Sutton:

I was all the reason. I was asking if you grew up because I wore this shirt today. Do you recognize this character here?  What is this?

Ritu:

Yes Doraemon. Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome. I know a little bit about you, but I for some reason had this idea that you actually grew up in Japan and that was why you were so fluent in language. Once you go as an adult, it's a little bit harder, unless you really immerse yourself in the culture.

Ritu:

I did. I really immersed myself in the culture. I went there just for a year, honestly, and ended up staying 17. It's so crazy how that place had such a big impact on me. It was such a stark contrast to where I grew up, which was India.

Bradley Sutton:

Whereabouts in India.

Ritu:

In Delhi, the capital city of chaos that's how I describe it from chaotic to super orderly. You can imagine what a difference, that is A stark difference from the world I knew. I was just drawn to the calm and the orderliness of that place. How things were punctual, everything happened as expected, there were no surprises, everything was planned in so much detail, which I kind of liked. I think where I'm at right now is a nice middle ground, because I think I like the chaos. It has energy. It has a certain type of progressive energy that all of us need, especially as entrepreneurs. We need that energy to be able to kind of keep moving forward. But then I also like the organizational skills that I picked up while I was in Japan, because you need that to have good execution. I think best of both worlds is what I'm trying to be at right now, trying to draw from both my cultures.

Bradley Sutton:

Then did you go to university in India.

Ritu:

I did. I'm an engineer. I did my electronics engineering from India. I went back to school much later in life. I went back to school in the US and I did a course in data science, which is why I'm very attracted to PPC and data and data analytics and that sort of stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

When you graduated with the electrical engineering degree, did you start working in India, or is that when you went to Japan?

Ritu:

Yeah, I started working right away and I started working in India and I worked for an IT company and it was a pretty long stint there as well, like I was very interested in technology right from the start and it kind of aligned with my life's goals and stuff like that. At the time. I mean, little did I know that I would completely switch at a certain point. When I was in Japan I worked for not only the company that I was in India, I kind of went to their Japan office and I started helping them out. But then later on I switched to a more technical role at a school, at a high school, American school in Japan, and then I had my kid and took a break from work and then I kind of dealt in a little bit of entrepreneurship. I started running my own business. I had an Etsy store. Yes, in Japan, while I was in Japan, I started my Etsy business selling jewelry. It was like kind of one of a kind jewelry and I realized that, gosh, it's not enough just to create a listing and people are not going to flock to that listing. So I had to teach myself a whole lot of stuff like marketing advertising. So I learned Facebook ads, Google Ads, blogging, YouTube, all of that stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

So Etsy in the United States, or is there an Etsy in Japan?

Ritu:

No, there's an Etsy in the United States, but I was selling on the US market from Japan. So I was producing my stuff there, but I was shipping it worldwide wherever there were shoppers. But shipping costs are exorbitant. Sending stuff from Japan it's very expensive. Yeah, so mostly was attracted to the data side of things. Yes, I have both left and right brains, because the creative side was just all my creations, the jewelry that I made. But then I needed the data science side of things to kind of round things off and make money out of my business, because everything we do here is based on data and I know he's intended the data company. So is PPC Ninja. We might think that we're in the business of selling goods, but actually we're in the business of leveraging data. So that's why it was so important for me to get that knowledge and make sure that I'm kind of ready to go with my own endeavors.

Bradley Sutton:

Now. So, Etsy was kind of like your first online marketplace. Now, did you ever end up selling on Amazon or did you go straight into software and consulting etc.

Ritu:

Yeah, so I've never sold on Amazon, but I've helped businesses sell on Amazon. So it's basically the data side of things. So, I only sold on Etsy. I sold on my own website for a bit, but then I have never sold on Amazon myself. But PPC is where I'm focused on.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now you talked about having an analytical mind, and that's kind of like what you're known for. When you've spoken at events like Billion Dollar Seller Summit and others is especially in the last couple of years, you're one of the go-to people as far as AI and things like that, now me, I'm a little bit behind. I use even on this podcast, we use AI to generate title options and transcripts and things like that, but I would say I'm not one of those full force ahead like, hey, ai is going to replace hours and hours of work. I haven't really adopted it to that effect. So, the typical Amazon seller what are some things that you don't have to be a seven, eight, nine figure seller but just like any Amazon seller if they have not started utilizing AI to help them in their operations or business? What are? Let's take it to that spectrum first. What are some things that you think that any Amazon seller could benefit by utilizing AI?

Ritu:

Yeah, there's so much. Actually, the magic happens when you start combining things. So AI by itself may not be the be all and all of things, because it's not going to operate in a silo. You've got to combine it with other pieces of data that you have access to. For example, just this morning I was preparing for a new product launch for one of our clients and I'd got all my data from Helium 10. I was at the stage where I have to come up with some keywords for broad match campaigns. I wanted to make sure that all the right keywords are in there, not just the long tail ones with high search volume, but I wanted to make sure that I'm capturing all the seed combinations of important words that make sense. So what I did was I exported the Helium 10 cerebral analysis and I fed it to chat GPT and asked it to come up with two words and three word combinations of seed keywords that would perfectly describe this product. Now what I'm going to do next with that is basically convert that into broad match modifiers, which basically means you add a plus sign in front of all the seeds and then I'm going to create campaigns with it. So that's something that I do at every launch. I generally don't skip that step. It's an important one for me. So, in addition to all the long tail keywords, I will come up with enough seed words that will run at a slightly lower bid but will be like a discovery campaign for me through the broad match modifier channel. So that's kind of one thing that I do.

Ritu:

Then, like yesterday, I was doing another one for another client, where we have a list of keywords that we discovered from the search query performance report, which is kind of this new, very valuable piece of data that Amazon is giving us these days. So from there I was able to come up with a structure for sponsored brand headline ads and I didn't have to do the work. I just fed that entire list to chat GPT and said, hey, organize this into groups of very related words and then give me a headline ad which is less than 50 characters, because that's the amount Amazon will give us. And then it did that for me. I also gave it one other important instruction, which is to make sure that one of the keywords or a very close variant of that keyword in the group must be included in the title, and that's basically my way of saying, hey, I want this to be a lower funnel ad, not a generic kind of upper funnel ad, because my sponsored brand ads tend to be more focused on ROAS rather than brand discovery and brand awareness. So those are some of the ways that I'm using it almost on a daily basis. I had switched to chat GPT plus a long time ago. I've been paying for it and it's totally worth it.

Bradley Sutton:

So there's how much is it for somebody to subscribe to?

Ritu:

that it's about $20 a month. It's not much at all, yeah, it's just $20. And what it gives you is all the beta features, all the new stuff. So right now you can actually upload files very easily. You can upload any kind of file to almost any kind of file to chat GPT and then ask it to analyze, analyze the file and then you can ask it a bunch of questions. So it's just made life so much easier. And I mean I think sky is the limit with what you can do with AI. It's like I always, always feel like I'm not using it enough, even though I'm using it probably quite a bit more than a lot of people, but I still feel cautioned to use it more.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. So there's some of the ways that you can use it in PPC. Now I remember you presented something. I've seen you speak, you know, various times, but I don't remember which event, this or what it was. That might have been a billion dollars, but where were you doing? You were doing like translation, using like Helium 10 because, like you were doing research, you weren't translating the English keywords. That's obviously a big mistake that some sellers make. Hey, I've got my Amazon USA listing, let me just translate it. Or let me just translate the keywords. No, you need to do the research in that marketplace. So you switch Helium 10 to Amazon Germany, for example, but if you're not a German speaker, you just see all this Deutsch keywords and you don't really know what it means. Or so they're doing it in Amazon Japan and they don't speak Japanese like you, so they might not know. So what's your? I'm not sure if it was AI or just something in Google you were doing to kind of like make that process a little bit easier.

Ritu:

Yeah. So what we've done is we have integrated chat GPD right into Google Sheets, and we had to write a little bit of code for that. But once we did that, what's happened is that we have these ready to go sheets where we simply change the prompt and add a bunch of keywords and then it will just translate into whatever language, right? So? And I've noticed that any translation done by chat GPD is way better than Google Translate and I've tested it, especially in Japanese, because I can read it. I know that the quality is much better.

Ritu:

Just to give you an example chat GPD will use the right combinations of Kanji and Hiragana, whereas Google Translate will not. It just doesn't do a great job. And if I tell chat GPD to give me a translation in all four different scripts, that's, kanji as well as Hiragana, Katakana and the Roma G, it will give all those to me. It's a no-brainer to use chat GPD for that sort of thing rather than Google Translate and then other languages as well. Like we're just onboarding this client that has four markets and we have no speakers of those languages on our team. But with chat GPD, we can simply include that into our SOPs, into our workflows and just use those sheets to kind of get the final product out. So it's really great the combination of Helium 10 and chat GPD workflows. They work really well for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now going back a little bit, just remember you were talking about broad match modifiers. There might be people out there who don't know what that means. Can you explain that a little bit?

Ritu:

Yeah, yeah. So a broad match modifier is a type of broad match, so when you're setting your add up, it'll still be a broad match. However, by simply adding a plus sign before every part of the keyword which means if it's a two word keyword, then both the parts will have a plus sign in front of them what you're gonna ensure is that the buyer search must include those words in exactly that format in order for that match to happen. So this eliminates any kind of kind of synonyms or related words that Amazon might try to kind of connect to, which you don't think need to be there. So at this point, amazon is even replacing exact matches with weird sort of words that it thinks are similar. So we don't want that, because we've done all of the research to find out which exact version of that keyword is giving us the highest search volume, so we wanna stick to it.

Ritu:

In order to make that happen, we're actually finding ourselves doing more and more work with broad match modifiers, because all the other match types are being weird anymore. Like exact matches are not behaving like exact matches. Same thing with phrase match and broad match anyway, always was a bit too broad and it was always kind of giving you all kinds of weird matches for sponsored brands, but then it started doing the same thing for sponsored products as well, and that makes it a little challenging. It can be wasteful. So yeah, broad match modifiers is a great way of making sure that your matches are clean and that they don't bring in kind of extraneous, superfluous words that you shouldn't be targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you use that 100% of the time when you have a broad campaign?

Ritu:

So you always have if it's a three word phrase.

Bradley Sutton:

You'll put the plus in between each of the.

Ritu:

Yes, 100% of the time. We've been doing it for the past two years and we actually future proved ourselves because we knew this was coming. It's kind of like Amazon always follows Google. So we knew this was coming because Google introduced broad match modifiers first. Now they've already sunset it. So I don't know where this is gonna end up for Amazon, because what I've heard and I don't wanna just speculate, but what I've heard people say is that Amazon might be moving toward a future where there aren't any match types. There's only a word, there's only a keyword, and then it figures out how to match it the best way. Now it's plausible, especially in this AI world. It's plausible that that might happen. But in the interim, I'm betting on broad match modifiers and exact match. Of course, can't do much about the fact that Amazon isn't treating exact matches the way they ought to be treated, but that's the best we have right now.

Bradley Sutton:

So what would the difference be between using broad, doing broad target with modifiers compared to phrase for the same, the same, you know, like coffin shelf, like. So if I do coffin plus shelf in broad or coffin shelf in phrase, what's the difference in the potential? You know showings of that keyword.

Ritu:

Yeah, no, I think the showings of that keyword might totally depend on the bids and they might also depend on relevancy. So it's very hard to predict which of the three match types are gonna win. You know that's been a struggle. I mean you can't really say if you put coffin, what was it? Again coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, coffin shelf.

Ritu:

Yeah, if you say coffin shelf broad coffin shelf phrase and say coffin shelf exact, what we would want it to do and what would be logical is that if I had a higher bid for exact match, then you know all the searches should come in match through exact match. But that's not always the case. You know, we've seen so much variability there. It also depends on which campaign, you know, starts out those keywords and then each campaign has its own story, its own history. Because let's say, you combine that keyword with a bunch of other keywords and let's say those other keywords got a majority of the early data points, like it started hitting some other words coffin longtail words Before it hit your coffin shelf word, then what happens is that this word starts getting starved of impressions, the other words start to take dominance and these words that get starved of impression give you the false impression that they're not working, whereas it's just a matter of how things started off, like what were the set of searches on that day, on that very moment that Amazon decided to match?

Ritu:

And then it's going to just take its cues from whatever little data it has in the beginning, because that's all it has to play off of, and then it just keeps giving more and more and more impressions to the early data points and everything else just gets ignored, you know. So it's like a game Like PPC is a game that you know you've got to be able, you've got to be willing to keep playing, trying different things, different ways, moving things, you know, trying it in a different match type, in a different campaign, restarting, stopping, all of that you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay now you know like, for example, if I just do you know, going to this same example, you know coffin shelf, no modifier and broad. You know, yeah, nowadays you know something crazy can come up with, like, you know, spooky decor.You know, potentially it could even come up not even including the word, but ones that are traditional, would be like, you know, coffin shelves for men, coffin shelves for women, but then also it could be coffin shaped shelf, like it could insert a word, or shelf shape like a coffin. You know, like changing the order, but if I put that modifier in there, does that force it, in your experience, to be only longer tail, like it's coffin shelf has to be in there as a phrase and then it's only putting words at the beginning or the end, or still. It could switch it up a little bit.

Ritu:

Yeah, it will switch it up. So coffin shelf could be shelf coffin even. As long as the word shelf and the word coffin both exist in the match, it will match. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, going back to Helium 10, now I was looking at, I did it. I still haven't seen your replay of your presentation you did for Helium 10 Elite a few months back. But I was looking at your slides and there was something that you were talking about magnet and seed keywords and just by looking at the slide I couldn't tell what the strategy was. So can you explain what are you doing? I'm not sure if this has to do with chat, gpt or, but just how are you using magnet in a unique way?

Ritu:

Yeah, so what I do is basically I start off my keyword research by looking at audiences, like who is the right target audience for a product, right? So that's my first step. Now the audience list will help me figure out what words these people use. So if it's a garlic press and let's say there's five different types of people, there could be just regular straight up chefs, there could be restaurant owners, there could be whatever. So there's like five or six different types of people who might use a garlic press.

Ritu:

Now I ask ChatGPT to tell me all the words that these audiences or avatars are likely to use when they search on Amazon. So I'm actually starting from a suggestion of a seed keyword. That's my starting point, and then I use those seed keywords that chat GPT generates to go and dump that into magnet. And then I use the expand option the second one, not the first one and that basically gives me all of the keywords and their search volumes, and that's what I need Basically.

Ritu:

I wanna kind of run it by search volume information to figure out if it is really a word that I should be going after. Now I don't always come up with those words, probably because the search volume is too low, in which case I don't need to worry about it, but I can still use that information as broad match modifiers to just generate some sort of discovery. So like, for example, eco-friendly. I don't know if there's any sort of garlic press that's eco-friendly, but let's say someone in that audience wants an eco-friendly garlic press made out of bamboo or whatever. I will still create broad match modifiers that have those important words in that combination so that I can at least start to do some keyword research through an ad rather than through existing search volume data.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, switching gears from keywords now to images. I know you've talked about mid-jurdy Canva. Have you played around at all with the new Amazon one that they made kind of for sponsored brands? And then, if so, what's your results? I've had very different, like some of it are absolutely terrible, but then I know that part of it's because I don't really know how to prompt them. I'm not very good at prompting, but what's your experience with the new Amazon AI image generator for sponsored brand ads?

Ritu:

Yeah, I mean it's not bad for someone who's really struggling with image creation in general, but it's not really usable for every case right? In some cases, it's gonna be hard to come up with the perfect background for your image. The other trouble I have with it is that the product image is too small on the canvas, and that's not how I like my sponsored brand headline ads Generally. This is a tip actually for our listeners when you create a sponsored brand lifestyle photo, the biggest mistake people make is that they fully capture the lifestyle setting in which that product is being used, but then the product itself is so tiny. That's a big mistake. That shouldn't be the way right. The way to do it is to have the product front and center. It has to be blown up right in the middle and then you could maybe suggest what the background is. You might just use suggestive creatives rather than have it in absolute terms. It's being used in the setting that it's being suggested, so for that reason I generally like to request for zoomed in, highly close up type of images so that we can have better conversion rates.

Ritu:

And there's a story that I just wanna share here real quick. We had one client with a dog product and the product was being used on a dog that was sitting in the lap of a woman on a sofa, and then there's a living room in the background so you can imagine the size of the product. It's like so small you can't see it right. So then what we said to this client was give us a zoomed in image. So then they zoomed right in, so all we see now is the pop and we see the product. Right. So it completely changed the metrics for that ad and then we started using that particular image for many other of their sponsored brand headline ads, and then the rest is history.

Ritu:

They really started growing after that. But the point is that close up images are more important than pretty images, right? So pretty images anyone can create pretty images. You wanna make them highly converting images and for that reason I might not use the Amazon's AI generated images right away, unless they become better, unless they can kind of keep the product as the hero it needs to be, front and center. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out any prompt that can help me get to that stage, but I'll keep testing. I'm not sure yet.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so then what outside of Amazon? Then, like I said, I know you're using like mid journey, which is another one that's not too expensive it isn't like 10 bucks a month or something like that to use mid journey, or yeah. So then what if somebody is like all right, you told us what some basic stuff that people how chat GPT for 20 bucks a month can help Amazon sellers. What is something that Amazon sellers of any level can use mid journey for? That's kind of simple and definitely adds value.

Ritu:

Yeah, I think mid journey is definitely the leader and if you can learn to use it, there's nothing like it yet. But even straight up, chat GPT is now getting pretty good with images, so you can describe whatever you want and then it is connected to dolly in the back and then it generates those images and gives them back to you right in your chat GPT prompt, right. So if you have the paid version, then you can start testing that as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so let's say I've got all right, I've got a pretty nice image. You know, maybe it's a white background image or something of my product. Would the first thing I should do with experimenting with AI and mid-journey and things? Would it be making an infographic? Would it be trying to make a lifestyle? Like I remember in the early days of AI, like you could never put a human being in there because they would have like 17 fingers and just crazy faces and stuff like that. But like what should I do then? What kind of images? Or is it not really don't use it for your main images, but use it for, like, the sponsored brand and sponsor display, things like that?

Ritu:

Yeah, so okay, I think we need to think of images as layers, just like we think of layers in Photoshop. Right, there's layers like a background layer. So if you want just the ambience, the mood, the background, you generate that layer independent of anything else. That's one way of going about it. And then you layer in your product. You have your kind of no background product. Then you can always place it right in the middle, do those sorts of things. So it would probably be a two or three step process where you think of each layer separately, even the humans. You could bring humans in from a different source. You can get humans from there, you can get your backdrop from somewhere else and then you can get your product from your own product images and put them together. That would probably give you the best results.

Ritu:

But if you tried to have mid-journey to all of that, you might experience some failures there or some surprises with, like you said, 17 fingers and stuff. Now, mid-journey, the latest versions of it are getting better and better, so it's very human-like and it doesn't appear awkward. The facial expressions aren't awkward anymore, so that's good news, just means that we're going in the right direction. It's only gonna get better from here. So I would think of layering as one concept, and then, of course, where you wanna apply it is another thing infographics. I don't think chat, gp or even mid-journey would be good for infographic other than just generating the background for it, because text it still doesn't do a good job with text. You'll have to use some of your other tools for text. So again, it's layering, combining tools and coming up with the concept. So yeah, those are some of the ways in which you can use images.

Ritu:

Now posts is another interesting one. A lot of people are using mid-journey for generating posts, and that's a good way of generating lots of posts content, because Amazon doesn't allow you to repeat an image twice. So what you can do is you can have Dali or even Canva. I've used Canva AI, which is different from Canva normal. I can explain the difference, but anyway. So Canva AI can generate based on your description of what kind of backgrounds you want, and then you just slap in your photo your kind of hero image on top of it and there you have your posts. It takes barely any time to create like 20 different posts and most people don't realize this, but posts are free advertising. I would highly recommend generating posts on a regular basis and take advantage of it.

Bradley Sutton:

I've seen them more in search results lately too.

Ritu:

Posts. Exactly, it's one of those widgets that comes up.

Bradley Sutton:

That never happened, like six months ago or something. But, now it's right there on page one, so it's important to do, I agree.

Ritu:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So earlier you talked about search group performance. I love search group performance. My self is just like it's stuff that three, four years ago we would have. I would have bet a million dollars that Amazon would never release this kind of data to the public, and Amazon definitely has come a long way. What are some other ways that you're using search group performance, analyzing the data that Amazon gives?

Ritu:

Yeah, so search group performance. Like you said, it's unbelievable that Amazon is actually sharing this information out, so it's really up to us to take advantage of it as soon as possible. Almost feel like time is of essence here, because everybody's going to have access Everybody has access to that information. But right now most people are in the state of overwhelm. They're like, oh, I have this great data, but I don't know what to do with it. So most people are stuck at that stage.

Ritu:

But if you want to take the next step, then I would suggest start downloading those reports right away, because these things also get lost. Amazon discontinues things that you think they're going to be giving us forever and forever. For example, the brand analytics data that used to be I don't know millions of rows has certainly been compressed to just 10,000, and so on. So I mean there's a loss there that cannot be replaced. So I would say, number one start downloading your at least your monthly data at the ASIN level and then stitching all that data together, and by stitching I mean maybe putting it into a data warehouse. We use BigQuery in order to bring data in, and the way to stitch it is by making sure that your reports have some extra columns like the date column has to be there Then you have to make sure that you have the brand name in it and you want to make sure that your market is in this, so that when you stitch all that information together, then you can use a single report like a looker studio to dip into the data warehouse and you can basically use switch filters to switch between your different markets. So if you plan your data strategy well, then you will be able to use it more efficiently than just using it in a throwaway style, which most people do.

Ritu:

Most people go download a report, they look at it, they stare at it and they're like, ok, whatever Done, and it's thrown away. You don't want that. You want a system. You need an ecosystem for managing your data so that you can look at those from time to time. You get a month over month review. You get a month over month trend. You can see if anything has lost its search volume over time. It's so easy to check that at a search term level. Once you have stitched all that information together and is available in maybe something like a looker studio, how about something that's good?

Bradley Sutton:

it's important to understand the you know, like how to get started and not just like, all right, let me. Let me just look at search career performance or this data, just, you know, in the UI on on Amazon. But then what's the next step? Now I've got everything in my data warehouse and stuff like, for example, me. One of the things I like to look at in search career performance is comparing the conversion rate by the keyword for for just the overall niche, compared to my own. You know my own conversion rate. But you know, I think that's probably one of the most no brainer things. What are some other maybe not so common things that you're looking at when, when you get all of that data into your, your data warehouse, and start you know, start looking up stuff?

Ritu:

Yeah. So one of the things that I find really interesting is the average price per search term. So this is you know, amazon gives you the average price and that, basically, is a good indication of whether that search term is going for cheaper products or is it going for slightly more expensive products. Just to give you an example, let's say you have the word lotion right Now. You have a $50 lotion by L'Oreal, maybe, and you have a $5 drugstore brand Same thing, selling lotion. But if you're going after, if you're looking at the search term lotion, whatever, daily lotion or whatever and if you see that the average price for that search term is going at $6, let's say that's the average price of the product being sold. That is telling me that, no matter what I do to compete on that, on that search term, it's going to be hard because I'm going to be competing with lots and lots of cheaper brands. So we actually have filters on our search terms or search query reports, so that we only look at those searches that are in the ballpark of our products price point. That basically eliminates a lot of the noise, because otherwise you might be led into thinking that gosh, this is a great keyword and then you spend lots of money on it and ends up being a high cost scenario. You don't want that. So you look at both of the things one that you mentioned, which is what we call strength, keyword strength, which is determined as a ratio of purchase share and impression share. If you can get that ratio to be above one, then that's a good keyword. That is strong, inherently strong, because you're winning more of the purchase share than you're winning of the market, which basically puts it in a good spot.

Ritu:

And then the second one would be the filter on price. The third filter I would put is search volume, because, again, we don't want noisy, insignificant terms to distract us. And I think the fourth filter I would put there is data sufficiency, like how many sales have you had for that keyword over that period of time? So yeah, those would be the four filters to kind of get everything else out. And then, yeah, I mean that would be our way of figuring out which search terms are good. Then the other use cases of that would be to stitch that data with your ad data. So when you stitch those two together you can find gaps in a systematic sort of way, not just like a one off, throw away kind of way, where it's always being merged and it's always coming together and you can always see these are the ones that I'm not advertising yet. And then, yeah, I think those were the two main ones.

Ritu:

The third, slightly more advanced one, is when you want to figure out if a search term is good for product A, product B, product C, product D off your catalog because they might be sharing those keywords. Then you can see relative strength across your different products and see where you want to channel your information. Now that comes with the caveat, and that caveat is that there's a very high halo sales ratio on Amazon, which means you might be directing traffic to one of your product variations and something else is actually getting picked up eventually. So you need to know all of the. You need to know all those pieces in order to make the right decision and essentially in terms of using your, your traffic source as a fire hose, literally, and saying, okay, I want to direct it to this product and not to this product. Unless you know what the halo sales are, you could be off.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah, well really great stuff. Now, before we get into your last strategy you know, maybe it could be a PPC strategy, since that's your specialty how can people reach out to you if they, you know? How can they find you on the interwebs if they want to? You know, get some help with some of the stuff that you've been talking about today.

Ritu:

Yeah, absolutely so. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there, so just look up my full name, Ritu Java, and you should be able to find me there and just say hi and I'll be happy to help. Yeah, and other ways, you can just reach out to our website, ppcninja.com or anywhere else. You see me.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now we have some of we do on our show. We call it TST. That's the 30 second tip. So you know you've been giving us lots of great tips and strategies, but what's like a hard hitting one you can give us in 30 seconds or 60 seconds or less. I'm not going to cut you off, go ahead.

Ritu:

So I think that you know we're all sitting on tons and tons of data and we don't know how to use it. I would suggest start thinking of strategies to use your data by connecting them up. Every piece of data that we get from Amazon or other sources, whether it's keyword rank tracking or search volume data, or your ads data or organic data. Also, you know competitor data and stuff like that. It's in different locations, it's hiding behind wall gardens and stuff like that.

Ritu:

You want to figure out a system to bring it all together, and I would recommend using a data warehousing strategy to start bringing everything together so that you can start looking at it holistically. So I would recommend start to think of simple ways in which you can convert your snapshot data into time series. That that would be my advice, and time series is basically for people who don't understand that. It's basically assigning dates to all your downloads. If you're downloading a business report, make sure you add a column and put the date there so that that becomes a way of identifying when that event happened. When you're connecting so many pieces of data together.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Awesome Well thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time.

Ritu:

Than you so much Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

This was really awesome, awesome and we'll definitely be having you back on the show sometime next year to get your latest strategies.

Ritu:

Awesome, we'll look forward to that. Take care, Bradley, have a good one.

 

#514 - Managing 200 PPC Campaigns in 10 Minutes

What if you had the power to manage over 200 Amazon PPC campaigns in just 10 minutes each week? Imagine the time and resources you could save with the right tools and strategies. Join us in this episode as we share how we use the Helium 10 PPC tool, Adtomic, to streamline our campaigns and work smarter, not harder. Bradley shares his best tips on campaign structure and show you how to apply rules to automatically transfer successful keywords from broad campaigns to exact ones. 

Ever wondered how to navigate the labyrinth of Amazon PPC management? Allow us to guide you. We've harnessed the power of Helium 10's Adtomic tool for campaign automation and optimization. Discover how to conduct regular campaign audits, use negative keywords to curb wasteful spending, and use Adtomic to pinpoint unprofitable keywords.

Now, let's talk profitability. We know you're in this business to make money, so we'll show you how to optimize your Amazon advertising costs to maximize your return. We'll demonstrate how to set goals for ACoS and TACoS and use the Adtomic tool to optimize bids. And before you think about outsourcing, let us convince you of the merits of understanding Amazon PPC yourself. Despite your busy schedule, we believe learning how to manage your own PPC should be a priority - and we'll help you see why and how. 

Google ads, Amazon PPC techniques, factors to negate keywords, and insights beyond the attribution window - we've got it all covered. We know the value of data and why you need to pay attention to it. Intrigued? Excited? We hope so because this episode is packed with strategies and tools that could revolutionize your Amazon campaign management. 

In episode 514 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 01:09 - Manage 200 Amazon PPC Campaigns Efficiently Using Adtomic
• 03:53 - Campaign Grouping and Targeting Strategies
• 11:04 - Optimizing Keywords in Amazon Ad Campaigns
• 11:52 - Effective Amazon PPC Strategies
• 14:05 - Keywords and Campaign Management Simplified
• 16:41 - Optimizing PPC Costs for Profitability
• 17:56 - Profitability and ACoS
• 27:39 - Keyword Negation and Pausing Decision Factors
• 27:50 - Google Ads and PPC Techniques

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today I'm going to show you guys how I managed my 200 PBC campaigns in only 10 minutes a week, plus answer all the questions you guys submitted live. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we go ahead and take your questions live after giving you a demo of a cool tool that can definitely give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today you'll notice I've got my what I call my Adtomic hat and shirt on. That's because I'm just going to give you guys kind of like a 10 minute run through of what I do to go through and manage my PBC accounts. I've been using Adtomic for since it was before Adtomic Used to be called At. So I've been using it for probably about three years now and you know I have probably over 200 PBC campaigns, over three, four accounts that I use it on, and I pretty much you know some. There can be a week where I don't even open it once, like it's doing everything for me. On average, I would say I spend about 15 minutes a week just checking out what's going on and implementing suggestions and things like that, and that's over 200 campaigns. So let me just give you kind of like a little idea about how I roll through it. Like maybe you used to use Adtomic before but trust me, it's like way different Now. A lot of this stuff. I already just recently audited the account, so you might not see too much new information here, but let me just show you what like my process is and why it only takes me like 15 minutes Now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

First of all, I have everything set up in kind of like my campaigns talk to each other, all right, and regardless if you guys use Adtomic or not, this is how I feel you guys should set up your PBC. All right. You have these groups of campaigns that all go to one product, and you've got one that's a exact manual campaign. You've got a broad or phrase match campaign I like to call that a research campaign You've got an auto campaign and then you've got an ASIN product targeting campaign, potentially a sponsor display campaign and then potentially sponsored brand headline campaign. So all of these kind of talk to each other, the auto and the broad campaigns. You can view those as kind of like keyword harvesting campaigns, discovery campaigns. You're discovering keywords that you might not be targeting yet and then, if you find some good ones now you move it to the exact product marketing campaign. Maybe you move it to the exact match keyword campaign, all right. But again, everything talks to each other so that you know the campaigns are benefiting each other, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is where I let me just show you how I set up that, that kind of like flow that I just talked about. So, for example, here is my large coffin shelf rule rule group, all right. So we've got a large and a small coffin shelf, or a large coffin shelf, and then there's a variation where it's a large and a small together. All right, I'm targeting both of those in my PPC campaigns. And here's the rules that I have set up so that I am not having to just, you know, every day download Excel sheets and make pivot tables and things like that. What I did is I put all of those campaigns right here in a group of campaigns. I've got my performance campaign. I actually have two. You know I probably hit like 25, 20 or 25 targets in one. So, like now, I only add it to a new one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I've got my product targeting campaign. It's an ace in targeting campaign, sponsor display, my auto campaign and my research campaign, which I actually have as a broad and, as you can see what these checkbox that I'm showing on the screen for those of you watching this is. I'm saying, hey, if you find a keyword in the research campaign, like a broad right, like, let's say, I'm targeting a broad target coffin shelf and all of a sudden I get sales on this keyword coffin shelf for gothic decor, like a long tail keyword that I wasn't targeting, I'm saying, hey, find it here and then go ahead and put it in my performance campaign because instead of waiting for Amazon to show me in this broad match and just like hope that Amazon shows me, no, I want to target it specifically, all right. So that's basically all of these little boxes up here is me telling Adtomic to look for keywords in certain campaigns that I don't have in the other one and then, if it's good, go ahead and add that keyword as a manual target, be a product or keyword. Now, it's not just any keyword. Um, you can put your own criteria. So, as you can see what this is, just me, this is not saying oh, you guys have to copy what I'm doing right here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I said I only want you to move this keyword to an exact campaign or suggest to me to do it if it gets at least two orders, cause, you know, sometimes there might be one, or like it might be complete fluke. You know, like maybe Amazon has me in an auto campaign and for some crazy reason, they showed me for my coffin shelf or, uh, you know a keyword egg tray or something like that, right, and then it could be like five days after clicking to add maybe the person actually does buy a coffin shelf. You know, it's probably not going to happen again, right? So I I put here a minimum of two because to me I'm like, hey, I want two people to order something. Then I know, hey, this is probably kind of like a good, a good keyword. And then I said, and I want my ACoS to be 30%. You know, if I had to spend 200% ACoS just to get these two sales, probably not that great of a keyword. And so, basically, that that's what it's doing, it's going to, it's going to, it's going to look at this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I could set here the look this is, by the way, this bottom part is all new. I could look at the look back period. You know, some people might say, hey, I want to look at the last 30 days. Some people say, hey, no, I want. I'm a big seller, you know I'm doing spending $1,000 a day. I want to look every five days if there's new ones that meet this criteria. I put last 60 days. And then, hey, how often do I want to check this? I put daily. And then, what time zone do I want this rule to be off of? Now? I could automate this, right, I could automate it, but I'm not going. I don't automate my mind because I just like to be able to, to to click on it. Now, what about? On the flip side?

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's arguably more important to have good negative match, good negative match rules set up, all right. So I've got a negative match on this auto campaign and let me just show you how I have that set up. In the negative match, my, my rules aren't talking to each other, my campaigns aren't talking to each other, all right, cause I just like to do it in isolation. So I put here hey, I don't know why I didn't put this, somebody put six clicks. I don't want to get a negative match if it's just six clicks. So I'm going to split $10 here or $5 spent. So what does that mean? So some people people have their hands on the cookie jar in the project exit count and keeps screwing up my, my things that I have to end up changing it back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, what this means is I'm saying, hey, if I get 15 clicks on a keyword or a search term in this auto campaign with getting zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to go ahead and negative match this so that I stop spending. Or if I spend $5, regardless of the number of clicks on a certain search term with zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to negative match that. And that's all this is doing, all right. So this is what. Again, I don't care if you guys are not using Adtomic, if you're just downloading spreadsheets. This is kind of like what you should be doing, right? I hope you're doing something like this where you know every few weeks, you kind of uh, you know audit what's going on on your PPC so that you're not wasting your spend, all right. So that's the kind of just the simple structure.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I can go a lot deeper into. You know budget rules and and different kinds of uh. You know situations there for what I want Adtomic to look at, but I like to keep my stuff real simple and then so, basically once a week, I come in here to my suggestions and oh yeah, by the way, one thing I forgot to tell you guys is I set everything at target ACoS, all right, there's different rules for my bidding, all right. So I was talking about keyword harvesting, keyword negative, what my rules were? Well, there's different rules that I could pit for uh pick for my bidding.

 

Bradley Sutton:

As you can see, I put everything here on uh and this is like AI powered. I want to target ACoS, like I want the campaign to perform at a 20% ACoS on almost all these. All right, I could choose max impressions or max orders, that it's not looking too much at the ACoS, but just just for this account I have everything on uh target ACoS and then I could put min, max, max bid. You know, like, maybe I have a $10 product and I know I never want to go past $1 on a, on ACoS per click. So I could say, hey, for my bid, I never want Adtomic to try and raise this bid on this search term or on this target. I should say for more than $1, or I want to. I never want to suggest to me something lower than than this. All right, so so that's that's. Uh, that's another thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now, once a week I have my, my bidding, uh, you know, targeting, uh algorithms. Here I've got my rules as far as my positive keywords, my negative keywords. All I have to do is go to the suggestions, all right. And then, for example, uh, what I'm looking at here is the AI bids. So, hey, my, my target ACoS is 20% and let, on this keyword, my ACoS is 86%. So it's telling me to go ahead and lower my bid. All right here. And then, if I, if I agree with the suggestion. All I have to do is click one button. I can actually click the whole entire page here If I agree with all these suggestions, and it happens instantly.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm not finding it in seller central. Where is this campaign? Where, you know, let me click on edit bid and let me, you know, find it. This and that that would take just by itself. You know like how, how many. I have a hundred and seventy nine bid changes I need to make. Do you know how long it would be to find these in my, in this account only has like maybe like 75 campaigns, but to go find them in these 75 campaigns and go into the ad group and everything and change these one by one, that would take forever. I could literally do it in 10 seconds right here if I just click a couple of buttons.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, here is my new keywords. I actually do have two ones, all right. So let's take a look at what it found. All right, take a look at this, look at this keyword here Coffin shaped shelf. All right, I spent $7 on this and I got $89 worth of sales. All right, and this was from an auto campaign. And so what is it telling me to do. It's saying hey, click me and then go ahead and add this to your manual campaign and, potentially, your broad match campaign. Now again, am I having to go find these campaigns, add a target, set the bid and all that stuff, like I would if I, if, if I'm down, if I'm working in seller central, uh, manually? No, I just click one button and boom goes the dynamite. It is now done. It is now added to that campaign so that I can go ahead and target that manually.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Here's another keyword that it just found. Again, it must have found this in the last four days because I just audited this. I just went through all my suggestions. Like three days ago, wooden egg rack, I spent $5 on uh, which campaign is another auto campaign. I got $55 worth of sales. It's saying hey, go ahead and add these to your manual campaign. All right, it would do the same thing for ascent targets as well. That it might find in the auto campaign.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Again, negative keywords. It's, it's, it didn't find anything right now, but that's where it would be All right. Now, what if you're just getting into Adtomic and you don't have all your rules set up and and you're just setting up your campaigns? It might take a while. What I suggest doing is like audits on your account, all right, and I just did this audit. Let me show you the kind of audits that I do. I go right in here to analytics and the first thing that I want and again, nothing should come up here that's not already negative matched, because I, like I said I already went through this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But let me show you what I did to, in seconds across my account, find the worst keywords. So what I did was I said, hey, I'm looking back at the last two months of PPC activity here and I'm saying, hey, I want to see something that gave me zero sales, all right, but I had at least 30 clicks and I'm on the wrong page. I need to go to the search term page. Let me go to the search term. I can look at this at the ad group level, campaign level, target level. I'm going all the way down to the search term level in this case, all right. So again, I'm saying, hey, I had zero PPC orders, but I spent, let's just say, $8 at least on a keyword or on a search term, and what came up? Look at this Right instantly.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, great, I'm positive. I already negative match all of these because, like I said, I just did this audit. But look, if I had done this earlier I would have saved myself $152. Right here. This is not a big account, guys. This project X account doesn't do that much in sales anymore, but still, this is how much money I was wasting $150. I can just negative match all of these in one fell swoop. Right, right, instantly. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What about the flip side? What if I want to find some killer keywords again? All of this is automated anyway, so that that's why I don't have to negative match any of these, because it already did it. But what? What if I'm like hey, is there anything that is is is doing really well for me that maybe I could increase my bid on? So I'm going to go to my target instead of search term level, all right. And I'm going to say, hey, show me something that got at least one order. But the ACOS was less than 5%, like crazy kind of ACOS. Right, and take a look, there was three targets that hit that. All right, now you can see I already change it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But look at this. I was targeting this asin in an. It must have been in a product targeting or sponsor display. Look at this. It was a sponsor display campaign, guys. I spent a dollar and 42 cents and I sold $119 worth of product for a 1% ACOS. I could be leaving money on the table by having such a low bid. So my bid before was 47 cents. So you can see I already took action and I raised it up, almost doubled the bid, to see what would happen. Look at this one. Here's one where this broad match target fresh egg holder countertop. I had the bid at 51 cents and after one click I got $18 worth of sales. So now I raised the bid to $1. Cause I'm like, all right, let's see if I can get some more action on this keyword. But again, I click literally two things to be able to find this. So this is why, guys, I have four Amazon accounts and over 200 campaigns. This is why I can spend 10 minutes a week doing all of it and manage everything.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now I was going to go into a refund gene a little bit, but I went kind of long here on Adtomic, so I want to just make sure there's enough time for Q&A. So at this time I'm going to check back in the questions to see what questions you guys were asking. You can ask me about anything Helium 10 related here, and it doesn't have to be about PPC, it doesn't have to be about Adtomic. Another Facebook user says what can we do to reduce PPC? I pay a lot and every product I sell is paid for by Amazon, all right. So one thing is don't think about it. As far as you know, reduce PPC Like, if you're profitable, who cares if you spend a million dollars on PPC, if you're making $8 million, right, and you're profitable, right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So it's not just about the amount you're spending, but if you're be thinking more of, in terms of profitability, if you're spending so much on PPC that you are no longer profitable when you make a sale, yes, that is something you absolutely need to tackle and there's different metrics. You can look at that, you know. Maybe you're looking at your TACoS, your total, ACoS. Maybe you're looking at just your ACoS at the campaign level and you need to know what is your breakeven point, what? At what ACoS or TACoS are you able to turn a profit? And then that's the goal you set. And again, I just showed you guys how to do an Adtomic. You put in that goal of what you're trying to do where you know you can be profitable, and it's gonna kind of give you these suggestions automatically on what how you need to lower your bids in order to hit that goal. And, at the same time, it's not just about lowering bids, it's about stopping altogether spend on keywords that just are not doing it for you. So pretty much everything that I just showed you today, that is exactly what you need to be doing. You know, even if you whether you have Adtomic or whether you don't have Adtomic doesn't matter. You need to be auditing your account, looking at those metrics.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says what is the best ACoS? So the best ACoS is what you can make money on. All right, for some people it's 5%, because they have very slim margins. Some people it's you could be like 80% ACoS right, and you're not making money. But guess what? It's okay because you've got products in like Subscribin' Save or some kind of replenishment right, where you're willing to lose money on that first order, because you're selling tea or you're selling coffee or something like that, because you know that they're gonna turn on Subscribin' Save or a certain percentage of customers, so you're willing to lose money on that first order and because you're gonna get that money back, all right. So again, the answer to your question is there is no magic ACoS number. The magic number is whatever you can still be profitable at.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody says my ACoS I'm not sure they're the same person because I can't see your name but they said my ACoS is 70%. You know, for me, if it was 70% that would be terrible. I'd be losing money, crazy money, because I do not have enough margins on my products where I can afford 70% ACoS. But three years ago me, I was doing a lot of supplements which I'm not doing anymore. I absolutely wanted 70% ACoS, all right. I've got an account that is a hemp cream, all right. And I'm totally fine with 50% ACoS because I'm getting people and Subscribin' Save, absolutely fine with 50% ACoS. But you know, in my coffin shelf, brad, I want 20% ACoS, all right. So you gotta use these kind of you know reasoning here in order to know if your ACoS is good or not. I've got a shout out from Tony from YouTube. He or she says cheers, cheers. Back to you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says what subscriptions should we upgrade to so I can communicate with me more? The way that you can communicate with me, regardless of levels is here Once a month. We open this up so you can talk to me on these, on this. Ask Me Anything. If you want to be able to reach out to me in a Facebook group that I check every day, it's the Elite Group, so only Helium 10 Elite members have direct access to me. You can even book one-on-one calls with me if you're a Helium 10 Elite member, and we also have weekly Zoom calls that usually I'm on as well. So lots of touch points in the Elite Program. I'm not trying to sell you Elite right now because, guess what, if you want to sign up for Elite right now, you can't. It's closed. It only opens up certain times of year and right now it's closed. But you know, go to helium10.me forward, slash elite. I think there's might be a waiting list there. And if you want to join that so that you could be able to talk to myself and Kari and Chevali and Kevin King, then yeah, make sure to sign up for the wait list for that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says I hired somebody, but unfortunately I don't get any profit. I pay a very high fee. For instance, the payment is 500. Are you talking about you hired somebody for PPC management? If so, don't do it. I suggest to anybody out there don't outsource your PPC unless it is a resourcing thing, in other words, that you, you're, you're trying to expand and you're a one person one man or one woman show and you just don't have the bandwidth to do PPC. But you know how to do PPC. Okay In that sense, go ahead and hire an agency or or a service provider to to to take care of it. But it's important that you know PPC really well yourself first. Otherwise it's going to be hard for you to judge the work of an agency or a service provider if you don't know what is good and what is bad management.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now my suggestion if you do have the bandwidth, you 100% should be doing PPC yourself. All right, you absolutely should be doing it yourself. Like, it's not that difficult, it's. It's complicated, right, there's a lot of moving parts, but, as you can see, tools like Adtomic just completely simplify the process and make it really fast. And that's why, to me, it's not even a bandwidth issue, if I can manage to I mean, guys, I work at Helium 10 full time, more than full time. Like you think I have time to be managing all the all these things on my own. I that's. I only spend 20 minutes working on PPC and that's that's for four Amazon accounts and I have a full time day job. Right, it's not that much. You should be doing Adtomic yourself or you should be doing PBC yourself.

 

Bradley Sutton:

In my opinion, if you have a tool like Adtomic Now, if you were trying to do it on your own and you have to do it manually and you've got 200 campaigns, what I do in 15 minutes would take you maybe five hours a week, if not more. All right, just look at that. Remember that bid page that I was showing you guys 179 bids after just five days to change, like what. That just takes forever to do manually and even to get to those calculations. So if you're on your own, I highly recommend not hiring out and there are plenty of great agencies out there and there is a need for them, like, we love agencies out there, I have them on this show, right. But those, the ones who I suggest using those, are the ones who have kind of like outgrown. They're like hey, I'm a seven figure seller and I've got 3000 campaigns to manage and I've only got one employee. I don't want to have to train somebody from scratch. Okay, go ahead and hire an agency, but if that's not you, I think you should be doing PBC yourself.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody says the ACoS was 1%. Yeah, on that. On that example that I showed of how I had this crazy good search term, I had one where the ACoS was 1.18%. And then so that's a situation where it's like, let me raise my bid up right on this target because you might be leaving money on the table when your ACoS is so low. Because, like, let's say, my bid where I got that 1.18%, what was it? It was 47 cents. Right, maybe that 47 cent bid is only getting me impressions 10% of the time, like at the end of the day, when other people's budgets are out. Oh, then I start getting some bids or I start gaining impressions at that 47 cents. Maybe if I raise it to $1, I could be getting impressions all day long. All right, is my ACoS going to be 1%? No, but I don't care. If my ACoS is 10%, 10 times as much, I'm still making money like crazy. Because if my break even point is 20, 25%, that 10% is still making me money. So that's why you want to look at the small ACoS and don't just like pat yourself on the back and say I'm a PBC king, no, you want to raise that bid up because you might be leaving money on the table. All right, let's keep going with the questions now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Dennis says what should be an approximate ad spend to justify Adtomic monthly fee. It depends on how you value your time. It's $1.99 a month for Adtomic and that includes $10,000 spent. So basically that means if you are spending less than $10,000, if you're paying Amazon in PPC fees less than $10,000 a month, you're only paying that flat rate of Adtomic $199. So at that point it's a matter of how do you value your time. Like, if you value your time at $50 an hour, right, if you value your time at $50 an hour and it takes you 10 hours a month to do your PPC, that means you're kind of spending $500 of your own time on PPC and in that sense is $200 of Adtomic to take that 10 hours down to 30 minutes or less than one hour. Is that worth it? Absolutely it's worth it. You know Every week Above that it's still a matter of time savings. All right, if you're spending $20,000 a month to PPC, you've got a pretty big operation. All right, you know you're probably a million dollar seller. If you're spending $20, $30, $40,000 a month on PPC, it probably would take you a full-time employee to manage your PPC, or paying an agency like $1,000 a month or something like that, right? So in that sense again, it's probably worth it to have Adtomic, it's all. There's no right or wrong answer here. It's about how you value your time. If you only value your time at $10 an hour and it only takes you 10 hours a month to do PPC now manually, is it worth it to get Adtomic? Probably not, I'll be honest, probably not. But if you value your time more, then I would say it's worth it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Dennis, how to get initial reviews apart from the Vine program? That's pretty much it you know like. If you're talking about like some actual service that is, terms of service, approved, it's Vine. You know that's the only program that Amazon has for reviews. Now if you just wanna get a better chance at getting more reviews, you can use the Request Review. Amazon allows you to send one Request Review per order to customers. Has to be at least, I believe, eight days after the product delivers. So you can automate that in Helium 10 follow-up, right, you don't have to click one by one each order to say hey, let's say hey, 13 days after the product is ordered, send a Request Review. That actually triggers the Amazon Request Review inside of Seller Central. But you're doing it from Helium 10 follow-up and then you could just say, hey, do it on this day and only orders in this marketplace or only this ASIN, this schedule, this other ASIN, this other schedule. You can automate that and basically do, set it and forget it, and then that can give you a better chance to get a review, because your customers are theoretically reminded to leave a review more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Sergio says what factors do you decide to negate a keyword or pause campaigns? It's very rare that I pause a whole campaign, right, like I don't think I've ever paused a whole campaign because my campaigns will have five, 10, maybe 15 targets. Sure, will I pause a target in the campaign, but all 15 of my targets are bad and I'm like that's very rare, you know. But to negate a keyword, I showed you what I put in Adtomic. I put, hey, I want at least 15, 20, sometimes 25 clicks and slash or a spend that's equal to 50% or more of the retail price of my product. So if I'm selling a $30 product, I put $15. In other words, if I get $15 worth of spend on a target with zero sales, I'm probably gonna go ahead and pause that target. What if?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another question from Sergio is what if the keyword is highly relevant but competitive and have to spend a lot to rank? Check your conversion rate, all right. So look at your conversion rate for that keyword in search query performance and see if it's really bad compared to your niche as a whole. You gotta figure out why. All right. So it's not just a matter of, oh, let me pause this or let me just keep spending a lot more money, et cetera, et cetera. It's a matter of you gotta figure out if that is your most important keyword, why are you not converting for it? Why are people converting for others more than yours? Is it your price? Is it your pictures? Is it your bullet points? What is it? That's something that's very important to consider. I don't just blindly change bids or just pause or just give up on a keyword just because I'm spending too much money. At the same time, I don't just blindly keep it going because I know this keyword is important. I have to understand why my conversion rate is not good on it and try and fix it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Matt says I've noticed that my overall ACoS for my PPC has almost doubled to 28% over the last two weeks. Does PPC usually get expensive around Christmas? Yes, ACoS per click goes up. A lot. People raise their budgets, they raise their bid sometimes and that's just gonna drive up the cost. So that is. I'm not saying oh, you gotta deal with it and be happy with losing money. But no, if you're asking, is this typical for this time of year, the answer is yes, and the reason why is because, again, people's budgets are higher, so that means less people are running out potentially of budget, so that you're not getting in at those cheaper prices that maybe you would towards the end of the day. Normally Other people are just like taking a blanket raising of their bids across the board so that to try and make sure they get top of search and that could be raising the bids as well. But yeah, this is a very competitive time for PPC.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Tony says what is the thing with the electronics category? Why don't you get data All the time? I mean, we can only give what Amazon gives, and so a lot of products in the electronics category, amazon doesn't give parent level BSR, so that means we can't have a sales estimate for it. Uh, now the says I spent $500 a day in ads. Uh, I get over 200,000 impressions, 350 clicks, but zero sales from those. However, my organic sales are extremely good. Is it because my impressions, my clicks? I'd make sure you're.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, what is your look back period? I would not look this week. Make sure that you're looking at least one to two weeks back, and if those are the numbers you're seeing, that's very strange. I don't think I've ever seen 350 clicks in zero sales. Now, if that's across, like you know, 40 keywords or something, okay, well, well, that makes a little bit of sense. But first of all, make sure you're you're looking outside of just the, the attribution window. If you're looking within the seven days, it could very well be that somebody today is going to click on something or going to buy something that they clicked on maybe a week ago or something, uh, and you might be looking at the data and they'll say zero sales. But if you look at that same data for this week, in two weeks, it'll say you had sales. So I would make sure you're looking back at least two weeks, first of all.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But then, if, if it is true that you're just not getting sales, you got to figure out why are these keywords relevant to your listing? Now, if you've just got a whole bunch of those 350 clicks is across 50 keywords, right, so that each one is less than 10. I'm not sure it's time to panic yet because, like I said, I wait until I get 15, 20 clicks with no sales before I start worrying or thinking. That's not going to be good for me. You know, maybe only seven clicks per keyword has happened. Who knows, maybe your eighth click you're going to get a sale. So it all depends on what kind of um, what time period you're looking back on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, and your, your second question kind of alludes that uh, now that it says could clicks that haven't been attributed to sales for that day be attributed to a high organic sales the following day? Uh, clicks can't be attributed to organic uh sales, like it's either one or the other. But if, if, if the sale, uh, the, the sale that you see might not be updated in Amazon as a PPC order, if that's what you're asking, then yes, that is possible, which is again why I suggest looking no less than uh a week, a week back and an older, instead of looking at this week. We got one more here. Let's see.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Matt says I love the freedom ticket course. Great job, learned a lot. Can you recommend a Google PPC course? I'm looking to drive more external traffic from Google directly to my Amazon listing. I've actually been looking into trying to create some content not myself because I'm not a Google expert but we might be bringing some Google ads into uh Helium 10 as far as in our training, so that we can, you know, let people know how to drive that external traffic. But even you know something that's very lucrative these days, even more than Google ads from right here is Tik Tok uh shop, and, and so I I suggest looking into Tik Tok shop If you haven't done so yet, matt, and we'll have some content about that soon as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. This is something that our serious sellers club and our elite members get every single week here, which is our ask me anything, but once a month we go ahead and open it up to everybody, like we did today, and we also repurpose this as a podcast. So thank you, guys, so much for joining us and we'll see you next week. If you're an SSC member, we'll see you guys next month. If you're just in our Facebook groups and make sure to write all your questions down about Helium 10, I'll try and get them answered right here, live on the air. Thanks a lot, guys. Bye, bye now.

 

 

Helium 10 Buzz 11/30/23: Amazon 3D Images Released | Black Friday Results | Helium 10 New AI Image Tool

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon Hosted Record-Breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday Holiday Shopping Event, and Announces Millions More Holiday Deals to Come
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/11/amazon-hosted-record-breaking-black-friday-and-cyber-monday-holiday-shopping-event-and-announces-millions-more-holiday-deals-to-come

They did it again! Shopify merchants break Black Friday record with $4.1 billion in sales
https://news.shopify.com/they-did-it-again-shopify-merchants-break-black-friday-record-with-41-billion-in-sales

Save the date for Amazon #unBoxed2024 in Austin, Texas.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7135687573812768768/

Focus: Walmart shifts to India, cuts China imports
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-shifts-india-china-cheaper-imports-2023-11-29/

Stay tuned as we explore Helium 10's newest features, including an exclusive AI-powered image generator for Amazon Sponsored Brand ads and the ability to generate custom images for Amazon ads and  Amazon Posts. We'll be sharing hands-on demonstrations on how to use these features and their potential benefits for third-party sellers. Plus, we have news on a monthly networking call in Spanish, designed to help Spanish-speaking sellers connect and share strategies. Join us for all this and more as we continue to provide you with innovative tools and updates that are transforming the Amazon and E-commerce landscape.

 

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:

• 00:52 - Amazon 3D Images
• 02:32 - Amazon Black Friday
• 04:31 - Shopify Black Friday
• 05:17 - Amazon Unboxed
• 06:02 - Amazon Transparency
• 07:01 - Made In India
• 08:45 - Spanish Networking Call 
• 09:50 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 16:54 - Pro Training: How To Instantly The Most Searched Word On Amazon

 

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Soon, you can upload 3D images for your products on Amazon. Results from Black Friday. Amazon Unbox Conference date and new location announced. Amazon transparency update these stories and more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon Walmart e-commerce world. We also let you know on the brand new tools and feature updates that Helium 10 has, as well as a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. All right, let's go ahead and hop right into the different news articles Now. The first one was an announcement this week from Seller Central itself, so you can see this in your dashboard, and it's entitled 3D models to replace 360 degree images starting December 14th. All right now. This is going to be for US, UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy. All right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

In the past, you could supposedly it says here you could put 360 degree images. Now, project X products had it, project 5K products had it. We never requested it. It was like Amazon just choosing to do on your own. I never actually heard of many people, if any, who were able to request the 360 degree images where you can kind of like put your finger in the app and like drag it around and see the whole thing. I've never actually known somebody who outside of like vendor central who could request that. But regardless, 360 degree images are going to be a thing of the past. And what is replacing it are these view in 3D, different kind of like experiences, view in your room, virtual try-on and showroom? So this was announced a while back at, I believe it was Amazon Accelerate. There was some talk about this. Now, what Amazon is going to come out with, what they said is, hey, to make it easier if you do create 3D models. It's not like we have like imaging software, right, they're working on a tool that'll allow you to use your phone in order to scan your product and create a 3D model. So more news on that coming soon, they say. But that is a change that is pretty imminent, because it says, hey, this is going to happen in December 14th.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so next article is going to be also from Amazon. It was a press release that they did, and this is about Black Friday results, right? This article says Amazon hosted record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event and announces millions more holiday deals to come. All right, now I don't know how they calculated this, but they said customer save 70% more on Amazon during its 11 days from November 17th through Cyber Monday compared to the same period last year. Now it also cited a recent independent study from Profitero and it said that Amazon had the lowest online prices entering the holiday season, by an average of 16% across 15 different categories, compared to other leading retailers in the US, and they're on pace to deliver fastest delivery speeds for Prime members in the company's 29 year history 29 year history I didn't even know Amazon's been around for 29 years. That's crazy. Anyways, just some random stats here that Amazon talked about says customers ordered more than 500 million items from third party sellers. All right, and so that's a lot. This is just again. During 11 day period, and also some new programs started getting the limelight with their first kind of Black Friday. It says for the first time, prime members purchased great deals directly from Buy With Prime merchants during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday event. And it said merchants who participated in promotional activities experienced an aggregate more than a 300% increase in units purchased through Buy With Prime versus their daily average for the month of October.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let me know out there, what about you guys? Anybody have some good numbers to report? I heard some people say hey, you know, cyber Monday actually worked out better than Black Friday, but how is your whole Cyber Five altogether? You know how was it from Thursday all the way through Monday? Let me know in the comments below, speaking of Black Friday, how many of you guys have Shopify websites? An article from Shopify, similar press release, says they did it again. Shopify merchants break Black Friday record with $4.1 billion in sales. So it says hey, from the crack of dawn in New Zealand, which is where you know, it becomes Black Friday first through the final minutes in California. Well, that's not right. The final minutes of Black Friday is in Hawaii. It says our merchants drove a 22% increase in sales over last year Shopping peak, when collective sales reached 4.2 million dollars per minute At 12 pm Eastern on Friday. Uh, what about you guys out there who've got Shopify websites. How is your Shopify Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Uh?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to amazon now there's an announcement on amazon ads linked in Uh for amazon unboxed. You might remember amazon unboxed just a few weeks ago in New York, where it's been the last couple of years, you know, we did a podcast live there. They announced all kinds of cool stuff like sponsored tv and things like that. Well, uh, is amazon unboxed going to be in New York? Uh, in October next year? Well, it is going to still be in October, but guess what, guys? Uh, it is now moving to drumroll, please, Austin Texas. All right, so save the date, guys. If you miss this year's unboxed Uh marketing your calendars. Amazon unboxed 2024 for the first time Austin Texas, October 14th through 16th.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, going back to amazon seller central Uh, we announced this update a while back, where they kind of teased that this was coming, and now it's uh going to be in effect, and this is about amazon transparency. Amazon transparencies, a way to to help kind of uh dissuade counterfeit sales of your product. And they now announced amazon being that you can now have use your own serial numbers for transparency. All right, this is new, you know, you don't have to use theirs. You can use your own Uh serial numbers. And, again, you know, if you are uh active with your products in transparency, it means that they can't be listed or shipped to customers without valid codes. So if you have trouble, like with hijackers and things, basically this means that people you know, other sellers trying to like, list your or you know, add their uh the skew to your ASIN, it's not going to get accepted or shipped if it doesn't have these transparency uh codes. So for more information on that, check your uh dashboard.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now interesting article. This one is coming from Reuters and it was entitled Walmart Shifts to India Cuts China Imports. Now, this is interesting because, uh, it basically said that they're moving more for the Walmart products that they produce themselves. They're moving the production more and more to India. All right, the world's largest retailer, Walmart, this article says, shipped one quarter Of its us imports from India between January and august this year. All right, that compared with in 2018 2018, guess how much? 2% it went from 2% to 25% being produced in India in just the last five years. The data, according to those articles, shows that it only 60% of its shipment only quote, unquote, only came from China. Now, the reason why it's only 60% is because in 2018, it was 80% of all of Walmart’s products were made in China. But China is obviously still Walmart’s biggest country, but it talks about, you know, hey, there's a shift happening at Walmart, you know.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Guess what guys? Project x, all of our products have been made in China. Until Two months ago, we produced our very first product in where? India? All right, so that is going to be coming. You're going to see a feature podcast where we talk about the development Of that product, and we'll have Meghla on here. She helped us source it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But big companies like Walmart, amazon, third-party sellers more and more are moving production outside of China. What about you? Are you still producing everything in China? Are you producing in India? You producing in Pakistan or other countries? Let me know in the comments below, all right, uh, one more thing before we get into some really cool feature announcements. We're not gonna some moss. I'll let spaniel.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So one more thing Do you speak Spanish? We have our very first monthly networking call in the Spanish language starting next week. All right, this is going to be something that will be hosted by our Serious Sellers Podcast en Español host, Adriana Rangel, and this first one is going to be on December the 6th All right market calendars, December the 6th, at 4 pm Pacific time. And then, for those who speak Spanish, for everybody who speaks Spanish go to h10.me/llamadaconadriana. h10.me/llamadaconadriana. Go to that website and you'll be able to register for the zoom. So again, if you guys want a network with other Spanish speaking sellers, whether you're here in the States, in Latin America, in Europe, in Spain, wherever you are in the world, go ahead and sign up. This will be a monthly Networking call where you can, you know, talk about what's working, what's not working in your business, get some help and I might, you know, pop in there every now and then as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's get into the helium 10 new feature alerts, and we've got some doozies today, guys. Whoo, the Helium 10 product team is been cooking with fire for sure. All right, the very first one is guess what, guys? Helium 10 kind of low-key now has an AI generating or an AI Powered image generator. All right, now, this is actually the Amazon Sponsored a brand ad image generator. But I'm gonna show you, guys, how you can use it for Amazon post. You can use it for you know, potentially lifestyle images or infographics, or getting you know other ideas for your, for your images. It's not perfect right now, but this is cool. The only place Outside of Amazon that you can get this tool is in helium 10. Why, cuz? Amazon chose helium 10 to be its exclusive partner, namely in atomic? Amazon chose helium 10 atomic to be the exclusive software for now. It'll open it up later to others, but we are the only ones that you can get this in. Let me show you how it works, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So basically, you go to your atomic and then you hit a new campaign. Once you get into your campaign builder, you're gonna want to hit single campaign. Once you get there, you're going to want to hit sponsored brand, the middle one. Once you hit sponsored brand, you're gonna hit next and then here you are going to go ahead and Put enter a couple of your products from the brand that you are trying to do. You know an image for, so I'm gonna go ahead and choose what up right here on my screen the helium 10, a coffin bookshelf and Coffin coffin egg tray here and then scroll down. Make sure under sponsor brand campaign, you select the actual brand that you're trying to do this actually kind of doesn't matter, because you're gonna be able to enter your own images yourself. But since I'm actually gonna do one for the coffin shelf, the coffin bookshelf, I'm gonna go ahead and choose Manny's mysterious oddities. Now, once you select that, you scroll down here to this new section called Creative.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the whole purpose of this is actually to create sponsored brand, so you can actually create the, the custom sponsored brand image right here. But I'm gonna show, I'm showing you guys, how to just create any image you want right now. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna first just do this coffin bookshelf and I'm gonna put a different background, all right. So right here, under custom image, you're going to hit AI generated image, all right. Now I'm gonna go ahead and since, like I said, I'm gonna use the coffin bookshelf, so I'm gonna go ahead and choose that again here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now what I'm going to do is, in this prompt, I'm gonna say what I want I it to be like in the room. So I'm going to say put this coffin bookshelf hanging on a light colored wall and there are other bat themed decor items hanging on the wall, all right. So I mean that that's just a super, a super simple thing right here. I can actually choose theme here, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to choose a theme for this. Let's just see what happens. This usually takes about a minute to do, so I'll come back as soon as it generates and here we go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, sometimes you're going to get some crazy stuff, like here it actually changed our coffin bookshelf a little bit, but take a look, you know, here it put. It did exactly what I said. I said, hey, put it on a light colored wall and you could see, here's the coffin bookshelf hanging on a wall and there's some like bat shape, like little decor items on the wall. Now I will. I did not give it a good prompt. You know, I only wrote about 121 characters. I can write up to 300. I didn't even include a theme, but you, you know you can get pretty specific.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, is this AI going to be perfect? No, this is coming directly from Amazon, you know so. Helium 10 doesn't have control over this. So you know, like, if you're not getting good output, it's it's. You know that's because Amazon's AI is not great yet. But again, this is using connecting directly to the API, to the Amazon's AI generation, and what I can do here is I can actually, you know, choose some of these. I can zoom in and then I can actually save these. I can select them and save them right here, download it. I can save it to my creative assets. So it's kind of like a cool way to, you know, generate Amazon post images without ever even leaving helium 10. So that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about today. The second thing is also super, super cool, requested by a lot of our users, and this is wherever you see keywords in your insights dashboard and cerebro, in magnet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, sometimes you see a whole bunch of keywords and you know you can see the, the score there for how important the keyword is, you know, based on maybe it's search volume or or competitor performance score. But sometimes you're not quite sure how maybe what I call real world relevant the keyword is like, for example, you know, coffin shelf. I think you could understand that probably all the results are coffin shelf. That's the top 10 on page one. But what about other keywords like coffin decor? Maybe it's not coffin shelves, but just random coffin products, and so what, what have you always had to do before.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you just want to kind of take a quicker or a quick look at the results of, you know, keywords in cerebral magnet, well, you would click one by one on those keywords and take a look at them on Amazon. Well, now you know you're not going to have to do that anymore. Let me show you exactly what you can do. Anywhere where you have cerebral magnet, any keywords, you just have to put your mouse over it, like so, for example, if I want to say what is in coffin shelf, I just put my mouse over and I can see they're mostly coffin shelves here. But then maybe I'm like, all right, well, what about goth gifts? Are there any goth gifts that are showing up here in, you know, for coffin shelves? And I can just all I do, I'm not clicking on anything. I just put my mouse over here and I can see there's some Spooky looking slippers or some skulls, and I'm not actually seeing any coffin shelves in the top 10. So now I know you know what this, this keyword you know, probably might not be too too relevant here. I can look at a coffin box. I'm like, hey, what kind of things are coming up for coffin box? Okay, there is one coffin shelf, but the rest of these are just like maybe some jewelry boxes. So again, I am not clicking on anything, but now anywhere where there's a key where I can put my mouse over. So we're get an idea about the last time healing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Then 10 check the top 10 results Little thumbnails that show what products were ranking for these keywords. I could see their price, how many variations they have, how many reviews they have. You know, that can be cool, like instantly I might see a keyword was like wow, look at this. Out of the top 10, most everybody only had, like you know, 10 reviews or 20 reviews. So like it's a great way to do product research as well. So I hope you guys can enjoy these two new feature updates from helium 10. Make sure you use it and let me know what you think.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last up, today we have our training tip of the week, and this one is going to be courtesy of Carrie, and this is another keyword based strategy where, in seconds, if you want to find the Keywords that have the most search volume, that start with a word or two words or three words, within seconds. Again, this is one of those no click strategies like. This last one I gave you was a no click strategy. This strategy has zero clicks. How can you see what are the top searched keywords that start with any word or phrase? Carrie, take it away.

 

Carrie:

I'm going to show you how to instantly find the most search terms that start with a specific Keyword. It's very easy and it's something that you can do for Low-key keyword research. If you're just kind of curious about something, maybe you found a product that you want to kind of look a little bit more into. You can see what the top phrases are that start with that particular keyword, and I'm going to show you how to do it. Right now. All you have to do is you just need to go to magnet and it's very, very simple. The next thing you're going to do is you're just going to start typing so we sell a coffin shell. So I'm just going to type in the word coffin and with this it's going to basically show me all the keywords that start with coffin. That in the order of the most searched to the least search. So we've got coffin nail tips. That is the most searched, and the next is coffin, and then the next coffin press on nails. So we can take it even further. We want to say I want to see all the keywords that start with coffin shelf from the most, you know, search to the least. So we've got coffin shelf, coffin shelf, large. So all these great keywords.

 

Carrie:

Another thing you can maybe try like the most popular search term or search product is garlic press, so maybe we can look at garlic Okay, so we've got garlic, garlic press, garlic powder, so we can say garlic press here and see if there's any other keywords. It looks like garlic press stainless steel is the next most searched Garlic press. Oh, so, as you can see, this is a great way to find. You know, kind of do some low key keyword research and you can see all the keywords that start that exact keyword that you want to find, and In the order of the highest search volume to lowest. So I hope you check it out. It's very, very easy and really interesting to take a look at.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Carrie, and thank you guys all for tuning in this week. I will see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#513 - Walmart Beta Programs, Google Ads, & AMA

Get ready to take your Walmart selling game to the next level! Our brilliant guest, Michal Chapnick, a Walmart expert, talks about Walmart's ad certification, the unveiling of innovative beta programs, and the integration of Google ads into promoting your Walmart products. She'll also shed light on Walmart’s commitment to third-party sellers through initiatives like fee discounts and personalized product suggestions. This is the inside scoop you need to unlock the potential of Walmart's marketplace and see your sales soar.

Discover the power of Google ads in driving traffic to Walmart and how it can work wonders for your brand exposure. Dive into the advantages of Walmart's SEM program and learn why it may be more beneficial than directly sending Google ads to Walmart. Michal reveals the abundant opportunities awaiting sellers at Walmart Canada and uncovers the potential impact of beta programs, such as brand stores, on your sales figures. This Walmart Wednesday episode is packed with insights and advice for those seeking to extend their business reach on Walmart.

As we approach Q4, the busiest time for e-commerce, Michal shares her expertise on maximizing your sales during this hectic period. From planning and implementing promotions to optimizing your listings and enhancing customer service, we’ve got you covered. Uncover the impact of the beta version of coupon codes and the power of video ads in holding customer attention. We wrap up our episode by acknowledging all the diligent sellers out there and remind you to make the most of the opportunities available on Walmart's platform, particularly during the holiday season. Buckle up for a wealth of knowledge, and best wishes for a profitable Q4!

 

In episode 513 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Michal discuss:

• 00:00 - Selling on Walmart Updates and Opportunities
• 03:13 - BIS Mentor and Customized Suggestions
• 06:07 - The Growth and Opportunities With Walmart
• 12:35 - Walmart's Influence on Black Friday Sales
• 15:23 - Running Ads for Walmart Benefits
• 19:17 - Opportunities for Selling in Walmart Canada 
• 23:53 - Promoting Walmart Sales With Coupons and Videos
• 31:56 - Optimizing Keywords With Helium 10
• 33:24 - Q4 Selling Tactics and Appreciation

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

On today's episode we have Walmart expert Michal Chapnick. She's going to be talking about Walmart ad certification, new beta programs for Walmart, as well as Google ads for Walmart. So this and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I'm your host today, and this is our winning with Walmart Wednesday, where we talk about all things Walmart. We answer all of your questions and I'm very, very excited today because I have an amazing guest. We have Michal Chapnick, who is going to be joining me. I'm going to be asking her lots of questions because she's a Walmart expert. She has a Walmart agency and she's had a lot of success on Walmart. I know a lot of you are familiar with her. Hey, Michal, how's it going?

 

Michal:

Hello, I'm good and good. How are you doing?

 

Carrie Miller:

Very good. Thank you, nice to see you, and thanks so much for coming on. I'm really excited to have you because you're one of the you know Walmart gurus one of the few Walmart gurus. I would say, probably one of the top in the industry here for Walmart. So thank you. Yeah, so I'm really excited because I know that you have a lot of kind of cool updates to share with us. Okay, so I'm going to get into it. I'm going to get into some of the first things. I'm going to ask you just what kind of updates are there that you would like to share with us about Walmart? Do you want to share any updates of anything new for Walmart or what's new?

 

Michal:

basically, I think there are so many Recently. You know, every week we do Walmart updates and we have, like you know, 10, 15 slides every week because they're really on top of it, they're working really hard and a lot of them are really exciting because and I'm telling that all the time Walmart really wants you. They want you on Walmart, they want the brand, they want you to sell and a lot of people you know sometimes having a hard time to enter Walmart or when they're on Walmart they're having a hard time to sell. But Walmart really wants you there and they're doing everything they can from their side to help you and, you know, give you help to set up, give you help with fees. There's always some kind of promotion there is doing for sellers that are already on Walmart or new sellers. So right now they're doing a lot of like. They're cutting off fees in different ways.

 

Michal:

So either if you have the Pro Seller badge and you can get deep discounts on fees and you can get credit that you can use it for run ads or to use it for the review accelerator program, so you get this credit back. The only thing you need to do is go to your BIS mentor. It's in every account. It's on the, I think, top left and Walmart is giving you customized suggestions so it just specifically for you.

 

Michal:

So from things like items that they think you have an opportunity to get more sales if you lower your price and they're willing to cut your sell off fees, so they will cut your sell off fees so you'll be able to take your price lower to sell more. So this is just one example of the second thing they will give you like a customized list of products that they think you should add to your account. So they're basing that, based on the category you're selling or the brand you're selling. So if you're a resale, of wholesale, you will see a lot of opportunities and I know that some of my sellers that I'm working with they're taking really good advantage of those and they're they managed to get a lot of sales because usually Walmart will tell you something that is out of stock or something that the other sellers are not using WFS.

 

Carrie Miller:

So once you got this inventory and it's already selling very well and you're the only one selling it or the only one WFS, imagine that is like so much self I actually talked to them about this and they said that they anything in the assortment growth tab, that those are really the best opportunities because they kind of compliment what they already have on Walmart. So they're looking for complimentary products. So I think that's why is they're really going to. If you take those suggestions, they're going to boost you and then you're going to get a lot of exposure and sales. Like I know, I was talking to an account manager and she said that somebody in the toys category had a bunch of assortment growth suggestions for toys and they started manufacturing them and basically have been killing it on Walmart, just making tons and tons of sales. So that's a that's something that is really interesting right now for opportunity for selling products.

 

Michal:

It is working. I know that one of our clients that he have an account manager. You know in the past you know they were doing it personally, they know exactly the opportunity so they can do it all and you know he's selling in the category of backpacks. They told him you know what styles right now there is like a lot of demand, for example, clear backpacks and things like that, and the same thing is killing they're. They're making six figures a month.

 

Michal:

They're just amazing. So Walmart is there to help you. I think, if you, I don't know I was selling on Amazon for 12 years, but I remember the 10 years ago. I used to get emails from Amazon every day with items to sell. They were like telling me hey, you know these these, you know those items right, and I don't know if they still do that. I have no idea, but I haven't gotten any recently. And but with Walmart is the same thing. They want to know.

 

Michal:

For them to get to the same or as close as Amazon sells, their catalog have to grow and that's their focus. They're focused in growing their catalog and they're using the sellers, the third-party sellers, to leverage the catalog. There's still far away in a couple of hundreds of millions of products from Amazon. There is so much place for new sellers and even people that come into Walmart and they're new and they don't know what to sell. I can show them so quickly. So much opportunities. There's endless opportunities. One of the coolest things with the mentor base even if you're a private label, walmart know you're selling, for example, in the toy category or kitchen, and they know exactly what product, have a lot of demand and they will tell you. And then you need to go and manufacture that or source that or there's so many ways you can get your hands on these items. This is one of the things that I really like, that they're really encouraging you and we just talked about it.

 

Michal:

Right now they have an update for the category of automotive. They will tell you all the products they're looking for in automotive and they tell you please bring those products, list them. We want you to create the listing. They do not want you to sell something. Yeah, of course you can sell. Something is already on Walmart but what they're trying to do is to get you to create new listings. They want you to not just to create new listing. They also expect to need to create good listings, because when they're good listing, they can be in front of customers. Customer can find them. When customer find it, the content is good, so he will buy it.

 

Michal:

Right now they give you the option to upload videos to your listing. Everybody can do that right now. It doesn't cost you anything. You can just go ahead and there's a when you go and open the case. There is one of the section it says upload rich media, upload video, and they will give you an instructions and a file to upload your video. So they're really doing a lot for the sellers and going a little bit back. The most important things that you need to remember is that you have to follow the guidelines, because you're going to have so much benefits coming after that, Getting the processor batch, for example. Now they're offering the SEM, that's the searching agent marketing, and what is that? So let's talk about that for a second, because that's I think this is one of the most exciting updates the last couple of months.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I saw it pop in my account and I took a look at it. I think my biggest question is because this is basically advertising through Google Shopping, through the portal, and they basically do it for you. As long as you're really well optimized, you'll show for the best keywords. But is this now the paid version of what was free? Because I remember my product used to show up a ton on Google Shopping just for free and I hadn't been advertising on Google for Walmart but it would say available on Walmart.com. Is it now kind of paid and not free, or do you see both?

 

Michal:

No, it's definitely both. So here's the secret. Walmart is spending millions Even I wish I could see their budget for Google Ads. It's insane, it's really crazy. They know the power of Google Ads. We saw in many, many clients a lot of time when we went deep into the sales and trying to understand where those sales are coming from. Between 30% to 40% of a lot of item sales coming from Google Ads. So Walmart is pushing all the listing to Google Ads.

 

Michal:

But there's a couple of criterias, like your listing have to be following the guidelines, you have to have good images, so you have to have not too long title and all the things that are very important, and you can see it in your listing score. There is a tool that show you exactly the score for every little part of your listing and if your score is high, there is no reason why you shouldn't be eligible to show up on Google Ads. So Walmart is not going to put you on Google Ads if you don't have enough images, because then the pain for your item to show up on Google a customer is going to click on that is going to come to Walmart and he's not going to end up buying because there's no information or there's no images. So again, they have to make sure your listing is going to have the chance to convert before they will do that. So the only thing you need to do is make sure your listing is following the guidelines. And so now Walmart is telling you we're giving you the option. We know how powerful is Google, we know how powerful the ads are coming. We are spending a lot of money, but if you want to do some extra, you want to spend more money, you want to put more product. We're giving you the option to start doing campaigns on Google, and I think that's huge and I think whoever is going to take advantage of that is going to see amazing results in their conversion rates.

 

Michal:

Because Still, 40 percent of people will start their search on Google. I think 35 percent going to go directly to Amazon, 40 percent on Search and Agent, and then the rest is spread on different things. Some people will go through Pinterest or even social media. They're going to look and stuff in there. Another thing that why you want to be optimized is the same thing as more you optimize and you listen to high quality. Walmart is not just advertising on Google or Bing or Ad. They're advertising with a lot of social media advertising, with a lot of bills website. They're advertising with a lot of really big influencers that they're paying them a lot of money. As more as you're listening is good. They will expose your items to all those channels they're advertising at.

 

Carrie Miller:

That's possible. Yeah, I know that.

 

Michal:

Yeah, I was talking with one of the account manager and they have the option to pick items and put them on this bucket, this list, and then website deals website like a silk deals, and there's all websites like that or influencers have the option to look at that list and pick the items they want to promote this week because they're getting paid and they get also getting paid affiliates. Yeah, there's things like that. Sometimes, if you follow influencers on Walmart on Instagram, they're doing a lot of Walmart. You can see they're pushing a lot of passion. Yeah, kitchen items. And right now it's crazy because people are waiting for influencers to show them what's the deals on Walmart, because everybody know that Walmart have the best Black Friday deals.

 

Michal:

Yeah, we always have the biggest selection, the biggest selection of deals in each category. Because other stores can be just electronics, best buy with Walmart. The Black Friday deals are on home, on outdoor, on Christmas decoration, toys, clothing, jewelry, everything. Walmart is very known in Black Friday.

 

Carrie Miller:

We did have a question about SEM. It says do you do Walmart SEM and your own Google ads at the same time? That's a really good question Because if you don't want to cannibalize your own Google ads while doing the SEM Google ads, that is a really good question.

 

Michal:

Usually, when you do your own Google ads, you choose where the traffic is going to go. You can run Google ads for your website. It's good because many times I remember I had items that I used to sell in the past. There were not all of people were selling them In the category. I would say it was a kind of a shoes, a specific shoes for kids. When I used to go to Google and I used to write that specific keyword. I get Google ads and I sell my shoes on Walmart. Next to it I saw my shoes on my website and next to it on Amazon. I used to get all the Google ads I could. Now, most likely, the customer will buy my shoes. It doesn't matter where, but he will buy them. Again, you're creating brand awareness. It's more ads you can create. It's more exposure. You can put your brand in a product. It's better for you because the customer remembered that.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think that they clarified it. I mean sending Google traffic to Walmart. Maybe not do your own Google ads to Walmart if you're doing SEM, potentially.

 

Michal:

Yeah, that's what it's going to do. That's exactly what it's going to drive traffic from Google to your Walmart. So I say you know, try, try, you can put a budget. It's not too complicated to run those campaigns. So I would say, give it a try. And before you do that, also go and search for your item on Google and see if it's really coming up, if Walmart is already promoting your items. And again, the most important thing, make sure your listing is following the guideline.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, for my own Google ads. I did do an experiment where I was trying to see if it would help with ranking if I sent outside ads, like from Google, like at U-Kan on Amazon, and I noticed that it did not make a difference when I sent my own Google ads to Walmart. And so I think that probably, if there is going to be a benefit, it's probably going to be through the SEM program doing ads to Walmart. So if if I were to choose between the two, I would probably do the Walmart SEM over Google to my own Google ads to Walmart, whereas I would still obviously do Google ads because I have Google ads to my own sites as well. But that's what I would think because I know that they are kind of looking at their own metrics and the more you convert on their side, I think that the better it is. But that could be just a guess, but I do know for a test that it did not help my rank. So there is that, because I know a lot of us do that for Amazon. We send Google traffic and it does help with rank, but it didn't on Walmart.

 

Michal:

Yeah, one more thing I'm thinking of is that it's probably going to be much better because they have better pricing, so it might be going to end up being much cheaper than you spend it yourself.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yes, it's Walmart.

 

Michal:

It's going for Walmart account. It's not your Google account, it's Walmart account having their own pricing. So you will get that. And the second thing it's known because I can see it. Every time I go to Google I can see Google love Walmart. Google will always place Walmart ads in first five. So this is another thing you will get better exposure and you have better chance to shop in a better ad in a better location Because, again, it's through Walmart. So just that it's worth it.

 

Carrie Miller:

We have another question. Actually Bradley asked this one and it says is Walmart Canada worth it yet?

 

Michal:

I absolutely think so, absolutely. It is very like with Walmart.com, the same thing with Walmart Canada. Not every product will be a huge success because those marketplaces are still building their customer base, but I think Walmart.com is doing very good. Now for Canada, from a lot of people that I have a lot of friends that live in Canada people online. When they go online they usually will go either to Amazon Canada or Walmart Canada. There is not too many options. Some items people can go to the store and have some problems to find Like there is not always big selection of things. So if you know to find those items that people having a hard time to find in the store or next to their house, you will know that Canada will be very, very good.

 

Michal:

So actually, going back to the time when I used to sell kitchens, we had exact same styles on that farm in Canada and actually it was a period of time that we met sales on Canada. Because I guess you know people need, you know everybody needs shoes for their. Yeah, you don't need to do much, it's going to sell. If you have nice shoes with quality, it will sell. And I think the thing is that, again, people when they go online, they don't. There's not too many brands that are selling on Walmart.com or Canada. So again, if you find those opportunities and there is tons of opportunities on Walmart Canada and also in Canada people, the Canadian, are paying high prices on stuff, so you don't have to sell nothing to cheap, you can sell it in your price or even higher and customers are paying and they're also paying shipping as well, so I think the profit is also very nice on Canada.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, let's go into some other things I know. Can you give us some insights to you know, like I think, some beta programs I think coupons, brand stores, any other kind of beta programs that you've seen, and have you been able to use them and what's your experience been with those?

 

Michal:

Yeah, so brand stores are available for very selected amount of sellers. Right now it's mostly they started with a lot of sellers that do it fashion, so we do have a couple of our clients that they have the option to do brand stores and right now it looks great. I cannot wait for it to be available to everyone because we need that. You know you want to click on the brand and go to a nice storefront that you can display your. You know what are you selling. I think it's going to help a brand grow really nicely on Walmart and I think the best part is, again we see the people that selling on Walmart. There's not a lot of brands that take Walmart really seriously and doing those extra steps, but the one they do, those that want to see really success on Walmart. So I'm excited to you know, to see some of the brands we're working with, you know, using that feature and growing. The second thing is coupon codes. So coupon codes again are in beta right now. Yes, and it's available from whatever.

 

Michal:

Only like 50 sellers got that, yeah, maybe now a little bit more, but I cannot wait for that because, again, this is huge for doing social media marketing, because people love those videos and those ads and everything that you give them. Coupon code is, like, so popular right now with Amazon, and I think it's going to help get so much more traffic and sales to Walmart when you can, you know, and display your items with the coupon code. I think so.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think that it's a bummer we don't have it right now because my sales when we started doing a coupon on Amazon have done really, really well, because I just think people are always looking for a deal. So, seeing that coupon, they're like, oh, I might as well just get this item too in here because it's on sale or there's a coupon, whereas you know we don't have it on Walmart yet. I'm kind of antsy to get coupons on Walmart. It would be really cool if they just decided next week to release those, because I'm desperately waiting for those because they work really well on Amazon. We see that they work because people are already shopping on there and they're like, oh, I'm looking, they're looking for deals, right? So the more access we have to give deals, I think, the more sales we're going to make on Walmart.

 

Michal:

So, yeah, in beta anymore. It's available to everyone. If you're a brand, you have to be brand and register, but is the video ads. Yes is the most exciting thing I think happened recently for brands is that you can create a video ad and you get your customer attention so fast because you know the minute they search for something, your video is and it's big, it's really big. You saw on Walmart, it's not like tiny. It's like yes, really like the page. It's really nice big deal, and I'm still amazed that so many brands are not using that. There are so many people and sellers that are not using the video ads or even just to upload the video to the listing. So many people are not doing that. So and so, yeah, this is I think the key to this with Walmart is paying attention and doing all this stuff. I agree.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think I've talked to some people and because the minimum is a dollar for the video ads, they haven't been utilizing them. Have you started doing video ads and have you seen some good conversion on those, like just better conversion overall? Or what do you see with the video ads Currently?

 

Michal:

yeah, we do have one of our clients that is running video ads and their sales are are really going high, Like we're talking about 30% more than before, so that's really nice. They're very happy with that, and so this is one of the things that you know with advertisement usually you should see growth and you know with sales.

 

Carrie Miller:

Mm, hmm, that would be. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, so let's see, there was something else that you mentioned, and it was ad certification. Do you want to talk a little bit about Walmart ad certification? I think this is a completely new program, so yeah, that's a new program that Walmart is.

 

Michal:

see that people struggling with ads Like they're trying to run ads and they don't know, they have no clue what they're doing. So they're saying, hey, let's give you a certificate. So I think it's just to make people feel like, oh, if they're going to go through a course, they're going to be certified and they know what they're doing. So this is what they're trying to do. Or they're even offering that to your team. It doesn't have to be you, it's going to be somebody from your team. So if you have a VA, or because Walmart advertisement is not difficult, but you have to take the time and and learn how to create your campaigns correctly, how to optimize them, how to find the right keywords, a check your competition.

 

Michal:

If you're running ads and you don't spy on your only competitors to see what they're doing, you're missing out. Because this can be. I always find. When I do, you know, when I look at competitors, when we run ads for customers, we can always see that there is, we have a list of all the relevant keywords and then we look at the competitors and sometimes they're missing one or two, or sometimes even more. And that's your opportunity. So I think it's just to make sure that you're not missing out, and so we can always see that there is.

 

Michal:

We have a list of all the relevant keywords and then we look at the competitors and sometimes they're missing one or two or sometimes even more. And that's your opportunity, because nobody's paying for that keywords and you can pay for it and get all the traffic. Or Another thing that I see all the time with the competitors is that they're paying for a lot of phrases but they're not coming out as relevant because they don't have that phrase in the listing. So the ad algorithm is very smart, so he will sometimes place them for these keywords, but only because they don't have somebody that looks more relevant. Once you come and you're more relevant, you're not really competing with him because you will always get the first spot in the first page because the algorithm know you're relevant. So it's easy. Even if somebody in your confederate is advertising sometimes they're not doing such a good job you can always come and find those little holes where you can take advantage of something that your competitor is not doing.

 

Carrie Miller:

Very good, very interesting. Well, I think we're pretty much at our time limit, but I was wondering if there's anything else that we didn't talk about that you might want to give advice on or share with the audience. Any final thoughts?

 

Michal:

Yes, I think through the end of the year. Right now it's a really good timing for a lot, especially of the new seller, to see the potential of Walmart because a lot of them will be surprised right now with the sales. So I really want a lot of you to catch the momentum of the end of the year. Right now it's the best timing to add new product because there's a lot of traffic. So take the time and add new product. If you have a product they're doing very well, sometimes you can even just create another offer. It can be two-pack, three-pack, it can be a bundle. Again, it's more items you add, more customer can find you, you create more brand awareness. So add as many skills, as I always think is a good strategy to build your brand and stay in stock, even though pay attention, because a lot of people what happened right now? They're getting out of stock because they didn't thought they're going to sell so many, so much on Walmart and they're getting out of stock quickly. So try to stay in stock so you keep your momentum and your ranking. So add, advertise. Now is the best time.

 

Michal:

Advertise, pay attention to your budget. Make sure you're running ads during those peak days and peak hours. You don't run out of your budget too early of the day, so take advantage of the Google advertisement promo code. One thing that I wanted to say it's going to be super cool when you run ads. So your item is showing up like write the first thing the customer seat and then you use a promo. Like promo it's mean you're doing something like reduce price. So your item right now instead of $29.99 is $24.99. So you already catching the customer eye because you can see this item is on sale and then they click on your product and then they see there is coupon code. Right, it's going to be like. I think it's going to create a lot of conversion.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think so too.

 

Michal:

Together, and so I cannot wait for the coupon code to come. But right now you can run ads, you can do promo and that's going to catch some eyes. You will get a lot of sales just by doing that, as well as running ads going to help you get ranked. So this is a really good timing to not just sit back and say, oh, it's too late. No, it's not too late, you have enough time. Continue optimizing. Even right now. I'm telling all our customers please run a new keyword report.

 

Michal:

One of the things that people don't do is everybody that listen right now. When the last time you optimize your listening maybe you upload a year ago did you optimize it since then? Keywords is something that change all the time, especially in Q4. Because in Q4 there's a lot of new phrases. So if you sell toy for girls and right now you can add something to one of your key features, it says that toy make a great Christmas gift for girls. Christmas gift for girls is a very high search term at this time of the year and if you don't use it, you're missing out thousands of thousands of customers that potentially can come to your listening because that phrase is in your listening. So it's the perfect time right now, today, or even if you're on vacation or something next week, whenever you listen to that at any time.

 

Michal:

Go to Helium 10, run keyword refresh, keyword report to your product and do a couple of adjustments. Go and add those keywords to your description, to your title, even to your key features. Even your attributes can use some refreshment. Go to your listing tool score and see your score and see what you can improve in there. So just by doing that and you know what I love about it, that if you do that, you will see that in the next week or two you will get more traffic. It's working, guys. I think this tip is always working.

 

Carrie Miller:

One more question on that Do you use Helium 10, Cerebro and Magnet to find those keywords, or where are you finding those keywords? Is that kind of the best option?

 

Michal:

I'm using both. So Magnet, we're always doing searches just to see what's coming up, and I always like to use Cerebro because I will go to my competing items. At least two or three of them will take their item number, go to Cerebro to see what they're ranking for, which keywords, and almost always I will find the phrase that I never got in the other search. So always do both.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, we're updating those keywords every week, so you should be able to find new keywords on Helium 10, Cerebro and Magnet. So thank you everyone for listening. Thank you so much, Michal, for coming on. I always love having you on because you are definitely one of the top in the industry, so I appreciate you taking the time and answering questions and giving advice. So good luck to everyone who's selling this Q4. I think we've gotten a lot of really great tactics here from Michal on what to do, from you know, for Q4. So we will see you all next time on Walmart Wednesday. So thank you.

 

Michal:

Bye Carrie. Thank you so much.

 

Carrie Miller:

Bye.

 

#512 - Amazon KDP & Product Differentiation Guide

Imagine navigating the exciting landscape of launching an Amazon KDP business and entering the glitzy Miss Universe spectacle at the same time. That's precisely what our incredible guest, Shivali, has managed to do. In this episode of SSP, Shivali takes us on a fascinating journey that begins with the debut of her original beauty and personal care product in the electronics section of Amazon and ends with her unforgettable time competing in beauty pageants. Gain insights into the tactical maneuvers she employed to overcome the hurdles in the fiercely competitive Amazon landscape and enjoy the open discussion of her unique approach to launching an Amazon product.

In the second half of our talk, we change topics and focus on the colorful realm of cosmetics and beauty, emphasizing the need to create styles that accentuate unique qualities. With her unique take on the process of creating digital products, Shivali shares the details of her next cosmetics training initiative. She also discusses her amazing book writing and publishing endeavors, as well as her first experience publishing KDP books on Amazon. In order to bring your private label endeavors to new heights, we conclude the episode by getting into the specifics of Amazon's KDP platform and providing insightful advice about quality control, marketing techniques, and pricing strategies. So, listen to this episode and take away some wisdom from Shivali’s inspiring story.

In episode 512 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shivali discuss:

• 00:00 - Starting a KDP Business
• 05:19 - Passion and Celebrity in Product Success
• 11:07 - Versatile Looks and Digital Product Creation
• 16:43 - Promoting KDP Books on Tick Tock
• 21:52 - Effective Usage of AI Writing Tools
• 23:53 - KDP Book Publishing and Marketing Tactics
• 27:52 - Understanding Amazon Royalties and Profits
• 34:11 - Being Proactive in the KDP Market

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we're sending Shivali to the other side of the microphone and she's going to talk about her advice for those wanting to start a KDP business, her super unique Amazon product launch that she's doing that would be impossible to copy, and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual search keyword in the title? You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome Extension tool, X-Ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. 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 e-commerce world. I'm not going too far away in the world. We're going to North Carolina right now. Shivali in the house. Welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Shivali Patel:

It's going good. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I'm doing all right. We're going to talk about KDP how Amazon sellers can do it. I'm going to talk about I know you're just going to be launching another Amazon product soon. We've got a lot of a business thing to talk about Before there. We were talking earlier that there was just recently Miss Universe. You said a couple of people that were in this Miss Universe pageant you were actually in the same pageant with them last year, the year before, right.

Shivali Patel:

Yes, correct. Miss Universe Thailand this year was actually our reigning international girl when I competed at Miss Super National in 2021. Then Miss Universe, Puerto Rico Carla, who also made top five at Miss Universe Miss Thailand, actually took first runner up. Carla was also, I believe she made top five. Yeah, really really strong group of girls. They're both wonderful. It definitely gives me the pageant itch as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, I've joked with you before that, hey, I'll approve time off, but there's got to be like some. I put a Helium 10 logo on my basketball court. I think that on your gowns or your evening wear or talent competition, there's got to be like Helium 10 logos displayed somewhere. Then I'll go ahead and approve that time off if you go back to pageant life.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, that would be a wild gown.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, but hey, it will bring us lots of impressions to Helium 10 and then all of a sudden our site traffic will spike and then we can attribute it. We've got this metric that we go evangelism reach and that'll definitely help the evangelism reach. Anyways, here let's go to business. First of all, the last time we talked was a while back. I mean, you're definitely no stranger to show, you even host a few podcasts yourself or a few episodes yourself with the weekly buzz and tacos Tuesday and things like that. But as a guest you haven't been on here in about a year and I remember at the time you were looking for a new product to sell on Amazon, and now, as of today, you've got it all in Amazon. But you were having like, didn't they like? Put them all on reserve status or suspended or suppressed, or what was going on there?

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, so my product is actually. It's in the beauty and personal care category, but it was also an electronics item, which is very interesting because when I was getting started a few years ago, I remember telling myself you know what? I'm not going to touch electronic items with a stick. It's not for me. I don't know all the regulations.

Bradley Sutton:

And then I think you have a death with electronics.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, that too. Let's forgot about that part too. But yeah, that was one additional reason that I didn't want to touch the electronics category. But I think the more time that I've spent in this space, it changes your mindset a lot, because then it becomes about well, which barriers are you willing to cross? Because problems are such an integral part to running any business system and it just comes down to what or how you're willing to overcome it. And so when I found this product, I was really, really interested in launching into it because I felt like I could deliver value into it. You're always thinking creatively well, what can I add to this product so that way it will sustain competitors regardless of when they're coming in? And with my first product, I had about nine months before I actually got that product to market because of some backend issues, and this for this particular product. You carry all those lessons that you learned through time with you, and so I really wanted to ensure that, regardless of when the product goes out, it actually sells. And it really came down to okay, yes, it's an electronics item, but I can learn it's a higher barrier to entry for my competitors. And then I did feel like I could add value to the space. So, yeah, that's really my mindset of going in.

Bradley Sutton:

But along those lines it ties in with what we were talking about with pageant, life and stuff. But people, I've always suggested to people, hey, you can't always go with what your passion is, because if there's no opportunity there you're not going to have success. But in a perfect world, if you can do a product that you're passionate about or leverage some kind of like off Amazon, you know, following, then I think you know people absolutely have to do that. Like you know, I always thought before like if I was still like really big in the Zumba world, like I was in the old days, that you know, like I could have had a lot easier way to launch some kind of Zumba fitness related product or something. So then you kind of, you know you said it's kind of like a beauty product, but then you're kind of taking your quote unquote celebrity status a little bit and offering like coaching or some kind of like digital service along with your product.

Shivali Patel:

Right, that is correct. So I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to do this, but pretty much anybody I talked to, yourself included, said it was a good idea, and so, yes, I have chosen to represent myself as Miss Supernational USA 2021. And I, whenever somebody buys the product which it's actually I'm fine with sharing it. It's a makeup bag with LED mirror and three settings, but it comes with makeup lessons as well, and it's not just live group coaching calls, it's like a full blown course, because I wanted people to not just walk away with a product, but walk away with an experience where they can buy this one bag and learn how to use all of the tools that they'll be putting inside of that bag, where they can now go into their everyday life and actually carry themselves with confidence because they now know or have a skill, sets and techniques on how to use those products. So it really was a long game for me and that's how I approached it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, but yeah, the reason why this is, I mean, nothing is guaranteed success. Guys in Amazon. You know like maybe something weird might happen and she has to like lower her price or something. But I know you're starting at a very high price and you actually have a chance of success. Like if I were to come in with an LED makeup bag and like, let's say, all of them were like 60 bucks and I'm trying to sell it for 120, I mean it's not. Not only is there not a guarantee of success, it's almost a guaranteed failure. Because why, you know, why would anybody pay 120 dollars? But with the fact that you're bundling this, this is now all of a sudden you actually have this ceiling, like it actually is possible for you to have success at that price, price point. Also, this is something that nobody can duplicate. Nobody can copy like any. You have some like super fancy water bottle, you know, that has like this really crazy design spout or whatever. So somebody can copy that. Eventually, can a can a you know Chinese factory or a factory from India just go and say, hey, let me get another country's miss super national or miss universe or whatever and offer coaching classes. You know that's like not going to happen.

Bradley Sutton:

So, again, this is not a guarantee for success, but this is the kind of thing guys those of you are selling on Amazon look for these kind of things that are hard to duplicate, whether it's on the product side, like something you have a patent for, or or it's on the you know the personal side, you know where you're offering digital courses or something like that with it, and then that just sets you apart. So that that was why I really liked that, that idea, and I think that other other people should think about. Not, not everybody has something you know, but, but sometimes we sell ourselves short A lot of people. We might have something that we don't even know. Maybe it's one of our relatives or something that we can offer as as part of a bundle. So how are you delivering? Like, is this course live? Is it like something you recorded and they get access to it once they opt in? Like, how does that work?

Shivali Patel:

I was actually listening to Alex Hermosi I'm not sure if I pronounced this last name correctly, but he talks a lot about the $100 million offer right, and something that is very principal to that is providing an offer. That is a no brainer, and when I was thinking about what I wanted to offer in terms of an experience and what would be most impactful, you want leveraged impact right. You want somebody to purchase this bag, transform their lives, and then they go and tell their friends and say, hey, oh my gosh, like I learned this incredible thing. I feel so much more confident, and I think that's a mixture of prerecorded lessons, but it's also live coaching, where people do have access to you. They do have the ability to ask you questions.

Shivali Patel:

Now, I would not consider myself a makeup guru by any, by any milestone, but I think you really only need to be a few steps ahead of somebody to be able to offer help, and with makeup, I have spent a considerable amount of years in the fashion and the beauty industry. I started very young and I grew up in that field, and so I do feel like I can say something to someone and help them with their confidence in applying makeup or even just in presentation, right. I think it takes a certain level of courage, or even foregoing some of the expectations other people might hold of you, to compete in something like a beauty pageant. And so I can take those and transfer them over to somebody else and hopefully that will allow them to be equipped with skills they can put into their day to day life, and so it's actually a mixture I'm sending them over into a funnel, right, and that funnel will set up the drip email campaign, which then leads them into this whole course. So it's a four module course as of right now. I plan to add to it. I want to update it consistently as new trends come out.

Shivali Patel:

As you know, there's so many versatile looks you could do. You could do a day look a glam look. Maybe you are somebody who's going day into glam, that sort of thing as well as just expression. So it talks a little bit about color psychology. We have what else? We have undertones, we have foundation matching just a lot of different broad ideas that are important when you are trying to figure out what's going to work on your face, because everybody's face is different. I can't actually go and give you the exact same things that I do, and it's not necessarily going to work for you, because you know you might have almond shaped eyes.

Bradley Sutton:

I think my beauty is a little bit different than yours, yeah.

Shivali Patel:

Exactly, Exactly. But for those of you that are listening, you know you might end up if you're a woman and your are planning to use the same exact makeup techniques that I am, well, it might not work, because you might have hooded eyes and I have almond eyes, that sort of thing. So we do have the four modules plus bonus lessons, where I'll have some of my pageant friends come on, some of the you know influencers that I can get on and they'll do lessons as well, and then I also have a group and they'll be promoting this product, like once you know, now that you see there goes again, guys, there's, it's not.

Bradley Sutton:

She's not just going off of what you know she has, but what you have is your network too, and so if you have people who are influential, you know, and who are down to down to promote, that's another great advantage. Like, like, I'm doing something different on the coffin shelf, you know, like I'm not making a community or anything but the coffin shelf market is very saturated. All of a sudden, you know, people come in low balling and I'm going to go a little bit more in depth in a future episode, but what I'm doing is I'm just experiencing again, again. I might fail at this, but I'll never know if I don't try. I'm actually raising my price and not going lower, like everybody's 20% lower than me. I'm going to go not only not lower, but I'm going to go 20% higher and I'm adding Products that almost double my cost of manufacturing. I'm giving, like, a coffin shaped box, like the box that it's gonna come in is literally coffin shaped and it can be reused as something else, like you know, a sock box or something like that, and I'm offering some other stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

So for me, that's what I think is gonna differentiate, because there's no way that any of these other cheap Coffin shelf makers are gonna go and spend two dollars and fifty cents like is what it's costing me to make this custom box for Shivali. There is no way any of her competitors are gonna go and have multiple pageant beauty queens From countries like you know offering courses. So, guys, again, the moral this part of the story is is do what you know, use your advantages, that you have to be unique and offer something that is that is not duplicatable and and that's kind of like along the lines of it doesn't always have to be a physical product. Mine, mine, is a physical product. I'm doing a box right and along those lines is a perfect segue. Your first entry into Amazon wasn't even in the physical product, wasn't didn't. Before you make physical products, you were doing digital products, namely KDP books correct.

Shivali Patel:

I got started by selling on KDP and I wrote books fairly fast. I had some ghosts written, but I also wrote some of my own and I knew that if I spent too much time on Writing them that I most likely would be disappointed in the results. Not trying to be a pessimist, just a realist, where if I spent, let's say, months preparing a book and I put it out into the world and people don't receive it well, or maybe it the field is changed by then, right, I would be so disappointed and so I worked on. I Just focused on putting it out there as opposed to perfection, just progress, not perfection sort of ideal.

Shivali Patel:

And yeah, it went okay. I wouldn't say it was. I became like a best-selling author or anything, but I sold copies and I continue to sell those copies actually from the books I wrote when I was I think I was 23 at the time- so those books you made years ago You're saying you're still getting, like you know, per like it's not, it's not free, you have to pay for it or you're free, so people are literally are still paying you for this book you wrote years ago.

Shivali Patel:

Yes, yeah, I mean, granted, my books are very, very cheap, because again I was like, okay, I wrote this in 24 hours. I think it was like 24 to 36 hours max, but I went through, wrote it pretty fast. One was on positive self-talk, the other one was on engineering powerful habits successfully. I've actually published way more than that. I just only tied those first two to my name and so those actually that are under my name, they're tagged to my socials and so I actually do end up going in and still seeing sales from those even today, and that's cool, because I don't actually actively promote them or anything.

Shivali Patel:

They just end up selling, and so I really, really love digital products because digital products cost you little to no money To actually set up right. You can go into Canva today and create something. In fact, last month I wrote four books and I need to actually get them published this month, hopefully this month. Hardcover paperback would be great. I wrote one on AI. I wrote one on what was my other one, even on, can you believe I like I struggle sometimes even in float Instagram, because I had done a case study with Instagram at some point where I quickly grew it from Zero to 10k followers in the span of like three to four weeks.

Shivali Patel:

Now, of course, that case study is a little bit old, but I learned a lot through it and I can still sell that information, and so it's really easy to go into Canva, build out a full fledged book and then it takes you maybe five minutes to upload into KDP. And KDP isn't even the only avenue you can use. There's many other platforms that allow you to do that. Now I specifically focus on KDP and I Was talking to Bradley not too long ago about potentially doing a case study about that for helium 10 content, which hopefully, if you guys stay tuned, you'll be able to see that. And that is just experimenting with tick tock, because tick tock is also growing. Tick tock shop just became a thing and.

Shivali Patel:

I'm really interested in seeing how you can kind of combine both of those landscapes into one Right now you can't actually add links, I believe, into the captions to promote your Amazon KDP books, but you can Send traffic using a link in bio to a funnel page or a landing page or even into those books via that route so you can attach your KDP link. I think as long as you have the link in bio. You can't actually do it inside of the Video that you're uploading, like the post that you're uploading.

Shivali Patel:

Okay and so there's so many things you can do there too, right, you can go in and do like a reading what is it? You read like an excerpt of your book and that's a reading. You could do Q&A. You could add Just some knowledge to the space. If you have something that is non fictional, you could do so many other promotional videos that can lend itself to traffic for your pages.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so let me give you a couple scenarios. Scenario number one I am listening to this podcast and I'm not selling on Amazon yet, and the reason why I'm not is because, you know, I don't have $3,000 or maybe my product is like super expensive, it's $10,000 what I would need to invest. You know, $5,000, what have you? And I'm just like, hey, I'm not on any kind of like strict timeline. You know, I got a few months like I can build, you know, save for my day job, but I want to kind of like X, you know, start making some more money on the side Without investing. How, what would I? Where do I start? Like, like, what's my research? Like you know, maybe I don't have the time to do an Instagram Case, that you know you know. Whatever, whatever you do like, do I need to pick a topic that I know or you know? Do I do like product research and in helium 10 and find some kind of Subject that way that there are searches on like, like what's my step one, two and three?

Shivali Patel:

I think that's an excellent question, and it's when I can get very excited about sharing information on because you absolutely want to do product research. There's no point in you building a book and then set trying to sell it in a market that's super saturated, or maybe you don't know how to market and so use the helium 10 chrome extension. That's what I recommend is make sure you download it. You can go to helium 10 comm forward slash extension and once you add that to chrome, you can actually use x-ray to see a lot of back-end data. Go inside of Kindle, the Kindle store, go into categories, subcategories, use x-ray to see how people are doing and then from that, maybe, if you find a book that you Are interested in creating a book on, you feel like you could do something better, you can optimize that listing better. Then what I actually recommend that you do is open up Canva, open up ChatGPT and Open up quill bot. Okay, and what you can do is, first of all, use review insights which is also a part of our helium 10 chrome extension on your competitors inside of that niche. Figure out what's good, what are people talking about, what do they like about that book, what are the topics that you want to focus your book on and then go into chat GPT, provide a title, come up with a title. If you don't want to go directly into that, you really want to get granular. Go into Cerebro before you go into chat GPT, go and see what people are typing in and then from that Make a list of all the chapters you want to have for that book, all the keywords you want to rank for, and then you can use those keywords as chapter titles. Then you go to ChatGPT, you feed it inquiries and if you put in garbage if you put in garbage you're gonna get garbage out. So make sure you're very, very hyper specific about what you're inputting in.

Shivali Patel:

When you do that, you can start with an outline. You can say, hey, I'm writing a book for this, this is how long I want it to be. I'm going to, over time, over the next few prompts, feed you a set of Subject or chapter titles, chapter topics, and I'd like you to Draft a written response in the tone of XYZ. Maybe you have a favorite author, a favorite artist. Whatever the case may be, get very, very specific and, as you go through first, still provide you with the outline. So I would recommend really starting with the outline. Once you have the outline, the outline will present you with maybe two or three different markers for inside of each chapter. So even if you don't know the first thing about that niche, that is okay. You don't need to do a case study like I did. I've written plenty of books that are on topics I don't know anything about, and that is okay for you too. So go in to chat GPT, go into the outlines and then actually take each chapter Section, so maybe just the two or three. Copy and paste that and then you'll see I'll draft an entire thing for you.

Shivali Patel:

Now, the only thing that I don't love about ChatGPT is, yes, it has limits, but it also is quite redundant sometimes in its language. So you'll see some words pop up over and over again. You'll see vast, you'll see realm, you'll see Ecommerce landscape if I'm talking about something in E come and so you might want to go in and be specific, say, hey, don't use any sequential words or don't use these specific words, include these keywords, and it will actually go through and refine what you've written. The point, or the best way, rather, to use chat GPT is Start broad and get more and more granular, refining your results every single time, and so pretty soon actually even in the span of 30 minutes you can have a full book that you can then put into quill bot, which is a paraphrasing tool, and Actually change out those words. So now you have a Section of your book that is AI generated but it looks more human because you've gone in and actually changed out some of those words.

Shivali Patel:

Of course you want to add a little bit of personal touch, but can you imagine how hard it must have been to write books that are 500 600 pages back in the day, not to say you need to write 500 600 pages. Most of my books are somewhere between some are as low as 20 pages and others are I think my highest might be about no, actually 120 pages, I think is my highest. But you can go in and go as little or as Long as you really want to keep in mind that if you go and upload this to KDP, you will need to do some formatting beforehand, as well, as if you are making that book a paperback or hardcover book, you're gonna have certain associated printing costs because this is print-on-demand if you're using KDP. Anyways, I've gone completely into a whole splurge based off of this initial question of what the heck do you do if you're just getting started right, and so that was really to start with product research. Do the keyword research.

Shivali Patel:

If you want to figure out which chapters to create, use ChatGPT with Canva and I say Canva because you can actually transfer over, not transfer over with Canva. You can make the book title, book cover, page, and so you're. You now have a free book cover that you've created. You can create a really nice manuscript inside of honestly like word. I've done word before. I've done this inside of Google Docs before. I've also done this inside of canva before, where you can really make it nice with different fonts, and then you will want to throw it into KDP after that and make sure that the manuscript looks okay.

Shivali Patel:

That's really, really important because people who are Kindle readers read this on a handful of different Devices and you will want to make sure that they can actually read what you're writing, because the they want to consume the content. They don't want to be distracted by mistakes. When I was 23 and I published them on my first books, some of the feedback I got, I thought, okay, I'll just get feedback and refine it afterwards. Well, I did get some things that in in the reviews and oh, like the grammar was a little bit, you know, off for one of my fictional books and I was like, okay, it's fine. Whatever, you know, this was ghost written, I don't really care about it, I'm not gonna go in. I refined it as much as I could and I feel like the story still got across just fine.

Shivali Patel:

So once you have your book built, your book cover built inside a Canva, you've saved it, you're uploading to KDP. Create a KDP account, go in, upload all of it. It's pretty simple to follow. If not, we do have blogs on KDP. So I suggest that you go and you check out our blog section on Helium 10 to to figure out how to actually upload it, if you need some help, and then, from there, focus on marketing. I honestly, through mistakes, have learned that it's not enough just to build a high quality product. You will need to do the marketing side of things as well, and KDP is no different. If you want to stay low on costs let's say you really want to save for private label then go into existing blog forums, go into Facebook groups, create that TikTok account and do what we talked about earlier, where you're creating promotional videos, maybe you're doing reads Q and A's, you are getting on live, maybe, and talking about the book. I have seen some lives that are ridiculous. Bradley, do you remember the Chinese seller who made $18.7 million just by promoting products?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, like three seconds per product. It's kind of ridiculous.

Shivali Patel:

It's absurd and people still sell based off of those three seconds. You also have people who are doing the whole NPC trend, if you've seen it, and they make money on that. If they can make money on that, can you make money on a book that sells content? Absolutely, but will you have to put in the work to actually make the promotional videos? Yes, so you can go in and do stuff. The trade off is really going to be the time investment, so you will need to spend some time inside of Facebook groups. I've done this before. You find niches that are related to your book, go in, actually post that. Hey, you know what? Like I just released this book. I would love to get some feedback. I'd love if you guys could show some support and you're not telling anyone to buy, really, but they can go in and select or or, you know, purchase that product if they feel like it's up their alley and hopefully leave you an honest review, as long as you were very, very forthcoming with what you were hoping for in the beginning.

Shivali Patel:

Outside of that, I've also used blogging sites so you can go in, find niches where there's tons of readers subscribed to an email list and those email lists are really, really helpful too, because I've used those to launch books before, where you can go in and essentially maybe some of these sites are free, some are not. Some are like 20, $25 book beam there's. There's other ones that cost a lot more and they have millions of readers who are waiting for books to be published. So you can also tap into Kindle Unlimited. You can go in and actually end up promoting, let's say, even the book for free while they're doing these promos, so a lot of people can read them, you can garner those reviews and then hopefully start your PPC campaigns to sell really well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so that's, let's say, I do all that. I make a book about 60, 70 pages. What's about the target price? And then, at that price, what am I taking home? You know, based on you know what, what Amazon is charging me.

Shivali Patel:

So you can select from two different royalty options. With KDP, you can do 35% or 70% of royalty from your list price, and that's if you're based in I think it's UK. No, if it's based in Europe, then that's without the VAT tax. So it's just taking a look at your list price 35% or 70% and it really comes down to you on what you want to market at.

Shivali Patel:

You'll see books that are $40. You'll see books that are $2, which is what my book started with way in the beginning and so you can go in and choose and then base off of the royalty price that you select, you'll be able to figure out what sort of profits you're making. Then, of course, if you are saving for private label, you know maybe you'll want to focus on building really quality books, not not making too many, and then just work on marketing them. Or you could go wide right. You can make many, many books that are really really cheap and just focus on the launch side of things to garner that initial revenue or not revenue. Revenue, yes, but also the initial capital you need to get started with private label.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, you know, that was a scenario that I gave, where it's like, all right, I'm just trying to get some extra revenue. Theoretically speaking, I could be already selling on Amazon and that's still you know, like I want to. You know, get more revenue so I can do that exact process. If I'm an existing Amazon seller, we would have nothing to do with my current Amazon business. It would just be, you know, me doing product research for something. But let's just you know. The other scenario, number two that was kind of like scenario one B, but you know. Now two is like all right, I sell coffin shelves and egg trays or what have you, and I want to leverage KDP in a different way. I'm not really necessarily making a revenue play, but maybe it's. It's something like I'm giving a free, you know, yeah, lead Magnet or add on what is a scenario? That I'm not necessarily making a revenue play, but as an existing Amazon seller, I could potentially leverage KDP and it'll benefit me.

Shivali Patel:

So I think a really good play for that is the leads generator, and that's just. You already have your product set. Maybe you want to tap into these Kindle users, because these are people that are already reading books. They're interested in that topic. Well, maybe they might be interested in a product in that setting, and so you can go in create a book using the process we just talked about right. Go into ChatGPT, go into Canva, into quill bot, and you can transfer those skills over and end up leading, putting in pages into your eBook that are for a leads generator. You tag that you can use portals inside of helium 10 to create a landing page and then actually end up taking that link and put it into your eBook, put it on KDP and then work on also ranking that book, so that way those readers end up hopefully navigating into your product and you end up capturing those emails as well through KDP.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so that's KDP. Now you know, one of your other specialties here at helium 10 is you work with our market tracker 360 program, something that I don't know too much about. It it's mainly for those who reach, like the eight, nine figure level. What's some new things that you can tell us about for those like, hey, I'm high, seven figure, eight figure seller, some new things that I can get excited about if I'm using market tracker 360.

Shivali Patel:

So the beauty about market tracker 360 is you can go as broad or as granular as you want, something we have been talking about today with this podcast. But what's really cool is now you can divvy out into how you want to build your market. So if you want to build your market, let's say, at a brand level, you can input up to 100 brands and focus on it simply at the brand level. If you want to put in keywords and asins, you can still do that, but you can go in and refine it based off of categories, subcategories as well, as something that is newer is being able to create markets based off of those subcategories too. So it takes a little bit of time to set up that market, but once you have it set up, you can always go in with filter presets and get an understanding for how your market is moving, not only from a year over your comparison standpoint, or a month over month or week over week. You can also just look at it from a competitor level, check out your market share, check out how your other competitors are doing year over year the historical comparison of your products versus their products, whether it be at a brand level or at a product level. You can also dive deep into your keywords, into their keywords, check out what strategies they're using and then how they're rising and falling in terms of a keyword heat map. And so it's really nice being able to not only set up the market as you want, you can go in at the.

Shivali Patel:

I've heard so many you know six, seven, eight, nine figure sellers talk about how important it is for them to be able to see their category or subcategory just at that level, and we're actually coming out with that. Now is before you could go in and get granular, do it as a filter preset. Now you can actually create the market based off of that. So that's something exciting that you guys can look forward to, and if you are on the diamond plan, I believe you have access to a market. So I highly encourage you to go in and make use of that single market you have. Okay, cool.

Bradley Sutton:

So I always forget about that. You know, like I even said right now, market tracker 360 is like, mainly on our supercharged plan, but if you're a diamond, you can actually, you know, go ahead and get one started. So, even if you're not a eight figure seller yet, go ahead and, you know, take advantage of that free one If you've got a diamond account, all right. So now we're at the end of this episode. Do you have our, our 60 second tip or 60 second strategy of the day you can share with the audience?

Shivali Patel:

I think my 60 second tip is going to be be proactive because, first of all, we are very close to new years and we talked a lot about KDP today, but you can absolutely tap into that market now because there are going to be so many people that are out there looking for goal setting things, for habit planners, and it's a really easy way for you to start with a no content to low content book. Maybe you don't need to do the whole ChatGPT thing just now. You can go in create something inside of Canva that is maybe template base, that you can go in, switch out the formatting, the colors and try to start working with the marketing side of things to get a feel for what it would be like if you posted a medium to high content book inside of KDP. So you can start really, really easy with low efforts and then also be proactive in terms of maybe you want to go out, maybe you want to check out some trade shows. You want to find a really good product for your FBA business. I know we didn't fully talk about product research for a FBA business, while I might have shared a little bit about my mindset about finding my latest product that I'm going to be selling. You absolutely can go in into trade shows, into stores even, and start thinking outside of box. What value could you bring to that niche with that? I hope you implement and you don't just listen to the podcast.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right Again. You're no stranger to the podcast. You'll be hosting some upcoming episodes of Weekly Buzz. And then also, you were definitely instrumental and part of our relaunch of Project X and you were handling one of these products that was actually sourced in India and so definitely have you back soon to talk with you and Meghla, who helped out with that project, to kind of see how it was. We've never had a Project X product sourced from India, so that one is going to be launched soon. So as soon as that launches we'll definitely have you back. But thank you for sharing your knowledge and we'll be seeing you soon.

Shivali Patel:

Sounds good. Thank you so much.

Helium 10 Buzz 11/23/23: Amazon Review Police | Amazon Posts Videos | Black Friday

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

How Amazon is using AI to ensure authentic customer reviews
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-ensure-authentic-customer-reviews

Temu, Shein far lag Amazon as online holiday shopping ramps up
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/temu-shein-far-lag-amazon-online-holiday-shopping-ramps-up-2023-11-22/

Amazon to Launch Live Shopping Deals During Black Friday Football Game on Prime Video
https://variety.com/2023/shopping/news/amazon-black-friday-football-game-prime-deals-1235805778/

Hyundai to Sell Vehicles on Amazon Starting in 2024
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45896102/hyundai-amazon-car-sales-2024/

Stay tuned as we discuss the latest new features from Helium 10 and share some valuable newsletters to keep you in the loop. Later on, we share some game-changing strategies with Mina Elias for auditing your Amazon PPC campaigns. You'll learn how to manage campaigns effectively and monitor and improve campaign performance. Join us for this exciting episode!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 01:02 - AI Review Police
• 03:20 - Temu, Shein Lagging
• 04:53 - Black Friday Football
• 06:45 - Amazon Posts Videos
• 08:15 - Hyundai Buy Box
• 10:00 - Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter
• 11:00 - Commerce Accelerated
• 11:35 - Weekly Buzz
• 12:19 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 16:20 - ProTraining Tip: How To Audit Your PPC Campaigns with Mina Elias

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon is employing AI to police fraudulent reviews. Timo and Sheen are lagging in holiday sales. This week is the first ever Amazon Black Friday football game. You soon can have videos for Amazon Post. These and much more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Bradley Sutton:

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 is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on as far as news goes in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you all the latest new Helium 10 features that have been released this week and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, today is Thursday. Yes, I'm recording this on Thursday. Yes, it's an American holiday, but we at the weekly buzz do not take any time off, guys. We want to make sure you guys know what's going on out there, so let's go ahead and hop right into the news.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The first article of the day is actually a was a press release by Amazon, and it's entitled how Amazon is Using AI to Ensure Authentic Customer Reviews. All right, you know a lot of us worry, sometimes complaining about, you know, a lot of competitors doing some black hat strategies in reviews, right, and so this article goes in to talk about how advanced AI helps publish authentic reviews and weed out the fake ones. You know it mentions how the vast majority of reviews pass this Amazon bar of authenticity and they get posted right away, but that they're using AI to kind of look or try and detect if there's potential review abuse and if that happens, they either delete the review, they take action against the reviewer A lot of interesting things this article talks about. Now, the thing that almost kind of like worried me was that I still see, in 2023, a lot of obviously fraudulent reviews. You know where it's reviews that have to do with, you know products that you know are not even part of. You know the listing and a whole bunch of other things. This article was talking about how, in 2022, amazon observed and blocked more than 200 million fake reviews. So it's like that's kind of crazy if you think about it. Like that's last year and this year I'm still seeing reviews like man. That's a lot of reviews and a lot of you know, fake reviews and bad reviews. So it's funny because you know, we've been talking about that FTC lawsuit and I I've always mentioned how there is like so many other things I think that Amazon sellers are worried about. Uh, as far as Amazon goes, that the things that that FTC thing is and I would say the like, the fake reviews is one of them where all of a sudden, some new competitor comes in and within like three days, there's like a thousand reviews or or all of us, and they, they merge a whole bunch of listings and or resurrect some dead listing, those reviews for a phone case, but you know it's really for a coffin shelf or something. I mean, these are the things that, uh, you know I think a lot of Amazon sellers hope that you know Amazon would crack down more on. Hey, this article might be a move in the right direction If it's utilizing more advanced AI. Obviously, ai in 2023 and 2024 is not what it was in 2022. So maybe there is uh kind of like light at the end of this tunnel.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled T moon Shane lag far behind as online holiday shopping uh ramps up. So you know, like I've been talking about this cause it comes up in the news a lot, how you know they're making a lot of waves, so many people are going to their websites and stuff. But I'm not. I never really was worried, uh, about you know, t moon she like biting into Amazon sales. Even Amazon's not worried. We talked about in the weekly buzz before how Amazon is not even doing price matching on these websites Cause it doesn't even really consider it like on the same level. Now, uh, similar web in this article said that hey, nine out of 10 visitors to T moon and sheen and when I say a lot, you know visitors there's millions of uh, uh visitors coming this holiday season. This article says nine out of 10 are window shoppers, not buyers. All right, sheen's website drew 28.6 million unique visitors in October, which is up from a year before, but visits that resulted in actual transactions, you know, a visit to the website that ended up in a sale went down to 4.1%. How does Amazon compare? 56% of Amazon's 268 million monthly visits in October resulted in sale. So, again, like I don't think Amazon is is scared or we as Amazon sellers need to worry about all this traffic that's going to, like T moon and sheen, people are not really buying on there right now. You know things could, of course, change, but as of now you can. You could see that. You know, buyer intent is really lacking on those other websites.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, speaking of Amazon, uh, this next article is from Variety. The title is Amazon to launch live shopping deals during black Friday football game on prime video. All right, so the very first ever black Friday football game is happening. Usually, you know, thursday, thanksgiving, Thursday, football is kind of a big thing. Now, the first ever Amazon black Friday game and it's going to be broadcast on Amazon and says deals are going to go live during pre game, half time and post game sales. All right, and there will also be one big limited time deal per quarter.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now there's rumors about what these might be. You know some say it's like. You know, might be some big uh from beats by Dre and Lego and different things. Now you might think, well, you know that it doesn't. That's not me, you know I don't have my deals on there. But again, we've been talking about kind of like a move by Amazon to start having more deals with their prime video and their video assets, and even though this might not have regular third party sellers.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know we're not going to afford uh, you know, a spot in this once a year. You know, you know football game. But imagine, you know if millions of people are watching football and you know a certain percentage of them are going to go to buy these beats by Dre, or these legals or these other things. Now, all of a sudden guess what? It's a you know, commercial time, or it's a break, it's halftime, they're on the Amazon app and they're buying something else, but now that they might go ahead and browse other other things, you know. So this is good for for Amazon sellers. Even though you might not be taking advantage of this exact kind of advertising, you are advantaged by it because Amazon is sending all of this new traffic directly to Amazon and hopefully you know that they can find their way to one of your listings if they start browsing, you know, while they're waiting for the second half to start, or something like that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, interesting, interesting things, how you know, the world of advertising for, for Amazon and the world of sports and entertainment is coming a little bit more together. Next, one article is actually just from you know, from my buddy, jeff Cohen's LinkedIn. I've been seeing this. You know multiple people post about this. I don't have access to this in my account but I wanted to, you know, show Jeff's post here because he was the first one that I saw talk about it. But on LinkedIn he says that Amazon post is going to soon support video. So Amazon post, you know, hopefully you guys are utilizing that. We've talked about how you can use the Amazon AI and the helium 10. I had to create images and captions completely automatically with Amazon or for for Amazon posts, but soon you're now going to be able to upload video. You know I personally have been seeing Amazon posts come up more in search results than in the past. Perhaps you've seen that before. So imagine if now in the search results you can see Amazon posts that have video. All right, so it's going to be pretty cool. Jeff talks about here in his his LinkedIn posts that he says that, hey, shoppers who interact with a post end up performing 45% more branded searches, and brands with 10 plus post have, on average, compared to brands with fewer than 10 posts, two and a half more time store visits and almost four times more followers. And so you know, the thought being that, hey, that's just with static images. How much more could, potentially, having video now increase your branded search and some of your traffic? So if you don't have it in your Amazon post section yet, you know, like me, it's probably going to come in the next few days for you. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is actually from car and driver First time we're quoting car and driver here in the weekly buzz and it's entitled Hyundai to sell vehicles on Amazon starting in 2024. All right, says looking for a 2024 Hyundai, look no further than your Amazon Prime account. Now, again, does this affect third party sellers? You know, maybe, maybe not. I just thought this was an interesting kind of like article here, because that's just kind of crazy If you think about where things are going now. Basically, this article is saying that, hey, you're going to be able to like, pick your color and everything. You're going to use the buy box. There's going to be different dealers that maybe have different offerings. Different dealerships are now playing the game of fighting for the buy box like arbitrage sellers. There's no, there's no haggling here, and I just think it's like kind of like fascinating where the world of online commerce is going to. You know, buying brand new cars online is not new, but Amazon obviously is going to be the biggest website ever to sell new cars. And who knows, you know, maybe I'm just waiting for the first dealership to make a mistake on their coupon and they don't realize there's some coupons or deal of the day stacking and I'll be able to get a new Hyundai Santa Fe for like 50% off or something. My very first ever new car was a 1999 Hyundai Elantra. So yeah, I kind of only drive like he is and things now, but I still love my Korean car. So, who knows, maybe I might be one of the ones to be one of the first ones to buy a brand new car on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, that's it for the news articles this week. Actually, not that much going on Now. Before we get into the helium 10 new feature alerts, I wanted to call attention to a couple of newsletters. I've never really been one to promote newsletters, never even had my own until a couple of weeks ago, but there's only three newsletters that I subscribe to, or that I actually read out of all the ones out there, and so the first one is actually the billion dollar sellers newsletter. All right, so that's made by, obviously, kevin King from the helium 10 elite program and the AMPM podcast. It's very, very valuable. All right, there's not BS in here. There's actionable strategies. There's not a whole bunch of fluff. A lot of humor in there, though. So if you guys want to get strategies that you can use right away and some no BS newsletter, go ahead and go to h10.me forward slash BDSN. H10.me forward slash BDSN. Completely free to subscribe to that newsletter and a lot of great stuff. That's the first kind of like outside newsletter I ever read in my life, just because it's the only one worth it to me.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another one that I've been subscribing to for a little while is made by Pacvue’s own Melissa. All right, so this is on LinkedIn and this is called commerce accelerated. So if you guys want to subscribe to it, go to h10.m/melissa. Another great newsletter. A lot of advertising in there and a lot of, you know, high level strategies as well as stuff that affects, you know, third party sellers. The last article was a recap on Amazon unboxed that Melissa was at, and so I highly recommend subscribing to that newsletter. And then, of course, you know shameless plug. The last newsletter is the new weekly buzz newsletter that I'm doing. It's not just like a transcript of this weekly buzz. I go break down all of the news articles and have some video on there and some other. You know strategies as well. So if you guys want to subscribe on LinkedIn to my Helium 10 weekly buzz newsletter, just go to h10.me/newsletter. h10.me/newsletter. All right, now let's get into the Helium 10 new feature alerts. Every week, we are launching new tools, new features, new functionality. A lot of it comes from you, the users. So what do we have cooking for this week? Even though it's a short week, we still launching things. The very first one I want to talk about is for Cerebro and Magna, and these are custom filters.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This has been asked for by a lot of you out there and you know you guys all have maybe your own strategy of how you run Cerebro as part of your process, like right, like maybe. Hey, I'm going to analyze, you know, 15 different niches and for everyone, one of my criteria. For example, what do I have? Here I'm showing a search volume of a minimum 400. And then a minimum number of one competitor. Maximum two are ranking between one and 20. And these keywords have a title density of three, like, like. There's like six filters that I'm using right there. Now, if you're having to do this search 10 times a day, right, because you know you're just doing some bulk research, it's probably a hassle for you to have to, one by one, re-enter all of these filters in. So now what we have is, once you enter some filters, at the very bottom of Cerebro, you are going to want to go ahead and hit this button called save as filter preset, right. And once you hit that button, another window will come up allowing you to go ahead and put a preset name and you can say, hey, this is my, you know, keyword research version one or whatever. And now this is going to show up as a one click filter at the very top of Cerebro, so that when you get into Cerebro, you enter the ASINs, you can just hit one button and it automatically populates your filters. Same thing for magnet. All right, let's say I have this process where I'm like hey, I out of all these keywords from what came out from, you know, these thousands of keywords that came out inside of my magnet search show me everything that has 500 search volume, that's at least three words, and that there's only 300 competing products for this keyword. Right, again, it might take a little bit of time to enter all these filters in. Once you do that again, just hit the save as filter preset and what's going to happen is you can just name this filter and then now, when you enter in, go into a magnet search, you are going to be able to just, you know, hit that button and your exact filters are going to come out.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next and the only other update for the days is for those of you who are on the Helium 10 supercharge. You know, plan our supercharge plans for like eight, nine figure sellers. You guys have some pretty crazy graphs that you're going to be able to do, all right. So on your insights dashboard you're at the very bottom there's a, there's a button that says add a chart, right, you know everybody else has access to this too, but you got supercharged members have access to kind of like a crazy, crazy next level charting system. All right, and this is just the beginning.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So it takes you to a new page and then basically, what you're going to want to see is you can choose any two metrics that you want to compare, like, hey, I'm going to compare my ad click through rate with my unit soul. I want to compare RoAS, ACoS, ad spend and net profit. You know, all in the same chart. I want you know the dates to be preset. At this. I mean, like, pretty much, you're going to be able to now take anything that is in your, you know, helium 10 account, which comes from seller central, obviously all of your data, and then start putting it on graphs and tables and compare different things that you normally wouldn't be able to compare, because a lot of again, why do we have this? A lot of people were saying, hey, I love the data that's in Helium 10, but I end up having to, like, download it into Excel files and make my own power points and reports. No longer you can just compare anything you want, download the graphs and, and you know, make tables, et cetera. So that is for supercharged members. All right, that's it for the Helium 10 new feature alerts for this week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Last up, we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a PPC training tip, and it's with a guest speaker, mina Elias, who you guys all know and love, and this one is going to be about how you can audit your account. Like, maybe you haven't been paying enough attention to your PPC, well, how can you go in there and give it an audit, mina, let us know how. Mina question that we've gotten from our audience is hey, you know, I've been running PPC for a while. I'm running it on my own for now. How can I run like an audit to know if I'm doing well or not? What are the things that you look at so that somebody can really understand like, hey, I'm doing excellent. Or you know what? I need some improvement here and there?

 

Mina:

Yeah, so I'll walk you through our audits and basically how I do an audit like step by step. Step number one I'm looking at portfolios. Are you organizing your products into portfolios, you know? Do you have like multiple child ASINs that are that have different campaigns, or are you lumping all of your, your child ASINs into the same campaigns? So then I would create the portfolios.

 

Mina:

Next is my campaign naming convention. So are the campaigns named? Easily? For us it's like product code space dash space. You know the type of the ad, like close match, loose match, complements or substitutes, if it's auto, broad phraser, exact, product targeting, expanded ASIN, so what's the type of the ad? Space dash space. And then it's like the purpose of the ad. So if it has a purpose like ranking or you know branded, something like that, if it's like brand, brand name, and then you know space dash space, the source of the keywords, and so that's like if it came from helium 10 or if it came from the search term report or if it's like a main keyword or something like that. And that allows me to sort through campaigns pretty quickly, because whenever I'm looking at like show me all of the performance of my, like exact, you know keyword campaigns, then I can just type in exact in the search and it pops up.

 

Mina:

Next I'm looking at the budgets of the campaigns, especially for campaigns that are either running out of budget or have a good row as. So if your campaign has a low a cost or a good row as, there's no reason that the budget should be low, even if you feel like, okay, my budget's $50 and I'm only spending $25 a day, it doesn't matter. Because what I've noticed is if I go from 50 to 250, I'll go from spending $25 a day to $80 a day, and if the ACOS is good, then you're just going to make more sales with the good ACOS it's definitely worth trying. And then if you're running out of budget, obviously that's also red flag. You should always control your spending based on a bid level. So lower the bids to spend less, as opposed to capping, you know, your spend on a budget level, because that I've seen just kind of effects performance negatively.

 

Mina:

Then from there I'm going to click into the campaigns and I'm going to make sure that each of them have only one ad group. What I've noticed is multiple ad groups cause like, let's say, you have $100 budget, it could be $80 to one ad group and 20 to another ad group Again doesn't make any sense. I don't know why it happens, but it's something I want to avoid, because it could be that the $20 ad group is the one that has the better row, as but Amazon is. Primary objective is to make you sell more. And then, once I'm in the ad groups, the next thing I'm looking for is how many keywords do you have in there? If you have, you know, more than five keywords, I start suspecting that you might have keywords at the bottom not getting enough like budget. So I'll just sort by sales or sort by spend and then I'll see. Okay, you know keyword number one, two, three, four, five, they all have sales. But like six, seven, eight, they have like one sale in the last 30 to 60 days. And then keyword number nine onwards, they don't have any sales. So those keywords are all areas of opportunity. If I pause those keywords in that campaign, move them to, you know, create a new campaign with those keywords, give them another, another chance. With a good budget they could end up spending a lot more money on making sales. So that's the next thing that I look for.

 

Mina:

Then I go into the placements tab. So, you know, do I find any placements like top of search or product pages where the ROAS and the click through rates are significantly better than they are in the rest of search? So, for example, if I look at, you know, in a campaign, I look at the placement tab and I see the top of search has like a 8% click through rate instead of like a 0.4 in rest of search and it has like a 7x ROAS instead of a 3x ROAS. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the bid by placement, you know, by 25% or something like that, just a small number, to what I'm telling Amazon is, if my bid is a dollar, I'm allowing you to spend up to a dollar and 25 cents. If it means that I'm going to show up on the top of page one, because, you know, I've seen, based on the data I'm converting, well, there, then I'm going to go into the targeting tab or the bulk sheet. You know, if you don't know how to use the bulk sheet, just stick to the targeting tab.

 

Mina:

In the targeting tab I'm sorting for keywords that are not profitable, so only exact and product targeting. I'm going to, you know, just do either two types of keywords. One where I'm like orders equals zero and spend is greater than a certain number. So orders equals zero means it didn't make me any sales and I spent money. Let's say I spent more than $15, or like half of my product costs, with no sales.

 

Mina:

I'll tell you how to handle them in a second. So those ones, I'm going to lower the bids or eat or pause them. You know, if it's spent $30 in the last 90 days and it didn't make any sales, just at this point it's not going to make any more sales. It could in the future, once you conversion rate significantly higher, but not right now.

 

Mina:

So, and then the other thing is okay, I'm going to just sort by a cost. So show me everything that's greater than 75% echoes and again all of those. And warning guys, you know, for anything that's greater than 75% echoes, do not touch things that have a really good, like a really high number of sales, because the ACoS could be bad but in reality it could be driving a lot of sales, even on the organic side that it's just not being attributed. So again, ACoS is high. I'm going to lower the bids and then vice versa, I'm going to sort by anything that has like a row as greater than, let's say, 5x, for example, and then I'm going to increase the bids of all of those keywords, meaning I'm willing to show up higher in the search. And you can always do like a cross check with you know cerebral and see where you're ranking organically for those keywords. If you're ranking organically and sponsored high, you don't need to increase the bids, but if your organic and sponsored rank is low and your row as is good, it's worth trying to increase the bids, get more visibility, more clicks and more sales. Then I'm going to go into the search term report. That's the final piece. And in the search term report, again two directions.

 

Mina:

Number one keywords that are not working. This is for auto broad phrase and expanded ASIN. The reason is for a broad keyword, it could be 30 different keywords that are being triggered in the search terms that are, you know, resulting in bad performance. So maybe five of them, 10 of them are bad, like low row as or spending, no sales, and then five or 10 are very good. So you want to keep the good ones and then negative the bad ones. So, again, a filter sales equals zero, spend greater than $15.

 

Mina:

Take all of those keywords and go into the campaigns and add them as negatives, negative, exact, and then you know a cost greater than 85%. Again, be careful for keywords that are generating a lot of sales. But I can take all of those keywords, add them as negatives in the campaigns and then vice versa, I can identify any keywords with like greater than five RoAS. Take all of those keywords, find which match types they're not currently being targeted in. So maybe they're in broad, they got discovered in broad but I'm not actually targeting them in an exact campaign or a broad campaign or whatever. And then I take those keywords and start launching them in new campaigns so I can get more visibility on those keywords. But that's essentially what I'm doing, that, step by step, awesome.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right guys. So if you want to get more tips from Mina about how to you know run PPC, make sure to check out his company and hubhealium10.com. You can look for Trivium. Or if you have a platinum account or higher, make sure to check out PPC Academy. It's in your learning hub on your Helium 10 dashboard. He's got tons of great modules there. Mina, thanks a lot for joining us.

 

Mina:

Thanks for having me All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks very much, Mina, for that, and thanks to all of you guys for tuning in. Hope you guys enjoyed this edition and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#511 - Managing Q4 Amazon PPC Campaigns

Are you ready to skyrocket your knowledge of Amazon PPC? In this TACoS Tuesday episode, prepare to be amazed as we bring you the secrets of the trade from none other than Elizabeth Greene, the co-founder of Amazon ads agency Junglr. Dive into the world of data analytics and learn why understanding the numbers behind the numbers is crucial. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned seller, we've got insights that are bound to give your Amazon PPC game a boost.

We talk about the core strategies for launching new products, from using supplementary keywords to strategic ad placements. We uncover the importance of context when branching into new markets and how to leverage different keyword match types to target specific search terms. Learn about optimizing strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and how to manage your budget effectively during these peak seasons.

Lastly, ignite your understanding of advertising for branded products on Amazon. We debate the significance of tracking the share of search and using Search Query Performance reports, and reveal our strategies for advertising for products with only a few relevant keywords. Tune in and take away valuable strategies and insights that will elevate your Amazon advertising game to new heights.

 

In episode 511 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Elizabeth talk about:

• 00:00 - It's Time For Another TACoS Tuesday Episode!
• 05:34 - Evaluating and Auditing PPC Strategy 
• 08:10 - Analyzing Ad Spend Efficiency and Impact
• 12:34 - Advertising Strategy and Keyword Targeting
• 17:45 - Advertising Strategy for New Product Launch
• 25:32 - Keyword Research Using Helium 10
• 30:51 - Using Keywords and Sales Volume
• 36:31 - Optimizing Bids for Better Ad Performance
• 42:22 - Control Ad Spend, Gain Campaign Impressions

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions live, as well as discuss what you could be doing in terms of launching and auditing your PPC campaigns during the Q4 season.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds, get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India and much more.

Shivali Patel:

All right, hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Series Dollars podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday presentation, where we talk anything and everything Amazon ads. So today we have a special guest with us, and that is Elizabeth Greene, who is the co-founder of an Amazon ads agency called Junglr. So with that, let's go ahead and bring her up. Hi, Elizabeth, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you?

Elizabeth:

Very good.

Shivali Patel:

So, nice to have you on. Thank you for joining us.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, thanks for having me. These are always, always fun.

Shivali Patel:

And what an exciting time to be talking about Amazon ads to a fat. It's cute for you. Oh my goodness, you must be slammed.

Elizabeth:

Life is a little bit crazy right now, but you know it comes with the territory.

Shivali Patel:

So it does. It is peak season I see we have someone coming, so it's a very exciting time to be in business and I'm looking forward to reading your questions and hopefully having Elizabeth answer them Now. The first question here says what can you suggest for a beginner like me, who is just starting out, and what and where can I learn to grow as much as possible?

Elizabeth:

I would actually say there's two skills that one, in the beginning, none of us have, and they are skills and they can be learned, even though they're considered more quote, soft skills. Data analytics made it not as much.

Shivali Patel:

My two things are going to be.

Elizabeth:

Data analytics and communication skills Community Asian sales are, you're going to find, are quite important when it comes to management of accounts management of accounts that are not your own. So if you are, even if you're a brand manager in a company or, you know, obviously, at an agency seller and a sourcing person, okay then I'm going to go with data analytics. Data analytics are going to be your friend. The things that I've kind of discovered have been, like you know, sort of mind blowing. For me are the numbers behind, the numbers Meaning. So when you're trying to evaluate ACoS, right, a lot of people are like, oh, it costs one up, it costs with down. Great, I know this, I can look at the account. What the heck am I going to do about it? Data analytics really good data analytics not only tell you the what, but the why and then the what next. So you're, if you can get really really good at the why and the what next, that's going to really set you apart and the way that I kind of have come to it. This is my own personal journey. Maybe there's other people who are way smarter than me, have way better journeys, but for me it has been, again understanding the numbers behind the numbers to have, for example, right, you start in a little bit of a way, it's kind of like the matrix.

Elizabeth:

So when you're breaking down, say ACoS, right, you go, okay, ACoS one up, big, else one down. Why right, what the heck happened? You're like, oh, wait, I can calculate ACoS by ad spend divided by ad sales. Okay, so it's either that ad spend went up and sales remain consistent or went down, or ad sales went down and spend remain consistent. She like, oh, okay, there's those two variables. Okay, now I can say, okay, ad spend increased. And then I can go, okay, ad spend increased. Great, I know that why. And then you're like, okay, so I can calculate my ad spend by my cost per click, by my number of clicks.

Elizabeth:

So either my cost per click went up or the number of clicks happening in my account went up. And then you can look at those two variables and go, oh, okay, it's the number of clicks. Why? Oh, I just launched a whole bunch of new stuff. Okay, that's why. Or my cost per click went up exponentially. Why? Maybe you know, it's just a natural market change thing. Talking about prime time, peak season, now you're probably going to see cost per clicks going up. It's a market thing. Versus other times you might have aggressively increased a whole bunch of bits in your account and so then you go check back. So data analytics that's the way I view it. I am not classically trained on data analytics, I just have looked at it for over five years now and tried to figure out the what the heck is going on a question and the what to do about it questions, and so those. That's my way of sort of. I've learned to sort of peer into the matrix. So if you can get really good at understanding not just what the data is but what it's telling you, that's really going to get you to the next level.

Shivali Patel:

Definitely, and I think a lot of people have very different strategies. I think Elizabeth's strategy, you know, is definitely one you should take into consideration. But also, the best way to learn is going to be trial and error and until you're really sifting through your own data, I think it's going to be hard to you know gauge sort of what's happening. I think a lot of things in business are just as they come. Now I want to kind of take the other side of that and go into, let's say, somebody's not a beginner, right, somebody's been selling for a while. They're more established. What do you recommend to somebody who might be evaluating or trying to audit their own PPC strategy?

Elizabeth:

Next level is going to be evaluating things on a per product level. And let me clarify when I say per product, I mean per listing. The reason why is the data gets kind of funky when you pull it down to a skew level. You definitely can, but there's some nuances that you really want to be aware of that can kind of lead you in the wrong direction if you're looking at a per skewer, per child days and level. But if you can start looking at your ad strategy, your sales growth, everything through the lens of listings, that's really going to take you to the next level.

Shivali Patel:

So when you see listings, are you talking about maybe like the conversion metrics? Are you looking at the keywords that you're using, sort of what is like the underlying factors? I guess all the above.

Elizabeth:

Honestly, but to make sense of it all. Because, to your point, like force for the trees, if you look at like everything, then do you walk away being like I have no idea what in the world I'm supposed to focus on? So the way that we've begun looking at it and the reason why we started looking at it like this is because we managed several clothing accounts. Talk about complexity, talk about force for the trees. You're like where in the world do I start? And you want to make impact on these accounts. Right, you can't just like all right, I did my bit, adjustments and call it good. Like you really want to get at our hands dirty and like really start improving the accounts. But you're like where in the world do I focus? So what we've started doing is percentage of total have been a little bit of a game changer. They're not, it's not the newest thing on the block. A lot of people use this percentage of total, but the two things that we look at is the percentage of total sales of each. Again, we're talking about a listing level. Again, reason clothing you have up to hundreds of different SKUs on a per listing level. Like how the heck do you make sense of it. So how do we make sense of it is rolling it up to the parent listing level and then looking at the percentage of total ad spend, again on a per listing.

Elizabeth:

So this gives you a lot of clarity into what products are driving the most sales for the brand. And then, what products are we spending, are we investing the most ad spend on? And when you look at it this way, it's very common to have these things happen in the account. If you haven't been paying attention to them, you oftentimes will see like oh wow, this product's driving 2% of my total sales volume and I'm spending 10% of my total ad spend here. Like that's probably a discrepancy. Maybe I should go and adjust those ads. So that gives you a lot of clarity. And then to court of gauge because again we're an ad agency, so ads are the thing that we focus on the most to help and drive improvements for the brands is we will look at the impact of the total spend on that per product. So again, percentage of total ad spend, and then we'll look at what we call like quote ad spend efficiencies, meaning ACoS, Total ACoS, ad sale percentage, also the delta between your ad conversion rate and your total conversion rate. Our unit session percentage is actually really helpful gauge. And so we're like, okay, we're investing most of our dollars here. How is our efficiency on that large investment?

Elizabeth:

And then you can sort of pinpoint like, oh, wow, I'm investing most of my ad spend into this product, to the point of like 5% of total brand sales, 13% of total ad spend investments. And wow, the ad spend investments are really unprofitable. Now, if you're in a launch phase, there might I mean there's context that you need to add to the numbers, to the point of like telling the story with data. And if you're managing the brand, you probably know the context. But at least it goes as okay. So here's two products we should dig into more. Here's two products we need to probably invest more of our ad spend on. And it really starts to clarify things when you really kind of understand how to see the picture in that way.

Shivali Patel:

To kind of follow up on that how do you really end up deciding which keywords to go after, as well as, maybe, how to really structure them into campaigns in accordance with your budget, because I know that's different for everyone?

Elizabeth:

Yes, it definitely is. We will always focus on relevancy first in the beginning. Now there are certain times if you're doing like a brand awareness play or you're like, wow, I've really targeted my market and I need to branch out, like what's the next hill? Absolutely go after categories, you know like, go after those brand awareness plays. But if you're in the beginning and you're in a launch, the nuance of Amazon advertising is you're not building, you don't build the audience. Amazon has built the audience for you.

Elizabeth:

All we're looking to do is use specific keywords or search terms to get in front of the audience that is already existing and that's where relevancy comes in. So you're saying where is my specific shopper? What are they using to search for products like mine? And I need to make sure I'm showing up there. So we're always going to prioritize that. That typically is going to get you better conversions, you know, better clicks, more interactions with your brand and which leads to more sales. And then also on the flip side, and if you're doing this on launch, it is a really good product sort of evaluation, because if you're showing up exactly in front of your target shoppers and your click rate is terrible and your conversion rate is terrible and like nobody's buying, there's probably a signal that maybe there's things to adjust with the listing or other factors that you should look into.

Shivali Patel:

Do you ever go into, like branch into, I guess, supplementary keywords where maybe it's not exactly for the product but it's maybe like a related product, and where do you really place those sort of ads?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so when we'll do it is really dependent on the overall performance and the ads spend or profit goals, right? I mean, it seems so stupid, simple, but if you are advertising more, you're going to be spending more, and if you're struggling to bring down Total ACoS or ACoS again, ad spend divided by ad sales, the one thing you can control with ads is ad spend. So in those cases when we're looking to bring down Total ACoS, we're typically looking at pulling back on ad spend. So if a product or brand is in that phase, I'm not going to be like let's launch all these broad things and we're not quite sure how they're going to convert, right? So context is really key here, but when it comes to branching out, it really is dependent.

Elizabeth:

You will find certain products on launch where, like, for some reason, it's really difficult to convert on the highly relevant terms but, like adjacent markets or, to your point, like somewhat related keywords or related products, actually work really well. So we're always going to prioritize what's working. So if we're like finding all of these search terms that are popping up through, like, say, broad match or autos or something, wow, we weren't aware that this is actually a really great market for us. But it's very obvious, looking at the data, that's something that we should, that's a direction we should go in. Then obviously we'll push towards that direction. But depending on if we're going to like decide to branch out on our own, it probably is highly dependent on the ad spend and then also sort of the phase of the product, meaning like how we kind of conquered everything and what's our next play.

Shivali Patel:

And in terms of when you are launching, yes, we're going for the most relevant keywords, right, that are where you can find your target audience. But what about in terms of exact match, like yes, are you going directly into exact match and auto and broad all at the same time? Are you just kind of doing exact first and then branching into auto?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so we do like exact first. I'm still a huge fan of like all the above, exact phrase and broad. The one thing that we have found is like within your exact match, you can just be more specific on what search pages you're spending your ad dollars on. So if you, especially if you have limited budgets in the beginning and you're like, hey, I really want to make sure that I hyper target these keywords, exact match makes a lot of sense. Now, if you're talking about you like branching out, we're still going to prioritize putting a higher bids on our exact match keyword. So we're still going to try and have most of.

Elizabeth:

Let me say this if you're going to be aggressively spending on a specific search page, you're like I've identified this keyword, this is my ranking keyword, I'm going to put a lot of budget behind it. Exact match all the way. Now I don't want anyone to say that clip and be like wow, she hates broad and freight. Like, no, I love all the above. Like we run autos, run multiple autos, category targeting, like all the above, do it. But if you're trying to get really aggressive with something, it's just it's the nature of how the match type works more than like it's quote best, because they don't really think it is.

Shivali Patel:

Now I do see that we have some new questions, so let me go ahead and pop them up. We have can you give a refresher on how people can do modifiers, since nowadays exact sometimes performs as phrase match and phrase sometimes is like broad. So if someone wants to make sure that an exact is that exact two word phrase is adding plus in the middle self that.

Elizabeth:

Yes, it does, but caveat, it only officially does in sponsor brand ads. If you look at the document, I mean I gotta go check it because they're like they keep updating the documentation on the slide and like not notifying us. But from my understanding and from the reps I've talked to, and also the search storm reports, I've seen modified broad match I don't believe a hundred percent works all the time in sponsored product ads, which is super annoying. So for those of you listening who are unaware of what a modified broad match is or modified search terms, modified broad match is a thing in sponsor brand ads. So the way that broad match keywords work in sponsored brand ads and they have sense care that over to sponsor product ads is that it cannot only target. You know we do classic broad match, right, you can put keywords in the middle, you can swap stuff around. But like if I had the keyword running shoe, right, both the word running and the word shoe must be present in the search term for your kind of traditional sponsor product broad match. It's not the case anymore.

Elizabeth:

You can target what's called related keywords. So for example, one would be like sneaker, right, it's kind of related to running shoe. And if you wanna say. I stuck a screenshot out on LinkedIn not that long ago and I was like, how is this relevant? Like one of them, it was like targeting like a bread knife and the search term that it triggered was like ballerina farm, go figure, I don't know, but like, so you can get like this really weird, funky stuff. So what we do to kind of combat that one, just keep up on your negatives these days, like, keep a sharp eye on your search and reports and add those negatives.

Elizabeth:

But the one thing that you can do is just sort of like to Bradley's point make each those individual words have to show up is if, in front of each of those words that you want to make sure are present in the search term, you can add a little plus symbol. So in the example of like, say running shoes, I would say plus shoes, plus what is our running whatever? Plus running, plus shoes, right, and then that would trigger to the algorithm. Okay, you have to use these things inside of your searches, which again is a factor in sponsored brand ads. If you look at the documentation, they do say that modified broad match is a thing and it's been a thing for a while. I just hasn't been super popular. But I haven't read documentation that they've rolled that over into sponsored product ads. I don't think it's a bad idea to get in the practice of using modified broad match and sponsored product ads though.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, thank you for answering that question. We also have another one that says I'm going to be launching a brand new store for FBA and Shopify for my own manufactured product. What will you suggest that I do for the first few months?

Elizabeth:

Well, I'm gonna assume that the question is saying, with ads because that's my area of expertise like new product launches, there's a lot. So definitely follow @HumanTank because they way more than just add advice to offer you. But as far as the advertising, I would prioritize keyword research for the product launches. That actually would be really helpful when you're trying to vet even the space for your particular products. And then I would again, I would hyper focus on relevancy in the beginning. I would run that in exact match, probably high bids.

Elizabeth:

In the beginning you're looking for two things. You're looking to get eyeballs on your product, ideally those eyeballs conferring to sales that is remain to be seen, based on how appealing your product is to the market and how good your search pages et cetera. But you want to get eyeballs in the product and then you want to use those eyeballs to sort of vet again how much these shoppers like your particular product for purchase. So that's what I do. I would focus on those again for like the first couple weeks is typically what we do, and then you might sort of branch out into phrase match run, auto campaigns et cetera. Now here's a trick is how many keywords you choose in the beginning to launch is actually going to be determined by your budgets. So I have seen so many sellers in the groups like they'll be like oh my gosh, I just launched and launched my ads and I'm spending like $1,000 a day and I can't afford it and I don't know what's going on. Again, it's simple, kind of seems like stupid logic but the more keywords you're advertising on, the more clicks you're gonna get, the more cost per clicks you're gonna pay, the higher ads spent. So you actually want to factor in what you're doing for your launch strategy with your budgets.

Elizabeth:

Like I just got off a client call and we're like all right, we have these new product launches. Yeah, it's a really competitive space. It's like skincare. We're not gonna have reviews in the beginning. You know what? In the beginning we're gonna keep ad budgets really lean and we have a really good brand recognition. We're just gonna leverage brand recognition because we know the conversion rates are gonna be there. It's gonna help us get the initial products. But we also are understanding that if that's the strategy we're running again a little bit more limited, just leveraging brand lower budgets we're not expecting the sales to be exponential in the beginning. So it's like setting expectations and then kind of understanding what makes sense for you at this stage.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, and, keeping that in mind, the review portion that you're mentioning, right, yeah, you end up like, let's say, for example I'm not sure if I'll pronounce it right, but in Sweat's example right, his question when he's launching, do you end up waiting for the reviews to file in before you are running those ads or do you end up just kind of going in? And of course, there's many moving components, yeah, there's a lot of moving parts.

Elizabeth:

It depends on what the brand's wants to do. Typically we will start running stuff out of the gate Again. We just kind of set expectations. The reason why ACoS is so high in the beginning is for two reasons. One, your conversion rate tends to be a little bit lower and then, two, your cost per clicks tend to be a little bit higher because you really are trying to get aggressive to be able to get that visibility on the product and then over time, ideally, conversion rates improve because you get more reviews and then cost per clicks hopefully go down as you optimize. So between those two things, that helps it get better. So we just set expectations with like hey, because conversion rates are low means it takes more clicks to convert, which means ACoS is gonna be a little bit higher and we expect potentially sales not to be still or out of the gate. Sometimes it'll be surprised. Sometimes you launch a product and you're like, wow, this is amazing, this thing just absolutely took off and I hope for all of you listening, that is the case for you and your new products, but it's not always the case. So it's really more setting expectations and then just deciding what makes sense for you.

Shivali Patel:

Why would someone create like a branded campaign If they've already have their standard stuff? Do you maybe want to talk a little bit about branded campaigns?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, there's two kinds of branded campaigns. One is considered branded, or maybe brand defense is what you might call it. One of them is you have a whole bunch of products. Which you might do is you would advertise your own products on your other listings. The goal of that is you'd be like, hey, if somebody is going to click off, they might as well click onto my own product. Again, it's called a defensive strategy because you're plugging people off and refer to it. It's like plugging the ad spots. My competition can't get this ad spot on my listing. The other thing that you might do is if you have any branded searches happening so people searching your brand on Amazon then what you can do is you can again advertise your own products.

Elizabeth:

There's a lot of debate out there. They're like, oh, if I already have people searching for my brand, why in the world would I be spending on it? Because they're going to convert for my brand anyways. Yeah, there's arguments to be made. The things that you can do is you actually track your share of search in using search query performance reports to look at your own branded traffic and be like am I losing out on sales through my branded traffic? That's something you can do if you want to be like, is it worth it for me to run? But the second thing and the one I was referring to when I was talking about that more specific launch that we're doing is if you have great brand recognition meaning there's a lot of people searching for your brand you've already built up a lot of traffic to your current listings and you have a new product that fits very well into that brand.

Elizabeth:

So example I just gave was we have a brand that has a skincare line. Right, they have their launching complimentary products. They have really good repeat purchase rates. What we can do is for people searching their brand, we can make sure that the new products are then advertised and show up high on their branded search, where they might show up lower before if we weren't leveraging ads for that. And then what happens is someone's typing in the brand like oh, wow, there's a new product from this brand. Awesome, and most likely not always, but of course you know you read the data, but most likely you're going to get people purchasing very similar. You know you can use ads to be able to get visibility again on your own products, but you're using your new offering. So that's kind of a way to like. If you have a good brand, share to be like. Hey, I got a new product. I want to try it out using ads.

Shivali Patel:

Got it, and I see Sasha has a question here, and it is what's the best way to research Amazon keywords for low competition products? And I'll go ahead and add as well what do you do in the case if, let's say, there is not necessarily a market, maybe it's a brand new product that doesn't end up having any sort of crossover? You're creating a sub niche.

Elizabeth:

Yes, those are the most difficult. The two most difficult products to advertise for are one to your point of like there really is no relevant traffic for it. Or two, when you only have one keyword that has any search volume and there's like nothing else besides one or two keywords, because every single one of your competitors knows those one or two keywords and there's really not anything else to choose from. So there's not really a way to like play a sophisticated game. You just got to like grin and bear it in those categories, which is like kind of painful sometimes. So reword I mean your keyword research is really going to be exactly the same as for any other product. You're going to be looking at your competitors, seeing what they rank you for. I mean, we use Helium 10, love Helium 10, just did a walkthrough of how we did keyword research using Helium 10. Like it's a really great tool.

Elizabeth:

The one different way that we have of generating your first keyword. We actually generate two keyword less in the beginning. So what we'll do is we'll use, say, like a commonly searched keyword. So a lot of times people will start with like all right, type in a commonly searched keyword and then like, look at the ranked competitors, choose them, you know, choose the relevant ones and then go through that. What we will do is we will take that first you know pretty general keyword that we're pretty sure is relevant to the products, and what we'll do is we'll type that into.

Elizabeth:

I'm going to get them mixed up. I'm going to say it's magnet, it's the keyword research tool, so you type it in and then you look at search, so you sort by search volume and what we'll do is we'll actually go down that first list and find what we call our highest search volume, most relevant keyword. So what you're looking for is the intersection between where you actually have good shop or search, and it is also relevant to your product, because the more hyper relevant you get to the product, typically speaking, not always the lower your search volume is going to be. On those keywords You're like all right, what's my top of the mountain? Because oftentimes people will be like, oh, metal cup, that's a great keyword, yes, but it's not highly relevant keyword. So you're looking for, like women's metal cup for running or something like is there a good search volume there? How can I like niche down a set? And then what we'll do is we'll take that search page for a highly relevant keyword and use that as our springboard to find our top competitors.

Shivali Patel:

So we do also have a question from David where he asks how would you use not sure what that's supposed to say for top competitive keywords when your product have multiple attributes such as gold diamond ring, gold solid hair ring and engagement rings should I run through, bro, on each? I'm assuming that's just supposed to be. How would you search for top competitive keywords? So? Yeah so I would, I would just look for.

Elizabeth:

I would look for whatever is the highest relevancy, highest search volume, one that's going to give it and you're going to have a lot of applicable keywords. So the walkthrough that I did I think it's just yesterday what we did is we were looking at baby blanket, and what we start doing with our final keyword list when we're looking again we're prioritizing relevancy is you will find what we call buckets of keywords, right. So when I was doing baby blanket, it was like girls receiving blanket, receiving blanket for boys, like some like okay, there's a bunch of girl keywords and their bunch of boy keywords and these are actually a little bit related to specific variations. You can start getting really sophisticated with it. But as you do that keyword research and as you're looking for that relevancy, you're probably going to find a lot of these buckets. So what we'll do on launch is we'll like take our group out and be like okay, so to your point, we have a bunch of diamond keywords.

Elizabeth:

Oh wait, I have a bunch of solitary keywords, right. So you can actually group those. I can take all my solitary ones and be like hmm, I wonder if the search term solitaire is. I wonder if people like my product in relation to that search. Okay, so let me take that out. Let me put those in their own campaign. I'll label the campaign like solitary keywords or something and then I would advertise the products there or engagement ranks, right, okay, maybe that's applicable to my products. Let me again pull those out and put them in a subgroup and a campaign. The reason why I like doing this is because then I can just scan campaign manager instead of having to like go in and like, look at a campaign with, like the solitaire keywords, engagement ring keywords, gold, diamond keywords. I can be like, oh, these are sub group in campaigns and then when I'm in campaign manager, I can simply look at how each of those three campaigns are performing and be like oh, wow, it seems like gold, diamond ring keywords actually perform best and you still want to analyze at a keyword level. But that makes it a little bit more scalable to like understand shop or search behavior in relation to your product.

Shivali Patel:

Now I see that David also would like to know about the filter for keyword sales filter, which it is essentially just telling you on average how many sales occur for that particular keyword every single month. So that's really what you're looking at there, but, Elizabeth, maybe you want to expand on whether that's something that you end up looking at when you're doing your keyword research for these different brands that you work with.

Elizabeth:

I don't really Everything honest. The two things that I look at actually probably three things is I would like to look at. We look at numbers to the count of competitors that are ranking again, because we're doing that whole like find, you know, do the first list to find the second keyword, to find the really really super specific products. So if you can find good super specific products, then you can kind of like use their ranking on the keywords. So actually I love that Helium 10 added in that column because it was one that a lot of us were like calculating.

Elizabeth:

When I'm like God, I don't have to do the formula, I just already filter for the list, so it's really awesome. So we'll download that list and then you know, we'll just see what's the highly relevant and the kind of cross check that with search volume you can use. I don't think it's a bad idea to use, you know, kind of like the sales volume, because sometimes what you'll find is that even though there's like a high search volume, if the keyword is sort of like a little bit broader keyword, you might actually not have as much sales volume through those keywords as you would think. So it's not a bad idea to analyze it at all. We just find if we're like again, we're super honed in on that relevancy factor, then we tend to come up with the ones that have better sales volume anyways.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, I think that's really, really insightful. We also have Sergio. Sergio, do you like to use the same keywords for each campaign in broad phrase, and exact campaigns?

Elizabeth:

I do. I would say the one sort of not qualifier would put on it, the one thing you should be aware of. I would recommend keeping the bids lower in the broad and the phrase match. I don't always agree with Amazon's recommendations, but if you listen to their recommendations on this, they actually recommend that you keep it lower.

Shivali Patel:

And Sasha has a question. If I was to start selling a product that has a monthly volume of 60,000 units a month, how should I position myself? Should I run out?

Elizabeth:

I would first want to know how the product performs. That's your first goal. You want to figure out what your average cost per click is and you want to figure out what your actual conversion rate is. Once you have those factors, you can actually start building production models and sales production models and stuff. Actually, it's not hard to build or not search. You want to search traffic production models based on oh, I want to hit $50,000 a month in products, this is my conversion rate. What you need is you need your conversion rates. You really need your conversion rates is the main one, and then you're going to need your cost per clicks in the ads to be like all right, this is what it's going to cost me. Right now, you're going off of nothing. I know I've said it about 20 different times on this live, but I'm going to say it again relevancy, focus on your exact target market, see what your numbers tell you, and then you can build up from there.

Shivali Patel:

I think that's a good plan, so hopefully that is helpful for you. Sasha, I see we have Sweat's leaving, but he has found the response was informative. Now I wanted to touch on something we talked about at the beginning of this call, which is Q4, right, we've been talking a little bit about auditing your strategy and some general PPC knowledge, but also what about, I'm sure a lot of you guys that are watching? If you're already selling, then you probably aren't full swing. Maybe you've already gone ahead and optimized your listings for Q4. But what happens if maybe somebody is just starting to be like oh no, I completely dropped the ball? Do you have? Hopefully, not Hopefully, none of you guys are in that position, but let's say something like that happens, sort of maybe if you have a take on what somebody can do to make sure that they're still able to tap in on Q4's potential.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so we're assuming it's a brand new launch product and we have nothing.

Shivali Patel:

We can assume that they've been selling for a while, but they haven't changed anything for Q4.

Elizabeth:

Got it, got it, got it. Ok, no, that's fine. So I would say if you're already selling, most likely you probably have some ad structure. You're not in a bad spot. Ok, q4, right before Black Friday, December and Monday, we're not launching a whole bunch of test campaigns. Don't do it, because what happens is Black Friday, Cyber Mondays Really, what you're doing, you don't get same.

Elizabeth:

I know there's not really data available, but honestly, nobody's really looking at that. An inside campaign manager. You're not going to be able to say, oh OK, I got 20. My ACOS was so much better this last hour, so let me increase these budgets, right? What you have to do is you have to look back at historical data. So if you want to test anything, do it before this week is out. Get those campaigns up, get that data, because you're going to be completely flying blind If you launched a bunch of stuff a day before. You're completely flying blind on performance metrics and it's so easy because of how many clicks are happening on the platform to really lose your shirt. So I would say, if you're like oh my gosh, I don't have any specific campaign set up for Black Friday, so that's fine, you're actually in a really good spot. So what you want to do these weeks leading up to it you actually still have time you want to go into your account and you want to evaluate what is working now, what is crushing it right now, and then I'm going to make sure, as that traffic comes in, that those have good budgets. I have healthy bids on them.

Elizabeth:

To be honest, days of for the most part, unless we have a really specific keyword on a very specific brand, they're like we have to be aggressive when we must win top of search for this particular keyword. For the most part, we're adjusting budgets. Day of is our typical optimizations. So what we're doing prior to that is we're like all right, if we're going to be increasing budgets, we want to make sure that all of this is super solid. So you're doing two things. One, you're identifying all the stuff that really works and you're like all right, I need to make sure again, budgets are healthy, bids are healthy, all my optimizations are done. And then the second thing we're doing and this is also very important is what is all the stuff that's not working, meaning Clips with no Sales? Where are all my high costs, low sale keywords going on? Here's a good one. What are all my untested stuff, that I've just been increasing bids. So it's so easy.

Elizabeth:

If you're like normal optimizations, right, we're going to go in what has no impressions, increase the bids. We do this as well. It is not a bad practice. What often happens, especially if you don't have any caps so we have caps, we're like, all right, we're never going to increase past x amount of dollars or whatever If you don't have any caps. Sometimes what happens is you're like you can end up with like $10 bids.

Elizabeth:

So what I would recommend doing go into your targeting tab. I would filter for everything with zero orders, or you could just leave it totally blank, sort by the bid what has the highest bid in your account and you might look at it and be like holy crap, I had no idea that was in there. And what you want to do is what we call a bid reset. So you're just looking at all this stuff and you're like, hey, it's not getting any impressions. Anyways, it's not going to hurt me if I lower my bids, but then at least I know when that traffic hits all of a sudden that random keyword that didn't have any search volume, that I had like $10 bid on. It's not going to like pop off and waste all of my ad budgets.

Elizabeth:

There's another filter that is really helpful to identify the irrelevant stuff. I'm not saying pause all these things. I'm saying use this filter to bring to the top everything that you're like how the heck did that get in there? Because it's super easy. When we're looking in our search term reports we're like, oh, this converted once. Let me go test it Again. Great practice. What happens is sometimes you get these random things in the account so easy for it to happen. So what you do is you go again. Targeting tab is going to be your friend here. You're going to want to filter for anything that has what is it? Zero clicks, zero, maybe once, two clicks.

Elizabeth:

We're looking for impressions. It has probably at least 1,000 impressions on it and you want to filter the click-through rate by anything that is lower than maybe a 0.2 or 0.15. So this says it's got a lot of impressions, it's not really doing anything in terms of sales volume and it's got really bad click-through rates. And then sort that by either your click-through rates highest or lowest to highest, or you can maybe start by impressions, highest to lowest. So what you're trying to do is what it has a bunch of eyeballs that nobody cares about and what you're doing is that brings up.

Elizabeth:

So a lot of people saw it. Not. A lot of people clicked on it, which oftentimes means irrelevant stuff, and because it's only got a couple clicks, there's not a lot of data, so it hasn't moved into our optimization sequences. So again, it's just a once over of the account. The first time you do this you'll probably be like what the heck, why is that there? And then, if you find that great pause, it put low bids on it, just kind of. Again, we're doing clean up. If you don't find anything that doesn't make sense for you, conkudos to. You're doing really, really good targeting. But either way, it's a really good thing to give it a once over before again traffic hits and things kind of go crazy.

Shivali Patel:

Now we do also have your keyword sale filter. Says 89 with low search volume, and another keyword has 20 keyword sales but a higher search volume. Is there one that you would kind of opt for? I know you said you don't typically look at the keyword sales Filter.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. So the two things I would look for is one I'm gonna say again, relevancy. I believe in it so strongly, I'm gonna say it again. And then the other thing that you would look at is, you know, the Helium sandwich. Again, another thing that I appreciate that you guys have added to the download keyword reports is the Recommended bits. Now, again, you guys are pulling them direct from the API, like Amazon does provide the recommended bits. However, as we all know, like if you go in you launch campaign, you like add different products, the recommended bids change, so their benchmarks don't take them as gospel, but they are really helpful to again kind of help you identify how competitive a particular keyword is over the other. So, like a budget's were concerned, you're like, well, you know, this one has like 20 sale, like the sales volume is pretty good, but like, wow, that one's Really competitive. I got to pay two dollars cost per click versus the other one where I'm like, well, I only have to pay like 50 cents cost per click. That probably would play into my decision.

Shivali Patel:

Okay, all right, there's. I know I said to, but let's just do this last one and then we'll. We'll call it. And so how do you structure your top keyword campaigns versus your complementary keywords? I know we briefly touched on this earlier.

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so I will cash with. So I saying I'm not a huge fan of doing everything as a single keyword campaign. I think it's way too overkill. You end up getting way more confused than you do in sight From doing it like that. That being said, if we do, I definitely have like a top keyword. We are going to put that in a single keyword, exact, match, specific campaign. The sort of it depends Questions and answers that I always give is the more the higher amount of Control I need over where I'm going to be directing my ad spend, the less keywords I want to have. Then more important it is for me to gain impressions on this keyword. For, again, for my campaign strategy, the less keywords I'm going to have. So if it is a top keyword, if it's my main ranking keyword, if it's super, super important to me, single keyword campaign right, because that's I need to control ad spend. I need a lot of impressions on this and super, super important versus another keyword set, right. Maybe I don't really have it. So the other, very other end of the spectrum is going to be like a whole bunch of a Campaign that actually works really well.

Elizabeth:

For us is single word meaning, like you know, cup bowl dish In broad match low bits. Do not put high-pits on these. Even if you have great ACoS, don't put high bits. Not a good idea. But we'll run these all the time. But what happens is because we cap our bids at, say, I think it's from 25 cents, maybe 30 cents, maybe in 15 cents. We never intend to grow our bids past that, right.

Elizabeth:

So how is it important for me to control ad spend at the campaign level? Not really because I'm controlling it at my bid level, right. How important is it for me to gain impressions? Not really because I'm expecting half of these keywords to not get impressions whatever. So I would be fine with putting, you know, say, 50, 100 keywords in that campaign, right, because for me it makes no sense to create 10 different campaigns that I have to like keep an eye on, versus just one important like oh yeah, that's that strategy and that's kind of like my background thing, right. So I would look at it through that lens again. How important is it for me to control spend at the campaign level? And then, how important is it for me to gain Impressions on these particular keywords? The more infatily you answer yes to those two questions, the less keywords you should have in that campaign. The more you don't really care about those two things, or they don't really matter as much then I would be okay with a lot more keywords.

Shivali Patel:

Alright, well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for your time and your information, your knowledge. We appreciate it. I know a lot of people learned quite a bit. Sasha says thank you. We have sweat who says you know he was also waiting on those other questions that you were answering. That was very informative, so we do appreciate it so much. And yeah, that is it for today. You guys will catch you on the next TACoS Tuesday. Thank you!

Elizabeth:

Awesome! Thanks, I appreciate it.

#510 - Amazon Seller Success Stories, Flat File Strategies, and More!

If you've ever wanted a peek into the world of Amazon selling, this episode is your golden ticket. We're joined by elite sellers and Amazon specialists, Christine Douheret and Sasha Zubatov, who share invaluable insights and strategies they've used to overcome challenges and achieve incredible success in the E-commerce space. With their unlikely backgrounds - Christine hailing from Hollywood with a degree in interior design and Sasha from New York with a computer science degree - they bring unique perspectives to the table.

Our guests reveal their strategies, such as utilizing flat files and Helium 10 Elite training, that have helped them stay ahead of the curve. They divulge how their diligent manual research, constant learning, and strategic use of VAs have been instrumental to their success. Listen in as Christine recounts her staggering 300% sales growth in just a year, and Sasha shares her client's seven-figure sales accomplishment. We also delve into the not-so-pretty side of things, including having listings hijacked and the struggles of facing stiff competition.

As we wind down our engaging chat, Sasha shares her take on Walmart's competition and the suitability of products across platforms, offering her top flat file strategy. We also discuss the potential risks and rewards of creating product variations. Christine, always ready to help, extends an invitation to listeners who may need assistance or have questions about their Amazon journey. We wrap up the episode with a look at possible future Amazon and Walmart meetups and the unique challenges these could present. However challenging, the future of e-commerce remains thrilling, and we're here to help you navigate it. Tune in and let Christine and Sasha's success stories inspire you to create your own journey to success.

 

In episode 510 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Christine, and Sasha discuss:

• 01:53 - Sasha's Funny Helium 10 Swag Story
• 10:35 - Sell on Amazon, Overcoming Challenges
• 16:25 - Sales Success and Expansion
• 19:11 - Successful Strategies and Challenges On Their Amazon Journey
• 25:18 - Organize and Inform for Successful Outcomes
• 27:26 - Understanding and Protecting Flat File Strategies 
• 33:18 - Profit Margins and Competition
• 35:01 - Sales Performance: Amazon vs Walmart

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a couple of elite sellers and Amazon specialists who have come from completely different backgrounds but now have found success on Amazon, Walmart and what is even going to share his unique flat file strategies with us. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think we know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker.

Bradley Sutton:

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 e-commerce world. We've got a couple elite sellers on with us from opposite sides of the coast here, if I'm not mistaken or I'm not. Let's find out. Actually, where are you guys actually from? Let's start with Christine. Where are you at right now? Where are you calling in from?

Christine:

I'm in San Diego California.

Bradley Sutton:

You're in San Diego, so forget it. You're local to me. I don't know why I thought you were on the east coast for some reason. Where in San Diego are you at?

Christine:

Carmel Mountain, Carmel Valley area.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, about like 30 minutes away from me. You know towards what is it? Towards the stadium down there, right? No, not like about 10, 15 minutes, okay, cool, wow, you're almost my neighbor and Sasha, about the distance south of me, you're north, you're up in like Orange County, California, right?

Sasha:

Yeah, I'm within like half an hour of any local workshop you guys put on.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. Now here's a funny story about Sasha, like one time our you know, one of our executives, Bojan, he in our private Slack channel he posted a picture and he's like sell and scale summit t-shirt spotted in the wild or something like that, and he had snapped the picture of somebody that he saw in the checkout line in his grocery store up in I don't know somewhere in the OC and I was like wait a minute, that looks amazing. I was like yes, it's Sasha right there. So you're famous inside of Helium 10. There for wearing a Helium 10. Swag out in the wild, love it.

Sasha:

From now on, every time I go to Costco, I put that on. All right, you never know when a Helium 10 employee might capture you, awesome, awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, Christine, let's go to your origin story. Is San Diego where you were born and raised, or are you a transplant, or what?

Christine:

I was actually born and raised in Los Angeles. My parents were transplants. However. They came from Switzerland on the Queen Mary for their honeymoon, and so they landed in Los Angeles, and that's where I grew up.

Bradley Sutton:

The Queen Mary. That's now like in Long Beach, that one that you can actually.

Christine:

Wow, nice, that one 1955, that came over.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, Sasha. What about you?

Sasha:

I'm originally from Odessa, Ukraine, and so I speak Russian, and I wound up doing a lot of business with Russia, and that's what actually led up to Amazon eventually.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay now, how long have you been here in the States?

Sasha:

I grew up here. I grew up in New York in 1980s.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you must have moved here when you were one or two years old, all right. So growing up in New York, you had emigrated over here. What was your aspirations? Were you just wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut, or what did you think you'd be when you grew up? Quote unquote.

Sasha:

I had very little choice. My dad was an engineer and my mom was an actress, and all my life isolated between the two. So jump back and forth.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you end up going to college for then.

Sasha:

I ended up going. I got my bachelor's in computer science initially, and then, when my business was doing well enough, I went into a theater program.

Bradley Sutton:

So you still made both of them happy after my goodness, the model son here, Love it. What about you, Christine? What did you think you'd be when you grew up?

Christine:

I always wanted to be an interior designer and actually that's what my degree is in. So I was an interior design when I lived in LA, in Hollywood, for a big firm and often did a lot of the studio sets with the studio designers and maybe did something for Sasha's mom or there, you never know. Actually Johnny Cochran's office, I did.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay, all right, wow all right. So now you know what. How many years were you in that field, Christine?

Christine:

10 years.

Bradley Sutton:

10 years and then after that?

Christine:

Then I went into nurse recruiting.

Bradley Sutton:

Nurse recruiting.

Christine:

Well, yes, recruiting nurses for travel assignments. So a travel nurse assignments across the US in every hospital there's probably 20-30% of travel nurses, so that they can adjust their fluctuations in census, and so they bring in travel nurses when it's high census and reduce the travel nurse population when it's lower census.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm half Filipino. Is it true that, like 30% of nurses, are Filipinos?

Christine:

They do bring a lot of Filipinos over, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, so you're moving Filipino nurses around all the country, and others as well, and then how long do you do that?

Christine:

Ten years, at least ten years.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, so you stick with stuff. You start. I like that. All right, so well. There's 20 years of work, so you must have started working when you were three, four years old, yourself there, okay, and then after that, did you find e-commerce or what's next in your life?

Christine:

Yes, and I found e-commerce, so it brought together everything I've learned and I just wanted to be able to do something that I could do from anywhere in the world. Since my family is from Switzerland, as you know, since my parents immigrated, I like to go there frequently and I wanted to be able to do a business I could do from there, if I needed to be there for two, three months, or from anywhere in the world, and I found this.

Bradley Sutton:

So did you just like Google at the time? Do you remember like where you know things I can do on the road, or something like that? Do you remember what you searched for?

Christine:

No, no, I um. I always like to buy things on Amazon, and I knew that it was growing, that people would be buying online more frequently, and so I started searching how to do that, and I did several webinars and classes and seminars In fact, I did probably six months of education before I even jumped into selling to make sure it was something that I could do, that I had the skills for, that I had the money for and that I would be able to grow with. See, like in nursing nurses, they can grow, they keep growing in their careers, they do all kinds of different things, they advance, and I wanted something that I could also grow with, so I could become a bigger seller, I could expand selling to different regions, different countries, and so I found this fit the bill.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. What about you, Sasha? How does somebody who studies theater and engineering end up in e-commerce?

Sasha:

I went to Russia with a suitcase full of computer parts. That's how I started in business, and from then, on, I think one dollar Sounds very shady.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I don't know how.

Sasha:

Listen, I mean nothing with. Russia is a white hat, let's put it this way. So yeah, and so that led eventually to doing a lot of exporting to Russia. I did everything from computer parts to software to eventually slot machines even, and mining equipment, so that kind of led naturally to.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you say slot machines and mining equipment? Amazingly, yes, never in the history of vocabulary has that, I don't think, been used in the same Both of those things? That's interesting. So you're basically exporting whatever and whatever they wanted there. Huh Okay.

Sasha:

So it really does depend on relationships there as well, just like here in the States, and so wherever you can find a competitive advantage, that's a good place to go, and so eventually, when that died down as a market and now essentially it's almost entirely out of reach, you look for other opportunities, and by that point I've already had a number of other businesses that I was involved with, and so I started Amazon on a dare with a friend of mine who really did not believe that we could do any sales on Amazon when his website was doing so well.

Sasha:

So I bet him that we could beat his website sales with Amazon sales, and that's how it was what year are we? Talking about this was just not too long ago, I think it was 2018,.

Bradley Sutton:

I think it was Okay so that's about five years ago. All right, and then, and did you make that bet without even knowing a lot about Amazon? Or at that point, had you done some studying and research into it, or something?

Sasha:

I knew very little about Amazon. I did not have any experience selling on Amazon or listing on Amazon, but just simply understanding the marketing and the size of the market and the demand there. It just seemed it was a bet I couldn't lose.

Bradley Sutton:

So yeah, okay, I took it, Christine. What about you? What year approximately was it that you made this leap into e-commerce?

Christine:

Well, I launched my first product at the end of 2019.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Around the same time and are you still selling that exact product today?

Christine:

No Can you tell us what it is, then well, there's still kitchen products, but Well, I am still selling the remainder of that particular Also, somebody is still active.

Bradley Sutton:

That's pretty impressive for your very Not many people are still selling, like four years later, their very first product. Usually, it's like they just get their feet wet and they're like, oh nope, this was the wrong choice, but that's pretty impressive. You still have some inventory left and still going on that yes. Now how did you learn to how to sell on Amazon?

Christine:

You know I did a course. I did a course, but I can't say that I really learned how to do it from that course. What I really learned was when I started believe it or not signed up for Helium 10, because they have so many of the courses, you know the get started courses. That's where I really Like I was already on the platform beginning the sales, but there is so much to learn.

Bradley Sutton:

So in Helium 10?

Christine:

I did all of the modules you know, from the first set to the second set. I mean literally everything and I would say that, and also being part of the elite meetings, that is where I really learned how to sell, so you joined elite even before you were that big of a seller. Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

And then that that was me, Like in 2016, 2017, I wasn't even a seller and I was like you know what I just want to, like be a fly on the wall in these trainings and learn, and that's how I like. I probably learned more in six months than I could have, you know, in like two or three years taking a course or something. So I took a very similar path as you, All right, so that's interesting. What about you, Sasha? Did you take a course too? Or you just like got just dove right in? Or how did you learn to do what you were doing in the first?

Sasha:

year or 18? It was all just manual work, digging into Amazon specs, so really digging in into the specifications of flat files and categories. And I actually started with there are not category listing reports, but with transaction reports. You know those reports that list every transaction and the challenge there is that Amazon doesn't give you a flat file there. It actually is grouped by different categories. It's very, very hard to figure out exactly what the expenses are, so it really makes you work to break it up and clean it up. And that took a lot of time to break up that file and eventually I made it so that every column would be would represent a single type of expense, so it'd be easy to run pivot tables on it and analyze it.

Bradley Sutton:

There goes your engineering background a little bit there. Now, where are you still selling the very first product that you started with?

Sasha:

No, and it's not because it wasn't selling well, it's just it became less of a product for the manufacturer. So I don't really sell my own products. I help partners that I have sell products in their accounts typically, and so it depends in a way what they're.

Bradley Sutton:

So that first one that you launched was that for your friend, who you made that with.

Sasha:

That's right, that was his products and businesses that have storefronts that are brick and mortar they have other channels, so they have other needs, other interests, so they might have distribution, they might have a retail store, and so Amazon website aren't always their first priority.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that's another thing that one of you have in common with me is when I first started until I worked at Helium 10, I didn't have any of my own products 100%. I launched over 400 products before I started working at Helium 10. 100% was for other people partners or people who hired me. Just my mindset was like I'm good at what I do, I have a specific thing I'm doing and I like doing this where there's not risk, like I'm not risking my family's savings and it could totally fail, so I'm gonna get. I mean, it's not.

Bradley Sutton:

Of course, I always try to have success, but I didn't have to stay up at night knowing that I risk my second mortgage or something to do this product launch. Amazon could just close the account down back in those days. Now, if I had things to do over again, now that I know what I know, I would have probably gone ahead and launched on my own products. But in those days I was very happy just getting a paycheck and if they made a million dollars from my $1,000 work, great for them. But then if they lost money, it's like all right, sorry, not sorry. We did it. We did what we could.

Sasha:

I hear you. I hear you, but for me it's entirely different. I prefer to work with somebody else's product and do the marketing. In a way. For me it's sort of more customer facing for me. To figure out what it is they need, what their needs are, and make it work.

Bradley Sutton:

What's the biggest success story? Like some projects that you've worked on and now they've scaled up to X number of sales in a year or something like that. Anything stick out in your mind.

Sasha:

For me. There was a client that had not been on Amazon at all, but their products have for years and years. They're a large manufacturer of beauty products who sold through retail and distribution and when I took them on, they had hundreds and hundreds of listings that were not created by themselves but by other resellers that needed to be on Amazon. So in the end, when we eventually were able to capture that market share, those beauty products wound up being really large, really large numbers for them.

Bradley Sutton:

Hmm, well, how large we're talking. Well, we're talking about seven figures. I like it all. Right, excellent. Now going back to you, Christine, like you've been selling now for like three years or four years, which year was your peak in sales and approximately how much was it?

Christine:

I would say this year is the peak in sales. So this year's increased like 300% over last year.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

Christine:

An increase, and well, we're in the high six figures at this point.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, so this is your full income now.

Christine:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

And do you have employees, or are you doing this all on your own?

Christine:

Oh no, I couldn't possibly do it all on my own. Now I have a VA who does all of the reporting and all of the things like that for me, and of course I have a team. I've got the photographer, videographer, social media.

Bradley Sutton:

So that's in-house, or you just like have somebody on retainer or something.

Christine:

I just contract out as I need it yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now, what's been your biggest L, your biggest loss, still with you, Christine, like the worst thing that's happened to you since you started selling on Amazon, because that's something that I like to keep it real. Amazon is not all rainbows and unicorns Listings gets shut down, you get hijacked and bad experience with customer service. Let's keep it real here. Let's be vulnerable. What's your biggest loss you've taken, or worst thing?

Christine:

Well, I had a. It's a product I still sell, so it was actually selling very, very well and it was like top you know top numbers and a new person had designed a similar product and so they came in and cited us as patent infringement. Amazon pulled all the listings down, which, of course, stopped the sales immediately. Now we had authorization to sell, we had a patent, we had everything, and I contacted Amazon with I mean right away and sent that document, sent it to the person that claimed the IP, and it still took over two and a half weeks to bring the listings back up. Of course, by then sales were lost. It had to sort of rebuild its rank and everything, and this person did it which I've learned since in order to launch his product right.

Bradley Sutton:

So he wanted to clear the way so that he was the only kind of player in the chain.

Christine:

Exactly, and so that's my first time really realizing the tricks that people play just to get ahead and that was disappointing. It was sad I lost money, but you know what? I wasn't going to let him win, so I just worked hard to get those sales back.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. Now let's flip the script. What's the coolest thing that's ever happened? You like something unexpected or something amazing where you went viral, one of your products you sold out of inventory in two weeks or you made ridiculous profit on something. What's one of the coolest things that's happened to you?

Christine:

Well, yeah, I have sold out of inventory, but I've learned now to keep that in stock in backup. But actually this last prime day was probably one of the most exciting for me because I sold over a thousand units on that day For me that was A thousand units in one day, wow. Yeah, for me that was big, that was a big, exciting moment.

Bradley Sutton:

How many SKUs?

Christine:

In that particular product line there were five SKUs.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. So how many units did you have in stock to cover that? That's a huge day.

Christine:

Well, here's what happened is I did run out, but I have a backup over at Deliver. So when it ran out it pulled from Deliver and gave me enough time to get more in. So I had, thank goodness, in the backup warehouse. I had a whole another thousand units ready to ship. And was able to send them in immediately as Deliver was fulfilling the overflow orders.

Bradley Sutton:

What would you say is the reason you did so well on Prime Day? Did you have some kind of, you know, Prime Exclusive Discount? Did you have a coupon? Did you send some outside traffic? Is there one thing that resulted in that crazy sales day?

Christine:

Well, I did a Prime Exclusive Discount. I also, prior to that, made sure all my ads were prepped and primed and that I made sure that the listing was 100% perfect and the pictures were perfect all before that Prime Day. So I guess I was just prepared.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it, Sasha. What about you? You know, sometimes, working with multiple accounts, you get exposed to even more things than the average. You know, seller, what's the worst thing? It doesn't have to be from you, but just like you were part of an account and you heard that something crazy happened. What's?

Sasha:

on Amazon. I think the most heartbreaking thing is when listings become hijacked. I mean, I've seen policy violations on Amazon and all sorts of difficulties that we have working with Amazon, but when listings get hijacked, that's just. I think. To me that's the toughest part.

Bradley Sutton:

And so what was one of the worst? Like somebody who had like, was there any? That was like they were selling 100 a day and it went to zero because of it, or something crazy like that.

Sasha:

They've got an entire product line with something that competitors were able to put Covid-related keywords in there somehow During the time when Covid items were hot and Amazon was blocking sellers, and so their entire list product line was shut down.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, all right. Well, let's not be doom and gloom. Christine talked about her. Great, you know, 1000 sale prime day. What about you? What's a crazy, amazing thing that's, like you know, can't happen, probably in the rain or it's very. It would be very impossible or very difficult for it to happen off of Amazon, but you've seen it happen on Amazon.

Sasha:

Gosh, I have to think about that, but the thing that comes to mind that the most satisfying thing that I had experienced was when I finally figured out how to put attributes up on Amazon that they don't give you in the category listing report. There are, for some, certain categories, like in the, for example, a grocery category that I work with a lot. When I was finally able to put up the nutrition table to get all the nutrition values up for products when it's not it's not regularly available in your category listing report, that was probably the most satisfying experience.

Bradley Sutton:

Where is that show on the list? Or does it show on the listing, or is this is only? We're talking about the back end here.

Sasha:

So it shows on the listing right above the bullet points. It's in that prime space below the title and right above the bullet points it'll show like nutrition information. It'll show ingredients and it will show the nutrition table that you usually see on products in the grocery store.

Bradley Sutton:

But for most products you don't actually get those attributes even if you download the flat file that you would, you know like it's not going to. It's not going to show up there.

Sasha:

It's not going to show up, even though it should.

Bradley Sutton:

So how do you do it? Do you like copy it from another category listing report that it does show up and then just paste those columns or something? Well, at this point, at this point.

Sasha:

You could probably find it. You could probably find it in some other category. I had to search for those attributes throughout the internet. I found them eventually in a European Amazon catalog. So I had to scrape them off of there and that's how I populated those columns. It didn't exist anywhere. My suspicion and I don't know this for sure, my suspicion is that they were available for products that were sold through Amazon Fresh. You know Amazon Fresh that product line, and so if you were in stores at Amazon Fresh, you had access to those fields, but not if you were in seller central, and so that was a bit of a hack.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we're going to come back to you because I know your specialty is like flat files and stuff like that. So we're going to be getting lots of strategies. But going back to Christine, let's talk some strategy. Not anybody can have a thousand sale prime day. Not anybody can scale up on their own to high six figures. So what are some things that you think you're doing that is unique or that you're focusing on? Maybe it's not so unique, but it's like you put a big focus on it and you feel that that's part of the secret to your success.

Christine:

Well, I have these master files on literally everything that's required. So I think being organized and having all the information in one place is really important for me. For example I have, since I'm on both Amazon and Walmart I have like a spreadsheet that's got you know the UPC, the ASIN, the titles, the bullets, I mean literally everything on it that I can then, you know, adjust before fixing a listing, and I can refer to that sheet at any time I need to when I'm doing something else in Amazon, and also the same with Walmart. They have different IDs, different things, and this sheet goes as far as it has dimensions of the products and the pricing of the products.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, guys, I don't know if you picked up on this, but something I like to tell people is, no matter what career you come from, there's things that you can take from your previous life and apply to Amazon. You know if you guys picked up. You know Sasha used to be, you know computer science and engineer and stuff, and now he's got this analytical mind and now he just happens to be an expert on you know Excel and flat files and stuff. And listen, Christine, you know being an interior designer. You know she couldn't just like throw stuff together. You know like she probably had.

Bradley Sutton:

You know this system where she would really plan out her sets and very detailed, and now she's taken that and applied it to the way she manages her interior, designing her Amazon catalog, so you can always take stuff from and then play. You know, plus, sasha, you know being a service provider too. You know he's taking his acting lessons. He's very well spoken and eloquent there and very good looking too, so he's using whatever he can do right there. Sasha, back to you Another, maybe a flat file strategy that you can share with the community.

Sasha:

So with flat files, I think it's important to know that the category listing report is not necessarily what's live on the product page, and that's a major misconception that people have is that when they receive the category listing report, when they download it, they think that that accurately reflects what's up on the system, and it's not the way I would. The way I think about the CLR is that it is just a suggestion. It's what you've uploaded to Amazon and then Amazon makes a decision about whether they will accept that recommendation and update the data in the system or not. Conversely, the file itself, the category listing report or the category template, that is also Amazon's suggestion to you, what you can upload to the, to the cloud, and you don't necessarily have to follow that recommendation.

Sasha:

That's why there are a lot of ways to hack the file, the Excel file that comes down from from Amazon, and so one of the first things that you do if you do have a conflict, if you have an issue, you may take a look at what's in your category listing report and then compare it to the, to the UI, to the data fields that you see in your seller central when you click the edit button and take a look at the shaded text and numbers that are right above the field, which shows you what's what's on the cloud live, and very often you'll find that what you've uploaded is not exactly the same as what's on that now, and that could be things like title, it could be bullet points, clearly, product ideas and other other fields that Amazon doesn't think that you have the right to update or you have the priority to update. So that's one check that I would do once in a while to make sure that what you think is being uploaded is actually getting up there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, is it? I mean, I know this was the case years ago, but you know what would happen and how some people would get their listings, you know, shut down. Is you know, like, like, like COVID type keywords, but any adult keywords, drug related keywords, they would go to a marketplace where that seller wasn't in and where there's open spots in their flat file sometimes they would get to, you know, throw some of those keywords in there and then it would stop it. And then you know what was you know one way years ago of how to stop that is like hey, hey, you know, make sure everything in your flat files are filled out and even upload it to different marketplaces. Is that? Can that still help? Or what is the latest protection on how you can stop people from abusing the flat file system? Where, where they can get your listing, you know, shut down?

Sasha:

That is absolutely the right thing to do is fill out the category list and report with all the fields that are relevant to your product, and there's a couple that that are sort of not part of your product listing unless you're in the adult category that you should also update. But that is the good recommendation to update as much as you can that is relevant to your product, because bad actors can update your listings by doing that in other marketplaces or by virtue of having access to higher level of Amazon account, for example, they can do it through vendor central right. So that is that is a good recommendation. It is getting harder for people to to hijack casually because Amazon is making it more difficult for people to create and modify listings for that are owned by brand registry. But they they could still do it, and so I would.

Sasha:

I would say don't go overboard and try to complete every single empty field in your listing report, because you really cannot do that. There are many more fields that are related to your product. Then you can actually see when you download your category listing report. So you can't really even contemplate completing every possible field, but you should fill out those fields that are relevant. You should fill out those fields that have to do with compliance has met and so on, and you should fill out the field that has to do with is is this an adult product? To make sure that those don't get in there. Aside from that, you could you could still have bad actors put bad, bad keywords in your product. They'll get you shut down so that yeah, that's that hijacking process still exists out there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I'm just curious what's your ratio of sales from Amazon to Walmart? Five to one, 10 to one. Amazon more, Would you say it?

Christine:

for me it's. Let's see, last year it was like Five to one, this year it's more like eight to one on one.

Bradley Sutton:

It changed so eight to eight. For every eight dollars you sell on Amazon, you sell one dollar on Walmart.

Christine:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, are you using WFS?

Christine:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, how's your profit margins? You know like after, if you know calculate out what you're you know selling or you know doing for PPC, etc. Is the profit margins similar or you making more money than one platform, than the other?

Christine:

Well, last year I made more I mean profit margin was better on Walmart. This year the advertising Something's a skew there. So the profit margins not as good On Walmart as it was last year and I'm hoping they fix that and that goes back up. But typically because Walmart doesn't charge as much for delivery, they do still charge the 15%. They don't charge as much delivery. There is room for a better profit margin on Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. Do you find that there's less competition for your niche on Walmart compared to Amazon? Are you fighting more competitors on Amazon or is similar to the same ones? You who are there on Amazon are also there on the Walmart.

Christine:

I think it's less competition. It's less competition, but it's harder to rank up for some reason. But you know, it's a unique client. Each platform has its set of unique clients, right and certain products. Like I, have five different products With many, many skews. So one product does very, very well on Walmart and Not so well on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So you're doing better on Walmart than you are on Amazon for one product.

Christine:

Yes, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I know Kerry's got one or two like that too interesting.

Christine:

Yeah, and where the other products do better on Amazon. It's interesting. So I I come to where I'm picking out different products for the different platforms.

Bradley Sutton:

Could you have predicted that, like you know, when you were looking in helium 10 at the search volume or the competitors, like could you have said you know what I think this might be, or it did it just happen, and then now, in retrospect, you know what to look for as far as science about what could be better on Walmart than Amazon?

Christine:

I think it just happened. But yes, now in retrospect I can look a little bit more, I have a bit more information about what to look for and you know, price is a key it's just a key thing on Walmart. So having good price products so if you have a product that's a little bit higher priced For me I'm putting it on Amazon it just doesn't move as well on Walmart. In my category I'm talking about kitchen now in another category it might work just fine, but in my category the lower priced products that appear to have the best value for the price let's put it that way Move better on Walmart. And yes, now I'm picking out things that fit that category.

Bradley Sutton:

Sasha you doing anything at all with Walmart, or everything that you do is all on Amazon.

Sasha:

I help with Walmart as well, but it really varies by client. There are certain products that don't do well on Walmart at all because they are on Walmart shelves and so if it's a, if it's a product that can be purchased from Walmart, in the store and Amazon and Walmart will ship it at their Walmart price, it's very difficult to compete with an Amazon price that includes FBA fees. So it it's really kind of all over the board where some products do Better on Walmart when there's no competitors and there's some products that really don't even have opportunity to compete.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and what's your last strategy for us? If I were to ask you for your 60 second, your 60 second strategy of the of the day for you? I mean, I said flat files because that's your specialty, but it could be about anything.

Sasha:

I'll stick with flat files. My top recommendation would be to create variations. Create them often and Don't wait until it's too late. You're your ASINs, your, your product listings are your assets on Amazon and they're constantly at risk. They could be taken down for multiple reasons, and so when your product reaches a level of maturity, when you have Thousands of reviews and is doing very well, create a variation, even if you don't think you need one. Create something with small, small modification. Pair it up with your best seller and let that new product gather reviews and that new product becomes a new asset and Then, once are doing well, you have the option of splitting it off from your main parent and take up Amazon real estate. So that's one of the top strategies I use with clients is I create variations with, with new products cool, cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Now. If people wanted to reach out to you, Sasha, to see if you know to contact you and ask for your you know Russian escapades, or perhaps talk about you know flat files or whatever, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Sasha:

If, if they want, if you want to have, they want to have that beer, I'll tell them the local bar. But if they want to talk about Amazon I'm usually on the Friday calls at 11 o'clock that those are always great case studies, so I'm usually. They are also in the Helium 10 elite Facebook group and of course it. If you want to reach out directly, my email is at amazon@cutterstone.com. Cutterstone spell, just like it sounds.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool now, Christine, you know, no pressure, you don't have to say your contact information, but if somebody was inspired by something you said and they wanted to reach out to you, dude, would you like anybody to reach out?

Christine:

Yeah, I'm happy to help. I mean, so many people help me along the way I want to do the same, so I'm happy to help, and my email would be christioinfo@gmail.com.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right. Well, you too it's. It's a great, you know, been having you and you know weekly calls and seeing you at the elite events. And Next one, probably neither of you can make it to because I'm doing it, we're probably doing it in Germany, so that'll be a bit of a bit of a drive for you guys who are used to being here in Southern California, but perhaps I'll see you at the next, you know, like online meetup or Next conference. You know be great to see you again.

Christine:

Thank you.

Bradley Sutton:

Great to be here.

Helium 10 Buzz 11/16/23: Amazon On Snapchat & Instagram | Buy With Prime Benefits | M.Y.E. Update

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

Snapchat users can now buy Amazon products without leaving the app
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/tech/snapchat-users-shop-amazon-products/index.html

Meta lets Amazon shoppers buy products on Facebook and Instagram without leaving the apps
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/meta-lets-amazon-users-buy-on-facebook-instagram-without-leaving-apps.html

How Shein and TikTok Shop are trying to shake the ‘Made in China’ reputation
https://restofworld.org/2023/china-shopping-shein-tiktok-shop-global-sellers/

3 new shopping benefits Prime members get when using Amazon’s Buy with Prime
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/buy-with-prime-new-shopping-benefits-2023

Advertisers Are Investing in TikTok Shops Despite Mostly Tepid Results
https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/advertisers-are-investing-in-tiktok-shops-despite-mostly-tepid-results/

Walgreens Shifts eCommerce Fulfillment From Warehouses to Retail Stores
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/walgreens-shifts-ecommerce-fulfillment-from-warehouses-to-retail-stores/

Join the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz newsletter on LinkedIn. We break down all the week's news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-Commerce World, New Feature Alerts, and Training Tips!

But that's not all, we're also diving into Amazon PPC and keyword research techniques. With new updates and features to Helium 10’s Amazon PPC tool, Adtomic, we discuss how you can sharpen your spending strategy and optimize it. Our special training tip from Shivali will guide you on how to mine long-tail keywords from a root keyword or phrase to boost conversions. So, strap in and stay tuned for a session packed with valuable news, tips, and insights!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 01:02 - Amazon & Snapchat
• 02:51 - Amazon & Instagram
• 05:10 - Shein Sellers Wanted
• 07:37 - Buy With Prime
• 10:02 - TikTok Shop
• 12:11 - Fulfilled by Walgreens
• 14:40- Manage Your Experiments
• 15:38 - Amazon Robots
• 16:41 - Weekly Buzz Newsletter
• 17:08 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 20:30 - ProTraining Tip: How To Find Long-Tail Keywords From Root Keywords

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Customers will soon be able to buy Amazon products without leaving the app Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. Buy with Prime launches, more benefits for dot com sellers. There's now new kinds of split testing that you can do in manager experiments. These new stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz how cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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 is the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories that's going on in the Amazon and Walmart and e-commerce world. We also give you the new Helium 10 features of the week as well as a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got tons and tons of really exciting news stories today. sometimes it's a little bit dull out there. You're trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Sometimes it seems that I'm trying to like find news stories, but this week we got a few bangers out there, so let's go ahead and hop right into it

Bradley Sutton:

Now. The first story is actually from CNN and this is entitled. Snapchat users can now buy Amazon products without leaving the app. Now, this I thought was an interesting story. It's going to be followed up by another story that was actually announced last week, but according to CNN here it says Amazon will now run shopping ads for select products on popular photo messaging apps, snapchat, and Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNN Now. This spokesperson said that for the first time, customers will be able to shop Amazon Snapchat ads and check out with Amazon without leaving the app. All right, so. So that means like a lot of these social media apps, the last thing that they want you to do is leave the app. So there's been a lot of reluctant sometimes for links that just take them out, because what are these social media apps want? They just want you to just stay. Stay in the app, right like you see the moves that TikTok shop is making, they don't want you to have to go to Amazon, they want you to just buy right there in TikTok shop. like a lot of these apps make it difficult to go outside of the social media app because they just want you consuming the content there and consuming the ads, et cetera. So this is actually interesting. On Snapchat, you don't even have to leave the app to purchase Amazon products anymore. Now it says in app, shopping with Amazon is available for select products advertise on Snapchat and sold by Amazon or by independent sellers in Amazon store. So this is not just like a shipped and sold by Amazon. This, these are products that are you, you sellers out there are going to be able to sell. Now the bottom of this article says this Snapchat news comes on the heels of a similar Amazon initiative announced with Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms last week.

Bradley Sutton:

So that's actually our second news article of the day, and it's by CNBC, and this was from last week, in case you missed it out. There this was entitled meta lets Amazon shoppers buy products on Facebook and Instagram again, what's the key? Without leaving the apps, all right. So meta debuted this feature that lets users connect their Facebook and Instagram accounts to Amazon so they can more easily buy goods, promote them their feeds. Now it wasn't clear. If Snapchat is doing the same thing, I mean you'd almost have to. If you're not leaving Snapchat, that means that your Amazon account must be linked inside of Snapchat in a way. Now, this is just like super, super interesting to me because TikTok shop, as we know, has been making all of the waves lately and and this could be like Amazon answer to social commerce, as it's called, and like hey, maybe they see, like hey, this is the future. people are browsing social media and you want to kind of capture them while they're browsing, and at the same time, make these apps happy by not taking them to the Amazon app.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the Amazon spokesperson said to CNBC said customers in the U? S will see real time pricing, prime eligibility, delivery estimates and product details on select Amazon products ads in Facebook and Instagram as part of the new experience. So it's not just oh, there's going to be like a little button over here where it says, yeah, go ahead and buy with prime or buy this on Amazon. It sounds like like the buy box experience almost on Amazon where you can see all these details about when it's Going to get there. So, like this, this is, I don't know, I don't want to say like as flown under the radar a little bit. this is already like a week old. I'm reaching out to a lot of my contacts at Amazon to try and get some more details on what this is gonna entail, but I think this could be depending on how it's rolled out could be huge for third-party sellers to be able to advertise Directly on some apps and, especially, depending on the kind of flexibility we're gonna get for targeting so it could be something super, super cool and, again, like just more and more opportunity for e-commerce sellers out there now with this kind of like new Thing of social commerce. be it tick tock shop, be it snapchat, now Instagram, Facebook Really exciting times to be an e-commerce seller.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of e-commerce sellers, the next article is from restofworld.org and it's entitled how Shein and tick tock shop are trying to shake the maid in China Reputation alright, so it's talking about how these platforms are looking for global sellers and it gives a couple of examples. Like it talked about somebody who was in Latin America who was selling on the platform there that we all know, is one of the top ones in Latin America, which is mecca libre, and she was, she was doing, like $15,000 of revenue and she actually said that. like, when I first started considering Amazon, the process was confusing. There's too many documents required. The process to become a seller was very long, she said. But then this year in January Shein I hope I'm pronouncing that right, I don't even know Shein, but anyways Shein Contacted her and I was like, hey, would you like to sell on our platform? And there was actually Mexico based advisors that she could reach out to and they helped her set up the account, so that what she had said was difficult on Amazon, wasn't on Shein, and she's already sold $16,000 worth of goods on Shein's marketplace since it launched in Mexico this this past June and it's already surpassed Her medical Libre sales that she's been selling on for years now.

Bradley Sutton:

in the past for those who don't know much and including myself, I don't really know much about Shein never bought one thing on it, but Before it was almost all like. China, Chinese sellers on there and made in China products, but then last year they opened up distribution facilities in Poland, us and Canada this this article says and it's also opened up factories in Brazil and Turkey and also one coming in India. Now this article says, they're trying to compete with Amazon and that's why they're trying to build their fulfillment network and also open up to international third-party sellers. Now go ahead and check a link in the description, for the rest of this article is actually a super long article, but interesting. I really don't think she is like a big threat or anything to Amazon. I'm I think the reputation of the products and service is kind of low right now. But it's something to look out for and I'm curious. Shein reached out to this seller To sell on Amazon. What about any of you guys watching this? Have any of you been reached out to by Shein and Temu and TikTok shop to sell on the platform? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is a press release from Amazon and it's entitled three new shopping benefits prime members get when using Amazons buy with prime. So buy with prime, was announced earlier. We actually talked about it on the show where you can take like the Amazon Prime experience and kind of put it on Dotcom websites. All right, so until now you could see, like reviews and things and things like that. You can have the buying, literally buying with prime, right, you get the same day or one day or two day delivery. But now Amazon is announcing three more updates to this program.

Bradley Sutton:

This article says that this holiday season, prime member benefits now will include 24 seven customer service through a live chat feature. Again, this is for buy with prime obviously this has always existed for just regular Amazon. But now if somebody's shopping on a Shopify website and that Shopify sellers using buy with prime, these are the benefits that the customer is going to be able to get. So, again, 24 seven chat, live chat for customer service. Another main benefit is that you're gonna be able to see all of your orders in one place. So let's say, today I buy something from my Amazon app right. Tomorrow I buy something from the Amazon website. Day after tomorrow I go to dot a dot com website that's using Buy with Prime. I buy something there, I can go in my Amazon app and I'm going to see all of those orders in the same place. So that's something that's new that you know. Now is another benefit again, 24 seven live Support. you can see here in the screenshot what that is going to look like.

Bradley Sutton:

And then the returns. Amazon's already kind of pretty easy to have returns, but now by with prime can go through the same return process Even though they're buying from a dot com website. Now it says customers are gonna be able to choose from an expanded number of convenient drop-off locations at UPS stores, whole food markets or Amazon fresh stores, without boxing up or labeling Items. All they have to do is show a QR code and hand over the item being returned. All right, remember this is something bought from a dot com website. And now by with prime, members are gonna get all these kind of like regular Amazon prime Benefits. I'm just curious how about you guys out there Anybody start by with prime? Does any of what I just mentioned here make you more inclined to perhaps do buy with prime? If you've got a dot com website, let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from ad week calm and it's entitled Advertisers are investing in tick-tock shops despite mostly tepid results. And this is interesting to me because the title says, oh, mostly tepid results. But then the article goes on to just like give example after example of people, kind of like crush it on the platform. So the article to me didn't really match the, the, the headline here. But it says hey, there's mostly lackluster results in tick-tock shop. It says like, that's not what I'm that's not what I'm hearing. But then in the next paragraph it says hey, cosmetics brand beat BK beauty Join tick-tock shop. When it opened up three months ago, barely ab, barely spent anything on advertising and since joining the company has more than doubled revenue. Don't you see how, like why I'm confused with all this negative talk. Like in the title, in the first paragraph. The next Paragraph says oh yeah, somebody has spent digital, a single digits advertising and now they've doubled their revenue.

Bradley Sutton:

The article talks about how the platform is offering incentives such as ad credits, customer coupons, they're covering fulfillment charges, offering tons of promotions to gear up for Black Friday. I've talked about how helium-ton elite members like Elizabeth have been really absolutely just crushing it on that platform. In this article another story they give they say hey, mental health focus journal company, Zenful note, has generated 45%, pretty much half of their sales from tick-tock shop in just two months. So again, I don't know why they're kind of dissuading people from TikTok shop but at the same time talking about how people are just crushing it on there. But it's going to be interesting to see how this work. how this goes because, like I, really have high hopes for TikTok shop. It seems like they're doing the right things and it's not just taking like a whole bunch of random products from manufacturers in China that they're shipping snail mail. that takes three day or three days, so three weeks or something to deliver, like Shein or Temu. I mean, this is just like regular, kind of like Amazon level of product. So I really think that's next year that is going to be the platform that a lot of sellers are going to want to expand to.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from payments.com and this is entitled Walgreens Shifts Ecommerce Fulfillment from Warehouses to Retail Stores, and it talks about how they're, instead of fulfilling their dot com orders from their Walgreens warehouses, they're trying to do it at its 8,700 stores. They had this quote that says 78% of Americans live within five miles of a Walgreens. How about you guys listening out there? You probably have a Walgreens pretty, pretty close to you, but 78% are near there. So this maybe doesn't necessarily affect third party sellers too much, because this is. Walgreens mainly sells a lot of their own products.

Bradley Sutton:

But this is what I've always tried to talk to you guys, especially when I talk about Walmart and other places. We think too much only about selling online. If you can get and brick and mortar, it can be very lucrative. I've talked about when I worked at another company and they would sell in Walmart the kind of PO's that would cross my desk where one PO was like way more than what our entire year of Amazon sales were and we were in seven figures of Amazon sales and that would be like one PO from Walmart's because of how many Walmarts there are. We had accounts at that same company. I worked at Walgreens and it was still a big business and you don't have to worry about. a lot of advertising and customer service and all this stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

So like, when you are building your brand, absolutely start on Amazon, start on TikTok shop, but be thinking bigger picture, like, like, really create a brand and great packaging and things like that. Because now, if you start crushing on Amazon, you're going to get on the radar of buyers and at some of these places potentially, and maybe you can get your product in a Walgreens or a Walmart. And then this kind of move that Walgreens is doing is like pretty cool. Like imagine if you were making some kind of supplement, right, and you got it into Walgreens, brick and mortar. Now your online sales for Walmart, or Walgreens.com would also be pretty high because the fulfillment process potentially could have even same day delivery. Walgreens is saying that they're going to use, like Uber, eats and DoorDash drivers to deliver their stuff. But anyways, just something to keep in mind, guys, don't just confine yourself to thinking that you're only going to sell on online marketplaces. Getting into brick and mortar can be very lucrative.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is not really an article at all, but it's something that is in your manager experiments dashboard. So if you go to manager experiments, that's Amazon's kind of like split testing tool. It's always been free on live listings and you've been able to do stuff like test your, your main image and things like that, but now you can actually start testing your A plus brand story and also you can do simultaneous experiments to where you, where you test two separate things, all right. So this is something newish that maybe some of you didn't know about is available. I still recommend Always doing your split testing and audience kind of like polling before you even have your listing. You can do that with Helium 10 Audience. It's just right there in your Helium 10, dashboard. It's also available. it's made by a PickFu and I've been using that for six years now and that's like a game changer. But if you didn't do it before you launch and you're having trouble, absolutely you can use manager experiments on your live listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is just kind of a funny one I wanted to throw in here because it kind of has to do with Amazon. But it's kind of crazy what we're going to. And this is CNBC and it says Amazon's Astro Robot is now a roving security guard for business. I mean, guys, we are literally going into the Terminator world. Amazon is selling this robot for $2,300 and it's for businesses and it's like a security guard. it's on wheels but it like roams your store during the day, make sure people are not stealing it roams it. During the night, when you, when you leave your place of business. But amazon is more than just a marketplace. They're like at the forefront of a lot of different technologies. And now there's robot security guards. Guys, in 2023, 2024, what is this world coming to? Ai robots, what is next? All right, that's it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

One thing I wanted you guys to know about was if you like to get the news and maybe you're not always about watching a video, you just want to watch it or read about the news. I have a brand new newsletter that covers in depth A lot of these news articles. We're talking about a lot of the things that we discuss in this show. So if you would like that, just email to you from LinkedIn and you have LinkedIn super easy, one click to subscribe to it completely free. Go to h10.me forward slash newsletter. H10.me forward slash newsletter takes your LinkedIn website and then just hit subscribe and you'll get notified every time if there's a new article.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now let's get into the New Helium 10 Feature Alerts of the week. every week, Helium 10 has is releasing new tools, new filters, new features, new functionality that you guys have been asking for, and so here's a rundown of what is cooking for this week, the first one that I'm going to talk about actually, all of these are an Adtomic, our PPC management tool, and the first one is about day parting. All right, so in the past, you could select certain campaigns and then in helium, you can look at the data that Helium 10 provides and see that, wow, my, my, a cost is like infinity. It's like terrible Saturdays from 7am to 9am. So what I'm going to pause my campaign every Saturday at that time so I can save some money, right, but that's just kind of like partially.

Bradley Sutton:

Why people like day parting. a lot of people might want to increase their bid. Like maybe on Sunday mornings a cost is like 6% on a certain campaign or a group of campaigns. Well you might want to increase your, your, your bid at that time. Other times, maybe you don't want to pause the whole campaign, but maybe you want to decrease your bids. Well, now you're going to be able to do that if you go to your day parting schedules section and you go to the bottom here where you can create the rules. You can just select which day you want to choose the time period that you're wanting to do. Like, let's say, I pick Mondays from 3am to 7am and now I can do increase bid, I can decrease the bid or pause the campaign, and I can do this at the campaign level or at the portfolio level or even at the product level. So, super cool update from Adtomic. That way really allows you to kind of like laser focus your spend and optimize it based on the previous performance, but on time of day and day of the week.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, another quick filter that is new in Adtomic. we have our AI bidding suggestions and that's like based on the algorithms that you, that you choose. I'm going to talk about a New update to the algorithms too, but like, for example, I've got a whole bunch of AI suggestions here about how, what I need to do to my targets as far as on the bidding in order to reach my goal, right, and so we have a couple new filters where I maybe I just want to see hey, show me all of the suggestions, the AI suggestions, where it's asking me to increase the bid or decrease the bid All right. So that's a new filter that you're now going to be able to see on your suggestions page. The last update or feature alert for the day is the ability now, on auto campaigns, to choose a bid rule. All right. So a bid rule is kind of like.

Bradley Sutton:

maybe you're trying to hit a certain kind of target ACoS. Maybe you want to use our algorithm that maximizes the number of impressions. Maybe you want to maximize the number of orders. Maybe you want to use one of your custom bid algorithms, all right. So before for auto campaigns, you weren't able to set these, but now for the auto campaigns, you can go ahead and choose one of our algorithms or one of your own and go ahead and activate it right there. So I highly suggest everybody go ahead and do that if you're using Adtomic. Last up, we've got Shivali here for our training tip of the week and it has to do with a keyword research technique, a very, very simple way that, within seconds, you can get tons of keyword ideas based on you entering a keyword into our tool, Magnet, Shivali. Take it away.

Shivali:

How to find long tail keywords from a root keyword or phrase. Why is this important and how can you use it to make money? Well, as an Amazon FBA seller, of course you're interested in ranking on the top half of page one for your main keywords as well as your supplementary keywords. But how exactly can you lead to even more conversions? Well, of course you want to get in front of a audience that is ready to purchase, and the best way to identify that is by taking a look at your long tail keywords. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, these are those keywords that have maybe two, three, four, five additional words in the actual search term. And by taking a look at those search terms, right, you're starting to take a look at those people who are ready to purchase their warmer leads. They know what they're looking for, and that means that they are ready to buy so long as you can convey exactly what it is that you are selling and it matches what they have on their mind.

Shivali:

So let's go ahead and take a look at Magnet. I'm going to show you a filter you can use, and that is simply this word count filter right here inside of Magnet, that you can use to input a minimum or maximum and narrow down your search results. So I went ahead and inputted coffin shelf as our main seed keyword and clicked get keywords. We were outputted 3,204 filtered keywords in results. And then I want to narrow that down further by finding those really excited consumers. I'm going to go in and input in a minimum of four, I'm going to click apply and, as you can see, it immediately narrowed that down to 792 filtered keywords compared to the 3000 plus we had before. Now, of course, not all of these are going to be relevant. I'm already seeing that instead of the coffin shelf, we're now taking a look at Vampire Diaries makeup. That's not really relevant at all. So let's go ahead and combine this with the phrases containing filter and I can input in coffin, click apply filters and you'll see that automatically narrows me down even further to 157 filtered keywords.

Shivali:

Now this was a very, very fast way for you to go from 3000 filtered keywords into 157 and find keyword phrases where people are looking for something very specific. Of course, if I were a consumer and I were typing in bookshelf, that's going to be a significantly different feel and probably browsing for different styles of bookshelves, compared to somebody that's typing in coffin shaped bookshelf or coffin shelf or coffin bookshelf large six feet tall. So this is a very precise market and of course I'll still want to go in and open each one of these up and see whether or not the search term is relevant to our product. But of course this is really easy to also remove if I realize that that's not a phrase I want to maintain as part of my listing later on.

Shivali:

So, as you can see, this is a really easy way for you to find those really strong buyer intent keywords or key phrases that you are looking for. That can help you boost your conversions really fast. Of course you want to be ranking for those keywords and you want to drive traffic and all of that's great, but you also want to convert and so when you're using those longer tail keywords, you can get in front of audiences that are looking for something specific and that allows you to make that conversion a little bit easier. So that barrier to entry to actually get them to purchase is so much better when you are using words that are a little bit longer in length. So with this, I hope you go into Magnet, you implement, you take a look at those long tail keywords and you find success. I will catch you in the next video.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you very much, Shivali, for that. I really recommend, if you guys haven't done it recently, even if you've already been selling for a while, go ahead and put some of your main keywords, especially if it's a not a long tail keyword. Put that into Magnet and just see what comes up. hit the smart complete button, for once you have the keywords that come up. After you put your main keyword in there and see how many keywords come up, and I bet you, I guarantee you, there's going to be keywords that are completely related to your main keyword because it's your main keyword is literally a part of those keywords that you possibly didn't even know had search for him. So that's just like a cool little homework assignment for you guys. All right, thanks everybody for joining us this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.