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

#507 - 2024 Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass: Part 2

Ever wondered how to turn strategic insights into a goldmine? This episode brings the secrets of Amazon analytics to your ears, highlighting the pivotal role of keywords in boosting your revenues and leaving your competitors behind. We've got a masterclass in the works that will open your eyes to the capabilities of organic and sponsored ranks, the art of tracking Amazon keyword ranks, and decoding the difference between ranks in Cerebro, keyword tracker, and a browser search.

Fasten your seatbelts, as we explore deeper into the labyrinth of Amazon Brand Analytics and trends. We will guide you on how to use data inside Helium 10 from Amazon’s brand analytics data to unveil what's happening with specific keywords and how to turn this knowledge into strategic decisions. Plus, watch out for our segment on the "time machine method" in Helium 10, a secret weapon to fuel your Amazon business’ growth.

Finally, we'll share some hard-hitting strategies for uncovering the top Amazon keywords for your market niche and revealing hidden opportunities in keyword research. We'll discuss how to use Amazon Brand Analytics to see the history of Cerebro keyword searches, identify sales spikes, and compare organic and sponsored ranks. By the end of the episode, you'll be armed with the knowledge needed to dominate your market and boost your Amazon business to new heights. So, are you ready to elevate your selling game?

 episode 507 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:27 - Advanced Amazon Keyword Tracking Strategies
• 08:11 - Amazon Brand Analytics for Keyword Strategies
• 13:54 - Comparing Amazon and Helium 10's Data 
• 16:53 - Analyzing Historical Trends in Keyword Distribution 
• 19:56 - Keyword Analysis for Amazon Sales Increase 
• 25:52 - Top Amazon Keywords for Multiple Products
• 32:58 - Optimizing PPC Strategy With Competitor Analysis 
• 37:19 - Opportunity Keywords and Competitor Analysis

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today is part two of our seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into keyword research using Cerebro, and the strategies we're going to go over today, if implemented by you and your team, could potentially mean thousands of dollars of extra revenue for you. 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’s completely BS, free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this is now part two for a series that we've been doing that we call seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into Amazon keyword research. Now, if you haven't seen part one, you should go back and, you know, hop on that video, because a lot of what we're going to talk today is based on some of the things that hopefully you've mastered already in part one. So, for any reason you just happen to find this episode randomly, go back to episode 506. You can do that h10.me/506 and make sure to listen to that one. Take a lot of notes. Make sure you've mastered that before getting into this one. All right, for the rest of you who already watched that, let's go ahead and hop into it.

Bradley Sutton:

Last episode, we went through about 12 different strategies that can definitely help you, mainly looking at like individual products, using Cerebro and how to like reverse engineer, organic ranks and sponsored ranks, and how to use some of the advanced features of Helium 10. Today, we're going to look at even more advanced features. A lot of these are or most of these, all of these are available to anybody with a diamond and above, a lot of these are still available to anybody with a platinum Helium 10 account as well. But again, even if you don't even have Helium 10, let alone one of those plans, still pay attention to this, because these are strategies that you should be using, regardless of what software you're using. It's literally stuff, some of this that I would say 95 to 98% of Amazon sellers even if they have Helium 10, they're not using it, so it really can give you a competitive advantage over others. Again, the way that we do this in case you forgot it from the last episode instead of just making this some step by step guide, we'll show some step by step, but the main focus of this is to give you goals. All right, all right, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is like a how to guide. We're going to say stuff like how to compare organic and sponsored rank to the being the top clicked in brand analytics. All right, so we're going to start off with a how to and then, as soon as we do that, we're going to talk about well, why is this beneficial? Why do you even want to achieve this goal? What can it mean to your bottom line? And then we're going to get into the strategy. Ready to go? All right, strategy 12. How to start tracking Amazon keyword rank up to 24 times a day. Now, why would you even want to do this? How is this beneficial to you? How could this make you money?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, as we have talked about in previous videos, the ranks organic and sponsored that you might see inside of Helium 10, Cerebro are either from, could be from today, could have been from five days ago, could have been from 29 days ago. It's anywhere between one and 30 days old. We're not checking it completely actively. It gives you just a holistic look at ranking. Now there might be something that you really want to focus on, like your top keywords. You might not want to see something where it could have been taken last week. It could have been taken a couple of weeks ago. You really want to focus on that keyword? Well, in that case, you're going to want to be looking at your rank a lot more frequently than just looking at it, you know, once a day or even once a week. So one of the ways that you can do that, if you really found some good, most important keywords for your listing, is by exporting to a different tool keyword tracker.

Bradley Sutton:

And again, just to kind of set the scene here, what is the difference between a rank in Cerebro, a rank in keyword tracker and a rank you might see on your browser right now? You know, some people say wait a minute, how come my rank is different from what I see in Cerebro, to what I see in my browser? Remember, these are not estimates that are taking us to Cerebro. This is an exact rank taken from an exact browsing scenario. You could have 10 people at the very same time in different parts of the country. You could have three people in the same house at the same exact time search for something on Amazon, and it could be different ranks. All right, whether somebody's on a mobile browser, somebody's on Safari, somebody's on Chrome. Somebody signed in, somebody signed off. Somebody signed in in Los Angeles, California, somebody signed in in Brooklyn, New York. It could have different ranks. It usually doesn't fluctuate that much, but that's why you might see something different. It doesn't mean that one is wrong and one is right. They're all actual ranks but, you know, based on the browsing scenario, amazon might show something different.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, how can you track up to 12 or 24 times a day? Let me show you how. You're going to want to take your keywords that you want to go ahead and export let's just say, coffin letterboard, halloween DVD collection and coffin bookshelf. So you go ahead and click this button, add to keyword tracker, find the product that you're wanting to add this to, and you can add track a new product if you haven't added this to your keyword tracker before, and then, basically, you are going to automatically have these products in keyword tracker. Now, once you go over to keyword tracker, you should see those new keywords that you had added in here. Now I mentioned at the top of this section is how to do it 24 times a day. Well, by default, keyword tracker, unlike Cerebro, it's checking once a day. If you wanted to check up to 24 times a day. You're just going to hit this little rocket chip that is next to each keyword and then now you are going to get ranks 24 times a day for this keyword. So that's just a great way. Again, if you want to get more into detail on keyword tracker, there are other videos that kind of help you with that.

Bradley Sutton:

So that's just one of the ways to export keywords out of Cerebro. There's actually a couple more ways that you can do that. One of the ways is a lot of people like to manipulate the data, maybe in an Excel spreadsheet All right. So if you want to do that, all you have to do is hit the export data button directly from Cerebro and then you could say, hey, download to a XLSX file or a CSV file, and then what that does is it downloads all of the raw data, keywords and all the search volume and everything into an Excel spreadsheet, and then you might be able to do a little bit more filtering or something like that that you might not have been able to do inside of the Helium 10 dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

A third way that you can export the data from Cerebro is to our word processor tool, which is called Frankenstein. All right, so if you export, if you hit export and then you hit it to Frankenstein, what it's going to do is it's gonna open up a new window and it's gonna open up Frankenstein. So what this allows you to do is it allows you to take away duplicates and maybe filter out certain words, allows you to do word counts. You wanna see. Hey, show me all of the keywords that have at least four words. Show me all the keywords that have coffin. Take out any keyword phrase that has Halloween. Whatever you wanna do in Frankenstein, you can manipulate the keywords in that way. If you wanna have a better instructions on how to work with Frankenstein, there's a video that's in the Frankenstein tool that helps you with that. So there's three different ways to export. Number one go to Keyword Tracker. Learn how to track these keywords 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios. Number two export your keyword list to Excel and then manipulate the data that way. And then, number three export it to our keyword processing tool, Frankenstein. That gives you even more options.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's get into the next strategy how to see the top clicked and top purchased products for a keyword using Amazon brand analytics data. So Amazon brand analytics is something that Amazon released about two, three years ago, really helpful. It is a data point that tells you, for any keyword, what were the top three products that were clicked and then, from those top three click products, what was the percentage of their click share and what was their percentage of their conversion or purchase share. For any keyword that comes up in Cerebro, you can actually see that number. Now, why is this important? How can this metric help you make money? Well, all keywords are not created equal. All right, there are some keywords that result in a lot of clicks and a lot of purchases. There are some keywords that don't have a lot of purchases. There are some keywords where maybe the top three products that are clicked, they're dominating the clicks, they're dominating the purchases. There are other keywords, when you add up the top three products that are clicked, that they might not have a big percentage of the overall clicks and conversions for a keyword, and that could give you information to let you know, hey, that market might be a little bit more wide open. There's a lot of ways to look into this data and get ahead of the game. Like you might wanna focus on a keyword where you see a couple of really bad listings that are just dominating the sales, and you know that you can take over. That might be a more attractive keyword to focus on as opposed to something else. So how do you do that? Let's go ahead and hop into it In your Cerebro results.

Bradley Sutton:

You'll notice one of the columns. There's two columns. It'll say ABA, which stands for Amazon Brand Analytics Total Click Share and ABA Conversion Share. Now, right next to that, you're gonna see a little graph button, so like, for example, I can see Coffin Shelf and it says ABA Total Click Share 30.5%. What that means is the top three click products over the last month or over the last week for that keyword resulted in 30.5% of the overall clicks. It says ABA Total Conversion Share 15% for that same thing. Now, that right there just tells you something that you know, because, theoretically speaking, if the conversion rates were all created equal, if three products got 30% of the clicks, they should get 30% of the sales. Right, if all things were created equal. But this means that of the top three click products, a lot of people are clicking out of it and that means 85% of the sales that come from these keywords are not even from the top three clicks. So that right there might give you some strategy that you can look at. You can actually filter in the Cerebro results for this top three total click share and top three total conversion share.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing you can do is click on the graph. Like, if I click on this graph that is right next to ABA Total Click Share, another graph comes up and you're gonna wanna put your mouse over the different months or the different weeks. I can actually change the date settings to say, hey, I wanna look at this data on a weekly basis and maybe I'm just gonna look from October 1st all the way to October 28th and now, week by week, I put my mouse over this graph and then here at the bottom I can see which ones are the top three click Like. For example, for this week, October 22nd to October 28th, I can see that my product had 9% of the clicks. It was number three and it had 11% of the conversions. So that's pretty good. Look at this. There was one other product on here that had 13% of the clicks but only 3% of the conversions, so their conversion rate was not very good. So again, a lot of great data that you can see in here. This comes directly from Amazon. This is not some estimate from Helium 10 or some algorithm. This is directly from Amazon. So use this data in order to get some additional insights into what's going on on certain keywords. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to compare the organic and sponsored rank and see how it relates to being one of the top three click products. Now, why is this beneficial? How can this make you money? When you talk about spending money on Amazon, as an Amazon seller, what do you think? You spend a lot of money on Sponsored ads? You're probably right, right. Apart from inventory, of course, and shipping and things like that, what do you pay Amazon the most for? It might be PPC, and so you wanna know hey, am I getting the best bang for my buck with my PPC? Do I even need to invest heavily in staying at the top of search for PPC? Do I need to, like, stay top of search and do some kind of campaign to bring my organic rank up? There's a lot of these questions that you might have, and without looking at this next measure, I'm gonna tell you you might not be able to see the answer. So let's go ahead and hop into this. How you can see this If you click on the graph inside of Helium-Tensoribro, on one of the ABA total click share figures here and, by the way, if you see an NA, that means it wasn't available inside of Amazon brand analytics, so let's go ahead and click on one that has the graph.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm gonna focus here on the right side of this graph, and this is giving me the last three months of what was the top three click products and these first columns that I'm looking at. It'll say click share and conversion share. Again, this is directly from Amazon telling me who were the top three clicked and purchased products. And the thing that is interesting is the next two columns are the organic rank average and the sponsored rank average. So we're now comparing Amazon data to Helium 10’s data. All right, take a look at this. I'm looking at my product here. For the month of October, I was a number three clicked product okay, but look at my organic rank average 21. So you might think that you probably would get zero sales being page one position 20, right, but I am one of the top three clicked and I was even converting at a higher clip than the number one clicked product. Why I could see here from the Helium-Tens data that my sponsored rank average was number two.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so how does this knowledge help me? Well, now I know I don't necessarily have to do some crazy campaign to get ranked organically. As long as I can stay ahead of the game on my sponsored rank, it is going to keep me to be one of the top three click Other keywords. You might see different data where the sponsored rank might not even be that important, but the organic rank seems to drive all of the sales. You might see another keyword where it's unless you are at the top of the page in organic and sponsored, you might not be one of the top three clicked or purchased products. So again, this is a super, super valuable data point that only Helium 10 has, where it compares Amazon brand analytics data with our keyword tracking data so you can find out which keywords to focus on and which keywords to focus on organic versus sponsored, how to view the history of how many keywords a product has ranked for organically or in sponsored ads. This is one of my favorite ones, something I've been asking for for years before the team finally put it in.

Bradley Sutton:

I like to call this tool the time machine method, but actually it's called historical trends inside of Helium 10. Now, why would you want to know this? How can this make you money? Well, you might see what a product is doing right now on Amazon. That's what Cerebro is for right, and it's always been for that. Hey, where are they ranking for now? But what if you're in a seasonal niche? Or what if you're curious about what happens during November of each year, because that's when sales spike? Or what happens when it's a beach ball and it's in the summer? You know, like, if I'm in December and I'm looking at Cerebro for a beach ball item, the keywords that people are finding this product now it's probably very different than the keywords in June and July.

Bradley Sutton:

Another way that I'm looking at this data is that you know what if there are trends in how a competitor is doing sponsored ads, or maybe trends in how their organic reach flows, like maybe they do outside campaigns that give them temporary spikes at different times of the year, let's hop in to see how you can see all of this data, and even more so whenever you are in Cerebro. There is a button in the middle under keyword distribution that is called show historical trend. You are going to want to go ahead and click that and it's going to open up the historical trends for up to two years if the product has been active, for where their organic and sponsored keywords have been showing up, and you'll see it in different colors. So like, for example, you could see that in October of this year they were ranking for 698 different keywords and also they were ranking sponsored 281. Now here's something that is cool. If I'm going to go back in history and I could see, wow, look, in November and December of last year, these guys were going hard and heavy. They really upped their PPC spend. This is not my coffin shelf here, I'm looking at somebody else's coffin shelf. So now I know, going into November of this year, hey, I got to be on guard because it looks like this competitor really ups their spend on PPC during November and December. But take a look at this If I look in January, it looks like they pretty much turn off their PPC ads.

Bradley Sutton:

They were only showing up for 84 different keywords in sponsored ads during January of 2023. So now, all of a sudden, I've got some data that shows, hey, they didn't really do any sponsored ads in January. January might be the time where I can kind of overtake them with my reach if I go opposite of them and go a little bit hard and heavy, maybe in November and December I'm like man it might be too hard to compete with them. Maybe I'll dial back my spend and let them go ahead and go crazy with their spend. I mean, there's different ways to interpret this data. There's no right or wrong way.

Bradley Sutton:

But for the first time, you can have visibility into the reach of your competitors. Maybe you see a competitor sales going up and up and up, right. Well, I would go ahead and look at this historical trend and see why are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more keywords? Same thing Maybe their sales are going down. Well, I'm going to check Are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more, more keywords? If not, that means they just got more efficient, right. If their sales were going up and the keywords were actually going down, it means that they were just laser focused on certain keywords. Which keywords were they focused on? I'm going to show you in the next strategy exactly how to find that. But, guys, take a look at this on your listing and your competitors listing, so you can see the history of all of the number of keywords that they're organically and sponsored ranked for All right. Now the next strategy is how to check an Amazon products organic and sponsored rank history. All right. So in the previous strategy we talked about how to just see the total number. But how do you actually see what they were ranking for and when? Why do you want to see this? Why is this important? How can it make you money?

Bradley Sutton:

Again, the example I gave earlier of a beach ball. You know if I'm going to launch a beach ball in July of next year, or maybe I'll launch it in spring, but you know the main focus is gonna be in June, july, august. In December I can't really Do keyword research on this product and know what are the best keywords. Right, I need to go find who was One of the top selling beach balls in June, july or August of last year and then I want to Analyze them. Not in December of this year, what, when nobody is searching for beach balls and they might even have their listing active.

Bradley Sutton:

But I want to see what were the keywords driving the sales of that product during that time of year. Maybe there's other products where I could see that they had a certain spike in a certain month. Regardless of see. Maybe it's not a seasonal product at all. It's a product like a power bank or something that people buy throughout the year. But I noticed in a certain month they had a lot of sales. Well, you know what I'm gonna do I want to compare what keywords and where they were ranking for in the month before their sales went up and then compare it to the month where their sales went up and which keywords increased in rank organic or sponsored. Guess what? That is the reason of why their sales went up. I can literally tie a sales increase at least part of their sales increase to Exact keywords, so that now I know for my product which keywords I want to focus on Of which potentially could increase my sales.

Bradley Sutton:

So how can we do that? Let's go ahead and hop into it. So again, if I see a, let's pretend that this coffin shelf here had a spike in sales on a certain year, like November of 2022 what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go in click historical trend and then I'm going to find the month when they had the the big sales. Now, before I even do that, I might go into the previous month and have that cerebral open in another window so I can see where they were ranked on a quote-unquote neural month. But let me show you. I just click on this exact date here of November 2022 and then I'm gonna hit apply filters. And now this is like taking a time machine, because it is now going to show me the cerebral, as if I was doing this in November of 2022.

Bradley Sutton:

That's what it is showing now, and then now I can go ahead and use Helium 10 filters and say, hey, show me of the keywords that had at least 300 search volume during, you know, october of 2022, where were they ranked? Between positions 1 and 20. And then now, all of a sudden, I can see the exact keywords that they were probably getting a lot of their sales from. And then again, what I'm going to do is, if I was trying to see a Spike in sales, like where the keywords coming from, I'm gonna take one of the months where their sales were down and then compare, keyword by keyword, which one they had a big increase or which one they hopped to the top of page one. And now I know Exactly why they had a spike in sales.

Bradley Sutton:

That customer. If they're not even using Helium 10 or they're not looking this data, they probably don't even know themselves. Uh, I say that customer, that competitor, they probably don't even know themselves why they have the spike in sales, but I can actually see that now and now I'm gonna use that data to make sure that I get ahead. So, guys, this I Cannot emphasize how valuable this feature is. Nobody has ever had anything like this super, super important that can really get you ahead looking at either spikes in sales, valleys in sales. You know it's the opposite. I didn't really mention that. But let's say you notice a competitor a certain month had a terrible month, even though they were in stock. Obviously, if they're out of stock, well, they would have a bad month, but they were in stock. They had a terrible month of sales. Well, I'm going to look at when they had a great month right before and I'm gonna look at what keywords they went down in rank, what keywords did they take the pedal off the metal for their sponsored ranks? And then, now I know the keywords, I need to make sure that I don't fall off, because now I know that, hey, if I fall off on these keywords, it could result in another sales. You know, sales lull, like it did for my competitor. So, guys, this is probably top one, top two around their favorite features in all of Helium 10, out of the 75 million things that Helium 10 can do, this right here is one of my favorites and this is what could really really give you a leg up on the competition Historical Cerebro. So make sure to use it.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to view the history of your Cerebro keyword searches. All right, why is this beneficial? Can this make you money? Well, a lot of this data changes over time and maybe you are like always checking somebody's Cerebro and you or somebody's product in Cerebro and you want to see the history of something like Amazon recommended and how it changed over time, or some of the graphs you know over time. Maybe you don't have access to the historical Cerebro? Well, what you can do is you can actually go in and see your history so that you know what was going on and when. All right, so how you can do that is by at the very top of the screen. Even before you get into any search, you're gonna see a very button at the top right called history. If you click on that, it is gonna show you all of the history of every single product you have ever searched in Cerebro and it gives you the date of when you looked at it and you can even search. Like you can see, I've used Cerebro here 1,500 times. I could search hey, where's all the coffin shelves that I searched for? And if I hit open, what it's going to open up in is the Cerebro as I looked at it as of that day. So this is a great thing to look at if you want to look at how things have progressed since the first time you looked at a product or a group of products really important to check your history in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to find the top Amazon keywords for a niche or a market, or multiple Asins, a group of products. Why is this important? How can it benefit you? We've been talking until now about looking up individual products in Cerebro, which is absolutely a great method and a lot of tools can do that, but now we're taking it to another level, where you are analyzing multiple products. Well, how this can help you is you know you might if you just look at one product like the top seller in a niche and understand their keywords, their top keywords. That's valuable information, right, but do you think that that one product is the only one making sales on keywords. No, another product might have discovered a different keyword that this first product doesn't know about, and so if you analyze that product, you know you might want to know what keywords they're ranking for. Maybe you want to know what's the most important keywords overall in the niche. Where are most of the top competitors all getting their sales from, because they're all ranked high? What are the keywords where maybe only a couple competitors really know about it? So these are kind of under the radar keywords that might have less competition. All of these are reasons on why you should analyze multiple products at the same time.

Bradley Sutton:

So let's just again talk about how you can find the top keywords, the top keywords for a group of products, or the most relevant keywords. Well, I actually like to start this outside of Cerebro. I mean, you could just go ahead and copy Aysons one by one directly in this Cerebro. I actually like going to Amazon itself and then looking at the products that way. So here I just searched for coffin shelf here in Amazon and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run Helium 10 X-Ray on this page Now. Once I do that, the top products are going to come up.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here is something very important. I'm going to select from X-Ray right on Amazon the keywords that I want to look at in Cerebro. But what's important to do is Cerebro Multi-Aysons search is built on comparing your product to your competitors. So if you have a product right here on this page, you want to make sure to select it first. All right, so I'm going to select my product, my coffin shelf, first. Now, if you don't have a product, maybe you're just doing keyword research in a brand new niche. I like choosing a product way from the bottom of the page. That's not one of the top sellers as my baseline product, and the reason is is because I don't want to exclude it from the search results. All right, so the way that Cerebro is built is to compare your product to competitor products. But you can kind of use this mini hack if you don't have your own product, just by selecting a random product here from the bottom of the page and then selecting your coffin shelf, so I can choose up to like maybe 10 or even 20 of the top coffin shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me go ahead and choose, you know, some of the top ones that I see here on this page, and then, once I've selected them. I'm going to go ahead and hit the button Run Cerebro and it's going to open up Cerebro in another tab and it's now going to show me my rank versus all of the other competitor ranks in Cerebro. Or, if I didn't have my product as the first product, it's actually going to show me just the baseline product versus all of the competitor products. But it's really the competitor products that I'm going to be focused on. So now, if I just want to find out what the top keywords are, as you can see here, it found over 3,000 keywords that any one of those competitors that I looked at are ranking for. All right, that's valuable, but you know I really want to focus on the top keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

There's one button you can do right here at the very top of the page. If I just hit the button Top Keywords, it actually goes in and does some filters for me so that I can see what some of the top keywords are, and you could see it filtered that you know 3,000 keywords all the way down to five keywords. What is this based on? It just threw in some filters that make sure to show me what are the keywords that more than a few of, more than just one or two of these products that I chose are ranking for, and they're all kind of ranking high. The competitor rank average is between one and 40. That's what it did. So maybe this five keywords is not enough. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, hey, you know, show me the 300 and up search volume. Maybe the competitor rank average is between one and 50, and at least three ranking competitors are all ranking for it, and then, if I go ahead and apply those filters, more keywords might show up. Now, as you can see, 22 filtered keywords show up.

Bradley Sutton:

The column that I like to look at here is the competitor performance score. This can be viewed. As you know, some people call this relevancy. I don't like calling it relevancy because it could just be a fluke. But if you see a 10 out of 10 competitor performance score, that means that a lot of these products you know I think I had five or six products that I entered in here a lot, if not all of them are all ranking for it and they are all ranking relatively high. That's what this competitor rank average is.

Bradley Sutton:

Look at this this keyword has competitor rank average of 7.6. That means the five products that we're ranking for this keyword. If I average where they're showing up for it's page one position seven, right. So that's pretty crazy. If I wanted to know exactly where they were ranking for, I just put my mouse over relative rank and then it shows why that competitor rank average is so high. Look at this. It says one is number one, one is number three, one is number five, number 13, 15 and 16. You take that on average and it goes to a 7.6. All right, so this is a great way to see what are the top keywords in a niche. That means all the top sellers, if that's what I chose when I was looking in Amazon. If they're all ranking highly for a certain keyword, it's gonna show up here on this top keyword list. This is a great way to get your best keywords for your Amazon listing.

Bradley Sutton:

How to find the top sponsored keywords for a niche or a groove of products. Why is this important? How can this help you? If you are trying to enter a niche where you haven't run PPC ads before, you might not have the best idea about what are the most important keywords to advertise for. But if you're going into a niche where there's competitors who have been on there a few months or a few years, theoretically speaking, maybe they have already gone through a lot of auto campaigns and they know what the best converting keywords are. So if you look at where they are focusing their spend, where they are focusing on top of search, where they're showing up on page one in the sponsored results, it can actually help you go ahead and start from date one to be focusing on the right keywords in sponsored ads.

Bradley Sutton:

So how can you do that? Well, let's just say you did a multi-acent search, like I showed you in the last strategy, and you are looking at about four, five, six, seven or however many acents. What you're gonna want to do is you might want to look at sponsored rank count, and I like putting a minimum of two there. That means, hey, show me the keywords where at least two out of these competitors are advertising for you might wanna go three out of five instead of just two. Let's just start with two. And then sponsored rank average. You might want to choose between, let's just say one and 20, kind of like saying, hey, these are the keywords that if I take the average rank, they're on page one or two of sponsored ads, and then maybe I'll go ahead and do a search volume minimum of 300.

Bradley Sutton:

There's no magic numbers here, guys. You guys can play with these filters. That's why we have so many of them and, as you can see here, eight keywords came up for this coffin shelf niche and so I can see here coffin shelf, coffin shelves, mini coffin. If I look at the sponsored rank count, I could see how many people are advertising from the top players and then what the sponsored rank average is, and I could see some of these. Look at this one Cough and shelf. We've got somebody page one, position one, somebody page one position nine, eight and 10 in sponsored rank, and then one is 65. That brought down the average a little bit. This gives me a really quick way, within 30 seconds or less, to see who the top players are all kind of focused on in order to focus their PPC spend, and then you can definitely use that for your own PPC strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last strategy of the day how to find the keywords that most of the top competitors are sleeping on. Why is this important? How can it make you money? We talked earlier about how to find the top keywords for a niche, and that is just period. End of story. The top keywords just because a lot of the competitors are ranking for it doesn't make it a bad keyword. That actually makes it a good keyword. But, that being said, it's understandable to know that, hey, if all of the top competitors, all the top sellers in a certain niche, are all getting sales from this keyword because they're all ranked high, it's a very competitive keyword. Again, I reiterate, that doesn't mean it's a bad keyword or something you shouldn't have in your listing. You absolutely have to have the top keywords. But what about the keywords that maybe only one competitor or two competitors are getting sales from? This could be a potentially non-competitive keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, sometimes these keywords are a little bit less relevant to your product. An example might be like Gothic decor. Right, maybe only one or two competitors of coffin shelf are ranking for Gothic decor, but all the other products that you see when you search for Gothic decor? There are things like maybe like a spooky skull holder or some Gothic bed frame or some Gothic looking wall ornament or what have you. But here's the thing, the reason why sometimes certain keywords work for products you might not think are relevant.

Bradley Sutton:

Like maybe you didn't think that a coffin shelf is Gothic decor is that there are people out there who search for a keyword with different buyer intent. Right, there is maybe somebody who, in the back of their mind, they really do want a coffin shelf, but they don't call it a coffin shelf, they call it Gothic decor. So what they're looking for is a coffin shelf. So they type in Gothic decor. They see a whole bunch of random products. But if they're looking for a coffin shelf and only one or two products are coffin shelves on page one, guess what? Those one or two products have a 50-50 chance or a 100% chance if only one of them is ranking for it to get the sale, because all those other products on page one is kind of meaningless to that customer who went there with an intent to buy a coffin shelf. They just use a different keyword than most people. So this is why looking for these keywords while they might not be the top keywords that can get you sales, they're a great way to kind of like take advantage of special keywords that certain competitors out there have found that's relevant to their product and they're getting sales.

Bradley Sutton:

And now, instead of having to fight seven, eight, nine of your competitors for a sale, you're only fighting one or two competitors. How can you do that? Let's go ahead and hop into Cerebro. So if I did my multi-acent search that I've showed you guys how to do in the other strategies, all I have to do is hit one button for this, and it's the button at the top left that's called opportunity keywords. This puts in a kind of like preset filters that you can play around with later and it's telling me a competitor performance max five, and then only one competitor is ranking between one and 15.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so, as I can see, as you can see here, there are 12 keywords that came up. For example, one of them is Gothic shelf. Now, why did this keyword come up on this search but not the top keywords search? Well, if you look here, there are only. There is only one competitor here who is ranked between one and 15, and it's somebody rank 13. The rest of them were ranked on. You know, here's one that's 16, here's one at 76, one at 77, one at 96. So, only if I get on the top page of Gothic shelf, guess what? I am only fighting one competitor for that sale, for somebody who might buy a coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

You see how valuable this keyword list can go. If you want to, you know, fool around with some of these filters to narrow it in other ways. You can absolutely do that. But this is just a great way to see what we call opportunity keywords. Or maybe only one or two competitors getting only you know, maybe a couple sales here or there from this keyword because it might not be fully, fully relevant to the niche as a whole. But you're only gonna be fighting one or two people for sales for this keyword and usually you know all the top 10, 15, they all have a few of these keywords that they might be getting sales from. And now you can combine all of those top keywords into your listing and be one of the only ones that has all of those keywords in there and getting sales from them.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, as kind of an addendum to this strategy, some of these filters they're really great to use, just like get some insights right. So forget about that preset opportunity keywords filter, if I clear this, I really want you guys to play along, or play around with these filters here, which are number of competitors and competitor rank. All right, basically, the number of competitors filter means of how many ASINs do you want to hit a certain criteria that you are about to specify. So, as you can see, here I had put five ASINs. So maybe I say, hey, I just want to see the keywords where a minimum of one competitor any one of these, or all five of them, it doesn't matter is ranked between one and 10. So what I'm doing is I put number of competitors minimum one I don't put a maximum and then under the competitor rank filter, I put one and 10. Now this is going to show me all of the keywords where just any one, any two, any three, any four, any five of these ASINs are ranked between one and 10, and I came up with 83 keywords. So, as you see, guys, the possibilities are endless here.

Bradley Sutton:

With all of these filters, there is no one magic way that's going to get you the best keywords. Everybody has their own strategies. That's why we have these filters. But even that one could get you sales trying to look for keywords that at least just one of your competitors is getting sales from. All right, guys, that ends part two of our keyword research masterclass. We're going to have an unprecedented part three coming up soon, where we're going to show you the rest of the Cerebro strategies and we're even going to get into our other tool, magnet, to get you strategies that are going to give you sales that can help your business. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you in the next one.

 

#506 - 2024 Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass: Part 1

What if you could unlock the potential of keyword search volume to exponentially boost your sales on Amazon? Imagine using a comprehensive tool like Helium 10's Cerebro to not only identify the keywords a product ranks for but also understand the demand of a keyword, observe products gaining the most clicks and purchases, and even keep track of your competitors' PPC strategy. In this Seller Strategy Masterclass episode, we break down these complex strategies, which, if utilized wisely, could lead to extra sales amounting to thousands of dollars. 

In the realm of Amazon selling, understanding search volume and history is paramount. We guide you on how to capitalize on these essential metrics using Cerebro's robust features. Ever wondered how to leverage the power of reverse engineering the success of your competitors? We've got you covered! We dive into how to identify hot keywords in your niche, understand your competitors' PPC strategies, and find common roots among relevant keywords, all by harnessing the power of Helium 10’s Cerebro tool.

In our quest to empower Amazon sellers, we reveal new features and how to use the Cerebro IQ Score to identify profitable keywords and optimize their impact on your business. Plus, learn how the Amazon Recommended Rank can revolutionize your product listings. From the USA to Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates, and even the Walmart USA marketplace, these strategies are designed to supercharge your Amazon-selling experience. So, buckle up and join us for this riveting masterclass on Amazon seller strategies!

In episode 506 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:13 - A Seller Strategy Masterclass For Cerebro
• 06:11 - Using Helium 10's Cerebro to Analyze Amazon Keywords 
• 12:38 - Understanding Search Volume And History 
• 19:18 - Understanding Competitors' PPC Strategy 
• 22:59 - Finding Common Keywords on Amazon
• 26:35 - Optimizing Title Density for Amazon Rankings 
• 30:59 - Amazon Keyword Indexing 
• 45:02 - Frequently Bought Together Products in Cerebro

► 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

Helium 10 Buzz 11/2/23: Amazon Email Marketing | Premium A+ Update | Bad Review Removals

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.

Walmart Announces Black Friday Sale Details and Previews Early Deals
https://www.cnet.com/deals/walmart-announces-black-friday-sale-details-and-previews-early-deals/

EU Store Transparency Report
https://assets.aboutamazon.com/cd/28/4d02dd2e41ec8c6d1bc341e9d919/amazon-eu-store-transparency-report-jan-june-2023.pdf

Bad Review Removal
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/h10bradley_dont-remember-getting-this-notification-activity-7125484541426708481-WmJx/

Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit's collaboration with brands and law enforcement result in global raids
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazons-counterfeit-crimes-unit-successful-raids-worldwide

Exclusive: How Walmart is using AI to supercharge its holiday plans
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-how-walmart-is-using-ai-to-supercharge-its-holiday-plans-190849969.html?guccounter=1

Shopify merchants seek AI boost for key sales decisions
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/shopify-merchants-seek-ai-boost-key-sales-decisions-2023-11-01/

TikTok tests new ways to embed commerce into the in-app experience
https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/tiktok-tests-new-ways-embed-commerce-in-app-experience

And don't miss our deep dive on how to generate unlimited Amazon Post graphics using AI. Let’s discover how to elevate your business and create engaging content for your customers. It's an exciting time to be in e-commerce, and we're here to help you navigate it!

 

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

• 01:12 - Amazon MYCE
• 02:37 - Walmart Black Friday
• 03:38 - FBM Update
• 04:22 - Premium A+ Content
• 05:21 - Amazon EU Details
• 06:33 - UK SAS Program
• 07:24 - Bad Review Removal
• 08:22 - Amazon CCU
• 09:41 - AI Everywhere
• 12:30 - Follow Helium 10 x Pacvue on TikTok
• 13:05 - ProTraining: How to Generate Amazon Posts using AI
• 19:48 - Helium 10 New Features Alert
• 23:48 - Did Bradley Hit 1 Mile?

► 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's allowing sellers to send emails to customers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's new requirements for premium A plus content, amazon's now sending emails out when they remove bad reviews, and there's tons of new AI news in the e-commerce world. This and much more on this week's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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 weekly buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the e-commerce world this week. We also let you know what new features Helium 10 has and we give you 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? So first of all, if you're watching this on YouTube, you see I'm moving a lot. Well, I'm trying to be the first ever newscaster here to do a whole news segment while walking a mile on a treadmill. So that's what I'm doing. You guys know I've been trying to push health and wellness this year, so I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is and do some exercising here. Live on this show. My goal is to do one mile before this broadcast is over. Anyways, let's go ahead and hop right into the news. There's lots going on, all right. The first news article of the day is actually from Seller Central. It's on your dashboard and you may or may not have known this, but you can do marketing emails, all right. So now what you can do. This article here is talk is entitled increase visibility of your holiday deals with marketing emails. And so if you're a brand registered, you're able to use manage your customer engagement tool to you know market, to repeat purchases from existing customers and also your brand followers. Like you know, maybe you've gotten some brand followers thanks to Amazon Post, and if you take a look at this article, it talks about that. You're you can offer percentage off discounts, seven day deals and product launch announcement emails, and they're especially saying hey, you should try and do this during Black Friday and for Cyber Monday. So where you can do this, you can hit the link for manager experiments right there in that article. You go to your manager customer engagement page, you hit create campaign, you select your brand and then basically, what you can do is you can hit market product or promote a promotion and then you can market to recent customers brand followers or more and once you hit the next on this entry form, you're going to be able to pick your product and write the email, put the delivery window and more. So a lot of cool stuff that maybe you haven't taken advantage of, but if you've got some brand followers, you're going to be able to go ahead and take advantage of that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next article of the day is actually from CNET and it's entitled Walmart announces Black Friday sale details and previews early deal. So this is kind of like a cool because it gives you kind of like a timeline of what is going on on the Walmart side. So they've actually got multiple events. So, like the first one is actually starting Wednesday, November 8th, you know, super early, at 3pm Eastern time, and Walmart plus early access goes from 12pm Eastern time. The second event starts on November 22nd and then Cyber Monday, November 27th, and so I'm bringing this out because you know if Walmart is going to be pushing these deals, that means there's going to be more traffic on Walmart.com, and if you're selling on Walmart.com might be a great opportunity to do some kind of discount or promotion or just be expecting extra traffic, so don't think that you have all the way until Black Friday, Cyber Monday, in order to start getting some more traffic on Walmart. It's starting as early as November 8th, according to this article.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is also from your seller central dashboard and it's entitled update on default handling time for seller fulfilled orders. So if you're doing seller fulfilled or FBM, you know traditionally you've had like two days in order to fulfill the orders. But make sure to check your dashboard. There's some new news. It's talking about how more than 85% of seller fulfilled orders are shipped within one day. So it's going to start putting by default one day, all right for the order window, and so I think this, you know this could be good because, if I'm assuming that, if this happens now, customers are going to see one day less as far as the estimated delivery time and obviously that's going to help your conversion rate, theoretically speaking. So check out that update in your dashboard and see if that affects you.

Bradley Sutton:

Next update is again your seller central dashboard a lot of the news articles in your seller central dashboard that you need to be checking out and it's entitled update to premium A plus content eligibility requirements. All right, so the new update is that first of all, I think before you actually had to have like 15 approved A plus content modules to be eligible for premium A plus. Well, now All you need is five All right, so five in the last 12 months. And then also you need a brand story module published on all of your brand-owned product listing. So again, premium A plus content allows you to put like really unique information, like video and other things. So if you're able to do that, make sure to qualify yourself for that. You know, so you can also get, even if you only have one or two products. You can still get qualified by having that brand story and then doing five times, getting some kind of A plus content approved, even if it's for the same listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, there is an article from Amazon Europe and it goes it's just called a transparency report and it goes like super into detail about tons and tons of facts and figures of what's going on on Amazon Europe and, like you know what they do to protect sellers and things. But the thing I wanted to show is the number of monthly active users for Amazon on the customer side for each of the countries in the EU. Now, obviously, uk is not in the EU, so that's not here. But if you guys thought that the number one country was Germany, you would be right 60 million active users. What do you guys think is the number two country? Number two country is actually Italy at 38 million, number three is France at 34 million and number four is Spain at 25 million. Those are the only ones that are in that bracket. The next one is Austria, with five million monthly active users in that country and there's not even an Amazon Austria, so they're probably shopping on Amazon Germany or one of the other marketplaces. So again, check the link in the description below. Kind of interesting if you guys want to see this whole EU transparency report.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, again going right back to the seller central dashboard, but this time in Europe. All right, so if you are in Europe, you now are able to get a SAS or a strategic account services representative. You know sellers in the US have been using this to do tricks like what's called anything in the buy box. We've had that on the podcast before. But again, you UK and EU sellers, go to your seller central dashboard. You've got this notice. That's not on the US side, but you are now able to register here for the SAS plans and it's actually migrating a couple of the existing EU plans where you were able to have some kind of rep into this SAS core You'll rep service. So make sure to check the dashboard. You'll see a link that will allow you to go ahead and see if you can apply and then see if you qualify.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up there's this email that I got this week from Amazon. I hadn't seen it before. I'm not the only one who's gotten a lot of sellers I've been getting it some this week, some last week, some the week before where Amazon is now letting you know when they remove bad reviews or reviews from bad players on Amazon. So if you look, I put a link in the description on one of my LinkedIn posts where I talk about this. But here this is how the email looks. It says we remove product reviews from bad actors. All right Now, by bad actors. It doesn't mean Owen Wilson, sorry, bad joke, but anyways by bad actors. It means you know, whatever, they're probably abusing the system somehow. But I got an email that said hey, we notice there's some bad actors. We removed X and Y and Z reviews. You know happy selling pretty much. So I'm curious did you guys? Have you guys gotten this? Click the link below to my LinkedIn post and reply there. Let me know if you've gotten this email or not.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, for the next article, we have a theme song for it. Yes, we are talking about the Amazon department called the Amazon law and order CCU the counterfeit crimes unit. That actually is a real thing, guys Amazon counterfeit crime units. If you guys are listening on the radio or the your radio in your car or something, hopefully you heard the law and order theme song right there. But anyways, amazon has had this CCU, this counterfeit crime unit, where every month they seem to be doing new things to kind of crack down on counterfeits out there, and so they have a latest update that gives and kind of updates on the kinds of things that they've been doing. They did like raids, like crazy raids on with 150 Chinese law enforcements in China to like kind of like break down this smuggling ring on a bunch of fake products that were coming out. They took action against counterfeit rings across Europe. But this, this department, is doing some some cool things to try and break down on the bad players that are out there. So make sure to take a look at the link that we left in the comments below or in the description below, so you can see the kind of steps that Amazon has been taking to keep Amazon clean from the bad players.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the last few articles we're going to talk about are all about AI, and it's kind of crazy how AI is just taking over every marketplace, as being like in the news. Last week, as you guys know, we talked about the announcement on Amazon how they have now generative AI to help make images. We're actually going to have a demo of that in just a couple of minutes here. But now even Walmart is getting in on the AI. Bandwagon says how. This article from Yahoo Finance talks about how Walmart is using AI to supercharge its holiday plans, and it's talking about how they're using it to try and distribute the inventory across the country a little bit better across there, more than 4,000 stores and this is going to be able to allow them to deliver same day to more locations by having the right inventory in the right distribution centers and stores Again, a benefit for Amazon sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Moving on in this AI craze, there is an article out of Reuters about Shopify Says. Shopify merchants seek AI boost for key sales decisions. So make sure to check out this article, where it talks about Shopify's new kind of like features that are now featuring AI. And then, of course, not to be outdone, TikTok shop is testing new ways to embed commerce into the in-app experience, according to insiderintelligence.com. Now, this was almost the most interesting story for me, because they're rolling out this kind of like AI tool that can use AI to identify products in videos and suggest similar items for sales on its e-commerce marketplace. This isn't using the affiliate program.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, this is interesting because, like, what that means is, let's say, somebody has got a just dancing video or they're doing a Amazon or a TikTok shop or a TikTok live or something, and then, in the background, all right, they've got I don't know some barbecue. Well, it sounds like what's going to happen is the AI is going to try and like, detect if any TikTok shop seller has a that exact barbecue or something similar, and then give a suggestion to somebody who's watching this regular TikTok video hey, do you want to buy that product that you see in there? You know, I mean, people follow these influencers and they want to copy them. They want to have what they have. They want to have their same furniture or have their same phone case and stuff. Now, without the influencer even promoting directly other products, TikTok shop is going to be promoting other TikTok shop products from there. Now I think the influencers might get a little bit upset, because this article talks about that. They're not actually going to get any affiliate commission for this. Anyways, this is interesting Another way that AI is being used. All right, that's it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, before we get on into the next segment, one quick thing. Speaking of TikTok, do you know that Helium 10 has a TikTok page? Guys, make sure to go to it, add it. Go to your TikTok app, search for Helium 10 pack view. All right, helium 10 pack view, no spaces, and then you'll see tons of videos from our social media team. Like Sydney, we've also got clips from this podcast and we've also got educational content on there. So again, give us a follow, like a couple of the videos to help the algorithm. Helium 10 pack view is the name of our account. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we've got our training tip of the week, and this is a great one by Shivali. She's going to be talking about Amazon post, but did you guys know that you can actually have an infinite number for free of Amazon post, that you can post pictures every day and you don't have to make new images by yourself, or you don't have to take new pictures and you don't even have to make the captions. Guys, all right, it is completely done by AI, thanks to Amazon and thanks to Helium 10's new AI feature for Amazon posts. You guys want to find out how to do it. Shivali is going to explain how in this next video.

Shivali:

Hi there, Shivali. Here I want to talk to you about Amazon posts, which is a really powerful tool that you can use to elevate your business, create engaging content for your consumers, all while showcasing your products in a way that tells the story behind your brand. Now there are a lot like social media posts, but you can't just copy over the product listing copy and images. There has to be some intentionality, because it has to be visually appealing and attention grabbing. Let's take a look at an example. You can find Amazon posts by selecting the storefront underneath the product listing page and navigating to posts here. As you can see, it's not just a plain image with boring description. In fact, it's designed to be visually appealing and catch your attention, and that's what you really want. This brings me to my next point, which might answer your question, and that is what if I don't have a bunch of photos laying around from a fancy photo shoot? Well, that's what AI is for. You can use Generative AI to generate the content that you need. It can create images, captions and even suggest the best times to post for maximum visibility. It's kind of like having a creative assistant right at your fingertips, making your Amazon posts look like a million bucks, even if you're on a budget. I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to enhance your sponsored brand campaigns on Amazon. So I'm going to go ahead and navigate to my Advertising Panel, click Campaign Manager and, once I have that open, what you will want to do is select the sponsored brand campaign that you want to try this with. If you don't have one, no worries, you can just create a new active sponsored brand campaign and then, once that page has loaded, you are going to click on Create so Creative is on the left-hand paneling once again and then select Edit Creative.

Shivali:

Here comes the fun part. So you select Custom Image, click Change Image and then click Choose an AI-generated image. So this is in beta at the moment of recording, and what you will want to do is select whichever product that you want to try this with. I'm going to type in an image description, so this one's quite simple. It just says Product Hanging on Wall in a Bedroom, above the Bed with a Gothic Bed Frame. I would click Generate and ideally, what you would see on your end is multiple image options. Then you would go through and select the ones that you like that you find appealing. As you can see, we were given three outputs based off the query that we inputted, so I would then go ahead and open each one of these up and click Save to Creative Assets. I'll show you where these are getting saved in just a moment here, but let's go ahead and click Save for each one of these. All right, let's X out of that and then, once we have that stuff saved, it's going to be in Creative Tools, underneath Creative Assets, right here.

Shivali:

This, guys, is your gallery of images of your creative assets that you can really use anytime that you have generative AI images being saved. This is where they are being funneled. So what I'm going to do is just click this three dots icon and click Download and then, once I have that downloaded, I can then go into my brand content, go into Posts and begin creating a post. Let's select Manny's Mysterious Audities and then click Create Post and upload our image. Here I have the AI generated image, click Open and, as you can see, for us it's saying the image is too wide because, again, this design was built underneath our sponsored brand campaigns when we were trying to just generate AI based image. Keep in mind that this has saved us a lot of time and money and efforts in just being able to get images without actually having to do a photo shoot. So it's pretty simple to throw this image then into a sizing machine or even something as simple as Canva to resize it and then upload it.

Shivali:

After that I'm also going to need a caption. So what I'm going to do is go into our listing builder and as long as you have the product characteristics, the brand information, product name, tone, target audience, etc. Filled out at the top of your listing builder, then you can actually go all the way down to Amazon Posts or just select the tab right here and click Write it for me. I did already go ahead and click Write it for me, just to save a little bit of time so you guys can see it. But, as you can see, it's really good. This pulls from your keyword bank, it helps with your generated search volume and it absolutely makes your Amazon posts process a lot easier. Let's jump back into Amazon Posts and get that pasted in and once you have that part filled out, you can just add in your product. I'm going to click Add. Mine says out of stock, so it says one available. ASINs won't show in your post and posts have to have, of course, at least one ASIN in stock to be visible, but this was just an example. I wanted to go through and show you guys just how easy it is to generate images and captions so you can quickly create posts even if you don't have access to a wide gallery of images. Go ahead and click Submit for review. As long as you've followed along and you've created this with me, I hope you guys recognize that, with this new AI generation tool and the listing builder tool with Amazon Posts, now you really have access to a never ending supply of Amazon Posts. So with that, we look forward to seeing your content on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, thank you very much for that, Shivali. So, guys, that's available. I believe you might have to have diamond for some of that feature functionality inside of Listing Builder, the feature that she talked about for Amazon Post or creating those images that's pretty much open to anybody. So, guys, you, there's no reason anymore for you not to do Amazon Post. You can generate the images now for free and then, limited amount, you can generate captions for free, so you don't have to always be thinking about what am I going to write for a caption. So, guys, get into that now. And we've got announcements coming soon. Guys, that's going to make that process even more easy because we have an exclusive Helium 10 as an exclusive arrangement and access to a certain I can't really, you know, completely spill it, but a certain data point and a certain functionality that only Helium 10 has for the next few months, and we're going to try and give you guys that functionality as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up is a brand new feature that we're going to start doing weekly. Helium 10 is actually launching new features every week, guys. You know, sometimes you guys might not know everything that we're releasing. So here in the weekly buzz. Starting this week, we are going to start letting you guys know in a special video here what all we have launched in the last week so you can see if it benefits you and then make sure that you and your team use it. All right, so this week's Helium 10 new feature alert, let's hop right into it. The first one is actually on your dashboard in Helium 10. All right, or it's actually in a couple places. So you just go to your insights dashboard right here as soon as you log into Helium 10, if you've got the diamond plan on the above, you've got. You're going to see all of your information down here at the bottom. That's not new. What is new is that now, if you put your mouse over any of your products, you have this whole new widget of information that is going to come out where you can see the BSR in the parent category, the BSR in the sub category of your product, your listing age, you know who's, what seller has, the buy box, what your current price is, the review count. Now, that's for your product. So maybe you're thinking like, well, I already know all of my product stuff, but the other thing is on our competitors page. All right. So we have a competitors page now. If you're tracking your competitors, you can also again now mouse over and then you're going to see all of that same information. So that's a one cool thing that just got launched in Helium 10 insights dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

A couple of things now in Cerebro. If you're in Cerebro and you do a multi-ASIN search, one of my favorite filters were the advanced rank filters. Now they are no longer called advanced rank filters. I just wanted to let you know we change the name so it's a little bit more easier to understand what the advanced rank filters do is. It allows you to filter out and say, hey, I want to see at least this number of the competitor ASINs and this multi-ASIN search are ranking between this and this right? Well, now, now in those headings, if you guys want to find those features, it's right down here and it's called number of competitors. This is the filter the artist, formerly known as advanced rank filter, one which really kind of like confused some people. So again, what you're looking for is number of competitors, and then you put a minimum and maximum here of of how many of the competitors you want to kind of be ranking a certain range. All right, so if you put in 10 competitors and then you put a minimum of two and a maximum of five, basically, what you're saying is, hey, of these 10 competitors, I want minimum two and maximum five of them to be ranking between X and Y. And that's where you go to the very next field, which is called competitor rank. So you can say, hey, I want these to be ranking between one and 20. I want to know all the keywords, or at least two of these competitors, but a maximum of five are ranked page one, position one to 20. So, again, this is not a new filter. Is this a new name? And I'm just kind of reminding you guys about it. Again, it's called number of competitors and competitor rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if I actually go in and hit the show historical trend, we've got a small update feature there. This comes directly from you guys. So if I hit this, I can actually go in and pull out hey, show me the certain ranks, let's say, of June 2022. And now what you see? When you see this search volume, like before, we just picked the last week of this month. All right, so this is showing me the ranks of all of these products during the month of June of 2023. But now what this search volume represents that you see in the search results. Again, this is by, you know, customer request. It is now showing for that month of June, the week that had the highest search volume. All right, so 1468 was what the highest search volume was during the month of June. All right, that's it for this week's Helium 10 new feature alerts. Well, guys, that's also it for this week's Weekly Buzz. As you can see, I didn't hit my one mile goal here on my Apple watch. I only got 0.67 miles in. I'm going to have to keep walking for the next 20 minutes to hit that one mile. Anyways, guys, thanks for tuning in this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#505 - Amazon Launch Strategy + Q&A Session

Unlock the secret to a successful Amazon launch strategy in our latest episode, where we discuss the fundamental aspects of the Maldives Honeymoon launch and Bali Blast pre-launch strategies, including keyword research, test listings, PPC campaign setup, and much more. We promise to equip you with an arsenal of tips, tricks, and strategies to help your product launch be successful. We'll kick off with the importance of sending relevant signals to Amazon, particularly when exploring a new niche - a component many entrepreneurs often overlook.

Shifting gears, we'll discuss how the Amazon Recommended Rank can be your secret weapon in product visibility. We'll walk you through optimizing your test listings, and share real examples of how to enhance your titles and send targeted traffic to specific keywords. We're also sharing how this strategy works in the Amazon Germany marketplace and all other Amazon marketplaces in the world, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of different markets and how the strategy adapts accordingly.

Lastly, we'll dive deep into the world of Amazon PPC campaigns, bid modifiers, keyword tracking, and the power of product bundling. And if you're confused by Amazon fees or finding a reliable 3PL - we've got you covered. We'll explore fee structures, pricing strategies, and 3PL selection to ensure you’re set up for success. Plus, we'll answer all your burning questions in our monthly Q&A session. So buckle up for a jam-packed episode filled with actionable insights, personal anecdotes, and real-world examples designed to elevate your Amazon selling journey!

In episode 505 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 03:32 - Amazon Launch Strategy 
• 08:04 - Understanding Amazon Recommended Keywords 
• 11:29 - Maximizing Amazon Impressions
• 13:03 - Utilizing Test Listings for Product Launches
• 16:37 - Launching and Ranking Products in Amazon Germany 
• 25:59 - Surviving and Thriving Amidst Price Wars 
• 28:31 - Launching a Product and 3PL Recommendations
• 31:25 - Launching Product at the Right Time 
• 34:19 - How To Get Monthly Q&A for Serious Sellers Club Members

► 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 recap strategy session on Amazon launches and we answer all of your questions live, such as how to do keyword research on combo product listings, how to set up PPC campaigns and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The freedom to get course, made by Kevin King, is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It's got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed, step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me forward slash freedom ticket. Don't forget that if you do sign up for a Helium 10 account, don't pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life.

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 a show that is our monthly ask me anything and presentation. So once a month we open this up to all of our Facebook groups and our YouTube channel etc. To open up to any questions that you guys might have for me about Helium 10 and a lot of the functions, but we always start out with like a mini training session as well. Now we actually have this every week in our Serious Sellers Club. So for our serious sellers club, which are automatically enrolled in, if you've been selling on Amazon for over a year and do at least $500,000 a year of revenue, you're in our serious sellers club. This is something we give to them, as well as our Helium 10 elite members, every week, but once a month we open it up to everybody. So that's what we're doing today. We want to make sure that you guys just get a little taste of what happens behind the scenes here. But anyways, what we're going to be I want to present on while you guys are getting your questions ready and putting them in the chat.

Bradley Sutton:

Is Amazon Launch Strategy, all right. So we just had episode 500 come out where we talk about a recap of the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, which that goes way, way more into detail on that. So you should definitely go to that episode 500 for a recap. And then another one that I want you guys to look at is what we call the Bolly Blast Strategy. That's like your prelaunch strategy. We just make up funny names for for stuff because it's easier to remember. But go back to episode 466 and 467. All right, episodes 466 and 467. You can go to h10.me forward slash 466 or h10.me forward slash 467 to go to those like prelaunch strategies about how to do your keyword research and how to set yourself up for success. But let's just focus for next. You know, five minutes or so on the, just the actual launch strategy, and I'm going to be doing this this week. I'm relaunching something and launching something. I'm always doing tests, as you guys know, and I'm going to be losing this exact strategy this week for this new launch. But basically, if you've done all the right keyword research, you know part of that Bolly Blast Strategy that I was talking about. Basically, what you want to do is is set your listing up to make sure that you have the most relevancy signals sent to Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, this is something new that we hadn't talked about in previous episodes of the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy. Right, we just said, hey, start your. You know, do the right research, start your listing, get ready to get ready to go and you know you're off to the races. But what I've noticed in the last year is a little bit of a I guess you could say algorithmic, you know, shift a little bit, where the effects of not being relevant from day one to Amazon is kind of like far reaching, like it's going to mean that you can't get, you can't get impressions in your PPC. Obviously you're not going to start ranking for certain keywords. And so one of the new things that I have been suggesting when you're launching, especially in niches that are not that competitive and that there's not that much, you know, established sellers, this is probably not the same thing as launching for collagen peptides or garlic press or something like. Or you know, neck pillow or something like that. Like, I would think that if you have optimized your listing the right way, probably Amazon knows what you are from day zero or from day one, right, but even in that situation it's not 100%. But especially if you're in a newer niche where there's not that much data out there, any little thing could mean that Amazon is coming completely confused about your product. And this is how I discovered that.

Bradley Sutton:

So I did some testing, test launches on this coffin bath tray, like a think of like a regular bath tray where you're just chilling your bathtub. You got a tray that goes over your your bathtub and you put your candles on there and your books or whatever. So I had some, some test products that I was launching and from day one, like I could not get, it didn't rank me right away for coffin bath tray and I wasn't even getting that many impressions in PPC, if any. So some some zero at all on some keywords that were highly relevant to coffin bath tray, which is what the product was, and it's not like oh, I didn't make my listing in the correct way or anything like. No, I had this in my title, I had that keyword in other places in my listing. I did the list. Trust me, guys, I did the listing the right way. By the way, I'm sure this has happened to you guys. How many of you guys have launched a product in the last year or two where you're one of your, some of your main keywords? You couldn't get impressions in PPC or it was like impossible to rank in the beginning. Has that ever happened to you? I'm sure it has. But basically now there's a way to predict that.

Bradley Sutton:

So you look at Amazon recommended rank this is in helium 10. All right, this is in helium 10, uh cerebro. That is actually a live feed from Amazon. Now there's no, there's no metric in Amazon called Amazon recommended. We made that name up, but where that data comes from is directly from Amazon. It's in real time, all right. It's not some estimation or some aggregate uh information. It is actually uh directly from Amazon in real time, and what it's referring to is is which keywords Amazon thinks is most relevant to your listing. Now, in the past, this one data point that we've been getting for years, it was only for in the context of Amazon PPC. All right, it's the keywords that Amazon suggests that you uh advertise for the most in PPC, but now it's kind of more.

Bradley Sutton:

For over the last year I've been noticing these, this trend, where it's a great indication of just in general, what Amazon thinks your product is. All right, you know what. I wasn't planning to do this, but but let's go ahead and and maybe just do a live demonstration Throw me a random product in the chat that that's got some, um, that's got some decent reviews. It's been on Amazon for a while, like maybe it's got a thousand reviews or more, where the keyword should be kind of obvious what Amazon thinks uh for. All right, here we go. I see somebody threw in something.

Bradley Sutton:

Aubrey says recipe box. All right, let me look that up. Recipe box or book box? I guess it's a box. I never heard of this uh product before. I think I think I, um, I misspelled it, but that's fine, all right, let me. Let me just show you guys what we're looking at here. All right, here we go. So this is a recipe box. All right, let's pick one that has a lot of reviews. Uh, heart and berry recipe box. It's kind of weird, though it hasn't had that many sales at least. Oh, there are 200 sales for this one. Um, 300 sales for this one. Let's maybe use this one right here. All right, sensory for you recipe box. That's pretty hilarious. Let's just take a look at this box really quick. Okay, I see what this is. All right, now I'm going to put this into helium 10's cerebro. Let's go ahead and go into cerebro here. All right, here we go. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So now, as you guys know, the the regular helium 10, you know, we've got all of our organic keywords and and sponsored and and and all that information. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to sort by Amazon recommended rank. That's one of these columns right here. Okay, you guys see that right here. All right, amazon recommended rank by me sorting it right when it goes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. What this means is this is the the top keywords that Amazon thinks you should advertise for. But take a look at these top keywords, guys. Look at this 10 recipe box. Recipe box. Recipe keeper box. Recipe box cute. Is Amazon confused about this product? No, absolutely not. It knows exactly what this is. All right. Now I don't know if this is going to work. I'm just going to go and pick an older, an older listing here.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go to like to page something that's not doing very good for recipe box. Let's go to like to page three. Maybe there's a brand new product here. Let's see, is there? Is there still a box that allows me to choose the top new products? There used to be a filter here that says like brand new products. Maybe it's not here anymore. Oh, here are new arrivals last 30 days. Let's take a look at this. All right, so this is last 30 days. Okay, perfect. Now I'm going to go to like something that's like way at the end here, like that's not ranked on page one, something that was brand new. All right, here we go. This is not a recipe box, but this is a tea leaf storage container. All right, let's take a look at this. I'm going to take this asin right here, copy this. Actually, I'm just going to run it directly in Cerebro. I'm going to hit this button and go run in Cerebro. So this is not a recipe box, obviously, but it's a. It's a newer product and if I'm looking at this, this product, it looks like a rectangular tea. Oh, tea leaf storage in here. That's probably what this product is. All right, but I'm just curious what is Amazon going to think that this is? Let's take a look right now. All right, let's go to Amazon Recommended and again, I obviously did not choose any of this. I have never looked at tea leaf boxes in my life here. But let's go ahead and do the same thing where we sort by Amazon Recommended rank and look at this. All right, this is not too bad.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the number one keyword this has made a little bit worried. It says coffee tea, and the number two keyword says storage container. But there it is right. There. Tea box is number four tea storage, but a lot of okay. So this kind of is a good. This kind of is a good example here guys, look at. Do you remember how on the recipe box, how in the recipe box all of these keywords had recipe box, the top recommended rank, like there's no doubt what Amazon thinks is this product. But notice this newer product. It's got some random stuff here. Like it does have the good keywords here. But then look at this. It says can storage is the number three keyword, coffee container it's not necessarily a coffee container. Seal container T10, okay, well, t10 might be a good one. Empty tins all right. So this is interesting here because, as you can see this newer product, can you see how Amazon is a little bit confused, maybe about what it is? All right. So that's why, right here, how this can be powerful.

Bradley Sutton:

What I suggest doing when you are how does this tie into launch? All right, what I suggest doing is do a test listing, all right, because if Amazon is confused about your product, guess what's gonna happen as soon as you launch it day one. You're not gonna get top impressions right away for a keyword that Amazon doesn't think is your product, right? Sometimes it takes a little tweaking, like should you maybe tweak a little bit of your listing optimization to make it more relevant. Yeah, you gotta tweak that to get this Amazon recommended number fairly high and to see if you can get these impressions. So when you do a test listing, this is the reason why Number one is for Amazon recommended. Number two is to make sure that from day one you're gonna start getting impressions. Now, if your Amazon recommended is non-existent for an important keyword, it's probably it's gonna be difficult usually to get those PPC impressions.

Bradley Sutton:

So now the question comes in well, what can you do to influence the Amazon recommended rank? Well, sometimes it is about listing optimization. Usually, if you don't have any of your title, you having your title, well then Amazon will figure out what it is. Sometimes it's sending traffic to a certain keyword search. We talk about that a little bit in episode 500, about the kind of things you can do to make sure that Amazon gets that relevancy signal. But the point of this discussion is about making that test listing. Is, if you just launch your product and you're having to figure things, these things out, like all right, how do I send this relevancy signal? Do I need to change a part of my listing somewhere to make sure Amazon knows where my product is. And let me do this test wait an hour for it to update. All right, let me see. Does this have an effect on my PPC? What's happening during this time? Time is being wasted right In, like your honeymoon period and initial velocity.

Bradley Sutton:

You want to kind of like start off your product with a bang from day one, where you're potentially getting clicks and sales and ads of carts and different things from organic customers out there. Well, if you're having to spend all your time trying to fix things, you're accumulating days of bad like interactions with your listing right and then so it's gonna be that much harder to write the ship. So that's why in episode 500, I was recommending people to make this test listing do all these like test and figure this stuff out beforehand like on a quote unquote fake listing. Now, when I say fake listing, you still have to have a real UPC. So you have to pay 10, 20 bucks for a UPC. You're wasting, but for me it's invaluable.

Bradley Sutton:

Testing, get everything right so that you know what you need to do to your listing to get your Amazon recommended. Rank up what you need to do to your listing to get those PPC impressions, and then now on your real listing from day one day zero. Now you're starting off on the right foot, and sometimes it's not just about optimizing your listing. It might be that you have to send some traffic to a certain keyword. Well, at least, instead of trying to figure out what that traffic is, you already figured it out on your test listing and now you can just go ahead and start off doing that from as soon as you make your listing live. So again, that's just like a summary of the. You know the recent differences in the Maldives Honeymoon strategy. Again, go back to h10.me forward slash 500 to get you know all the details, and then I show some of my, or I talk about some of my tests. I did that that brought me to this conclusion, but I hope that is going to that episode, plus the 466 and 467 about how to set up your listing, should help you have a good launch. You know whether you're launching here in Q4 or going to launch in Q1, these strategies definitely should help you.

Bradley Sutton:

So now what I want to do is open it up to questions. Okay, js says how do you run a test listing before you order inventory? No, no, this is not before you order inventory. This is you've already got your inventory ready to go and it's probably in Amazon almost, or on the way to Amazon. At least it could be at any time during this time. It could be before you order inventory, but to me I wouldn't do it. That that's way too far in advance. I would do this test listing like one week before you're ready to actually launch, and the reason is is you want the freshest information. You know you want to do something three months beforehand and then basically it's out of date by the time you're launching three months later, right? So this strategy is to have all inventory handy and start with a dummy listing. Yes, that's what I do. That's what I'm literally doing, literally today. I'm doing that on one launch. I'm relaunching some holiday related products that are going to be good in December, and so I'm doing a test listing to just like check what's going on right now. But, like, the product is already on the way to Amazon from my warehouse in California, so it's going to be there in like four or five days. So, yeah, that's what's going on there. Good question Farhand says if we launch in Germany, then what strategy is the same strategy?

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so everything that I just showed you guys right now. You can also do for Amazon, germany, as far as looking at the Amazon recommended, and Cerebro, as far as you know, sending the traffic you know to your listing. Everything I mentioned today absolutely is applicable to the German market. Here we've got somebody who said how to rank a product which is a combo of two different products. Okay, great question. So there's different ways to do it. All right, and I've done it both ways. I've done a product where I have the exact same product and I make two separate Asins for it because the keywords that can go for it are different, and I was just like you know what I want to kind of like tailor, make my listing and the image and the copy for people searching for this thing, but the product could be used for something completely different and so I made a completely separate listing for that. So that's one way to do it, not very recommended unless you're in a very niche thing, like I am, if you've got like two products, like I don't know, like I'm looking here at my desk, like like headphones and a microphone right Now.

Bradley Sutton:

Number one you want to make sure that you are relevant for the customer who is most likely to buy that product and who is the customer that's most likely to buy a headphone and microphone combo? It is somebody searching for headphone and microphone. So you've got to find the keywords most related to somebody looking for that combo, right, which is different for every product. Obviously it could be for this one, it could be podcast, podcast beginners kit or something Headphone and microphone combo, right. Those are words specifically for somebody buying a microphone. But then what I think you're asking is sometimes maybe somebody's searching for headphones but they're like oh, there's headphones and microphone together. I might go ahead and buy that. Well, yeah, now you've got to optimize and be ready for those headphone only related keywords and the microphone only related keywords. So it's kind of like you are doing three different keyword research. You're doing the research on other products and other keywords that have already the same combo that you have. You're doing research on the ones that have just one of the products and a research on ones that have the other one of the products, and then what you're going to want to launch on for me is going to be still the keywords. That is most likely to get you a sale and that's going to be on the combo products, right. So, or the combo keywords. So that would be my suggestion to you there.

Bradley Sutton:

Great question from Dan says is there a Helium 10 workflow chart checklist to help launch a new product on Amazon? It's pretty much that, that, those podcast episodes I mentioned. Now we're going to make that into like a PDF form soon. A lot of customers have been asking for that. But if you want to like it to go through a checklist to make sure you've done, you've done everything you can on the keyword research, you've done everything you have on the listing optimization, again, go to episode 466, then 467 and then 500. And those three episodes is kind of like my virtual checklist of everything you need to do, from the keyword research to listing optimization, pre-launch and then launch.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that the CLA says Bradley, what do you suggest? Create a campaign with each ad with all three match types, or create one campaign with one ad group containing all three match types? I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding, but if I understand what you're saying, basically what I would do is or what I would do what I do do is I make separate campaigns, each with one ad group, and it's a different match type. So I always start with one exact match campaign. Okay, I have another campaign that is a broad match. Usually. I have another campaign that's auto, and then I'll have two different product targeting campaigns. One is an asin targeting campaign and then one which, and then one that is a sponsor display campaign. But yeah, if you're talking, if that's what you meant by the match types you know, like broad, exact and auto, yes, I always keep those in separate campaigns, personally, in atomic Of course I'm talking about.

Bradley Sutton:

Kassar says new launch in Canada market. Give me some tips about how to rank in Canada. 100% the same. So everything Kassar, that I said today about launch, I obviously was talking about the US market, but that would be the. That would be also the Canadian market, german market, whatever you're launching, and you would use those same strategies. Everything works. Or back to Dota says I have gold cross necklace as phrase, match and gold cross necklace as exact in the same ad group. At which point should a performing keyword be moved as an exact keyword? Yeah, so, so again, for me, I wouldn't have that when I set up my campaigns. And helium 10, atomic, I keep the, the, the match types separate, all right. So what, what I'm going to have is I'm going to have a. Let's just say I don't have gold cross necklace as an exact match, but I have gold cross. Gold cross, all right, or no? No, no, let me say gold necklace as a phrase match, right? Okay, I set up atomic rules to say if I get two orders at a certain a cost or below, to go ahead and suggest to get that and make it an exact match in my Exact campaign. So then, if gold cross necklace, which is a phrase match from gold necklace, if gold cross necklace gave me two orders at 25% a cost or whatever you know I had chosen for that, it's gonna actually suggest to me to hit a button and it's gonna move it to my exact match campaign which again, is separate from my phrase match campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Very important, in my opinion, to keep things separately for this reason, so that you could kind of like segregate what's going on as far as the a different, as far as your different campaigns and match types go. Constance says, when creating a new manual exact single word campaign, would you suggest to go above the suggested bid and do placement strategy a hundred percent for product pages and top of search to collect data or burn money? Yeah, somebody asked me this before. I'm old school, alright. So me personally, I don't use the placement strategy. That does not mean that it's bad or that you shouldn't do it, it's just because I have a system that's been working for me for years where I just changed my actual bid instead of doing the placement. You know, you know the bid modifiers and it works for me. Now, if you want to play with the, you know the top of search and stuff like that, there is nothing wrong with that. I know plenty of a very successful Amazon sellers who use that. But me personally, I keep everything in atomic, just strictly about the, the bid, and I'm looking at my keyword ranks right In atomic you can actually see, if you're tracking that keyword and keyword tracker, where you are ranking and sponsored. So that's why it's easy for me to like just modify my bid, because if I have boost on and keyword tracker, I know exactly where my sponsor that is showing up, if it's showing up in in 10th or 15th or 1st or 2nd, and so I know that. Alright, let me raise my bid up. Alright, then I'll get a little bit higher rank theoretically, alright. So that's that question.

Bradley Sutton:

Dauda says Bradley, how can we get a one-on-one call with you? So this is for helium 10 elite member. So I do one-on-one calls Once a month with any helium 10 member who wants it, and there's also group calls we have. So if you're part of helium 10 elite program, yes, you can have one-on-one calls with myself and also carry. Alright, daniel says my product is a two-piece set One main product and one complimentary product. I made sure that both are purchased together and I'm using 80% keywords for the main product and 20% for the complimentary. So wait, daniel, is your ace in just one ace in, or are you having people or do you have some kind of deal where it's like buy one and then Get this one for X percent off or something? If both of you, if this is just one ace in, daniel, what you want to do is Exactly what I said about 10 minutes ago. I don't know if you caught that, just rewind on this, but you want to make sure that that you're focusing on the Combo keywords, where people might be searching for both together, and then, yeah, going For the individual keywords as well, because sometimes this is differentiation. Maybe you, maybe there are no combo keywords out there and you just put this bundle together because you know that people will probably buy it, even if they search for just one, then yeah, then all you have to worry about is the individual Keywords. I'm not sure about 80% keywords for the main product and 20% for the complimentary. It depends on what you think has the most search volume for somebody who would buy that product, because maybe the people who buy the complimentary product are more likely to buy the combo and in that sense, you shouldn't just be Giving it 20% of the keyword keyword juice. Right there.

Bradley Sutton:

Kassar says when a good selling product, people start the price war, how to survive to maintain your organic rank in the product. Yeah, well, first of all, sometimes you just can't. Let me just say that right now. I know that's bad news for some of you. Sometimes it just gets so crazy that you just can't make money. You're just gonna have to cut that product after you sell out, all right. That being said, you know, like the coffin shelf right now for Project X, we've got tons and tons of competition and they're just doing some ridiculous pricing. You know, like we're, there's no way they're making money on it due to I know what shipping costs, right? So what I decided to do? I'm doing the opposite. I'm going up in price. I'm raising the price by like three or four or five dollars and I added about three or four or five dollars of cost To my product because I'm expanding out, like I'm doing some like really cool box that I'm going to use and I'm adding some trinkets to the coffin shelf to, and so my theory is that, hey, I'm gonna catch the customers who are looking for a more premium style of product and if this doesn't work, you know what? There might come to be a day where I have to stop selling the coffin shelf, and right now I can still sell it for a higher price. But if sales ever go down to zero, I am not gonna get in a price war. You know where. I'm not gonna put the coffin shelf for 19 dollars when I used to sell it for 32 dollars. No, so sometimes you just can't Compete. At that you you'll have to cut the courts. But Enhance your product with different, with different things, and go for that more premium look, and you know you could have some some action there.

Bradley Sutton:

Mario says Quick question Should I negate an important keyword for my product after having spent 25 dollars on it and zero sales, when the product itself is 40 dollars? This is a good question. Now, if you, if it's one of the main keywords like this is what people would search, before just blindly negating it, you've got to figure out why people are not converting. All right, so I would look in search query performance for that keyword and look at the Competitors who are getting high clicks. You don't know who's getting high purchases, so you know you could do that. You could look in brand analytics and see who is the top three Clicked and then is there one of them who is getting a lot of sales. And then I'll just take a look at that listing and ask yourself why is somebody clicking on my competitors listing after searching for the same keyword and they're buying my competitor product but not mine. So you've got to ask yourself what is the reason why they're not.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if it's a keyword that you just think is relevant to your product, are you were hoping is relevant to your product? Well, in that case you might have been wrong. So, where that cutoff is for you $25, you know if that, if you got, for me it's almost more important the number of clicks. Now, of course it's important how much you spend, but if I only got 10 clicks and that was what cost $25. That might not be enough data to say, hey, I need to negate it. So it should be like 2025 clicks, 30 clicks even, or yeah, if you get 30 clicks and you don't get a sale, you're probably not gonna get a sale. And again, all of this can be done right there in atomic, so you don't have to. You know, look at this manual. Amazon is regularly increasing different types of fees and squeezing the profits. Please guide on pricing strategy while remaining in Competition. So so, yeah, this is why you have to have your helium 10 profits Active and connected to your account and be monitoring that, because you've got to really keep an eye on the PPC cost. You know the other fees no, amazon is not charging that much. You know Amazon increases fees, but it's it's pennies that that Amazon increases.

Bradley Sutton:

If that affects you, you've got bigger problems. All right. If Amazon increasing the fulfillment on something from 73 cents to 81 cents and that kills your bottom line, you've got some other problems. That's different than just Amazon, all right. The one that really affected some people, which I can empathize with, is Amazon doing away with the small and light program that really affected me. That wasn't just a matter of pennies. You know that's like a dollar worth of profit off of our bottom lines a lot of us, you know, if we didn't do anything. So it's very important to make sure that that is. That is a setup. All right, we got one more. Ali is in the green room. We'll bring up Ali to the stage. Ali, how's it going? Hey Brad, how are you Pretty good on yourself? Excellent, yep, go ahead.

Ali:

So I'm just launching my new product. I just wanted to know that, is it better to launch in the fourth quarter or should I wait till January and then launch it? Because you know, right now the competition is really high and the sales are high, but my budget is not that much. Initially I have the budget, but I'm trying not to spend too much so that I can, you know, learn the game first and then go big.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it depends. It depends on on on the market. You know like if you've got a product that is still gonna, you know like if you're selling a Christmas tree ornament, well you better launch it now because you know you're not gonna do very well in January. But if it's something that is too expensive to launch now, because the traffic is so high that the amount of sales it's gonna take to get to you to page one is is going to be too much, that's a personal decision. You know you might have to wait.

Ali:

Yeah, page one, you know there's not a lot of reviews on. The maximum number of reviews are like 100 or 150 or something, but the search volume is a lot and it says not a seasonal product. So I think it would do well in any season. That is the thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, so those. That's the thing. You have to wait because the other thing is, like you said, maybe the search volume is very high right now, meaning it'll be very expensive to launch, but if this is the window where People have 50 and 75 and 100 reviews, but if you wait until February, everybody now all of a sudden has 400 views, yeah well, it's still gonna be expensive now because it's gonna. It's gonna cost you more to get you know, to get the velocity. So so there's, there's almost no right or wrong answer per se.

Ali:

Yeah, I mean personally.

Bradley Sutton:

I have never, ever, waited until Q1 to launch something. If I have something, I have the product in here and it's October, November, I'll go ahead, and I'll go ahead and launch it.

Ali:

Okay, so can I ask one more question? Okay, I decided to go through the PA 3PL route. You know I'm not I'm not delivering the product directly to Amazon. So I was looking into it and I really can't find some reliable website or somewhere to find 3PL. So do you have any ideas about that? Although that's a very immature question, but I did just try out hubhealyum10.com.

Bradley Sutton:

So there are some 3PLs there, hub.helium10.com and the Helium 10 users have like reviewed some of them, so I would take a look at the ones, look at the reviews and then go from there.

Ali:

Okay yeah, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Dan says this listing builder have all the features of screw, but you shouldn't be using. No, nobody, guys should be using scribbles anymore. I don't even know why we have that tool still active, like, like listing builder 100% took it over and it's way better than scribbles, all right. So, yeah, you should only use a listing builder. And if you have trouble syncing the listing Check with support, you know, make sure that you the the SKU that you're editing. All right, make sure that it is the original contribution skew. All right, make sure it's the original contribution skew, otherwise it's not gonna sink. But yeah, when, whenever I have trouble getting a listing updated, usually actually in listing builder, it actually updates better than if I try and do it myself.

Bradley Sutton:

A real estate Emporium says if our product is selling good, you recommend adding new variations or more products in the same niche. No right or wrong answer here. It's different for everything you got to choose. I've done both ways Before. Where I've added new variations, like a new colors, because I see the demand Sometimes, I'll just, instead of that, I'll launch a new product like, instead of a regular egg tree, a stackable egg shelf. So you can go both ways. That's a beauty about Amazon. All right, guys, that's all the time we have today. I was glad I was able to get to a lot of questions. Sometimes it takes you guys just a little bit to get Loosened up to be able to ask questions. So thank you guys, very much for joining us again. This is something we do every single week for our Serious Sellers Club and Helium 10 Elite members, but once a month we open it up and we repurpose this as a podcast episode. So thank you guys for joining us and we'll see you again next month when we open up this. Ask me anything. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good rest of your day.

#504 - Amazon Unboxed 2023 New Releases

Join us for a fascinating discussion as we unpack Amazon unBoxed 2023, exploring the most exciting releases such as generative AI and more that can level up your advertising game. Our co-host from Pacvue, Anne Harrell provides us with a unique perspective on the advertising industry. Let’s start with our chat with Jeff Cohen, Principal Evangelist, Advertising API at Amazon, as he shares his transition journey and the biggest differences he's noticed.

Listen in as we dive into the role of ad tech in digital transformation and its implications for brands. We examine Amazon Ads' new offerings like generative AI and sponsored TV, which promise to revolutionize brand imagery and audience engagement. Get the inside scoop on Amazon PPC and new-to-brand metrics that could redefine your brand's success measurement. We also explore Amazon Publisher Cloud, a game-changing technology for publishers that promises unique and differentiated opportunities for advertisers.

Get to know Miranda Chen, the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, as she walks us through its potential. Learn how lookalike audiences can help your brand reach new customers and how templatized analytics can make AMC more accessible. We also examine Amazon Marketing Stream and Rapid Retail Analytics, which provide valuable data on retail signals. Discover how sponsored products can appear on platforms like Pinterest and the features that make Amazon's new Sponsored TV offering a game-changer. All this and more, right here on our podcast!

 

In episode 504 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Anne, and our special guests discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon unBoxed 2023
• 04:31 - Insights on Amazon and Advertising Growth
• 08:29 - Sponsored TV and Ad Tech Announcements
• 12:29 - Embracing Change in Amazon Advertising
• 20:40 - Amazon Advertising Full Funnel Solutions
• 23:39 - Benefits and Capabilities of Demandside Platforms
• 28:25 - Lookalike Audiences for Reaching New Customers
• 34:59 - Amazon Marketing and Rapid Retail Analytics
• 41:15 - Amazon's Sponsored TV Announcement

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a special episode here at Amazon Unbox 2023 where we're going to talk about all of their releases, like generative AI and sponsored brand hats, and also a lot of cool things like sponsored TV. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10 I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're here at Amazon Unboxed in New York. I've been on the road for like three weeks and there's a second there where I wasn't quite sure where. I was. I've been in so many countries lately, but we've got a co-host today and from Pacvue, and how's it going?

Anne:

Great. How are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

I'm just delightful. Now, what is your background? What do you do at Pacvue?

Anne:

Yeah, so I'm a product solutions director for DSP at Pacvue, so I do basically anything related to DSP and AMC help with our product road mapping, help with strategy for some of our enterprise level clients doing customer within AMC marketing you name it, I probably do it.

Bradley Sutton:

How long have you been at Pacvue?

Anne:

I've been at Pacvue for coming up on four years now, so about three and a half years total. A lot has changed since I joined. I started at Pacvue focusing on our managed services team, so I was primarily working with some of our strategic accounts, helping to build out their capabilities, doing strategy not just for DSP but across kind of omni-channel focuses, so for search as well. Prior to working at Pacvue, I actually worked in an agency in Austin, Texas, where I'm normally based, where I again did omni-channel strategy for enterprise level accounts. So my background is not just with programmatic and DSP, but I really gravitated to it. It's just one of those types of advertising channels that really allows you to have a lot of flexibility and creativity and really is conducive to innovation. So I really enjoy working on the DSP side of things.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now what did you go to school for?

Anne:

I went to school for advertising, so I think I'm in the right place.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you're right. Where did you go to school at?

Anne:

It's called St Edward's University. It's in Austin, Texas. So I've been in Austin since I went to school and I just never left about a decade.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I was about to say, because you don't sound like you were born and raised in Austin.

Anne:

I was not Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

What were you born and raised?

Anne:

Well, where I was born was Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but raised is a harder question. I moved about 10 times before I graduated high school. So you pick a state, I probably was raised there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, yeah, because I was like wait a minute, she doesn't sound like a native Texan here.

Anne:

I know no accent yet.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, maybe 15, 20 years from now you might have a little twang in here.

Anne:

Right, right, I actually have a little bit of a Southern accent, I think I kind of got rid of it as I moved around.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now what are you? We're going to be talking to some people that probably people have never heard of podcasts, right? You know there are exactly executives here at Amazon who are you most excited to talk to today.

Anne:

If I were to have to say, my favorite subject matter is definitely the DSP AMC side of things, and I know that we're speaking to Kelly, who's the VP of DSP, so that's obviously a great place to start. We're also going to speak to Miranda, who is a director for AMC at Amazon, so I think there's going to be a lot of really great content around that. But in general, we're also talking to a lot of people who are very broadly focused across all of ads, and so I think we'll have something for everyone in this one.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so you guys might be. There might be some newbies out there, don't tune out. This is stuff that you're going to need to know If you're an advanced seller. We're going to talk about some stuff that you guys might be able to use right away. That was just announced this week at Amazon Unbox, so let's go ahead and hop right into the interviews, all right. First up, we've got my brother from another mother here, jeff Cohen. Jeff, how's it going?

Jeff:

Everything is great. So great to see you, so great to see the whole Helium 10 Pack View team at this conference. It's great to catch up with everybody.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Now you've been in the game longer than me. I remember the very first conference I spoke at. You were a speaker and you were already a veteran speaker at that time. You know side note that that conference there probably had the best food I've ever had at the conference. This is probably the second best Like.

Jeff:

I'm really impressed with the offerings here. Yeah, I'm curious what conference that is, but we don't have to go into that now.

Bradley Sutton:

But it was right here in New York. But you were on the SaaS side. You know, like I am now. Now you're at Amazon, like what's been the biggest you know kind of eye-opening thing or difference, now that you're on the other side of the aisle.

Jeff:

Yeah, interesting because I always like to joke that you know I drink the Amazon Kool-Aid before I ever like came here. I've been an Amazon like fanboy since like 2005 when I started textbookscom and it's been interesting because I'm in a unique position where I can bring the outside in and the inside out, and I think that you know, one of the many things that I've learned is maybe like the patience that you have to have with Amazon Maybe I didn't have as much patience when I was on the outside and the amount of time that it takes for some of the things to develop at Amazon. But when they like grow and they go to scale, it then moves at like this rocket ship pace. And so I think you're starting to see that with some of the tools, like AMC or even like you know what's happening with, like Amazon Studios and some of the new, you know productions that are coming out, you have this like rocket ship pace of what's happening in terms of the development and the new opportunities and how advertisers are using the technology, and so you have to kind of be patient when new things come out. So when you have a totally new product like Sponsored TV, you got to realize that it takes a little bit of time to kind of figure out how does it work into the individual advertisers media mix, and so that's the measurement work for each brand along the way. But then once it kind of gets up to full speed, you get to see like how it all works and you know and how it's really excelling brand growth.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, now we're going to be interviewing a lot of your colleagues here about some very specific announcements that happened here at Unboxed and before I ask you to give a rundown, you know, one of the things that was announced today it's on the website too is about the new generative AI that can help people doing Sponsored Brand Ads to generate some new creatives. Can you talk about that just a little bit?

Jeff:

Yeah, I think there were like three themes to the keynote today that I kind of jotted down. One was this idea of, like digital transformation and one was this idea of like how ad tech plays in in a responsible way. And then the third one was like how we reinvent, right, how we have reinvent what's possible. That was said numerous times, and I think Gen AI kind of fits into almost all three of those categories. And you know, we saw a lot of opportunity, a lot of new changes with Gen AI that have come out of AWS. We saw a lot of changes with Gen AI that came out of Amazon Accelerate, and now we're starting to see some come out of Amazon ads and I'll you know it's cool, right, we can take a product and we can turn that product into a full lifestyle image. And I think it's if you can just start to kind of think about where the possibilities go from there and what else brands can do and how we can enable that, either with what Amazon ads is doing or with what our partners are doing right, because it doesn't always have to be invented by us at Amazon it's really making it easier for brands to be able to take advantage of this technology that maybe was a little expensive or time consuming or difficult to use, and now it's all done with prompts and it's really simple and easy and that's really cool yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what about some of the other announcements? Say you have any. You know things that stick out that you're especially excited for.

Jeff:

Yeah, I think that what we're doing I mentioned it during our opening segment but Sponsored TV, I think is a really cool one and you know, in short, it's democratizing the ability for brands to be able to place ads into our streaming portfolio right so across Prime Video, free V and all the other channels that we have that I can't even remember them all because I'm supposed to think so quickly and I think that's really cool. And again, like there's no budget for that, you do have to have the creative, but Amazon has services that can help you make that creative or there's third parties that can help you make that creative. And I thought that was a really exciting announcement that was made, you know, on the heels of the announcement that was made a month ago. It was kind of reinforced about like what's happening with Prime Video and it moving to an ad supported network, creating a ton of, you know, new inventory for brands to begin to explore, and that's really super exciting as we start to go into it. And then there was like a bunch around ad tech and like what's happening around measurement and I know, like from you know, we're all near and dear to this idea that measurement is critical to our overall success and new metrics that are being released, making it available to understand how new to brand customers are impacting the business, and I think those are all really important for us to be thinking about because we have to close the loop. As advertisers and as we move to this cookie-less world right, it's signs point to it happening in 2024, we have to find ways to be able to close the funnel and understand how our ads are working, and Amazon's working really hard to help brands be able to do that, both within our suite and also when you're outside of our suite.

Anne:

Yeah, you mentioned the new. New to brand metrics, new to brand consideration metrics, I think is what we're calling them. Can you walk our listeners through what those really are?

Jeff:

Well, when you're looking at new to brand, right from like a super high level, new to brand is starting to give you this metric that's beyond ROAS, and it's starting to allow brands to look at who was not buying their brand within the last 12 months. Who's now buying their brand, and there's a suite of metrics now that are available for you to be looking at so that, as you're looking at different inflection points of your advertising, you can start to actually dial down into what action you're looking for people to take. And I think that's what's really cool. And it's like this evolution and brands have to think through this evolution like one of the simplest ways to think of this, right for people who maybe, like this concept's a little far for them. One of the simplest ways to think of this is around this idea that, like, if you're trying to get more awareness of your product, when you're looking at a video, you don't want to just see video views, you want to see how long they've been watching the video, and so you might start optimizing your campaign based on video length, how many people get to a half the video or three quarters of the video. And so, when you start to get into the new to brand type of metrics, you're actually saying, okay, I want incremental growth and by definition is, you know, sales you wouldn't have had before. One of the best ways to measure that is by people who are new to your brand, and so by having multiple metrics now to be able to understand how those are being impacted, you can now go back into tools like AMC and see how that funnel is working and which ones are driving the actual you know points that you want to drive and that that's really cool, right, it's, it's very excited about.

Anne:

I'm very excited too, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right. Last question for you know maybe not something that was released here at Unbox, but you know you're very active on LinkedIn. You see what people are posting about. You know I'm sure you look at metrics about what advertisers are using. Is there something in Amazon advertising that you feel is is kind of being slept on or not enough people are talking about it, that you think more people should be using it?

Jeff:

I mean more people should be using Helium 10 and Pacvue.

Bradley Sutton:

That goes without saying.

Jeff:

Okay, besides that, I think that you know, bradley, you and I get asked this question a lot, right? And? And our answer is always it depends. And I think that, instead of like saying, like this is a tool that you should be using or this is a a, an advertising function, you should be trying, I think that advertisers need to be open to the idea of test and learn, and I think the more you can train your mental model to work in a test and learn type of environment, the more open you are to change, because the only thing that's constant is going to be change. Right, and you started by saying like, where this industry was years ago when we both started, think about all the change that's happened and all the change that's occurred, and the brands that have not just survived but thrived through that are brands that have taken advantage of new opportunities, have invested by testing and learning and have then double down on the things that we're working. And I don't mean to oversimplify it, right, but it's not a very specific answer of like, use helium tens tool for keyword, blah, blah, blah, but it's like that's just one piece that you then use to implement the strategy. So work backwards. What's your goal. How are you gonna get there? And then figure out what tools you need to help you scale.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, well, jeff. Thank you so much for joining us. We've been trying to get you on the podcast for like two years. I'm happy it finally happened and we'll definitely be keeping in touch. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. All right, next up, we've got Kelly here. Now, Kelly, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us what you do at Amazon.

Kelly:

Absolutely so, Kelly McClain. I lead our demand side platform at Amazon, so we call it ADSP, and excited to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you for the time. Awesome, Awesome. Now you were, you know. Just saw you on stage a few minutes ago. What were your big reveals of the day?

Kelly:

Yeah, really good question. So I think if, if you think about Amazon ads and kind of where we've, where we've been and where we're going, we've really continued to make a lot of progress on on how, what we've been building a lot of our goals. We're focused a lot on interoperability with our ad tech solutions, so making it easier to use. We're focused a lot on performance improvements and then again, all of this is underpinned by making sure that we're putting privacy at the core of everything that we're doing, and so, with that in mind, we've been kind of launching this week in particular, a lot of different updates around, as you think about planning, activating and measuring, right. So within planning, we were launching Cross Channel Planner, which is a new way for you to really think about full, full funnel planning. We announced Amazon Publisher Cloud, which is the new clean room technology for publishers, which we're really excited about. We've been making a lot of performance improvements to the demand side platform, both with the user interface as well as the backend performance, and then we've also been been launching a lot more on our measurement capabilities, right, so making sure that marketers are getting the insights real time, making it a lot easier for them to kind of understand. You know how they should be looking at performance and where they should be making future investments. So we're excited about it. It's going to be a really fun week.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. We have our resident DSP nerd here, Ann, so she's going to go ahead and ask have some follow up.

Anne:

Definitely. Amazon Publisher Cloud was announced today, which is a big step for your publishing partners, obviously. Do you see any benefit for advertisers with this release?

Kelly:

Yes, definitely, and you know, I think to your point. I mean we've had, if you think about kind of clean room technology, right, really starting with cloud solutions. Then Amazon marketers cloud right thinking for marketers on how we can help support them. And Amazon publisher cloud it's going to be a mouthful after I'm speaking all morning. So excuse me, but you know that's really about a solution for publishers, right, giving them much more of the ability to pair any unique insights that they have right Demographics that they might know, of course, with folks who are coming to their site and then pairing that with Amazon Ads data. But the real core of that is, of course, providing opportunities for publishers but making it easier for them to connect with advertisers, right, advertisers. Often that you know there's so many different deal opportunities out there. A lot of the kind of deal process is very manual today and it's hard to discover the right deal and knowing which deal is right for you to reach your audience and so you know. A simple example, right is, if you're, let's say, you're a common website and you know the different demographics that are coming to your site every day, but by layering on Amazon audiences, you might realize, oh, I actually have pet food lovers who or sorry, pet food lovers- I have pet lovers who are coming to my site that I didn't realize, and so then that offers publishers the ability to maybe customize some unique deal opportunities to advertisers who might be trying to target pet lovers right, or specific brands who might be selling pet food, and it provides much more unique, differentiated opportunities, and we actually had a recent test with NBC Universal and they were able to offer three and a half times more reach than what they'd seen in the past, which is really exciting. So we see this as beneficial to both marketers and to publishers by really making it a lot more simple to connect with audiences.

Bradley Sutton:

At the end of the day, you know, pet food lovers are pets in about 10 years at Unbox. I predict like there's going to be some DSP where pets can actually base, you know, based on what they see on TV.

Anne:

They've already made more of the food, Exactly exactly, so we just launched something.

Kelly:

And if that's possible, maybe pets will be transformed into some sort of language that they can then activate.

Anne:

I think so, I think so. I don't even want to think about that.

Kelly:

I know, I never really thought about that?

Anne:

Yeah, that's very exciting. So, essentially for the advertisers listening, it's going to make your reach potentially broader but also more relevant, right? So the publishers have the ability to make targeting more relevant Absolutely Great. Another big announcement was the cross-channel planner. Yes, so can you walk us through how you think the ability to forecast reach will change how advertisers perform through their DSP program? Yeah, absolutely.

Kelly:

I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges today, as you all know right, is the fragmentation of channels and information and the overload of signals, right, and so that's where we're excited with Cross Channel Planner providing more of the ability to help marketers understand who they should be reaching right across the funnel and get much more information on how to kind of more efficiently drive their spend. In the past, we've launched Channel Planner, so that was our first product for mostly catered towards streaming TV, right, and how do you think about reach curves and how do you make sure that you're delivering against that for upfront pitches and so forth, and this is really kind of the next iteration to driving more efficient spend. So, ultimately, we think this is going to be kind of the next step of just providing much more granularity across all of the Amazon ads products on Amazon beyond Amazon, to make it easier to figure out. Okay, where should I be allocating my budget in the best way possible? We had a baby brand who actually was reaching audiences and they activated. So they leveraged Cross Channel Planner, activated via the DSP, and then they used custom advertising to direct customers to their online store and actually had four and a half times click through rate and 11% increase in impurchase rate, which was pretty cool to see. So again, I think the ability to plan and then easily activate is something that we're really committed to and excited about.

Anne:

Do you think this will be applicable for advertisers who are advertising both on Amazon and off, so more so that third party placement this will help plan for that as well. Absolutely.

Kelly:

So Amazon is known for retail media and driving conversions in the Amazon store, and we've been making so many investments over the past several years to really drive much more full funnel solutions and making all of our solutions work for all types of advertisers whether you're an advertiser that sells on Amazon or not because we're really excited about the power of again combining Amazon signals with marketers, third party and third party signals in a way that you can actually drive conversions, drive reach and have more of a full funnel experience and conversation. And that's where our Amazon publisher direct team comes into play, where we have a lot of these relationships and can reach anyone across the internet. But we've also been investing in modeled audiences and the performance through the DSP, and so a lot of people are kind of thinking about the loss of cookies in a negative way. We actually see this as an opportunity. We see this as a way to really innovate and rethink how marketers can potentially reach people in a privacy, safe way. That also drives performance, and so this is why we've also been investing in our modeled audience solutions right so, especially as we think about driving sales or reach off of Amazon, and we've been seeing over 25% increase delivery with a lot of the solutions, as well as 12% less cost per click per impression, which I'm barely able to talk. I'm going to lose my voice by the end of this day. But so, yeah, I think all of these from again, the planning, how you can activate all of the performance improvements we've been doing within our DSP we're excited. We'll continue to help accelerate marketers across full funnel wherever they want to reach people, which we're thrilled about.

Anne:

Definitely the ever looming third party cookie deprecation. Yes, exactly.

Kelly:

Yeah, a lot of energy, but understandably, and I think it's the right thing for us to rethink how we can really connect marketers and people in the right way, moving forward.

Anne:

Agreed, agreed. Another thing that was mentioned was the bidding enhancements that are now going to be available through the DSP program. So, essentially, you pick a KPI and you let Amazon do all the bid optimization in order to get to that KPI. Do you think this is going to change costs for advertisers, like, will CPMs go down in highly competitive categories or go up because of this automation?

Kelly:

Good question and, being a DSP enthusiast, I'm sure you know that our system has been really hard to use in the past. We've heard feedback from customers and partners that it was very complex, and so we've really been. So this goal seeking bidder, as well as re-augmenting our interface so that it's much more anchored on goals, has been paramount. We want to make it easier to use the DSP. We want to understand what is your goal, what are you trying to do? What outcome are you trying to drive for your business? And we've been making a lot of user interface improvements. And then the goal seeking bidder, on the back end to your point, I'm not sure what it will do in terms of you know, I can't talk to overall pricing in the system, right, but what I can say is that we're already seeing, you know, up to 40% reduction in CPAs, where we're able to better optimize against a goal, and we're seeing marketers just really gravitate towards the ability to kind of have much more of a simple experience. But we also believe in control, and so I think that's one of the powers that we think the Demand side platform has is, if you want all of the customization, if you want the complexity, we have that right. You can really adjust whatever types of bids that you want. You can layer on various different types of audiences. You can play around with different creatives. You can, you know, make a ton of different ads to try and test and at the same time, if you want a more simple, easy experience, you know what your goal is. We're able to help optimize and provide recommendations on the best way to do that. So we see it as kind of a nice balance in providing marketers kind of that wide range of capabilities, because we think there's a lot of different discussions in the industry right now on what way folks are going to be going.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time and thank you for all you do at Amazon. We appreciate it.

Kelly:

Thank you for the partnership. Appreciate it, of course.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks, thank you All right Now we've got Miranda. Miranda, this is our first time meeting you, so can you introduce yourself and tell us what your position is at Amazon?

Miranda:

Absolutely. I'm Miranda Chen. I'm the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC for short. I've been at Amazon for 11 and a half years now, live in the Bay Area and at AMC I lead several teams responsible for product and engineering, developing our audience activation capabilities, making AMC easier to use for more and more customers, as well as our go to market and customer enablement activities.

Bradley Sutton:

All right Now. We have a wide variety of listeners, anywhere from brand new people selling on Amazon to humongous billion dollar brands. Now, the billion dollar brands probably know all about AMC, but some of our newer ones might not understand that. Maybe there can feel like wait, marketing, stream, marketing, AMC, there's all these acronyms. So can you just give a quick, maybe 30 second, one minute introduction about what is AMC?

Miranda:

Yeah for sure. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, is Amazon ads as clean room, so it's private and secure by design. Each advertiser has their own campaign signals of all their various Amazon ad spend within their particular instance. So we have signals from sponsored products, sponsored brands, streaming TV effectively like all of the actual campaign events and enables custom flexible analytics on those signals. And then it also enables advertisers to be able to upload their own first party signals or third party signals so you can think of, like product catalog, retail conversions, things like that, and so then you can generate really really flexible insights, typically using SQL, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, overlap analysis and then actually take actions on them.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, so most of our listeners probably weren't able to attend here at Unbox. What's the big release for your department here at Unbox?

Miranda:

Yeah, so we had a couple different releases specifically related to AMC that I can touch on. The first was AMC template analytics. So it takes some of our most popular queries, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, and then allows users to be able to generate those insights without needing to touch any codes. So that's a pretty exciting development, particularly since we know that not everybody no SQL has taught themselves SQL overnight. And then the second one was AMC lookalike audiences. So we already have the capability where one can generate a custom audience based on specific parameters. So let's just say, an advertiser saw, wanted to create an audience of folks that had seen their detail page view or even added to cart but didn't actually activate and then wanted to drive better performance. They could create a particular, they could run a query, generate that insight and push that directly to the DSP. So that's one way. That's AMC rule based audiences. And then now we launched this enhanced capability for lookalike audiences. So it enables effectively exactly what it sounds like. So finding alike audiences based on that same seed, leveraging machine learning in a clean room capacity trained on Amazon, shopper and customer signals, but all still in a private and secure place.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, you're already starting talking technical terms that are over my head, so let me bring in the smart one of us. And to clean rooms. My room's not clean, I don't know. That's not what we're talking about here, but go ahead and please follow up and make me sound smart here.

Anne:

Yeah, of course. So I'd like to talk about lookalike audiences more specifically, because this is a way for brands to reach highly relevant, essentially new customers. So do you think this will change the way people are targeting that new to brand customer targeting incrementality?

Miranda:

Yeah, I mean we think it's going to be a great way for brands to be able to reach more and more shoppers. So, as I mentioned, the lookalike audiences are trained on based on deep, deep ML, based on lots of very, very, very good signals, and then the advertiser can actually leverage, can get to choose what's their specific seed for the audience, like what's the general size of the audience, based on their objective and then also the relevance. So I think it'll be a really key tool as a part of the marketer toolkit.

Anne:

Yeah, definitely. Do you think lookalike audiences are scalable for brands that maybe have lower purchase data or lower engagement data that are using AMC?

Miranda:

I think so. I think they're precisely like the brands that actually could benefit from it, right Because they have a small bit of deterministic signals that they actually want to be able to enhance. And then also because AMC is private and secure by design, as I mentioned, they can also choose to upload their own first party or third party signals and then create a seed based on that and then continue to go find additional customers that seem similar to that seed.

Anne:

Right, I love that you call it a seed, because it sounds like it will grow over time if you're utilizing these tactics, so that's a great way to phrase it.

Miranda:

Thanks, it didn't come up with it.

Anne:

Well, we'll give you credit anyways. So you talked about the AMC templatized analytics, right? Is this a way to make AMC more accessible and, if so, are the queries that are available through those templatized analytics? Will it grow over time? What's available through that?

Miranda:

Yeah, so we think it's a first step towards making AMC easier for more and more customers. So we don't have a specific timeline yet on additional templates, but it is something we'll be continuing to evaluate. We have been talking to different customers and internal teams about how we can also make AMC easier to use through point and click applications as well. We also work with dozens of partners that are making AMC easier to use, either through visualizations or through their own innovative dashboard. So I think through the combination of either homegrown or partner built capabilities, we'll be able to continue to bring AMC insights to more and more customers.

Anne:

Yeah, pacview is one of those partners. We do have an AMC dashboard Great, I think. Another question that's kind of just in general about AMC do you think there are any verticals or categories that benefit the most from this data, or that you've seen a lot of growth and success with using AMC?

Miranda:

Yeah, we think of AMC as equal opportunities. So we look at the data a lot. We're very, very data driven surprise, surprise at Amazon and what we've seen is that there's penetration for AMC across brands and partners and agencies as well as across all verticals. So we've seen, certainly, strength from brands that sell on the Amazon store, but also pretty strong results with entertainment, with automotive, financial services. So you can think of someone who's like automotive who might have a bunch of local dealerships. They want to be able to do more fine event grained analyses based on specific geos, and so something like AMC is perfect for that be able to do more precise measurements. So, yeah, certainly we think it's a great product for all, but it really depends on that particular advertiser's objective and then what are the types of signals that they want to bring in and what kind of insights they can generate.

Anne:

Definitely, it is flexible.

Miranda:

Exactly Infinite and flexible. Yes, Great.

Anne:

My last question is just a kind of a fun one. Do you have any specific query or an example of a query that you think was really innovative that's been pulled through AMC that you can recall?

Miranda:

I think it's probably a generic answer, but I think the Path to Conversion one is probably one of my favorites, just because it's the simplest. I think AMC was actually the first place where an advertiser could see all of their signals across all of the Amazon ad products, and so someone who was buying sponsored products and DSP might not have realized before that they actually were driving better results together, and so Path to Conversion, and actually be able to understand how those two products were interacting, for example, really brought a lot more power and insight, I think, to advertisers.

Anne:

So I don't think that's generic at all. I love that one too.

Miranda:

There's a reason. That's core kind of at the top of the instructional query library.

Anne:

Right.

Miranda:

Agreed, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

I have another question for you. I like asking stuff that maybe nobody else is going to ask. When you want to take off your Amazon hat and kick back with a hobby to kind of like balance work life, what's your go-to hobby?

Miranda:

Well, I have an almost four-year-old so she is probably my hobby in most of the time. I'm going to try and go do fun things on the weekend, whether it's exploring new coffee shops or going to find music.

Bradley Sutton:

The four-year-old is a coffee drinker, is she?

Miranda:

No, she's not, but she's an avid consumer of chocolate croissants, and so we sample baked goods in lots of different places. Then mom gets her coffee. I think that's probably it, but in my prior pre-kid years I did a lot more yoga and hiking and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

So enjoy those years. You know, my kids are over 20 already, so I wish I had a four-year-old. I remember those days All right. Thank you so much for joining us and you educated me a lot. It sounds like Ann knows all about what you're talking about. It was like a different language to me, so I appreciate you educating us on IMC. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much.

Miranda:

Thank you so much.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, we've got Teresa here. Teresa, could you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Teresa:

Sure, I'm Teresa Uthralton. I'm the Director of Partner Development here at Amazon Ads.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. How long have you been here at Amazon?

Teresa:

I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, so I'm approaching that red badge. For those of you that know our badging conventions, Nice, nice.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you're from here in New York. I've always been in New York, yep. So I'm going to start off with maybe the most important question of the day Julianne's Pizza in Brooklyn. Is that the best representation of New York pizza, or not?

Teresa:

Oh, that's tough. There's so many really good pizza places now I can't even keep up with them. There's so many.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Well, we're going to have to connect right after this, because I have two days left and I need to maximize my time here.

Teresa:

Yes, Alright now.

Bradley Sutton:

We're not here to talk about food here.

Teresa:

I recommend checking out Roberta's in Bushwick though.

Bradley Sutton:

Roberta's in Bushwick. I have not been there.

Anne:

Yes, I think you'll really enjoy that.

Bradley Sutton:

We're going to that one.

Anne:

Right now. Yeah, actually, cancel the interview. Let's go there, we go. Yes, of course.

Bradley Sutton:

Now Anne here is going to ask a lot of the more technical questions, especially those that have to do with enterprise. Now I'm here to represent, kind of like, the voice of the average Amazon seller, and you know, there's some people out there who might not fully know what Amazon marketing stream is first of all. So could you just go ahead and just kind of give a quick elevator pitch for what that is?

Teresa:

Sure. So Amazon marketing stream is a partner-facing product, and what it does is it provides really granular hourly signals on all our advertising metrics through the Amazon API, and what that means to a seller is that they will be able to get all sorts of insights about their business that normally they would not have known.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, I love that. Did you practice this? I didn't even tell you I was going to ask that. All right, cool, cool. How about rapid retail analytics, your other specialty?

Teresa:

I know I love rapid retail analytics, so Amazon marketing stream obviously totally focused on advertising signals. As we know, so much of what's exciting about Amazon ads is that you got online retail and digital advertising Right, and so rapid retail analytics provides that level of granularity on retail signals, and one of the reasons that's so exciting is that that data used to be available at a daily cadence with a 72-hour lag, so we literally it's almost near real time now, which is a really, really exciting development.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Well, now that I got that out of the way, let me turn it over to the smart one of us too, and for some follow up questions.

Anne:

Yeah, so I kind of want to double click into Amazon marketing stream, specifically the fact that it was recently released for DSP or it's being extended to DSP. How do you think this will change the way advertisers manage their DSP campaigns now that they have that real time data that we were talking about?

Teresa:

Well, it's interesting. I think one of the things that I've learned is I've been humbled by our partner's creativity. Right, you know, I was just. I was just telling someone. I joined this team three weeks before Can last year and so I showed up at Can meeting all my partners for the first time, and we had just launched the first version of Amazon marketing stream and I was like this is the coolest product. But what really got me excited was it's a product that we developed based on the feedback we got from partners Like they, they have a seat at the table, they participate in all our betas and our product teams love them, right, because they get like this incredible, you know, they get their hands dirty and they come back and they're like these are the 27 things that are wrong and you need to fix right, which is if you're a product team, that's actually like really helpful, right, so, and what? The thing that's so interesting is like it launched and everyone loved it, but then people are like well, but it only has sponsored products. Right, like, I want more, I want more, I might want more. So I think what's exciting about having ADSP signals in there is that's going to unlock a whole bunch of opportunity around partners that are deep on ADSP Right. Definitely and I think you know, probably a few months from now, we'll have some really interesting case studies, success stories. There's really like almost no end to the creativity of our partners, which is really great because they're such awesome builders.

Anne:

I agree. I'm curious AMC they not AMS? AMC? I know they get our accurate, our Amazon accurate. I know, there's so many of them Also provides hour by hour data for both DSP and for sponsored ads. Prior to this, especially prior to AMC, but also prior to AMS, this wasn't available for advertisers, so you kind of had to guess when you were running, like day parting or anything along those lines. Do you think the release of the stream data for DSP will eliminate the need for the AMC hourly data?

Teresa:

Well, I think you got to go back to like what are the use cases that people use other product, right? I think, like what is great about Amazon marketing stream? Right, it's an aggregate, aggregate data pipe, if you think about it, right, and so ultimately that's going to help people build solutions that are evergreen. It's going to help people train AI models right, because how do you train AI models? You need, like, lots of granular signals, right? And whereas the Amazon marketing stream is really about very specific use cases around, like understanding the customer purchase path, understanding incrementality, understanding attribution, so I don't think it's like one or the other, I think it's very like use case specific.

Anne:

Right. That actually leads perfectly into my next question, which is how you see these two datasets working together with advertisers currently, or how you see in the future that they can work together.

Teresa:

Yeah.

So I think, like what I think is really exciting about partner innovation is, ultimately, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer, right, like there's that whole age old question about, like I know half my advertising is working, but I don't know which half, and I think we're getting about as close as we're going to get probably in our lifetime, but we're on the cusp of that with a lot of these tools, and so I think the the part about Amazon marketing stream that I think is so exciting is that it will allow the kind of automation that makes brands so much smarter and helps them do more with less. Right, and we're seeing like especially like this year has been an uncertain economic climate for a lot of folks, right, and a lot of a lot of folks are trying to figure out like my budget has been cut or my budget is capped, but I'm being asked to drive more growth Right, and I think, like partners have been able to deliver solutions based on Amazon marketing stream and rapid retail analytics that have really enabled that Awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

And you had a last question.

Anne:

I did. It's a fun one. What's your favorite thing about being at conferences like unboxed?

Teresa:

Oh, it's meeting my partners. You know, I learn so much from from meeting with partners, right, like I said, it's very humbling. The innovation, the creativity, what they teach us about our customers, what they teach us about our products and it's such an incredible learning experience is so energizing. Were you at our our cocktail party last night?

Anne:

No.

Bradley Sutton:

I was not.

Anne:

We had a lot of cocktail parties. I'm sure it was very.

Teresa:

That was like such a fun buzzing party and I got to meet partners from all over the world. At our award ceremony on Monday we met partners that came from Delhi and it was just really, really exciting.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right, well, thank you so much for coming on the show and we appreciate all that you do at Amazon.

Teresa:

Thank you, thanks guys.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we've got Ruslana here. Ruslana, welcome to the show.

Ruslana:

Thank you, Bradley and Anne, for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you based here in?

Ruslana:

New York no, I'm based in Seattle.

Bradley Sutton:

Seattle. Okay, Seattle was just there for accelerate, lots of rain, but I like. I like Seattle weather a lot. Quick question for you, first of all just how long have you been at Amazon and what is your title there?

Ruslana:

I'm a vice president of sponsored brands display in TV advertising and I just celebrated my 10 year anniversary Last week awesome, congrats, congrats.

Bradley Sutton:

now we're gonna go into like what you announced today, but you know something while you were on stage, you also referred to something that was, you know, launched a little bit ago. We're how, now you know, sponsored products can show up on websites like Pinterest and things like that, and one thing that was I have a bad memory, but it was new to me, maybe I knew about it, I guess, didn't know was like it's not just a product that's gonna display, but it'll also show, I believe, like the reviews count and even the shipping time did I, did I hear that right.

Ruslana:

Well, with sponsor products, our goal is to deliver the same value that Advertisers are getting today by having sponsored products was an Amazon store and some of the critical sort of trusted Amazon attributes, such as reviews, pricing information, as well as Prime delivery promise, are essential elements To helping customers make decisions and actually purchase. So yes you are, you got it right at that. Sponsor products will be containing Kind of product level or Amazon key, amazon trusted information Within these new and exclusive placements across some of these sides to help our advertisers to really go quickly and with ease from discovering something or exploring something to actually purchasing awesome, awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

That's been. That's been out for a while, but today, when you're on stage, you announce something brand new, and that was sponsored TV. So just give us maybe a quick 30 second, one minute overview of what that is, and Anne has some follow-up questions on that.

Ruslana:

Well, we see a sponsored TV, tv advertising as a whole, as a critical element of brand-building strategy. That should not be something that Brand cannot do. Any brand of any science should be able to tap into this opportunity and reach these engaged audiences on a big screen In the living room, and so sponsored TV is aiming to accomplish just that. We have worked very closely with our brands and our customers and Backwards from them, to understand what their key pain points have been and why they have not potentially used TV more actively Was in their overall brand-building strategy and, as a result, launch sponsored TV. I'm trying to eliminate three main pain points no guarantee commitments, no spend, minimum creative support and, lastly, access to first-party Amazon, first-party signals. Even when you advertise in TV, powered my machine learning and Right measurement so that advertise and send value, because what we've learned is spend is intimidating, a Lack of the right creative or ability to create the right credit. Just knowing what resonates on such a screen is Hard and intimidating and, lastly, just understanding the value that TV delivers for these brands was difficult. And so, given those three main pain points, that's there. That's why we're sponsored TV. I think to wrap like there is another element right. We at Amazon, we very custom obsessed and in this instance, we have two customers right. We have brands, and we just talked about the value we deliver for the brands, but there's also another key customer, which is the viewers, and for viewers, this is an opportunity to discover diverse collection of brands and products in places where they choose to spend their time.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now I'm just wondering where, like? What kind of placements are these? Are these like, like, like trailers that come up, or are there just actual, you know, banner ads that might pop up while you're watching a TV show?

Ruslana:

Oh, this is a TV advertising we're talking about, so they are video, so this is not this not sponsored display.

Jeff:

Yeah.

Ruslana:

This is video ads and they sponsor TV. Today service was in freebie content. Like I don't know if any of you watch freebie, I do. I love certain shows there, so big fan. So there is freebie content. There is streaming. Do you stream? Do you twitch?

Bradley Sutton:

Yes.

Ruslana:

Okay. Well, when you twitch during live streams, that could be. Another opportunity was in.

Bradley Sutton:

There might be people watch watching this right now on our rebroadcasts of this.

Ruslana:

People that twitch. This is where the ads would show. And then, lastly, was in a fire TV apps.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent yeah.

Anne:

So it was mentioned that the goal of this campaign, or at least one of the goals, is to make it more accessible to Advertisers who have lower budgets, don't necessarily want to deal with spend minimums etc. Do you feel like there's a lower level of budget sufficiency for running these campaigns, or can it be tested with a small amount of money?

Ruslana:

Well, we, as I said earlier, right customer obsessed, working back, working backwards from our brands and working backwards for them. I'm really observed that they do want to be able to engage with this audience. Why wouldn't you like if you launched a product that is net new, delightful, on the market? Why wouldn't you want to tell? Like you know, I talked on my keynote about hex glad. I don't know if you don't know, if you have it in your kitchen, but if you don't, I highly recommend. I discovered through our sponsor TV offering the brand and I love the non-stick and also non scratch.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh no, you had me out when you showed part of the video where it flipped over and nothing Was coming on.

Anne:

I like that.

Ruslana:

Very impressive and so at the end of the day, like that is the brand that I'm delighted to cook with every day, and I like my eggs for breakfast. Doesn't matter if it's Monday or Tuesday, Wednesday or Sunday, so in at the end of the day, I think these are the type of brands. They want to engage with the right audience at the right time, and I think this is the right time.

Anne:

Great. Can you walk us through some of the targeting that will be available with this type of advertising? Most of sponsored ads is keyword basis. That going to be the truth for Sponsored TV, or is it going to be more signal-based behavioral audiences?

Ruslana:

Well, we always try to help our brands reach the right audiences. So let me Maybe adjust one statement here Most of sponsor brands is not keyword based sponsored products. Keyword based sponsored Products is keywords based. Sponsor brands has keywords Elements in their way and how you express intent. Sponsored display doesn't have that way to express intent. But our aim is to always work with our brands and help them, give them the right tools to express the intent in the best possible way so we can deliver their message and their story in the right place at the right time. So in the case of sponsored TV, the advertisers could use both sort of category based interests and as well as Genre based interest.

Bradley Sutton:

I've got a spooky brand on Amazon, so like come Halloween season gonna be Maybe throwing some ads on some spooky Halloween shows or horror show.

Anne:

Perfect, I think we have time for one more question. So I'm curious how do you recommend brands measure success with these campaigns? Do you have specific KPIs that you think you know appropriately measure the success for sponsored TV or anything along those lines?

Ruslana:

So they reach. Traditional metrics are available similarly how they would be available for any other TV offerings, but in addition, we are sharing branded searches as well as detail page and store page Traffic, and so that is a starting point for the offering. We will continue evolving our metrics and help brands understand the value they're getting out of their sponsored TV offering Wonderful.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ruslana:

Thank you for having me and in Bradley.

Helium 10 Buzz 10/26/23: New Amazon AI Image Generator | Walmart Incentivized Reviews | Amazon Anime

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 rolls out AI-powered image generation to help advertisers deliver a better ad experience for customers
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-ads-ai-powered-image-generator

Walmart beefs up its third-party marketplace as it challenges bigger online rival Amazon
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/18/walmart-beefs-up-online-marketplace-in-amazon-challenge.html

Amazon introduces Consult-a-Friend, a new mobile experience that lets you ask your friends for advice while you shop
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-introduces-consult-a-friend-mobile-shopping-experience

Amazon will now let you access Crunchyroll’s anime library right from Prime Video
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23929990/amazon-prime-video-crunchyroll-channel-now-available

We round up with a focus on the importance of researching historical search volume and keywords for the upcoming holiday season. Stay tuned for all this and more!

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

• 00:55 - New Amazon Image AI Tool
• 03:24 - Walmart Incentivized Reviews
• 04:13 - Amazon Seller Export
• 05:30 - Small Business Search
• 06:12 - Walmart Stats
• 08:23 - Amazon Call A Friend
• 10:29 - Anime on Amazon
• 12:22 - $1 Million TikTok Shop Month
• 13:25 - Join Helium 10 Elite
• 14:15 - Pro Training Tip: Historical Trend Keywords Q4

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon releases a new tool that allows you to make customized images with AI. Walmart is actually encouraging incentivized reviews. Amazon buyers now have a chance to phone a friend, as it were. This and many more news stories on today's edition 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 on all of the news stories in the Amazon, Walmart and E-commerce world 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 this week. Let's go ahead and hop right into the news. If my screen looks a little bit different, I'm actually recording this from a hotel room because I'm in Amazon unboxed in New York, and that's actually the first news story of the day. Amazon has actually announced today that there is a new generative AI image generator. Now it's especially designed for sponsor brand ads, but, as you can see from this article here, you're going to be able to use your main image from your listings and then you can write like a prompt, like put this water bottle on a Maldives beach or make this water bottle seem like it's underwater, and then what it's going to do, what Amazon is going to do, it's going to take that image and then it's going to go ahead and like overlay it on this computer generated with AI background. So, basically, what Amazon sellers have been wanting to do, you're going to be able to make lifestyle images with this generative AI. Now, as I said, it's mainly for sponsor brand ads. So you know how, in a sponsor brand ad, you can use a custom image now which convert a lot better.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, for a lot of you sellers out there, you might not have had a means to make a custom image, like maybe you don't have a studio where you can just get new images made. You know, maybe you're not wanting to rent an Airbnb to take a photo shoot in a certain you know room setting that you that you need. Maybe you don't have the means to do something in Photoshop for this image because you don't know how to use Photoshop. Well, now, this is where this generative AI is going to come in, because you can take your image from your listing or another image you have and then overlay it on any kind of background. Now I did a step by step tutorial on how to do this, because there's actually other kind of applications. Like you could just generate some images in this tool and use it as a lifestyle image, you know, for you you can generate multiple images and use it in Amazon post. So if you'd like to know how to use this and it's completely free for brand registered store owners go to the Helium 10 blog, h10.me forward slash blog, and then this should probably be one of the first blogs that comes up on the page. There will be a step by step with images on exactly how to use this new tool. I'm curious, if you've tried it yet, let me know in the comments below what kind of results you get. It's not always perfect, you know. Sometimes there's some funky images that come up, but this is super cool that Amazon announced this at Unboxed today and if you tune in this Saturday for the regular episode of the podcast, there's going to be interviews with a few vice presidents and other executives at Amazon about all the other advanced Amazon advertising releases that they announced this week here in New York. So make sure to tune into Saturday's episode. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, it was an email actually that I got from Walmart and part of the email says as you can see here, the review accelerator program now lets you get double the number of drumroll, please incentivize review. So it's hilarious. You know like we talk about Walmart. You know, following the path of Amazon from before. Remember, it was okay to do incentivize reviews back in the day on Amazon. Right now it's okay to do incentivize reviews, you know, using Walmart on the Walmart platform. So now they have this review accelerator program and it offers twice the number of incentivize reviews. I think this is more like kind of like. I haven't used it, so I think it's kind of like the Amazon Vine program, but if you're interested in finding out more information, if you're a Walmart seller, make sure to go to your email and you probably got this email this week and then click on that link and I'll give you more information on how to do these Walmart incentivize reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next news article here is just from your seller central dashboard. It's entitled ship FBA inventory from China at a lower cost. This is something that you talked about at Amazon Accelerate a little bit, and some sellers have been using this already, but it says hey, now you can ship your FBA inventory from China to our US fulfillment centers at a lower cost with seller export and delivery. I've always used my own, you know carrier, so I'm not sure if this is completely new or if this is something that has been existing. They're just expanding it. But it basically says hey, seller export and deliveries and Amazon partner carrier program that handles your FBA shipping, including customs clearance and door to door pickup and delivery. This program is integrated into seller central and offers a simplified FBA experience with Amazon negotiated shipment rates, seamless payments and end to end tracking.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So if you'd like more information on this, go ahead and go to your seller central dashboard and you'll be able to hit get that news story. Is that something that you'd be interested in trying? You know there's always been people out there who say, oh no, you know like I don't want to Amazon to know where my suppliers, because they're going to copy my products. Amazon doesn't need to like know who our suppliers is going to copy our product. So I don't think that's the issue. But I know that's maybe holding some of you guys back. So what about you? You going to use that. You know, check out Amazon's rates here, All right. The next article here is also from your seller central dashboard and it's entitled find small businesses using a small business search filter. So this is going to be on the buyer side, where they're you know. You know how. If you have a small business badge, well now, buyers who are interested in this kind of thing, they're going to have this filter, and I think in a lot of websites it's already active, Like if you search coffin shelf. So if you scroll down the page in the coffin shelf, you can actually see here there's a business type. All right, business type filter and then small business. So just another reason why you should make sure that your small business certification is still active on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CNBC and it's entitled Walmart beefs off its third party marketplace as a challenges bigger online rival, Amazon, and there's a lot of interesting things, facts and figures from this article that might encourage you about selling on the Walmart platform. It talks about the older or the Walmart seller conference that they had earlier this year, but it's talking about what their plans are for this this Q4 and also some of the numbers that are encouraging. You know how Walmart had, kind of like a another prime day ish event. Well, if you notice here, it says more than half the items included in Walmart sales event that week they were from third party marketplace sellers. You know, you could have said that maybe two years ago, as most items were actually from Walmart itself. There's a increase in year over year sales, as you can see from this graph those of you watching this on YouTube and sales, and it says about 70% of items, including in Walmart plus week, were marketplace items. So way more than than half actually. Now this article quoted the outside source saying that you know, while Amazon has about 1 million active sellers, Walmart has only about 100,000 right now. So obviously still way, way, way, you know, below Amazon and as far as the share in 2023 of e-commerce sales, Amazon has 37% and Walmart has about 6%. But that 6% is is it's all time high. Just in 2016, it was at 2%. Now, remember another way that Walmart has an advantage over Amazon, as you can see from this article. It says they've got 4,600 stores across the country and those act as kind of like mini warehouses, with more than 50% of online orders fulfilled from the stores. All right, so you know. You might think, hey, well, Amazon has all those warehouses. Walmart has way more stores than Amazon has warehouses. So as Walmart expands the kind of delivery and storage at their stores, it could be a way for them to get even wider footprint than Amazon for delivery. But anyways, check out that article from CNBC. It's kind of interesting, very encouraging. I have always recommended you guys, you know, if you're into selling on Amazon, the USA, you should be selling on Walmart as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, next story here is actually from Amazon itself. But how many of you remember back in the day what was that show called? Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And it was like a quiz show, right? And then do you remember what would happen if you like didn't know the answer? You had the opportunity to phone a friend. I think it was called, right. It was like with Regis Philbin, who was the host of that show. Anyways, Amazon now has something like that for buyers. So take a look at this article. It's entitled. It's not called phone a friend, but it's an. It's entitled Amazon introduces consult a friend a new mobile experience that lets you ask your friends for advice while you shop. So this hasn't been live across the board. I'm curious if any of you have it. But basically what's going on is you could be on a you know mobile listing and, instead of just having the button where you can just share a link with your friends, it actually opens up like a chat window where you could use your text message or other messaging apps and Collaborate live with you know, your selected friends about a product and get feedback. What do you think? Do you think this is going to help sales or do you think it could hurt it, like maybe you know one? One kind of logic could be that, well, Maybe something that somebody would just bought, no matter what, Maybe now they might not buy it because they're gonna go ask their friends and maybe their friends don't don't reply right away. I'm not sure, but it's kind of an interesting you know interesting thing and there's gonna be buttons that that have to do with it and, like your friends are gonna be able to like vote if they like it.

Bradley Sutton:

You know multiple friends, so later this could be something that Drives more data points as far as what Amazon shows for keywords. So imagine somebody searched an Amazon for a certain keyword. They click this item. They have console friends. If somebody has a product where all their friends liked it, I would imagine that the Amazon algorithm is gonna work to maybe push that one up, as opposed to one where everybody all of your friends gave it a thumbs down. You know this is all still kind of speculation right now, but again, very interesting. Amazon is always trying to innovate on the buyer side and the things that it does on the buyer side Obviously affects us sellers. To what? What are your thoughts on this? One? Another article today coming from the verge, and it's entitled Amazon Will now let you access crunchy rolls anime library right from prime video. So I'm not sure how many anime fans Japanese animation out there are like me. I have a crunchy roll account and this is not gonna be free, but you still pay, like the 799. But now you can do it from prime video. All right, so you can like cancel your crunchy roll account now.

Bradley Sutton:

There's a couple reasons why I brought this up as an article. Number one it's just another benefit of Amazon Prime, you know, and the more Amazon Prime customers there are, the or, the more sticky, the more tools that there are, you know, the more sticky they're gonna be, you know, the better it is for us sellers. And I'm literally gonna do this because I can't stand the crunchy roll app. You know I need to watch my spy family and demons layer and all my other animus that I watch. Crunchyroll sucks as a platform. Prime video it's cool, like I don't have a problem with prime video, so I'm definitely gonna be switching this.

Bradley Sutton:

But then also announced today at Amazon unboxed is and I don't want to spoil it too much. Like I said, it's gonna be talked about in Saturday's episode, but we're we're gonna talk about how they're. They're putting advertising now out for like prime video. Now, does this count as prime video? It's an outside service. I'm not sure you know how that's gonna work, because I think the Amazon sponsored TV is is mainly gonna be for like Amazon shows and and things like that. But who knows, maybe now all of a sudden, you know, you might have some kind of like. You know trinket that weeps like, or people who like anime, and, and you could potentially target people who watch in the future Crunchyroll anime from Prime video. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but again, this is cool to speculate on and cool to think about. Amazon is always adding things that eventually is going to trickle down to us Amazon sellers here. Last thing I want to bring up is you know, a couple of days ago here in New York we had our quarterly workshop for helium 10 elite members and it was a doozy, guys. We had a Leeron who gave you know, crate input on a lot of features in sellers central if you're not using, and then we actually had an Amazon or a Helium 10 Elite member. She's been on this podcast before.

Bradley Sutton:

Elizabeth. You know she sold over $20 million on Amazon. Now she is up to guys after her only third month on TikTok shop. She is doing a million dollars a month on TikTok shop and she, like, opened up her TikTok shop seller center account, broke down exactly how she does her sales and showed you know the group. They're everything that they can do. We're going to have that recording up. So I think elite might be open guys. It's 3.99 a month. It would be worth. I'll tell you right now. It would be worth it to like, sign up just for two months or one month just to be able to get the recording, this video. You're like, I don't I've never said that before. You know, we have quarterly workshops all the time. They're all great, but this one literally could pay for itself just with you learning how to do TikTok shop. I mean, do you think you want to sell a million dollars a month on TikTok shop? I'm not saying that's going to happen, guaranteed, but, um, it's definitely possible because she's doing it.

Bradley Sutton:

So, guys, go to H 10.me forward, slash elite or upgrade your account, just temporary, to elite. I'm not sure you still can. They might have closed it already. It was open for a couple of weeks. They might have closed it. If so, if you have no way to upgrade to elite, send a message to customer services. Hey, I heard Bradley in the weekly buzz says to sign up for elite and he said that you guys can help me push it through, even though it might be closed. But but find a way to sign up for elite. We're going to have that recording up in about two or three weeks and, guys, it is a game changer to be selling on TikTok shop and she shows you exactly how to do it. All right, that's it for the news today. Now, next up, you know we're right in Q4. We have some really cool new ways in healing Tensa rebro, to do keyword research, looking at what your competitors are. You were ranking for maybe last Q4. You can do that now with just a couple of clicks. Carrie, show us how.

Carrie:

Today I want to show you a quick and easy way that you can find keywords that are going to be great for key 4, that maybe your competitors are Capitalizing on, that you have not really focused on at all yet. So I'm going to go ahead and just get into it and the first thing that you want to do is you want to log into your helium 10 account and you're going to go to cerebro. So it's under the tools bar. You're going to go to cerebro here and this is what cerebro looks like and I've already pulled it up for us and this is our competitors ascent. Right here I want to take a look at the keywords that maybe they were capitalizing on during Q4 of last year and that maybe we were not taking a look at. The way that we do that is. We're going to do that reverse ascent search and then I'm going to click on show historical trend and it's going to show us the past 24 months of data. So this is all bar graphs of sponsored and organic keywords. Now I'm going to click on December of 2022, because I want to see what they were doing in December of 2022, and I'm going to click apply filters. This is going to show all of the keywords that they were ranking for, organic and sponsored during that time. So you can see there's quite a big list here and I want to take a look at first maybe where they were in spots between ranking one and Maybe spot 20. Then I'm going to hit apply filters. This is going to show kind of the top keywords that they were potentially focused on, and so there's still about 209 which I'm sure there's a lot of great keywords that we're missing in here that we can take advantage of.

Carrie:

But I want to see some kind of Q4 specific things for the holiday season. I'm going to look at gifts, gift Christmas. That's what I'm going to kind of take a look at and see if we have some great keywords in here. It looks like we've got some great keywords, so goth gifts for home, goth that gives for women, goth gifts for women. So I'm going to take a look and see if we have any of these that we are indexing for. So I'm going to go to check index checker and it's under tools and you're going to click on index checker here and on index checker. I've already put our ASIN in here and I'm going to put in. I think it was. Let's see here we have goth gifts for women and goth gift. Okay so goth gifts for women, goth Gift, let's do another one. Let's see here what else we have that has a good search volume. Let's say, spooky gifts for women. Let's see if we're indexed for spooky gifts for women.

Carrie:

Okay so let's go ahead and click index checker and we're going to see if we're even showing up in as Relevant for these keywords in Amazon. And it looks like we're not showing for any of those. So that's kind of not so great. We want to make sure that we have these keywords, you know, indexed so that we can start advertising on these keywords and we can start ranking organically for these keywords. So there's probably quite a few keywords that we haven't capitalized on During the holiday season that we need to focus on right now, and I think those are some of the greatest. I looked, I took a look at the historical search volume and some of those they might be, you know, a few hundred right now, but a lot of them go up to, you know, 15,000, 20,000 during the month of December. So there's a lot of opportunity here to really capitalize on these keywords that maybe no one else is focusing on. So go ahead and check it out and let us know what you think.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much for that, Carrie. So, guys, I'm not sure if that's for platinum members, but at least for diamond members, maybe platinum members to you guys might have access to what she was showing you, so make sure to use that right away. Really important to be looking at the keywords here in Q4 from last year as opposed to just Looking at what's going on right now. All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. I've been away from the weekly buzz for a couple weeks, but it's good to be back. I'll be back next time to see what's buzzing.

#503 - Maximizing Holiday Sales: Amazon PPC Strategies and AMA with Mina Elias

Get set to sail through the bustling holiday season sales with ease and finesse as we bring you this month’s TACoS Tuesday PPC expert, Mina Elias, Founder of Trivium Group. Ready to divulge his invaluable strategies tailored for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire holiday season, Mina introduces us to the art of optimizing ads. Listen closely as Mina recounts his own experiences and shares the lessons learned from past mistakes to ensure you make the most of your holiday sales.

Whether your product is a Black Friday hit or not, we've got the perfect strategies to maximize your sales and click-through rates. Discover the clever technique of adjusting your bids to your benefit and the smart way to maintain your spending within limits. We reveal some hidden gems on best utilizing the holiday season with budget recommendations and crafting holiday-specific ad campaigns. 

Finally, we get into the world of Amazon DSP, providing insights on increasing conversion rates. Uncover the secrets of the optimal spend and timeframe for DSP, learn about bidding strategies for supplements, and also evaluate the effectiveness of Google ads. As we wrap up, we share some valuable tips on targeting long-tail keywords, setting and increasing bids, and making the tough choice between what ad types are top priorities. Tune in for these expert insights and make the most of your holiday season Amazon sales!

 

In episode 503 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Mina discuss:

• 00:00 - Black Friday, Cyber Monday, & Holiday Amazon PPC Strategies
• 00:13 - Amazon Prime Day Feedback
• 04:01 - Sales And Advertising Strategies for Seasonal Products
• 04:52 - Bidding Strategy for Holiday Shopping Events
• 10:53 - Split Testing for Main Images
• 13:57 - Holiday PPC Budget and Sponsored Campaigns
• 15:14 - Adjusting PPC Budget for Holiday Season
• 23:07 - Custom Images in Sponsored Brand Ads
• 26:53 - Running Amazon DSP
• 31:42 - Amazon Rank and Bidding Strategy
• 34:08 - PPC Strategy for TACoS and Keywords
• 35:09 - PPC Strategy for Improving Conversion Rates

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we're talking with Mina Elias from the Trivium Group and he's going to give PPC strategies for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season in general. This and so much more on today's episode.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don't know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience Just entering your poll or questions and, within a short period of time, 50 to 100 or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me forward. Slash audience.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we answer all of your PPC questions. We have an expert guest who's going to help answer all of your burning questions, especially for the holidays. Today on our show, we have Mina Elias, and I'm so excited to have him on. He's an expert in PPC and so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on.

Mina:

What's up? What's up, guys.

Carrie Miller:

Thanks again for coming on live with me. I'm so excited you're here.

Mina:

I know. Thank you for having me. It's been a minute since I've done a TACoS Tuesday.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, do you want to just introduce yourself a little bit, so everyone knows who you are, and a little bit about you and your agency.

Mina:

Yeah, my name is Mina Elias. I'm the founder of Trivium Group, which is an Amazon agency, amazon marketing agency. We handle pretty much everything on Amazon for brands. I started as a supplement brand in 2018, using Helium 10 religiously, of course. I grew and scaled that brand to over a million dollars. It's called MMA Nutrition In 2021, there was a very large demand for people coming to me saying please run my PPC and stuff like that. I ended up starting an Amazon ads agency. Initially it was just Amazon PPC. Now we do PPC, DSP, SEO, creatives, helping brands launch on Amazon all that kind of stuff. I actually worked with Helium 10 on their PPC course. If you are a member of Helium 10, if you haven't checked it out yet, you should definitely check it out. It is a full, thorough course. Me and Vince Montero did it together. It's like beginner all the way to advanced. It's everything that I do in our business for managing ads. I love sharing everything that we are doing and learning. We have about 150 brands under management, 80 people on the team. We're learning a lot every day and Amazon is changing. I know that it's hard. When I started out, it was very hard for me to know what's good and what's not good. I'm here to share my experience and then hopefully it benefits everyone.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. I have some questions prepared here for Meena that are more holiday oriented. This should be a really good episode. Here's the first question what is your Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy?

Mina:

Cool. I love talking about this because on prime days and Black Friday, cyber Monday, I mean one wrong move and you could end up losing all of your profits. The reason I say this is because that happened to me multiple years in a row, at least two years in a row, where I was following the strategy of spend a lot of money on ads, do deep discounts and then you're going to sell four times more on Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day. I did sell four times more, but I also spend way more and it resulted in me losing money or not making profits those days. There's two categories in which products fall. One category is they do very well in Black Friday, cyber Monday and Prime Day. I'm talking like expensive products, giftable products. You should know your product. If you don't, I suggest that you go into Helium 10 and you can see the performance historically of product sales over time, and I think Bradley did a video on this. It's on my YouTube channel, just Meena Elias. You'll find a video of me and Bradley and he uses X-ray and cerebro to show you historically how has this product sold and if you notice that certain products or you don't know if your product is going to sell a lot and you notice that there's a spike, then you're like, okay, my product might fall into that category of it's going to do really well Black Friday, cyber Monday. So if you're in that category, I'm going to give you the strategy which is leading up to Black Friday, cyber Monday or any Prime Day. You basically want to increase your bids. You know that you're going to do a deal, so you want to increase your bids and get as much rank as you can, because during Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're probably going to have to decrease it a little bit because you might not be able to handle the volume of the spend that's going to happen from all of the additional people coming in onto the platform. So you're initially increASINg your bids 30 days before you know you have a deal coming. The day of, you know the day before, I would say, and then the day of and then day after, you're going to lower your bids a little bit, probably I would say by 10%, nothing crazy and you want to check frequently that you're you know how much your spend is and you want to make sure that it's not out of control. There's also guardrails. I wouldn't do account level budgets, but if you have a software, you know you could do some sort of automation where it's like if you hit a certain spend in that day, then you know, lower your bids or your budgets by certain amounts so you're not overspending Again.

Mina:

The thing that I learned the hard way was, you know, I would, on average, sell $2,000 a day. The Prime Day came, black Friday, the 7th of Monday came, I sold $4,000, but instead of spending an average of, like you know, 400 to 500, I spent 1,500. And that extra 1,000 or whatever in profit that I was going to make because of the sales, it all went to ads and I ended up not making as much money or losing money. And you know why would I do that? When I'm just like selling more units and now I have to order, you know, more units faster. Now, if you're not in that category, what I would do is you need to have a very focused strategy on organic only. So 30 days prior to Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're going to increase your bids again, but the day before like, or maybe even two days before leading up to the day after those days, I cut my bids by 30%, and we do this across all the brands, so it's a significant cut, which essentially means you know if someone is clicking on your ads, you know they're probably like deep, they're not like window shopping or anything like that. They're probably on page three or something like that. And it's cool because you know people are going to, who are scrolling that much, might be interested in buying. And what I've noticed is, even by cutting our ads by 30%, they will probably our PBC spend will probably be more, like 10% more than what it usually is, but as a result we do get an increased amount of sales. It's not the same as if our bids were high. So we'll maybe sell 50%, 70%, 100% more than what we usually would sell in a day, but you know we'll have our ads spend the same and so all of that difference is net profit.

Mina:

And so you know, if your strategy is, if you're not the seasonal product, black Friday, cyber Monday type of product, you want to cut down by 30%. But if you are, then you're going to have a deal and you're going to probably only cut by 10%. Those perform exceptionally well for products like that. So we've had giftable products that were 45 and we brought them down to $35. We've had coffee makers that were $300 and we brought them down to like 260 or something like that, to 59. And that coffee maker, I think, did $70,000 in one day, wow, yeah, we had a card brand, a card holder, that did like a million dollars between both prime days. So when you have a giftable product, when you have an expensive product, something that people wait for deals to buy, you can make a lot of money and definitely utilize the deals that you know prime day deals or Black Friday, cyber Monday deals.And then one more thing that I didn't mention for both of those is if you do plan on like showing that you have a lower price 30 to 45 days before Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day, increase your cost, your sale price and let's say you're a $30 product, bring it up to 35 and then, right before you can drop your price back to 30 and it will show that you have had the lowest price in the last 30 days. So, on top of like a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, or, if you don't have a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, which some people might think that it's a deal. That's essentially what we've been doing. And then another thing to consider is what are the things that you can do to improve your click-through rate during those periods which are going to be your sale price, your main image and your reviews? Those are the top three things that can influence your click-through rate. The higher the click-through rate, the more you're taking advantage of all that traffic that's coming in.

Mina:

And so, main image, the time to split test this probably now, because you have about a month until Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You know, with price testing, see how far you can go up right now before actually having a significant impact, because then when you go down you can have a deal and you don't have to go down as much. If you raise your price by 20% now and you notice that your sales and your profits are pretty much the same, when you do a 20% off in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you're going to get all that much more profit because you're having more sales at the same price. And then, if you're at a 4.2 stars, do whatever it takes between now and Black Friday, cyber Monday to hit a 4.3, because once you hit the 4.3 and you have 4.5 stars, I've seen click-through rates go way up and traffic you know, paid and organic significantly improve. And just a note for everyone, higher click-through rates means lower cost per click, that's. I mean, I don't know why that's the case. My theory is that Amazon views higher click-through rates as better experience for shoppers and, as a result, they want to reward you and allow you to spend more money. So if you're looking for one way to get more free sales through organic traffic or more sales at a lower cost, through a lower cost per click, work on click-through rate.

Carrie Miller:

So would you say, to do the manage my experiments, to do split testing for those main images, or how do you usually split test?

Mina:

You know, manage my experiments has not been that reliable recently and I updated my main image and I did manage my experiments and I noticed that for one variation it said that the old one is better and then for one variation said the new one is better. So I said you know what? I'm just going to test putting the new one up and I know what my click-through rate has been the last month. Let's see what's going to happen the next two weeks. So I added the new image and click-through rate went up by a lot. Oh wow, yeah, I mean, and it was against kind of what manage my experiments said. So I think the ultimate way to split test is just, you know, use something like you guys have a poll feature right, yeah, yeah, audiences. So use Helium 10 audiences, get some preliminary data and then you know, if you feel a little bit more confident and you're like, okay, cool, like this image is definitely better than my old image, then go ahead and just like test it. Worst case your click-through rate goes down for a couple of weeks. No big deal, you can catch it pretty quick. I would not make any decisions until at least seven days because you need like one full week cycle so you can look at the average of the click-through rates before, average of the click-through rates after and then say, okay, you know, after it's definitely worse, because for me, Monday the click-through rate could be 0.4. Tuesday could be 0.28. Wednesday could be 0.43. You know what I mean. So that's how it just fluctuates. No one knows why. It's human behavior, you know. None of us you know behave in a predictable way Like you know, at least that predictable. So it's okay, like just let a full week cycle go by.

Carrie Miller:

Do you have some tips Like are there certain things like maybe if you have multiples in a package should you show all of them, or what are some kind of tips you have for those main images that you've seen, kind of better performance on the click-through?

Mina:

Yeah, great, great question. So for me, I think what I've seen is the sale, the selling points, like the, the USB, the selling point being visible and you showing that you're better than everyone else just from the main image. And so when I, when I put a bunch of you know like products next to each other, my competitors versus me, like I know that I'm looking for a product, not a lot of people take advantage of the text on their, on their boxes or on their products. So, for example, let's say you know you're selling like flip flops, the cloud flip flops, so you can have the flip flops and, and you know, in an angle whatever. Or you can have the flip flops put on top of a box, a fake box, and on that box you have two sides where you can write text and it says, like you know, the softest material on the market or whatever a hundred percent recyclable stuff like that, right, because you can have that text on the box that you couldn't have actually have on your package, and that box probably doesn't exist. You know you're probably shipping it in a, in a clear bag, but no one is going to pay attention to that detail and and you know, at the end of the day, they're going to get your your slippers. They're going to look this, you know they're going to look like slippers.

Mina:

So for me, my, my product, my electrolytes if you go look at it on Amazon, it's like shinier. There's text on the cap, there's like some different logos that show that actually don't exist on the bottle and when they do get the bottle it looks very, very similar. There's just a few things, and those few things those are the differences that when someone types in a keyword and they're looking, you know they're browsing, I catch their eye because I have, like some elements outside of the product that are eye catching and I have some text on the product that, like they're looking at all like this is an electrolyte powder, so this is an electrolyte powder with no sugar, with no carbs, and it has this and it's made in America and it's all of these things on the label and so they're like they're convinced to click on me without having to read like title or anything like that.

Carrie Miller:

Wow, that's amazing.

Mina:

Yeah, they're just心 restoring, etc. You have to get creative in that one, and so just think about what your product is and what are some elements that you can add around the product to make it pop. And then you utilize packaging with text to make your main image an infographic instead of a main. You know, like if you could make your main image an infographic? That's what I'm getting at.

Carrie Miller:

Very interesting. Okay, thank you for sharing that. That's a really good info. Okay, let's go on to the next question here. Let's see, I think you kind of asked well, this is for holiday season, so how should I adjust my PPC budget for the holiday season? So, in general, like you know Q4, there's more spend. What budget recommendations do you have?

Mina:

Yeah. So again like if, if, if you don't know historically how much your budget goes up by, what I would do is I would go, I would go into helium 10 and I find the increase in sales you know from my competitors and I would probably budget 50 to 100% like growth in my ad spend based on what I'm seeing. So let's say my competitor goes from selling 100 units a day to 200 units a day during during that season. Then I'm going to take, you know I'm spending $1,000 a day on ads. I'm going to go to 1500 or max 2000. That's kind of my range of of increase in ad spend and I'm obviously going to do it slowly and make sure that my revenue is growing, you know more, so that I'm left with net profits. So that's another point is to make sure that you are tracking your net profits. So net profits is your sale price minus your Amazon fees, minus your cost of goods sold, minus your advertising you know advertising spend and then obviously refunds and reimbursements take that into account and that's your net profit. You know, on Amazon, excluding, like your own, like cost, you know VA's, whatever, that kind of stuff. So make sure that you're measuring that because that's the, the like, the true number of, like how much you're taking home. And as that number, you know, is increASINg, you can increase your, your ad spend. And you know, hopefully, because at the end of the day, like I don't care about selling three times more in Q4. And then you know, my net profits the same.

Mina:

I'd rather sell four times less and have the same net profit because it's easier on my cash flow. So that's how I would. I would adjust my budgets Now. If you have historic data and you understand how your sales perform, then you can do it based off of your, your sales growth. Again, if, if you're like, not your spend growth but your sales growth, so if your sales have historically gone up by 80%, then I'm I'm, you know, going up by 40 to 80% on my ad spend. I'll start by going up 40% and then notice how much my sales went up, cause if I start going up by 80% and my sales are on the by 60, I'll scale it back down to 40. Because, again, I want to keep that gap big enough so that I'm making more profit, taking more money home.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point. Yeah, profitability is the most important thing at the end of the day. Yeah, another holiday specific one. What are some strategies for creating holiday specific ad campaigns and promotions?

Mina:

Yeah, so this is. I mean people are not going to like this answer, but every single time I've tried to create anything that's holiday specific has not turned out well. So sponsor products ads work amazing. Every time I start, I try doing a holiday sponsored brand, which is you know the Christmas tree with the products surrounded and you know that kind of stuff like Christmas vibes, I don't know what it is. My theory is that people on Amazon see that as an ad and they're like I don't want to click on an ad but they see sponsor products as like a very like organic thing and they're like oh, I didn't even know that it was an ad so. And then I've tried it with DSP too, and that one was painful because we have to come up with like 16 different sizes for each creator.

Carrie Miller:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Mina:

And so we tried a lot of it and it did not outperform regular you know our regular standard ads so I wouldn't worry too much about you know. Creatives for holidays, okay.

Carrie Miller:

I've. We've got a lot of questions in here, so I'm going to start pulling up some of these questions from the audience. Um, rick, I hope you said your name right. What is, or what are your rules to stop sponsored campaigns when a keyword does not perform as desired?

Mina:

Okay, so usually, if I'm, if I'm trying to be aggressive and grow, it is about the same price as my product and no sales. So if I have a $30 product, if I spend $30 in no sales, if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, I'm adding it as a negative. If it's an exact, I'm lowering the bids and I'm going to lower the bids consistently until they either stop spending money or they're profitable. But more than likely, you know, they're just going to stop spending money. But I'm just giving it a chance to be on page four and if someone finds it and clicks on it, they're likely to convert. So that's, that's my strategy. If I'm going aggressive, if I'm trying to be conservative, it'll be 30 to 50% of my sale price. So if I have a $30 product, anywhere between 10 to $15 and spend and no sales, then I'm going to add it as a negative or positive. Now, if you notice that there's a lot of those and if you notice that you you know you went in and you're like, okay, cool, $15 and spend in no sales, I'm going to add it as a negative or lower the bids and you do that and you're left with very little and you feel like you know, like it's not your sales, your sales are not there. You probably have a conversion rate problem. So your problem is more yes, kill the bleeding. So $15 and spend no sales added as negative. Stop spending money on it.

Mina:

You know you can't help it, but focus on your. You know, with your current ads being the same, that your TACoS like gets cut in half by you doubling your conversion rate, because then from there you can start removing some of the negatives and retesting them, or just taking the negatives and relaunching them in newer campaigns and seeing if they're going to be able to get it, and then you're going to perform Cause. A lot of times it's like a balance between conversion rate and ad spend. So here at this ad spend, you know, and this conversion rate, I'm fine. Now, like you know, this conversion rate, now I'm not profitable. So when my conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. Conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. It's like a balancing app.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point. You know that. You know you got to look at your listing too. Is it the most optimized, or your images the best they could be? I mean even just your main image, the way you were talking about. You know adding those different things on the packaging, that's um. You know little touches that make a huge difference. So that is really good. You know not all. You know you can negative the keywords, but then you know they might not be bad forever. So it's really good. Mr techie says, PPC strategy help required. Selling a product in Indian market and then I launched it in the US Market. Have 60 plus feedbacks. My ACoS is 150%. I was running exact match, but conversion rate is negative 7%.

Mina:

So not sure what the question is, but yeah, yeah, can you, can you clarify the question? And then I mean, if your conversion rate is 7%, I mean ACoS really doesn't matter to me Tell me what your TACoS is. That's like maybe gonna be a little bit more indicative. Tell me what your, you know your margin is and what your TACoS is and what your conversion rate is like overall on the listing and I can maybe help you a little bit better. But I mean, if you're, if you just launched, it's more than likely your conversion rate is low. Having 60 plus Feedbacks or reviews, I'm assuming, is not enough. Also, running exact match alone isn't great. You can run broad phrase and exact and auto and expanded ASIN and whatever is working. You know you can keep that and whatever is not working you can pause it or add it as a negative.

Mina:

And the goal is to you know, across all the different Add types that you have match types and all that kind of stuff, to find just a bunch of winning keywords. You start off, let's say, with a hundred dollars a day in budget and you know you launch a hundred dollars a day worth of ads and maybe ten dollars of those ads are profitable. So the other 90 you're gonna kill and then launch a new 90, and out of that 90 there's 10, and so now you have 20, that's working, 80. That's not working, you know. Kill that 80, launch another new 80, now you have maybe 30, and you know, and so on, and so you're just trying to stack up like More keywords that are profitable and they're working, and then kill the ones that you tested but didn't work out, and again, all of them will work better if your conversion rate is higher.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's a good point. I think he said something else a little bit. I've already spent over 3,000. My sales are around 1800 through profitability, though Profitability is very low. So I think you kind of gave some good advice there. So so let's see. Bradley has a question. He says are you 100% of the time doing custom images for sponsored brand ads and if so, what kind of images are working well?

Mina:

Okay. So the one, the one image that I've seen perform really well and yes, I am doing custom images for sponsored brand 100% of the time the one image that I'm seeing work really, really well is Like something like social proof. So people that are on Shark Tank, people that you know, were like featured on, like there was a creative one where it was like the product and then like put on the cover of Forbes, you know, like with a magazine of Forbes, like next to it. We've seen like stuff done with an influencer, like really big influencers Hillary, dove, Halle Berry, you know who are like celebrities. So social proof is what I've seen Works incredibly well and you have to do it in a way where, like it's, there's no like text, so you can't just do like a bunch of like logos and stuff like that. I don't think they're gonna allow that, but that is what I've seen works best. Everything else has worked kind of Okay, you know, like similar sponsor brands in general and you know I hate to say this, but sponsor brands in general, they seem to not perform that well. They seem to just spend more money and not generate sales. So I'm a hundred percent an advocate for sponsor brands for your own branded search terms. But the second that I start going into like sponsor brand for other keywords. What I notice is it's like the people are clicking on sponsor brand and sponsor products, spending money and not and it's not generating any more sales. And we've tried it where our organic and sponsored is low. So there's. You know there's no chance they're coming into our listing and we try and run a sponsored brand and They've. They've done Okay, they haven't done great.

Carrie Miller:

That's interesting. Okay, the next question how you mentioned in one of your videos that you use same keyword in multiple campaigns, does not, does that not cannibalize the keyword?

Mina:

Yeah, so the only time I'm using the same keyword in multiple campaigns if they're if the match types are different and it does not cannibalize, and I'll explain why. So when you have a keyword in broad, that keyword triggers 50 different searches, 50 different search terms, right, if it's in phrase, it triggers 20 and if it's an exact it triggers one, and then these are, just, like you know, rough numbers. So it let's say that you know you have the same keyword in broad phrase and exact, this keyword in broad is gonna show one of 50 times. Now, if you have a hundred dollars a day budget in that campaign and a one dollar cost per click, that that means that it's gonna show across those 50 keywords twice per keyword. You know you're gonna. It's gonna, you know, be two times per keyword in 24 hours. And then you know for for the, the like phrase, it's gonna be five times per keyword and then for the exact, it's gonna be whatever, however many times, you know a hundred times for that keyword. That's, if you reach a hundred dollars, they and spend, and so you add that up, right, two times, five times. You know, and let's say, 20 times in 24 hours. They're not gonna compete with each other like there's there's so much time in the day. An ad could be showing up, you know, every minute. So it's like there is. They're usually in different match types, not gonna compete, and if they do happen to show in different times, from my understanding the the one that has the highest bid is the one that's gonna show up. So it's not a big deal. I don't think they compete. I just think like, statistically, you have something that shows up twice in 24 hours, five times in 24 hours, 20 times in 24 hours. What is the chance of them running into each other?

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's true. Okay, so Jeffrey asked what's the minimum amount of Spend needed and the minimum time frame you recommend for running DSP? That's a really good question. I've had this question a lot recently.

Mina:

Yeah. So I would say 2000 a month is would be the bare minimum and that's just kind of enough to cover like some loyalty or retargeting campaigns. And the minimum like in the first 30 days, that's when you're still getting data, and then in the second 30 days, that's when you're starting to optimize. So within 60 days you should start seeing like the true results. So I would say the minimum at spend would be 2000 and then the minimum you know amount of time should be 60 days, and then 60 days that's if you're like running it with someone, that's like experienced and they know what they're doing. If you're doing it yourself, it's probably it's gonna be longer. You know more, like 120 days because there's a lot of things that you have to tweak to get it Right. But yeah, I mean it doesn't have to be a lot of ad spend. I think you can get retargeting down with 2000. You just have to figure out which Placements work the best. So for me it's been usually Amazoncom, desktop, mobile web and mobile app. Creatives has been responsive, e-commerce has performed the best, and then audiences are Like sometimes 30 days is enough, 30 days retargeting. Sometimes you have to go with like 60 days retargeting. So it just depends on how many people are coming into your listing. For an audience to be created on DSP, you need at least a thousand Unique visitors a month to create an audience awesome.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, the next one is how are you using the bidding strategy for supplements and are you getting good results?

Mina:

First for supplements, the way that, like I work, from long to long, tail up, like from from long, like long term, like um, low, low search volume, all the way up because lower search volume are easier to win. And so my strategy is, you know, going to helium 10, I put in my, or I go into, like you know, the search results on on Amazon type in my main keyword, open up X-ray. I pull up the top 10 competitors, launch them in cerebro. Then I set up some settings, so I would say like a minimum of 500 searches a month, minimum ranking competitors seven or eight out of the 10. Um, and then maximum position, 60. Um, and so now it's showing me keywords that are relevant to most of these competitors with decent search volume and they're not ranked a super low. And then from there I have my core list and I take that core list and I start launching.

Mina:

I launched the big ones initially just to get relevancy and to get a lot of indexing for for a lot of different keywords. I'll watch this broad phrase and exact, but I start with the lower search volume keywords and I put them five in a campaign, one in broad, one in phrase, one in exact, and I'm gradually launching them and I start with a bid that's lower or around the suggested bid. Sometimes the suggested bid is $5. So I'll just start at you know, a dollar or $2. Anyways, and then I can always inch my way up, and so from there I wait and I, you know, I spend and I see what's going on. And then I start inching data up based on like, what's getting um, impressions, um, and obviously, if there's anything that's performing well, I'm spending a little bit more money on it. And I'm basically trying to start like I'm casting a net at the bottom and then coming up, up, up, up, up, until it starts like catching some people and instead of like spending up here, and then I'm like, damn, like this, spending too much money, it's not profitable, and lowering the bids.

Mina:

I started the bottom and work my way up and then, as I stack the, the long tail ones, it's easier to launch the bigger ones Because they're going to be more costly, but they'll balance out because they they will drive a lot of traffic, but you should have like a decent amount of sales that are profitable coming in first and then then it will work a lot better than if you just start with the broad keywords Um and yeah, and that gets me pretty good results. We're like looking for negative keywords very frequently, making sure that any keyword that spends a certain amount of money with no sales, is added as negative, like if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, um, and then all any keyword that's like underperforming bids are lowered. And we're constantly launching new keywords and testing new keywords out. So, going through the search term report, um, you know, twice a week identifying any search term that converted profitably that we're not currently running. I'm not negating it or anything, I'm just taking it out, putting it in its own campaign in different match types to try and double down on those keywords.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome, all right. Next question Are Google ads still effective?

Mina:

Yeah, I would say Google ads are still effective. Definitely. I think you're trying to drive cold Google ads to Amazon because you have a lack of attribution. It's very hard to optimize. I wouldn't necessarily put my money there before maximizing uh, PPC and DSP.

Carrie Miller:

Can you elaborate a little bit more on this strategy for a rank? Do you have to put in specific keywords on your Google ads in order to rank on Amazon for those, or does it just sending Google traffic allow all your keywords to increase an organic rank, Like what? What is the strategy for that?

Mina:

The strategy is individual keywords. So it's like we'll set up a keyword, uh, in its own campaign and we'll drive traffic to Amazon and we're noticing that the rank of that keyword for us organically goes up and we're tracking it in the search query performance report, um, in terms of like all of everything ranking higher. That works well when we're using influencers. So we've done a strategy where we've hit up a bunch of influencers, like I'm actually going to do this for my new product that I'm launching, um on Amazon. It's like a new, it's like a packets version of my electrolytes, but basically I'm giving it away to a hundred different influencers and what we've seen is like brands that have done that that they've given it away to influencers on Tik Tok and they've like posted about it and made good content. And then people are like looking up the brand name and looking at it on Amazon, like that's really helped improve organic rank across the board.

Carrie Miller:

That's amazing, thank you, okay, so what's the best way to choose initial bids?

Mina:

Yeah, so start with suggested bid, you know, and if the suggested bits too high, just start lower and then work your way up. There's like no science behind this. Um, you're never going to nail it. You're just going to start somewhere and then you're going to have to optimize it. You're going to have to optimize over time until you hit the you know, the sweet spot. But I would rather you start lower and work your way up, because if you start higher you're just spending a lot more money faster.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Next one should broad and phrase match be used in campaigns throughout the product lifetime? I think is what that is.

Mina:

Product. Okay, so should broad and phrase match type? Yeah, broad and phrase match types should be used forever. They're like different types of keywords. So you have one keyword and you have different match types and those different match types perform differently. So you know, it's like. That's just how it is. Like you can have a electrolyte powder broad, electrolyte powder exact and electrolyte powder broad could do amazing, because inside of electrolyte powder broad there's 40 keywords. You've negative 10 of them that are not doing well, and then there's 30 of them that are doing good, you know. And then electrolyte powder exact is just that one keyword and you know you've optimized the bid as much as you can and it's doing okay, but you know it's spending too much money and not an ecosystem is high, etc. Etc. So you should always use phrase and broad. Yeah.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Okay, and we have some continuation from the one earlier who had 150% ACoS negative 7% conversion rate. He said TACoS are 125%. Current sales two orders a day. Category gift bags. I need PPC strategy for the current situation in helium 10. I see my rank is poor for major keywords. I am tracking.

Mina:

Yeah, I mean this is. It looks like to me it's more likely a conversion rate problem. When I see TACoS that high, I mean it's not going to be your, because if your TACoS is that high, then great like, pause all your keywords and only keep the ones that are profitable. And if there's like, if the ones that are profitable aren't even making you two sales a day, then yeah, I mean you have a conversion problem. So it because if you fix your conversion rate, then your 125 TACoS could become 50% TACoS and then you'll have more opportunity to get you know, launch more keywords and some of them be more profitable, which will drop your TACoS even further. But it seems, as of right now you're, it's probably a conversion rate problem.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah.

Mina:

Sorry, let me just say okay, while you fix your conversion rate, what should you do for PPC? I would say go after a bunch of long tail keywords, start with a very low bid and work your way up slowly and try and catch some profitable keywords. That's, that's all you can do. There's not much else that you can do, right? It's because then, the day you're launching different keywords, you're testing different keywords, some of them need to convert and it's, you know, it's up to your conversion rate.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. I think that's actually the last of the questions here, so and we're about, you know, almost at 40 minutes, so we've definitely had a pretty good episode here. So thank you so much for joining us on this live. We really appreciate you coming and giving all this expert advice. I think you just dropped so much information here, so many good tactics that people can start taking into, especially these holiday season times, to help, you know, maybe not overspend and to be more profitable. So thank you so much again for joining and we'll see you again, hopefully another time on TACoS Tuesday, and we'll see you again.

Mina:

See you later, see you soon, thanks guys.

Carrie Miller:

Bye everyone.

#502 - $6 Million Amazon FBA Business with 0 Employees?!

In episode 502 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Swapneel discuss:

• 00:00 - Selling on Amazon And Scaling Rapidly
• 14:18 - Product Launch Strategies and International Market Approaches
• 12:47 - Scaling a Multimillion-Dollar Business Solo
• 17:52 - Product Research and Potential Products
• 20:39 - Issues With Suppliers and Product Lifespan
• 23:42 - Product Launch and Maintenance Strategies
• 34:40 - What's Next For Swapneel?
• 38:52 - Swapneel's 60-Second Tip

► 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 very unique seller. He sold over $10 million over the last couple of years, has 60 products in over 10 marketplaces and launches a new product every month. Guess how many employees he has? Zero. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash black box. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. 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's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and from the other side of the world. We've got a serious seller here that is joining us for the first time in the show. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, since it's your first time on the show.

Swapneel:

Hi, my name is Swapneel and I'm from India. Been selling on Amazon from the year 2014 and, as a full term, from last four years.

Bradley Sutton:

So yeah, were you born and raised in India?

Swapneel:

Yeah. What part Rajasthan, Jodhpur.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. And have you lived all your life there or have you moved around at all?

Swapneel:

Yeah, so when I was like 19 years old I went to New Delhi like for my university for five years and then right now I'm like kind of digital nominate, so I don't really live here anymore, but just maybe like two, three months a year just to visit my family, because my family still live here.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, what did you go to a university for?

Swapneel:

I did law so.

Bradley Sutton:

I wanted to be a lawyer.

Swapneel:

Yeah, so I did law for five years and I specialized in intellectual property rights.

Bradley Sutton:

How does one go from five years studying law and then all of a sudden, e-commerce? Not a natural transition there?

Swapneel:

No, I was doing part time, like other than focusing at university. I was working as well All my university years. Any commerce yes, I was selling on Amazon from 2014. And yeah, so, and I did. Well, how did that?

Bradley Sutton:

happen, though, because that's still not typical. It's not like okay, yeah, during the day I'm going to study law, during the night I'm going to sell on Amazon. I mean like especially in 2014, when hardly anybody was doing it, so how did Amazon even get on your radar?

Swapneel:

So, even before Amazon, I was doing a lot of other platforms like eBay, and there are some other local marketplaces like traders shop clothes, so, and you know, in 2013, amazon entered in India, but in 2014, they opened for everyone, and I knew that Amazon is a really big e-commerce company and I should be there and yeah. So, but, like, even before I went to university, I was making, you know, some money like some, doing some other stuff like flipping goods from online to offline.

Bradley Sutton:

So, like you've always been like kind of like I had an entrepreneurial mindset in one of those early age. You trying to make some action, okay, now it's making a little bit more, a little bit more sense, okay. And then things started getting bigger so that when you graduated from university, did you just go full time into into e-commerce then yeah.

Swapneel:

So that that time, like for me the money was pretty big motivation thing. So in my first year of the university I wasn't sure how much I would be making as a lawyer. But on the second and third year I got to know from my seniors like what is the actual situation and I realized that man like I need to put like at least 10 years in law if I really want to make some serious money in this field.

Bradley Sutton:

Now back in 2014,. I'm assuming you were selling an Amazon USA.

Swapneel:

No, I just did in India. That's where Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

India was active in 2014. Yes, yes, I didn't even know that. Okay.

Swapneel:

Interesting, yeah, but it was very new. It was really new they didn't do reselling or private label. Yeah, so I was just doing reselling. I used to buy a lot of stuff from USA, mainly from Amazon.com, and then selling in Amazon India. Yeah, Interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, at what year did you first hit the seven figures?

Swapneel:

The 2021, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

2021  okay, and at that point were you one hundred percent private label or were you still doing like some reselling and things?

Swapneel:

I was doing both and like I feel like so, in 2020 I launched a lot of private label products. During all the, like you know, doing the first lockdown, I was just focusing on all the products launches I will be making, doing product research and my first product has really contributed a lot for my private label journey, like I started with one product and then just my.

Bradley Sutton:

You're still selling that product now.

Swapneel:

Not anymore, because the demand is okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Can you tell us?

Swapneel:

what it is, then, yeah, sure.

Bradley Sutton:

I can show. Go ahead and send me the link over in the chat and let me pull it up on my screen. Let's see here. Okay, I see what this is, so let's pull it up here so everybody else can see. There we go, all right. So this is like a, like a USB capture card I'm looking at here. And how did you find this Like? How did you even decide that this was going to be your product? You just got it randomly, or?

Swapneel:

what. So for me, like one of the criteria to search the product is checking the new launches of my competitor or and see like if I can have that same product in a very less turn around and can enjoy the party. So that's what's my like, I mainly do. And during that time I saw like a lot of people were seeing selling this product but they were doing MFF, like they were not doing full fill by Amazon and like, even though the product demand was there, but they were, I don't know why they didn't did FPA. And I knew one thing like as soon as I will do this FPA, the product doesn't have any. Like you know, any of my computer doesn't have a lot of reviews and if I will do full fill by Amazon, then I can, you know, sell a lot of goods as well. So how many?

Bradley Sutton:

how many at the peak? Like? How many units of this were you selling a month or a day?

Swapneel:

I was selling like I was selling like a month I was selling more than 1500 units in India.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, wow In Amazon India. And yeah, okay. All right so then you're like, okay, wow, yeah, this is definitely better than reselling, or I have to get a little bit and stuff you could just Well. Did you manufi, did you get it from China, or did you get it from there in India?

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I got through some of the suppliers in China. Yeah, but the best thing about this product is not just selling, but the margin I had. So I was buying this product like for $5 and was selling for like this product for around $40.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, very nice. Yeah especially in India you're still living in India that the money goes even farther.

Swapneel:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

How long until you bought your parents a house?

Swapneel:

So I bought the like. You know, as soon as my business started picking up in doing COVID, my family was already super excited. So they already finalized, you know, like don't worry about being a lawyer anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

No, forget that you know like, hey, this Amazon is good, huh, okay.

Swapneel:

Yeah, but that you know definitely I was in a bit of stress situation. It's a really big thing, you know so, but that stress really motivated me to push myself further and focusing every small details of my finance, my product. So, yeah, I was a stress, but at the same time I was able to, you know, do better in those situations.

Bradley Sutton:

So 2021 hit that $1 million mark. How much did you sell last year in 2022?

Swapneel:

I did $5.4 million.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, getting to $1 million is impressive enough. How did you go from $1 million to $5 million just in one year? We're just launching tons of products, or you had some products go viral Were you launching to other marketplaces. How did you increase so fast?

Swapneel:

So, like I was doing some international markets before in and out, like you know, kind of drop shipping back in 2018 in UK and some EU market also in USA but it was not, like you know, full time or doing throughout the year. Sometimes my accounts were also suspended because of drop shipping. But back in 2021, I started again focusing on the international markets, but still was not doing like a full-fledged business. And back in like 2022, I expanded my business in a very serious manner, like in whole of EU UK, Canada, USA. I know everything how to do an average because I had a lot of experience. And also in 2020, I did my business in Austria as well. So that has really helped me a lot. You know, like provided me enough money to expand in those other markets. Yeah, so that was one of the things like really helped me. And like I was just using my suppliers, which I'm already using in India, and I know that, whatever I would be selling the same product in USA, I would be doing 10X more at least. So that has changed a lot. And also my negotiation skills really helped me because a lot of my suppliers started giving me credit and I utilized those that credit in a very efficient manner like, yeah, you get loan and if you just spend on yourself, then it's not a good idea, but if you utilize pretty well in the business, then definitely it helps. So that's what helped me in 2022. Okay, All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Now it's coming up. We're now here in Q4 in 2023. Are you going to do better than last year? Same Worse. What do you think you're going to end up with this year?

Swapneel:

So this year it would be exactly the same what I did last year, because the situation has changed a lot this year. Firstly, I'm traveling whole of this year and it's just maybe like 40-50 days. That was in India. Other than that, I was traveling full time. I was just came, like three, four days ago, from like a four month of trip. I was in North and South America. So this year I was like pretty relaxed and also a lot of things happened at Amazon as well. So Amazon is, I think, are really not smooth at Amazon, so trying to fix those things as well, all right, so now you've got this five months, you've got this five, six million dollar business.

Bradley Sutton:

You're traveling, enjoying yourself, not working like 100 hours a week, so you must have 20 employees supporting you, huh.

Swapneel:

Oh, not at all.

Bradley Sutton:

How many total employees have you had the last few years?

Swapneel:

So in India I just had one accountant and one person who manages, and then there is one guy from at Veros. That's it in India. But I never had any employee anywhere else, even though my Indian business is not even like 7%. If I compare to my last year's sales revenue, my Indian business was just 7%, but for the rest 93% revenue, I never had any employee. So for your Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

USA business and in Europe you have zero employees, just you.

Swapneel:

Yes, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Well. So I mean, people listening to this might ask a question well, like, maybe that makes sense. You know, like if you're working like 90 hours a week and have no life and just stay in your basement and work all day, but how in the world do you scale a business so much? And you're the one who has to answer the customer service, you're the one who has to find a line of their products, you're the one who has to do the keyword research, you're the one who has to make the listing, you're the one who has to fight with Amazon if customer support, if something happens, how in the world can you run a five, six million dollar business just by yourself and not even working really full time?

Swapneel:

So the one of the best thing with Amazon is their FPModels. So a lot of customers, don't you know, reach out to you if they have any issues with the delivery and all the stuff, and that is one of the reasons why customers, you know, contact to the seller at first place, other than the warranty and all the stuff. And also I was doing a lot of reselling as well in US market, so the brand has to take care of those stuff. So a lot of time was saved for sure, yeah, so, and I had really good partners, for example, with the Logistic thing. I have a really nice shipping agent and that really, like you know, eases my work a lot, just sending the details of the labels and everything and just telling you where to ship which market. They take care of everything. So for me, the main goal was just to, like you know what I can do to improve my revenue, and also sometimes I used to use some freelancers if I was not really good with something. So, yeah, that's it.

Bradley Sutton:

So how many marketplaces now are you in? So right now I'm in USA, Canada, UK, whole of the EU, UAE, Japan, Australia, India, but more than 10 marketplaces, probably, and are you selling the same products across the board, or, like, some products are only sold in EU, or some products only in USA?

Swapneel:

Each market is different. For example, in India I can sell mostly a lot of products, but not very high end products and which are technical. Each country the situation is really different. Sometimes there is a really low like maybe a local company who is doing really good and have a lot of reviews, and maybe you don't have any kind of competitive advantage, even though I will try or push, try to push. So for me it's more like market specific strategies, because not all markets are same and every market is completely different.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what's your, what's your process? Like, how many products are you launching or actually until now active? Approximately how many skews, different skews, you know, like if you're selling the same one product in USA and Canada and Europe, just count that as one. But just roughly, like you know, 20 skews in all marketplaces, 100, 300, like roughly. What do you think?

Swapneel:

So, like beginning of this year, I was also doing a lot of reselling, but now I'm not doing business with one of the company I used to do and that has definitely contributed a lot to my last year's venue. But things have changed.

Bradley Sutton:

So private label. Then how, yeah, how many skews are you doing?

Swapneel:

So currently I'm launching like every month at least one new product in private label and so and some I also take off the old you know, which are not really performing really nice and not what my efforts or the you know margin is shrinking a lot, so I just cut off, you know, those products. So right now maybe like 60, 70 products 60 or 70 products.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, walk me through. Have in mind your last product you launched. Like, when was the last product you launched this month? Last month? So have one product in mind. You have it in mind? Mm? Hmm, you got it in mind. Ready, yeah, yeah.

Swapneel:

Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Now was it July that you launched it.

Swapneel:

Yeah, oh.

Bradley Sutton:

I guess that one product you have in mind. What month did you discover it, or what month are you like? All right, this is what I'm going to plan to launch. You know we talking January last year. You know what was it? Spring when was it?

Swapneel:

So in April and May I was in China and I was looking around some products and then I found some product which is doing good in the US market and I contacted some suppliers. When I was in China I visited the factory. So it was in May, in the month of May.

Bradley Sutton:

But which came first. You found the product, or, like you found the idea in China, or you had done some research when you were still in the USA and then went to China. Which one was first?

Swapneel:

Sometimes, you know, because of some advertisement or anything if I find I just keep on. Like you know, at least every day when I'm doing product research I spend at least one hour on Amazon just browsing and doing really nothing, checking what's going on and if I can add something value on that product. So then I just found one product and I was doing more and more research and then seeing like I do check, like you know, if any product is launched recently and the rank is going crazy, it means this product could be a potential. So this is one of the reasons. And then to validate, I check the data how much volume it says in a month and other than that.

Bradley Sutton:

What are you looking for? Like are you checking how many do you have, like a limit? Like oh no, there's already 30 people selling this, so it's too late. Or like what's your what are some criteria? Is that you're looking for when you're doing your validation?

Swapneel:

So I check if this product is a really advanced, then how the product you know like before generation did, for example, like which was not that innovative enough. It was a basic product, but how much that product was doing, how much is the reviews for that product. Is a really really established and do I have chances of getting success or not? So I do check all these things and I also do the search result how much is a search volume for this particular product? And to check whether this product is seasonal or not.

Bradley Sutton:

So okay, so, so then you did all that with this product, and then your next step was you actually went to China to like check some suppliers for it, or what was the next step after you're like you know what, this looks really good, it passes my test. What was the next step for you?

Swapneel:

So I was already in China during those time in April and May and I felt like visiting the factories and you know it's a really good idea rather than just chatting them. I visited factory and I did all the customization with them and, yeah, so ordered like I can also negotiate better. For example, they gave me a price for 10,000 units but I said, hey, it's a new launch and you know, then I try to get the same price for like maybe four, five thousand units and at the same time I make sure that if this product is not really doing good or it's very new in already UK or the U market, then I make sure that I launch the same product in all across the market places all at once.

Bradley Sutton:

So this one product that you launched in July, the one that you have in mind was that only for USA, or was that one that you had launched in other places?

Swapneel:

Yeah, at the same time I was launching UK and U for that product it was Enslafrom.

Bradley Sutton:

On the subject of suppliers, have you ever had issue with your suppliers where they sell your product to other people?

Swapneel:

Oh, A lot of suppliers do that a lot of if not that, then how do you handle that?

That is one of the reason, like why a lot of my products don't have a long life long life in case. Like you know, like people do a lot of drop shipping like tick tock products and Instagram, really, you may see so most of my products are also related to that as well. Not all, but at least 30% of the product. So I sell it. The trend is going on and, yes, then eventually the trend dies, or so it's not like I can sell the same product for another 10 years as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Yeah, so you. So you don't get really emotionally attached to the product because you know that. You know, like now are all these products you're launching similar brands, or or you always starting just different, random brands.

Swapneel:

So I have some products, specific brands, and some brands are just used for any miscellaneous products.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So then, this product. You were there in April and May. You happen to be in China. You were browsing Amazon. You found it. You found a new supplier for it, got it ready, 4,000, 5,000 units, shipped to Europe and to US. What's your, what's your launch strategy? Like, like, like, how do you, how do you what some techniques use? Like, how are you getting to page one? Are you just using, you know, ppc? You have any special techniques that you can share? I?

Swapneel:

Use very basic first of all. Obviously, your product should have really nice photos, should classify why your product is better than any other product in the market.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you get nice photos? Do you have like a studio?

Swapneel:

You do business with or what. So I first will try to work directly with the supplier so that I don't have to spend a lot of money upfront For these photos, even because I'm not sure whether how the product will gonna do. And then, if I cannot get anything, then I try to look at fiber to find some people who can do for me, and Then also do the nice a plus content, make sure the bullet points are really good, everything this is a really basic thing to start with, and then, since I launch a lot of products and a lot of market, I Utilize one of the best tool of Amazon, that is, amazon wine, because that really help you. And If you will launch a product in a lot of market, then you get a lot of reviews as well, for example, in the US.

Bradley Sutton:

My view just oh and all the reviews are stacked together, then you be Like you get 20 vine reviews in USA, 20 vine reviews in UK in the same ascent. Now you've got 40 reviews instead of I mean, I'm sure many people do that, but you know, it's just kind of just dawned on me like that's a good, that's a good strategy to have and another reason why you should launch on the the same ascent, okay. And then you find the keywords from helium 10, like you use Cerebro or what tool are using.

Swapneel:

So for me, because some of the products are really new in the market, there are no competitors as well, so it's really difficult to focus. You know which would be the keyword. So I just use Amazon automatic ads to check all the keywords which are performing and by or but. Maybe every week I try to optimize and seeing if some of the keywords are element, trying to put in the negative list, so, and trying to make sure that those keywords are on the product title bullet points. Yeah, yeah, to improve, to improve, so like just very basic, to like no things I use. And Once, like initially, you always get very good reviews because of the wine, because normally people don't put a lot of negative reviews, they leave mostly positive reviews. So you already got initial pull, you know, for your product. Yeah and Then it is totally depends upon the actual customers reviews. If the actual customers are Giving me good reviews, then I can be sure that this product is really doing good and Then I can have that as a long-term product as long as there is a sale for this product. And then I started improving more of my ASIN by putting videos, doing, you know, whatever things I can improve for this product, then putting some Warranty-related things, making sure the customer is always happy. Yeah, I feel like if you sit on Amazon, you should always align your values with what the values of Amazon are. Yeah, so I just make sure that and I take every detail of the customer to further improve the product as well, like checking voice, you know, a voice of customers.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so now you know, thinking back then, from April, your product research phase to Negotiating, negotiating with suppliers, you know, getting samples and doing your customization, like you said, sending it to the marketplaces, creating the listing in the different marketplaces, managing those PPC campaigns in the first few weeks to launch that product that you launch in July, up until, let's just say, august. You know, so one month into the launch Approximately, how many hours do you think that you spent doing all those things?

Swapneel:

Oh, one of the so one of the most interesting time for me when I launch the product is the first sale. I look at the velocity of then another cell, how fast I can. I'm getting another cell. Then you know, checking the performance each day and whether it's improving or not. And, yeah, I closely check every detail during those time and for me, whenever it's my first launch, my goal is not to make profit at all and I will focus on that. Yeah, for me, the main focus is just to see how good is the product and how is the demand actually, because if your product reviews are good and you are early, more Than you can make money for years for sure for this just one product.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay so, but then how? Same question like the how long do you think you spent up until you know, after those first few weeks of spending a lot of time checking the sales? You know like, do you think it took you 50 hours from April to July or to August for that product? Was it 10 only, or or approximately? How long did, uh, did you actually put actual work into that product? I must say like maybe, yeah, for 30 hours at least okay, so about 30 hours of work for the one product, and then now, like, let's say, a product gets mature. You know, now you are making profit. Now it's kind of taking care of itself. Like how much time in a month do you spend on that product, would you say you know because I'm you know, you're probably having to do your ppc and, and you know, check reviews, customer service. Is it like one hour a month because you almost have nothing to do? Is it five hours a month for that one product? What would you say?

Swapneel:

so if the product is really doing good, then the first important thing is to make sure that I have stock for this product, sure? So I negotiate with the supplier and, you know, try to to make sure that I have stock, and then I'll look at the competitors if there is something innovating they are trying to do and if I can implement the same as well, you know, as soon as possible, maybe one of my suppliers putting some new product as a free or, you know, trying to value add, then I also make sure that I do some value addition as well, because, just because of this stuff, I don't want my product rank to go down yeah, so how long does it take?

Bradley Sutton:

you know, like, what is your maintenance phase for a product? For that, for that? We're talking about that same product, you know. Now you know it's October, that product you launch in July. Thank you, how much time are you spending on that product?

Swapneel:

so right now I felt that this product reviews are not really doing great and I'm not motivated enough right now to do further, even though even without advertisement right now I'm getting sales for those products. But if I'm trying, this is a low value product. So if I'm trying to invest a lot in the advertisement it's not really giving me a lot of fruitful results. So right now I'm like, okay, once this product is sold I will not start again, but then, but, but still.

Bradley Sutton:

How much time is it are you spending on so?

Swapneel:

every day. I always wait for the helium, then emailed about my performance, and it gives me all the units I sold in each of the market and that really give me a lot of idea. If something is going interesting, then I try to figure out why it's going like that. And, for example, yesterday I definitely checked on that product and I was saying like, okay, I'm getting sales, not doing anything. And then I checked the reviews are there any improvement in the reviews or is there a possibility of me I take that as a possibility if I can, you know, sell this product for a long time. But yeah, I see that I still have some stock left and the other variation is that really go good, I didn't have that, but I'm still wait and watch. Right now I'm not trying to buy something. You know more from us at first yeah, let's see.

Bradley Sutton:

So you think maybe less than one hour a month you spend on it now yeah, maybe two hours yeah, so so now we can, we're getting a little bit clearer picture of how you, you know scaled up and still can be by yourself. Is, you know, like, hey, maybe to find and and vet the product and and all the work to launch it only took you 30 or 40 hours, and now that it's in maintenance mode maybe you're only spending one or two hours, you know, per per product a month but, I remember you telling me you know that you're leaving money on the table, probably because you're not using, like, all of the tools, or you're not doing all of that, the analytics, since you're by yourself. But still, even with not doing everything that you could be doing, you're, you're, you're doing millions of dollars. And then what? What is your like profit margin, would you say, after your expenses for for your business? At least 15, 15, 20 percent so always want to make 15, 20 percent. If it dips lower then then you go ahead and cancel that product.

Swapneel:

If it goes less than 8%, then definitely not worth it at all.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So what's the future hold for you? Are you just going to keep doing what you're doing, like this, and just do stuff by yourself, launch a product once a month and things like that and then put on maintenance mode, or are you going to like you know what? It's time that I need to start delegating some of my tasks and maybe take some employees on? What are you going to do next year, in 2024?

Swapneel:

So ever since I was at our BDSS event, that has completely transformed how I see things and how better I can do, and from that time on was obviously I was struggling, so not focusing a lot during all those months, but right now I'm just thinking like every day. Once in a while I have thought about the delegation and what all things I expect from someone, and I'm right now in phase of hiring people, because I know one thing that I can do a lot better what I'm doing right now If I have people. For example, I have a lot of products in Australia. They do really good for me, but I feel I'm so stupid that I'm not sending the inventory on time there. A lot of my products are mostly on outdoor stock and if some market is doing really good, then I don't focus a lot on the market which don't perform well. For example, my USA and UK and EU market do such so better especially Germany, UK and USA that I don't put a lot of efforts in Canada, Australia, Japan, India and also I feel it's really bad because I have all the resources, all the infrastructure. All I need to make sure is ordering the right quantity and making sure that I have stock for those products. That's it. Yeah, so I'm losing just that.

Bradley Sutton:

That's the first thing that you're probably going to want to hire for is like, hey, I need somebody just 100% managing my supply chain, making sure that I'm not running out of stock anywhere. Okay, All right. So what would you say is your I mean, I'm assuming USA is your number one marketplace what would you say is your number two, three and four marketplaces out of all those that are going on UK?

Swapneel:

UK, I feel, can do a lot better as well. I really I'm very happy with UK market, a lot better than US market, because I feel the competition is less, the margin is a lot better than US, but overall sales it's number two.

Bradley Sutton:

You're saying next to USA.

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, right, okay, so far. Yes, so UK would do better than US maybe for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh really, wow, that's pretty impressive. Okay, interesting, all right. So, yeah, you got inspired by going to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You can see all the strategies that people are using, and these are strategies probably your competitors are using and you're not you know. So, yeah, it's like when you go to events like this, it can open your mind as far as as you know, seeing what, what is possible out there. Okay, so, other than hiring, finally, some help. What are some other goals for you for next year?

Swapneel:

Focusing on external traffic, because this is a huge thing, really really huge thing, because I see a lot of products on Amazon having 30, 40 reviews and then there's a competitor having 20,000 reviews and they are on the top five products. Why? Because they're getting external traffic. So external traffic is a really huge thing and I think I should have some strategies to work on that thing. Maybe TikTok release, Instagram release, and I'm really like focusing a lot to get some people on board related to marketing, because that's where I feel I'm really not good at all. So, trying to work on that and, yeah, I think that can be really big thing for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Well, I wish you all the best of success. You know I've seen you already at a couple events this past year and hope to see you again at some other local events. And yes, please definitely start hiring people and get some help that you need, and then you'll be able to travel even more, you'll have some more time on your hand and you can enjoy what's your favorite place that you or craziest thing that you have done living as a digital nomad the last couple of years.

Swapneel:

So I'm kind of and really in juggy right now. So I do skydiving, mostly a lot of sports, mostly a lot of sports related to air, you know. So when I was in like just a few weeks ago, I was in north of Washington and I did some being walking on a plane, like almost eight years old plane. I was walking on that plane and that was one of the craziest thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Like on the wings and stuff.

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was really a show.

Bradley Sutton:

No, thank you, thank you.

Swapneel:

For me, like selling on Amazon is just giving me freedom to do what I love the most. I just need financial freedom. That's it, Because that's it Like it. And such a beautiful thing like selling on Amazon you can work and travel at the same time.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah

Swapneel:

Whenever I'm traveling still not many people very rarely meet someone who is selling on Amazon, to be honest, especially of my age group and they're traveling because either they quit the job or they just got two weeks off from office.

Bradley Sutton:

That's yeah, yeah. And they have to go back to work but not you yeah.

Swapneel:

So, yeah, this is a really like, really nice life, you know as a digital moment. But only bad thing is that when I'm traveling, I cannot focus a lot on my work. So I feel like, from going forward, maybe next few months or years, I would like to live at one place a lot more so that my work doesn't hinder. And obviously, if you will, if I want to approach eight or nine figure in coming years, then I cannot do by just one or two hours a day. I need to put more efforts and really need to be very cease at work, because big money comes with big responsibilities as well, I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, all right. So why don't you leave us with a 30 second tip or 60 second tip? It could be either like an Amazon strategy, or maybe it's a strategy for traveling, for how to live as a digital nomad, a strategy for Amazon India. It could be about anything, so go ahead and give us your strategy.

Swapneel:

So I feel like there would be always a stress when you are selling on Amazon and you always need to have a patience, because Amazon will not fix your stuff in five minutes, even if your listing is gone, your account is gone or whatever. So the most important thing you can focus is on your mental health and you should prioritize that thing, because in life you may make a lot of money you can on the other day, if your account is suspended, you are bringing your nothing. So, but one thing can always help you is your mental health, and I think exercising is one of the best things, because that has changed completely me. I still remember how I was doing the first lockdown and how the journey from last three was not at all smooth at all, but not at all, like you know, not very smooth at all, but going workout and not stressing that helped me to not to stress. So I think, yeah, everyone should do this if you are especially selling on Amazon, because you don't have a lot of social life as well when you're selling on Amazon, except traveling, Okay, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, that's good for everybody to follow. I wouldn't follow the having zero employees for $6 million business, but everything else is kind of you know, something that I think a lot of people can do Well. Again, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you in person sometime next year.

Swapneel:

Absolutely Can't wait to see you again. Thank you so much, Bradley.

Helium 10 Buzz 10/19/23: New Amazon Marketplace | Transparency & Returns Updates | Big Deal Days Recap

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Sr. Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. 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 announces the launch of Amazon.co.za in South Africa in 2024
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-south-africa-store-launch

Amazon makes it easier for brands to join Amazon Transparency through new interoperability features
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-makes-it-easier-for-brands-to-join-amazon-transparency-through-new-interoperability-features

The internet is littered with fake reviews. Amazon, Glassdoor and others are trying to fight back
https://apnews.com/article/fake-reviews-amazon-glassdoor-expedia-trustpilot-43a478ac0b27d6bb773a3bbdba1858b1

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days Was the Company’s Largest Two-Day October Holiday Kick-off Event Ever
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/10/amazons-prime-big-deal-days-was-the-companys-largest-two-day-october-holiday-kick-off-event-ever

We'll also introduce you to the game-changing tool, Market Tracker 360 - your trustworthy guide in navigating a rapidly changing market. Get a demo of the MT360 tool here. Lastly, maximize your holiday profits with Helium 10's Q4 Strategy Guide – a step-by-step roadmap to unlocking the full potential of Amazon’s peak sales season. h10.me/q4guide

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

• 00:47 - New Amazon Marketplace
• 01:52 - Amazon Transparency Update
• 04:30 - Fake Reviews
• 06:26 - Prime Big Deal Days
• 07:39 - Walmart Listing Update
• 09:18- Return Policy Change
• 10:16 - ProTraining Tip: Market Tracker 360 Demo
• 16:30 - Download The Q4 Strategy Guide

► 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

Carrie Miller:

Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. The Walmart marketplace has created a brand new program to help sellers save on their referral fees, and Amazon is making it easier for brands to join Amazon transparency this and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Keri Miller and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz episode, where we bring you the latest and greatest news related to Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce space. We'll also give you a tip or strategy for serious sellers at any level. Let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's start off with one of the most exciting stories of the day today, and that is that Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. This marketplace is going to be in South Africa. So if you are a seller in South Africa, this marketplace is going to be opening in 2024 and it's open to currently local South Africans. So they basically announced that you can start applying for this marketplace now at seller.amazon.com/southafrica and that's going to be where you're going to apply, and it's already set up and ready to go for you to do that. It's a very, very exciting opportunity for anyone who lives in South Africa, because a lot of sellers are in that area and you're selling in Europe and you're selling in the U? S and other parts of the world, but now you can sell locally to your neighbors, and so it's a very, very cool time to be able to bring your brand to Amazon with that fast shipping in South Africa. So let us know below if you're a South African seller and you are planning on applying and selling in this marketplace.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next up, we have another amazing announcement by Amazon, and that is that they are making Amazon transparency a lot easier for brands to join. Before, they had a basically a 2D data matrix barcode that they would put on products and you had to label your products physically with this with your packaging. So this meant that if you wanted to join the Amazon transparency, it would take quite a bit of time to get that all set up and going, because you have to wait till the next run of your packaging and get it on your packaging, or you would basically have to repackage all of your products if you wanted it on your current inventory, which would be very expensive. What's really exciting about this is that they are making it easier for brands through new interoperability features. So, again, you know they had it available to a lot of brands, but they had to do their packaging with that special barcode on it and as of 2020, I believe they said as of 2020, there were more than 10,000 brands that did Amazon transparency, and now 33,000 brands are actually enrolled. So I think that that number is going to jump up dramatically and this is really good for sellers and for consumers because of the fact that you know, when you have that assurance that you're not going to get counterfeit products, it makes the whole process better for sellers, for their account, health and for consumers. They're getting the product that they paid for.

Carrie Miller:

So you know, I can imagine that it's going to be very, very easy, and so what's going to, what's going to happen is you can take codes that are already on your packaging and they can use those codes to verify whether or not your product is not a counterfeit. So, if we take a look, there's an example down here and Logitech actually has done this. So Logitech started out with this kind of using their own codes and what they did is they used the serial numbers that were used for warranty purposes, so those were the codes that they were able to use for this transparency and able to validate these. And so what they do when they, when Amazon's shipping is out, they scan these codes before shipping it out to verify that this particular product is the original and not a counterfeit, and then they can send it out. If it's not, if it's not anywhere to scan, or they're you know something is wrong, then they'll put it to the site because it's counterfeit, and that saves you a lot of hassle. Now this is going to be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US, so that's pretty exciting that they're really trying to roll this out worldwide. I think it's going to be an amazing thing to be able to roll this out quickly. I know I'm very interested in getting this going on my, you know, on my brand as well, because I don't have to go back and repackage everything. Are you going to start enrolling in brand transparency and do you think this is a good thing, or do you think it's going to be a hassle? Let us know. Whatever it is that you think below. Okay, going into our next article.

Carrie Miller:

The next thing is about reviews. Now, this goes to you know kind of with the theme of counterfeit and whether or not they're real, and, as you can see here that you know, this article is saying that the internet is littered with fake reviews, and we do know that this is true on Amazon, on Glassdoor, on TripAdvisor. I know for myself, I went and looked at reviews for a restaurant that I just opened and it had so many great reviews and I was like, oh my gosh, this place is going to be so amazing. And I went there and it was absolutely terrible. And what I realized, it was a lot of friends and family that were making, you know, these reviews go, you know, to five stars and they were putting these glowing reviews for it. And it was literally not the customers, because later on the actual reviews started rolling in and I could see that it wasn't the truth. So there is a lot of that that's going on, and so I think that this could be potentially a really good thing.

Carrie Miller:

It says in this article that they are, these big companies are actually teaming up now. So we've got Glassdoor, trustpilot, expedia, bookingcom and TripAdvisor. They're saying they're all launching a coalition to protect, you know, the consumer reviews, and so what they're going to do is they said that they are going to be sharing methods on how to detect fake reviews. This, I think, is going to be great, you know, for all of us to make sure that you know, when we're buying something, that we're seeing the actual reviews of actual customers, and then also just for those brands, because it's going to help consumers to know exactly what they're getting. So I think this is going to be good on all friends, for everyone. They're probably going to come up with some really great technology to really, you know, detect those fake reviews. So those competitors that you have that you know that are putting up those fake reviews. We're going to hopefully stop that, and so we'll see what happens with that. And let us know if you've had any issues with reviews. I know I've had some issues with fake reviews from competitors on my own listing. I'm curious to know if you've had any issues with fake reviews, so let us know in the comments below.

Carrie Miller:

All right, this next article is actually something that I was a little bit surprised by, and the reason for that is it's talking about Amazon Prime Day, big deal days, and I you know the economy is kind of struggling right now and I didn't feel as much momentum going into this day as I think a lot of other people probably did. And so it shows, because Amazon's big Prime Day deal day was the company's largest two day October holiday kickoff event ever. So that definitely tells me that I was wrong in my thinking. I thought it was kind of, you know, not that much excitement going on, but there clearly was. They had a billion dollars across in savings across all the Prime members. They also had 25 million items that were delivered either same day or next day delivery, which is incredible. They were busy delivering packages. Let me tell you, one package was even delivered within 54 minutes. So really, really interesting that this is, you know, kicking off so strong, especially with the economy the way that is. I think that this is a really good indication that we're going to have a really big Q4. I'm very excited for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and just the whole holiday season. This is always my biggest time of year. So really, really great exciting news to see that it's still going strong in sales on Amazon.

Carrie Miller:

All right, the next piece of news is from Walmart. So if you're a Walmart seller, I wanna see if you are seeing the same thing that I see in my dashboard. So I basically kind of logged in today and saw this in my dashboard it's the pro listing savings. Now it looks like what happened. Is I qualified for a pro listing savings? I think you'll have to be a pro seller in order to be eligible for this, but what I'm gathering is they choose listings that are doing very, very well, selling quite a bit, and you actually get refunds on your referral fees. So I have, as of today, this just starting about $3.12 in savings. So that's pretty cool. I know it says over the last 90 days, but I know this just started, so it's definitely not over the last 90 days. I think this is gonna be bigger and bigger as time goes on, and it's very, very cool to see this kind of thing because Walmart's really incentivizing sellers to join the Walmart marketplace and I think this is another incentive. As fees go up on other marketplaces, Walmart’s giving discounts and you can see on the next screen here this is.

Carrie Miller:

I kind of looked more into it and it's based on competitive pricing and fast and free shipping. So I use WFS and I also have, you know, the same pricing that I do on Amazon. So I think that's what helps me with that, and so you get 10% commission savings. That's pretty amazing. So I'm curious to know if any of you have seen this in your dashboard. Let me know in the comments. Let me know if you have any other additional things to add about that. I think it's a very, very exciting thing for Walmart sellers to just save money. You can put that money either towards more ads or just it'll add up over time. So we'll see how long they keep this going for, and I wanna make sure I can get all of my products eligible for it.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, last piece of news, but not the least for sure, this is just an announcement about the return timeframe, and this happens every single year on Amazon.

This is really nothing new, and so they're basically extending the holiday returns policy for consumers that purchase items between November 1st and December 31st, so they're returnable all the way through January 31st of 2024, except for Apple branded products, which are returnable only through January 15th. Now this policy applies to seller fulfilled FBM, fba and Amazon retail orders, and basically this happens every year. So it's something that I know a lot of us are very used to, and it's just another kind of added benefit for people to buy products during the holiday season on Amazon, and I think it does help us all in the long run. So just so that you're aware that's what's going on with returns. If you get some returns from November all the way into January, you'll know exactly why. Okay, so up next we have an amazing demo by Shevali. She's gonna be talking about Market Tracker 360 and how it can benefit you. So take a look at this demo.

Shivali Patel:

The tool I'm about to share with you is a great way for you to gain insights into niches, regardless of if you are a scaling seller, large brand or business that has been in the industry for years. When it comes to dominating sales, monitoring, tracking and staying on top of any rapidly changing market is important, and so, yes, you could go into Amazon and try to keep up with all the new competitors flowing in and out of your market, but wouldn't it be easier if you just had a tool that allows you to market create, curate and understand dynamic markets in one place? Well, that, my friends, is exactly what I'm about to share with you. Let's jump into market tracker 360. So, with market tracker 360, we do have logic in place. If it's your first time inside of this tool, you will be taken directly to market creation. However, once you've created markets, you'll be funneled directly to market list, which is this page right here. But what exactly is market create? Well, let's talk about it. When you click create market in the top right hand corner, you have access to four choices. We'll talk about these three in this video. For the custom market that is based on products, the system will pull in products that are adjacent to the ASINs you select. You can add in products from your list that you build inside of helium 10, type or paste them in directly into the search field box. Or, if you are a token connected user and your account is connected to your seller central, just click select my products to add and checkmark any of the ones that you want before clicking add. The only thing to note for ASIN markets is there is no filtering step. Let's click back and going back. As you can see, you can also define your market based on up to 15 keywords, either from your curated keywords list inside of helium 10, just by typing them in, or using our integrated Cerebro and magnet tools for relevant keywords without having to leave the tool. So if I were to type in matcha kit, I could click this auto complete, which, by the way, is simply what people are typing in on Cerebro, magnet and black box inside of helium 10. Click analyze keywords to receive this output of additional keywords. Use the information given to figure out which keywords you want as part of your market. You can also use this option to create hybrid markets of keywords and ASINs, though you don't see any ASIN additions.

Shivali Patel:

On the second stage of this process. You will see it in the third where it says optional set custom rules. Let's go ahead and jump into the next example for a full walkthrough. Now, if you do have your token connected, we are also offering what we're calling the auto magic creation, which simply means we will create your market. For you to do this, you just need to select up to five of your product lists based on their category, and we will find associated keywords to base your market on, though you can still enhance the market with keywords of your own choosing after the fact. You'll notice in the first step of this particular choice, our product pool is already grouped based on the lowest shared subcategory node, so we want to create one based on, let's say, coffin shelves. I'm going to select these two product pools. Select next to receive a prompt that asks if we want to set any custom rules for our market or simply go ahead and review and create our market. I'm going to click yes. Take me to custom rules.

Shivali Patel:

The third step we're looking at is the filtering step I mentioned before. You'll see this step on three of the four choices of market creation, with the exception being ASIN only creations. Now, if you wish to have a very granular view of your product markets. Setting custom rules is a good idea, as it allows you to generate a default viewing criteria. This is a feature for every market creation option, except for product only or ASIN only markets, as I mentioned, and just think of it as a top level filter. So when we do automatic market updates, only the selections that apply to these filter sets will show. You will always have the capability to add individual ASINs to your market at this level. So if there are any specific ASINs you want in your market view, go ahead and add them here, be it from your list or from your own products, we'll click next. That brings us to review and create, which is the fourth step in this process. Give your market a name. I'm going to call this auto magic coffin shelf market. We can set a default date range. Perhaps I'm only interested in seeing the last 12 months. Give it a default currency. I'm going to select USD. Choose your method of market updates. If you want products to be directly injected into the market without needing any approval, then you could select automatic how we relay the keywords to the products after.

Shivali Patel:

Market creation is typically modeled based on a fusion of the best seller rank, sales volume and search volume Controlled is similar to our original market tracker. It will give you the opportunity to refine by showing you new products under the suggested products tab to add or remove from your market, and the disabled option is just a static market, which would direct all the products that we receive to the removed products and suggestions section within market settings. From here, you can then review all the information that we just discussed, be it adjusting your product list, fine tuning your category, subcategory information or your additional filters. I'm going to click create market. That's going to take us back into our market view. We'll see the new market reflected on our market list page in about 10 to 15 minutes. Hopefully now you know how to create markets inside of market tracker 360 using keywords, keywords and asins, asins only, or even auto creating that market, as long as you have that token connected. Of course, you can gain a lot of insights and analytics with market tracker 360, but it all starts with this first step, so make sure you go and do that first step.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you so much, Shivali. That was amazing. I know that this is such an incredible tool, especially for larger sellers, to really help view the market overall. So check it out. If you haven't already, we'll put a link below to where you can schedule a demo in the market tracker 360 arena so you can get more information about it if you're really interested in it. And the final thing I want to leave you with is we've actually made a queue for checklists for sellers to get ready and prepare their listings and their business for hopefully the biggest queue for ever.

Carrie Miller:

And I basically put this together along with a bunch of resources that we have and it's things that you can use. You know Helium 10 for, and then also just tools on Amazon that are going to help boost your business during the holidays. So it's, it's in a checklist. There are videos to go with a lot of these particular items to show you how to do them, and I think it's a very, very beneficial thing for you to. You know, implement a lot of these strategies. It's still not too late to implement them.

Carrie Miller:

So take a look at the checklist. You can download it, you can print it out, look at some of those videos and I promise you, if you implement some of those, you'll see some positive results from this checklist. I think it'll be a great, great resource for you that you can use this year and in the years to come. So we'll put the link below and so that you can check that out too. Thanks again for joining me this week on the weekly buzz. I think Bradley will be back again next week, but thank you for letting me kind of step in for him this week. I hope you all enjoyed the news articles that we have. I think we have some great exciting stuff going on in e-commerce, and so we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

#501 - Walmart Seller Coupons, Brand Stores, & Ask Me Anything

Listen in as we tackle all your burning questions about selling on the Walmart marketplace, from gaining access to coupons and utilizing brand stores to handling comp errors and deactivations. Discover why it's critical to get your inventory to Walmart as soon as possible before the end of October and learn the ropes on what metrics you need to focus on when aiming for the Pro Seller badge. We also tackle your questions straight from our Winning with Walmart Facebook group, so tune in for those insights.

Interested in the Walmart Influencer Program? We've got you covered! This episode also explores the ins and outs of the Walmart Influencer Program and provides key updates on when brand stores and video ads will be available to sellers. Listen in as we discuss the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart, the steps to register your trademarks on the platform to get the Walmart brand registry, and whether there is a request a review button in Walmart.

Did you know that Helium 10 has tools for the Walmart marketplace? We explore the nitty-gritty of product listings, coupon availability, and how to compete against first-party brands on Walmart. Plus, how to join the Helium 10 Winning with Walmart Facebook Group. Don't miss out on this Serious Sellers Podcast episode to make the most out of your Walmart selling experience!

In episode 501 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:

• 02:13 - Access to Coupons for Walmart Sellers
• 06:24 - Walmart's Review Programs and Opportunities
• 09:48 - Prohibited Items Approval
• 12:58 - Walmart Image Guidelines and External Traffic
• 17:39 - Solving Comp Errors on Walmart.com
• 19:27 - Seller Badge and Rich Media Guide

► 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

Carrie Miller:

Today, we're going to be answering all of your burning Walmart questions. In this Ask Me Anything episode. We're going to be answering things such as when are coupons going to be available for everyone? When can I start utilizing brand stores, how can I deal with comp errors and deactivations? This and so much more.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me forward slash Walmart group and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join. You can tag me and carry with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our Winning with Walmart Wednesday episode, where we answer all of your Walmart questions and we give you all of the latest and greatest information about selling on a Walmart. In this episode I'm going to answer quite a few questions that we've had in the Facebook groups. I asked quite a while ago if you had any burning Walmart questions, so I'm going to go over those questions for everyone today and give you some great answers. In addition to that, I wanted to remind everyone that we are in Q4 already, which is kind of crazy that we're already in the last quarter of the year. But start sending in your inventory now to Walmart, because WFS is already starting to take kind of a longer time to check in products and it's going to just get worse and worse as the holidays keep coming closer. So, just like Amazon, try to get your inventory in by the end of this October and just kind of do more than you're used to sending in. I know last year I actually ran out during the peak season of inventory to forever to get checked in and so I missed like three weeks of December, so it was kind of a bummer. So if you haven't done that, make sure to send in that inventory.

Carrie Miller:

I want to start answering some of these Walmart questions that everyone had and I think they're really good questions. I think they're going to be very helpful for just looking at these answers for all of you. So the first one is that I had on my list is that someone in the groups asked because they really wanted to know this from Walmart, and these are not official Walmart answers. By the way, this is just some research that I've done. It's no way connected to Walmart, but I did do the best that I could to find answers for all of you that had really important questions for Walmart. So the first question was Amazon allows access to all deals and coupons to every seller, regardless of their sales volume.

Carrie Miller:

When will Walmart give equal access to things like flash picks to Walmart sellers, equivalent to best deals seven days, and what they said is that deal parity right now does not exist on the Walmart marketplace. However, if you do have an account manager, then they actually can submit those coupons for you. So for those of you who are lucky enough to have an account manager and usually you have to have a certain number, a volume of sales per month in order to get one of these account managers. They actually can help you and they'll be able to submit based on the fact that if you have a you know good seller response rate, if you have good WFS metrics and you know a low number of refunds kind of use it basically in the pro seller range they'll be able to help you with coupons if you're not a one piece seller. So that is something to kind of keep a thought in the back of your mind If you, you know, do have an account manager, ask them about coupons, if you can get into those flash picks and they potentially could help you with that. So sorry, I don't have a better answer, unfortunately, but I think that is a good way, you know, at least for some of you, to get access to some of those coupons. All right, so I'll go to the next question.

Carrie Miller:

Let's see here when can you tell us more about the Walmart influencer program? So the Walmart influencer program is called the Walmart creator program and they are actually trying to do similar to what Amazon has done and they're recruiting a lot of influencers and I don't know if you've seen this, but I know I've seen this on Instagram because I follow a lot of the fashion deals pages, and they are promoting Walmart products in terms of clothing. Right now. There's a lot of cute stuff that you know Amazon sellers are now putting on Walmart, so these influencers are also promoting it on Walmart and they're getting commissions for it. They get a specific commission based on the category, just like Amazon, and so that is something that's really up and coming and something to keep an eye on. If you are in certain categories like home decor, fashion I think those are really good. You know areas to really utilize those influencers because they already have kind of the right audience for you, and so I would highly recommend kind of checking out. Go on to Instagram and search hashtag Walmart influencer or hashtag Walmart partner and you'll see a bunch of videos come up and you'll see you know whose accounts are really Walmart partners so that you can partner with them.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so the next question is I saw that brand stores and video ads are in beta. When will these be available to sellers? Now? This is a question a while ago. Video ads are actually available now to brand registered sellers, which is really, really exciting. So if you have your brand registry all set up in the brand portal on Walmart, you have access, so you should be able to see on Walmart connect the video ads so you can do that. In terms of brand stores, they there isn't an ETA for brand stores, but I do know I've seen some sellers who are in the beta and they are testing it out. So I imagine it's the same as what happened with the videos. The videos were in beta not too long ago and they're going to start rolling out. You know the brand stores probably in a similar way. So that's pretty exciting and I hope it's soon.

Carrie Miller:

But they encouraged everyone in the meantime to take advantage of rich media. Rich media is like A plus content on Amazon and you can go on to the into the help section for rich media and you can actually get free hosting of videos and 360 images currently. So I would check that out. Otherwise, there are a bunch of agencies that do host rich media and you can get different modules that are really I think they're really great modules that you can utilize on Walmart. You just have to pay per skew, so it's a little expensive but worth it if you can see that conversion All right.

Carrie Miller:

The next question was Amazon has a request to review button that allows Amazon sellers to press a button on an order and Amazon sends a review request email to the to the customer on the seller's behalf. Will Walmart do something similar to help us get more reviews? So the answer of this is that there isn't something that's currently available but and there isn't a timeline for it to be able to get it to be available. However, Walmart actually does send a review request automatically after seven days to the customers on Walmart to request a review, so that's kind of an automatic thing that they already do. They wanted to also encourage all of the you know Walmart sellers to utilize the review accelerator program. So the review accelerator program if you have on your product five reviews or less, then you can pay $10 to ask your current customers for review. So it's actually, I think, different than Vine, because what it what it happens is that people are already buying your product and they'll send them an email and say, hey, we'll pay you $3 if you'll send in a review and then we pay. We pay Walmart $10 for this service, so it's actually really worth it. Up to five reviews, you can get verified reviews from your actual customers. So review accelerator it's in the growth opportunities tab, so check it out there If you have less than five reviews. There's also a review syndication where you can get your reviews copied and pasted, basically over from your website. So a lot of really cool opportunities for reviews, but they don't have any kind of timeframe for that request review button like Amazon has. However, I do think it's pretty encouraging that they're already sending those emails for us, so that's something that's that's great to see.

Carrie Miller:

So someone just asked how do you register a trademark on Walmart? So basically, you would take the same trademark that you have as an Amazon seller and you're going to go to the Walmart brand registry portal. It's a whole different website, so you can just Google Walmart brand registry portal and then you're going to apply there. It's very simple. You just put in your information there and you can. You can get accepted pretty quickly. So I would recommend go ahead and Google that and it should be pretty straightforward.

Carrie Miller:

What is the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart? We have 10 bestselling products on Amazon that we are simply not allowed to list on Walmart. The products have all the required government approvals with the EPA, et cetera. So the answer that I found on this is that there's an item report in Seller's Center and it's gonna have the reason code for why an item isn't published and so you can actually open up a partner support case, for all you know, for the web with whatever the reason code is. And then also, if the item status is on says item on hold, then the seller needs to either submit the required documents or provide the missing attributes to complete the submission. So it'll say what attributes are missing or what documents are missing, and you should be able to submit those. I will say I did kind of a case today you can find it on YouTube and we were uploading a hemp product onto Walmart and it has been quite a challenging process and you can actually see part of the process on YouTube. But I'm gonna give an update soon. But the update really is that they really don't want hemp products in WFS right now and I was able to get it approved to sell on Walmart. But it's been quite a challenging process so I'll go more into details about it. But the good news is we can sell seller fulfilled, just not WFS. So there is hope for any of you who are having an issue to get around that and do seller fulfilled if possible.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so the next question is some of my products are not approved to sell via Walmart WFS but they are approved for seller fulfilled. So this is kind of similar to what I was just talking about in regards to the hemp. Is there any special program that I can apply for to get these hazmat products approved for WFS? And it says Amazon has something similar and we are part of the Amazon hazmat program. So the answer was that internally, wfs has recently actually launched an updated prohibited items handling solution across their fulfillment network, which this is actually very new. So, depending on the category, prohibited items are handled in three different teams under the specialty compliance organization hazmat, food safety and non-chemical hazmat. So this is going to hopefully help reduce the time where these products are actually just stuck and unable to be fulfilled with WFS. So definitely inquire about those if you're writing a ticket to kind of be directed to those teams and hopefully we can get some progress on some of those Cause. I know I've seen quite a few questions about this, so I would definitely want to continue to try to get you all more answers about this. So that's the amount of information I have right now. So keep messaging me on Facebook or sending those questions in on the Facebook group winning with Walmart, so that we can help you get those questions answered.

Carrie Miller:

The next one is my account was denied. What can I do to get approved after I was initially denied? So sometimes well, actually most of the time they don't provide a reason, but there's soft denials and then you can do an appeals process and then there's like termination, which is much harder. So you'll have to kind of usually I think sellcord.co. They are an agency. They have helped a lot of people who have been kind of denied. You can reach out to them. That's kind of the best answer I have. Or you can kind of reach out yourself, but I would kind of suggest contacting somebody who's really good at this, and I do believe SellCord does do a good job of helping people get their accounts. You know out of that status. So if you have had that issue, I would say contact sellcord.co. And that also includes you know if your account is suspended or termination is very hard. So you will definitely need you know, inside access. So I would definitely recommend contacting SellCord for that as well.

Carrie Miller:

What is Walmart doing to attract more customers to their online marketplace? And so this is a great question and I can definitely answer that they are doing quite a bit. So they have Walmart Plus, which is kind of like Prime, and if you go into the stores they have it advertised everywhere. They're giving discounts on gas, they're giving discounts on just all a bunch of different things within the Walmart programs, like just in store discounts and also delivery and groceries. You get those for free. So they're really pushing for, you know, just getting more customers into Walmart Plus. Now I also saw when I was looking at applying for an American Express Platinum card, that they have a free opportunity for free Walmart Plus If you have that card. So if any of you have that American Express Platinum card, you get free Walmart Plus. So something else to it's basically like a free Prime membership. So I definitely recommend taking advantage of it. But they're doing things like that to really increase the customer reach. Also, if you notice and I've talked about this in other presentations I've done they are doing a lot of external traffic through Google Shopping and they're also doing Bing Shopping. So you'll see your Walmart products show up in Google Shopping and Bing Shopping without even doing any ads. So they are really doing a lot of work to try to drive traffic that way. So hopefully that answers that question. So this might be college.

Carrie Miller:

This is another question from somebody. This might be common knowledge. But what are the best performing aspect ratios for images on Walmart? Should mean image and secondary images be the same aspect ratios? Is the answer category dependent, and there is definitely some. There are some differences on the different categories. So I would recommend that you go into the Walmart guides and you can look for image guidelines and you're going to be able to find exactly what the image guidelines are for your category. So go ahead and check those out.

Carrie Miller:

The next question I would like to know why the payment schedule for reporting is every two weeks and then why it sometimes I have to wait a third or fourth week. Now I've seen this question quite a bit in the groups and I don't know exactly what's happening, but it's just a common thread, like I've seen it quite a bit. So if you, if you've had this, you can put it in the in the chat or the comments, because I'd love to know. But basically, the payment should be every two weeks, but something if you're not getting it every two weeks, it should. It's probably an error and I think you should open up a support ticket to see what's going on with that, because that shouldn't be happening. So make sure you kind of figure out what the problem is so that it doesn't continue on. So that's what I would recommend. I don't think that that's part of the process. So it is supposed to be every two weeks. I have confirmed that. So take a look at that. And, yeah, just go into the support and ask what's going on with your particular account. And personally, I did see this actually happen, so it did get fixed. Additionally, when see when removing, when doing removal orders, when it shows on the payment summary, can we get a detail of what the removal order consisted of? So if you want to understand what the removal order maybe consisted of, you can go to the WFS dashboard and that will give you a breakdown and it's going to highlight what was in the removal order.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so next one is it possible to allow for multiple SKUs to the same UPC code? Amazon allows this, albeit in one UPC code to one ASIN. So no, this is definitely no. Walmart uses UPCs as their unique identifiers for products. So you cannot have multiple SKUs associated with the same UPC, otherwise you're going to get a lot of errors. So this is really important to make sure you have you own your UPCs and then also that you have an individual UPC for each product. I know back in the day in Amazon you were buying second. You know basically barcodes from other you know third parties because they were more expensive but you can buy individual barcodes from GS1. And I highly recommend doing that to show that you own the UPC codes. Because if you do have somebody hijacking your listing or taking over the content, you can prove with owning UPC code as well as your trademark, that you own that product and the listing so you can get it back. I had a problem with this because one of our products for our Project X did not have a UPC code that was GS1 registered. It was kind of a bot as a third party thing a long time ago and I was unable to get that content back. So it was really kind of frustrating. So I know this from firsthand experience my own business.

Carrie Miller:

I've always had UPCs for each product because you want to kind of think when you're starting out with these products with the end in mind and growing your brand and business. Each product should have a UPC. We've always been wanting to know if Walmart has a honeymoon period similar to Amazon. Now I haven't had an answer to this. I do not think that it's as intense as it is on Amazon. So what I would recommend is to do your best to optimize start ads. Do whatever you do for Amazon on Walmart and I think that you will be successful.

Carrie Miller:

The thing about all of this is I noticed people. What they do is they'll open up and start a listing on Walmart and literally just copy and paste what they have on Amazon and they're not doing Walmart PPC or anything like that to help promote their product and they're like why am I not making any sales? Well, you would never launch on Amazon without doing PPC or optimizing for Amazon. Walmart has different guidelines to optimize their listings. So you know, make sure to follow those guidelines and I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. The next one is what advice do you have to third party sellers to help them compete against first party brands on Walmart? So the answer to this is Walmart really isn't viewing the two as competitive against each other, but they recommend that you find kind of holes where first party sellers are not really, you know, filling in the gap and finding opportunities on Walmart where you can provide products that are not available via 1P.

Carrie Miller:

When I've gotten a comp error, it feels impossible to get help for this. What is the best way to solve issues dealing with comp errors and how can we find out what the error is so that we can fix it? So then the comp errors are very difficult, I will say, and sometimes what they're saying is that you can actually go into the item report and check the columns. When you upload via flat file or anything like that, you can check the columns, the life cycle status, and then it's going to say published, unpublished or system error, and then on the adjacent column for the, it's going to have an error code and it's going to say things like enhanced vetting, IP infringement, shipping or etc. And you can open up a ticket to get help with this. But in my experience I've noticed that it's usually a pesticide word like antibacterial, antimicrobial. So if you make sure that you don't use any of those illegal words that are, you know, banned on Amazon, then you should be fine, and usually if you kind of delete your listing and rewrite it again. Without those words it'll come up within 15 minutes. So that's been my experience with that.

Carrie Miller:

So another question here is when some someone first starts selling on Walmart, what can they do to get their products ranked? Is it all based on clicks and sales or is there a lot more weight given to the listing quality score? So they did. You know Walmart doesn't really give me a lot of information about ranking, but I do know, for example, if you get a high listing quality score, that does help with your ranking. So make sure you fill in all those attributes in the back end. You know you enroll in WFS, you have reviews to start out with, get your listing quality score 90% or above, and I think that that will definitely help you. You also want to start running pay-per-click advertising to get some sales and I think you'll start to see yourself ranking as that goes. But in terms of like you know state, you know something that they actually say. It's really quite challenging to really say.

Carrie Miller:

And then the pro seller was another question. How can a seller become a pro seller and get the pro seller tag on their listing? So you want to make sure that your products are delivered on time. So I recommend using WFS because it takes care of most of the categories that are required for a pro seller. The thing about pro seller badges is you can actually filter on Walmart for pro seller so customers can say I want to only buy from a pro seller. And I noticed when I got the pro seller badge that I was starting to get more and more sales.

Carrie Miller:

So I will say it isn't an important thing. So you've got. You know, at least you've got an on time delivery rate of 95% or above in the last 90 days. You have less than 1.5% cancellation in the last 90 days. You have a really good seller response rate, higher than 95% in the last 30 days. And then basically it's, you know, fast delivery. And you also have to have over 250 orders in the last 90 days and you have to have at least been active for 90 days. So when you launch your products, you know, do your best to get those 250 orders and get those fast delivery times in and you can get the pro seller badge within 90 days. I think it's really, you know, worth it.

Carrie Miller:

So I would say WFS is probably the most important thing to make sure that you get that and yeah, so, and then the next thing is what? Will rich media eventually be free to Walmart sellers, like it is on Amazon? So there are some modules that are free, and that is the video and also the 360 image views. You can go into the help center and click on rich media. You can find it there. So otherwise, if you wanted to pay for some in the meantime, you can contact an agency and they can help you with that.

Carrie Miller:

So let's see if I have any questions. All right, Nelson, hello. Nelson says I'm a new to Walmart, in the process of onboarding and we already established our stores at Amazon. Is the procedures from Amazon to Walmart going to be similar when it comes to brand name products? If we are able to get wholesalers offline in our city to sell as branded products so we can sell online, are we still allowed to sell them? Yes, you are allowed to sell wholesale products on Walmart and I actually met at the Walmart conference quite a few sellers who have done very well selling wholesale products on Walmart. I think it's a lot less competitive right now in Walmart. So I highly recommend you get in there and start going for those, those products and, you know, make sure that you get in the game now? Great question. All right, let's see.

Carrie Miller:

It looks like I think someone was asking about tools for Walmart. Helium 10 has some incredible tools and I would recommend that you check those out. We have cerebral, which is our keyword research tool for Walmart. Another tool for Walmart called magnet it's another keyword research tool. We have x ray, which shows you sales volumes for Walmart it's our Chrome extension. We also have profits for one, one to help you, Walmart, to help you manage your profits. And we have our ranked tracker. And for pay per click advertising, we have add atomic for Walmart to help you manage your pay per click advertising. So we have all those great tools to help you and support you on your way to selling on Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

Also, if you're a helium 10 member, we have freedom to get Walmart where we should. We walk you through a to z on how to sell on Walmart, so that's available to you free if you are a helium 10 member. So check it out. If you haven't yet checked it out, alright, so it looks like I don't have any more questions, so hopefully, if that was very helpful, thank you to everyone who submitted their questions.

Carrie Miller:

For me to answer it was really, you know took a little while to get the answers to some of those questions and maybe some of them. I still need to do a little more research and hopefully maybe digging to get some more details on some of those answers, but hopefully that helps you in the meantime, and if you have any questions, join our group. Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. All you have to really do is search in the Facebook groups Helium 10 Winning with Walmart and you can join our Facebook group and ask questions there. You can tag me, you have questions, or other sellers are in there answering questions as well, so love to see you there and we will see you then. Have a great rest of the day.