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

Helium 10 Buzz 7/13/2023: Prime Day Results | Temu Trouble | UPS Strike

In this episode, we cover the latest news in Amazon and the E-commerce industry. This week’s breaking news includes results from Prime Day, how the UPS strike can affect your business, and more!

#473 - The Story of a Near TEN Figure Amazon Seller!

In this exciting episode of SSP, we had the privilege of sitting down with Farhan Huda, he is part of an incredible company that is on track to become the first-ever 10-figure seller that we’ve had in this show! Join us as we dive into Farhan’s captivating backstory, their brand called Utopia, and his manufacturing experiences in China and Pakistan. We also discuss how they reached the impressive 9-figure mark and their journey towards 10-figures.  
 
Farhan also shares his valuable insights on avoiding problems with Amazon, their criteria for successful products, how they’re staying competitive in crowded markets, and strategies for success. Don’t miss out on Farhan’s top strategies for newer sellers and his 60-second tip that could transform your business. This episode is a must-listen!

In episode 473 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Farhan discuss: 

• 01:25 – Farhan’s Backstory  
• 03:22 – Talking About Their Brand: Utopia  
• 05:17 – Manufacturing Products In China And Pakistan  
• 11:49 – Hitting The 9-Figure Seller Mark & On The Way To 10-Figures  
• 12:53 – How To Avoid Problems With Amazon  
• 15:30 – “Every Household In The US May Have Bought Our Product”  
• 16:20 – How Often Do They Launch Products?  
• 17:26 – Are All Their Product Launches Successful?  
• 18:45 – Their Criteria For Successful Products  
• 20:08 – How They Stay Competitive In These Product Categories  
• 22:09 – 9-Figure Seller’s Top Strategies For Success  
• 23:56 – Selling In Walmart.com  
• 24:37 – Utopia’s Top Marketplaces Outside The US  
• 25:23 – Should You Consider Manufacturing Products In Pakistan?  
• 27:23 – Farhan’s Hobbies & Healthy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind  
• 29:12 – Top Strategies That Newer Sellers Should Do  
• 31:39 – Why Is There A Big E-commerce Boom In Pakistan?  
• 34:24 – Farhan’s 60-Second Tip

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a nine figure Helium 10 user who is going to be talking about their story of their company. And if we have them back on the show next year, their trajectory might make them the first 10 figure seller to be on this show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you a YouTube blogger, blog writer, course creator, or other kind of influencer or educator? Maybe you just have a network of people interested in e-commerce. Did you know that you can earn commissions of 25% for life? For everyone that you refer to Helium 10, we’ve got many partners earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars monthly in commission from Helium Ten’s partnership program. If you’d like to join our affiliate partner program, please go to h10.me/crushit and tell them you heard about it from the podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is a 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 we’ve got a super serious seller here I believe you’re in Canada right now? Is that where you’re calling in from?

Farhan:

I’m based off of Canada,

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Awesome, awesome. So Farhan, welcome to the show. Where, where in Canada are are you at?

Farhan:

I’m near Toronto. Mississauga.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. How long have you lived out there in Toronto?

Farhan:

Oh, it’s been a while. I moved to Canada in 2003. So since then I have been in Canada, but I have been working in and out of US all along since I’m here. So I have been traveling quite a while. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Originally from Pakistan?

Farhan:

I was born and raised in Pakistan.

Bradley Sutton:

What part?

Farhan:

Karachi.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Been that’s my favorite food in Pakistan when I’ve been there is, is from Karachi. The chicken briani was, Oh my goodness. Amazing. It’s my mouth water, just thinking about it. Yeah.

Farhan:

Near the beach. And then, I don’t know if you have been to Toronto, but if you come, we have a lot of good Pakistani food.

Bradley Sutton:

One restaurant here in like, all of San Diego that, or at least that I know of. And so, yeah. All right. I, I’ll, I have another reason now to go visit Toronto. Now I’m assuming you went to university there in Toronto as well?

Farhan:

So I did my bachelor’s from karachi. Then when I moved here, then I upgraded my degree from University of Toronto.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what did you study?

Farhan:

Computer Science.

Bradley Sutton:

Computer Science. All right. Now, upon graduation and getting your degrees, is that what you started you know, getting a job in and things?

Farhan:

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I graduated in a software, and then I worked for a few software companies over here. Then I started my own software company basically working as a consultant. And then my friend was having this startup or expansion of Utopia, basically. He was working in New York as well, and trying to set up Amazon business. And then he needed my help, so I joined them and then expanded from there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so about what year was this?

Farhan:

So that was 2014.

Bradley Sutton:

2014. Okay. Okay. So

Farhan:

Yeah, when I started helping Utopia. So it’s about nine years.

Bradley Sutton:

Did it start as an Amazon based business, or was it a .com business? Was it a you know, brick and mortar business?

Farhan:

So a little bit of story is that, so my friend started around in 2009, 2010 when he had some stock. So his dad had a towel business in Karachi. Okay. So when he retired, he moved to New York with him. To keep him busy, they imported few, few lots tried to sell on eBay, well before even eBay. They had a wholesaler they contacted, but they didn’t have good experience. So they tried to sell it themselves. So started with eBay and then for a few years did eBay, then Amazon popped up. They started doing Amazon as well. And then obviously eBay went down, and then Amazon picked it up.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So when you joined the company, what did you join as, or what was your responsibility in those early days?

Farhan:

Early days, so I was in product management. We were adding more products. So initially I was doing part-time basically I was trying to figure out whether that’s gonna work out or not. So basically initially working on adding new product through Alibaba. Then we went to China, mainly Canton Fair few times between 2014 and 2016 added more product expanded the US business. And then between 2016 and 2019, basically we launched 2017 Canada and Europe. And then basically expanded over over there. And so me, from the beginning, I was in the product management. Then I grew from there took our other roles in supply chain, HR, procurement sales and whatnot. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the family business started in Karachi. Now, at that time, were they manufacturing only in Pakistan, or even at that time you were importing from other countries?

Farhan:

So initially it was towells only in in Pakistan. And then when it picked up, we saw some, some decent reserves from there. So then we started basically we are brand owners, so we manufacture only in our brand. So we were manufactured from China. So then we added other home textile product words like bed sheets, converters, pillows, curtains, you name it. So until 2018-2019, the other products we were doing from China, and in 2019 we started expanding our, our manufacturing facilities in Karachi and started slowly moving products from China to, to our own facilities. And now it’s about, I would say 80 to 85% manufacturing and in Pakistan, and rest is in China.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you choose what you make in Pakistan versus what you make in China?

Farhan:

So it was straightforward initially. Mostly the I would say stainless steel products. So we have, our bigger portfolio is home textile, but we, 20, 25% of our products are plastic based and cookware, stainless steel as well. So, so those were I would say we were, we didn’t have the expertise in the beginning, so, so we were doing those in China initially is still to date we are expanding our manufacturing capacity. The good problem we have is that whatever we manufacture, we, we import or buy ourselves in US and Europe and sell. So there’s always a challenge for the capacity. So if we wanna fill the gap, we want more inventory. So we still, sometimes we take some of the home textile goods from China as well, but mostly the kitchen products, stainless steel, although we are setting up our TNS steel and, and cost iron and product line in Pakistan as well. So the long run goal is to be independent and, and do all the manufacturing in Pakistan.

Bradley Sutton:

So the, the stuff that you get from China, it’s not necessarily, you don’t run the factory, you don’t have full control like you do in Pakistan, you’re just buying from

Farhan:

That is correct. So the main reason the business strategy was that. And that came into being around 2017-2018 other big sellers were coming on Amazon. Amazon was doing their own private label, so they were getting bigger orders from the vendors as well. So if you are manufacturing, let’s say from a bigger vendor as well, but they have multiple customers, so I mean, you are not higher up in the priority, and then you will face the supply chain challenges whatnot. So having your own manufacturing capacity, you have control for the manufacturing, supply chain quality and price as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Once you have a SKU that you’re producing in Pakistan or producing in China, I almost, I’m not sure if I understood correctly, but do you have backup factories at all? Like where sometimes you might make it at one place and sometimes you make it another, or once you have something made somewhere, a hundred percent of the manufacturing is at that factory.

Farhan:

So the goal is to have a hundred percent manufacturing of that factory, let’s say in Karachi and Pakistan. But if, if we are having some challenges in terms of, let’s say manufacturing capacity or some of the, let’s say the print items, right? We, we, we haven’t scaled up in our manufacturing. So, so, so part of this of the printed products on the Bedsheet side or on the, on the curtain side, we are still doing from China, because we have some, like, we are still setting it up in Pakistan.

Bradley Sutton:

But what I mean is like, let’s, regardless whether you’re making something in Pakistan or China, yeah. Like it almost sounded like you were saying you, you have like a backup. Sometimes the production is not enough, or Hey, this SKU is only made at this place, this SKU is only made in China, this SKU is, or do you sometimes, oh, man, we’re, we’re, we’re behind in Pakistan, so let’s switch manufacturing to–

Farhan:

Not like only in one location.

Bradley Sutton:

So that was why I was asking my question then, is like, that’s interesting to me because like, do you ever run into issues where, you know, the quality is a little bit different or customers notice that something is different, or maybe it’s just like the, the color is slightly off or anything like that when you’re switching back and forth between factories?

Farhan:

Yeah, yeah. So, so we would try to minimize that, but you’re, you’re right, sometimes the shades challenges are there. Quality. I think a lot of vendors or manufacturers, we are working in China. We are working for about 10 to 12 years, so they know what quality we like. And then we have a very, very strong quality team that do pre-inspections as well in China to make sure that quality is up to the mark. But yeah, on and off, we do run into challenges there sometime. And that could be from either side that one of the recent imports we did. And, and, and there are some, some bad reviews or in quality reviews are coming from there. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, it wasn’t your product, but I, I was just thinking about that. And I ordered some I had bought a new, we, we, we bought a new sofa at our house, and then I bought these like, I don’t know what you call them, like sofa covers mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then I just bought like, you know, four or five to test out over one part of the sofa, and we’re like, oh, okay, this is good. Let’s, let’s go ahead and buy the other four. And it was really weird. Like one of them, like, I know I bought the right color, but it was just slightly off. And I’m like, that’s kind of weird. Now, now I’m, I was too lazy to make a bad review and I just figured that nobody you know, my, it’s not so bad where my guests would notice, you know, but I’m like thinking like, Hmm, when you started talking about that, I’m like, huh, I wonder if whoever I bought this from, it, maybe it might have been similar. You know, they’re making, they’re making stuff at different factories and

Farhan:

Yeah, different locations, different manufacturing. And sometime it could be the different raw material or the way the chemical com compositions are even with the same factory when we make the darker shares like dark gray or black, even so in, when we are doing dying and, and, and other processes, sometimes those they, they can be a little different, right? We try to keep it exact the same, but, but it could be the raw material and, and other, other, other technical details. Yeah. Which could process with the difference of the shared, especially. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, our mutual friend Denise told me that you, you guys are nine figure, you know, company. When did you hit the, the nine figure? What year did you hit the nine figure mark?

Farhan:

Around 20 16, 20 17? Yeah, I mean, we are on track of, maybe by next year we will hit the billion dollars. So wow.

Bradley Sutton:

On, on Amazon Marketplace sales or what, what

Farhan:

On Amazon only? I would say it’s around six 50. I was talking about as a, as a global utopia. Awesome. But mainly big portion is, is Amazon. So Utopia is a umbrella, long mentioned. We have few businesses mainly are around Amazon, which is on Amazon sales, but Utopia Industries is for manufacturing. Then we have Utopia for fulfillment, which is mainly for our logistics, for all the warehousing and delivery from in and out, from warehouse to, to how,

Bradley Sutton:

How about like Walmart and, and other marketplaces as well.

Farhan:

We have tried, Walmart is not that big. Ebay, we still do, but I would say still like one to 2%. We do have our own B2B side YouPay d.com, which is about two to 3%, but 95% of our sales e-commerce sales is mainly from, from Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when you have an account that is doing hu literally hundreds of millions of dollars on, on Amazon, like to me, I’d be super scared, you know, cuz Amazon, as we know, just sometimes just randomly my Yeah. Suspended account, like have you guys gotten suspended at all? Or, or your account shut down?

Farhan:

Yeah. Yeah. We, we had few few nightmares like that. And, and, and most of them when, whenever we, we worked with Amazon. So for the last three, four years, we are their premium account. So we are in the top of the chain. So we have a premium account membership so we work closely with, with the, with that team. So, so probably you’re aware that on and off Amazon run their bot or, or some sort of a algorithm and then they start sending those, those emails that your account is at risk and whatnot. So we worked clo we worked closely with them, but yeah, few years ago, there was a time when, when they kind of for a few days actually our account was stopped, right. And then we worked with the team and it was enabled again, and then we kind of had an SLA with them.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, those two or three days, you’re losing more than many Amazon sellers make in a full year. That’s crazy.

Farhan:

Yeah, it was a million dollar multimillion dollar loss. Right. Wow. But then we work with them, we had an SLA and then now even if we get, it’s not at the account level, it’s usually at the product level. And, and, and most of the time, the, the premium account team, they resolve our issue right away. Like I would say the last month we had one of those emails, I think a lot of sellers got, got those emails. So I just called the guy and then he was able to re have, have it removed more.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Wow. That’s, that’s kind of crazy. Yeah. I’m looking, I’m looking at your, your, I was just looking at your, your main page on on Amazon here. And there’s, you know, you could just see some of these skews, like this is not the full, you know, just one skew 20,000 units. I mean, you’re selling like literally thousand units a day, onal for, for some of these, these, these products. And it’s just really, really impressive. And I just noticed that while we were on the phone, I was looking just to make sure that betting or that, that, that that throw wasn’t bought from you. But I just happened to, you know, I went to my orders on Amazon and I, I typed in Utopia mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and sure enough, in 2022 I, I did buy some cotton washcloth. So if you guys are listening out there, check your Amazon orders, look for Utopia and see if PR probably 50% chance you’ve bought some one of the their products. In the past.

Farhan:

We have saying in our company that at, I mean, every household in us have at least one of our products, especially our bedding products, and we claim that we are like number one online bedding sellers in, in us. So we have been studying, if you see batch years, you will see reviews and then all that from there, you can see how many years we sell every

Bradley Sutton:

Day. Not exactly what you thought you’d be able to say in 20 years that when you graduated with computer science degree, not really that you’re gonna have a a home product in every household in North America.

Farhan:

No, I wasn’t even, I, yeah, I never thought of I, I would be doing that. I would probably, okay, I’m on the software side. I’ll probably make some, some products or work for a company. Like, I don’t know, Facebook was not a dead time, but Google and whatnot, and then probably having a startup and whatnot. But I mean, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now how often, you know, do you guys, how often do you guys launch new products? You know, very often you just kind of stick to your bread and butter, or are you just constantly trying to find the next, you know, new

Farhan:

Very often solutions? We have dedicated so we have a big product management team, which, which looks after all the marketing, pricing, strategy and whatnot. And within those so we have 11 product teams out of two are dedicated for the research and development. So we have a process like every week we have, we are shortlisting products adding new variants and working on new products as well. So I would say in a given year, we, especially like last two years after Covid, we have been launching every month, tens of tens of product new, new categories as well, obviously in the diff same similar genre, home textile and in home and kitchen. But and a lot of products are, are, are, are being researched and, and in the last phases of launching as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Now do you, you know, because you have such strong, a strong brand and so much traffic and things like that, are all of your launches successful or sometimes you launch a product and you’re like, Nope, this is just not gonna work out. We’re gonna have to cut this.

Farhan:

No, we, we had some bad experiences in 2018, 2019 where I think that was not the right time. We tried to introduce some products, some electrical products. We were going out of our comfort zone, I would say or different genre. And then we did some baby pros as well, and even home, home and Kitchen Pro as well. And, and I think we were in that not that mature in terms of launching in 20 18, 20 17. So at that time, I would say our, our success was 15 to 20%, but nowadays for the last, I would say 12 months it’s, it’s easily 70 to 80%. So still, I would say 20, 30% of the product doesn’t work out. We try, we give them each product launch at least couple of cycles, two to three cycles. When I say cycle, it means that delivering decent amount of inventory to Amazon so six to 12 months, and after 12 months of a certain group launch we review and see whether we want to continue that or, or not. But

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what’s your criteria? Like what, what determines successful versus unsuccessful? Just profitability or a set number of units that you want to do?

Farhan:

Profitability is, is one thing, but I mean, for the first six to 12 months, we don’t look for profit, right? That’s part of the marketing strategy. So we look for how, how the customer is reacting to it, what are the reviews? If the reviews are 4.7 plus, we are accumulating reviews at a certain pace. So we are selling probably, you know, that one to 2% buyers give you reviews. So if you’re selling enough units, so you’re generating less in first year, you have 300, 500 reviews, good reviews and then you see the potential as well that where you can grow in terms of profitability wise and whether you can take the best seller or not, because where we are the size of, of the company, we are, we only, well, we mainly look for the best seller.

Farhan:

If we can get a best seller for that particular rescue or, or, or the group, right? If that potential is not there, if you’re not getting a good review from the customer, we still don’t decide to stop it. We, we see why customer is not liking it, whether it’s the quality, whether there’s the feature or is the U s p that’s why it’s not popular that we can improve. But yeah the criteria is to, to get the best seller, good reviews be on the top first page organically for sure. And then, then eventually making the profit on it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, traditionally, you know, some of the categories you’re selling in are, are some of the most saturated, you know, most competitive categories out there. So are, are you, is it hard to stay profitable? Like, like are you having to, to play the price war game or because of your brand awareness, you can come in at a higher price point than maybe some of the newer Chinese sellers or, or things? Yeah. Like that and what’s your strategy there?

Farhan:

So, so for the last two years, it gets very, very price competitive. But for us, I think the main advantage is that we were always very price competitive. We work on volume rather than having a bigger margin on each, each unit. Right. And, and that’s why when we did our manufacturing and we leaned it, so we are vertically integrated, so we try to make our manufacturing cost at minimum and, and, and to keep the profit margin reasonably not very high so that we can give that advantage to the buyer, right? And, and then from, from from, because we were, we have some early seller advantage as well. We have been selling for, for last 10, 12 years. So, so the products they are there, which are mature, adding more variations to that or related product, they pick up very well when we do, yeah.

Farhan:

New launches. Then through our marketing strategies, like different strategies, selling on the 50% loss and then, and all that coupon strategies, deal strategies, we, we bring a product to a certain level, like first page or close to the best seller, and then we, we focus on, on the profitability. But we don’t, we don’t do like very high margin on, on any of our product. Our product, if you see like converters or pillows or even hangers they’re very price competitive as compared to even Amazon Basics. So because our competitors are like bigger giants, Amazon Basics and <inaudible> and whatnot. So, so, so we, we keep our price very competitive.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what, what are some of your you know, let’s talk, you know, some strategies, some unique, some things that you, you think you do are unique. You know, you’ve already talked a little bit you know about, about your, your, your strategy here, but what you know about launching things, but, but what are some other strategies, whether it’s, you know, reviews, whether it’s branding, whether it’s packaging, whether it’s, you know, logistics. Yeah. You know, when you get to this level, I’m sure you’ve, you know, have a few tricks up your, your sleeve. So what, what are some things that you think you’re doing that maybe the majority of Amazon sellers might not be?

Farhan:

Yeah, obviously I, I won’t be sharing the core, core secret. Secret,

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? Yeah. But please show me all of your SOPs and let, let’s share it with the world

Farhan:

<Laugh> for sure. But on the high level, obviously, your product needs to first satisfy the customer need, right? So, so what’s your product? Whenever somebody’s launching a product, what are their U s P? It needs to be price competitive, because what you see sells, right? So your, your pictures, your, your videos should be up to the mark. You should do PPC marketing. It goes upfront, but to be competitive, obviously the packaging you mentioned, because if you’re doing fba, it goes with the volume and, and, and, and the dimensions as well, right? So your packaging needs to be accordingly. So it’s, Amazon won’t charge you too much for the FBA fees. Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm. And, and, and then, then the quality of the product and how, how you’re doing your, your marketing through the deals, through the coupons, through through keyword marketing. Obviously this is one of the main, the ppc you need to learn that art and, and, and you need to be on top of it. Amazon changes their algorithm, not very often, but, but, but they do change it often, right? So you need to be well versed about that, so, and then change your marketing strategies accordingly.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now when you say, Hey, Walmart hasn’t worked out, do you just like, give up on Walmart completely, or you still just sell there? Just don’t put much focus on it?

Farhan:

We, we still sell. So we, we started on Walmart around 20 18, 20 19, actually, 20 18, 20 19. We tried a lot of platforms. We tried jad.com, we tried sharers, we tried Target, we tried Walmart, and then we said, no. I mean, our, I mean, it could be beneficial, but they’re way behind in terms of our revenue and, and, and return on investment. So, so we focused on Amazon. Recently for the last six months, we are still doing Walmart. You will see few of our products who are there, there are a couple of guys looking after that, but the focus is, is, is very low.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay. Foreign marketplaces what’s num number two, three, and four for you as far, obviously, you know, USA is number one, but for foreign Amazon marketplaces, what, what’s some of the top for you

Farhan:

For us Europe and Canada? So Canada, in terms of revenue, I would say is, is around eight to 10%. But the profitability in Canada is very high interest. Profitability is, is around 15 to 18% uk. We sell all across uk, Europe in Europe, we have France, Germany, Spain, Italy. So if I do combination of all I would say in terms of revenue, 70% in us, 20% uk, Europe, and 10% Canada. But profitability ratios are different, obviously.

Bradley Sutton:

So, I mean, it makes a lot of sense that your company, you know, manufacturers a lot in, in Pakistan, obviously, you know, the company started there. But for, for anybody, you know, whether somebody’s from Pakistan or not, you know, there are certain perhaps products that you might suggest that, hey, you know, you probably should look at at, at Pakistan as opposed to China. Like, I, I, I agree with you, like, Hey, maybe stainless steel. Yeah. You know, unless you have your own stain, you know, like, like that’s probably, you know, good just to be in China and plastics and, and stuff like that. But would you say anything related to textiles is better to start in Pakistan or only certain kinds of, of textiles? Or how would you suggest to somebody who’s, who’s looking to get into a new niche and they’re like trying to decide where they’re gonna source their product?

Farhan:

De depending on, on, on the products itself, right? But I mean, home, home textile, if you’re doing any home textile, gu a lot of bigger retailers like Walmart, target, they’re importing from Pakistan, they’re bad shoes, they’re comforters their pillows. So, so the home textile not in Karachi, but even you go on the other province, Punjab, faba site, you have a lot of home textile manufacturing units over there. Spore goods are really good. Some of the dental equipments like FD approved dental equipments for, for dentistry and, and operations and whatnot. We do our cosmetic care products. We have utopia care brand so like scissors, cuticle, nis and whatnot. We do from, from from Pakistan as well. But yeah, any, any of the home textile good. I, I think in terms of quality and price competitiveness Pakistan is, is very good. Garments, even jeans related products they are being manufactured in Pakistan, and, and you will, you will find a very good quality I think in that region, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, the cotton, the quality of the cotton is really good. So, so those, those part sounds really good if, if they’re doing the justice with the manufacturing and, and, and the quality control.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, we’ll, we’ll get back into you know, the, the, the Amazon strategies in a couple, couple minutes here, but one, one question I ask a lot of, you know, lately the, my guest is completely non, non entrepreneurial related, but it’s important, I think because, because, you know, I, I had health issues last year and, and as entrepreneurs sometimes we don’t know how to, you know, balance, you know, work, work and life. So just, I’m just curious, number one, what are some of your hobbies that you do when you want to get a, you know, step away from, from Utopia? So what, what’s your, what’s your opposite of utopia your, your personal utopia, and then also what are some of your, your habits, your healthy habits, like whether for mental health or physical health, like, you know, gym you have Yeah, yeah. You know, sports that you do. Go ahead.

Farhan:

Yeah, so, so first thing is, I mean, I, I have been playing cricket. I don’t know if, you know, there’s a sports like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, baseball, cricket, it’s very popular in, in that region, Pakistan or England as well. So I still play that that’s the one thing I told my wife and we were getting married that I, I can’t leave cricket behind, so I still play in the summer, in the winter, obviously I play indoor in the summer I play outdoor cricket, right? Okay. Other than that I like biking and hiking. So in summer with, with my cares or with my friends, I go for biking and hiking. So that keeps for, for my mental health and whatnot. I have noticed that it’s very working well for me, if I, if I sleep early around 10, 11 and wake up around 5, 5 30, so I get my, my own time like without, with family and whatnot I get a few hours in the morning before kids wake up, and then in the night as well, I get a proper healthy sleep. So that, that’s working out very well. So that, that’s what keeps my, my mind at peace as well. And I think physically healthy as well, doing gym or just running in the morning. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. All right. Back to the strategies, I’m just curious, you know, you have a lot of experience on, on Amazon now, obviously, you know that the average person who’s just starting or maybe, you know, smaller company looking to expand, they can’t just use the same strategies that you, you know, they, hey, let, let’s, you know, take a huge loss for six months and let’s do this crazy campaign, and, and, and let’s get up to 20,000 units of sales in the, in this, I mean, like, you know, that’s not the average person, but you know, in your experience, like what, what, what should the average person, you know, whether they’re new or, or maybe they are like a, you know, small seven figure company, you know, like what do you see as some of the the niches or, or, or some of the, the opportunity, you know, cuz my opinion, I’m sure you, you agree that some people say, oh, it’s too late to, to sell on Amazon. No, it’s not too late. You know, there, there’s still plenty of opportunity Yeah. On Amazon, you guys have your niche, you guys have your process of what you do. Yes. But when you’re, when you’re doing your, your thing, I’m sure you see other things like, oh, you know, if I was just by myself, I probably would’ve done I probably would, would get into this or, or something like that. Yes. What, what would you think for for people out there?

Farhan:

No, you are absolutely. I I think it’s still opportunity is there and it’s huge opportunity on, on Amazon all across e-commerce. And especially in e-commerce. Amazon is the giant, right? So opportunity is there for, for anybody who’s starting or, or a small scale as compared to 2012 or 2014, it is a lot of more, more sellers out there. But it’s still, if you, if you can find categories or, or products I will not recommend to go for a niche product because obviously you’ll have to do more marketing and, and you’ll have higher risk score there. So, so products which are everybody’s need, every household need or product where you see less competition, right? Pick those product don’t like start crawling first, then walking and running, right? So look for the products and target maybe 10 units a day, then 20 units a day, 15 units a day, those make those smaller wins. And then then increase your portfolio from there. Target maybe make your milestones in a way that in first three months of selling, you wanna be on the second page on your, your keyword search. Then six months you wanna be on the first page organically, right? Because that’s, that will take you for the long haul. Maybe in the first year, you can be on the first page organically. That would be a great, great success order there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Cool. You know, I, I, I, I visited Pakistan a couple of times and seen firsthand the, the kind of like enthusiasm about e-commerce is crazy. Like I did, like, yeah, I don’t know, I’ve probably done five or six events and there’d be anywhere between 500 and a thousand people, you know, at each one. And what, how do you, how, how do you view the, the kind of like, you know, 10 years ago that wasn’t the situation, you know people weren’t into e-commerce. Like, what, what do you, what what’s going on over there? Like, like, why, why? So why all of a sudden is there this big boom, you know, like in the past, maybe people thought about, you know, getting, you know, help for their Amazon business, all right? Maybe Philippines, you know, maybe only India, you know, but like, why, why, why, why is Pakistan coming on so strong lately?

Farhan:

There, there, there are few, few success stories there as well. Utopia being one, right? When we started and we opened our first office in 2015, and we were having very hard time finding people with the e-commerce marketing experience, let alone Amazon, right? So what we did, we, we looked for the, one of the top a few top business graduates universities, and hired people from there and trained them, right? So over the course of, I would say eight, nine years there were a hundred of resources we hired and, and they moved out of utopia. They start, some of them, I know a few of them, Danish being one, they started their own entrepreneurship training centers as well. They help a lot of sellers as well. They work with other, they, they work with other giants, manufacturing giants or, or corporate giants were there to set up those training centers.

Farhan:

And at the same time, as I said Pakistan is a, a manufacturing, like one of the bigger strength in Pakistan is, is home textile and manufacturing. So those giants, they got entrusted looking into success of Amazon, success of Utopia and other like enablers and, and whatnot. And, and they, they came up with, with like a big, big, big initiatives to expand. And then on, on the talent side there has been a a lot of good talent. It’s just to show them direction, right? What I have seen when I, when I was kid, everybody was doing like, engineering and, and doctor and whatnot. But now for the last four or five years, it’s, it’s like there’s a boom of e-commerce. People know, and especially with the covid push, everybody’s going towards e-commerce or online sellings or social media, right? So, so on the talent side as well, people are very motivated and, and interested learning e-commerce and, and, and, and the good talent is, is working over there. And, and on, on the training side or on the university side as well people are, are, are taking initiatives and, and, and training those guys in the right direction as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. Alright. Something we do on the shows LA last we call either the 60-second tip or 30-second tip. You know, you’ve been giving us different strategies and stuff, but you have something you can say that’s kind of quick hitting maybe 30 or 60 seconds strategy, Amazon or non-Amazon, whatever. Maybe, maybe it’s your own Briani recipe. You wanna, you wanna give in 60 seconds? I’ll let us know what, what, what can you tell us here?

Farhan:

I’ll, I’ll just say what I, I, I say my, my team. Whatever you guys do, just keep trying. If you’re launching a product or working as a virtual assistant in the beginning whatever field you’re working, try to be the champion of that field. Work. Go for the excellence, right? And then, or be the magnet and, and the other success and money will, will come towards you. So whether it’s been your marketing strategy or you’re making a ani, go for the go for the excellence of that particular task. And, and, and then things will come to you eventually. And then be, be persistent and keep trying.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Farhan, thank you so much for joining us. And Incre, congratulations on all your success. We usually try and invite guests back, you know, maybe once per year, and who knows, maybe by, by the next time you’re on here, you’ll be our first ever 10 figure. Sure. 10 figure seller coming on here. All right. I really hope. Thank you very much and we’ll see you later.

Farhan:

Thanks for inviting Brad. Have a good day. Take care. Bye.

#472 - ChatGPT Help For Amazon Listings & Helium 10 AI-Powered Tools

Welcome to another seller strategy masterclass episode! Today, Bradley walks us through Helium 10’s Listing Builder and Insights Dashboard. He shows us valuable information like how to get help from Chat GPT to start creating your listings inside Listing Builder, how the new Insights Dashboard can save you a lot of time by doing your work and delivering the results that you can view in an all-in-one dashboard! Plus, he shares an upcoming game-changing feature for Insights Dashboard that will blow your mind! Tune in and learn all his tips from these amazing Helium 10 AI-powered tools.

In episode 472 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: 

• 01:25 – Welcome Back To Another Seller Strategy Masterclass Episode!  
• 03:03 – How to Check If You Need Spanish Keywords In Back End of Your Listing  
• 05:29 – How To Prioritize Your Spanish Keywords
• 08:39 – How To Get Help From Chat GPT To Create A Listing
• 14:16 – How To Compare Key Metrics vs. Previous Time Periods
• 15:42 – How To Measure The Results Of Your Listing, PPC, and More Tests
• 19:29 – How To View All Of Your Product’s Metrics In One Place
• 22:14 – How To See Product Performance at Parent Variation Level
• 24:24 – How To Have Helium 10 Do a Lot Of Your Work For You
• 26:00 – A New Game-Changing Feature That’s Coming For Insights Dashboard
• 26:29 – Get Insights For Competitor Changes And Activities
• 27:19 – What Kind Of Insights Or Notifications That You Want?
• 30:39 – How To Send Your Feedback For The Insights Dashboard
• 31:24 – The New “Profitability Down” Feature

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today I’m gonna show you things like how to use ChatGPT to help you get started writing your listing, and also some new ways that you can save hours and hours of work by having actually Helium 10 do your work for you and just delivering you the results. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions, so they had to pay extra money. Every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we’ve got another edition of our Sellers Strategy Masterclass, which is a monthly series where I give you guys just strategy after strategy on how you can use helium 10 and other tools in order to help your Amazon and or Walmart business.

Bradley Sutton:

And so today we’re gonna be focusing on a couple of tools. Mainly a lot of this is gonna be powered by ai. And so the first thing we’re gonna be talking about is Listing Builder. That’s why I’m wearing my LB hat. Today. Let me know if anybody actually knows what team this comes from, but I consider this my listing builder hat. We’re gonna be talking about how AI can help you, especially when you have writer’s block. And then I’m gonna be going into a lot of insights dashboard, which is just like next, next, next level stuff, guys, like, I’m gonna be talking about some things today where it might be a process that, that took you or one of your employees, maybe three, four hours a week, some of these processes.

Bradley Sutton:

And now it’s gonna be like three or four seconds, literally, I’m gonna talk about that. And then I’m gonna show you a way that you can participate in kind of like helping the roadmap of Helium 10, because this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of stuff that we actually need your input on. So I’m gonna be showing you some cool things that are coming, and then how you can actually shape the direction that we’re gonna take some of these new tools in. So let’s go ahead and get started. The very first strategy of today is how to utilize Spanish keywords in your listing when you maybe have more than 10 keywords. Now, this is something that I think all of us know, right? Like, hey, we need to have Spanish keywords in our listing to be indexed for them because there are so many you know, hundreds of thousands of people, not millions of people, for example, United States who search in Spanish on the Amazon platform.

Bradley Sutton:

So, like, for example, maybe you guys are familiar with you know, Cerebro and how you can find different Spanish keywords. Like here, I just looked up a collagen peptides, what I’m looking at here and there was like 20, 25 Spanish keywords that had the word colágeno in it that all had like 400 or more search volumes. So in the collagen space, there’s obviously a lot of products that utilize Spanish keywords and they have a lot of search volume. So here’s how you can know what to do here, because you don’t have room to put every single one of these phrases in the search terms, in the backend of your listing. By the way, I know a lot of people, or some people talk about using maybe image alt text from an actual image.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m gonna check that to see if you are not indexed, if that will actually get you indexed. I’m not talking about A+ Content, alt image. I’m talking about like in the meta description of, of your images. Gonna definitely be testing that I think it helps, or I’ve pretty sure it helps on Google, but I wanna see if you can it take you from a not indexed to an indexed state on Amazon. One thing that I’ve tested extensively and never have had much success on is doing that in the alt text of the actual A+ Content. You know, I’ve tried that not many times, like I’ve tried it like 13 or 14 times where I take a word, be it Spanish or be it another keyword that I am not indexed for, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

Not searchable on Amazon and put it only in the alt image text for the A+ Content, and then check like a few days later in my index and I can’t get it to work. Now some people might maybe just stuff it completely and then maybe have some success getting some keywords indexed. I wouldn’t do that in the first place. Even if it did work personally, I would not put Spanish keywords or just, just or keyword stuff, those alt image parts of A+ Content because it’s kind of against Amazon terms of service, first of all, because it’s, that’s meant to be a section that is for like blind people or people who use screen readers and things like that. And that’s just not even that’s just not cool I mean, there’s millions of people searching Spanish on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Guess what? There’s thousands tens of thousands of blind people searching on Amazon. And imagine they go to your listing and they’re trying to understand what the images are, just, it’s a bunch of Spanish keywords and they’re not even a Spanish speaker. So it’s just not a cool experience. So for me, I put my keywords in the back end of listing the search terms. You know, a lot of that, a lot of it, not all of it gets indexed. So when you have 20 keywords like this the question might be, well, how in the world can you get indexed for all of these keywords? If you’re not indexed already, you can only put a few of these maybe in the search terms. So what I like to do is once my listing is active, if I wanna prioritize this, I’m going to go to Amazon to, to my listing and to the very top right, I’m going to select the Spanish version.

Bradley Sutton:

You click on the flag that’s next to the search bar, And then hit Espanol, and then it’s gonna transfer the listing in into Spanish. And then scroll down to where the Helium 10 Chrome extension has a little widget where you can see the BSR, and at the very top there’s these little buttons, And you’re gonna want to click on Listing Optimizer when this listing is in its Spanish form. And then what happens is, is you are now going to import that Spanish listing into the old Scribbles tool. So you could see how it, it put the title, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It says here, it pulled in the whole front end of the listing, right? So then what I do is I’m going to go ahead and put in those 20 or 14 or whatever keywords that I had been curious about or that I want to index for.

Bradley Sutton:

And I hit apply. And now what Scribbles is gonna show me is if the Amazon translation for this has these keywords in it Now, I said this is about Listing Builder. Obviously I’m showing you scribbles, but you can definitely do this in Listing Builder as well. And as you can see here, there’s only one keyword in phrase form that the Amazon Spanish translation has. Now, this is something you’re gonna notice. Amazon is using its own translation. It doesn’t mean it’s the most optimized form of Spanish that people are actually searching. Here’s a proof of it. This is a listing where the top keywords for collagen. It’s not showing up in that phrase form. So if you’re index for it, okay, maybe it you decide that, okay, hey, I don’t care if it’s in phrase form, all I care is about being indexed.

Bradley Sutton:

But maybe some of these keywords you wanna be have in phrase form in your listing, not in the translated form or in the translated version, but just in the backend of your regular version to send more of that rank juice to Amazon. So this will tell you how many of the individual keywords are in there. Like you could see Colcolágeno is in there <speaking spanish>. So like, there’s these various individual keywords that made up, the Spanish phrases are definitely in here, but perhaps the ones that I have the highest search volume where I think is the most relevant that’s what I’m going to choose to put into my listing. So this is a quick hack on how you can use Scribbles or Listing Builder, import the, the listing from Spanish the Spanish Amazon translation, and then see how the listing is optimized.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, let’s just talk about just regular English listings for Amazon USA. Maybe you are not a native English speaker you’re from another country, English is not your first language, and you’re struggling with getting started writing your listing. Or perhaps maybe you are a native English speaker like myself and just you have writer’s block, we all get it. Sometimes you’re like, man, I don’t know how to get started writing this listing. Right? What are some ways that you can use AI to help? Let me go ahead and show you. If you have your list of keywords your, your phrases and your words I’m talking about Listing Builder Now maybe you’ve got 10, 15, 20 different phrases, and then you’ve got an additional 100 or so individual words you want to get you want to be indexed for.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you go into Listing Builder and then what you do, this is very important. You gotta enter in the product characteristics. You know, this is important because I know there’s some tools out there, or if you’re just using ChatGPT by itself and the tool only has, you like import keywords search terms are important to get in there, but you need to have product characteristics too. So like here, I just threw together something for this listing, this coffin shelf listing. I was like, Hey, this is a coffin shaped shelf for hanging on the wall or tabletop, it’s made of wood. It’s good for smaller spooky trinkets. It’s a black paint. And then I put the brand name. Now of course, I should probably have you know, put more here in product characteristics. You know, things that come from maybe the review insights of the of my competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

You’d want to fill this up as much as you can. I’m gonna put here, I wanna show the brand name at the beginning of the title what my product name is. It’s just gonna put coffin shelf. And then you can choose like the tone. So you know, do you want it to be formal, casual, friendly, humorous, persuasive, educational, empathetic, inspirational. You know, not all of us can just think and change our mode to these different, these different styles. But you can do that with with ai. So I’m just gonna choose humorous cuz it’s for a coffin shelf and then target audience maybe it’s just for men or maybe it’s for women’s for certain ages. I’m gonna go ahead and put that. And then like, let’s say under this words and special characters to avoid, let’s say I had some keywords that for sure I thought maybe ChatGPT is gonna try and throw in a, a drug related word that it doesn’t realize that it’s forbidden against by Amazon, like CBD or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Or maybe it, no, I think it’s gonna put in a cuss word because it’s very common. Or maybe a brand name or something like that. I can throw those into words and special characters to avoid. And now the mo, what’s the most important part of your listing? Well, it’s gonna be the title. So that’s what I suggest working on first. All right. And then put in the keywords that you definitely want to include in the title. All right, your top two or three keywords. The way you do that is you hit this button here, and I’m gonna go ahead and choose coffin shelf gothic decor and gothic decor for bedroom. Remember, that’s like one of the Maldives Honeymoon or Bali Blast kind of strategies is making sure that you try and have nested words together. Like, so if two of your main keywords are gothic decor and then gothic decor for bedroom, perfect example of you know, a couple keywords that you’d want to get into your listing or into your listing title so that you can kill two birds with one stone.

Bradley Sutton:

So once you go ahead and, and choose which keywords you want the title, just hit this one button, write it for me. And then what’s gonna happen is ChatGPT is gonna come up with a suggestion on what it can be. Now, look at this. I had put spooky, right? And it says here, Manny’s mysterious oddities coffin shelf, the perfect gothic decor for bedroom spook up your space. That’s even using, what is it called? Alliteration or something like that, with this black wooden coffin shelf. Now remember, these weren’t even keywords I put in, I put made of wood and it knew to change it to wood, and I put that it was a black color and it just put black there. So if, if I’m good with this, all I have to do is hit use suggestion and then boom goes to dynamite it used up some of my keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So right there, I might not have been whether I’m a native English speaker or not. That is arguably a lot better than what I could have come up with in five seconds, which is how long it took ChatGPT to do that. And then basically you just keep going on, like say hey, alright I’m good with that title. Go ahead and write the bullet points and try and use these, these words. And then as you go along, you choose if you want to accept what ChatGPT has given or you wanted to rewrite it, and then keep writing out your listing and including your description at the very end. If you still have phrases and, and keywords left over, we’ll just go in there and edit it out and use up all the keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So I personally don’t use ChatGPT in order to just make a complete listing and just like say, Hey, go ahead, ChatGPT, take the wheel. What I use it for is to get ideas on, on changing a title or if I am starting from scratch, just to get me on the right track you know, making some kind of theme that I can follow. Because you know, a lot everybody has writer block sometimes, and right off the bat it’s going to give you kind of like a direction you can go with on your listing that you probably wouldn’t have been able to come up on your own. So I highly recommend using this. This is for those of you who have the Diamond plan on Helium 10. Alright, let’s now switch to something new-ish.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, it’s been around for a few months and it’s called Insights Dashboard and some of the different ways that you can utilize this to help you with your analytics and help you basically grow your Amazon business. So the first strategy I wanna talk about is how to compare key metrics versus previous time period. So this is exactly what you see just when you log into Helium 10 now. And for example, I have the revenue metric being shown right here. Now at the very top of the screen, I’m showing like some dates from last month in June, right? May maybe I want to actually just look at the whole entire last month of June. So June one to June 30th. Now, if I have this comparison button toggled, what this is going to show me is each day it’s going to kind of show me this time period versus the previous time period.

Bradley Sutton:

So regardless of what time period I’m looking at, it’s going to compare it to the previous time period. So here I’m looking on June 16th. Overall my gross revenue was $322, but on that same day, last month, in May 30 days before it was $400, My profit margin went from 13% to 8%. These are things that I might want to look at, like, what in the world is going on? Why is my profitability down? Why is my sales down? Well, this will help you look at trends, So that’s the number one thing is comparing your metrics to previous time periods. The next thing is how to measure the results of your listing PPC and more tests. So I, I could be on any of these pages right here, but the cool thing is, is this add note button.

Bradley Sutton:

So let me explain why you would even use this. You know, maybe you’re using manage your experiments inside of Seller Central. Well it’s going to take detailed notes of well, what’s happening, what experiment you’re doing, but what are some experience you probably run on your own? What if you’re changing a bullet point? What if you’re changing an image? What if you lower the price of your product by a couple dollars? What if you maybe add some Spanish keywords, the backend of your listing what if you increase your PPC budget for a product? What if you increase your PPC target your target cost per click, right? On a certain a certain keyword or search term, right? I mean, the list goes on and on. We are always doing things to our listings, hopefully to try to increase sales or to get better conversion rates, et cetera, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you could make these changes and then just go back and kind of like, remember when you did it, or maybe you wrote down some notes somewhere and then, alright, let me try and figure out when I did this and that. I mean, you should be doing that, I hope, I hope you just don’t blindly make changes and like cross your fingers, hope it works. But what you should be doing is taking detailed notes of when this happens. And so that’s what you can do right here on the dashboard. If I do something, I’m gonna hit add note, and then I pick what date I make the change, and then I choose, Hey, what did I do? And I could make my own, I put a whole bunch of tests right here, but I can make my own you know, action.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, Hey, increase my PPC bid or change this listing image, and then I choose the actual product that I did the change to, and then I can even write more notes here in the description. Now, what happens is it’s going to show up on that date, So for example, right here, if I hit this actually just shows me the alerts. So these are alerts that I made or not that I made, but that happened in my listing. But if I had made some change, like I increased my budget, it would show up here on this date. Let’s say it’s June 9th. And then what I would want to do is, let’s say I’m looking at that specific product and I changed a PPC bid. Well, what I’m gonna wanna do is after that exact point in time, I’m gonna be looking at my sales, or I’m going to be looking at my refunds.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m gonna be looking at my you know, my PPC spend, whatever my, my keyword ranks, whatever the case is, I wanna see what kind of effect that had. Now, you might think, oh, hey, if I just do that one time, I got one product. You know, that’s not that necessary. I don’t need to do that. But, but trust me, guys, even if you only have one product, this is important because maybe you remember three weeks from now what you just did, but you can remember a year from now, like Prime Day is coming up, right? And maybe you’re, you did some test, Hey, I, I’m doing a two week pre-prime day sale, or a one week pre-prime day sale. Well, a year from now, you’re preparing for Prime Day. Do you remember what you did?

Bradley Sutton:

Even if you only have one product last year, you might not. So now all you have to do is look back on the date range of this year’s prime day. I’m talking about a year from now. And you’ll see this note that you added, Hey, on this date, I lowered my price, I did a temporary sale. And now you can look back. Well, how did I do? Ooh, my profitability went down and my sales stayed flat. Were you gonna do that again next year for Prime Day? Probably not. So this is why it’s important to go ahead and take these notes inside your insights dashboard so you can track all of the different things that you’re doing that you’re trying to increase your sales. Next strategy here is how to view all of your products metrics in one place.

Bradley Sutton:

As you know, helium 10 has like a million tools. Seller Central has tons of different data points. Well, how can you see everything at once? Well, here on the bottom of your dashboard and the products table, you can see everything now. Like, here’s my my Project X Gui’s Chicken Coop egg rack, right? I can go ahead and see here. Hey, all of my keyword ranks, I don’t have to go into keyword tracker to see it. I can even see how many keywords I’m tr I’m in the top 10. I can see what is my category bsr, my subcategory, bsr. Maybe I wanna look at without having to go into Amazon or go into a tool, Hey, show me the entire history of the BSR of this product. What’s my star rating on it?

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the history of my reviews? You know, how many units do I have in stock? How many days of inventory does that stock represent? What’s the price history of this product? How many sales have I had today? How many units sold in this time period that I selected here at the top of the page, do I have, what’s my refunds been units and the dollar amount of refunds? How many page views in my page view rate? This is this is coming from your business reports in Seller Central, right? What about my sessions in my unit session percentage? What’s my conversion rate? What is my gross revenue, my net profit, my profit margin? How much Amazon fees did I pay for this product? What’s my ROI? What’s my cogs? It pulls in your PPC data for this product.

Bradley Sutton:

Here, look at this one. I spent $200 last month on PPC. This is how many impressions got me 140,000 ad impressions. This is how many clicks I got. This is my rate, this is my ACoS my RoAS. Do I have the buy box? All of this guys I know some for, for those of you listening to this, maybe in your car, as you have trouble picturing this, this would have to take multiple helium 10 tools plus seller central. It’s all in the same table, and I can choose different views as far as what I want to see. So this is kind of like what I highly suggest you guys doing right away if you haven’t played with this yet, but just hop right in there. Those of you with a diamond plan, you can have up to a thousand products that you can track here.

Bradley Sutton:

I think if you have the platinum plan, you still get like 20 or 50 or something like that. But go in there, start playing around with it. Take a look at your keyword ranks. Take a look at your alerts you might have had things happen to your listing that you didn’t even realize was happening. Take a look at your inventory levels. All of that is right here, and you’re not gonna have to go into separate tools anymore to see this. You can see it all right in one place. Now, one interesting thing that we kind of like are one of the first ones to do. This is my double egg rack. Now, I just happen to know that I actually have multiple variations. I’ve got this double egg rack, I’ve got the bottom rack and a top rack as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe I wanna know, instead of just seeing the sales of this double rack. What is my whole entire egg rack listing? How is it doing on sales and some of these metrics? Well, if you hit here the related ASINs, I could say, Hey, view related child ASINs in the table. So now what, what it’s gonna do is it’s going to show me the, the three products that have to do with this ASIN. This main ASIN, it has two other variations. And now I can see all of those aforementioned stats that I was talking about together. Or maybe I’m like, you know what? I don’t wanna have to add up all of these maybe I have a listing that has 10 variations. Like I’m selling the clothing category, and I’m like, Hey, I wanna know for my t-shirt, my red t-shirt, total how many sales that I have across all the sizes.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, now you can actually view things at the parent level, And it aggregates all of the data. So those three child variations I was talking about, now this unit sold, represents all of it put together. So I I don’t know of any other major tool that, that does this, this has been something that you guys have been asking for, for a while, but those of you with variation listings, you can now view all of the metrics for your product. You can’t do this in Seller Central, right? You could even do this in Helium 10 before, but again, you could view it at three different levels at the very skew level. You know, like me, I have multiple SKUs per ASIN, because I have a FBM and a FBA SKU. You, I could look at it at the very SKU level.

Bradley Sutton:

I could look at the ASIN level so maybe it adds both of those s skews together, or I could look at the whole parent level where it shows all of the child items together my keyword ranks, my sales, my PPC, et cetera. The next strategy is basically how to have Helium 10 do a lot of work for you. And this is gonna be kind of like the thing I’m gonna be talking about the rest of this episode, because this is the most beneficial the most, the, the thing that can just really put money in your pocket because of the time and the data that it gives you. And you know, there’s a reason why this, this new dashboard is called Insights Dashboard, and that’s because of the insights that it gives you. So if you look on the left hand side, those of you with the the diamond plan you’re gonna start seeing these insights.

Bradley Sutton:

Like for example, hey I got this insight. Your gross revenue for this product is down 300% from the previous week. You know, you might wanna look at it. So normally maybe I’m paying somebody to look at my gross revenue or some certain metric, and hey, let me know when it’s bad. No, you don’t have to pay nobody to do that more. You can just program this to, to let you know when some of these things happen. Here that there are some negative keyword suggestions for my PPC campaigns I did not implement. This is telling me to go ahead and implement it. There are here it says competitor keywords that I’m not ranking for. Here’s another one where it says, Hey, your main image size is not a good dimension. You know, go in and, and you might want to check it out.

Bradley Sutton:

Hey, we found $50 worth of refunds that Amazon could owe you. Go ahead and submit that. Hey, transfer inventory to avoid running out. There are so many different insights that it’s already giving, giving you like some of the alerts that might happen to your, your product, like your image changes or your listing gets suppressed. Now here’s the exciting part because there are some things that are, are coming that are just gonna be kind of crazy soon. Or by the time you’re watching this, you might be able to click on competitors on your product table. You guys know me, I don’t use this word lightly, but this is what’s gonna be game changing for you guys, cuz you’re gonna be able to add up to five competitors per each one of your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Just like you kind of see here in this mockup. Now, let me explain the fire that this is gonna bring you all right. Now try and hold if you’re driving, you should pull over because probably gonna blow your minds and you might get too excited and start speeding and blame a speeding ticket on me or something, right? So, so make sure you’re sitting down when you hear this. You are gonna be able to assign competitors to each of your products, and that’s just gonna open the floodgates of insights. Imagine this guys, your competitor raises or lowers their price. You’re gonna get an insight or an alert about that. Let’s say they change one of their images they change their title. You’re gonna get this insight drop in your dashboard. No more having to like pay your employees to monitor you competitors every day for these kind of things.

Bradley Sutton:

Just get this guys. Let’s say your competitor is running like a lightning deal or a coupon, or they just changed their price lower or, or they’ll run a special deal today. Guess what? You’re gonna get an insight. You know, you’re gonna know, hey, your competitor is running a sale and you know, how do you use this information? Well, some people, they’re like, Hey, I gotta match whatever my competitor’s doing. So this is something, this is not like game changing in the sense that, oh my goodness, you’ve never monitored these kind of things from your competitors people. No, of course, I hope that you guys are monitoring that. But the game changing part is you’re probably doing, you’re having to do this, you’re yourself manually, or maybe you’re paying an employee to mindlessly go in and look at a hundred of your ASINs and then 300 competitors total for each of those ASINs and refreshing them every day.

Bradley Sutton:

Hey, let me know when they’re running a lightning deal. Hey, let me know if they changed their image. You’re not gonna have to do any of that anymore. We’re gonna let you know when these things happen. The thing, the parts that I really like is the keyword level. I hope it’s part of your strategy where you’re paying one of your employees to go in once a month or once every other month and run cerebro on your listing compared to your competitors listing to see if they’re ranking for any new keywords organically to see if they’re bidding super high for a certain keyword in sponsored ads that you’re not even indexed for. Like, imagine that you are gonna get a notification that says, Hey, your competitor is getting sales from this keyword, their page one, position three, and A, you are not ranking at all for this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

B as a matter of fact, you’re not even indexed for this keyword. C how about adding it to your third bullet point? Would you like ChatGPT to create a new bullet point based on that? That’s the kind of stuff that’s gonna come guys to, to this insights dashboard. So again, if your mind is not blown, you don’t understand the gravity of how powerful this is gonna be. Now here’s the important part. We need each of you to kind of like let us know what other kind of insights you want to have that you now take action on based on what you is happening to you or your competitors. So now you kind of know the direction that this tool is going in, and now that you know you can assign 3, 4, 5 competitors to each of your ASINs, what kind of notifications do you, do you want?

Bradley Sutton:

Like, is there something you want to monitor on your competitors? Now, a few of the things I didn’t mention that’s already gonna gonna happen is like BSR level, you’re gonna be able to specify a percentage. Like, Hey, let me know if there BSR changes by this percentage. Let me know if their BSR passes mine. Let me know if my competitor sales goes down by this much percent. Let me know if their review of velocity goes up by this amount. Well, we’re already gonna do like tons of stuff. So maybe your ideas that you have, we might already have in, in motion, but still don’t let that stop. You still let us know what exactly you want to see from your competitors that you would want to get insights for. And especially I’m talking about strategies that you are already doing. Now, this stuff is not brand new like anybody could see if you’re, if a competitor BSR goes up or down, but you gotta manually do it right now.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about like showing you some new data point that nobody has access to. What I wanna do is take the strategies that you are already doing and how can we automate that for you so we can give you more time back in your pocket? So the way that you guys can give us kind of insights into what you would wanna see in Insights dashboard is scroll to the very top of your dashboard, and at the very top, there’ll be a button that says, send feedback that specifically for this dashboard. So make sure to click that and let us know. Just say, Hey, Bradley said to use this to to give feedback on what I would like to see for my competitor insights. Some more things that I didn’t show you guys that’s coming that’s on your own listing is you are gonna have this new metric where it’s called, I think we’re calling it the profitability down where it’s like, Hey, if my sales goes down by this much percent, or my conversion rate goes down by this percent or my sessions goes down, give me a note.

Bradley Sutton:

A notice instead of you, again, having every day to go in and look at your, your business reports to check these data points, we’re doing that work for you. So tons and tons of stuff that is coming to this Insights Dashboard, and it already is powerful that it can help you with a lot of your day-to-day activities like as of right now. So if you have not activated this dashboard, make sure to do it. But again, tons and tons more stuff coming and we’re gonna be able to build on this platform to bring you other insights, to bring you other metrics. So I really, really, really need a favor from you guys, and that is for you to just dive into here, play around with it, see how it works, and then hopefully your creative juices are kind of you know, turned on and you’ll be able to give us some, some feedback on the kind of things that we can help you with that our AI can, can go ahead and automate for you and just give you the results.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, I’m super excited about this Competitor Insights where I don’t have to worry about having a VA every day check if my competitor has a coupon on their listing or if their image change or I don’t have to worry about you know, if my competitor is, is getting sales from this keyword that I’m not unless I’m checking it every day. No, all of this stuff is gonna be automated and I’m just gonna have this notification in my insights dashboard if it happens. So again guys, please click on that, send feedback and let us know. Hope you guys were able to learn a couple of strategies from this. If I talked about things that you guys currently aren’t doing, go ahead and watch the video of this helium10.com/podcast. You can look watch the videos on there of each of these episodes, or you can view that usually one week after it goes live on our YouTube channel. Just look for Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast and you’ll be able to find these episodes. So again, I hope you guys enjoy this episode and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye now.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/6/23: Amazon FTC Trouble | New PPC Alerts | Walmart, Etsy, eBay Updates

In this episode, we cover the latest breakings news in the Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, & eBay marketplaces. From Amazon’s FTC antitrust suit to this week’s training tip on how to streamline your FBA reimbursements.

#471 – Amazon Listing Optimization Tips, Buyer Journey Case Study, & More!

In this episode, we had the pleasure of welcoming back Lailama Hasan, to share the results of her recent case studies. Tune in and discover how her findings can help you enhance your Amazon listing optimization game! We started by diving into her customer behavior case study, exploring what consumers are truly looking for in your product listings. From there, we had dived into the significance of titles, premium features, discounts, coupons, and reviews in the eyes of Amazon buyers. She also talked about how changing titles led to an astounding 93% increase in sales. Surprisingly, she revealed that removing the brand name from your Amazon listing titles can be a game-changer. So, make sure to tune in until the end to learn how to level up your Amazon listing optimization game in 2023!

In episode 471 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lailama discuss: 

• 01:09 – Catching Up With Lailama Hasan
• 02:30 – What Is Lailama Up To These Days?
• 04:15 – Diving Into Her Customer Behavior Case Study
• 06:33 – What Are Consumers Looking For In Your Listing?
• 08:18 – Titles, Premium Features, Discounts, Coupons, & Reviews
• 10:29 – Is Amazon’s Choice Badge Important?
• 13:55 – Changing Titles Lead To 93% Increase In Sales
• 14:22 – Removing The Brand Name In Your Amazon Listing Titles
• 17:47 – People Are Going For Shorter Titles
• 19:20 – Getting Creative With Amazon Product Photography
• 20:40 – Can AI Replace Creative Agencies?
• 23:05 – DIY Product Photography Techniques & Using AI Software
• 24:01 – Creating Compelling Amazon Listing Images
• 24:34 – Make Sure To Subscribe To Lailama’s YouTube Channel
• 27:36 – How Frequent Should You Refresh Your Listings
• 29:27 – How To Find Lailama Hasan In The Interwebs
• 29:54 – Find AMZ One Step At Helium 10’s Seller Solutions Hub
• 30:37 – Lailama’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 Lailama back, and she’s gonna tell us the results of a couple of cool listing optimization case studies that she’s done that will help you optimize your listings for 2023. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you wanna be able to sync your listings that you create in Helium 10 to your Amazon account in one click, including being able to sync subject matter, which you’re not able to even edit now in most listings on Amazon, you’re gonna want to use Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure to find out how to use Listing Builder by going to h10.me/listingbuilder. That’s h10.me/listingbuilder. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got my sister from another Mr. back today on the show. My former co-worker here, Lailama. How’s it going?

Lailama:

I’m doing great. How about you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. Now, you’re back working at AMZ One Step And so I wanted to reach out to you and to kind of just like see what you’ve been, what you’ve been up to. I mean, even before you worked at Helium 10, you would come on this podcast and give us some cool listening optimization strategies and, and things like that were of great benefits to the audience. But before I get into that, are you moving with your brother and and sister-in-law to Toronto or just them?

Lailama:

Yeah, yeah. Entire time I am with them.

Bradley Sutton:

For some reason I thought that they were only moving, but you’re, you’re moving to that city. That’s a big move to go from Edmonton to Toronto.

Lailama:

It’s like a four hour flight, so it’s gonna be a big change too, like this city.

Bradley Sutton:

A cultural change though. Like it’s completely, it’s very different, right?

Lailama:

Like New York 2.0.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Do you guys have a place out there already?

Lailama:

Yeah, we’re all set. We’re packing up, busy moving these days, so, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And like having to leave friends behind and, and stuff like that or how’s that?

Lailama:

Sad. But, you know, we’re pretty flexible that way. We came to Canada seven years ago, so, you know I’m sure I’ll be fine.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how does that work for like, AMZ One Step though? Cause obviously you and you know, Tayyaba your sister-in-law, like who was just in the podcast a few weeks ago. You guys do a lot of work at the studio, I believe you told me you were working at the studio there doing shoots until like 10:00 PM Like are you guys opening a new studio in Toronto, or all your work is gonna be remote now, or what’s going on there?

Lailama:

Not as yet. I don’t know if we’re gonna start like a studio there, but we’re gonna have a studio at home. Cuz I’m making YouTube videos now too, so that’s gonna be where I do most of my work in the studio.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Lailama:

Work from home, but there’s gonna be a studio allocated to it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Yeah, I’m sure you know, Saddam will keep you busy. He’ll make sure that you’re, you’re working. That’s one thing he does well, right? So that should be no problem. Now let’s, let’s talk a a little bit about, you know, what you’ve been, what you’ve been up to. Like when you go, went back to , like are you pretty much doing a lot of the similar stuff that you used to do back before? Like, you know, make content for them and then also like manage like photo shoots and things like that? Or what kind of stuff have you been working on?

Lailama:

Yeah, so content, YouTube, educational videos, and then also creating commercials for clients. So, you know, just, again, very listing optimization focused. But on the site I also have been running case studies to get some extra insights. Like, you know, all the sellers already know what works, what doesn’t work, you know. But I really wanted to dig deep into you know, how the little nuances, like for instance, this case study that I recently did was focused on consumer purchasing behavior. And I think, you know, a lot of us know how to optimize for the Amazon algorithm, but I really wanted to see the other side, like what makes people add your product to the cart.

Bradley Sutton:

So how did you set this case study up? Like were you like capturing the screen of how people navigate on the buying pages or what did this case study involve?

Lailama:

So this video is actually coming out, shameless plug, but what we did was we took a bunch of participants and we gave them like a price range. We didn’t wanna give an exact dollar value because you don’t wanna like tilt them in a particular direction either. Sure. And we were recording their screens and at the same time I’m behind the camera looking at their screens and trying to ask them at every point why they did what they did or what made them go for that. And they were also like voicing their opinions on everything. So it was great. Like, what are people thinking in real time as they’re shopping? And you know, there were some really interesting insights. So a lot of the information did confirm things that we already know. For instance, like I’ll actually give you a very interesting thing that I learned from it.

Lailama:

It was like, we all know that Amazon badges are great. It’ll give you the, you know, higher clickthrough rates because people, it builds that trust. It’ll increase organic traffic, so on and so forth. But once you’ve peaked the curiosity of your buyer and they click on your listing, you know, what happens after? Do they guarantee that sale? Not really. Like, yeah, you can reach out to the relevant buyers with these badges, cuz look, we’re here as sellers and we’re thinking, okay, we’re gonna do so and so these are our strategies in order to get that Amazon badge. But for the consumer, like they don’t even know how we got there, how we earned that badge. So they’re looking at it and they’re like, oh, it’s flagged Amazon’s choice. Let’s see why it is Amazon’s choice. Now they’re on your listing and they’re looking for information that will convince them to buy your product.

Lailama:

And so a lot of the times what I noticed with these listings was they’ve optimized for the algorithm, but not the consumer. Now what I mean by that is these weren’t being added into the cart. So I dug deeper and I’m like, okay, why aren’t you left convinced? Like, you know, they kept saying things a lot of the times it was either things like missing information in the images. So secondary images, people were trying to look at their competition and almost replicate the same kind of information that they had on their secondary images, which doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers wanna know that information. So that strategy where we just like copy paste from our competition is not gonna cut it. You have to look at the information in your reviews, your Q & A section, what people really wanna know about your listing. So missing pieces of information, you know was a big problem either in the images or in the product description. Sometimes it was too advanced, sometimes it was too beginner friendly and, you know, people who actually were enthusiastic about a certain category or were experts on the subject matter didn’t look for the information that they wanted. So, you know, I would say like, people aren’t optimizing for the consumer. We almost lose that sense of the consumer side of us when we become Amazon experts.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I’ve always said that, you know, people focus too much on the algorithm. You should focus on the algorithm, you know, you gotta be discoverable and stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s not the algorithm who’s buying the product, it’s a human being. And so if you lose that part then, you know, then you’re in trouble. So what would you say, I dunno, top five, top three. What are some interesting things that you discovered from this, you know, analyzing the consumer behavior? Like what things that you found out that you think that sellers should now take action on, or at least should be thinking about it, you know, as they optimize their listening?

Lailama:

Again, going into the nuances of everything, right? Yeah, people will have nice titles, but what consumers were really looking for was a feature being listed in the title in the beginning or in the first few words, like let’s say bag with compartment. That was a big one. Like this person was looking for a bag with compartment. So that’s a feature. And then a lot of sellers were also listing the use cases of these features. So like bag with compartment for shoes, for laptop, for so and so. That sometimes would really confuse our buyers, you know? Sure. They were like, oh, if it says it’s used for a laptop, can I not use it for shoes? So I would say like, sometimes people almost go overboard with stuffing their title with keywords and that’s not necessarily a good idea.

Lailama:

A lot of the times, like whatever’s viewable in the mobile experiences, all that a customer wants to see, they don’t want like a huge list of it. Cuz sometimes it can confuse them as to what they can use the product for. So that was one thing. Another thing that was really interesting was pricing strategy was a big thing here. People were judging based on your prices. So if you were priced way below the market average people would be like, okay, is it not good enough quality? If you were way higher than the market average, then they were looking for that extra like premium feature that would make them think that it’s worthy of that price range. But then there were products that were competitively priced and the ones that were like even a bit higher, but discounted people went for that as opposed to the lower non-discounted prices. So discounts were playing a huge role in how they were making their decisions. Like they were really drawn onto the listing based on the discounts. And 80% of the people were not even adding coupons onto their carts. So they were drawn into the listing based on like 80%.

Bradley Sutton:

Good grief. That’s a lot.

Lailama:

Yeah. But they didn’t end up adding it to their cart. So it’s a win-win case for the buy a seller. Like if you’re not making use of coupons, then you should a hundred percent. But there’s one other thing to notice with the coupon rates is if it’s too big of a coupon, like a five, $10, whatever, it’s gonna be noticeable in the end price. So people will be like, oh wait, why isn’t it priced the same way? So they’ll go back onto the listing and add the coupon, whereas if it’s like one to $3, people usually don’t even notice it in the final price and, you know, will not even bother going back or notice it actually. So these were the two key things. And then the third one was reviews. A lot of people look at reviews because they’re shopping online. So yeah, we don’t entirely have control over our reviews, but working towards getting a higher review count. So one thing that was really common among people was they were looking for like a thousand reviews or higher, and that’s when they fully trusted the brand. Anything lower than that, they’re like, I don’t know. And then they would really focus on the review rating. If it was lower than 4.5, they’d be like, okay, this isn’t trustworthy.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t take any products less than 4.5. I guess I’m a stingy person when it comes to that. Yeah. And a lot of people, I’m not the only one, I guess.

Lailama:

Yeah, no, a lot of people are like that. But you know, like you don’t really have a lot of control over your reviews, but what you can do is offer customer support. You can improve on the quality of your product. In fact, this happened during the case study I ordered for them and one of the product came damaged. So that product had no insert. They haven’t had an insert, but there was no like contact information or customer support mentioned on the insert. So they came up to me and the participants were like, can you get a replacement for this because it came damaged and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Even though on the description section they said reach out to us if you have any problems with the product. But they had nothing that they could, you know, help us out with cuz it was out of the return window for Amazon. So, you know, there’s like these little things that you can do to avoid negative reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

How much did it impact people’s choosing things in the search results or even their buying some of those badges? Like, you know, I’ve always been skeptical a little bit sometimes of how important like a bestseller badge or an Amazon’s choice badge. And it’s interesting now in the last like few days, there’s newer kinds of Amazon’s choice badges that are coming out. I forgot what it says. It’s like Amazon’s pick or it was something weird like that. But anyways, like, like did that have an impactful, did you see people trust those products more or not because they, they didn’t know where it comes from or what do you think?

Lailama:

So if it came in the first like five to 10 results, they were more likely to click on that first. So that was their first pick, which I would say is like a big influence, right? Because they were like, oh, if I Amazon you know, chooses this, or if bestseller, they would say, oh, I guess people are buying this, so it must be good. So I would say it had a major influence on the click-through rates at least. The rest is up to the seller then.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now you also did a case study on, on titles. What about titles? Amazon titles, I’m assuming.

Lailama:

Yeah. so this was a case study where, you know, we were done on a client’s listing and we saw a 93% increase in their sales just by changing their title. And they weren’t doing bad.

Bradley Sutton:

93% just by changing the title?

Lailama:

Yes. Which was–

Bradley Sutton:

What did you do? Like make the title ooze gold or something? Like how in the world is that?

Lailama:

So here’s the weird thing. We did not change any keywords. Okay. Keywords were not touched. We literally restructured it. Shortened it so that it was exactly what fits into the mobile viewing experience and we removed the brand name. And that’s something that’s been really working because unless you’re a Nike or something, people really aren’t looking at your brand name. So you’re using the first couple of characters, really important characters towards the brand name, which people don’t even know you yet, right? And we put this unique selling point in the beginning, so like, it was cutlery, we said it was like this number of items in a pack or something like that. And this is the kind of information people are looking for. So you, I would say like, you wanna figure out what the unique selling proposition or what the key pieces of information in your product category is, and then put that in the front. Now a lot of people did ask us like, we have been suggesting that this to some of our clients. And a lot of people are like, oh, but like, it’s not compliant if we don’t put the brand name in there. So on so forth. People get nervous about it.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s actually really interesting right now. It’s so stupid because what you just said is right, that Amazon, in their terms of service wants you to put the, the brand name at the beginning. But it’s, it’s been now three, maybe four months on some of our listings where on certain keyword results, Amazon takes out the brand name, like you put it at the beginning and Amazon literally takes it out unless you go on the product page itself. So like, you know, sometimes that’s good because like, you know, like if you don’t have a lot of brand recognition, just like you said, you know, like people don’t care but the brand, they wanna know what the product is. But then if you are trying to build a brand, or if you’re like Nike or something like that, I mean, literally the whole thing about the product is the brand. And if your brand is strong, and now Amazon is just saying, alright, you know, shoes, you know, instead of Nike shoes, you know, it makes all the difference in the world. So that’s kind of interesting. But yeah, because of that, it kind of like, to me, at least in my mind, it makes it less likely where Amazon is gonna suspend your listing if you don’t put the brand at the beginning. I mean, how could they do that when even they themselves take it out, you know?

Lailama:

Exactly. And another thing is like, we upload it through, we always split test titles. So if you upload it through manager experiments it technically has passed that bot test, so you’re good. If they’ve approved it, then you’re good.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you ever had one where it wasn’t approved? In the manager experiments?

Lailama:

Not so far.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well that probably means you guys are doing the right thing. But that’s actually interesting point, like test like some extreme thing in manage your experiments to see like what it would approve because yeah, I actually just started one the other day and I was frustrated. I thought I would be able to start right away, but now it’s like, oh no, we, we gotta like, we have to like check this out and it’s gonna take like, you know, a few days. So obviously somebody must be you know, reviewing it or something before it approves it. That’s a good point.

Lailama:

Exactly. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. What, what else can you talk about titles?

Lailama:

I think, you know, like it’s, what I’m seeing so far is like, again, it, what we use here could not, might not work for another niche, but from what I’m seeing is like people are preferring going for shorter and shorter titles. Like a lot of buyers even confirmed by this case study where just not attracted to these long titles. They were just like lost in the details. So this was kind of the main point or takeaway from this case study as well, like two different case studies now that people don’t want a really long title. While it may be good for like ranking purposes and so on and so forth, but if people are getting confused, ultimately you don’t wanna put that in there. And highlighting the feature is really important. Like, I know people do it, but like, putting it in the forefront of the title and also highlighting something that’s really unique about your product would set you apart.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. So, you know, these case studies that you’ve been working on what, talk to me about just like your, your bread and butter, which is, you know, I don’t think you were doing 10:00 PM last night, a case study. You’re probably doing a, a photo shoot. So, so don’t tell me about the, you know, I mean if, if that product’s private, you don’t have to tell me the exact thing, but, but can you just, I’m just curious about like how photo studios work. Like what was it an Amazon product you did last night? Like how did you decide to, to set it up? And you guys have some, like I saw in your Instagram story you were like putting some like Roman statue props or, or something like that in this photo shoot. So, so talk to me about what you did last night and just in general. So some recent photo shoots that you’ve done.

Lailama:

Yeah, we’ve really been trying to get creative with the photo shoots. Like the Roman thing was statues and everything. We wanted to do that for like a brand for pants. Now if you look at most of the, you

Bradley Sutton:

Know, a brand, well, how does a brand for pants have to do with Roman statues?

Lailama:

So it was kind of like a fashion shoot, right? Okay. Because we wanted to make it unique. Like you look at all these Amazon’s basics and their pretty much the same thing. So I feel like with competitive niches, it’s just so hard to stand out. And so your creatives really need to be at another level because a lot of people will go for Amazon’s basic pants. But how do you set yourself apart? So you need to have like a strong brand presence. And that’s what I’ve been really working on and like videos and photo shoots as well as you know, you don’t wanna use the same techniques over and over again. Like sure, it’s a candle, so put it on a podium and, you know, just do the basic stuff is like, how can you as a creative agency give them that unique outlook?

Lailama:

And you know, a lot of people talk about like AI taking over and while, you know, I think it’s really convenient with all these different softwares where you can create images and everything, it’s much easier if you wanna do it yourself, but you know, like at some point you are really losing your uniqueness as a brand. And yeah, you know, that’s when you’re looking at the images, like this was one of our findings in the case study as well, is they were one of the participants looking for gym gloves. All the images just looked the exact same way done on against a black backdrop, like copy pasted almost, but a little bit of a difference in the design. And then it came down to like the very basic factors, like, okay, review count, review, rating and pricing. So the buyer wasn’t able to look past anything any of those three factors because everything looked the same and the quality looked the same, so they were ultimately gonna go to those things. So if you don’t have the kind of review count that your competitors have, or you are not able to compete on the pricing, then you really need to stand out in other ways.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now what are some techniques that you think people should use if they can’t, you know, hire AMZ One Step to stay until 10:00 PM at night to do photo shoots and, you know, it’s not cheap, obviously, you’re, you’re not doing this for $5 an hour. How can people get that effect, you know, from, from like home? You know, like, I, I still suggest, Hey guys, if you’ve got the budget, you’ve gotta use professional agents as matter of fact I don’t even know, I don’t know if Saddam told you this, but I just hit him up yesterday because I’m doing like this mini kind of project X with, I’m helping out somebody’s supplement brand. And I was like, Hey, I’m gonna get them to hire AMZ One Stepto kind of like refresh their, their images, potentially do 3D and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Because, you know, they, they did their images on their own and it wasn’t that great. But maybe I’m just starting out, you know I don’t have a huge budget. I remember before you had done a few, you know, project x products you know, photo shoots just on your own, even though you had the, you know, full studio. I was like, Hey, try and do this on your own to try and imitate what people would have to do if they, if they can’t afford a, you know, a studio. But, but what are some best practices? You know, like I can’t just go and get a Roman statue to Yeah. To, to use as a a, as a prop. So, so what are some techniques you can, you can talk to us about?

Lailama:

Yeah. For anything, any small items, like you can just take a picture in good lighting. And then there’s so many AI technologies, like even with Canva, let’s say they remove your background for you and then you take that and, you know, use softwares like flair ai, there’s a bunch of others like Mid Journey. And what you can do is use that background, that product that now doesn’t have a background and put it onto like another background, whatever goes with your branding. It could be like a candle that’s staged on a podium against a silky backdrop or something like that. So for infographics like that, I feel like there’s quite a few options. You know, you just get the background removed, put it on something else, and you don’t have to buy the props, right? So it saves you on the cost. It may not look as realistic, but yeah, it just definitely gets the job done.

Lailama:

And yeah, but anything that may require a model, like I’ve been trying to experiment with that. While these apps do give you like a lot of options, but it doesn’t quite have that realistic look. It looks more like you know, like a fake hand or fake person. So yeah. But infographic style images, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you don’t have the budget a hundred percent, just use one of these AI softwares. You don’t need to be an expert. It’ll remove the background for you, put it on to another background.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, I was looking at your YouTube channel here, and I saw this, this video here, I always like screenshot on on funny, funny, funny poses of you. So here this, it was about creating compelling Amazon listing images. So I unfortunately did not watch this video. First of all, I always joke like how I think I’m an honorary Hassan because as soon as I saw this, I remember seeing this thumbnail. I was like, wait a minute, didn’t you borrow this blouse from your, your sister-in-law?

Lailama:

Your attention?

Bradley Sutton:

You too. Like, how do I know? How do I know your wardrobes? Even I know even, but anyways, so, so I was too distracted when I saw that. I was like, I couldn’t take this video seriously. Cause I was like, wait, this is not, this is not te I’m looking at here. But anyways, what was this video about? Yeah, this listing images. Can you talk about it?

Lailama:

I basically broke down the different image types, and that’s not necessarily the infographic lifestyle, but image categories that I created my own. Like there’s a lot of people who wanna do comparison to their competitors. There’s dimensions, you know, like the basic kind of images that everybody wants to cover. So one of them was about, one of the categories that I talk about is dimensions. And again, this is another thing that we saw in the case study is to this day, a lot of sellers will put like three centimeters long, four centimeters wide. Like that doesn’t work anymore. Like, and I mean, not, not that it worked before either. Like people, it’s hard for them to visualize, you know, being on the other end. So you need to I’ve basically shown people how they could show the scale and dimensions of their products in other ways.

Lailama:

So one was an example of a suitcase. What we did was put it under, we placed it under a bed frame. So now people know, okay, this is the usual length of the bed frame and this is how it fits under a bed. So they have like a visual reference of, you know, how to show their dimensions. Yeah, you can add the numbers as well, but this just gives them an extra kind of reference. There was another example of like Mike, you put it next to like a can of pop, and that was like, everybody drinks Coke and Sprite or whatever. And so now they know how big this mic is gonna be when it arrives. So just different kinds of product image categories that people can make use of and not have to stick to the regular, like with comparison, people, you know, make use of your regular charts. It has this feature, competitor does not cross. So, you know, you just don’t wanna use these old techniques. They’ve been overused. So just ways to stand out from the crowd.

Bradley Sutton:

How often do you suggest that people refresh their images? I mean, this is not something that people should be, oh, yeah, every, every week change your images, you know, that, that might mess up your, your listing. It doesn’t give people a consistent, a consistent feel, but like once a year you know, should, should we change a couple, once every two years, once every six months? Do you have any suggestions there?

Lailama:

Images and your product title? I think like once or twice even like this seller that we changed their title, they were doing perfectly fine. But, you know, my thing is manager experiments is like an amazing tool. You can just use that and keep experimenting, like keep split testing. You might uncover another opportunity, which could give you such a huge boost in sales, right? So I would say like once or twice a year when you can just change up your title, or doesn’t necessarily mean changing up your keywords, but just like structure it differently. And the great thing about manager experiments is like you are running both titles at the same time. So half the people are shown the original and half the people the other. So you’re getting real time data and if you lose out, you’re losing out on only 50%. So the risk isn’t that big, you know what I mean? It same goes with images. You know, it has the capability to split test main images, secondary images a plus. So the, the second you think, okay, sometimes there are times when your product has a feature that you realize, oh, I haven’t highlighted that, and that is something people are looking for. Or you got a good or a bad review based on a certain feature. Maybe that is a good time to add that feature into one of one of your images.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, before we get into your 60-second strategy for the week, you know, I referenced your YouTube channel right there, that pe you know, you’re definitely giving content. So how can people find you on the interwebs? Especially the, the content that you’re, you’re putting out for people? People?

Lailama:

Yeah. It’s posted on the AMZ One Step YouTube channel, and I also shared it on my LinkedIn, which is Lailama Hasan. My name if people can spell it.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. All right. Now one interesting thing is like, AMZ One Step is part of the Sellers Solution Hub. But anyways guys, if you want to just reach out in general to AMZ One Step sometimes they have discounts for like, you know, elite members on the page, but if you are logged into your Helium 10 account, and then you wanna see what kind of, you know, bonuses they have, or at least just reach out through the hub, go to hub dot helium ten.com and then just search for AMZ One Step And you’ll be able to reach out to them that way. Now, what is yours? 30 or 62nd strategy of the, of the week for everybody?

Lailama:

Yeah. So a lot of sellers can get nervous about like, main image strategies, and we give a bunch of those strategies out right at the end. You wanna increase, increase your click through rates. So one way, one hack that I have for testing that out if you’re nervous about it, is upload the strategy that, you know, your agency or whoever’s come up with versus like a fully compliant image. And you know, what you wanna do is upload it on, manage your experiments, and if it gets through the Amazon bots, then you’re good to go and you can upload that image, actually, it will verify it for you, so it’ll automatically upload it for you. Because one thing I wanted to point out is a lot of people will be like, oh, this is not compliant, but you theoretically, 80 to 90% of the main images on Amazon are non-compliant with including props, you know, let’s say a fruit and fruit bowls or including a model in there, or, you know, adding an extra sticker onto your label. All of these are non-compliant. So this is just a hack that I have if you’re worried about it, and plus you get extra insights on which version works better.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, cool. Well well that was great to see you at the Prosper Show. Hopefully I can see you guys a again soon. I was trying to get you guys to go out to Bali, but with the move and everything that, that didn’t work out, I know you guys have a villa out there and another studio. But maybe we’ll get to work together on this one project that I was talking about for Project X. But regardless, I look forward to seeing you and your, your brother and your sister and your sister-in-law. Again, we can all, we can all hang up. Cause I swear I’m a, I’m a just a, just the American member of your of your family here. But thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge and look forward to having you on the podcast maybe next year again.

Lailama:

Thank you for having me.

 

 

#470 - Amazon Ask Me Anything with Bradley

In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Sutton tackles all the burning questions submitted by our amazing community. From optimizing your Amazon listings to how to improve your ACoS, Bradley leaves no question unanswered. Join us as we delve into topics like changing images for dropping conversion rates, the impact of new content in Amazon listings, alternative KPIs for effective images, leveraging ChatGPT for listing optimization, periodic listing updates for different keyword sets, Helium 10’s guide to product launches, and more! Don’t miss this jam-packed episode where he shares his expert insights and actionable advice. It’s time to tune in now and take your Amazon game to the next level!

In episode 470 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley answered the following questions:

• 01:53 – Changing Images When Conversion Rate Is Dropping
• 02:18 – Does Amazon Love New Content In Our Listings?
• 02:56 – Any Other KPI For Effective Images Other Than Sales?
• 05:42 – How To Use ChatGPT To Optimize Your Listings
• 07:31 – Periodically Updating Listings For Different Sets Of Keywords
• 08:45 – Is There A Helium 10 Guide To Launching New Products
• 09:09 – Should A Keyword Become A Negative Target With Good Impressions & Clicks?
• 12:55 – User Customized Order Threshold On A Positive Rule
• 15:09 – My ACoS is Over 100% Any Tips To Lower It?
• 15:55 – How To Improve Your ACoS Using Helium 10 Adtomic
• 19:09 – What’s A Good Target To Hit For ACoS?
• 19:32 – Look At Your TACoS
• 19:53 – Let’s Talk About Bid Strategy
• 20:35 – What’s The Best Way To Learn/Start With Adtomic?
• 21:33 – How To Setup Rules Inside Adtomic
• 25:52 – A Tool To Prevent Running Out Of Stock
• 26:13 – Which Is The Best Filter To Get A Keyword From Cerebro

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today I’m gonna be going over all of your top questions that you guys have submitted as far as Helium 10 and other Amazon strategies. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And what we do, guys, is once a week, every week we have a training for our Sirius Sellers Club members, and our Helium 10 Elite members, Sirius Sellers Club is our private community of sellers who are doing over $500,000 a year on Amazon. And our Helium 10 Elite is one of our special communities as well. And once a month we are going to be opening up this kind of ask me anything to everybody and also repurposing it as we are doing right now as a podcast episode so you guys can take advantage of some of the questions that other people have and maybe it’s some similar questions that you have.

Bradley Sutton:

So here is our ask me anything for, for this month. I hope you guys are able to get some, some great tips out of it. And if you guys would like to participate in the July one, don’t forget to sign up to get notifications on when we’re gonna go live. If you’re on our email list, you should get a notification. If you’re subscribed to our YouTube, subscribe on our Facebook groups and you’ll get a notification on when we go live to do it. But we’ll definitely be doing this once a month. You guys could submit all your questions about Helium 10 live. Let’s go ahead and hop right into it. Whatever helium 10 questions you guys have on how I can help you with your Amazon business go ahead and throw it into the chat and I’ll try and get to as many questions as as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody from YouTube says, I changed my image because my, my conversion rate was dropping after changing my picture. It didn’t see much increase. Yeah, so just because you change your images, that doesn’t always guarantee that, oh, okay, hey, everything is going to be completely fine. You know, after that, that’s not, you know, that’s not, that’s definitely not the, the way it works. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t try changing it because sometimes the image strategy changing can help, which is why, again, you use Listing Analyzer to look at what is working for your competitors. Andrea said Amazon loves new content. Yeah, sometimes that’s true. But I wouldn’t change your, Ima I wouldn’t change your listing all the time because at least on the, on the keyword side, sometimes it can actually confuse the Amazon algorithm. So just because you can do new, new listings and you’re a listing builder in Helium 10, I wouldn’t always, I wouldn’t always change my listing like nonstop because the, the algorithm might not be able to, the algorithm might not be able to, to react in time. Jesse says, is there any KPI we could use to see how effective our images are other than sales?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what matters, sales. But sales is only the very, very end of it. There’s different steps. There’s add to carts. There is your session unit session rate. So for example, the first thing in Helium 10, I would be looking at, especially on our, on the new insights dashboard and something that I check like sometimes on a daily or weekly basis is my unit session percentage. Alright? Basically out, out of how many sessions, how many sessions, how many times people visited my page, what was my sales, right? And then the sessions itself, because think about it, if my keyword ranks stay the same, which they don’t always say the same, but let’s just pretend that on average my keyword ranks are similar from this week to last week and my sessions or page views, if either of those metrics goes down, what does that mean?

Bradley Sutton:

That means that people in the search results were choosing my product less. They clicked on it less. Let’s just say if the search volume was kind of similar, right? And so this is obviously something you can look over time. So I’m gonna be looking at my Helium 10 dashboard at my sessions, first of all, and my keyword ranks because if the keyword rank stays the same, but my sessions goes up, that means more people are clicking on it in the search results than before. Meaning that maybe they like this new price point I put, maybe they like my new title, maybe they liked my new main image. If my sessions goes down well then something is wrong. The same thing, like maybe we’re talking about your, your page views or I mean, maybe you actually change your a plus content or you change your secondary images, something you can’t see in the search results.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, the metric that would show that is of course your unit session percentage. All right? So if you were getting 100 sessions and you are doing five sales, well, your unit session percentage is gonna be 5%. That’ll show on your Helium 10 dashboard. But if all of a sudden that goes down to 2% after you change some images, well guess what? Whatever new images you have, they’re not performing as well as your old ones. So I would revert back to the old ones, right? If your unit session percentage went from 5% to 8%, well then regardless of what your sales did, you know, cuz maybe sales, you know, can go up or down if that, if that unit session percentage went up, you know, you made the right decision with changing your images. If you’re outside of Helium 10, and once you get into search crew performance, you can even take it to the next level and start examining your impressions versus your clicks versus your add to carts.

Bradley Sutton:

And then your sales Kunal says, how exactly can we use ChatGPT for optimizing and upgrading the listing? So here, let me tell you exactly how I do it. So I had a listing that I thought needed refreshing, and so what I did was I imported it into my listing builder and then I put some new keywords I wanted to include in there. And then for a couple of the, I didn’t do the whole entire listing, but like a couple of the bullet points, I just had the ChatGPT inside of Listing Builder, kind of like, give me another idea based on a different vibe. So like you can choose inside of Listing Builder the vibe that you want, like humorous or serious or there’s other, there’s other ones you can do.

Bradley Sutton:

So I was like, I wanna do a humorous one, maybe I wanna do a new title that’s humorous. So I put in there which keywords I want listing builder to use or ChatGPT And then I, I had it refresh I had it refresh a new title for me using that different vibe. And then maybe I didn’t use the exact one that it gave me, but it gave me an idea, like it made something in the way. I was like, oh, that’s a pretty cool way of saying that, or that’s a pretty cool way of saying this bullet point. So that’s how I personally do it. If I have a brand new listing, I’ll use it to get a start on it. I have all my keywords and I’ll have ChatGPT make round one. Now I go in there and I still change a lot of it, right?

Bradley Sutton:

I still change a lot of the listing because ChatGPT doesn’t always use all the keywords that I want to specify, but I have it get me on the right track because sometimes we all have, you know, writer’s block sometimes and we don’t know how to get started, but it usually as soon as ChatGPT makes a test listing based on what the inputs I put, I’m like, man that’s a great, that’s a great start. And then I go in there and I start optimizing it from the keyword the keyword basis. Matthew says, what are your thoughts on periodically updating your listing to try and optimize for different sets of keywords? So, so like I said, I am not going to do it that often. All right? Like when I say often I’m talking about I’m not, I’m not updating my listing like once a week or something like that, that’s gonna confuse the Amazon algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

So I could do that in a Helium 10 Listing Builder. I could do a different listing every day if I wanted to, but no just because I could do it, I can do it doesn’t mean it’s a good practice. I usually don’t change my mature listings more than like once every couple months at most, because there’s usually not new keywords that comes up all the time. Now, if I just have a new keyword that I found that my competitor is ranking for, and it’s just a matter of throwing one keyword in there, sure, I can do that, but I’m not gonna change, you know, I’m not gonna throw into my title like once every month, you know, I don’t, I don’t wanna change my title that often, but I’ll throw in a keyword here or there if I’m trying to up, you know, change my entire bullet points, I’m not gonna be doing that once a month.

Bradley Sutton:

No, because again, the algorithm needs time to adapt to what we are putting in the listings. And if I’m constantly changing it, that could actually hurt my, my rank, my rankings. Is there a Helium 10 guide to launching new products? Yes, we have that like the mal, you know, we talk about in the Maldives honeymoon strategy. So this, the 466 and 467 is kind of like the, the pre-launch strategy, all right? So, so that, that’s what gets you like 80% of the way there. And then I would go to h10.me/400 And look at the second half of that episode as far as how I actually launch the products. After that, Michael says, should a keyword become a negative target if it gets a good rate of impressions and clicks? For me, let’s say I’m using Adtomic, I’ll tell you what my rules are that I put in helium 10 Adtomic is I say, Hey, if I get a keyword that has 20 clicks or spend, that equals half of the retail price.

Bradley Sutton:

In other words, if I have a $50 retail product and I’ve spent $25, I’m actually gonna suggest Adtomic to suggest to me to negative match that keyword. All right? If it gets like 25 clicks sometimes I’ll do even 15 or 20 clicks or $25 spend 50% of the retail price, because usually that means that there’s regardless of the buyer intent, my product is just not vibing with them. So it’s just wasting money. That being said, let’s just say that it’s one of my main keywords. Like if I’m selling a coffin shelf and I get great impressions, great clicks on coffin shelf and zero sales, before I negative match that, I gotta figure out what’s going on with my product because that I’m not gonna have success in Amazon. If one of my main 10 keywords, I am getting zero clicks, that means something is broken with my listing, something is wrong with my listing that people are not buying it, or I’m just gonna give up on that product because if, because if there’s nothing wrong if I can’t figure out what’s wrong, then I might as well just stop selling that product.

Bradley Sutton:

Because if my main keyboard, I can’t even get people to click on it and buy it, I’m not gonna have long-term success, I guarantee it. So if it’s just a random keyword, yes, I am negative matching that in Adtomic because it’s just gonna keep losing me sales. But if my impressions and clicks are really good and it’s one of my main keywords, and I can maybe make an analysis and, and compare my listing to other listings and figure out what are people not liking about my listing when they click on it, then yeah, I’ll try and fix it before I negative match that. Joe says, does Amazon provide more ranking juice for a keyword from a clicked product link versus a clicked PPC ad? It’s near identical, you know, in my test, and which is why like the Maldives honeymoon strategy that we talk about works, which is a hundred percent based on PPC, because it, you know, think about what matters to Amazon, right?

Bradley Sutton:

They want to get the sale, sure that they can get, you know, a 50 cent cost per click, and of course they, they wanna make money in sponsored ads, but at the end of the day, if they have a $50 product, Amazon is making $8 on the actual sale of the product, plus the money that they’re gonna make in fulfilling it. Their profit margins in the pick and pack and all that stuff, right? So at the end of the day, Amazon wants to make sales, and so it’s going to show the products at the top of the page that gives it the best chance to make that sales, regardless if it’s PPC, you have control over that, but the organic one is the one that Amazon’s algorithm has control over. So when you are optimizing your listing for keywords, and that’s what this strategy I’ve been talking about today is about, then you need to make sure that you are showing up either in sponsored or organic.

Bradley Sutton:

And if you wanna show up in organic, you have to start with a sponsor. So usually it’s, it’s not one or the other you’ve gotta try and optimize for, for both. But Amazon is checking what people are searching for, what they’re clicking on, regardless of if it’s organic or if it’s PPC. Easy stud rack from YouTube says under Adtomic suggestions, new keywords. I see in quotation mark here, user customized order threshold on a positive rule, I see red, yellow, and green dots on ACoS. I’m scared to check the suggestion. What is it suggesting? So when it says user customized order threshold on a positive rule, what that means is that you set a rule, which is what exactly, what you should have done is you set a rule saying, Hey, if, if in an auto or broad campaign, I get X number of sales at this, a cost suggest to me to add this to my manual campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what you should have set up. It sounds like that’s what you did set up. So it’s suggesting, I mean, again, it’s suggesting whatever you entered into it. So the suggestions, there will be zero suggestions if you didn’t set up the rule yourself. So the fact that you’re getting a suggestion and an Adtomic easy stud rack, that means that you must have set up a rule. Now, I can’t tell you if the rule that you set up was good or not. This is a garbage in, garbage out thing. So if you gave it a terrible rule, well, yeah, you’re gonna get terrible results, but let me tell you what I put my rule, and then you can check your rules. So for my rule, for my positive rules, the one that means I’m adding keywords to another campaign I put in my Adtomic, if I get two sales for a search term or an ASIN, two sales, and the ACoS is below what my threshold is to be profitable, let’s just say it’s 30%, right?

Bradley Sutton:

If I get two sales at below 30%, ACOs suggest to me to add this to my manual campaign. So hopefully that’s what you did to set up yours, all right? And if you see it on the suggestion page and you hit the plus sign, you know, so you go ahead and submit the suggestion. It’s only going to do what you had set up for the rule. So I would go in, check what you had put for the rules, and then if you’re cool with that, then go ahead and run your suggestions through.

Bradley Sutton:

Michael says, thanks Bradley, your webinars ask me anything, and podcasts are literally lifting my business off the ground. I love to hear that, Michael, that’s awesome. Romaine says, my ACoS is over a hundred percent. Any tips lower. So hopefully you’re using Adtomic. So if you’re using Adtomic, this is what I would do. Romaine, I’m in the Project X account, and I mean, if you had the rules set up, Adtomic would be sharing, telling you what you need to do to get your ACoS down. But let’s just say maybe you didn’t set your rules up, or you just started with Adtomic. Like if you just, if anybody just starts at that Adtomic, here’s what I would, here, here’s what I would do. I, I would look at the last, like, let’s just say 60 days, all right? And I’m, I haven’t even looked at at the advertising here, so I’m hoping that nothing shows up here, but there might be some that that show up because I haven’t been on traveling for a while, so I haven’t been following up with my Adtomic here.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m going to go to my analytics and I’m going to go to search term, all right? I’m gonna go to search terms, and then what I wanna do is I wanna say, Hey, what have I spent at least or no, you know what, I’m gonna pick clicks. Is there any search terms that I have had at least 25 clicks? All right, but I have had zero PPC orders, all right? So this is just so simple. You can’t really, it’s harder to do this in Seller Central, but that’s why I love Adtomic. And look at this. Here’s 22 search terms, good grief that I have spent a couple hundred dollars on and that I have gotten zero sales. So take a look at this guys, right here, here is an asin. Alright? Maybe I wanna see what the heck is this asin.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’m gonna see what this ASIN is, this is another coffin shelf. Look at this, guys. I had not been paying attention to my Adtomic. I have gotten 116 clicks, this is terrible. What’s wrong with me? I’ve gotten 116 clicks on this keyword with zero sales. I spent $54. So I want to negative match, but I wanna see where is this showing up. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna show, I wanna see this in the ad group, the actual ad group. So I’m gonna hit this toggle for ad group. This is why Adtomic is so amazing, guys, if you guys aren’t using this, my goodness, you guys are wasting a lot of time. All right, so, oh, you see this is good. I actually have this ASIN as a target inside of, of this campaign. So I’m gonna actually click this and I wanna go into this campaign and then just take a look at what the heck I was thinking.

Bradley Sutton:

And what I did was I saw this on my analytics page, and now I opened up to the product target group, and sure enough, here is in the last 60 days, what ASIN was this? RK9, here’s RK9, 0 sale. So I’m gonna pause this. This is just wasting me money, like ridiculous. So I’m just gonna go ahead and pause this. And now I’m not gonna spend any more money on this target that is costing me money. Alright? What are some other ones here? Pink Coffin Shelf. Alright, for whatever reason on the research group, pink Coffin Shelf is not working for me. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m without even having to go to the campaign, I’m gonna go ahead and add this as a negative match. So I’m gonna hit this negative target, and I want to negative match this on this research campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

There it is right there. I’ve gotten 85 clicks with zero sales, I’m gonna hit apply, and now this is never gonna show up in that campaign again. So if I would’ve just left this, that’s like $75 worth of spend potentially that I just saved over the next two months by, by taking three seconds and doing this in, in Adtomic. So, so that’s what I would do. The first step I’m going to do to lower my ACoS is seeing where I’m spending money and not getting any sales. There’s, there’s of course a lot of other things you can do, but, but that’s, that’s my, that’s my first thing. Michael says, what’s a good target for ACoS? It, it depends, you know, there’s, there’s no one answer for this. The best ACoS you could have is what makes you profitable, but you should also be thinking about your total ACoS or your TACoS, because sometimes you could be maybe not so profitable on an individual ASIN or on your ACoS on your actual campaign that you’re doing, but because you’re running this, it has this like ripple effect across your other products where overall you’re still profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

So don’t just just look at your ACoS, but if you just wanted to just be profitable exactly on what you’re advertising for, yeah, you can look at your ACoS and then you’ve gotta find that, that sweet spot where you can still be profitable. Pala says broad phrase and exact, what’s the difference between the bids strategy? Again, every, everything I do, no matter if it’s broad, no matter if it’s phrased, no matter if it’s exact, when I’m setting that up in Adtomic, is I’m just trying to be profitable and my target price for exact might be different than it is. You know, like maybe sometimes for broad and auto, I have to keep lower bids because the, you know, the targets can be all over the place, right? So I might have to keep a lower bid just to make up for all the keywords that it’s gonna show me that maybe I’m not gonna get many sales on. But yeah, it, it’s up to you and it’s, it’s up to your product at what you can remain profitable. There’s no magic number that you should be shooting for.

Bradley Sutton:

Robin says what’s the best way to learn with Adtomic is if you just started with Adtomic reach out to customer support and they’ve got like this eight boarding, eight boarding, I can’t even speak, right? Eight week onboarding, short and firm, eight boarding, eight week onboarding course where you can hop on calls like this once a week and just get demos on how to set the whole thing up. And of course we’ve got videos as well in the Adtomic where you can help get set up. But, but yeah, I would definitely rely on that, that eight week course, which is completely free to get ramped up. Brett says, I first started with PPC, had a very poor structure. I’ve heard that if you move keywords to new campaigns, you lose history. How do you recommend reorganizing? All right, so here’s exactly how I have it in Adtomic.

Bradley Sutton:

I wonder if I could even show you guys my, I think I can. Yeah, I’m gonna show you guys exactly how I have it set up in Adtomic, and this is, is the best way to have it have it set up. All right, let me look up my rules here. Perfect, perfect. All right, so I’m gonna show you guys my rules for Adtomic. Let’s just look at my promotion rules, my positive rules. This means how I find new keywords. All right? So take a look at what you see here. These are all of my campaigns for this egg rack product. I have got a research campaign that’s a broad campaign. I’ve got an ASIN product targeting campaign. I’ve got a performance campaign. That means that’s my exact manual campaign. I’ve got a sponsored display campaign here. I have an additional exact campaign because me, I like to keep my tar my campaigns, my exact campaigns to a maximum of 20 targets.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s just me. I just keep it on max 20. And then once I reach 20, I gotta make a new campaign, right? I actually have three of those here in this, in this, in this flow. And then here’s my auto campaign. So how I set these rules up, I know this looks like if you’re new to Adtomic, this looks like just a bunch of check marks. Basically I have this set up where it’s basically it’s saying, Hey, let me show you at the bottom here. If I have two orders on a certain target or a certain search term or ASIN and it’s 30% ACoS or less, by having, if I find that in the auto campaign, by me having this check mark in the research campaign, what it’s saying is if I find a keyword that I get two sales on, it’s going to go ahead and add it to my broad match campaign so I can maybe find some more long tail keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s not going to delete it from the auto campaign that’s called keyword isolation. Some people call that I’m not doing that, I’m keeping it in the auto campaign unless it really starts taking off in the research campaign. The same time, it’s also adding an exact camp match for that search term that it found in the auto, in my manual, exact manual campaign, let’s say it finds something in the research campaign that’s my broad, it finds a long tail keyword. Again, it has to match this criteria of two orders and less than 30% ACoS. If I get that in my broad campaign, it’s also going to add that to my manual campaign. As you guys may or may not know in an auto campaign, it can show me for ASINs on product targeting, right? It can show me for an ASIN somehow. So the same rule applies.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s what I have here. I guess set up this once guys, and I never have to worry about this. If I get two conversions on an ASIN in my auto campaign, look at this, I have that, it’s going to add it to my product targeting campaign. Alright? My ASIN targeting campaign. So I can make Amazon show me for this ASIN and my sponsored display campaign. So again, all of my campaigns here are talking to each other thanks to Adtomic and I don’t have to go download my reports every single time and try and figure out and add things and delete things and negative, no Helium 10 is gonna do all that for me. And then, so let me just show you if, if the cam, if it actually works, I go to my suggestions. Let me see if there’s any new keywords that it’s going to suggest.

Bradley Sutton:

Hopefully, like I said, hopefully the answer is no, but wow. Look, look at this. Good grief. All right, so for this ASIN, look at this. I converted in a pink shelf or in my pink coffin shelf campaign. I converted for this ASIN right here. Look at this. I only spent $4 and I got $63 worth of sales. This was from an auto campaign, right? So if I put my mouse over here, it’s saying, Hey, you need to add this to your product targeting campaign and you need to add it to your sponsor display campaign. You think I want to do that? You better believe I want to do that. If an auto campaign can can perform this well, I definitely want to do it on purpose. So I just hit this button. Once I hit apply, boom goes to dynamite, it’s done. Adtomic just added that ASIN to my sponsor display campaign and it added it to my product targeting campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s thanks to Adtomic finding it this keyword in an auto campaign. So now I’m gonna be targeting those 24 hours a day, theoretically speaking in my exact campaign. So that’s the power of what Adtomic can do. Jesse says, is there a tool we can use to prevent running it outta stock? Yeah, inventory management, inventory management and helium 10. If you set it up correctly and, and you set the right algorithm of what you know, of what your product is and the sales are all tied to, to helium 10, it’ll help you to not run outta stock because it’ll tell you when you need to order more, when you need to transfer some from, from your inventory, like from your 3PL et cetera. That’s what I use for all of my Amazon accounts. What is the best filter to get a keyword from Cerebro? I mean, it depends. There’s a million filters in there, but I like the one click filters in Cerebro. You know, if I enter a whole bunch of my competitor ASINs, the very first button I’m gonna click is the button top keywords, right? The next button I’m gonna click is opportunity keywords. Those will give you some great keywords right there.

Bradley Sutton:

Samuel says, Bradley, from your example, if you add those keywords to your sponsored display campaign and find that after 30 plus days it’s not performing in that campaign, do you pause that target? Absolutely. So it, regardless of how I found a keyword, when I found a keyword, why I found a keyword. If there is a keyword that is not performing well, I, and I’m not gonna go dig into figuring out, is there something wrong with my listing? Let’s just pretend that I know that everything is as good as it can be. I’m just finding out that this keyword doesn’t perform well. If I’m getting that 25 clicks with no sales, 30 clicks with no sales, or if I’m spending 20 bucks with no sales on a $40 product or a $30 product, yes, I am pausing that target because it’s just not working.

Bradley Sutton:

If you don’t have to get a sale every five clicks, no, but my, my number that I pick is anywhere between 20 to 40. If I go 40 clicks without sale a sale or 30 clicks, it’s very unlikely that I’m gonna get a sale after 60 clicks, for example. I hope that makes sense, so that’s why I go ahead and pause it after, after that amount of time. So I thank you guys for joining me on this training. We’ll see you guys next week. Bye-Bye now.

#469 - Walmart Traffic, Q&A, And PPC Tips with Carrie Miller

Welcome to this special Winning with Walmart episode on SSP. Today’s host, Carrie Miller covers a wide variety of topics about selling in the Walmart marketplace. She talks about how Walmart sends online traffic to your listings to get more eyeballs and sales, how to get Walmart’s Rich Media for free, and more! Additionally, she answers questions like what’s the process of joining Walmart.com as a seller and can international sellers sign up on Walmart?

In episode 469 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie discusses: 

• 00:51 – Where Does Walmart Get Their Traffic?
• 06:23 – How To Get Rich Media In Walmart For Free
• 07:37 – Take Advantage Of AMX Platinum Card
• 08:17 – Process Of Joining Walmart.com As A Seller
• 09:01 – Carrie’s Blogs On How To Sign Up On Walmart and how International Sellers Can Now Sell on Walmart
• 09:21 – Helium 10 Tools That Work In Walmart.com
• 10:54– How Many Countries Walmart Is In?
• 12:19 – Does Walmart Accept Brand New US Business Owners?
• 12:48 – International Sellers Can Apply In Walmart Too!
• 13:53 – Does Walmart Accept PO Box As A Business Address?
• 14:17 – Let’s Talk About Walmart PPC And Helium 10 Adtomic
• 18:09 – Why Walmart Is A Good Opportunity Right Now
• 19:30 – Get Adtomic For Walmart Demos From Carrie Miller

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

In this episode, we are going to be talking about all of the different ways that Walmart is sending online traffic to your Walmart marketplace listings so that you can get more sales. We’ll also be answering all of your Walmart questions. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Carrie Miller:

This morning with Walmart Wednesday. I have some great stuff for you today, and I wanna talk to you a little bit about basically where Walmart gets their traffic. Okay? This is a kind of an interesting question because a lot of people wanna know, like, how can I get more customers on my Walmart page? Or how can I get more sales? And this is going to help you, I think, get a very good understanding of that. So the first thing is that most people are actually just shopping at Walmart. So there are, you know 90% of US households actually shop on Walmart. So if you can, you know, think about yourself, think about whether or not you shop on Walmart or if you go to Walmart you’ll know that there’s a lot of people already shopping at Walmart and they actually have an app.

Carrie Miller:

And many people, about 80% of people that are in the stores are actually using the app while they’re in the store, which is really cool. So there’s a lot of exposure there through the Walmart app where your products are. So that’s number one way is just because there are a lot of, you know, Walmart shoppers. The next way is Google. So I don’t know if any of you have noticed this if you’re already selling on Walmart, but your products actually, even if you’re not advertising, are showing up on Google. And the way that this happens is you optimize your listings for Google. And one of the ways to do that is to not keyword stuff. So on your title, if you’re following the guidelines that Walmart has set up for you to do this is going to help you quite a bit because the less keyword stuff you do, the more these search engines are gonna pick up your title and your product.

Carrie Miller:

So for example, here, this one is a Walmart product, you’ll see in the Google shopping, and it’s absolutely incredible because you’re not even paying for this and Walmart is, you know, doing this to help you get some exposure there. Also there are Bing searches. So not only Google searches, but anyone who’s using Bing as a search engine, you’re gonna be seeing Walmart ads there. So if you can see right here, we’ve got you know, a garlic press that’s being advertised under Garlic Press on the Bing search. So you’re showing up on Bing, you’re showing up on Google. So sometimes when you look at, so in, when you’re looking in Cerebro or Magnet for Walmart, which we have actual search volume on the Walmart app, you’re not actually seeing complete traffic because maybe people are coming in through, through Google. So you’re gonna, you know, see that 50% or so is what Walmart is saying is coming from outside traffic.

Carrie Miller:

So it’s really important to make sure you’re optimizing, maybe look up some Google Google Planner keywords, make sure you have some of those main keywords that are really related to your product, like in your title and in your listing so that you can actually show up on Google and bang for those. The next thing is something that’s really new, which is really cool, and I’ve seen this myself because I am all over Instagram and TikTok. You actually can see now that there’s a lot of people that are Walmart influencers. So if you search the hashtag Walmart partner or Walmart creator, you can see there’s a lot of influencers. Now, back when I did this search you know, back in January, I think it was, there were probably maybe 2000 hashtags, but if you search it now, there’s more than 11,000 hashtags for those those hashtag keyword searches on Instagram.

Carrie Miller:

So that’s pretty incredible. And there’s, there’s actually a quite a few more on TikTok, so lots of really great exposure. These creators are getting a commission, a really good commission depending on the category that they’re, you know, selling in kind of like Amazon. So you can see there’s, here’s some different you know, traffic, you know, creators that have shown their videos. So we have outdoor one, we had a Walmart summary, fines, a lot of clothing. I’ve seen a lot of clothing influencers really showing off Walmart stuff because people who are selling on Amazon are moving their stuff over to the Walmart marketplace. So there’s higher quality in clothing there. Home fines are big, that’s a big category. So you see a lot of home fines and there’s makeup as well. So if you’re in like the beauty categories, it’s really perfect for you to use influencers for that.

Carrie Miller:

There was a Father’s Day one recently that was just Father’s Day this last weekend. And so you’ve see, you see all these things and they actually also have their own Walmart creator pages like they do on Amazon. So they’re really kind of, kind up quite a bit in the creator space, in the influencer space. So there’s a lot of opportunity with that. So, you know, search those hashtags. Maybe you can find some creators that can create some content for you if you send their products work out some deals that way. The next thing is Walmart+. Okay, so Walmart+ is basically like Prime, so they’re gonna get the free two-day shipping. They’re gonna get you know, a lot of different perks. And one of the main perks I would say, especially with this economy, is that you get gas discounts.

Carrie Miller:

So you’ll see that you get, if you join the Walmart+ program, you get free discounts on gas, you get free shipping on two-day orders. You also get free delivery on grocery orders of there is a minimum purchasing it’s $35. But another thing is I’ve seen them working a lot of different partner programs. Now I’ve seen more than just this one that I’m mentioning, but you’ll see that this, this is the Platinum American Express. I was actually looking at getting this American Express card and one of the perks is that they actually pay for your Walmart+ subscription. So they’re really doing a really great job of getting Walmart+ subscribers, which is just really helping to funnel more people to Walmart through the Google searches, cuz maybe they’re looking at Google and searching for a garlic press and they’re like, oh, Walmart, I get free shipping, why don’t I just click on that?

Carrie Miller:

So there’s a lot of really good opportunity here with Walmart and the traffic. So something else that that is new that you guys might not know, and you’re listening now, so this is actually really good for you to be listing, is Rich Media. So Rich Media is a lot like a plus content and it is available now pretty much without having to pay. So Rich Media, you basically, you would have to go through kind of a provider and you would have to pay for hosting. You can still do that, but you actually can get it for free by going into your help center. So you’re gonna go into the items category, and then you’re gonna click on Rich Media. And then Rich Media, once you’re in there, you can click on video and there’s also a 360 image as well. So you can basically, it shows you how you can submit your videos for free so you don’t have to pay for getting that rich media up.

Carrie Miller:

So video is really, really helpful for really, you know, giving more benefits about your product. So if you can do that, if you have some time and you have some little slideshow videos, I highly recommend going in to, you know, the, it’s basically your contact support. So it’ll go, you go to Contact Sport and you do items in inventory, you’re gonna click on Rich Media, and then you’re gonna go through all the steps to create your rich media. So that is an, you know, an a very, very easy thing that you can do if you’re already selling on Walmart. Okay someone said, thanks for the heads up on the AmEx Platinum benefit. Yes. yeah, it’s, if you have the AmEx Platinum, if you’re a shopper, go ahead and just take advantage of that free membership to Walmart+, I know a lot of people have that card because you got a little lot of, you know, good perks and it’s like, I think it’s like $695 a year for that card.

Carrie Miller:

So one of the benefits is it, you know, pays for itself with all these different cool benefits and Walmart+ is one of those benefits. So make sure that you take advantage of that. Okay, so what is the process to join as a seller on Walmart? So for Walmart, you are going to want to basically go and apply. It depends on your your country. There’s different requirements. I actually have a blog for this, and it explains the different countries. But you’re basically going to go ahead and set up an account and you just apply, you put in your information and it’ll kind of give you a login right away. That doesn’t mean you’re accepted. You have to put in your business information once you’ve logged in, and then you wait for them to confirm that you are accepted and then you can put in your payment information and shipping details.

Carrie Miller:

So it’s really easy. It used to be a lot more difficult. You don’t have to put a whole bunch of information in. They really can look up your business on their own. So I’ll put the link to the how to, you know, sign up and then also the link to the blog article that really explains the different countries. So another thing that we do have that you guys may not know about is that we have some really great tools for, for Walmart. And so if you are a a Walmart seller already, there are Cerebro tools. So you can use Cerebro and do a reverse product Id search, and you can get all of the keywords. So for example, you have a competitor and you wanna see, you know, what keywords they’re indexing for. You can put in their product id, which is the last numbers on their url.

Carrie Miller:

You can take that product ID number, you can put it in Cerebro, and they’ll do a reverse search and it’ll show you all the keywords that they are indexing for. So it’s an amazing, amazing tool. We have Magnet for just searching phrases. So what you would do, say you have a garlic press, you can search garlic press and it’ll give you a lot of keyword suggestions that are related to garlic press. We have we have Adtomic now, so I can do, I’m gonna do a, a demo later on for that. But we have Atomic for Walmart, so you can do your pay-per-click management through Adtomic on Helium 10, which makes it a ton easier to manage your pay-per-click. So if you’re not doing pay per click advertising on Walmart, you definitely should be, that’s a hundred percent the most important thing you would never launch on Amazon without doing pay-per-click.

Carrie Miller:

So we’ve got Adtomic we’ve got inventory we’ve got profits management we and we also have our X-ray extension. So let’s see about some other questions. Someone said, how many countries is Walmart in? There’s I mean in terms of the actual retail store, they’re in quite a few countries, but availability, I believe it’s five or six countries, but they’re expanding constantly. So as you go to the signup page, you’ll see which countries are allowed to join. So you wanna check that out. And there’s definitely you know, a lot of expansion going on. They really want to get more sellers for sure. The UK, China, India, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, the us, those are all countries so far that are able to sell, but they, they have expanded to more recently. So they, if I didn’t list your country, it may also be available. However, if you’re a really, really big seller, you’re selling millions of dollars you might have an extra a leg up to be able to go onto Walmart. So you could send me a DM if you are kind of a, like a seven figure, eight figure seller and you wanna get on Walmart and you might not be in one of those countries.

Carrie Miller:

Does Walmart Rich Media direct on platform allow you to use Rich Media template for formatting or just upload videos? You’re just uploading the videos. They don’t have, they don’t have like the templates, but it’s pretty easy. You can follow the process. You can see when you go onto the and also, it’s nice to see you on here. You can, yeah, it, it’s just an upload for the video. So they, they had a lot of really cool templates before, and I think that might be what you’re referring to, but they’re gonna, I think they’re gonna be expanding that a lot more.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next question. Does Walmart accept brand new US business owners? I do believe they are accepting new business owners. You have to make sure that you have a business set up. Something I would recommend is maybe set up a Shopify account before so that you can kind of show yourself as you know, an established business and that you’re serious. So yeah, I would, I would definitely not shy away from applying, even if you’re a new seller. Okay, and then someone said, I missed when you spoke about international signups. So the international signups. So there are new, when we first started talking about Walmart, you really could only sell if you had a US business address, but now they’ve expanded to multiple countries. So you can you can apply if you’re in the UK, if you’re in Canada, if youre in India, China, I’ve written a blog on how all the different qualifications, because there are different qualifications for each country.

Carrie Miller:

So you’re gonna want to, you know, take a look at that. And each one’s different. So there’s different kind of business entities and things like that that you need to to show when you’re applying to Walmart. So it’s, it’s different for every country. And they are expanding countries constantly. They are that’s their main goal is to continue to expand and open up to more sellers and really grow their marketplace. So that’s pretty exciting for everyone who’s international. And if you’re not on the list yet, you know, definitely, you know, keep, keep a lookout. But if you are a really big seller, you know, sometimes they’re allowing you know, it depends on your revenue. But if you have, if you’re a high revenue seller, you know, in the millions, then you potentially could you know, get onto Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

So does Walmart accept PO Box as a business address? I don’t believe they do. So you’re gonna need a physical address. That’s, that’s the way it’s been in the past, is you really need a physical address for your business. So you could use, some people use their home address. So it depends on where you have your business set up, but you don’t wanna use a a PO Box that’s not gonna, they’re not gonna accept that they, they haven’t in the past anyway, so that’s a really good question. All right, any other questions?

Carrie Miller:

All right, I don’t see anymore. But if you’re not doing pay-per-click advertising, I wanna talk about that a little bit. Pay per click advertising is definitely a must. So we do have Atomic for Walmart and if you want to start utilizing Walmart Atomic, you can also send me a message on, on Facebook. Basically, on my product, I have the clicks I was getting on Amazon, were, you know, three and $4, and I was actually losing money on this particular product because the pay-per-click was so expensive on Walmart, it’s actually about 35 cents, 40 cents, you know, max 50 cents per click. So I really recommend if you, you know, haven’t started advertising on Walmart, it is a huge advantage if you start doing that, you’re gonna start to rank better. You’re gonna, you know, it’s much cheaper clicks, you’re gonna get more sales, and you can get all the way to the top of the search.

Carrie Miller:

So before about it’s been about a year now since they changed it, but before you could only rank advertise as high, as high as your organic rank, but now you can literally pay to get to the top of the search, and it’s not expensive. So I highly recommend, you know, taking a look at your category, see if anyone else is even advertising. A lot of times you might have a product and there’s no one even advertising on that product. So it’s really an amazing time to be on Walmart. It’s a very basic pay-per-click, very easy. I am not a PPC expert and I do it myself. You can do that with Atomic. So it’s a very, very helpful tool. So any other questions on here? I don’t see any more questions, but I guess I have a question to see if anyone on here is already on Walmart or if you’re in the, in the process.

Carrie Miller:

So if you are in the process, or if you’ve already started selling at Walmart, let me know in the chat. Just wanna see who’s on here and if you have any more questions. But if you haven’t taken advantage of the free Rich Media, do that 360 is available and you can upload a video. And then the other thing is, if you haven’t started Pay-Per-Click advertising, please, please, please start advertising. Go onto Cerebro and Magnet and search for exact keywords. Okay? You’re gonna find the exact search volumes, look for exact keywords, and you don’t need to forget about the low search volume. I’ve actually found that even low search volume keywords I’ve been making sales on. And I think the reason for that is because we have Google traffic that’s coming out like the Google searches, the Bing searches.

Carrie Miller:

So say, you know, the product gets, you know, a hundred searches a month or something like that, you’re still getting a lot, a lot of sales on that because of the fact that there’s a lot of outside traffic there and there’s creators. Now, maybe they would pick up your product, find some of those influencers that are doing Walmart that are Walmart creators, and you can find them by searching the hashtag Walmart creator or Walmart partner, and you can find some great influencers. Maddie says, I’m in Walmart, but can’t find a UK marketplace. Yeah, it’s, it’s mostly the, the US marketplace. So I would say right now the best opportunity for Walmart is in the US marketplace. They do, you know, have other marketplaces available, but I would say definitely if you can get into a Walmart fulfillment services WFS, you could ship your products in just like FBA. It’s a great opportunity.

Carrie Miller:

All righty. I think that is it. If there aren’t any more questions these revelations about the traffic, I think, you know, really hopefully sparked some, some thoughts in some of you to really optimize your listings for Google as well as Walmart. So you’re gonna get your keywords for Walmart from Helium 10, but then you can look to see if there’s any other keywords on Google Keyword Planner that might be really helpful for you to kind of rank for Walmart on Google. So if you have those lists already, you can, you know, utilize those. But definitely kind of think about what ways can I optimize my listing best? Look at the guidelines because on Walmart, they really don’t like keyword stuffing. Look at your listing quality score. The higher your listing quality score, the more visibility you’re gonna get and the higher you’re gonna rank.

Carrie Miller:

So you’re gonna get, if you have good shipping, you know, you’re, if you have the pro seller badge, there’s all these things you can do to optimize your listing on Walmart. Go to that listing quality dashboard and make sure you completely optimize your listing. And if you get, you know, 90 to a hundred percent, you’re probably going to be optimized for Google too. So that’s, you know, kind of a good rule of thumb, but Walmart I do have kind of a test product just to let you know about a revenue, my product that I’m, I really haven’t paid too much attention to. I should pay more attention to it, but it’s doing about, for one product, doing about 10,000 in revenue every month. I’m doing pay-per-click advertising and you know, I’m getting RoAS of, you know, between, you know, fours and $6.

Carrie Miller:

So really, really good opportunity right now for Walmart. So if you’re not already doing the advertising, if you’re not in there make sure you get in there and and start advertising. Utilize our Walmart Adtomic and I’ll do some demos on that later on and show you how to set it all up and get you all started with Adtomic. So again, if you are interested in Atomics, send me a message and we can get you all set up with Adtomic so that you will be ready for my demo. Alright, and if that’s it, I hope that you have a great rest of the day and thank you all for joining my Walmart Wednesday. Bye bye.

#468 - Amazon & Walmart PPC Strategies, Dayparting, & Improving Organic Rank

In this special TACoS Tuesday in SSP episode, let’s dive into the world of Amazon and Walmart PPC together with our expert guest Jocelyn Jeffries, Senior Manager for Retail Media at Pacvue. Our guest is an experienced professional managing $50 million in ad spend annually. Let’s listen to her insights, tips, and answers to our community’s questions about PPC asked live.

In episode 468 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jocelyn discuss: 

• 01:33 – Let’s Meet Our Guest Jocelyn
• 02:25 – Managing $50 Million In Ad Spend Annually
• 04:21 – A New AI Innovation That Pacvue Released
• 07:10 – Jocelyn’s Favorite PPC Metrics
• 08:08 – How Do You Get New To Brand Data For Sponsored Product Campaigns
• 09:27 – What Are The Benchmarks For NTB Data?
• 12:53 – A Weird Situation With PPC And Attributed Sales
• 13:57 – How To Use PPC To Improve Your Organic Rank
• 16:34 – Tip When You Are Targeting Top Of Search
• 17:35 – Running PPC Campaigns After Missing The Honeymoon Period
• 19:41 – PPC Tips And Insights For Amazon Europe
• 20:45 – How To Use Day Parting In Your Campaigns
• 22:46 – PPC Sales Increased But Organic Sales Stays The Same
• 24:32 – PPC Strategy For Walmart.com
• 28:03 – Rolando Joins Us To Ask His Question Live
• 35:31 – How To Get In Touch With Jocelyn And Pacvue

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got somebody on the show who manages over 50 million in an annual PPC spend who’s gonna be answering a lot of your questions, such as, how did you Day Partying, how to advertise on Walmart, how to launch and get organic rank from PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly tacos Tuesday show. TACoS Tuesday, where we talk anything and everything PPC related, whether it’s on Amazon or Walmart, or even off Amazon and Walmart. We can take your questions on PPC, on other platforms potentially as well. So every month we bring on a special guest. And so without further ado, I’m gonna bring her on here, Jocelyn from Pacvue. How’s it going, Jocelyn? Good,

Jocelyn:

How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. And what do you do at here at Pacvue

Jocelyn:

I am on our kind of managed service consulting team, so I’m actually guiding strategy for some of our largest enterprise clients which is very fun. We work with really cool brands, you know, across, you know, self-service, managed, et cetera. And we have a lot of fun, but really mapping out the entire strategy for the year, and we’re pretty deep partners at that kind of level where we’re involved in the retail side and the you know, promotions and merchandising and all of that kind of aspect when we’re that deep into the relationship with the client.

Bradley Sutton:

Have any rough, like, cool figures you can throw out, like, Hey, I manage one gazillion dollars worth of spend per month every day, or something like that. That impressive.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I probably manage about 50 million in ad spend through the year, which is very cool. You know, when you’re up to that level of budget, you get to do a lot of fun stuff, a lot of testing, a lot of learning. You know, I love a good test and learn. That’s kind of my thing at this point. Whether that’s, you know, testing new, creative testing, new audiences kind of addressing some larger, you know, brand initiative questions. You kind of get to do that, some of that when you start getting up to the higher budgets, which is certainly fun for someone like me.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What platforms are you knowledgeable on? I’m obviously Amazon, but are you currently, you know, running any campaigns on other platforms, be it Walmart, Instacart, et cetera?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so I manage campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, Criteo, Instacart, DoorDash.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the one you said before Instacart?

Jocelyn:

Walmart, Criteo.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s that?

Jocelyn:

Criteo is like Target, CVS shipped a bunch of the smaller retailers. They don’t have their own networks but that’s how Target does a lot of their advertising. So pretty much Jenny and everything I’ve done some campaigns on, which is fun. Obviously Amazon’s the biggest and has the most opportunity to learn and whatnot. But I do have experience in pretty much every retail media site.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. I don’t, so at least one of us knows what they’re doing here. All right. So you know, I wanted to show this quick video. We just launched something at Pacvue yesterday. Now you tell me, how do you say this? Like, I’ve known about this film festival and stuff for like, years. How do you actually say, is it Cannes? Cannes?

Jocelyn:

I think it’s Cannes. Cannes Lions can

Bradley Sutton:

Cannes. Okay. Well, I’m, I’m just gonna go with that. But at the Cannes Film Festival,

Jocelyn:

Think it’s all real name, but most people call it Cannes.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, people don’t come to me for your Instacart advertising, nor your French word pronunciation, but everything else you can come to me for. But anyways, let me show this video really quick for everybody to see, like this really cool, kind of like AI innovation that Pacvue has launched. Maybe, maybe I can even ask you a couple of questions about it if you know. So let me just go ahead and throw up this video for everybody to see in 3, 2, 1. Here we go.

(Video):

Pacvue Excel copilot is industry’s first natural language generative AI for commerce built directly into Microsoft Excel. You can query all of your PAC view data in one place with prompts, like, show me my top campaigns by ad spend. Pacvue Excel Co-pilot can also generate pre-formatted dashboards. Co-Pilot can reduce the time it takes to produce these reports from hours to just minutes. Now teams can spend their time on critical thinking, discussion and strategy. All of these charts can be automatically generated into a prebuilt PowerPoint alongside the relevant analysis. Learn more about Pacvue Excel Co-pilot and Pacvue AI today.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, pretty cool. So basically if I’m under, I haven’t seen this in action, so what it seems like it’s kind of like, hey, I can threw in a prompt like enter, say hey, like, Hey, show me this metric combined with this, make an Excel chart for it, or something like that. Or am I on the right track here?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, that’s exactly what it really does, and it’s a pretty powerful tool. You know, I think of that’s really how we think when we’re looking at reporting and looking at performances. You’re thinking in questions like that of what’s got the most efficiency, what has the highest conversion rate, things like that, where it’s gonna take some time to man either manually pull that or to, you know, shift through Excel files and whatnot to generate that. So it’s a much more like, I think, natural way to approach reporting. And it makes it so much easier and really kind of mirrors the way you’re thinking with the way performance is, is able to be displayed and makes reporting so much easier and so much time being saved. I think that’s what probably a lot of us who are hands on the keyboard are really doing is reporting out to your stakeholders, reporting out to your boss, reporting out to your client, whoever it is. A lot of what we do is, you know, the storytelling of reporting and performance. And so this makes it a lot easier to do at a lot quicker of a pace.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of your favorite, maybe more under the radar metrics? You know, we’re talking about reporting, we’re talking about analytics and things. I mean, you know, everybody I’m sure looks at ACoS, you know, most people nowadays look at TACoS, which is the name of this show. But what are some other things that, that you, that’s important to you? Like what would you say is the next thing that people need to be looking at? You know your CVR or your ROI, your RoAS? Like what’s your star metrics?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think, you know, return is what most people use when they’re looking at performance, and that’s obviously important. You know, you need the kind of the one-to-one efficiency of what that ad spend is generating for you. But I also enjoy looking at new to brand percentage and subscribe and save. Those kind of are the two opposite ends of, you know, the, the full funnel, you know, where you’re kind of living in the middle, when you’re focused entirely on return, you’re look living in like the, just what is the revenue that’s being generated? You’re not looking at the long-term impact of how many new customers am I bringing into my brand or my store? And how many of those are becoming loyal customers through subscribe and save. So when you start looking kind of beyond the RoAS and you start looking at different sections of the funnel, that’s where you’re looking at more of a long term kind of growth plan versus very short term, which is where you can kind of get kind of pigeonholed into when you’re looking just at return.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now speaking of RoAS one of the first questions here, it’s from Jack and Jack says, let me see if I can get it up here. How do you, or not RoAS new to brand how do you get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns? Is that available? I know it wasn’t like, you know, a couple years ago, but wasn’t that something that was recently released?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so you can get new to brand data through for sponsored brand just through the native console, but through AMC, Amazon Marketing Cloud, you actually get significant, you know, much more data. That’s really what Amazon Marketing Cloud is, but it also allows you to get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns along with all of your DSP metrics as well. So AMC is a very flashy, exciting topic. There’s a lot to do with AMC, but it does kind of fill in the gaps for some of the, the data that’s maybe missing. So that’s a huge kind of piece that we’ve been rolling out at Pacvue in general but also with a lot of our clients in the last, so it’s a year or so. It’s a pretty big huge topic and a lot of people are kind of overwhelmed because it is so much data and it’s hard to figure out where to even start. But you can kind of start by filling in some of the gaps that you have and, you know, just the native Amazon console.

Bradley Sutton:

And what do you do with this information regardless of how you’re getting it, you’re getting in Pacvue, somebody’s getting it you know, themselves, there’s something else. Now I know what my new to brand data is. What constitutes good numbers, what constitutes bad and, and what’s, what’s your action plan once you get that number?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so new to brand is gonna vary category to category. If you’re looking at toothpaste that’s different than if you’re looking at TVs. You know, you’re not gonna be buying a TV every year or maybe you are. But you know, those metrics are really gonna differ by your category. So looking at some category standards is important. You know, we release our CPC report I don’t think we include new brand in that percentage, but talking with you know, your Amazon rep and getting some of that data through context that you have is important to kind of set, like, what is the benchmark for me? Because 10% for one brand is gonna be horrible for another and wonderful for a different brand. So once you kinda have a benchmark of where you’re starting and where you’re trying to get to, that’s really when you can start taking action.

Jocelyn:

And a lot of that action is gonna be around targeting and shifting spend. So, you know, if someone’s already searching for your brand name, they’re probably not gonna be a new customer. They’re already aware of who you are. So maybe shifting some of that spend out of brand defense and going into more general category terms where people are searching for, I don’t know, natural toothpaste versus, you know, the brand name itself. So that’s when you start shifting where you’re investing in order to impact certain metrics. So, you know, the reverse is true for subscribe and save. If they’re already brand aware and they haven’t purchased, you know, in the last 90 days, you can spend some additional budget on retargeting, for example, to try and generate more loyal customers. So once you kind of have your objective of what am I trying to achieve in the next quarter, for example, and what are my benchmarks and what are my goals for that, you can then start taking action and start shifting spend of in what direction is gonna start influencing those metrics. So those are really kind of the actions you start taking once you start looking at this broader data.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So talking about, you know, PPC from a branded side, you know, your branded keywords and, and things like that, do you always keep those or do you suggest to keep those segregated like, hey, if any branded, you know, keywords or search terms come out, let me, let me keep those in its own campaigns, or do you keep them co-mingled with, with your regular random search terms?

Jocelyn:

No, I, we definitely always pull those out because you wanna know how much you’re spending on those, and you wanna know how much people are searching for those, you know, if that’s going to increase over time, you wanna be able to see that. And you’re gonna have a lot more control over how you’re defending your brand. You know, it’s kind of up to you of how much you want to spend on protecting your own brand name. It’s, if it’s very competitive and people are, you know, targeting your brand name, you need to be there to defend it. And if not, you can shift budget out of that, but you have a lot more control over how and where you’re spending when you have things separated out. So we typically have things break broken out by branded, you know, general non-brand category terms, adjacent, maybe, you know, similar products, things like that. And then competitor, if you are going after competitors that’s the best way to kind of structure your campaigns. So you have, again, much more control and you’re very intentional in, in how you’re spending your budget.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a Facebook user here that says, Hey, I noticed a weird situation. I got impressions, zero clicks, but a sale. So like, is that is that a data error from, from Amazon, if, you know, is it, is there a such thing as getting zero clicks, but actually getting a, a attributed sale?

Jocelyn:

It would be something from the past. So, you know, if you are advertising June 1st through the 20th, and then you pause for the 21st through the 30th, for example, you may get some sales attributed after, you know, after the time that you pause where you may have zero spend and you know, zero clicks that day. But because they clicked on the ad, you know, four days ago, the sale may be attributed then. So it’s probably an attribution thing less, you know, they’re not converting on an impression that sale would not be attributed to that impression. But it’s possible that it was attributed at a later date. So if you run outta budget, you know, with five days left in the month, you’re probably still gonna be seeing some sales trickle in because of the attribution window. So I would say that’s probably what the situation is.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I’ve got opinions on this next question, but you know, maybe we, we’ll, we’ll talk to you too, because it was actually interesting says, what is the best way to use PPC to improve organic rank? I was at the billion dollar seller summit in Puerto Rico last week, and there was a, a customer of PAC views there. Matt Altman, he runs a, an agency I forgot what the name of the agency was, but he, he was extolling the virtues of Pacvue, talking about how it’s really cool how they, you, you can kind of set rules based on your organic rank. Now, you know, now that you know, the last couple of years things like search, find, buy and two-step URLs are, are not you know strategies that we’re allowed to use anymore. Pretty much, you know, PPC is is one of the only, you know, on Amazon waste to improve your organic rank. So how, so how are you for your clients utilizing PPC in order in order to try and increase your organic position?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean that’s kind of the beauty of Amazon is that you do have the ability to influence a flywheel through advertising. Obviously things like promos and inventory and retail readiness obviously play a factor in as well, but PPC is the, the factor that really have the most control over. So when we’re looking at improving organic rank, it’s important to look at why are we trying to improve organic rank? Is it a new product? Are we trying to be more competitive or are we trying to go after higher volume et cetera, things like that. But if we are purely looking at, I want to rank higher on natural toothpaste, for example, we’ll, we’ll run with the toothpaste example. It’s gonna be very intentionally spending. Again, that’s kind of what my whole job comes down to. But in like understanding how much you’re spending and what it’s gonna cost to, you know, compete on that.

Jocelyn:

But if you want, if you’re in the natural toothpaste space, you need to be competing on those terms. You know you know, Toms of Maine, 12 pack natural toothpaste, blah, blah, blah, blah, is only gonna get you so far. That’s not really gonna improve your rank. You’re probably already solid there, but if you’re looking to improve your overall rank for a product, you need to be going after the keywords that are gonna keyword lead to that improvement. So it’s very much about understanding where you need to be spending and what terms you need to be spending and what’s actually gonna lead toward you know, improvement and rank. I think that’s the, the first step and then it’s going and executing on that. So PPC is really the, the tool that you can use to influence specific pieces of search term and, and customer behavior and whatnot. So that’s really how you start going after improving your organic rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, we got another anonymous question here. It says the question says, I’m trying to get targeting top of search, I put the maximum Amazon suggested bid as well as a hundred percent on top of search, but still we are getting clicks on product pages. What should I do?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so the bid adjustment is just gonna be adjusting for that target. You can do negative targeting. So you could do like negative a hundred percent on product pages, for example. It’s not like it adds up to a hundred. You could have a hundred, you know, 60% on top of search, it’s gonna increase that top of search bid 60%. Then you could also have, you know, 60% on product pages and it’s gonna increase the bid for product pages 60%. So it’s not totalling up to 100. So if you absolutely wanna cut off product pages, you can decrease, you can have negative bid adjustments, but just because top of search is at a hundred doesn’t mean it’s gonna completely eliminate product pages.

Bradley Sutton:

Wells has a question here. He says, Hey, we missed the honeymoon period. Our product doesn’t rank, so barely no sales. We’ve got a lot of competitors, so what do you advise us to do? We started PPC campaigns two years ago before learning Atomic or anything about ppc. So Osama’s got this mature product, I believe he actually sells in Amazon, Europe somewhere. If he’s who I think he is here. And, and obviously honeymoon period is, you know, this is a mature product, is two years old he’s not getting sales cuz he’s not organically ranking like, you know, I’m assuming he’s got some, you know, some reviews. So would you just suggest like trying to just go hot and heavy on some long tail keywords and, and build up some of those core keywords? Or should, you know, should he go extreme and maybe start over, you know, again, if he doesn’t have too many reviews or what would you say in a situation like this?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so there’s a couple approaches you can take. I think the long tail keyword is a good way to look at it. You know, if you’re spending money on again, natural toothpaste that’s gonna be probably a waste of money to be honest with you. It’s gonna be so expensive for you to even try and compete in that, that it’s gonna be a waste of dollars. So starting to look at what are some of the longer tail keywords that I can win, you know, if it’s, you know, the most br you know, specific keyword ever, but if it applies to your product, going after that and starting to just chip away at some of that organic rank is gonna be a good way to start. And then, you know, if you have a similar product within your brand or you have competitors, you can start targeting their product detail pages.

Jocelyn:

So if someone’s not specifically searching for you, but they see you on you know, another product detail page, that’s a good way to kind of start again, chipping your way in and kind of moving from the outside in to the, the kind of larger volume because again, it’s gonna be a waste of money if you’re trying to go after those high volumes and you don’t have the foundation of strong rank. So starting to chip away I think is the best method and mantra of having it, and this goes to new products as well of if you’re starting from zero, it’s gonna take some time. So long tail and product detail pages is what I would recommend.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean along the same lines as his question but you know, if he is who I think it is, like I said, he sells in Amazon Europe. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve never sold an Amazon Europe. I’ve only I only sell in Amazon, you know, North America. I’m sure you manage across multiple, you know, marketplaces. Does your strategy differ like say Amazon, Germany, Amazon France compared to Amazon USA or pretty much you are using the same, the same principles and the same strategies?

Jocelyn:

I would say as far as like foundation, like campaign structure and segmentation, it’s gonna be the same, but it’s gonna be different. Like there’s nuances obviously in how people search in different regions and whatnot. So the targeting’s probably gonna be a little different as far as, you know, what keywords customers are using when they’re searching for your product. You know, some words in, you know, America that are English are different than, you know, the UK for example. So it’s I think more targeting, but the core foundations of how do I set up a good account, how do I set up a good campaign structure? Those are gonna be the same, those are gonna transfer over well. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Rolando says, how do you use day partying as part of overall campaign spending? You know, I think, you know, Pacvue has had this for probably over a year now. You know, we’ve had it in Adtomic, I’ve dabbled a little bit we call it Schedules in Adtomic. I’m curious, you have way more experience than me on on day parting, so, so how are you utilizing this?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of way to utilize it from a day-to-day perspective. You absolutely should be using it. Pacvue released maybe a few months ago, maybe six months ago, a feature where you can do day parting based on specific metrics. So you’re maybe for conversion focused campaigns, you are basing your day parting automation on conversion rate, or you’re doing it based on impressions or cpc. So you can choose what metric you wanna even base your day parting schedule on. But it is really crucial, you know, every product, you know, some products are the general, you know, eight to eight but some, you know, have early morning shopping hours, evening hours, things like that. So it is good to be using that no matter who you are. Because it does save a lot of money where there’s no reason to be spending at, you know, 3:00 AM for example.

Jocelyn:

Or it may be a really competitive time at 2:00 PM in the afternoon. Being able to make adjustments like that is gonna save time for, you know, preventing you from doing it manually, but it’s also gonna save money pretty significantly. And then day parting, as far as like special events, you know, we can set up schedules for Cyber five where we’re going aggressive, you know, the 6:00 PM after Thanksgiving to midnight or whatever. You know, and you can do that around Prime day that’s coming up, you know, next month. So there’s a lot of ways you can do it from an always on perspective, but then also scheduling around how do you wanna spend during tent poll events. So we definitely have that laid out for clients around Prime Day. Like I said, cyber five, any of the peak periods, it’s really gonna save you a lot of time and money to outline that. So I always recommend a day party schedule.

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s a scenario, I’m sure you’ve run into, so, so somebody the PPC sales ha have increased, you know, which is not you know, could be good, could be could, could be bad, obviously bad if, if it’s not profitable, but regardless of what’s going on, the PPC sales have increased, but organic sales are staying the same. So, so the, the PPC piece of the pie as far as sales go has increased organic is still the same. What other methods would you be using to, to help increase organic sales? This person asked?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of things that lead to PPC sales increasing is, you know, you could have been much more efficient in how you were spending or you could be increasing your budget. You know, there’s a lot of factors that lead to increased PPC sales, but there’s not always a one-to-one of, I increase my ad sales 10% this month and my organic sales also increased 10%. And sometimes it’s, you know, a kind of trailing you know, this line goes up and this line goes up, you know, two months later, for example. So I think, again, going back towards what terms are gonna be actually leading to an increase in organic sales you know, that increase in ad sales was coming from just branded terms. You know, those may have been people that would’ve already shopped and already converted if it was an organic placement as well. So understanding what is gonna lead towards incremental growth versus existing sales is something I would take a look at. So you’re not just kind of eating away at sales, that would’ve already happened if you didn’t have an ad showing up for them. Sometimes it’s a matter of where you’re spending and where those sales are even coming from versus would they have already occurred organically.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I’m actually gonna send a, I see Rolando has another message. Rolando, I’m actually gonna send you a link. Maybe you can just hop on, hop on our our broadcast here and ask a question like, well, what about speaking of off Amazon, you know, Walmart is probably the, the second most, you know, known, you know, place to advertise and sell for as far as online marketplaces. How your PPC strategy lately for Walmart? I, it seems like in the last six months or so, they’ve really you know, really come a long ways. They’re still far away from the, the capabilities of Amazon on the advertising side, but, but you couldn’t even have what is it called, like second price auctions or what you know, like, like just, you know, a few months ago. So what are some big ways that your strategy differs? As far as Walmart advertising compared to Amazon advertising?

Jocelyn:

Yeah. So for those who don’t know, Walmart switched to a second price auction Q2 last year. So this is, we’re coming up, we’re lapping it essentially for the first year. And then they also changed the relevancy model. So that was kind of the big kind of hindrance of Walmart was, it was just not that advanced. And so it was very inefficient to advertise on Walmart. You know, first movers that got in early, I think did well, but overall it was more of an uphill battle than certainly Amazon. Obviously Amazon had quite a few years headstart, but with those changes, so many of our clients saw drastic improvements in Walmart. You know, we’re talking about triple digit growth basically because your money that you were spending was so much more effective once they made those changes. So a lot of it is kind of related to campaign structure as far as, you know, the product variations are a little bit different than Amazon.

Jocelyn:

So understanding how to segment your campaigns based on products and, and variations and whatnot, which they have now since recently allowed you to advertise much of the, the variations and really the different products themselves. So the campaign structure was very different based on the amount of products that you can even advertise and how you could advertise it, but it’s get definitely gotten a lot closer to what Amazon is as far as like a, an algorithm model and an auction model. They are rolling out some onsite display towards a kind of larger segment. You know, it’s been in beta for a while, but it’s becoming much more accessible. So I would say it was very sponsored product focused, but display is definitely becoming a bigger piece of Walmart now. So they’re doing, I think everything they can to catch up, I would say.

Jocelyn:

And then sponsor brand video, which obviously Amazon has had for quite a while. Walmart has rolled that out since as well. So there’s a lot more ad types now, but it was very much restrictive based on product and sponsor product was really the only ad type. So I would say our campaign structure has expanded much more in Walmart in the recent months based on what Walmart is making available. So that’s, I think, the biggest difference in the last three to six months is really accessibility to additional ad types and more ways of advertising your products than before.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. All right. Let’s go ahead and bring our first live guest on here. Let’s bring Rolando to the stage. Rolando, how’s it going, man?

Rolando:

Hello my friend. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. Thanks. Thank you. You, this is a historic moment, first ever outside guest live on tacos Tuesday, so here we go.

Rolando:

Where’s my food man? Where’s my tacos

Bradley Sutton:

It’s right here. I got some right here for you. I got some right here. On my shirt there’s the tacos, but before you forget your question, what was your question?

Rolando:

In looking at PPC spend, obviously Bradley was talking about how PPC spend is going up, right? It’s unavoidable, but we can look at where we can get better value. So if we’re spending a dollar a click to convert on a, like you’re talking about natural toothpaste, could we find a cheaper way to do it, whether it’s externally, like on Google ads, or maybe that term is 50 cents per click and shooting that over to the listing or somewhere else within the Amazon ecosystem that brings more value or essentially like a retail arbitrage on keywords. That’s what I’m trying to say. How do you approach that when you’re looking at spend as it just keeps ballooning every year Yeah. On Amazon?

Jocelyn:

Yeah. You know, obviously outside Amazon signals influence you know, Amazon performance as well. So that’s always an example and that’s always an option. I would say looking at ad types because we have some clients where sponsored brand is so much more efficient than sponsored products. Maybe sponsored products is very, you know, in the highly competitive space and it’s cheaper to win, you know, a video placement than it is to win the top sponsored product placement. So kind of understanding where you’re spending as far as like an ad type, because natural toothpaste for sponsored product may be different for than sponsored brand video, for example. And thinking about, you know, sponsored brand as a whole, there’s a lot more options of, you know, outside just the product collection, you know, there’s the brand store. So how can you get people from the brand store into your product detail pages because people that shop on the brand store typically have higher order values, for example. So looking at where you’re spending, not just from a holistic bucket of money perspective, but from a an ad type perspective we have a lot of clients actually with dsp. It’s pretty effective and it’s actually more efficient than sponsored products based on, you know, interesting more refine targeting and an audience understanding.

Rolando:

I just heard that the business side on Amazon is getting ready to open up targeting on the sponsored display. Have you heard about that?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so there’s a lot around business owners that you can target and there’s, you know, Amazon business lookalike and whatnot. So there is so much more, I think, refinement in who you’re actually targeting. You know, if you’re searching national toothpaste as, you know, a father of five, for example, versus me, a single woman in Denver, you know, those are very different audiences and maybe we have different conversions, for example. So I think that the real value of DSP is the audience understanding and kind of refinement. That’s the huge, huge piece of DSP. And when you’re looking at brands that have a very clear vision of who they think their customer is, it’s a better way to kind of approach that versus sponsored products, for example.

Rolando:

Can I ask you one more question while I have you here and Bradley? Yep. The B2B side and, you know, there are a lot of consumer brands on the, on the Amazon platform, but as you know, the B2B side on Amazon itself is, is growing every year. They’re making concerted effort with dedicated reps. They’re going after large enterprise accounts, government accounts. What’s the feedback that you’re hearing from your customers that have a contingent of B2B customers buying from them on Amazon?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, we actually have a few customers our clients that are thinking of like, how do we expand in to B2 B? I think they’ve met it pretty closed off, and I think they are making an effort to open up more in the kind of the coming year, because it’s only, I think about 10% of total Amazon revenue, if I remember that stat recently that we kind of heard from an Amazon contact. So they are, there are a lot of customer or clients who have thought about B2B and they haven’t really had the ability to go after it in the past and are now taking a look again of like, okay, Amazon’s kind of opening up some targeting and some placements and whatnot. How do we approach this? And it is very different I would say of what products you’re even including as far as, you know, you’re talking about pallets of batteries versus, you know, a 24 pack, for example.

Jocelyn:

Indeed. So so a lot of clients that are kind of have a presence but haven’t specifically gone after B2B are reevaluating it, certainly. And I think the B2B team at Amazon is reevaluating how do they kind of grow this side of the business? So I think there’s a lot more taring that’s available now, and I think it’s kind of like a mutual reconsideration that everyone’s doing right now of how do we make this work and how do we grow this side of the business. Again, it’s only 10%, so it’s not gonna be a huge kind of factor for a lot of clients. But if you were in kind of more the

Rolando:

Industrial industrial, yeah, we’re not office products. I would say we’re way over overindexed on, on for the percentage. You said we’re way above way, way north of that and the office space. So we’re seeing more of our sales come from B2B than that 10% mark. So it’s there. And then, and I, and I would imagine it’s only gonna get bigger as the overall pie start getting bigger at Amazon.

Jocelyn:

I would agree. Yeah. Awesome

Rolando:

Thank you for bringing me on, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

He’s actually been on our Serious Sellers Podcast en Espanol before good episode there. So I gotta bring him on the English one. Now. My last question is, is, is, you know, speaking of what, what this person was saying about smaller accounts, you know, Pacvue is not for smaller brands, but I’m gonna ask you what, you know, how can people find more you know, reach out to Pacvue for, for more information or reach out to you? But before I do that, who are the people who should be, you know, reaching out? Like if I’m doing only like about $600,000 a year on Amazon and don’t have much PPC spend like, like I’m doing right now, may, maybe I’m not the right fit for Pacvue, but, but who would get the most benefit out of contacting you and, and maybe seeing if you, you guys can help them.

Jocelyn:

Yeah I mean, I think that Pacvue is, it is more designed for bigger clients that are gonna, you know, benefit from the tool. But I would say there’s a lot of different ways to work with Pacvue. You know, the clients that I manage are, you know, the big boys in the space, and those are you know, require a lot of additional support. But we have, you know, kind of consulting abilities and we have, you know, people that just use our platform just purely for the technology. And the, the benefit that you’re getting is really the efficiency in operations and the time saved and the ability to kind of step beyond like the day-to-day bid management and be able to focus more on strategic initiatives, for example. That’s really kind of what, and that’s what Helium 10 does as well.

Jocelyn:

You know, like any of our, you know, suite of tools is really helping you be more efficient at what you do day to day so that you can think, you know, bigger picture and look at more, you know, higher level operational initiatives versus, you know, changing a bid from 45 cents to 50, you know, for 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM for example. You know, like that is really the benefit. So I would say there’s not a ton of, you know, minimum spend. You know, there’s a lot of ways that we can work with clients who just want help saving time. So I would say don’t limit yourself, but pfu definitely is, to your point, more for somewhat larger sellers. But there is not, you know, a specific dollar amount that I would say you have to be spending in order to benefit from.

Bradley Sutton:

And then if somebody, you know, did think that they might qualify and how can they reach out to you guys?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean there’s sales@pacvue.com would be a good place to start shooting us an email. And, you know, you’ll filter through a lot of, you know, the people that I’m not on the sales side, so probably wouldn’t end up talking to me, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or whatnot. And we can get you guys connected to the right place. But pacvue.com is a great resource for understanding what our tool can actually do for you and start getting you into the funnel of some emails and, and some contacts with people who are more on the sales side than I am. But pacvue.com is really where you’re gonna see a lot of what we can do and, and what we can do to help you. So I would say our LinkedIn and our website are basic.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jocelyn, thank you so much for coming on today. It was nice to have your expertise on here. And look for, it’s gonna be exciting to be seeing what copilot at Pacvue is gonna be doing for sellers moving forward. And would love to reach out to you maybe next year to come back on the show and, and help sellers like you just did right now.

Jocelyn:

Awesome. Thanks for having me today.

#467 - Amazon Pre Launch Episode: The Bali Blast - Part 2

Welcome back for part 2 of this 2-part strategy series with Bradley! In this episode, we dive into a range of strategies and tips to supercharge Amazon brand pre-launch activities. We kick off with a quick recap of Part 1 before getting into advanced topics like reverse engineering your competitors’ PPC strategies, expanding your keyword search, and uncovering long-tail keywords. We also explore tactics for identifying products frequently purchased alongside yours and share a seller’s success story after using the Maldives Honeymoon Method. Additionally, we discuss leveraging search query performance, optimizing listings using the Amazon algorithm, and understanding indexing versus ranking. Tune in for valuable insights on all the steps you need to do before launching your brand on Amazon.

In episode 467 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 02:18 – Make Sure You’ve Heard Part 1 Already
• 02:45 – Reverse Engineering Your PPC Strategy From The Competitors
• 05:05 – How Widen Out Your Search For More Keywords
• 06:19 – Get Long Tail Keywords Of Top 10 Phrase Roots
• 09:20 – Which Products Are Frequently Bough Together With Your Product
• 10:32 – How The Maldives Honeymoon Method Helped This Seller
• 13:07 – Bonus Hack: Using Search Query Performance With No Product Yet
• 14:48 – 10 Relevant Spanish Keywords? Check The Translation
• 17:56 – How To Use Frankenstein For This Strategy
• 18:57 – How Does The Amazon Algorithm Work For Listing Optimization
• 19:21 – Subject Matter Is No Longer Existing In Front Or Back Ends
• 19:51 – Amazon Indexing Versus Ranking
• 22:05 – Using Your “Keyword Bank” Inside Listing Builder
• 22:32 – Use Chat GPT To Build Your Lising Inside Helium 10’s Listing Builder
• 23:37 – Try To Nest Your Keywords Together
• 24:20 – Important Things To Note When Making Your Listings
• 25:24 – Don’t Use A+ Content To Index For Keywords
• 25:39 – More On The Difference Of Indexing And Ranking
• 27:17 – Check Indexing For Main And Secondary Keywords
• 29:32 – Add Top 10-30 Keywords Inside Keyword Tracker And Turn On Boost
• 30:11 – Setup Helium 10’s Market Tracker Tool
• 31:38 – Make Sure To Activate The SKU In Inventory Management
• 32:53 – Activate Your Helium 10 Alerts
• 33:27 – Use Follow Up For Automatic Request A Review
• 34:50 – More Bonus Tips: Strikethrough Pricing
• 36:11 – That’s It For The Bali Blast Pre Launch Strategies
• 37:06 – Stay Tuned For SSP Episode 500!

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today is part two of my two-part episode where I’m talking all about my pre-launch strategies for Amazon. You don’t want to miss today’s strategies because it’s gonna get you on the right track for the Maldives Honeymoon Launch method. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result, have the actual search keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool X-ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’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. And I am still here in Bali. I just finished my last dinner with the team.

Bradley Sutton:

They gave me this like parting gift, vegemite. I’m not even sure how to pronounce this hat I’m wearing here. So again, thanks to Regina and Chris for organizing this event. It was awesome and now as for my last night. I got my flight in a couple of hours here. I wanted to record part two of my Bali Blast method, which is my pre-launch method. Again, you guys call it whatever you want. This is just me being silly with, you know, making up names for strategies and things. But if you miss the last episode, part one, make sure to go back and watch that episode. Otherwise, you know, a lot of this is not gonna make sense. But basically what this two-part episode series is, is like, hey, I’m like, Hey, you wanna get that Maldives honeymoon when you launch your product.

Bradley Sutton:

We know about the steps that’s taken there. What about before? You know, what comes before the wedding? Well, bachelor’s party or bachelorette party, and where’s a cool place to go for that Bali, which is just happens to be where I am. So I was like, let me call this the Bali Blast method just to make it trending in my own mind at least. So anyways, the last episode, we went through 16 different steps on, you know, everything from keyword research to a little bit of listing optimization. And we’re gonna do a little bit more keyword research today and also some more listing optimization. And we’re gonna bring you right up until almost getting your, your PPC campaigns ready. And I’ll give you guys some bonus, bonus strategies as well. All right, let’s go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

The first step of today is actually step number 17 in this whole strategy, and that’s reverse engineering your PPC strategy from the competitors. All right? So basically what I want to do is put my competitor’s ASINs into Cerebro, just like I was doing, you know, to get the initial keywords, but this time I’m looking at sponsored rank average. So if I put a whole bunch of competitors into Cerebro, I’m gonna put a sponsored rank average from about one to 30 and maybe I wanna put in a minimum search volume. It’s not necessary, but I am then going to look at how many competitors are advertising for the keyword, like a high number of competitors and what their sponsored rank average is, which means if I were to take their position of where they showed up in search results, approximately what position would it be?

Bradley Sutton:

Like, for example, if they were ranking, you know, one four and eight, well, the sponsored rank average would be four, right? And the reason I’m looking at this number is because these will be some, some keywords that potentially, you know, are good or that at least the competitors have decided that they’re gonna pay more money. You know, you don’t get on the top of the page of sponsored results if you don’t have a, a pretty high bid and you don’t bid high unless you have some, you know, facts and figures that back up that that bid. All right? So it’s kind of, again, a way of reverse engineering what your competitor has had to learn through trial and error. And so this is gonna get you some more keywords that you definitely want to get indexed for.

Bradley Sutton:

Another step is, again, if you don’t have Helium 10, another way you can do some preliminary keyword research and get some more keywords is look at the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. Alright? Product Opportunity Explorer. Even if you don’t have brand register, you have access to that. It’s in your seller central dashboard. You enter in a, your competitor’s products and then find the niches that that product appears in. And these are niches of keywords, right? So for example, one of the coffin products, they are in the Halloween decorations niche. And then if you were to click in there, you are gonna see, you know, anywhere from 10 to 30 keywords that make up part of that niche. That’s another way to get some relevant keywords, I think not a lot of people are using. Even if you have Helium 10, it’s kind of like a cool way to get some more keywords for your listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Next is still in Cerebro. All right? I’m still in Cerebro and I still am looking at the same 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever competitor ASINs. Remember that first step, which I went over in the Wednesday or the last episode, this part one of this was clicking the top keywords and the opportunity keywords. And then just now I talked about looking at the sponsored rank average. Well, in this situation, under the same exact search. I’m going to start widening out my search. Remember, I wanna start finding keywords where I wanna get indexed for it, but I don’t necessarily need to be the number one, you know, click item. I don’t need it in phrase, form my listing. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have minimum search volume, maybe 200 or 300 or 400. I’m gonna put advanced rank filter number one, minimum one, okay, minimum one.

Bradley Sutton:

And then advanced rank filter two, which means where the range, I’m looking for 1 to 100. So basically it’s like, Hey, show me keywords where any of these products that I put as my competitors, at least one of them, at least one, is ranked in the first two pages. All right? So this is, you know, gets me a good list of keywords that I might want to be indexed four cuz they could potentially get me sales in the future. Alright, next keyword research step to get ready in this Blas method is number 21, get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. Alright? Get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. What in the heck does that mean? You know, when, when you’re looking at your, your top keywords, I already finished up until when I’m on step 21, I’m already finished with my steps that get me my keyword phrases.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I look at my keyword phrases, I might put them into a Magnet first. And let me just show you, what I can do is I can take those keywords and either stick it in magnet or just look at the keywords and see are there certain root words that are appearing? You know, Magnet will tell me if there’s keywords individual keywords that are appearing most often. It’s the ones that are most frequently there. Like for example, if I have a bunch of keywords like coffin letter board, coffin letter board, decor coffin letter, this coffin letter that, well, coffin letter and coffin for that sense are root words or phrase or mini phrases that are appearing in a lot of the keywords that I targeted as my main phrase. I know this sounds like kind of crazy, especially if you’re brand new.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me try and break that down one more time. Make sure you understand it’s really important, guys. All right, so if I have a list of 20 to 30 main keywords, I want to find the top keywords that are most commonly occurring. Because those 30 phrases, isn’t it completely 30 phrases that are completely unique keywords, right? Coffin, for example, if I’m doing coffin shelf coffin’s probably gonna be in half those keywords, right? So I wanna find those keywords, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into magnet and I’m gonna put that root, all right? So for example, coffin letter, I’m gonna put that root word here and I dunno, 3000 keywords might show up, but this time I’m going to use the filter in magnet that is entitled Smart complete. All right?

Bradley Sutton:

Because that’s gonna show me long tail versions and different versions like plural form or singular form of that root phrase, coffin letter. So for example, in this case, six different keywords come up, longer tail keywords. And then again, these are ones I’m gonna put into my secondary keyword list because these are ones I want to get indexed for. You know, maybe nobody’s getting sales for it right now, that’s why it didn’t come up in Cerebro, but it could be potentially, you could be the first one to, to rank for it all, right? Because if it’s a longer tailed version of a keyword that you’re relevant for, there’s a chance that it could be relevant to your product. So make sure to check those keywords as well. Next step right here is step number 22. Now, this is something that we went over in step three.

Bradley Sutton:

In step three in the last episode, I showed you guys about how to use Black Box Product Targeting in order to find frequently bought together products, all right? And that could be potentially be used for bundling or maybe to add something to give a good chance to get a good review. But in this sense, use that same function, all right? To see which products were, you know, really frequently bought together a lot with your product. All right? And now what you’re gonna do is some of those products, like maybe there’s five, hopefully there’s, you know, not too many, maybe there’s five or six. Pick a few of those really good selling ones that you think are more on the relevant side. And now what you’re gonna do, instead of trying to, you know, think of bundling options, this is gathering kind of loosely relevant keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So for example, in this coffin letter board, frequently bought together search, there were like stickers that showed up and there were these you know, actual letters that showed up and there’s probably coffin shelves that showed up, et cetera. Now, none of these are like substitutes for a coffin letter board, right? It’s not like, oh, I’m gonna buy, it’s not like it’s not like the same product, right? So the keywords that are driving sales to these products, like let’s say it’s a coffin letter board, and the product that’s bought with it is a skull candle holder. You know, the keywords are most likely completely different. But here’s the thing, you are gonna wanna for the mo again, we’re, we’re trying to look ahead to the Maldives honeymoon method, the launch method, which, you know, if you’re, that’s the first time you’re hearing this.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve talked about that in like at least 10 episodes here. Oh, by the way, I just talked to, you know I told you guys, I’m here in Bali organized by Chris Thomas. Chris Thomas is one of the leaders here in the Amazon collective and Amazon collected mastermind, and he’s also a coach, and he was on this podcast before, he was telling me in the car today that he helped somebody with this Maldives method, the Maldives honeymoon method, and was able to net something crazy, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, like within a one month timeframe, all unfulfilled by merchant products, but they used the Maldives honeymoon method, and he was like thanking me, thanking me for that. I was like, oh, that’s why I do this kind of thing. It’s so great to actually hear people using this methods again.

Bradley Sutton:

So, so what we’re talking about today, Bali Blast method, it’s trying to get us ready for that Maldives honeymoon. Anyways, I digress. We’re talking about frequently bought together products and then finding the top keywords for those products and then putting it in your listing. So when I say top keywords, if my product is a coffin letter board, let’s say one of the frequently bought together might be a coffin shelf, or no, what did I say? A gothic skull candle holder, right? I’m going to look using these same techniques we’ve been talking about or using brand analytics, whatever the case may be, I wanna find the top three to five keywords that are driving sales for that gothic skull candle holder. I can find that in brand analytics. I can run cerebra on it. And when I find the top keywords that are driving sales there, you know, by looking at what’s high search volume where they’re ranked at the top of the page, I’m gonna put those into my listing somehow.

Bradley Sutton:

And the reason why is I want to loosely relate my products to these other products that have a history of being bought together with my competitor’s products. Does that make sense? I’m not trying to steal the sales of a gothic candle holder. No. What I’m trying to do is set up my listing so that from day one, once I start doing ppc, maybe I’m going to product target these frequently bought together products. It could be that Amazon from day one might not give me any impressions if I’m trying to target the gothic skull candle holder, because Amazon might be like, wait, this product seems to be a coffin shelf. Like what would that have to do with this? Right? But then what I want the Amazon algorithm to do is be able to see like, wait a minute, this, this product has a lot of similar or some similar keywords with this product.

Bradley Sutton:

You know what? It’s very relevant to this product. We’re gonna start showing them this from day one that was actually, you know, a method we talked about too in, in Project X. All right, so Project X, you know, we talked about, you know doing some product product targeting as well. Alright, the next step here, that was step number 22. This is actually just a bonus step, but search query performance is something that was released, you know, a few months ago and, you know, people have like raved about it. Well, you can only do search query performance if you have an existing product and the existing brand, alright? So if you are doing, if you’re launching a new product that you’ve never had data before, you, you technically don’t have any access to search career performance data. Now, why would you even want search query performance data?

Bradley Sutton:

There’s some people I don’t look at it too much in this regard, but I know there’s some sellers who like to use it in order to get some more insights into like what kind of add to cart ratio certain keywords have, what kind of impression share you know, different products have, they wanna go deeper into the click share reports. So I, I did an experiment like a couple of months ago where I actually was going to you know, launch some socks on this, on the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Seller Central account, and obviously I’ve never sold socks on the Manny’s Mysterious Project X account. All right? So what I did was I created a dummy listing, maybe made a couple FBM inventory, and I s I I made the listing active, sent some PPC, and then what happened after a couple of weeks, I had a whole bunch more data that I could look at in Search Query Performance.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are launching something brand new that you have no search query performance history on, that’s kind of like a way around it now you’re gonna have to burn a UPC code and actually make a real listing and, and just put a really high price to, to make sure that nobody buys it. All right, the next step we’re gonna talk about, this is important. Step number 23 is if you have more than 10 relevant Spanish keywords, check the translation. All right? So if you are doing product or keyword research in Cerebro maggot in those, those earlier steps that we talked about, you know, I, I forgot what the steps were, like steps 10 through 17 or whatever, it’s very likely, if not guaranteed, that some of those keywords that you found, if you’re doing this in the American marketplace, you found some Spanish keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, here’s the thing. If you only found like two or three relevant Spanish keywords that you want to be indexed for, just go ahead and throw those in like the backend search terms. All right? But here, here’s what happens. What if you get like 12 or 15 Spanish keyword phrases? Well, you know, you don’t really have room in your backend search terms to put in 15 phrases of Spanish keywords. No, you’ve only got like, you know, 250 characters. So what you can do is go to the listing, go, go, go to your listing once you make it, all right? Once you make your listing and this is kind of like in the future, but again, right before you launch your product, and then go to the flag at the very top of the Amazon page. Now I’m talking about this in the context of USA and Spanish, but, but this could be Amazon, Germany, and we could be talking about English keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

You find it could be Amazon, France, and you found Italian keywords, right? This is the same principle, but anyways, on the USA side, change your listing to Spanish. And then what I would do is I would click on the import listing to scribbles, which is listing Optimizer, like, right, it’s, it’s right there on the Chrome extension, and it’s going to import the, the front end of your listing into in the Spanish version, you know, since I just changed the version to Spanish, which is what Spanish speaking people do, they change Amazon’s interface into Spanish, and instantly it translates the listing. I’m gonna pull that Spanish translation into scribbles, and then I’m gonna have that list of 10, 15 keyword phrases into scribbles. And remember when you put those phrases in the scribbles, it shows you the full phrases and it breaks it down to the singular keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to check, it’s going to instantly show me where I am where if I have those Spanish keywords in the translation, I didn’t make the translation, Amazon makes a translation, alright? But what happens sometimes is, is even though it translates your whole listing, right, it doesn’t use the exact phrases, you know, the correct phrases that maybe people are searching for. So if you have more than 10 Spanish keywords, this is what you do to go in there and see if there’s keywords that you already, that Amazon is already translating for you. Because if that’s the case, you’re probably optimizing enough, you’re probably relevant and you’re definitely indexed, right? Of course, obviously you can check if you’re indexed or not, but you, you’re probably relevant, right? But if, if those keywords aren’t in phrase form or some keywords are missing altogether, that means you’d probably want to put those individual keywords into the backend of your listing when you are creating it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? Step number 24, that was a little bit out of order right there on 23. We’re, we’re going back to the listing optimization stage right now. Remember I had two buckets of keywords that we’ve been talking about these last two episodes, the main keywords and the supplemental keywords. So now those supplemental keyword phrases, it could have been 200 phrases, it could be 300 phrases, whatever. I know I can’t put all 300 phrases into my listing. So what I do is I put those into Frankenstein and then I click on remove duplicates. And what it does is it extracts all of the unique words that make up those 200 phrases that I want to get indexed for. All right? So this is important to understand that don’t try and put all the phrases into your listing, you know it’s not going to fit.

Bradley Sutton:

So go ahead and put it in Frankenstein and first extract all of those keywords on the individual level. Now, this is something that I’m always asked about, and I’m gonna tell you since I made this slide, it’s actually changed. All right? So how does the Amazon algorithm work for listing optimization? Here is a level of importance, number one for indexing. All right? So if we’re just talking about indexing, which means being searchable on Amazon doesn’t mean ranking indexing how Amazon ties your listing and makes it relevant to a keyword so that you’re in the Amazon index. Number one is special features. We’ll talk about that in a couple of seconds here. Number two is title number three used to be subject matter, but as of about nine days ago, subject matter is no longer existing in Amazon front nor back ends. And actually, you know, I have found that bullet points are actually ranking higher now than generic keywords, which is the for artist, formerly known as backend search terms, so that it goes special features, title, and now bullet points, it’s next, then generic keywords and then description.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s for indexing. I’ve tested this a lot lately. I just tested this like literally last night on a live training I did for Serious Sellers Club members. And definitely bullet points is ranking faster than even generic keywords these days. Now for ranking, ranking is different. Ranking means like what gives rank juice. Like if a keyword is in phrase form in a certain part of the listing, which parts of the listing give the most bang for your buck, right? Number one title. The new number two is going to be bullet points. Number three is going to be generic keywords. Number four description. And the last would be special features. Special features does not help too much when we’re talking about indexing. And just to show you about how amazing special features is here’s somebody in the Helium 10 members Facebook group who, who said, Hey, shout out to Bradley for the tip of putting keywords in special features.

Bradley Sutton:

She writes I had two products with great conversion, great seo, and they would not index on my most relevant high volume keyword For three months. I opened several cases with Seller central, nothing, only after I put it in special features field boom became page one, positional one. So this special features works. I just tested it out literally last night on a live call. And on the live call there was a keyword that I couldn’t rank for, or that I had in the listing emo in the coffin shelf listing, and it wasn’t it wasn’t indexing for it all right? Even though I had it multiple places, put it in special features before that call ended, like 10 minutes later, we were indexed for that keyword emo that Amazon had previously refused to index me for. All right, next step, step number 25 is I have two lists of, of keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Remember, I have those top or main keywords, which are I have in phrase form all or phrases, you know, that should be anywhere from 10 to 30. And then I have a whole bunch, you know, maybe 100 or 200 individual keywords that, that were taken from my supplementary keyword list. And now I put all of those right here in into listing Builder, right? It’s super, super important that you do it this way and not just put all the phrases. All right, so now this is my keyword bank and listing builder is 10 to 30 phrases and maybe 50 to 300 individual keywords. Step number 26 is then go ahead. Hey, start with your title, optimize it for your main keywords, your canonical url, you know, get your listing really optimized. And then don’t forget, you have got to put those emotional trigger points we learned about in the last episode that you had taken from the customer reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one thing that you can do if you have the diamond plan in listing or in Helium 10, you can actually, if you, if you have writer’s block or you’re not confident with confident, I was about to say you’re not confident with your English level, yeah, I’m obviously not confident with my English level either. I can’t even speak English here. But if you’re not confident with your English level, go ahead and have the ChatGPT AI help you write your listing inside of Listing Builder. If you put your keywords and you put the kind of vibe you’re looking for, ChatGPT can kind of start your listing out and write it for you, and then you can tweak it to, to how you want it. But that really helps with writer’s block even for me sometimes. Alright, so again, create your title, make sure it’s optimized.

Bradley Sutton:

If you have multiple keywords, guys, if you have multiple keywords that were some of your top phrases, try to see if you have different roots of each other and get those in a title. The number, even though you have 30 keywords, that was your top you have 30 keywords, that was your top phrases. Can’t put 30 f keywords in your, in your title. So, so try to find the most relevant one. You definitely have to get in there. All right, so like for a coffin shelf, duh, it’s gonna be coffin shelf, right? But then what you wanna do is see if there’s a possibility to nest keywords together. So maybe one of the keywords was coffin shelf, maybe another keyword or a small coffin shelf. And another keyword is coffin shelf decor. Coffin shelf might be my number one keyword. And those other ones were main keywords, but maybe it’s all the way in the bottom.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m still gonna put those in the title because if I put the keyword small coffin shelf decor, I get three keywords for the price of one. I have got coffin shelf, small coffin shelf, and coffin shelf decor, if those were three of my keywords. So try to find those kind of things in order to get into the title. Alright, step number 27 is make the rest of the listing with your customer mind. Use main phrases, then single keywords. So try and get all those phrases that were your main ones into your listing, and then work on those single keywords in there. You know, you can use humor when it’s possible, and that’s even something you can put into ChatGPT to, to make it humorous if that’s appropriate for your niche. But make sure to speak to the customer’s use cases and problems the product solves, their fears that it might allay, and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Really make an emotional connection, especially when you’re writing those bullet points. Don’t forget about those niche themes that we learned about earlier in the last episode, where you want to, you know, use niche themes in order to kind of analyze the images and, and your image strategy. And before you even make your listing, you can, you know, set it up in helium 10 Audience which is powered by PickFu in order to maybe get some feedback from customers on if they like your main image. I like, especially if you have like two or three main images that you’re not sure which one you should go with, then that’s really going to, you know, let you know what customers like. Another thing you should do before you even get, you know, the listing fully ready is create your a plus content, right? And then activate the translation A+ Content.

Bradley Sutton:

Don’t be using it to try and rank for keywords or index for keywords, because I haven’t had enough tests where I can show it has an effect. Like I’ve tried to put keywords that I’m not indexed for and I don’t have in my listing, and I put it in different fields in a plus content a hundred percent of the time does not index me. But the one important thing is that you need to make sure that you have the Spanish translation active or whatever marketplace you’re in, go to the back end where after you get your, your a plus content approved, there’ll be a button that says Create language variation in America. The language variations would be Spanish and a Hebrew, I believe. And this is important because what happens if you don’t have this? All right, well, lemme just show you what happens if you do have it, if you do have it activated, like here, I’m showing you for, for those watching on YouTube, I’ve got on the left the, the a plus content for our coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? Looks pretty good, right? And then on the right it’s our Spanish a plus content. So that’s, if somebody changes the flag to Spanish, just like I showed you, changes the language of Amazon, this is how it’s going to show up. But take a look at this coffin makeup shelf, all right on the left, they’ve got a really nice looking a plus content right here with their coffin shelf. They’ve got a lifestyle model, et cetera, but they never activated their Spanish translation. So look what happens on the right side. If somebody changes Amazon to the Spanish version, their description and a plus content completely disappear. So, you know, is that gonna, you know, tank a hundred percent of their sales? No, but that just means that, you know, their conversion rate might go down by 20% or something for Spanish speaking people because they don’t have this a plus content activated for Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next step, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about indexing and ranking. All right? So again, the difference between indexing is you are potentially searchable for a keyword ranking means that you are actually showing up in the search results in those, in what Amazon displays, which is usually seven pages. Now here’s what could happen, and this is why you’ve gotta do this step number I’m not even sure what number we’re on now, like 30 or something like that, but is to check indexing for all of your main and secondary keywords. So remember those main keywords that were like 10 to 30 keywords, take that full list, paste them as is, as phrases into Index checker, and then take those 100 individual keywords, paste it right there on the next line of index checkers so that everything is there and you are going to run index checker for it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? And Helium 10 is gonna tell you, are you index? Did Amazon index you for these keywords? Now, here’s the thing, you are gonna find that even though sometimes, sometimes, even though you have the keyword in your listing, you’re not indexed, here’s a product that I did, a test product that were coffee socks, and you can see all of these coffee related keywords and even Mother’s Day related keywords I was not indexed for, despite me having it in multiple times. Now, here is why that might happen. Of course, it’s gonna happen if, if it’s like branded keywords or, or keywords that you don’t have the rights to advertise for or something like that, right? But, or if you don’t have the keyword in your listing, it’s like, duh, that’s why you’re, you’re not indexed. But in this case, think about what category these socks were in.

Bradley Sutton:

They’re in the, what is it, fashion category or clothing category to Amazon. These coffee related keywords might be completely irrelevant. They’re like, why would a piece of clothing need to rank or need to index for the word coffee? So what happens in this case, this is why you have to go and use that special feature sometimes to, to make sure that you’re relevant or that you get indexed for this keyword. So it’s very important. Don’t just assume because you did the greatest keyword research in the world, thanks to Helium 10, you’ve got the greatest listing optimization in the world, thanks to this podcast. But just because you did all that, that every single keyword that you put in your listing, you’re gonna get indexed for. Make sure to run this check with index Checker. Alright, the next step here is all of those top 30 keyword phrases, or like I said, maybe it was 10 or 15.

Bradley Sutton:

Add those all to keyword tracker. All right? This is, again, before you even start your listing that make it active, add them all the keyword and turn on Boost. Boost is that function that allows you to check 24 times a day what your ranks are, because this is super, super important. Once you start doing that Maldi honeymoon launch strategy, you know, and you’re in the honeymoon period, you want to know are, are you at the very top of the sponsor ranks? Are you improving your organic rank? You’re gonna know that as if you have boost on, and you are tracking these keywords from day one. The other thing to do is set up Helium 10 market tracker. This is not to be confused with Market Tracker 360, which is an advanced tool for like, you know, eight figure sellers, but the regular market tracker that you, that you have in your platinum or diamond plan, add your product there, add your main competitors, and four, three or four very, very specific, very, very specific keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? I made the mistake one time when I was setting up my coffin shelf niche that I put the keywords coffin shelf, which is right, but then I put like gothic decor and like spooky accessories. What happened was then Market Tracker started spitting me all these like new keywords that could be my competitors, but it really, it wasn’t because all I consider my competitors are actual coffin shelves, right? So this is important to do that. If you are using Market Tracker, you only put the most super, super hyper relative or hyper relevant keywords to your product. So that when, what market Tracker is gonna do is it’s going to start recommending to you like, Hey, do you want to track this other coffin shelf? Or, Hey, did you know that there’s a new coffin shelf that is entering your niche? And then you’re also gonna be able to, to start tracking your market share.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is something I would say that, I don’t know, 75% of Helium 10 users are not taking advantage of. This is literally what you should have going in your account from day zero. That means before you’re even in the MALS honeymoon launch strategy or launch period, you need to get market tracker set up. Next step is make sure to activate the SKU. You know, once you, it’s live in inventory management. All right? So your FBA sku, if that’s gonna be your main s skew, go to Helium 10 Inventory management. If you have platinum, you’ve got this, this is for USA customers. If we have more demand, we’re gonna go ahead and get it for European customers as well. But this is really important so that you make sure that you are not going to miss out on, on your, you’re having the right inventory in there, right?

Bradley Sutton:

It’s gonna tell you when to transfer from your warehouse. It’ll tell you when you need to order more, but because this is a brand new product, the Forecasting Algorithm inside of Helium 10 that you’re gonna use, this is again, Helium 10 Inventory Management. A lot of people don’t even realize we have full inventory management. I’ve been using this for years already for all of my brands. You are gonna choose the exponential algorithm because you don’t have enough history yet for the sales. Now, you know, if you want to, you can just change it to seven day velocity or 14 day velocity. But again, Helium 10 Exponential Forecasting Algorithm is going to forecast things out based on recent sales. Now, once you’ve been selling this product for a year, that’s when you change it to what’s called the additive forecasting model, because now it’s gonna look at your like 12 month history in the seasonality and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Another step here, again, before you even launch the product or before you go live, make sure to activate it for Helium 10 Alerts. All right? Because what’s gonna happen, as soon as you get product into Amazon’s warehouses, sometimes they might immediately change your dimensions to something wrong. And so you wanna be able to know if Amazon does that, so you can take care of it right away. And then also see if hijackers jump on your listing at the beginning or if you start getting some bad reviews. So again, takes one click, go into helium 10 alerts, activate the activate the alerts for that new FBA SKU. Go into Helium 10 Follow-up. This is for any level of helium 10 platinum diamond or above. And s set up the automatic request or review. Alright, I, I don’t do anymore the custom emails. You know, I know a lot of people like those because you can do things that maybe have better conversion rate, but no, all you have to do is you go to a request, a review and seller feedback template, make a new one, and then select the request a review template, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

And then, you know, I like to make it wait a certain number of days before I send it out or after it ships, I’m sorry, before I ship a certain number of days after I ship a product for when they’re gonna receive the notice. If you’re selling supplements, you don’t want them to get a note for a review, like right away, you know, they’re not gonna have enough time to, to know if they want to give you a review and if, and probably it’s gonna be a bad review if they give it to you right away. So what you want to do is you wanna set that date if you have a supplement to like 22 days after it ships or something like that. So that’s at the end of that 30 day window that you have. But maybe you’ve got a product that you knew that people use immediately and are immediately gonna know if they like it or not like it within a day of receiving it.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, for those people, I might go ahead and put, Hey, you know, show me or send this, you know, seven days after shipping or six days after shipping, send them a request for review. And once you set it, you can forget it. It’s always gonna go ahead and send to all of your customers. More bonus tips here, all right, this is something I haven’t talked about on the podcast before, but have somebody purchase your product potentially at your list price to give you the best chance to get a strike through pricing. All right? This is what you can see I did a few months ago when I was launching those socks, is I wanted the, the price to the retail price to show as 11.97 and my product was gonna be 9.97. But I’m also doing, you know, in the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy, which, you know, we talk about in other episodes and we’ll talk about again in episode 500, is I wanted to have a, a cheap price a cheap price to start 497.

Bradley Sutton:

So in order to do that, I set a FBM listing or or it could be I’ve been FBA listing live for like one hour or 30 minutes just in, just for it to go live on Amazon. And then they, I had somebody buy the product at 11 point 97. I only need one person to buy it. And then what happens like 48 hours later eat when I put my sale price at 4 97, I’m gonna have a strikethrough price on 1197, and it’s gonna show a big red letters here of 58% off. All right, guys, there you have it. That’s my new Bali blast or Bali Bachelor party, whatever you think. You guys let me know if this even needs a name or which, which name you like, but I’m gonna call it Bali Blast for now. This is the Bali Blast method on Amazon pre-launch.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, we went over about what, 36 steps on how to get your product ready to make sure how to give it the best sendoff of its single life. You know, the best send, how to give it the best bachelor or bachelorette party so that you can be ready for that wedding day, which is your launch date, and then your Maldives honeymoon period, which is that, you know, precious first, you know, month or so of time and you know, where you’re, you’re utilizing our launch strategies. But all of these steps are super important because if you just use the Maldives strategy for launching and you didn’t do these steps, you’re not gonna be successful. I’ll tell you that right now. These are vital to give you the best chance for success when you do launch your product, guys. All right? So let me know in the comments below what you guys think of this.

Bradley Sutton:

Again, two episodes here. Make sure to check both of these give it to your team to review so they can make sure that your next launch is gonna be using these methods. All right? Don’t forget coming up episode 500, toward the end of the year, we’re gonna, I’m gonna give you guys my latest updates on the Maldives honeymoon strategies. I’m gonna try and go to Maldives and film a special, that’s a special number, 500 episodes of the podcast. And then we’re gonna go into my latest launch strategies. But if you wanted to see what’s working for launch you can check out episode four. I think it’s like 400 or 400 to one in the second half of that. And that’s like what I’ve been using earlier this year for Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. But anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this two part series and I’ll see you guys in the next episode.

#466 - Amazon Pre Launch Episode: The Bali Blast - Part 1

Live from Bali, Indonesia, Bradley shares his top strategies that have to do with Amazon pre-launches. This is to prepare your Amazon brand for a great launch and honeymoon period. There are a lot of steps that lead to your Amazon launch, but these groups of strategies put a close to the product research, keyword listing, sourcing, and listing optimization stage of your Amazon journey to now skyrocket your new brand into epic launches! Let’s go ahead and hop into it.

In episode 466 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 01:46 – A Strategy To Help You For Before Amazon Launches
• 02:37 – What Makes A Bachelor Party Really Cool?
• 04:08 – Bradley’s Amazon Dad Joke
• 04:50 – Check This On Your Main Keywords
• 06:44 – What Is Title Density?
• 07:41 – Checking Your Competitor’s Strength
• 08:54 – Explore Bundling Options
• 11:29 – Identify Your Top-Selling Child Item
• 12:46 – Identify Main Topics From The Reviews
• 14:14 – Identify Pain Points From Reviews
• 15:56 – Check The Opportunity Explorer
• 16:40 – Analyze Your Competitor’s Image Strategy
• 19:37 – Preparing Your Keyword Lists & Bradley’s Keyword Research Strategy
• 22:21 – Keywords That A Lot Of Sellers Miss
• 22:29 – How To Get Opportunity Keywords From Helium 10
• 25:46 – Brand Analytics And Helium 10 Data
• 28:04 – Checking Off Amazon Keywords
• 29:24 – Find Sales Peak Days Of Your Competitors That Are In Your Niche
• 30:06 – And Corelate That Day To Brand Analytics
• 31:47 – What Is Bradley’s Time Machine Keywords?
• 33:48 – Bonus Hack: Checking Historic Keyword Ranks
• 36:57 – Stay Tuned For Part 2 Of This Episode!

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, I’m here recording this live from Bali because I’ve come up with a new strategy on how to get ready for your Maldives honeymoon launch. It’s my pre-launch Bali blast strategy. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for. Maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for eCommerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast, discount coupon SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

And as you can see, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I’m here in Bali, but the Amazon collective mastermind and it’s really amazing. My first time in Bali, really incredible. And I was inspired to go ahead and talk about the strategies that I talked about here at the Bali Conference and at the Billion Dollar Seller summit, most of which actually have to do with pre-launch. Alright, so I think you guys, you know, know about the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. It incorporates, you know, a lot of pre-launch strategies, but I want to kind of like separate it out like how to get ready for an epic wedding and honeymoon, right? Maldives honeymoon in real life is potentially to have an epic bachelor or bachelorette party. I never had one. I didn’t, I didn’t do that. But, you know, I’m sure many of you have, and, and some people I read actually go to Bali for their bachelor party.

Bradley Sutton:

See the B theme here? So I’m like, you know what? Let’s just make this easy to remember. Let’s call this like the Bali Blast method. All right? You guys don’t have to call it that. It is what it is. It’s a strategy that helps you get ready for a good launch. All right? So you don’t have to call it the Bali blasts. I might not even call it the Bali blasts. I’m just throwing that out there cuz I’m here in, in Bali right now. But think about what makes a bachelor party really cool. Again, I don’t know because I’ve never, I’ve never even been to one, let alone had my own. But I would assume that hey it, it’s meant to be kind of like your, your last hurrah really set you up for you know, not missing your single days, right?

Bradley Sutton:

You’re ready to move on to the next phase, which is, you know, married life and first of course the honeymoon. Alright? So that’s kind of like the thought process behind this strategy too. Alright? It’s, we’re here in Bali, think of a bachelor party. And what I’m doing is I’m trying to set up like completely put a close on the initial, you know, product research sourcing and listing optimization. Like, how do we put a close to my previous single life or before I had a product and now get ready to move on to that. All important, you know, merry life starting with that honeymoon period because it’s not just about, you know, the, the honeymoon period. And the Maldives Honeymoon strategy isn’t just about, you know, doing the right PPC, you know, during launch and setting your launch date in the future and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s all important, but there’s a lot of steps that lead up to the launch that will help make sure that you get off on the right foot for your launch. So let’s go ahead and hop into it. One thing I was doing guys, when I spoke at different events is I was doing some Amazon dad jokes and I’m gonna give the one that I gave, I don’t remember where I gave this, but it was the one that was the hardest for people to understand. All right, so let’s see how fast you guys pick this one up. All right, so here’s an Amazon dad joke. I was doing product research and I was trying to validate an idea I had for people to put loved ones ashes into a glass urn. All right, a glass urn. So my question is, you know, is this a good opportunity?

Bradley Sutton:

Did, did I validate this? Is this a good opportunity? Well, the answer is remains to be seen. Think about that for a second. You didn’t get it. Glass urn, remains to be seen. You know, the glass is transparent, all right? So it’s remains, you know, ashes to be seen. All right guys, don’t worry. This is not an episode about Amazon dad jokes. Let’s go ahead and hop right into the strategy. But before I do that one bonus strategy I mentioned this to the elite members a couple months ago or about a month ago, and I talked about this on my tour, is something interesting that you can notice on your main keywords. So if you go to your main keywords, especially in like the home and kitchen category, look at the search results and see if your competitors have this kind of bold black letters underneath the title, alright, underneath the title.

Bradley Sutton:

And if they do it’ll say sometimes, like, you know, here I’m looking at a Tesla thing I did, I see solid and it says geometric. And what happens is some sellers, they don’t know about this field and, and they just have like gibberish in there cuz probably cuz they were trying to fill up their listing you know, with the flat file and like, look at this one listing here. It just has a bunch of gibberish, looks like they’re SKUs, says Halloween show, 1790, all one word, right? This is something that you could fill out. This is the pattern field. All right guys, so this is the pattern field, and if you fill it out, it can give you potentially some extra ranked use. And at the very least, what it can do is it just sticks out on the page. If you have like your main keyword there or something that’s kind of sticks out on the page as opposed to just like random gibberish like some of these competitors have, you can see I was doing a Tesla scene for a, a bat math.

Bradley Sutton:

So or a bat bath mat, say that five times fast. And then I just go, went ahead and threw it into this pattern field and within like two hours it was already there showing up on the main page. So there’s a strategy in itself. Now, if we’re thinking about pre pre, pre-launch, it actually starts all the way back when you’re trying to validate your product and maybe you’ve already decided on it and you want to decide on what are the main keywords. And once you decide what those main keywords are, the first step into having a successful pre-launch is take a look at the title density of your main keywords. Alright? So your title density for those who don’t know, it’s, it’s a field that’s in Helium 10. And basically this is how many listings on page one have the exact phrase that was searched in phrase form.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I search coffin tray and Helium 10 says I’ve got a title density of nine, that means there are nine listings on page one that have the keyword coffin tray in exact phrase match. And this is important because it’s going to give you an idea of how difficult or how easy it might be to launch. All right? So the bigger the number, that means the harder it is to get to page one. The smaller the number, you know, potentially if it’s a lower search volume and the title density is zero or one, theoretically from day one of your launch, you could already be on page one because that’s how much emphasis Amazon puts on the title. So that’s something important to think about. Check your title density, that is step one. Step two, analyze your competitor’s strength. All right, this is important because when we’re talking about how hard or how easy it’s gonna be to get to page one, it’s not just about the title density, but how strong is your competition.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you do is what I’m showing here on the screen, throw all of your listings into lists or your competitors’ listings into listing analyzer and take a look at at their top keyword phrases, and it’ll show for the top keyword phrases in this niche where they ranked the last time helium 10 checked. And then you’ll see, like, look at this, this guy is a strong one here because look, he’s got, he’s ranked number one, ranked number one, ranked number three, ranked number six. However, this other main competitor in this niche, he’s only in the top 10 on one keyword and everything else, he’s like on the bottom of page one or middle of page one. All right, so now you know, hey, this com other competitor who’s at the very top of the page, he might be a little bit tough to work with, but this other guy, I can definitely take him.

Bradley Sutton:

You might reason. All right, so again, listing analyzer, go in there, see what kind of search volume top 10 search volume that your main competitors have. All right? The lower it is for some of them, that means that’s the competitors that you’re gonna probably easily be able to beat. Another thing I wanna talk about is explore bundling options, not just as something to add to your listing or to your product. I mean that, yes, that’s definitely something that you can do. You know, maybe you see that people are buying a coffin shelf and a skull together, right? So maybe you’ll be the first one to have a coffin shelf with skull together. Of course, that’s an option, right? But take it a step even easier. Use Black Box product targeting. Enter in your competitor’s ASINs and then filter for frequently bought together.

Bradley Sutton:

This is gonna show you what has been frequently bought together over the past, like 30 days or more that Helium 10 has detected. And sometimes you might find a product that’s like seven or $8 or even $6. And basically what this means is this, this could potentially be a product that you could source for like 30, 40 cents. Like one of the ones that was showing up here is, is spooky stickers. You know probably you could source some spooky stickers for like, what, you know, 25 cents or something like that. But if you have a history that your competitors are selling their product, and then the buyer at the same time is buying spooky stickers on their own, because you can see it in frequently bought together. Now what you should do if it’s really cheap, just go ahead and buy that product, maybe even in a smaller quantity if it’s a little bit more expensive, and then stick it into your product costing you 25 cents each.

Bradley Sutton:

If it’s really small, like stickers. And don’t advertise it. Don’t even advertise in the listing, right? I mean, you could advertise in your listing, but I prefer that for like, you know, more impressive bundling opportunities. But here’s what happens if you don’t advertise, and this is a strategy that, you know, Toma Rabinovich has, has been teaching for, for a while now. It’s part of his like six star method, and I’ve seen this myself out, out in the wild. But what happens is now your customer gets the product, they open it up expecting whatever they bought, say it’s a coffin shelf, but then all of a sudden they have these spooky stickers that customers like them, like, now what does that mean? That means it’s like a pleasant surprise, and it gives, it makes them like double 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x more likely to leave a positive review than if they were just happy with the product by itself.

Bradley Sutton:

And you could see this, there’s a couple of coffin shelf listings out there where somebody was bundling, you know, some stickers in it, and you see a, a decent number of reviews mention the stickers, like, Hey, you know, it was so nice to, to have these spooky stickers or whatever, whatever it said. So this is a something that costs you like 20 cents an order maybe, but could potentially increase your positive review velocity. The next step for Bali Blast, all right, your pre-launch setup is identify the top child or top selling child item. So this is only if you guys are trying to launch for a product that has multiple variations, and Helium 10 is obviously showing you the same sales for each one. Well, that just means that’s how many sales it has overall. So the way that you could kind of have an idea of which one is selling the best, so that you don’t have to buy one of each color and launch for each color is you run a review analysis on the listing and then hit product variations.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you’re gonna see the breakdown of the reviews. Usually one child item, it’s the one that is kind of like the star child item and has all of a big majority of the reviews. Like, like this I think is a letter board. I’m looking at the black coffin letter board has 77% of the review share. Number two is purple with 10%. Everything else is like less than 7%. So if this was me, I’m like, all right, I know if I’m just starting off I’m cool with maybe just getting the black coffin shelf, maybe the purple one to start off, and I’m not gonna worry about those other colors. Imagine if you didn’t have this visibility and you’re, you’re like, all right, let me order 500 of each of these colors. You would obviously be in a bad way for your inventory.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step we’re going to go in, number five is identify main topics from the reviews. This is going to be useful for your listing optimization later on. So the way you can do that is with that same tool, review insights, hit review analysis, all right? And then see what are the top phrases that are showing up. And then start digging into what people are saying about the top phrase. Like for example, that coffin letter board one of the top phrases is for Halloween. So what I would do is I would click on that and see, alright, what, how are customers using this for Halloween? And then I’m going to actually make sure to make that one of my images. Like let’s say the use case or what you saw in the reviews is, Hey, I put this in front of my house for Halloween to advertise what candies I have.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know, I don’t even celebrate Halloween. I don’t know what, what people do for this. But let’s just say that’s what people are saying. Well, now what I would do if this was my product is I would put that as one of the pictures, let, like maybe in front of a house that looks like it’s decorated for Halloween and the exact use case that people are using, I’m gonna make sure to put that in my image and maybe even the first bullet point, this is something that is not gonna show up in your keyword research, right? You know use for Halloween for, for what candies I have, you know, that’s not a key word that people search for. It’s not gonna show up in Cerebro, but this is a way that you can, like really again, start from day one, your Maldives honeymoon launch with a little bit leg up on the competition.

Bradley Sutton:

Next step, we’ve gone through five so far, number six, still talking about reviews, identify pain points from reviews. All right? So what I would do in that same tool on my competitor’s listing, I’m going to, from the all reviews page, all right, from the all reviews page, I’m going to see what are people complaining about. And I do that by sorting or filtering right here, one star only reviews. I could go one star or two stars and then look at this. I I’m seeing here people are saying, Hey, the letters fall out, letters are junky. Letters are hard to stay on. Alright? So again, this is something that is gonna go into one of my images. I’m gonna really show how, hey, you know, our letters don’t fall out. I’m gonna put that in the bullet points. All right? This is not a keyword. You would not have found this if you didn’t analyze the reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, one little bonus tip is I like looking at the all questions as well right here inside of Helium 10 review insights. And I wanna see what are the questions that people are asking about my competitors listing? Now here’s the benefit of that. Basically the questions section is telling you what your competitors have been missing from their listings. Does that make sense? Cuz think about it, if it was clear, may, maybe it’s not even missing, but it’s just not clear in their listing. If it was clear or if it was in the listing, would somebody need to go in and figure out how to actually ask a question? That’s somebody who is super interested in buying the product, right? And they even know how to find the question in an answer section on a page, and they couldn’t find the answer they’re looking for.

Bradley Sutton:

So that should show that it’s obviously not as obvious as the seller probably thought they were when they made their listing. So that’s something that you can, you know, get some extra insight as well. Another way you could look into review and kind of sentiment is check Opportunity Explorer and enter the ASIN and in product Opportunity Explorer, under customer review insights, they have like another cool way to kind of get some sentiment about the reviews and Amazon is even experimenting with some like ai different kind of ways to look at that as well. But that’s, for those of you who might not have Helium 10, you know, first of all, shame on you. Go ahead and sign up for Helium 10, six months, 20% off discount code SSP20. But if you don’t have Helium 10, you’re not gonna take advantage of that offer.

Bradley Sutton:

You can still get some sentiment of the reviews by going into the opportunity explore. Number eight, this is an important one. Analyze your competitor image strategy. So don’t just go in and, and, and give a whole bunch of, of instructions to your graphic designer or your photographer based on whatever they think you should do for your listing or based on whatever you think is the best image strategy. You want to look at what your competitors have been doing. Like, especially if you have competitors who have been selling pretty, pretty well, you know, for six months, maybe for a year or something. Take a look at their image stack tho those of you who are Amazon sellers, I’m talking to you right now. You have multiple products, let me know if you have a product that has been on Amazon for more than six months or a year.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have the same images right this second as you did from day one? If your answer is yes, shame on you. You, you’re a terrible Amazon, I’m just playing. But seriously though, you’re, you’re not doing very good. Alright? I would say that 90% of you who listen to this podcast and, and meet that criteria, your answer was probably no. I’ve changed my images over time. Now, let me ask you, why did you change your images? All right? Maybe you guys were doing a pick food test and saw that a different image might have worked better. Maybe some of you were using manage your experiments AB testing on Amazon, and saw that a different image worked better. Maybe you were reading the reviews from your customers and saw that people were confused about a size or something, and so that made you update your images.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, you have updated your images based on what the market has been telling you. Well, guess what? Your competitors who have been selling the product that you wanna sell for six months a year or more, they’re prob they’ve probably gone through a few iterations of images and what they have come what they have come to is a stack of images that’s been working best for them. So instead of you having to sell for a year and you having to figure out what is the best image strategy, kind of go off of what the competition is doing. And historically, you know, the way that Tomer and I I learned it from him, you know, we’re teaching this strategy is, hey, go to all your competitors listings, copy their images one by one, throw it into a PowerPoint, give it to your designer and try and see if there are like trends like, hey, every second or third image is an infographic that has the size of the product.

Bradley Sutton:

Or man, look at this. Every single competitor in this coffin letter board niche, they all on all of their images. Keep writing different interesting letters that actually have messages on the letter board that’s kind of marketing the product, right? Well go with this niche theme. You don’t have to do that. If you have a Helium 10 listing analyzer and you have the Diamond plan. If you have the Diamond plan, you hit the button that is media comparison, and within three seconds you are gonna see all of your competitors listings all laid out on one page where you can see these trends, you could see their strategy, what’s working for them, download this as a PDF with one click of a button, and then talk it over with your graphic team and they’ll be able to help you out with that. Let’s go on to the next strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

But before we do that, I’m gonna talk about preparing keyword list. All right? The next few slides are gonna be all about how you do your keyword research and which kind of keywords you are going to have. The way I like to do it, and you, again, I I like naming things guys, you know, Maldives honeymoon, Bali Blast, Bali Bachelor party, whatever. I have these two buckets of keywords and my personal name for these keywords is just real simple, no fancy name here. Top phrases and supplementary keywords. You do whatever works for you. What I say when I mean top phrases I is, I’m looking for between a max of 30 and 40 keywords that come from the following categories. Number one, the niche’s top keywords. And I’m gonna, there’s gonna be a slide about that. Number two, opportunity keywords. Number three, potentially off Amazon keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Number four, brand analytics keywords and number five, frequently bought together top three keywords. You might not understand what these are cuz these, again, this is Bradley’s names, you know, for them I’ll, I’m gonna explain each of them in detail. The next bucket I call supplementary keywords. And my supplementary keywords are my keywords that I’m only gonna have the individual keywords, not full phrases. So this is kind of not necessarily without limit, but you know, it could be 200, 300 or more. And my number one is gonna be time machine keywords. I’ll explain what that means. That’s another Bradley name right there. PPC, keywords, opportunity explore keywords, top two page keywords, Amazon recommended keywords and long tail keywords. All right, so let’s go ahead and go into the first one, which is identifying the niches top keywords. We are on Bali strategy for pre-launch number nine.

Bradley Sutton:

This is super simple guys. You guys hopefully have been doing this for years, right? Go into Cerebro, throw a, a random product as the first one if you don’t have your own product yet. And then five to 10 of your top potential competitors that you are going to be competing with. And you just hit one button, guys, one button in Cerebro and it’s called drum roll please. Top keywords. All right, so just one button and it’s gonna show you all of the, the keywords that these products have been ranking for. I wanna pull about 15 to 20 max keywords from here. So I might have to fool around with the competitor rank average. They’re ranking competitor filters in order to get my top 15 keywords, but I’m looking for the ones that are searched for the most, where almost all of my competitors are ranking for and they’re all ranking high.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail here because it should be obvious why that is a list of my most viable keywords. The next one though, that a lot of sellers miss in my opinion is opportunity keywords. All right? Opportunity Keywords are keywords where only one or two listings are ranking highly for a certain keyword out of your list. Now, I want you guys to, we’re gonna talk about this for a second cuz it’s important you understand why this could be a valuable keyword. If I were to ask you why, what would you say? And if you say, well, if it’s opportunity, well yeah, that’s, duh, that’s why I call it the opportunity keywords. But why is it an opportunity? We have to understand this, to understand the value of why this could be a golden keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

If I’m selling coffin shelves, my main keyword is gonna be coffin shelf it might be coffin bookshelf, well, whatever, right? It, it’s like that’s what the product is. That’s my main keywords. It doesn’t matter if all of my competitors are ranking for it, that is the most important keyword for my product. I’ve gotta rank for it. But I want you to think about this. Let’s just pretend for a second that out of your top 10 competitors, including you, all of you guys had the same number of reviews, the same price, very similar function, right? When somebody is typing coffin shelf into the search results and they land on that page and they see 10 very similar coffin shelves, obviously that’s not the reality, but, but just work with me a little bit on this. Basically, you technically have a one in 10 chance of getting that sale.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s just say that they can see all 10 at the same time. Maybe they’re not looking at the mobile browser where they only show top three or something, right? And the reason is because it’s all the same and they were looking for a coffin shelf and all 10 of those products meet what the criteria of what they were looking for. Now here’s the thing, let’s take, and again, I’m not saying that’s bad, that’s obviously the most important keyword for your niche. But let’s take a a more generic keyword like gothic decor. Now, if you go to gothic decor, maybe that’s one of the opportunity keywords, meaning only one of your coffin shelf competitors is ranking for it. If there’s only one that’s in the top 10, first of all, you know that to get in the top 10, there’s a subsection of customers who are searching gothic decor who end up buying that coffin shelf, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the top 10 if it’s, if it’s a decent search volume keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So by definition, you know that there are some customers who type gothic decor, but either A, they’re really looking for a coffin shelf, they just didn’t know that keyword, or B, they’re kind of just shopping randomly, but they’re the type of customer who maybe would buy a coffin shelf if they saw one on there, you know is this gonna get a lot of sales? No, it’s gonna get only a fraction of the ones that are coffin shelf. But here’s the thing, if that customer who is searching the keyword searches it, and they are the type of customer who’s either really looking for a coffin shelf or would buy it. Now if your product was only the second one on there in the top 10, compare with another, you know, the one who was already on there, you have a 50 50 chance, not a 10% chance.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, like in college of you have a 50 50 chance of getting the sale potentially more if you’re ranking higher. So you see why this is a valuable set of, of, of keywords, opportunity, keywords, one of my favorite ways and you know, Helium 10, one of the few tools that you can do that with just one click of the button just hit opportunity keywords and it will give you a list of those keywords and I would probably just pull like, you know, some of the top ones from there. Maybe a maximum of five or six depending on relevancy. Number 11 is I like to look at brand analytics and then compare it to Helium 10 keyword ranks. I can do this manually. If I didn’t have helium 10, I guess, you know, I would just go into brand analytics and look at the main keywords, and then I would look at the keyword ranks just by, you know, looking on Amazon where, where it’s ranking.

Bradley Sutton:

But you can actually do both of that in one tool, and that’s in cerebral or maggot. If I have the diamond plan with Helium 10, I can go anywhere into brand analytics. And what I’m going to be able to see is if I see the top three clicked for an item or for, I’m sorry for a keyword on the right hand side, I can see for the month what were the organic and sponsored rank averages for that month for the product. And here’s the reason why this comes in handy. You can see that here with some of these some of these listings here on this page. But what happens is sometimes it’s not always, oh, I have to be organically ranked at the top or I have to be organically ranked at the top of the page and sponsored rank high.

Bradley Sutton:

So I could see maybe a keyword where consistently the top couple clicked keywords. Maybe they, they weren’t ranked organically high, they were only ranked sponsored high. Guess what? If you look at the keyword coffin shelf and you’ll see that the Helium 10 coffin shelf is one of the top ones on there, well, you are actually going to see that our organic rank is only like 10 or 15. Our sponsored rank is one. So I could see that just with one click, I can actually see that right here inside of Cerebro. And so what that means is now I can take this information and plan my launch strategy. I’m like, you know what? I don’t necessarily needto be at the top organically for this keyword. I can be one of the top click ones if my sponsored rank is at the very top.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is a very valuable tool inside of Cerebro that I think a lot of you Diamond members aren’t using, but check brand analytics, which comes directly from Amazon, who were the top three click clicked, and then compare it to where they were ranking organically and sponsored to have an idea about what your launch strategy is gonna be for that. All right, the next one that we’re gonna go on is number 12, which is checking off Amazon keywords. This is only gonna be applicable if you are in a newer niche where there’s nobody that you can really kind of look or there’s not enough people to look at their keyword history on Amazon or in Cerebro. But there is some history on Etsy. What you do to do that is if you find a product that has some good history on Etsy and you wanna just see if there’s maybe some keywords that you haven’t thought about, go to Etsy, find one of the top sellers on Etsy of your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Go to their product page. On the very bottom, you’re gonna look at explore related searches. That’s a section that is on any Etsy listing. If the seller has filled it out, what this is is what the seller is telling Etsy are their main keywords. Maybe they based it off of you know, what keywords have driven the most sales for them. Maybe they base it off of you know, where what’s keywords brought them, sales and PPC and Etsy, whatever the case is. This is like looking at the most, like if, if Amazon sellers had a part of their listing where it says, all right, what’s your top seven most important keywords? It’d be like being able to look at that section. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that’s what this explore related searches is. So that’s a great way to look off Amazon for some important keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step is number 13, find sales peak days of your competitors that are in your niche. All right? So you can do that by looking at any BSR chart. All right? So if you’re using Helium 10 or you got the free, even the free Helium 10 Chrome extension, you’re gonna be able to do this. Go to any listings page, scroll down to where the BSR chart is, and then look at where the big dips are. Remember the dips in BSR, that means the lower the BSR number, that means the more they were selling, and you can actually see this on a day-to-day basis. So I’m gonna look for the exact day of when they had a peak. All right, so that’s number 13. And and that kind of goes right into number 14, which is now correlate that day that you found in step 13 to brand analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so again, I love brand analytics. I always have, I’m gonna, let’s say I found in their BS r chart that on July the 14th of 2022, they had a killer day of sales. Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put July 14th into brand analytics. I’m gonna make it daily, the reporting range, and I’m gonna put for top click products, whatever my competitor’s ASIN is. And then what’s gonna show up is now what were the keywords where they were the top three clicked, or they were one of the top three clicked and potentially purchased for that exact day. And I can now kind of reverse engineer what were their main keywords that resulted in them having one of the best days of sales for them for the year. Do you see how this could be beneficial? You know, when you’re just doing your regular keyword research inside of Cerebro, I mean, it’s totally fine.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s, it’s, it’s great keyword research, but that’s showing what’s going on right now. What if one of your competitors has fallen off in the last 30 days? What if they were outta stock for a couple months and they just came back in a stock? Well, they might not even be ranking very highly for all their keywords. This is a way where I can go in and see when they were ranking the best, when they were selling the best, what were the keywords on that day that were driving some of the sales for them. And then boom, right now, in July or June or whenever this is, even though I might be looking back at at November or October, I’m gonna be already have in my listing these main keywords. And again, we’re, let’s go back to what we’re talking about. Bali Bachelor party, the Bali blast.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re talking about having a pre-launch, you know, getting your listings set up to make sure you have that successful marriage period or that successful honeymoon period. This is one of those ways that you can do that by making sure you have the best keywords that were, that were historical. I could also do this for months, like maybe they had instead of just an exact day of when they just had a, like a blip maybe for some crazy sales for one day. Look at what months they had the best sales. Like here’s a BSR chart that I’m looking at and I can see, wow, July, they had a killer month, maybe October or November, they had a killer month. Overall in, in this case, what I like to do is I like to run the Cerebro time machine for if you’re a Helium 10 supercharged plan owner or an elite member, you’re the only ones right now who have access to time machine, but throw that competitor’s listening into Cerebro just like you normally would.

Bradley Sutton:

And then hit the historical analysis button. I call it time machine. I think in Cerebro it’s called historical analysis. And what you’re gonna see there is you are going to go ahead and see for that month, I can click on any month in the last two years. And then I’m gonna, it’s kind of like being able to see Cerebro at the time of, you know, whatever month I’m looking at. And I think it kind of goes without saying why this could be beneficial is because now all of a sudden I could see, you know, they were crushing it in, you know, September of last year. Maybe it’s a seasonal product and now I’m in February. Well, if I’m looking at Cerebro in February of a product that is seasonal and is really crushing it in September, am I gonna have the full keyword strategy, the correct keyword strategy?

Bradley Sutton:

No the keywords that are bringing themselves right now in February, if it was February right now that’s not gonna be the keywords that’s gonna be their top keywords for the year. So using this time machine is really a great way to go ahead and get some information there. Let’s do maybe just one more. I think I’m gonna have to like split this into two episodes because we got too much good information here. But the next step I want to talk about is just a quick bonus here, and this is checking historic keyword ranks. So this doesn’t even have a number here in the steps, but a lot of people don’t realize that you can actually add your competitors ASINs into keyword tracker in your, in your Helium 10 account. It’s not just your products. You can put anybody’s products in there and you think another, a lot of people also think that, okay, I can start tracking their keywords from the moment that I put in their keyword rank, right?

Bradley Sutton:

No, that’s not the case. Yes, you can, you’re gonna see it right from that moment, but you can, if it’s a, a keyword with decent search form, you’re gonna be able to see what their ranks were going back a year, going back potentially even two years. So let’s say through these steps like, you know, steps 13, 14, 15 or whatever you, you saw which keywords they were ranking they were getting sales from maybe which keywords they were highly ranked in Cerebro, throw those keywords, throw that product into keyword tracker and then wait like maybe one hour. Or actually you don’t even need to wait, wait one hour, wait like 10 minutes and then click on the historical chart. You are gonna be able to see everywhere where they were ranking day by day, week by week throughout the last two years for a certain keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is key again, I would say 95% of sellers are not doing this, where they’re checking at like almost a daily level the history of how their competitors were ranking. Here’s another, you know, thing that you can get from this. You can go back potentially to when they launched their product. Let’s say they launched their product in the last two years. You can almost redo their own Maldives honeymoon or their own honeymoon period to see what keywords did they focus on. How, how long did it take them after launch to get to page one for their keyword, you know? So this is like kind of a little bit crazy what you can, what you can do here. As far as reverse engineering. The other thing that you can do when you were looking at this historical keyword ranks is again, you can see where where they were ranking organic and sponsored.

Bradley Sutton:

Like for example, if I saw in brand analytics from step 13 that this, this product was ranking highly for coffin shelf, or not ranking highly, but getting sales from coffin shelf, well, I can see in both their organic and sponsoring for this keyword, they were positioned one or two for both organic and sponsored. So now I know like, man, for this keyword coffin shelf, if I wanna be the top seller, maybe I have to be ranked one and two if that’s what I was looking at. But look at this other keyword coffin decor that this competitor was ranking highly for. Look at their organic rank was like between two and four. So again, man, I gotta be top of the page, you know, I’m looking at the historical keyword ranks, but then look at their sponsored rank. It is like going from 20 to 15 back to 23.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s like on page one or two. Or not even, I’m sorry that, that’s like page two or three of the search results. So now all of a sudden I know, hey, you know what, for that keyword, I just gotta make sure I’m ranked organically because it looks like my sponsored rank is not necessary for me to be one of the top three clicked. Alright guys, that’s gonna be it for this first edition. I’m gonna have to, I don’t even know if I have time. My flight is in a few hours here. I’m gonna see if I can maybe record part two of this for you guys. But anyways, I’ll figure it out. I’m gonna come back with about 15 or more strategies for you guys that are all about your pre-launch, your pre-Amazon launch. Call it whatever you want. I’m calling it my Bali Blast or Bali Bachelor party. But these are the strategies that you need to take in order to get your listing ready for that Maldives honeymoon launch strategies that we’ve talked about a lot of times. So, hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned for the next one. We’ll see you there.