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How PPC Can Help You Grow Your Business - Amazon Seller Tips with Ritu Java - Part 2
March 7, 2022
How PPC Can Help You Grow Your Business - Amazon Seller Tips with Ritu Java - Part 2
Things we discussed in this session:

A. Part

B. Part 2

Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table:
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Website : https://www.ppcninja.com/

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Transcription in this episode:
[00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott [00:00:07] spk_0: and Amy Wees, you know, you just mentioned about indexing and I think that's one of the very important things that we pay attention to. So we we do a pretty thorough job of keyword research when we're researching keywords to put into our titled bullet points back and the back end is the one that kind of gets ignored because you know you yeah, there's a tendency to think, okay, I've mentioned everything on my listing, like what else can I put and then ends up having a bunch of random words that are maybe, you know, they're not making sense, right? So they're not uh maybe not as uh important to the success of the product as it could be. So I think the strategy of um indexing for as many keywords as possible in the back end begins with, you know, making sure that you have. Uh so this is a technique that I picked up from Stephen Pope and he really talks about it in depth in a lot of places, but his strategy involves uh you know, making sure that the maximum number of permutation and combination of keywords happens early on, and then once those keywords kind of become sticky with more conversions, then you can kind of rotate them out and have more keywords go into the back, right? So that's like the whole process and I'm sure you guys can find his, you know, his video is yeah, he's got some three or four videos on that, we can look it up, but that's what we've been testing and we've seen good results with that. So I think um the I mean I personally do not have any um I don't need to kind of do any other ranking strategy outside of amazon other than maybe just encouraging external traffic to kind of get those initial kind of get the organic kind of listing up. I think Amy you're better at that rate. You're, your whole world is about you know, finding out which keywords can we rank for the, finding those gems earlier. And I think that's something that you're pretty good at. But yeah, in our case we try to make sure that we're including as many keywords as possible. Making sure misspellings of spanish words using the back end of our a plus images and so on. All of those are good places to kind of uh stuff keywords that you will then start to rank for overtime. Love it. Cool. And then um yeah, I agree. Organic. It's really important to have that amazing S EO foundation. So um what about seasonality? Right. Were in queue for, we're in this situation now where we need to be thinking about seasonality for our targets bidding and budget. Did you want to say anything about what people should be considering for seasonality? Yeah, I think so one of the things that really stands out every single time. The spirit of Frank this Q4 comes around. We look at the data and it says so much about whether or not your you know your products are going to convert. You know or not. So basically what we see in the data is gift doubles versus non gift herbal. There's such a big difference between um how these to perform during this time of year. So if you have any kind of product that is not a gift herbal or not something that someone is likely to buy on the black friday, cyber monday or even the holidays. Then the recommendation that we give up to our our audience is to kind of protect yourself because this is the time when you're cpcs are going to be extremely high and so you don't want to get caught in that mad holiday rush of people just clicking around the click through rates are crazy by the by the way right now it's like going through the roof conversions are down, click. The Raiders are probably they're just stocking up and making just you know making lists or adding products to their um to the basket and so on. But I'm not buying yet right waiting for for black friday to uh to come around but you know by and large this time of year is going to be more expensive because people are in the mode of shopping in the mood for shopping and in the mode for shopping so if you don't have a gift of will protect yourselves. Well actually I just went to yesterday I went and download uh decrease all of our budgets to $9 for any product that was not a gift of all, Which we know is not going to convert. It has a history of not converting during Q4. Why would we waste money? Amazon's recommendation at this time of year is always the same. It's increase your bits, increase your budget, but it's not gonna make sense to uh you know, to most people. All right, so definitely protect yourself if you're in that category if you are a gifted, although you've got to be smart about, you know, showing up having, you know, visibility, so making sure that you have coupons running, you have some sort of deals running because these are what will help you get visibility. Um and um yeah, don't miss the traffic. It's it's it's for you to take at this point. [00:05:24] spk_1: Yeah, that's a great point. Um you know, one of the things that I've told people for many, many years now and it continues to be true is, you know, especially right now, like this week before, black friday and cyber monday is like you said, everybody's window shopping right? So right now you're really, you know, and I've heard of tons of people like you said amazon will be these things like raise your bids, you know, get the most sales and all the but honestly, in terms of return on investment, it's probably gonna be negative. Um So that's great advice. Um The other thing that um you know, I would love people to know and I've said this many times before as well is, you know, if you're ever budgeting out right and you have and you have a target that's converting but not converting. Well in terms of our oi right then the fix for that, the easy fix for that is to start scaling the bids back and raising the budget right until you until you get to the sweet spot where you're but not budgeting out And that's a net positive in terms of return on investment. So just a few things like that, especially going into Q4, those are, you know, a couple of points to really really think about on that same note, what are some of some other big roadblocks for Amazon sellers to get to profit profitability when it comes with, you know, dealing with the ads in PBC. [00:06:38] spk_0: Yeah, so I think um you know, in terms of roadblocks, um I think just knowing that it is a very competitive space and also this is a very competitive time when I think the big guys have all the budgets to spend and it's it's not gonna be for everybody, right, if we're talking specifically about Q for black friday and the holidays. Um I think that, you know, knowing that these are, you know, these are just games that the big boys can play and it's not for everybody just being cognizant of that is important. Um There's one strategy though I just like to mention which is re marketing and retargeting, so there's two but uh amazon gonna combines them into the same bucket and they just call them re marketing and I just want to mention that you know you have the ability to reach back to people who have some sort of brand loyalty. Like if you've sold anything for let's say a year you probably have enough people that you can re market to, right? So um using certain ad types like the sponsor display um purchase your marketing. That is one of the greatest ways to going to get them back because they are nine times more likely to buy from you if they have purchased in the past, that's just one uh tip, I want to kind of throw out there. Um The other one is retargeting. Retargeting is basically about, you know getting people who have maybe not completed their their order, they may be just abandoned card or whatever and you want to just get them back. Uh There is ways to do that also to sponsor display, right? You can do um really targeting even though they call it something else, they got reviews your marketing, you can get them back. The only caveat is for views re marketing, I would recommend like a short window I think go for the seven day window if possible and for purchases remarketing, go for the long window the 3 65 days because it's, it's cool that amazon allowed that. I mean it was, it was, It used to be there, then they took it away and then they brought it back but slowly. So 365 days back, we look back windows are amazing to get all the people who have purchased from you in the past to come come back to you and this is the best time to kind of do that. So yeah, I'm not sure if I answered your question about roadblocks. Uh, CPCS are rising. Competition is rising. There's also like so many look alikes like, I mean I can search on anything on amazon and find a whole page full of stuff that is just the same. I mean they look the same, they're almost in the same price range. How does one pay? Great. And it's very hard. So I think how do you differentiate your product from others? That's the other whole thing, which is not anything to do with PPC by. I think it's important because um, you know, even with PPC are showing up on top of the, of the search results page, but you're competing with very similar looking items and maybe items that are perhaps cheaper than yours maybe better. Maybe have thousands of fake reviews, but you know, that's the reality of, of amazon. [00:09:52] spk_1: Yeah, it's interesting too because I feel like amazon is trying to push back right now on the creep to amazon becoming more like Ebay right? People kind of abandoned Ebay because they didn't trust the purchase, they didn't trust the quality, the seller's etcetera. And I feel like you know, as much of a pain as it is because amazon these days will flag listings and do all kinds of crazy things um which are frustrating but I think what they're trying to do is to try to boot off some of these non professional sellers and these kind of like scam artists or people who are just literally copying like you said the same product that's already been done 100 times. They don't want that. I mean the price, the competitiveness is already there. So it's not really giving anybody a benefit. Uh it's not giving the shopper a benefit because there's already so many options. So at that point, you know, amazon is kind of like, you know, now we're, why are we showing these, you know, thousands or you know, it's the first pages where people are going to purchase. So um I have noticed with the algorithm though as well is they are now starting to pare down result pages, right? I mean there might be 100,000, you know uh dual insulated cups on amazon but when you search now it's like 2 to 3000 or you know a much shorter, a much smaller number because I think they're starting to realize like we don't need to show that many pages of results. Um You know, all it's gonna do is get people like walmart to steal our data. So it's, it's an interesting kind of what they're working with. Um One of the things that's not really new anymore, but it's still new in terms of the PPC kind of lifespan is video ads and I still see so many sellers not utilizing video ads and it's still one of the best performing if done correctly. You have so many, you know, a couple of tips maybe for people have not done video ads yet how they can get into the game and kind of best practices for video ads. [00:11:41] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. Um so I think video ads have a very high kick through it compared to any of the other at types. They have a six X click through it minimum. Right? Um and so that just gives you a lot of advantage over all the other at types because it stands out. You know, there's like a engaging moving uh, you know, visual there that is so eye catching. Um I think that, you know, you're right. I mean not too many people are doing video ads and you know when I ask people are you doing video ads, they will say yes. And if I asked them, how many are you running? They might say something like one or two, which is kind of interesting to me because if you're running like 30 or 40 sponsored product, key word based ads, why aren't you running 30 or 40 video ads that are using the exact same keywords. You can just replicate whatever you're doing on the sponsored products side of things into video, including product targeting and category targeting. So um that's, I totally agree with you. I mean it's underutilized and it's also your opportunity because if others aren't doing it, then you can maybe what throws people off is the minimum uh CPC, which is 25 cents. I think that's the floor that people gonna get intimidated by. And I think one of the tips I have is um you know, try with exact match and trees match instead of broad because broad on, you know, the sponsored brand side of things is very different from broad on sponsored products. Right? The matching is a little bit, little bit more broad on the sponsored brand side of things. Um and so what I've been doing is I've been using broad match modifiers and that's one way you can kind of forget cleaner data. So try to have broad match modifier instead of broad match. Try to have more exact matches and more phrase matches. But with this, I think you can get easily get closer to the number of campaigns that you're running on the sponsored products side of things on the video outside you just need one asset and you can just replicate those ads. Uh it doesn't need to be, you know, you don't need to spend a lot of money on it. Um, in terms of what these video ads need to look like. I don't think there's any clear, um, you know, consensus on, you know, just run this type of ad or that type of ad does, you know, pan and zoom type of ads that do quite well. There is um very high end kind of videography based video ads that are also doing well and then there's animation style video ads that can cost a little bit, but they're, they can be pretty effective when, especially when your product, there's certain aspects of your product that cannot be shown to duty or through a video. Like for example, if you want to show that you're selling masks and there's like six layers in your mask. Maybe an animation style might help to illustrate that point better than just duty or just saying it in words. Right? So I think with those three styles you can pick and choose, but we've, we've been testing and I think all three at types are doing equally well. Um, what you combine it with, like in terms of keywords or targeting actually is what makes our breaks a video ad, but definitely Go for it because uh four extra real estate, there is no other at type that gives you so much room on page one. [00:15:09] spk_1: Yeah, absolutely. And what people don't realize and and I think amy and I've mentioned this before is Canada now has like built in video editing and like you were saying, if you're just doing like, you know, we're like the text kind of zooms in and you can have a picture of the product and kind of do a little explainer video on your own. The barrier to entry now is really, really low. And you know, the other thing is to just do a search for some of your keywords and if you're not seeing video ads, then there's a huge opportunity, which I do quite frequently and there's still a lot of people who are not, you know, and what's funny is it's, it's uh, you know, usually the big brands are the ones who don't jump into this stuff early, but I feel like the most video ads I'm seeing are for bigger brands and the opportunity though is for the little brands because you know, that's where they actually might be able to compete on that real estate. So that's interesting. Um the other thing that I I love that you mentioned is, you know, is to go, you know, a little tighter on your targeting the other thing that's really cool video ads is using a system like Canada where, you know, you can make edits fairly easily, you can do like five or 10 different variations where you're not changing a whole lot, but maybe it's just like the background color or and you would be really, really surprised how certain colors, certain fonts, certain picture size is the way it's laid out. Can make a huge difference visually for people who click and then convert um, a lot of people don't think of that. So if you took a basic template of an ad you make and then you change the background color to five different colors and you, you know, maybe make the image on the top right on one and maybe in the top left on the other things like that little changes. You can then go out deploy those in testament, see which 11 is gonna after awhile gonna gonna be the clear winner and then you can dedicate more of your resources to that add. So so some great things that you can do there with video ads. Um we were talking, it actually goes great into my next question. You're just talking about match types for people or maybe not super experienced amazon PBC um can you maybe explain the different kinds of match types and how you see them working the most effective in terms of, you know, maybe stage of a product or large or you know, just kind of success with match types. [00:17:16] spk_0: Yeah, sure. So the way we, you know at PP SINGER, we have a system where we um do our keyword research and then going to sort the entire list descending by popularity. So um, so the most popular would be in terms of let's say um keywords that have made it to Brandon analytics and they're in the top 50,200 thousands of frequency rank followed by helium 10 or merchant words or jungles card, whatever you're, you know, tool of choice is um, you know, sorting them descending um in this long list and then and I do this in google sheets by the way. So it's very easy to insert checklists or check boxes and then just go check, check, check, check. And so my my um strategy is to first kind of get exact matches in. So that's my very first like I will make sure that the popular keywords are going to be covered by my exact match campaigns. The next I go to broad matches, I will try to collapse my broad matches into as few as possible so that I don't create data spread. For example, if I have bluetooth headphones and I have another keyword Bluetooth headphones for something or Bluetooth, green bluetooth headphones or whatever. I'm going to try and minimize the broad match keywords to just the core keywords so that I do not spread my data and I want those quirky words to get as much momentum as possible. So that then amazon will start to recognize them indirectly as you know the right keywords uh to show. Right. So that would be my next kind of phase and I go check, check, check, check collapse, collapse as much as possible. Now I might make some exceptions to that rule when I really want to make sure that a word uh that is very specific and it talks to a specific intent is covered in blood match. So to give you an example if I did bluetooth headphones for mac. Now mac is an important word and I want to make sure that I capture all the intent that includes that that word in it. Um so I will include that as a broad match keyword. And then once I'm done with my broad matches, then I go to my phrase match column and I look for any opportunities for, you know, words that are likely to be used together um and then identify those and I check those off and then make sure that they're you know present because they're not, I'm not I'm not bothered with the order. I need to make sure that they're in the exact same order. Um so that's kind of how I do my research and I make sure that um you know, my campaign sizes are small enough. I don't add more than 20 keywords per per campaign and that's just to make sure that the budget is um distributed evenly, even though, you know, you can't really direct that most of the times amazon is going to give the early data points a lot more preference. Um but by and large, you know you want to make sure that your campaign sizes are small. Um if you have like 500 keywords which no one I believe no one in this day and age does, but there's some people out there that will put a lot of keywords into a campaign. Um um what we see is that a majority of those keywords will not get any impressions and they will simply just stay there uh ignored, completely starved of any attention. Uh and only a few, a handful of the few that did get any kind of movement at the beginning, we get exponentially more and more impressions, right? So you want to make sure that your campaign sizes are small, You want to split them out by match type. You don't want to mix broad match with an exact match because broad match will move faster than your exact match and take up your budget. So that's kind of how I, you know, design my campaigns. Uh Now, one more thing I want to add there is with the broad match modifier. I actually use broad match modifiers across the board. Um even though I know that the you know sponsored products tend to have um a lot more uh you know cleaner match when it comes to brown matches. I still do the broad match modifier there as well. [00:21:39] spk_1: Yeah, I love and a lot of people are you know aren't even familiar with with the broad match modifier and like you said in terms of like bluetooth headphone right? In that phrase, you know, bluetooth is less important than headphones, right? Because somebody can buy it on headphones when they search headphones. You know they may not be looking for bluetooth but nowadays majority of people who have devices bluetooth built in, so that would be a modifier that you probably want to include in your broad match, right? So the plus um headphones and then some bluetooth plus plus headphones that people don't really know, you know what we're talking about in terms of modifiers. So that's that's some great tips. Actually one of my best performing keywords of all time is a broad match modifier. Um You know I've been doing this since 2012. So the other day I like pulled up my accounts you know in sorted by uh you know sales and spending all that kind of fun stuff and I just kind of went in just just for fun. Um And uh yeah so so that was an interesting thing to look at. So definitely if you don't know what those are, make sure that your um you know make sure you're diving into those um a few quick things here um as we wrap up is um you know you always hear this one and it's like oh I'm already on page one. Should I turn off my PPC and uh you know you kind of mentioned in the beginning how organic uh you know, rank is getting pushed further and further down. Um you know what what's your response to that? [00:22:59] spk_0: Yeah, no, I I wouldn't turn off the pc, that's uh even if I'm ranking number one, um if I see two of my products showing their one as an ad and one as an organic listing, I would rather take that it's more real estate on the on page one, it's less um you know, chance for someone else to kind of get in and steal my sale. I would rather play defensive than uh you know, be um you know, more short term about my approach, I would I would look at it as the only way to kind of stay there um you know, long term and um for that reason I would never cut back on my BBC. Even if I'm already showing up on page one position one, because that can change anytime, you know, that can change. If you, if you lose it, then uh there's people who are paying up to 900% of the of what you're paying through a placement modifier, right? Anyone can get into the first pot if they have a modified running. So that would that would just mean you have one less spot on page one, so I wouldn't do that, [00:24:06] spk_1: yep. Absolutely. And the other thing, you know, the analogy I always like to use is like, you know, I'd be like being in a store and be like, oh I got the end cap, so I'm gonna go take my products out of the, you know, my, my, my my laundry detergent on the end cap, so I'm gonna go take it out of the, the aisle where you know, where it stores that shows up, you know there because oh I've got the, I've already got the prevalence of that end cap, right? It's like, no, you wouldn't do that, you want your product to appear as many times as possible, be in front of the customer as many times as possible in order to get as many conversions as possible, right? And the more times people see your product, the more likely they are to convert, just like hearing a brand name, right, it's the same kind of thing visually, if you see the same product multiple times on that page for some reason can be like, oh did I look at that one, is that the one that I thought I wanted? You know, it's just more chance for you to convert. So um I absolutely agree with that. We get to the another favorite part of the episode where we love to ask our guests, you know what they're currently into right now in terms of books, podcast, personal development, motivational materials, kind of, anything that you're into right now or anything that's really affected uh your growth either on amazon or you know in the software or your own business, et cetera. We would love to hear if you have any tips there. [00:25:18] spk_0: Oh yeah, sure. So I love listening to this business podcast called Business lunch. I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but it's by Roland Frasier and I just love all the strategies that he talks about with, you know, things like buying businesses with zero down or uh you know how to kind of structure your day, things like that. So I'm really into listening to that podcast. Um you know, you know, driving around, I've got, you know, important, um you know, you know, tips coming in, you know, from this podcast. So I think one of the things that um I learned recently is um, you know, again from this podcast, which is, you know, making sure that I structure my day um in a, in a way that is kind of uh meaningful. I start my day with a list with the to do list, which is kind of one of the simplest things to do. I guess you sit down and write what you want to do during the day. But I'm trying to organize those, you know, to do into like these squadrons the urgency and the urgent and important cordons just to make sure that I know where the priorities lie because it's so easy to kind of skip that and kind of just go with the flow, just go with whatever comes to you. And I think social media is kind of trained us into being very kind of reactive to whatever is thrown at us. And so I would I would rather kind of just be very intentional about what I pick up. Um and it's also going to help me to shut off social media. Um to a certain extent, like I kind of tell myself okay, I've listened to all the, you know, I've seen all the posts, I've seen all the little videos, I don't need to be scrolling and listen, I need to stop, right? So I think putting everything into priority and also kind of saying no to a lot more things than than yes is what can help. And it is helping me kind of stay focused throughout the day and accomplish a lot more. [00:27:19] spk_1: Yeah, I love that advice. I keep telling people I've taken about six months off of business books because I've read so many and uh you know, at some point you have to kind of decide, you know, there's so many different books, different ways of doing things whether it's business, you know, accounting systems, all these different things I've read so many. And and I think I've gotten to the point now where it's like, okay spending more time and that's probably not going to help me, right, because I've got the basis I've got kind of that more down so now it's like, okay, what's next and you know, that's where it's more like personal development um you know uh strategic, you know, long term planning, trying to be blue ocean on whatever you're doing. Um So I think that's great advice. Absolutely. All right, here's the other time that we give to you to let people know where they can get ahold of you. You know, if you're doing anything new, what you have coming up, anything you want to let people know about, Please let them know about that, [00:28:09] spk_0: wow. Absolutely. Um So you can follow me on linkedin. I kind of post a lot there. Um So it's just my phone memory to java on Lincoln. Um And then coming up in january is our 25th mastermind. So if anybody's interested there's a few criteria that you need to clear. Uh and then you know on our website. So if you go to BBC ninja dot com and look for BBC mastermind, you will be able to get details about that. It is a free mastermind program, it's four weeks long. Um And so that was one and then the other thing is we're also kind of um opening up our software to agencies because it's got a lot of cool agency features and so if there's any agencies out there no matter how big or small, we're actually giving a pretty good kind of cash back discount of $5.500 paid over like five months. Um So if anybody's an agency out there and interested in, you know, evaluating our software, we also have a 14 day free trial. So please go ahead and sign up and um let us know if you have any questions we can handle your question that support at BBC nature dot com. So yeah, with that I guess back to you. [00:29:23] spk_1: Awesome. Thank you so much for you too. It's really great to meet you. Great to have you on today and if anybody has any questions, uh make sure you join us live every Tuesday one PM pacific time sell around table dot com forward slash live. That's when you actually get into the to be in the zoom meeting with us. We don't charge you anything and we stopped alive. We stop the recording and then we answer questions if you jump into the meeting so make sure you do that. You haven't yet done so as well. Please rate review, subscribe share this podcast with someone you know, who might find it useful. We really, really appreciate you guys, the people on the livestream. If you still have a chance, please go vote for the seller roundtable podcast at cellar poll dot com. I think we were last in second place. I would love to to eke out a win. If if you guys feel like you got value from us. We really, really appreciate that guys and that is all for the seller roundtable. Thank you guys. We'll see you next time. [00:30:16] spk_0: Thank you. [00:30:21] spk_1: Thanks for tuning in, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S EO dot com and amazing at home dot com.