Running ads on Amazon goes way beyond focusing on ACoS. In this episode, Todd Welch talks with Elizabeth Greene, founder of Junglr, about how to achieve sustainable growth by focusing on ad spend allocation, scaling efficiently, and dominating your market without wrecking your budget. Elizabeth, a PPC expert and Amazon veteran, shares key strategies for optimizing ad campaigns, creating sustainable ranking strategies, and avoiding common pitfalls new sellers encounter in their Amazon ad journeys.
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Top Takeaways for Amazon PPC Mastery
Amazon ads are crucial to growing your brand and staying competitive, but are you focusing on the right metrics? Elizabeth Greene explains why ACoS alone isn’t enough. Learn how to balance your ad spend, increase organic market share, and drive more profitability.
Structuring Ad Campaigns for Maximum Control
With her extensive experience, Elizabeth covers why creating a single campaign with single ad groups is essential. Find out why lumping keywords together in one campaign can limit your scaling potential and how structured campaigns can set you up for long-term success.
Diversifying Keyword Strategy: Why You Need Autos, Broads, and Exact Match
Discover why it’s essential to diversify your campaigns beyond exact matches and why sticking with a mix of autos, broad, and exact match campaigns can boost traffic, sales, and rankings. Elizabeth’s approach will help you balance profitability with growth.
The Secret to Ad Spend Allocation and 80/20 Optimization
Optimizing Amazon ads isn’t about throwing money at every product. Elizabeth reveals a unique framework for balancing ad spend allocation by analyzing top-performing products and aligning ad budget accordingly. Learn how this strategy can help you maximize results with minimal spend.
Resources From This Episode
- Junglr: Junglr.com – Learn more about Elizabeth’s PPC agency and how they can help you grow your Amazon ads with a strategic approach.
- Elizabeth Greene on LinkedIn: Follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn – Get daily PPC insights and tips directly from Elizabeth herself.
- KPOQ: KPOQ – The advanced analytics software for tracking Amazon ad spend and sales data across multiple channels in real time.
- Helium 10: Helium10.com – For Amazon keyword research, product analysis, and discovering high-conversion keywords.
- Viral Launch: Viral Launch – A tool for Amazon sellers to research keywords, estimate costs, and optimize product listings.
- Amazon’s Business Reports: Amazon Seller Central – Get key metrics on ad conversions, impressions, and organic reach directly from Amazon.
- Junglr on YouTube: Junglr’s YouTube Channel – PPC tutorials and strategic advice for Amazon sellers.
- From Pain to Profit KPI Playlist: Watch Here – Elizabeth’s insights on how to make sense of Amazon ad KPIs and maximize profits.
- How to Read Your Financials Playlist: Watch Here – Tips for reading financials and understanding your ad budget, profit margins, and ROI.
In Conclusion
With Amazon’s ad landscape getting increasingly competitive, it’s crucial to have a PPC strategy that goes beyond ACoS and tacos. Elizabeth Greene delivers actionable advice to help you control your ad spend, improve profitability, and ultimately dominate your niche. Start implementing these strategies to ensure your Amazon ads deliver real, measurable results.
Transcript
Elizabeth Greene (00:00):
So the Amazon platform is very much mature. There’s been a lot of opportunity with the aggregators that came in. It really solidified Amazon as a very solid business model, where before I was like, ah, you’re an Amazon seller. Now it’s a little bit more considered. I really don’t think anything has changed, but it’s more business, whatever that means, right?
Todd Welch (00:21):
More accepted.
Elizabeth Greene (00:23):
More accepted. That’s a good way to put it. I like that.
Announcer (00:26):
Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Sellers School podcast where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-Commerce Empire, a side hustle, and anything in between. And now your host Todd Welch.
Todd Welch (00:46):
What’s going on everybody? Welcome to another episode. We’ve got Elizabeth Green with us today. She is the founder of Jungler, and Jungler is an Amazon PPC agency helping you with everything related to ads and growing your business with ads. She’s also a former Amazon seller, so she started out in the Amazon game before moving into focusing on ads. And in my opinion, the biggest superpower of all, she’s a mother of six children age five to 13, which is amazing. I have one, so I can only imagine having six. So God bless you on that for sure. Elizabeth, I appreciate you coming on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about how you got into this crazy Amazon game?
Elizabeth Greene (01:40):
Yeah, first off, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited for this conversation and, and back in the day. So yeah, six kits and we were working to figure out some way to make money from home. I was at home with our kids stay-at-Home mom and wanted to be able to bring my husband into that wonderful messy world of being at home all the time. And so of course there’s so much opportunity. I think even more so, it’s almost like there’s so much opportunity. Where do we even start?
(02:13):
You can flip things at eBay, all of the above. The good one is selling on Amazon. So we figured out, okay, so there’s this thing called retail arbitrage, which is where you go and you find products that are physically in stores and then you would sell them for a little bit more on the Amazon platform bonus their, that somebody else doesn’t have to go to the store. You did that. So I did that dragging all four kids along, no, yes, four at the time. We got a two for one at the end of that with twins, and then that was a bit much. So we’re like, okay, that’s a bit much. Oh, there’s this thing called private labeling, which is you create your own products and then sell them on the platform, which is fantastic. Okay, I can stay at home and I can message people and I can coordinate.
(02:58):
And so we worked in on that. Got pregnant with twins. That was a whole thing, double the baby’s double the morning sickness business kind of went to the wayside a little bit. And then once we sort of picked our heads up out of the water, I want to say quite a couple months into actually them being born because double the newborns as well and then went to go get back on the horse. And so I was in a lot of the Facebook groups. And the one thing I really love about the Amazon community is just how generous everyone is with strategies and ideas. And obviously nobody’s sharing products in the private label world, but up until the point of products, if somebody finds a new hack, a new button, a new thing, it’s almost like they’re like, they can’t wait to tell somebody else about that so they can take advantage as well, which is amazing.
(03:45):
And so with that, I was in those Facebook groups as well, so people were having questions about advertising. Turns out I really liked the advertising piece of it. I think it’s a beautiful blend between data and creativity that I personally just find very intriguing. And so when people had questions, I happen to have the answers to those and so I have answers. I want to be generous as well, as much as everyone’s given to me. And so that led to someone saying, Hey, do you do this? And I was like, sure, why not? It turns out I was really good at it and turns out I really loved it. I happened to weirdly enough really like spreadsheets. Never before did I actually do anything with spreadsheets prior to selling on Amazon. All of the data is in spreadsheets. So I learned really quickly, really fast, and then it really has just been going from there. So my entire thesis on growth has been just give without expectation of return, which hopefully I can do here today and then it always seems to come back.
Todd Welch (04:44):
Yeah, that’s awesome. And so you’ve been running jungler officially for how long now?
Elizabeth Greene (04:49):
Yeah, it’s been six or seven years now.
Todd Welch (04:51):
Six or seven years. Very good. So that’s a long time in the e-commerce world for sure. And so you’ve been essentially started a lot of entrepreneurs. Somebody asked you, Hey, could you do this? And you’re like, sure, why not? And now you’ve blown up into a full PPC agency serving clients all over the place, which is awesome.
Elizabeth Greene (05:15):
Yeah, absolutely. It’s been great.
Todd Welch (05:18):
So we’re going to dive in today what people should be focusing on in their PPC. Now, a lot of people are focusing on ACOs and tacos, and if you’re just focusing on those, you can really be missing a larger part of the puzzle. So we’re really going to dive into what people should be looking at in their PPC to really maximize and grow their market share for their product. So where do you want to start with that? With the ACOs tacos? Let’s go ahead and dive into that.
Elizabeth Greene (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, I’d like to talk with ACOs. I think with that it might be helpful to talk a little bit about the evolution of the advertising platform, which I definitely went through. I remember the conversations that happened when I was having those first conversations. The questions were, Hey, do I need to run advertising? And if I do, maybe how? It was a little bit of tidbits. And now the question is how do I run advertising? It’s a huge integral piece of the business. Was Amazon getting rid of search find buys pretty much PPC only launches are definitely a thing now. And so with that evolution, it also came an additional complexity. So in the beginning it was like you could do the old school, start with autos, move to manuals, or you could slowly inch into it or it’s like, where do I even start? You pretty much like there’s two options and start with this one. These days complexity just seems to be exponential. In addition to that, there’s been just a real uptick of one, Amazon putting more advertising placements on their platform,
Todd Welch (06:55):
Which
Elizabeth Greene (06:55):
Is great for Amazon also means there’s less organic spots. So it’s much harder to much more competitive game these days and much more of a pay to play type system. And then the other one is just again, the increase in competition. So the Amazon platform is very much mature. There’s been a lot of opportunity with the aggregators that came in. It really solidified Amazon as a very solid business model where before I was like, ah, you’re an Amazon seller. Now it’s a little bit more considered. I really don’t think anything has changed, but it’s more business, whatever that means.
Todd Welch (07:32):
More
Elizabeth Greene (07:33):
Accepted, more accepted. That’s a good way to put it. I like that. So with all of that, what has happened with the increase in competition, the increase in complexity, and then just the increase in fees and just the current market being what it is, the bottom line is getting squeezed more and more. Well, the problem is in that seller is fine is there’s this tension between if you’re a private label seller, you have to grow off your own merit. You’re not enterprise. You can’t say like, Hey, let’s throw 25 grand at it. Let’s see what happens and optimize from there. No, if you do that, you’re going to be completely out of business. And so there’s this tension and necessity to figure out a way to be able to still grow your business. The other factor is that Amazon advertising will grow your business. It will lead to organic market share.
(08:22):
The question is can you do it in a way that is going to be beneficial to the business long term and not completely destroy cash flow? So you end up in six months and you’re like, great, I have no runway. I can’t grow. And so that’s really where we find if you don’t take a more, the buzzword probably is a holistic view to advertising or basically how does advertising lead to these other growth factors that are not strictly within ad console? And so what we find is that any sellers who are specifically focused on ad console as their only metrics will oftentimes again due to the rising competition, due to the complexity, will lead them to make decisions that hurt that long-term growth strategy. And so why it’s a problem if you only focus in on ACOs or you’re only focused in on roll ads on other marketing platforms, that makes total sense because you’re only looking at that one specific platform.
(09:25):
It’s not like it leads to additional growth factors or you might be looking at say, customer lifetime value in those cases, which makes total sense. But the thing is that with the Amazon platform, customer lifetime value actually extrapolates out to additional shoppers finding you not just that one shopper repeat purchase. And so what we find is that it really takes, again, taking a broader, more long-term view to what your advertising is doing. A good barometer for that tends to be tacos is a good one because that plays into profitability metrics. The other one that we would look at, we call the ratio of ads to organic, we call it ad sale percentage. So ad sales divided by total sales. What percentage of my total sales is being, do I have to rely on ads to generate? So of course the higher that number, the more reliant you are on your ads, the less you have the organic. So it’s like looking at how is my advertising today influencing better numbers tomorrow? And just making sure that you’re working towards that instead of, again, like a hyper narrow focus that you’ll wake up in three months, go, oh wait, I have no organic market share to speak of. And then you kind of end up stuck.
Todd Welch (10:38):
Yeah. So you mentioned that you want to not only focus on the numbers inside the ad console, so is there a specific place that you’re pulling information from as well and then merging it with the ad console data?
Elizabeth Greene (10:54):
So really the two things that we would march together would be business reports and then whatever ad console data. I’ll be honest here, I’m historically, I told you I love spreadsheets. I’m a DIY kind of girly. So back in the day I was trying to build out systems and some sort of automation to be able to marry these reports. Nowadays, I’ll be honest, software really does shine here when it comes to analytics. So we’ve adopted a platform and been using it for I believe over two years now. There’s plenty of platforms in the market. We just really happen to this solution where you do want some way to be able to clearly see your advertising data and your sales data together. Also, other helpful data points would be things like profitability and net profits, bonus points. If you can marry those other things that is helpful to keep tabs on, and this is something that we were working on building before, we’re like, oh, we can just get an out of box solution and save ourselves The headache on automations is inventory because for example, you don’t want to be pushing a product where inventory is running out.
(12:00):
If you have the product come back in stock, you want to be able to move quickly. And unfortunately, as much as we love our clients, they oftentimes tell us, oh yeah, by the way, that product’s going to run out of stock. If we didn’t have access to that in real time to be able to track, we found we couldn’t move as quickly as we needed to really help them make sure their ad strategy was supporting inventory positions. And so software here has been really helpful for us.
Todd Welch (12:26):
Okay. Are you able to share the name of the software?
Elizabeth Greene (12:29):
Yeah, no, absolutely. I love them. It’s called K-P-O-K-A-P-O-Q, to be honest, it’s essentially built for full service agency. So there’s a lot of solutions and automations in there. We just found that the way that they have their analytics set up and the way that we can slice and dice things, we’ve pretty much preferred it over any other platform we’ve tested so far.
Todd Welch (12:52):
But essentially what it’s doing is it’s just pulling all that data that you could download in reports and use spreadsheets and merging it all together for you in a nice dashboard and easy to access it all together.
Elizabeth Greene (13:06):
Yeah, so the problem with doing this manually is Amazon will back update data, which becomes, so even if you had an army of VAs going through and copying and pasting and putting everything together every single day and you were super on it, you would actually have to go back and retroactively update stuff probably at least 30 days back, which as you can imagine is a very hard lift. And so it’s much easier if you have API access to do that. I just didn’t want to have to fully build a software.
Todd Welch (13:37):
Yeah, for sure. So let’s keep it super simple. Let’s say I’m a seller and I’m going to launch one product. It’s my first product ever. I just brought in a thousand units. They’re on their way into Amazon, and how would you recommend that I set up campaigns, the initial launch campaigns for a product like that? Of course, it’s going to depend on the category. So let’s say we’re in a sports and outdoors category.
Elizabeth Greene (14:13):
Good question. So I’m trying to think of which way to tackle it first. Maybe I’ll tackle good campaign structure and then I’ll tackle how you go about the launch because the campaign structure will bleed over into pretty much all ad strategies and then the launch gets a little bit more specific campaign structure. What we found is really about control. We like single campaign, single ad group structures. There’s specific reasons why there’s a lot of people in this space. We’ll see, you have to have a certain X amount of keywords. I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s bogus, but I would say I wouldn’t want over 20 to 50 keywords. I find that that kind of dilutes things a little bit. Really what you find with this structure is if you threw everything together in one huge conglomerate campaign, you threw all of your products in and all of the keywords and you had 20 different ad groups and it was this whole structure.
(15:04):
I’ll be honest, it’s not. There’s a lot of people in the space who say like, oh, it’s because it has poor performance. That’s not actually true. Sometimes actually when you create, I lovingly call them Franken campaigns because they’re like this mishmash of everything. Sometimes those are your best performing campaigns and it can be very, very frustrating to be honest sometimes. But the reason why that would not be like, I don’t want to say a good structure, but the best structure is when you find something in that campaign, you’re like, oh my goodness, this keyword is phenomenal and this one product works really well, and this one ad group is like, the ACOs is amazing. I would love to put more ad dollars here. You can’t because budgets are set at the campaign level and all products within that ad group will be advertised on whatever keywords you have in that ad group and whatever bid you have. So you end up with this big structure that you might have really good things within that structure that you can’t put more emphasis behind, put more ad dollars behind. So from a control perspective or a scaling perspective, you end up having to almost rebuild the whole structure to fix it. So if you can avoid that on launch, I highly suggest you do that.
Todd Welch (16:14):
And so
Elizabeth Greene (16:14):
That would be one campaign, one ad group, and then only advertising. I’m not above putting multiple variations into a single ad group. There’s pros and cons to that. We actually kind of group them, but where we specify is on a listing level, so for child variations, you can think of listings in some ways as landing pages. So you think about it, if you were running a traditional ad somewhere else, would you be sending that traffic to two separate landing pages when you didn’t have control over where that traffic was going? No, you probably wouldn’t. And so that would be another way to think about the
Todd Welch (16:51):
Advertising. Okay, so you have a single campaign and then the ad group underneath that, is each ad group like a separate keyword or how are you breaking out those groups?
Elizabeth Greene (17:05):
Yeah, so we would do one ad group because again, the budget filters to all ad groups and then we tend to group match types into their own campaigns. So you have one here, one there. Reason being is when you start adding negatives in things, it can get kind of messy if you lump match types together in those things. And so the difference is then you have to decide. So that’s the structure you have your products. Also, I would start with sponsored product ads. I don’t care how big your budget is, we have brands are spending even you’re spending a hundred thousand dollars a month or something or above that by far. I think at least 80 minimum, 75% of your ad spend is probably going to be going to sponsor products. So should you run the other ad types, yes. But on product launch you should be fine, especially if you have a smaller budget and you really need to focus in that budget. I would recommend sponsored product ads. They also have the most impact on organic ranking, which is typically going to be your goal all upon launch.
(18:06):
And then the difference is going to be what keywords do you choose? That is probably the biggest one. Our research goes around where does the product fit into the market. Ideally, you should have, if you source your product really well already have an idea of where that product fits in the market, but actually what your listing SEO is going to be. So if you’ve gotten work from a company who did the listing for you or maybe your team, you might have a list of keywords, SEO and Amazon advertising keywords will differ because oftentimes you’ll put broader keywords or more high volume keywords in your SEO. Those may not be the best to go after upon launch.
Todd Welch (18:50):
Sure.
Elizabeth Greene (18:50):
Really what you want to look at is just take a good hard look at where does my product fit in the market? A great way to do this, we still do this when we’re doing keyword research, it’s manual, but you can go to the go on Amazon, type in that search and see does my product fit on the search page? The more the product fits on the search page, the more you can be pretty certain that your specific product is the type of product that those shoppers are looking for because rank is determined in a lot of ways by sales velocity and high conversions. So if there’s high sales velocity, high conversions for products, you can say, well, these are being purchased through this keyword, and so we really just want to find where can we best fit in the market. And then the other thing that not a lot is, I’m trying to get this message out here a little bit is when you’re also curating that keyword list, you should be filtering it based on your available budget.
(19:43):
Oftentimes what I see from new sellers is they’ll say, oh, they’ll go on YouTube. And it’s not like there was a bad launch strategy, but someone’s like, all right, you got to find 200 keywords and you got to make these five campaigns and then you got to put all this stuff up, put ’em a really high bids, be super aggressive out of the gate, and then they go there and they put that up there and they’re like, oh my gosh, I just spent $200 in the first 24 hours and my entire ad budget for the week was a hundred dollars.
(20:11):
It doesn’t work. And so the way that you kind of figure out where this lies with your account is you can look at the cost per clicks helium 10 for the US only, but it will have the average cost per or Amazon suggested bids. You also can, before you even launch your products providing you have those ASINs in there, you can go, I call it creating a dummy campaign, meaning you’re going to act like you’re going to create a campaign, but you won’t actually click launch. So you’re not going to spend anything. You can go and add those products in, add the keywords you want, and it will actually show you the suggested bits. So these are rough estimates. Anyone who’s doing advertising any length of time is like, yeah, those are not exactly accurate, and you’re right, but they are the closest we’re going to get to accuracy before we hit go.
(20:56):
And so that will give you an idea. So let’s say I had a daily budget of a hundred dollars and I look at one keyword and it’s like $5, well, $5 a click, that adds up really fast. I can only afford so many clicks, so maybe there’s something else that’s going to make sense of me or sense for me. So what we find is it’s a bit science, it is mathematics at the end of the day, which I like spreadsheets, you can forecast out these things. I find it fun, but it’s like, okay, so how many clicks can I afford at whatever the averages are going to be? And then, okay, so if you can only afford five keywords, I would much prefer you say, all right, these are my five keywords, I’m going to advertise on these ones. I’ll get the sales to be able to work up and add more later, but if I can keep my budget active for the entire day on five keywords, that’s going to get me way farther than if I can only afford two hours of activity because I pick 50 keywords.
Todd Welch (21:55):
Yep, for sure. So helium 10 is what you guys are using to find those keywords for products typically?
Elizabeth Greene (22:03):
Yeah, healing tends to go to og. Another one that we are getting into using as well is viral launch. There’s plenty of them out there. Another great ones, I mean even just Amazon suggested keywords. Again, take everything with a grain of salt, filter it through your own understanding of your products. Don’t take anything at face value that goes from Helium 10 viral launch or any other out there.
Todd Welch (22:26):
And that’s a key thing that you’re saying there too. If you’re launching a product, make sure and understand the market, and that’s where having some type of background in whatever product you’re launching is very helpful because you’re going to know the terminology and the different words that people use a lot better than someone who’s just grabbing random products and trying to sell them.
Elizabeth Greene (22:53):
Yep, yep. No, I agree. I agree.
Todd Welch (22:57):
Yeah, so you’ve got all the keywords in there, you’ve got the campaign set, the budgets are running and your products start moving. Do you guys have a strategy for using auto campaigns versus frank phrase campaigns and exact campaigns?
Elizabeth Greene (23:18):
Yep. So I would say there’s a lot of talk in the space. I don’t know if it’s old school or just for whatever reason and autos are only good for keyword research and then broad measure, the old school, okay, autos are the beginning and then we do broad and then we do phrase and we do exact, I would say we don’t treat, don’t really ever treat any campaign as like quote, it’s only ever good for research and that’s all we’ll ever use it for because what we’ve seen is that auto campaigns can create a lot of really good low cost traffic. It’s very easy to get lower cost per clicks and autos, not necessarily so much with exact match, broad match the same way. Now there has been updates to the algorithm on the search terms that broad match will pull, and so I will be, if you haven’t been aware of the update and you haven’t checked your search term reports for your broad match recently, go check those.
(24:14):
You probably have a lot of negatives add, so you definitely want to keep up with these things. What we’ve actually observed, because I’ve done, gosh, probably thousands of audits at this point, and so I’ve seen every type of ad structure, even ad structures you would never in a million years think to put in an account. And I’ve seen accounts that go to one extreme or another. So one extreme would be exact match only. We’re only going to focus on rank strategies. It’s all ranked. That’s all good. The ads are for we’re not going to do, there’s a common sentiment that I hear often. It’s like I’ve found all the keywords in my space, so why do I need autos? Why do I need broad? These are just keyword research what we’ve actually seen, again, because they come to me when things are in trouble and that’s when they want the audit.
(25:01):
So I see it at the end of that maybe six months later and maybe even a year later. And so I’ll audit those accounts. I’m like, oh, well there’s only exact match. The interesting thing about the accounts that go to the extreme of exact match is they will be really, they’ll have really good rankings on main keywords again because that’s the sole focus of these accounts. But the funny thing is they actually struggle with market share. So they struggle to grow sales because they struggle with the volume of traffic IE sessions that they need to really hit their sales goals. And then you have the flip side, which is the people who are like for whatever reason, they stuck up an auto, they stuck up broad and they never did anything else with it. So there’s relatively no exact match, maybe one or two. And they tried it and they’re like, Hey, cost is too high.
(25:48):
I can’t, so for whatever reason, it’s other extreme. So it’s all broad, it’s all autos. Those ones interesting enough, they do kind of okay with oftentimes profitability is not terrible. Now sometimes these can have really crazy swings as well just due to the search terms they pull and stuff. But these ones struggle with ranking and struggle to really maintain the market share. And so what we’ve discovered, again through audits and testing ourselves is that you really need both. It’s not an either or strategy. It’s an and strategy. And so our goal is to have those specific campaigns that are designed to help us maintain that rank, to help us maintain the presence on support, our presence on those main key terms that we know our customers are searching for and we need to make sure that we maintain some sort of rank there. But on the flip side, we also want to have those autos, those broads.
(26:42):
Now our goal here is low cost traffic. Fun fact, you are actually some people when they look at how they’re doing in the market, some people will look at ranking on main keywords. But another great barometer for how you’re doing is B-S-R-B-S-R is completely agnostic to your rank. It doesn’t matter. We’ve actually been able, because we wanted a quick turnaround, we had one account where we dropped, we were one number one BSR, and we got down to number two and we’re like, we need to get back to number one. What we did was went into the account, we’re like, where are the sales coming from? Let’s just pump that. We got back to number one BBSR within, I want to say it was two days with less than a point increase in total ACOs simply through leveraging broads and autos because we needed that fast, quick influx of sales to gain BSR. So there’s more than one way to go about it. And what I would say is if you’re like hyper-focused in on one very narrow strategy, oftentimes you’re missing one half.
Todd Welch (27:46):
So probably experiment with the autos phrases, exact broads and don’t just completely eliminate one or the other just because you think that would be the best. So with those auto campaigns and when you’re moving keywords to exact matches or phrase matches, you’re not putting them as a negative in the auto campaigns or anything unless maybe they’re doing really bad for some reason in an auto campaign.
Elizabeth Greene (28:18):
So I definitely recommend negating if you have poor performance, why have clicks that are not converting,
(28:24):
But in terms of negating something that is working, no, we don’t negate when we would test it in another match type or another campaign. The reason why is this is an infuriating thing about Amazon. Every ad platform has its nuances. This is one of the nuances of Amazon advertising is you would think if you put the exact same keyword, the exact same product, the exact same everything, exact same bids, like replicate it to a T, even if you go into ad console now and you copy one of your existing campaigns and pause the original, you’ll not be able to replicate that exact performance for whatever reason. I don’t know, I just know what happens. And so if we’re launching it in another match type or we’re moving it to an exact because we recognize that there’s a lot of potential here, what we don’t want to do is cut off that good performance.
(29:12):
Now, do we want to have most of the impressions probably coming through exact because we want to get super noted and more aggressive here? That would be the case. And so one thing we actually use internal tools for our bid optimizations. One of the reasons was is we wanted a lot of control over these things and one of the things that we actually implemented in our bidding system is to make sure that our bidding system is being more aggressive with the more specific match types and we’re being less aggressive when we increase things and when we decrease something because it’s not working, sometimes we need to be aggressive on the downward, but as far as the upward trends and where we’re pushing that traffic to, we want to be more selective with our more narrow folk, our narrow targeting types. So that is something that we do, so we don’t get rid of it, but we will try and control it through bids.
Todd Welch (30:09):
So if I understood that right, let’s say you’ve got a keyword that’s doing good in an auto campaign, you will maybe move that to a phrase or an exact campaign and possibly have a higher bid so that the ad sales start going through the exact campaign or phrase campaign more than the auto campaign.
Todd Welch (30:31):
Yep.
Todd Welch (30:32):
Okay, very good. Yeah, I remember for sure a lot of people teaching that process where you start everything in auto, then you move it to phrase negate it in the auto, and then you go from phrase and move ’em to exact negate ’em in the auto and the phrase. But yeah, then you kind of pigeonhole yourself in with those keywords and you never know things can change. People might start searching for things differently. The Amazon platform can change new keywords that you didn’t see before might pop up, and so you kind of always got to have those various different ad versions going so that you’re always on top of those different changes.
Elizabeth Greene (31:18):
Yeah, I agree with that. There’s a lot of things like that process of negating in the original or other strategies I’ve heard that you hear them, you’re like, that makes total sense. Why would I not pause that to make sure that I’m getting more specific in exact and really controlling things.
(31:38):
So there’s a lot of these strategies that in theory I would a hundred percent agree with and most of my, if you ever hear me have a very hard stance on anything specific, the whole exact and broad thing or not negating, I will stand on a soapbox on these issues, but the reason why is because I’ve tried the alternatives and I like to say any good ad manager who’s been at it for a while, if you have a really strong stance on something, it’s probably because you have battle scars. So a lot of the stances or the ways that we look at stuff is like, I’ve been doing this for a long time and so it means I’ve gotten a lot of battle scars and I’ve seen a lot of negative repercussions of some of these things. And so I do my best to try and just again be helpful and say like, Hey, this is what could potentially happen. This is what I’ve seen happen. I’ve seen some really bad repercussions of these things and so I would not recommend it. Are you going to completely screw up your account? I mean, you can always go through an archive negative, so you can always revert that if you need to, but I would say more often than not, I’ve seen it hurt an account more than it helps.
Todd Welch (32:52):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you got to be careful with your ads. It’s not an exact science all the time. It’s kind of a creative art as well. So you got to be feeling things out and constantly be changing and seeing things where things are going with the platform.
Elizabeth Greene (33:13):
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s one thing that we’ve really tried to build in our team as I’ve stepped away from a little bit more of the day to day is in this industry it moves so fast. And so it’s so hard to create a specific SOP for everything. And so the way that we’ve gone about it is you are going to have your standard best practices, the thing, make sure you’re checking for your negatives, make sure you’re adjusting bids. Are you going through your budgets? Are you reviewing these things? Are you tracking ranking? Are you checking the account daily just to see if there’s a fire? There’s those good standard. We know that these practices should happen, but what happens when those practices don’t necessarily work or you don’t see that working or in a difficult account like say a low conversion rate, high price product, those you will see one day, a 2% a cost and the next day is a hundred percent a cost and back down to five and you’re like, do I optimize for the two or do I optimize for the hundred?
(34:15):
Right? Or supplement campaigns advertising a supplement, you’re like, I have a $10 cost per click. What do I do in these scenarios? This is very different. Someone else told me I should leave this for a week. I can’t afford to let a $10 cost per click run for a week. What do I do? And so what we have done is just get a team of battle hardened Amazon ad managers and we have our standard processes, but what we do is really we really instead of that top down super us OP structure, we consider it almost like a bottom up approach. So when we have an ad manager who’s faced with those issues of, we’ve done that with the low conversion rate and the high price point products and we saw those swings, so what did we do? We went into the account and we troubleshoot it and we said, you know what?
(35:04):
I think if we looked at longer date ranges, it smooths out these humps and we can make optimizations here. And we tried that and it really works. And we’re like, okay, this works now team, now we have a playbook for this or the high cost per clicks. We’re like, the cost of testing is so high we can’t afford to test thousands of keywords. So we did frequent micro tests. We test those high cost per clicks. As soon as we know something works something, we pivot immediately quickly. It doesn’t take us seven days. It takes us as soon as we get the data, we work on it. And so we’re like, that playbook works really well and it helps us. So there’s a playbook for that. What about highly seasonal? What happens when you have a Mother’s Day product and you’re like, I got five days to make my entire year’s sales on this one product line. What do we do here? And so it’s working through those specific scenarios and then just again, bringing the wealth of knowledge on Amazon advertising. See, I know how the system works and because I know how the system works, it’s much easier to create a strategy to get around those roadblocks and then just try and do our best to educate when we find out the answers.
Todd Welch (36:08):
Now a question that I just thought of that people might ask if we’re leaving the same keywords in, let’s say it’s in all three in auto, a phrase and an exact, aren’t those going to be competing with each other and driving up the bid for that keyword?
Elizabeth Greene (36:28):
That is a good question. So Amazon did share in their literature that no, you won’t be bidding against yourself in terms of driving up the bid. Now I will say in terms of the impressions, so if ones this impression and one search term sugars, that impression, you will have that overlap. So I don’t think you can get around it. However, you won’t drive up your own cost for clicks, so you can be perfectly fine with
Todd Welch (36:56):
That. Yep. Yeah, that’s what I figured the answer would be. But I know a lot of people are concerned about, it’s a good question.
Elizabeth Greene (37:04):
I mean I would be concerned as well. You’re like, great, I’m getting $2 here and 50 cents here. Did I just jack up my 50 cent bid somewhere? That wouldn’t be great.
Todd Welch (37:13):
Yep, exactly. And so if you’re doing these ad campaigns, should ad campaigns always be profitable if they’re not at the level that you want them to be, should you just be pausing them or how do you deal with that kind of stuff?
Elizabeth Greene (37:29):
So that goes back to our original topic on making sure that you’re making good forward thinking decisions. Because at the end of the day, if you want something to be profitable, IE lower a costs is what we’re talking about here. An ad console, the real lever, the one real thing you can do is lower the bids. Well, what happens when you lower bids, you’re not as competitive in the ad auction. You show lower search. When you show lower insureds, you get less impressions, which means you get less clicks, which means you get less orders, which oftentimes will absolutely tank your rankings. So why I hear oftentimes from new sellers, they’re like, great, I launched these things, everything was great. I went into optimize what I should be doing. I am getting the orders, but now my ACOs is too high and then all of a sudden my sales just are gone nowhere to be found, right?
(38:19):
It’s because you were no longer competitive and you weren’t showing up where you needed to on the platform. But then what do you do about that, right? Because you’re like, I can’t learn at a loss forever, but then I need ranking. I’m just kind of stuck. And so in these cases what we’ve done is we’ll identify those key terms that are important to the product where the goal is ranking and for those specific campaigns and for those specific keywords, yes, we probably will be running at a loss for that one keyword. Now we’re going to be tracking our rankings. If you are our whole hypothesis and not hypothesis, but how we would go about it, I guess our approach would be if we’re going to be losing money somewhere advertising, we need to be making it up somewhere else, it never makes sense to run at a loss if you’re not going to have even some long-term benefits from doing that.
(39:10):
So in these cases it’s I’m going to achieve rankings. I know it’s a loss on this one term, but if I can make sure that that’s leading to my organic rankings, if I’m seeing the increase in my sales volume, then those losses are offset by my organic orders, which are organic orders are pure profit. You don’t have to pay for those so you can make sure that the account is winning overall. So there will be some key terms. Now should you always lose all the time on all of your ads? No, I don’t think so. So that’s why we have sort of, and that also helps offset the account, right? Because if we have that exact match super specific rank strategy we had talked about, well then if I have my lower costs broads, autos, those ones I’m running for profitability, I don’t like losing money on auto campaigns.
(39:59):
I don’t really like losing money on broad match campaigns or those ones because my goal there is low cost traffic, and so I want to push as much low cost traffic at as much high profitability as I possibly can into the account. You get that influx of traffic you’re not losing on it. And then that can also offset those more high costs, lower profitability ads. And then ideally everything should balance out. Again, we talked about things are complicated, not everything’s as straightforward as we want it to be, but you want to see that graph up and to the right. And then that sales trend again is going to offset that ad spend. And that’s where tracking total ACO can be very effective because as ads, as total sales grow ad send remains consistent, totally cost will go down.
Todd Welch (40:47):
And it also depends too what market you’re in, what category and how competitive is and what the lifetime value of your customers are. In supplements, for example, you’ve got a very high lifetime value of a customer once you capture them. So it’s probably a good chance that a lot of your ad campaigns are going to be losing money, losing money on the front end to make it up on those reorders and subscribe and save and things like that.
Elizabeth Greene (41:19):
Yep, absolutely. I mean the good news about if you’re tracking subscribe and save for those reorders, those do show up in the business reports. And so if you’re tracking total a costs, you will see the total a cost decrease because of that. So again, total a cost. It’s a really quick barometer to see, hey, how do my ads play into my overall profitability? So if I have a quick and dirty, rough napkin math, I always say use an actual calculator, make sure you’re tracking your numbers. Actually, you want your true net profit numbers. But if you want quick and dirty napkin math in terms of how does my ads plan into my profitability? I get a 30% margin on a product. I got a 10% total ACOs number 30 minus 10, 20, I got a rough 20% profit at the end of the day, right? Again, it doesn’t always work out like that. There’s inventory fee, there’s storage fees, all those things sneak up on you. And if you’re only tracking that math and you’re like, I think it’s 30% and I think tracking number is right, but if you wanted, again, rough napkin math to know that you can do that quick calculation,
Todd Welch (42:23):
Yeah, you got to remember all those extra costs. A lot of people, especially if they’re new, they don’t add in all those additional costs, even as basic as adding a label to a product or something like that. If you’re not tracking those costs that those can add up really fast and fees, fees, fees, always more fees. So you got to watch all of that. So are there anything else that we haven’t talked about that most people are probably not aware of that they maybe should be watching for in their ads or doing in their ads? Anything not everybody might know out there?
Elizabeth Greene (43:05):
One thing that we found a lot of benefit from, and again going back to Battle Scholars and School of Hard knocks, we’ve been managing clothing brands for quite some time, I think about five years now, four or five years. And one thing with clothing brands is there’s a large amount of products. I’m talking like tens of thousands of SKUs,
Todd Welch (43:26):
20,000 videos. Yes, I know.
Elizabeth Greene (43:29):
And you’re like, okay, I need to manage ads for this. How do I keep track of it? Where do I put my energy? Right? I know I have the wheels spinning, but what’s under the hood and where are the pieces broken? And so what we found to be really useful here is one, again, tracking things on a parent a level or listing level to be helpful. There’s certain interactions between SKUs on the ad side that can lead you to some misleading numbers, I guess you would say if you’re looking at a SKU or child LA level. So that makes that a little bit simpler. So you went from what, 20,000 skews? So maybe you have a hundred per listing or something. But the other thing that we found very helpful is good ad strategy really is good ad spend allocation at the end of the day, where am I putting my ad dollars?
(44:12):
Are those ad dollars working for me? And so one thing that we found very helpful, again, marrying business reports and advertising data, is to look at a calculation of our total account broken down by listings. We want to look at the total sales sessions are helpful here as well, as well as unit session percentage. On a listing level, and this is the thing that was really helpful for me to understand. Oftentimes we know our best products, but this is the top seller second bestseller, but do you know by how big of the piece of the pie is it? And so that can be very helpful to look at percentages of total here. So this top seller, I mean, if you have a particular product where 80% of the total sales is coming from that one product, your account lives or dies by that product, you better keep a very close eye on that, right?
(44:59):
Versus we’ve seen accounts where it’s like the top 10 products, it’s like 10%, 8%, 20%, they’re all those products where it’s just kind of split across everything, but it’s very helpful to know. But then from an advertising side, what we like to do is look at the ad spend for every single listing, and then you want to calculate, you need other metrics like ad sales, I like ad conversion rate as well. And those also allow you to calculate things like ad a cost total, a cost, what we call ad sale percentage. And we find as if you can break all these numbers again out on a listing level and then also take your ad spend and look at the percentages of total here. This is very quick, easy math. Now, compiling these reports takes a little finesse. You got to do a little spreadsheet work, but if you can, then you can say, well, okay, my top product is driving 25% of sales, but wait, I’m only allocating 15% of my ad resources
Todd Welch (45:54):
Here.
Elizabeth Greene (45:54):
Maybe there’s a misalignment there. Maybe you’re just pulling back, you want more organic or something, but at least look at those numbers. You wouldn’t be surprised at how many accounts I audit where I’m like, you have this one product that’s like 8% of your total sales and you’re spending like 25% of your total budget. Is there a reason for this? Oftentimes what I find is because it’s lumped, we talked about not being able to really control things when it’s those franking campaigns. The reason why is because oftentimes they’re just thrown into campaigns like that and you don’t really know what the split is. You don’t know where your ad resources are going. So just that saying, what is it bringing in? What am I allocating towards? It is very helpful. And then you can take it a step further to look at your ACOs, total ACOs sale percentage and say, okay, so I’m allocating 40% of my ad budget to this product.
(46:40):
What is the performance of that ad budget aco, total ACO ad sale percentage? Then I can say, well, 40% of my ad budget is running at a 25% total ACOs AKA loss. Maybe I better go fix the ads for that one product. Or, wow, this one product, my main product, 40% of total sales, I’m only allocating 15% of my added budget. Wait, I’m super profitable. I got a 6% total aid costs. Why am I not putting more resources here? So when it comes to especially these larger complex brands where you’re like, I know I have all my background processes, my SOP spinning, but really to do that strategic work, one new campaign, should I launch, where should I dig in? What needs optimization? What needs a second? Look, it can be very hard to see the forest for the trees and the ad console where if you have a report or something that you compile like this to look at it, say, oh, instead of saying, I need to fix everything in the entire account, totally costs up. It’s a mess. You go, oh, I need to fix these two products and I probably need to eloquent more resources to one, and then everybody talks about the 80 20, you find the 80 20 quite quickly if you know how to look at it.
Todd Welch (47:48):
Yeah, I like that. That’s super good idea and important to look at what products are selling the most you’re bringing in the most money from, and make sure your ad spend is related and not way lower than what those products actually should be. That’s a very good idea. Alright, awesome. Well, Elizabeth, this has been fantastic. If people want to reach out to you and get more information, how can they connect with you?
Elizabeth Greene (48:20):
Yeah, so best place if you’re interested in working with us, definitely going to be the website, which is jungler.com, J-U-N-G-L r.com. If you are interested in just like, Hey, I want to learn more from you about advertising, this place to follow me would definitely be LinkedIn.
Todd Welch (48:37):
Yes, I would recommend LinkedIn as well. You put out a lot of good stuff. I think that’s where we actually got connected as well. So definitely follow you on LinkedIn and start learning more about PPC and hopefully improve your business.
Elizabeth Greene (48:52):
Yeah.
Todd Welch (48:53):
All right. Awesome, Elizabeth. I appreciate the time.
Elizabeth Greene (48:57):
Of course. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Todd Welch (48:59):
Have a great one.
Elizabeth Greene (49:00):
You too.
Announcer (49:02):
This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow Amazon Seller, and always remember, success is yours. If you take it.
